Over 100 Israelis have died and more than 900 were injured after rockets were fired from Gaza by Hamas militants, Israeli officials said Saturday.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 198 were killed in Gaza and at least 1,610 were injured Saturday in retaliatory attacks from Israel.
“We are at war. We will win,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.
The Israeli Defense Forces earlier declared “a state of alert for war,” according to a statement issued by the IDF.
“Over the past hour, the Hamas terrorist organization launched massive barrages of rockets from Gaza into Israel, and its terrorist operatives have infiltrated into Israel in a number of different locations in the south,” the IDF said early Saturday.
This is awful, and there are no good sides to it. Hamas are terrorists, and the Israeli government’s actions have made this kind of thing inevitable.
A lot of innocent people on both sides will die, nothing will get resolved, and both sides will continue to do horrible things to each other.
This sucks.
Is there a way that a nation can use the same means their oppressor uses to perpetuate apartheid for the purposes of resisting apartheid and not be labeled as “terrorist”?
You’re missing the point. Hamas brutally oppresses its own people, as does Israel’s goverment. This is a predictably violent response from a violent group in retaliation against another violent group, and innocent people in both countries who just want to live their lives will suffer for it.
There are no good guys here. Israel is ultimately at fault for its treatment of Palestine, but that doesn’t excuse Hamas tactics of executing civilians in their homes - tactics that will not work and will not bring anyone to their side.
This is going to be a long, shitty time for a lot of people and nothing will be solved. And that fucking sucks.
Calling the tactic of "executing civilians in their homes” a Hamas tactic carries a lot of water for Israel as they shoot missiles directly into apartment buildings as you type.
I didn’t see this part in the linked article. I do not condone Isreal’s treatment of Palestinian civilians, but I haven’t seen any reports like what you wrote. Do you have an additional source so I can read up?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/israeli-airstrike-flattened-high-rise-building-central-gaza-103807208
might have been an hour or two before you were typing this actually.
Rest assured though, this wasn’t the only time, here’s another https://www.businessinsider.com/videos-show-israeli-airstrikes-leveling-gaza-apartment-buildings-2021-5?op=1
On a purely practical sense, ending the siege on Gaza would improve the lives of about 2 million people squeezed on a piece of land with a clean water crisis and no medical supplies. Israel, however, is unwilling to take such a step, and the stronger Hamas is, the less likely Israel is to compromise. The reality is grim, not because “either side” won’t budge, but because the situation is becoming increasingly impossible.
I’ve always hated Hamas’ tactics. They could have been a better resistance group, they could have not had an extremist idieology. And they could have stopped gambling with the lives of Gazans. All in all, Israel is an apartheid state and this the result of apartheid and decades of collective trauma.
Palestinians already tried a less extremist path. It didn’t work, they are still mass imprisoned by Israel.
It’s interesting that you mentioned apartheid. Although the ANC did declare an armed struggle against the White regime, in fact their attacks were inconsequential and contributed nothing to the struggle. The game-changer was a concerted campaign to mobilise world opinion. It was sanctions and isolation that ended apartheid, not bullets.
Mandela insisted to the end that turning violent was instrumental to actually getting attention. He went on to say this about how ineffectual their non-violent struggle was:
“The hard facts were that 50 years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.” --Mandela
They were largely ignored internationally while they were peaceful.
I trust his assessment of it over yours any day.
Put another way: How long do you think most people believe the anti-Apartheid struggle went on?
I’d be willing to bet most people have no idea about the decades of resistance to increasingly repressive laws that preceded the escalation. Even those vaguely aware that Mandela’s arrest happened in 1963, after the start of the sabotage operations.
They didn’t get much international support until the 1970’s, and that support was still fringe until the 1980’s, as violence had been ramping up for two decades.
Do you remember all the hijackings that occurred in South Africa in those days? All the hostage taking, and the civilians shot in cold blood? All the bombings of shopping malls and cinemas? No? Neither do I … because they never happened. Even in the face of massive repression, imprisonment, torture and murder of its leaders, the ANC focused their armed struggle on acts of sabotage and avoided as far as possible targeting civilians. They bombed electrical substations and oil refineries. They attacked police stations and military facilities. They never commited the barbaric acts we see today from Hamas. If they had I doubt that I, along with tens of thousands of others, would have marched in the streets demanding the release of Mandela.
You’re moving goalposts. You claimed ANCs attacks were inconsequential, and now you’ve changed your tone to focus on civilian attacks.
Sure, they carried out fewer and smaller civilian attacks than Hamas.
There are absolutely arguments over what the most effective use of violent resistance is, and to be clear I have never claimed that Hamas’ method is particularly effective, and it might very well be entirely counter-productive. What I argued was specifically against this:
But specifically to what you claimed in this latest reply, I do remember the bombing campaign that targeted a range of Wimpy burger joints during lunch hour. I do remember the regular use of limpet mines against sports venues, bus stations, shopping centres and other shops, restaurants. They were regular enough that they are one of the regular features of the 1980’s evening news that was seared into my memory as a child despite growing up half a world away.
The ANC liked to pretend they didn’t target civilians, but in the 90’s applications were made to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee by ANC members who admitted to bombing civilians, and ANC themselves submitted a lengthy list of bombings to the TRC which also included a long list of civilian bombings that they claimed to be “uncertain” who carried out but nevertheless submitted in a longer list of their operations alongside the police and military attacks you mention. These lists are readily available.
Mandela “escaped” being tarnished by this in large part because he was in prison from years before MK escalated from sabotage to bombings, and to this day it’s unclear how much he personally knew, especially about the civilian attacks. It’s clear other members of the ANC leadership, like Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo, knew, however.
Apartheid started in 1948, but segregation had existed for 40 years by then, and the fight for equal rights preceded the formal start of Apartheid.
What is clear with respect to Mandela is that he doubled down on the necessity of violence to his death and was clear that things got worse during ANCs nonviolent fight and first improved when they started fighting back. He held onto that view to his death.
ANC was founded in 1912 as segregation was just ramping up. 36 years after they were founded, Apartheid was passed.
They didn’t start killing until 1976, after 64 years of the world mostly quietly ignoring them as oppression got worse and worse.
1 year after they started killing, the UN finally made the voluntary and ineffectual arms embargo binding. 8 years after they started killing, the disinvestment campaign started seriously hurting the South African economy. 13 years after they started killing, Thatcher called the ANC a terrorist organisation at the Commonwealth summit, but beside having gone from being seen as a harmless nuisance to being called terrorists by both the UK and US governments, they won the struggle 14 years after they took up arms. But 78 years after they started fighting.
As such, I’ll take Mandelas words on the importance of their armed struggle over yours any day.
We can’t do that because holocaust.
I actually now blame mostly Europe and the US by the continuation of the situation in Palestine.
It is clearly impossible to solve this from the inside (too much hate by now, too many assholes on both sides whose power rests in the assholes from the other side killing people), which is why I think the US’ and Europe’s treatement of Israel as if it’s a Developed, Democratic, Western nation, all the while it’s more akin to a Theocratic South Africa with a Russia-style leadership, is probably to blame more for this than anybody else (and I say this as an European) - they were the only ones who could have forced a peaceful resolution to this (rather than just mild criticism and no action, which is all that Europe did) by doing the same they did to South Africa, but instead they did nothing at all but hypocrite talkie-talkie (or, worse, taking sides), effectivelly endorsing the choices of the Israeli leadership and totally disenfranchising the Palestinians, prolonging this cycle - want to see who has the most blood in their hands on this, go look in the White House, Number 10, Deutsche Kanselarie, the Palace Du Eliseé and the minion-mindset national “leaders” all over Europe.
The reason even we here go around and around in circles ping-ponging blame between both sides is because both sides are dominate by assholes, so of course they both commit disgusting attrocities and there is no way they’ll ever solve it themselves (it’s tit-for-tat-for-tit-for-tat all the way down), so it’s the international community who has the responsability to force them to do it.
Clearly the cycle cannot be broken form the inside (unless by genocide, which seems to be what the Israeli leadership is aiming for), so it’s the refusal of the US and Europe to do the only thing that might solve this - treat Israel just like South Africa was treated during Appartheid and Hamas as a terrorist group (the latter of which they already do, but without he other side of the equation, to pull out the boot of the oppressor, there will keep on being people with nothing to loose that end up with Hamas so it survives ever in the worst conditions) that has kept the cycle of violence going.
No. It will invariably be called terrorism.
ANC carried out terror bombings intentionally targeting civilians too after first trying non-violent protests, then trying sabotage, then targeting military, and not getting results. And they were called terrorists as well despite certainly doing far less harm than the regime they fought, and ignoring that while civilian, the majority of their victims were voters who had an active role in continuing to vote in the regimes engaged in the oppression.
The only way to stop being labeled terrorist is to win the conflict, like the ANC.
This is not a criticising of the ANC, btw… On a personal level I think some of their actions were deplorable, but I also think that it is fundamentally not up to any of us to judge the armed resistance of the oppressed unless we are actively fighting that oppression in better, more effective ways.
In other words: Personally, I think that anyone who is not personally at a minimum engaged in efforts to end Israeli oppression that is likely to right now be achieving more than armed Palestinian resistance has no moral standing to judge their actions.
And nobody here is.
The ANC won by mobilizing world opinion against the South African regime. The armed struggle was inconsequential and contributed nothing to ending apartheid.
Mandela disagreed with you, and maintained to the end that it was essential in mobilizing support. They got little attention until they ramped up.
The engaged in non-violent resistance against increasingly oppressive laws for decades with no support or attention, and achieving nothing. In fact Apartheid was put in place during, not before, that non-violent resistance, that was how little it achieved. The sanctions first started after ANC and others raised the stakes and violence started rattling the regime into escalation that caught attention.
However, whether or not it was effective is irrelevant to the argument I made, which is that unless you provide a better solution, you’re not in a position to judge how they fight back.
Why is this comment being downvoted?
Because people don’t understand that violence is necessary at times.
When you’re violently oppressed for decades while exhausting all peaceful options it gets to a point where you only have violent options left. Especially when the actual govt does fuck all to help you.
The Resistance Française would’ve been labelled “terrorists” by the current standards.
Iranian goverment is celebrating the attack they backed.
Thousands will die from their weapons. Thousands more will be permanently disfigured or injured. Hamas put their HQ right in downtown, so when it got predictably destroyed, it hurt a bunch of civilians.
Not surprising since the Saudis and Israel were finally starting to make up, which Iran hates. But sad nonetheless. I hope the Israelis and Palestinians can come to an agreement, and that Iran gets a better, more peaceful government. But I doubt it.
The PNA seems like the good guys?