On Wednesday, the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, said in its latest update that Israel’s ban on entry of aid has continued for nearly a month and that no aid entered the enclave throughout this period. All requests by humanitarian agencies to coordinate access with Israeli authorities have been denied.
Helles recalled when the blockade was imposed. The shops were empty within hours, and what was left was too expensive, she said. Even the charity distributions, which once offered a variety of meals, have dwindled, now providing only small servings of rice at the time of Iftar.
After days of eating little more than rice, Huda couldn’t sleep at night, suffering from severe stomach pain and colic. She was diagnosed with a stomach infection two weeks ago.
Understandable, yes.
Predictable, yes.
Deserved, yes.
Effective, perhaps.
Excusable? No.
Are we really debating whether it’s okay to rape / kidnap / slaughter civilians?
Read this New Yorker interview of a Hamas leader. Palestinians tried everything the “right” way. They engaged in nonviolent protest and were shot by the IDF. They went to the UN and Israel called it “diplomatic terrorism” and sanctioned the PA. They offered deep concessions to move forward on a two state solution and Netanyahu refused with no counter offer. They called for new elections and were blocked. There was really no way to left to resist Israel peacefully. The IDF was and is raping Palestinians.
I’m well aware - have been following this conflict for 40 years, generally siding with the Palestinians. I will say however that no one has done such a clean job of “trying it the right way” as you make out here. It’s been far more morally grey from the start.
But let’s accept your point and the language you’re establishing here. They tried everything the right way. Now they’re trying everything the wrong way. It’s like I said: they stopped waiting for the world’s moral outrage to save them, went it alone, and have played it as dirty as they think they need to. Understandable. Predictable.
They don’t need me to think it’s excusable, and it happens that I don’t. They’ve discarded any hope of moral rectitude and are simply trying to win the fight in practical terms by whatever means available. They’re not trying to be right, they’re trying to be effective - to control land, repel Israel, and help Palestinians.
How would you say they’re doing?
Instead of quibbling over whether suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism are orally excusable, judge them by their effectiveness on behalf of the Palestinians.
It’s hard to say what their condition would be without the suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and hostage takings over the last 20 years since the second intifada. No one knows what would have happened in an alternate reality where they continued doing things “the right way.”
But from what I see, “the wrong way” is not only wrong but ineffective. The October attacks have succeeded at the impossible: restoring Israel’s moral standing in the eyes of the world. If the west were silently complicit before, they are actively and vociferously complicit now. Gaza is nearly sanitized of all life. There isn’t even a bargaining table at which to give everything away at. Palestinians are being erased from existence.
So maybe, just maybe, on “effectiveness” grounds, these tactics are a practical failure as much as they are a moral evil.
Children. Are. Dying.
Standing on principle for decades is good, but you cannot ask people to watch whole families die and do nothing. Israel shooting and killing hundreds of unarmed protestors with no consequences from the rest of the world showed that the Gandhi-style strategy will never work. You ask about effectiveness, Israel showed that they won’t allow nonviolent protest, they lock up moderate politicians and fund extremists, and make any sort of peaceful reconciliation impossible. The large majority of Israelis and Palestinians who want peace are actively blocked by the Netanyahu government. It’s nice to tell people how they should do things from the comfort of your safe home with electricity.
I wish their entire strategy was built around minimizing the number of children dying, but it is clearly not. There is no actor in this picture whose is.
I’m going to push back on that, Gazans have zero options to prevent children dying. No options at all. They can’t even send them away since Israel won’t let them out. Hamas surrendering won’t save children’s lives. They have no “best” option since even Israeli officials are saying that Arab children are a threat that must be addressed now early or later. There’s no winning against a genocidal threat. Even former PM Ehud Barak, no friend to Palestinians, said if he was born Palestinian he would have joined a terrorist organization.
Such selective logic. Their massive terrorist attack has caused such blowback that now they have no good options to minimize child deaths. Maybe the terror attack was not about preventing child deaths? That’s the point here.
I understand you want to champion the Palestinians because they are dreadfully overmatched. But don’t let that whitewash your view of a very grey situation.
It’s so easy for you to criticize from your position of comfort and privilege, but meanwhile YOU have offered no solutions other than to try knocking down everyone else. Palestinian children were dying before the attack and are dying after. Even before October 7, Gazan children were malnourished and food insecure to the point where they are shorter than Palestinians on the other side of the wall. Most had signs of PTSD even back in 2022. Spare me your phony concern trolling if you were doing nothing about it before and have no solutions except to blame victims.
It’s a logical fallacy that I have to solve peace in the Middle East before I can evaluate the morality of kidnapping, rape, and murder.
But I do recognize my privilege. Moral qualms and principles are a luxury. Does this make them meaningless? Ceding morality to those locked in a cycle of murder takes us to a dark place.
The Israelis say the same shit you are, frankly. “You would do the same thing if they’d taken your family!” And “easy for you to criticize from the outside.” So this is easy to reflect back at you. Unless you’re sitting in Tel Aviv right now, you’re judging from a privileged place
Like I said, I’ve followed this conflict for 40 years. Casting off moral qualms to engage in a tooth and nail cycle of endless murder is what got everyone here, not what’s going to get them out. Hate cannot drive out hate, said someone less privileged than I.
You can have the final word here. I only ask that you spend it on something other than ad hominem if you can.
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For the rape* and slaughter part, obviously no. I’m not denying the actual atrocities that Hamas committed during the attack; they did rape and murder civilians and heads need to roll for that.
For the kidnapping part, the question still remains: What else were they supposed to do? Under the assumption that all lives are equally valuable, I see no reason to denounce taking hostages unless there was another effective way of gaining leverage to negotiate with Israel. Otherwise the only options left for the resistance are to give up or fight fire with fire.
Edit: *Apparently the rape part is completely made up.
Hamas did not rape any civilians. This is recently been fully debunked. The Israeli october 7 investigator said there was no evidence of any rape happening.
Any rape at all? I thought they’d only confirmed that no mass rape happened? If I’m misremembering that’s great.
Absolute zero. Everything was made up.
Lmfao lemme just go cry for a second. More seriously what the fuck Israel? I mean we all know the answer to that question but still, what the fuck Israel?
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Palestinians heartily agree with your “what else are we supposed to do” notion and long since stopped waiting for the world’s moral courage to come to their rescue. When they did that they also said that they no longer cared what anyone thought of the morality of their actions. They don’t need them to be excusable by us and frankly they aren’t. I’m past excusing anyone involved in this conflict.
Do you really tjink the October attacks gained them any “negotiating leverage?”
Given how thousands of detainees have been freed since October 7th, I think the answer is yes. That said I’m pretty sure even they didn’t expect the Israeli reprisal to be this big, so this whole thing is in a way one big miscalculation.