The Israelis have the power to end the political and economic conditions (which they created and maintain) which lead to violence
The Palestinians do not
If you're saddened or angered by the deaths of Israeli civilians, you can take those complaints straight to the Israeli government. Any handwringing about violence committed by the Palestinians is de facto support for the illegal occupation of Palestinian land and the apartheid state of Israel.
Is it hand-wringing to feel upset at civilians being taken hostage? Tell me why I should look an 8-year old Israeli kid in the eye and tell them they deserve what's coming to them
I think it doesn’t help to turn the focal core of what you’re upset with to that, in this moment. Yeah, it sucks. But tell me why I should look a Palestinian 8-year old in the eye and tell them their parents deserved to be tortured and killed. A tiger is backed into a corner and stabbed repeatedly, and swipes out with its claws — if you’re unhappy with who it hits, let’s root for the tiger to liberate itself so there isn’t a need for any swiping. And let’s also be upset with the assholes who would put their children in the way of a cornered tiger as a means of controlling it
GivingEuropeASpook is wrong about the Palestine stuff but they are actually right that indigenous decolonization movements do not generally call for the deportation of white people back to Europe so idk what you're on about here.
What the fuck? Israel is moving settlers from Israel and other parts of the world into the West Bank with the explicit purpose of genociding the Palestinian people. Israel goes into the West Bank, rips Palestinians out of their homes, demolishes them, and moves settlers into new buildings. This is happening in 2023.
What does that have to do with being forcibly relocated to countries that won't even take them? And what about the ones that dobresir their government? Should they be allowed to stay? Would some future Palestinian court be set up to determine that?
Israelis are like Canadians or Americans in terms of how they relate to global hierarchies and oppression. I would wager that's what most Hexbear users are as well.
I mean, I consider the killing of the Romanov children to be a tragic necessity at best, And someone recently argued to me that it wasn't even actually necessary. And also while I was searching for that post I was reminded that someone else told me that there was no evidence of an order from the higher ups to kill the kids.
Like, I completely agree that revolutions are messy and that we can't condemn them for excesses and errors, and that the scope of the amount of children killed by the forces they are fighting against are much higher and deserve our tears much more.
But at the end of the day, Alexei was 13, unequivocably a child, and with no administrative power as well. Applying some sort of collective guilt to him for the crimes of his father/dynasty is not materialist. Ideally, if the Civil War situation hadn't forced their hand, he would have been Puyi'd instead.
Like the person you're replying to here is being a concern troll asshole but on a base level I don't think concern for the murder of children is a bad thing. Like I think being able to say "wow, a child died, that sucks" proves that you are still human. I'm not sure I want to fight a revolution on the side of people who don't retain the idea that killing children is something to be avoided as much as possible.
In the case of this conflict, it absolutely needs to be acknowledged that the rage for the death of these children should be set at the feet of the colonizers themselves, not the people resisting them, to be clear. But I can't agree with the implication that I can't be sad at all about kids dying. Kids are my life. I work with them professionally and they are the primary thing I care about in the world. Any child's death is going to get to me on some level. Absolutely I should put their deaths in context and look at the bigger picture, and put the fault for their deaths at the right person. But that doesn't mean the base emotion of "I am sad a child died" is wrong.
Any child's death is going to get to me on some level
You just wrote a couple paragraphs about an aristocratic kid dying a hundred years ago while imperial exploitation grinds up hundreds of thousands of kids a year
I literally acknowledged that perspective is important like three times in those paragraphs. Sorry I have a bit of an autistic fixation on this. I get it. The victims of the Tsars deserve our tears more than Alexei does. I literally said that already. But idk any mention of the Romanov deaths is going to trigger a response from be because its a fixation. It was one of the things I struggled with for the longest time because of my difficulty accepting the idea that a child's death is ever a "pragmatic necessity". So its still very much on my mind to this day.
ETA: Its also worth noting that just because I make one post focusing on a topic doesnt mean I'm not upset about the "imperial exploitation grinding up hundreds of thousands of kids a year". Honestly, I do speak up about that but sometimes I feel like it goes without saying. I dont understand this frequent idea presented that because you write about one thing, you dont care about the other more important thing.
I certainly don't remember you crying and shitting yourself like this the last time the Israelis bombed Gaza or one of their snipers shot a kid in the head. Wonder what's different now
I don't remember interacting with you online before so I don't see how you could remember what I've done over the last 26 years of my life but okay go off
Yeah, I'm a bit shocked at the other celebrators. I mean I won't say the Israeli settlers and the gov't didn't deserve it, but honestly I'm a bit cautious of doing that...
happy there had finally been any kind of response to the regular killings of Palestinian civilians
What is there to be happy about? When this is over we'll return to the regular scheduled sporadic killing of Palestinian civilians, but in the meantime we're going to be inundated in a wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians, with some Israeli citizens thrown in as well. That's the material consequences of the current uprising, which are universally bad.
natives shouldn't fight against their oppressors, because their opressors will opress them
I didn't say anything remotely like that. If you care about actually ending the oppresion, nominally your strategic goals should be ending that oppression, not doomed violence for it's own sake. We even have a word for this on the left: 'adventurism'. The Viet Minh opposition to the French may have been violent, but it wasn't a fruitless and doomed affair, and their leadership went to incredible lengths to make sure their attacks where strategically fruitful.
what are do you people want Palestine to do?
Uhh not this, because it won't achieve any of their political aims and is just going to get a bunch of civilians killed. I don't need to posit a better idea to point out how much of a shit-sandwich that this is going to be for the Palestinians and that leftists shouldn't be treating it like their team scoring a goal in a football match.
On the flip side, can you point to why this is a good thing to be happy about from a material perspective, and not a vibes based 'psychological' victory?
Honestly, I think that you're wrong on the possibility of material victory. This offensive has shown the world that Palestinian resistance is not dead and that they can stand up to deal a devastating blow. If they can disrupt Israel's attempts to re-align various Arab nations, and if the hostages and threat of Hezbollah intervention can pre-empt a ground invasion in Gaza, then the resistance could make significant material concessions/gains. Depending on how the next few days go, then I think there's a chance of reforging the broader pro-Palestinian coalition amongst the various countries of the Middle East, especially in light of the Saudi-Iran rapprochement. If changing the geopolitical alignment into one that's much more favorable to the survival of the Palestinian people isn't a material gain, than I don't know what is.
There was clearly an incredible degree of effort and coordination to pull off an operation of this scale without alerting the Israeli security apparatus. I don't think this operation is particularly irrational or feckless. It's a gamble, but the alternative to action is a slow death.
They haven't done that though. They've shown they're capable of bloodying Israel's nose. They've killed scores and taken a base, but Israel's ability to wage a war against them has not been reduced one iota. This isn't some distant colony half a world away were a big psychological victory is enough to cause a pull-back. They're right on the border, and are treated as an imminent security threat by Israel, so in order to prevent them from waving war you have to actually reduce their ability to, not just their desire.
if the hostages and threat of Hezbollah intervention can pre-empt a ground invasion in Gaza,
Which, if you know anything about Israeli governments, especially right wing ones, you know has a 0% chance of being effective. They've killed their own men before to avoid this. A ground invasion is absolutely coming.
The Easter Uprising ended up with pretty much everyone dead. There was no military victory. The Brits bombed out the area and executed everyone they could. But it didn't stop with the Easter Uprising, it shifted the narrative and galvanized more of the population. It made them feel like they actually had chance again. I'd say they were on the border of the British Empire still quite at its peak as well. Modern military tech might have changed but the psychological effects can't be written off whole cloth a day into what's actually happening.
The UK didn't view Ireland as an existential security threat like Israel does with it's neighbors (or say like Russia does with Ukraine).
This is already being compared to Pearl Harbor, which if you recall, ended with millions of dead Japanese (and even then Japan was not viewed as an existential threat). I don't think it especially likely here, but you have already seen how the western propaganda machine can rewrite not just genocide but wholesale population extermination as being justified on spurious claims of 'self-defense'.
Look, if I'm wrong and if turns out that this does improve things for the Palestinians celebrate that, then. But maybe put away the champagne until the bodies are counted.
I mean my entry into the conversation was specifically asking what there was to be happy about. You can support Palestinians without being happy about what's about to happen to them.
lol, "I was just asking questions! I wasn't actually attacking people for expressing support, everyone should have known that my questions were a non secuitor that is completely unrelated to what I was replying to!"
Did you even read the specific comment I was replying to because you're acting like I'm in every comment chain tut-tuting, when I'm fact that is, uh, the opposite of what has happened
They haven't done that though. They've shown they're capable of bloodying Israel's nose. They've killed scores and taken a base, but Israel's ability to wage a war against them has not been reduced one iota. This isn't some distant colony half a world away were a big psychological victory is enough to cause a pull-back. They're right on the border, and are treated as an imminent security threat by Israel, so in order to prevent them from waving war you have to actually reduce their ability to, not just their desire.
No, it's more than that. They're demonstrating that Israel is weaker than ever, both militarily and domestically. Just compare 2021 and right now. In 2021, the iron dome was partially effective as a countermeasure against rockets (although the fact that it was only partially effective and not have a "95% interception rate" was itself a victory). But now, the iron dome is completely out of the picture, mostly misfiring and being useless since the Palestinians are no longer relying exclusively on rockets. In 2021, there wasn't much ground troops from the Palestinians while now, they are merking Israeli soldiers at military bases and commandeering Israeli tanks. At the geopolitical front, Israel's allies are weaker than before while the Palestinians' allies are stronger than before. The French is getting chased out of the Sahel and the much-anticipated counteroffensive in Ukraine turned out to be a dud. Now is the time to strike. In terms of weapons, I didn't remember much drone use by the Palestinians in 2021, but now drones are everywhere, blowing up tanks and merking Israeli soldiers. Israeli domestic politics is more of a clusterfuck right now than in 2021. There will of course be a rallying behind the flag, but that domestic unity will complete crumble when hostilities end, which will further weaken Israel and set the stage for another Palestinian offensive. Israeli propaganda game is also weaker compared with 2021, mostly because they got caught off guard and 2021 punctured much of their PR.
There's a qualitative leap between what we saw in 2021 and what we're seeing in 2023. Even the Israeli response was harsher in 2021 with more bombed buildings, bombed hospitals, and bombed cemeteries within the same time frame than right now. Why? Because Israel is weaker in 2023 than 2021.
Even the Israeli response was harsher in 2021 with more bombed buildings, bombed hospitals, and bombed cemeteries within the same time frame than right now. Why? Because Israel is weaker in 2023 than 2021.
Israel has initiated a full mobilization and is about to launch a ground invasion. Maybe, at the end of all the suffering and death on the Palestinians, they'll be a better position and that fact may be worth celebrating, but the only thing absolutely certain right now is that you're going to see somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 dead Palestians at the end of this, so the score is definitively bad at this stage, and there is no cause for celebration.
Yes you are, you just go about it in a smug disaffected and condescending manner where you act above it all. Then you are now acting like that’s a virtue of yours and not yet another symptom of your privilege and chauvinism.
So odd how you often speak up telling others how they are posting is wrong, and it’s always on behalf of some centrist/Liberal/imperialist topic. There are things you will not abide, such as slurs or islamophobia or “celebration of violence” - you do act moralistically about these particular topics. Yet when it comes to the primary contradiction suddenly nothing matters again. How convenient how everything lines up exactly as one would expect for a chauvinist
I'm not above this conflict, I'm away from it, all of us are. I don't have the arrogance to believe I'm involved in it as part of some cyber front like you apparently do.
You want to take the Palestinians struggle and claim it as yours despite not having any skin in the game and without any acknowledgement of the real human toll it's going to have. You're not at any risk, so yeah, I am going to open up my liberal maw when I see it treated like a football match.
I don’t think I’m in some cyber front, but you think being thousands of miles from a conflict gives you a right to both sides and take the chauvinist position. It’s the quintessential chauvinist error of the western left and you just can’t stop doing it. You are addicted to being wrong on imperialism.
Real Palestinians are cheering. Westoid shits like you are whinging. You have no perspective as to what you are
You hate Palestinians standing up for themselves instead of quietly getting choked out over decades. You do have to have a viable alternative if you are gonna shit on Palestinian resistance, unlike what you stated. You are an idealist
I fail to see how getting it over with in one mass slaughter is an improvement. Look if you're going to use your political ends to justify violent slaughter of civilians, you have to have a plausible path forward to showing how it achieves your political ends. So I'm telling you right now, walk me through this. How does today get us closer to Palestinians liberation? If you can't or won't do that, I'm absolutely going to treat you as though your just a spectator at a horrific sporting match.
You do have to have a viable alternative if you are gonna shit on Palestinian resistance, unlike what you stated
I in fact, do not have to. Just because this shit plan is the only one being discussed at the moment doesn't mean I have to pretend it isn't shit.
Hamas and Palestinian forces on the ground know the conditions and stakes better than you do. They have made their decision. It is not your role to question it, only to support it. You have a really hard time accepting your role and instead you want to be an idealist from the heavens, I have interacted with you before and I know this is how you are.
Hamas and Palestinian forces on the ground know the conditions and stakes better than you do.
They know them differently, but considering they're not operating from the same political or moral framework as leftists, being specifically islamist, I don't feel the need to defer to their views on the matter.
your role to question it, only to support it.
No one here is supporting it, they're posting about it on a shit posting website. My role in the shit posting charade is to shitpost whatever I feel like.
instead you want to be an idealist from the heavens
Two nimrods argued in the heavens and the former was better than the latter because the former actually thought he was helping in battle.
No one here is supporting it, they're posting about it on a shit posting website. My role in the shit posting charade is to shitpost whatever I feel like.
You always use this “it’s just posting none of it actually matters” defense to defend your half-baked liberalism and imperialist both-sidesism. If posting doesn’t matter, why can’t you post correctly instead of like a Liberal coward?
Haha so funny, dodge the point like always and retreat to your smug chamber of “nothing matters but I need to speak up all the time to talk about how nothing matters”
Seriously you should take your own motto more seriously and shut the fuck up
Look, when people start popping corks in the prelude to 10,000 dead Palesitans, I'm going to open up my gaping maw of liberalism and you're just going to have to come to terms with that fact, if you can be bothered when you're not busy celebrating the imminent deaths of 10,000 Palestians for no foreseeable gain.
Odd how according to you “celebrating Palestinian violence” is a bad way to post, you are going around criticizing other people’s comments. So you do care about what people say and you do admit we should strive to comment in a certain way - but only us. You get to say whatever libshit you want and you are exempt from criticism “cause posting doesn’t matter”
No anytime I point out your lack on principles and lack of adherence to the anti-imperialist line you always have some excuse about how posting doesn’t matter so you don’t have to exercise discipline
I fail to see how getting it over with in one mass slaughter is an improvement.
I'm failing to see how your concern trolling is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not we should be expressing support for Palestinian resistance.
Your protestations can basically be summed up as "I know what's best for the Palestinians and their resistance better than they know themselves. Our job as distant observers should not be to support the decisions that those resisting oppression have made, we should instead concern ourselves with armchair quarterbacking and second guessing them out of an abundance of caution that we might end up backing the wrong horse and get egg on our faces."
You don't seem to be in possession of any specialized knowledge that would make you a higher authority on matters of strategy and tactics than the people actually organizing a resistance movement who have access to all the same information that you do plus an entire life of living in those conditions and an intimate familiarity with the on the ground reality. This isn't a rogue group doing some adventurism, this is an effort organized across several different Palestinian resistance groups who will have already discussed the exact concerns you're bringing up before committing to a joint plan of action.
I'll listen to your concerns about whether there is a more effective strategy for resistance once you are the one putting your life on the line. In the mean time, I'm going to assume that the people who are actually living through that struggle have a better grasp on their situation than I do, and I'm not going to treat it like it's my job to second guess them.
I'm not telling the Palestinian resistors anything, I'm telling everyone here who is repeating the exact same folly celebrating at the breakout of ever hostility that has played out throughout history that there excitement and celebration is premature.
It's the same "we'll whip johnny reb and send him crying" arrogance and disconnection that absolutely destroyed morale when it turned out into a bloody years long slog. Literally tens of thousands of Palestinians are about to die and pointing that out has a lot of piss babies here up in arms because I'm yuking their yum.
You are once again conflating messages of support with celebration.
Yes there will be horror. There has been horror for the past several decades. Resistance is an act of hope. No one engages in resistance because they are under some false pretense that they will come out unscathed, but because what they are fighting for is worth the sacrifice.
So it falls incredibly flat for you to come in here and tell people "Why are you sharing in the hopefulness displayed by the people resisting? Don't you know how much sacrifice they are risking?!?!"
listen bro being happy there had finally been any kind of response to the regular killings of Palestinian civilians is fucked up bro we need to weep for the lost Israeli souls as well bro c'mon bro
Not support. The right to loudly be 'happy'. There are 300 other people in this thread expressing support for Palestine and I haven't said a peep against any of them. One can and many have shown support without acting like it's Christmas morning and that there are nothing but candy and nuts on the horizon.
Oh, so you didn't actually find some celebrating to reply to, you found someone mocking someone else for their both sidesism and used the word happy as the slightest bit of pretext to go on a comment spree ranting about people celebrating the loss of life.
I'm sorry, your moral crusade is so clear to me now.
Look if no on is happy then don't worry about me, but given I'm getting the exact same "let people have their treats" response doesn't do much to convince me that's the case.
I guess I just don't understand what end you hope to achieve by policing people having a positive response to resistance against genocide and colonization.
Are you just hoping to extol the virtues of stoicism?
Because the point you keep trying to make over and over again is "you shouldn't be happy, do you know that resisting oppression will actually incite even more oppression?"
Which is barely half a step away from a general defeatist attitude. Your position is basically "You're allowed to show support, but remember to couch it in extreme pessimism about the hopelessness of ever changing the world for the better." With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I just don't understand why that's the hill you're choosing to die on. The most charitable interpretation I have is that you just picked a bad position to defend, and you need to stop trying to post through it
I'm extolling the virtue of sobriety, not stoicism. This isn't a football game where we get to cheer when good team score and bad team fumble. These are real lives at stake, and we should actually wait to see that this current uprising improves their lives before we decide it actually was a good thing.
If Israel launches a ground invasion (which they will) and kills 200,000 Palestinians, and you ask us "was this good" everyone here will rightly answer no. That won't stop the uprising from being justified and understandable, but it will from being good.
Liberationary struggle is not hopeless, that's clearly evidenced throughout history, but pretending every revolutionary act of violence no matter how ineffectual it is is good is exactly how you breed adventurism. We know this in a leftist context I don't know why it's so hard to transfer that to a Palestinian context.
You're just using the logic that rationalizes pessimism as a virtue.
"If I'm pessimistic and I'm right then I avoid disappointment, but if I'm pessimistic and I'm wrong then I can be pleasantly surprised."
Which, if that's the the worldview you want to adhere to them more power to you. But if the only thing at stake is whether or not you have egg on your face for something that is incredibly good and justified in principle but might maybe later turn out to have been a blunder tactically, then I don't see what's so important about making sure everyone else is as pessimistic as you choose to be.
The "real lives at stake" will be at stake no matter how we feel about it, because our input has literally no bearing on how Palestinians choose to resist. And I don't see how second guessing the people who are putting their lives at stake is the more principled stance to take which you must endure everyone adheres to. The fact they have enough hope and revolutionary optimism to take action despite suffering under decades of genocide occupation is itself worthy of hope and optimism.
I don't see how "wait and see" is pessimism. There are lots of immediate consequences that can be reasonable inferred (like the death toll from a Israeli land invasion), and those immediate consequences are on the whole bad, so a realistic, not pessimist take on the situation is that the next few days are going to be very unpleasant for the Palestinians even if they do achieve strategic victories in the end. Maybe I'm taking a more consequentialist tack than you, but a move that is justified on principles but strategically folly is still a bad deal in the end.
The "real lives at stake" will be at stake no matter how we feel about it, because our input has literally no bearing on how Palestinians choose to resist.
I don't see how "wait and see" is so important of a principle that you must ensure everyone adheres to it.
but a move that is justified on principles but strategically folly is still a bad deal in the end.
But you don't have any special knowledge to evaluate whether it's a bad deal at this current moment. That's what's I'm describing as pessimism, and that pessimism is no more justified than optimism is.
To say that we all must share that pessimism does not seem to be necessary as a matter of principle, especially when the people who are putting their lives on the line clearly must have some degree of revolutionary optimism themselves or else they would not have acted. And they are in a much better position to judge whether their course of action is strategically sound than you or I are in.
I don't get to ensure everyone adheres to it, but if someone asks the hypothetical "why shouldn't I be happy about this right now", I'm going to chime in.
But you don't have any special knowledge to evaluate whether it's a bad deal at this current moment
The bad aspects are baked into the cake. The only thing certain right now is that Israel is about to kill thousands of Palestinians, and I take it that we both agree on that. That's going to happen whether or not they achieve any strategic aims. It's not pessimism to acknowledge that any gains are going to have a steep cost, and that such gains are no where near as certain as the cost. Maybe they will come out on top, but they've taken a gamble and I don't feel bad for saying we should wait to see which side the coin comes up before celebrating.
If I was a civilian benefiting from and supporting an apartheid regime, it would be very tragic for the brutal savages we keep locked up in a city sized cage to escape and kill me.
Quick question though, if Israel's gov't was gone and replaced, would it be better to name it "Palestine" or "Israel-Palestine" to be more inclusive, like how Rhodesia was once temporarily "Zimbabwe-Rhodesia"... ?
I can only come to the same conclusion. Its one thing to attack a military checkpoint directly on the border with your territory, heck it's even another thing to occupy the territory of your oppressors, but I don't see how anyone can excuse going out of your way to target random civilians in their homes or to shoot at any moving human you can see.
Its one thing to attack a military checkpoint directly on the border with your territory
The palestinians do not have territory. They do not have borders to defend nor any standing as human beings before the regime in Tel Aviv. They live in open air concentration camps under permanent blockade of water, supplies and electricty. It's not surprising that you enjoy misrepresenting the conflict given that your only recourse so far has been a knee jerk reaction to anyone who even so much smells as pro palestinian.
'rooting for the underdog in a war' is a rather inhuman way of putting it. this isn't a sports game. this is a reaction to a monstrous apartheid regime.
Yes, you're the one acting like with levity towards every murdered palestinian in this decades long american-israeli war of extermination.
'what am i to say to this injured occupier family i've seen in every news media around the world?' 'oh no the minorities will be really genocided now they shouldn't have reacted!' 'what will they tell that poor occupation soldier's family?? this will only make them more vengeful!'. gaslight after gaslight. we've heard it all before. from ireland to pretoria.
The Israelis have the power to end the political and economic conditions (which they created and maintain) which lead to violence
The Palestinians do not
If you're saddened or angered by the deaths of Israeli civilians, you can take those complaints straight to the Israeli government. Any handwringing about violence committed by the Palestinians is de facto support for the illegal occupation of Palestinian land and the apartheid state of Israel.
Is it hand-wringing to feel upset at civilians being taken hostage? Tell me why I should look an 8-year old Israeli kid in the eye and tell them they deserve what's coming to them
I think it doesn’t help to turn the focal core of what you’re upset with to that, in this moment. Yeah, it sucks. But tell me why I should look a Palestinian 8-year old in the eye and tell them their parents deserved to be tortured and killed. A tiger is backed into a corner and stabbed repeatedly, and swipes out with its claws — if you’re unhappy with who it hits, let’s root for the tiger to liberate itself so there isn’t a need for any swiping. And let’s also be upset with the assholes who would put their children in the way of a cornered tiger as a means of controlling it
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The Israelis could have fucked off back home any fucking time
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This is a hilarious argument if you apply to other places.
"What were the children of American colonists meant to do? They've never lived anywhere else."
"What were the children of white South African colonists meant to do? They've never lived anywhere else."
"What were the children of Australian colonists meant to do? They've never lived anywhere else."
Find me the indigenous activists calling for the forced relocation of all white people back to Europe
The idea that dismantling systems of oppression means doesn't mean that white people will be forced back to Europe, what are you talking about?
You don’t know much about decolonization movements, do you?
GivingEuropeASpook is wrong about the Palestine stuff but they are actually right that indigenous decolonization movements do not generally call for the deportation of white people back to Europe so idk what you're on about here.
What the fuck? Israel is moving settlers from Israel and other parts of the world into the West Bank with the explicit purpose of genociding the Palestinian people. Israel goes into the West Bank, rips Palestinians out of their homes, demolishes them, and moves settlers into new buildings. This is happening in 2023.
No investigation, no right to speak.
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Resist their government which continuously expands settlements into Palestinian territory and commits genocide.
What does that have to do with being forcibly relocated to countries that won't even take them? And what about the ones that dobresir their government? Should they be allowed to stay? Would some future Palestinian court be set up to determine that?
Israelis are like Canadians or Americans in terms of how they relate to global hierarchies and oppression. I would wager that's what most Hexbear users are as well.
Generally speaking, as far as I'm aware, most leftists advocate for a Truth and Reconciliation type situation in post-liberation Palestine yes.
The point is that this is all the fault of the Israeli government. What should the Palestinians do?
?
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If the civilians are lucky, their captors are more humane than the average settler.
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Not in the least what I said, but if you need a reason, it's a pretty funny thing to go around doing
Yeah so funny to tell a child they deserved to be hurt
Yes, imagining you going around and telling random Israeli children that is quite funny to me
Man you would be crying about the Romanov children halfway through the Russian civil war. Shut the fuck up
I mean, I consider the killing of the Romanov children to be a tragic necessity at best, And someone recently argued to me that it wasn't even actually necessary. And also while I was searching for that post I was reminded that someone else told me that there was no evidence of an order from the higher ups to kill the kids.
Like, I completely agree that revolutions are messy and that we can't condemn them for excesses and errors, and that the scope of the amount of children killed by the forces they are fighting against are much higher and deserve our tears much more.
But at the end of the day, Alexei was 13, unequivocably a child, and with no administrative power as well. Applying some sort of collective guilt to him for the crimes of his father/dynasty is not materialist. Ideally, if the Civil War situation hadn't forced their hand, he would have been Puyi'd instead.
Like the person you're replying to here is being a concern troll asshole but on a base level I don't think concern for the murder of children is a bad thing. Like I think being able to say "wow, a child died, that sucks" proves that you are still human. I'm not sure I want to fight a revolution on the side of people who don't retain the idea that killing children is something to be avoided as much as possible.
In the case of this conflict, it absolutely needs to be acknowledged that the rage for the death of these children should be set at the feet of the colonizers themselves, not the people resisting them, to be clear. But I can't agree with the implication that I can't be sad at all about kids dying. Kids are my life. I work with them professionally and they are the primary thing I care about in the world. Any child's death is going to get to me on some level. Absolutely I should put their deaths in context and look at the bigger picture, and put the fault for their deaths at the right person. But that doesn't mean the base emotion of "I am sad a child died" is wrong.
You just wrote a couple paragraphs about an aristocratic kid dying a hundred years ago while imperial exploitation grinds up hundreds of thousands of kids a year
Seems like a strange thing to focus on
I literally acknowledged that perspective is important like three times in those paragraphs. Sorry I have a bit of an autistic fixation on this. I get it. The victims of the Tsars deserve our tears more than Alexei does. I literally said that already. But idk any mention of the Romanov deaths is going to trigger a response from be because its a fixation. It was one of the things I struggled with for the longest time because of my difficulty accepting the idea that a child's death is ever a "pragmatic necessity". So its still very much on my mind to this day.
ETA: Its also worth noting that just because I make one post focusing on a topic doesnt mean I'm not upset about the "imperial exploitation grinding up hundreds of thousands of kids a year". Honestly, I do speak up about that but sometimes I feel like it goes without saying. I dont understand this frequent idea presented that because you write about one thing, you dont care about the other more important thing.
"Your parents sacrificed you to their blood machine."
Well would do you say to her, asshole?
Won’t someone think of the colonizers?
because 8 year old Palestinians are murdered constantly, this isnt a difficult moral situatuation
Yes
How is that any different?
There is no such thing as an Israeli civilian. All settlers are valid targets.
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Its optional.
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I certainly don't remember you crying and shitting yourself like this the last time the Israelis bombed Gaza or one of their snipers shot a kid in the head. Wonder what's different now
I don't remember interacting with you online before so I don't see how you could remember what I've done over the last 26 years of my life but okay go off
Yes if you don’t support revolutionary violence against oppressors you de facto support oppressors. It’s pretty simple
Yeah, I'm a bit shocked at the other celebrators. I mean I won't say the Israeli settlers and the gov't didn't deserve it, but honestly I'm a bit cautious of doing that...
Palestinians themselves are celebrating. It’s only westoids concern trolling
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That's not true at all.
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What is there to be happy about? When this is over we'll return to the regular scheduled sporadic killing of Palestinian civilians, but in the meantime we're going to be inundated in a wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians, with some Israeli citizens thrown in as well. That's the material consequences of the current uprising, which are universally bad.
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I didn't say anything remotely like that. If you care about actually ending the oppresion, nominally your strategic goals should be ending that oppression, not doomed violence for it's own sake. We even have a word for this on the left: 'adventurism'. The Viet Minh opposition to the French may have been violent, but it wasn't a fruitless and doomed affair, and their leadership went to incredible lengths to make sure their attacks where strategically fruitful.
Uhh not this, because it won't achieve any of their political aims and is just going to get a bunch of civilians killed. I don't need to posit a better idea to point out how much of a shit-sandwich that this is going to be for the Palestinians and that leftists shouldn't be treating it like their team scoring a goal in a football match.
On the flip side, can you point to why this is a good thing to be happy about from a material perspective, and not a vibes based 'psychological' victory?
Honestly, I think that you're wrong on the possibility of material victory. This offensive has shown the world that Palestinian resistance is not dead and that they can stand up to deal a devastating blow. If they can disrupt Israel's attempts to re-align various Arab nations, and if the hostages and threat of Hezbollah intervention can pre-empt a ground invasion in Gaza, then the resistance could make significant material concessions/gains. Depending on how the next few days go, then I think there's a chance of reforging the broader pro-Palestinian coalition amongst the various countries of the Middle East, especially in light of the Saudi-Iran rapprochement. If changing the geopolitical alignment into one that's much more favorable to the survival of the Palestinian people isn't a material gain, than I don't know what is.
There was clearly an incredible degree of effort and coordination to pull off an operation of this scale without alerting the Israeli security apparatus. I don't think this operation is particularly irrational or feckless. It's a gamble, but the alternative to action is a slow death.
They haven't done that though. They've shown they're capable of bloodying Israel's nose. They've killed scores and taken a base, but Israel's ability to wage a war against them has not been reduced one iota. This isn't some distant colony half a world away were a big psychological victory is enough to cause a pull-back. They're right on the border, and are treated as an imminent security threat by Israel, so in order to prevent them from waving war you have to actually reduce their ability to, not just their desire.
Which, if you know anything about Israeli governments, especially right wing ones, you know has a 0% chance of being effective. They've killed their own men before to avoid this. A ground invasion is absolutely coming.
The Easter Uprising ended up with pretty much everyone dead. There was no military victory. The Brits bombed out the area and executed everyone they could. But it didn't stop with the Easter Uprising, it shifted the narrative and galvanized more of the population. It made them feel like they actually had chance again. I'd say they were on the border of the British Empire still quite at its peak as well. Modern military tech might have changed but the psychological effects can't be written off whole cloth a day into what's actually happening.
The UK didn't view Ireland as an existential security threat like Israel does with it's neighbors (or say like Russia does with Ukraine).
This is already being compared to Pearl Harbor, which if you recall, ended with millions of dead Japanese (and even then Japan was not viewed as an existential threat). I don't think it especially likely here, but you have already seen how the western propaganda machine can rewrite not just genocide but wholesale population extermination as being justified on spurious claims of 'self-defense'.
Look, if I'm wrong and if turns out that this does improve things for the Palestinians celebrate that, then. But maybe put away the champagne until the bodies are counted.
You seem to be incredibly hung up on this idea of celebration, but most of what you're attacking are messages of support.
I mean my entry into the conversation was specifically asking what there was to be happy about. You can support Palestinians without being happy about what's about to happen to them.
lol, "I was just asking questions! I wasn't actually attacking people for expressing support, everyone should have known that my questions were a non secuitor that is completely unrelated to what I was replying to!"
Did you even read the specific comment I was replying to because you're acting like I'm in every comment chain tut-tuting, when I'm fact that is, uh, the opposite of what has happened
No, it's more than that. They're demonstrating that Israel is weaker than ever, both militarily and domestically. Just compare 2021 and right now. In 2021, the iron dome was partially effective as a countermeasure against rockets (although the fact that it was only partially effective and not have a "95% interception rate" was itself a victory). But now, the iron dome is completely out of the picture, mostly misfiring and being useless since the Palestinians are no longer relying exclusively on rockets. In 2021, there wasn't much ground troops from the Palestinians while now, they are merking Israeli soldiers at military bases and commandeering Israeli tanks. At the geopolitical front, Israel's allies are weaker than before while the Palestinians' allies are stronger than before. The French is getting chased out of the Sahel and the much-anticipated counteroffensive in Ukraine turned out to be a dud. Now is the time to strike. In terms of weapons, I didn't remember much drone use by the Palestinians in 2021, but now drones are everywhere, blowing up tanks and merking Israeli soldiers. Israeli domestic politics is more of a clusterfuck right now than in 2021. There will of course be a rallying behind the flag, but that domestic unity will complete crumble when hostilities end, which will further weaken Israel and set the stage for another Palestinian offensive. Israeli propaganda game is also weaker compared with 2021, mostly because they got caught off guard and 2021 punctured much of their PR.
There's a qualitative leap between what we saw in 2021 and what we're seeing in 2023. Even the Israeli response was harsher in 2021 with more bombed buildings, bombed hospitals, and bombed cemeteries within the same time frame than right now. Why? Because Israel is weaker in 2023 than 2021.
Israel has initiated a full mobilization and is about to launch a ground invasion. Maybe, at the end of all the suffering and death on the Palestinians, they'll be a better position and that fact may be worth celebrating, but the only thing absolutely certain right now is that you're going to see somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 dead Palestians at the end of this, so the score is definitively bad at this stage, and there is no cause for celebration.
Have you ever participated in a struggle? Celebrating victories is important to maintain morale. Stop trying to tone policing the oppressed.
No one here is celebrating from the Palestinians trenches.
International support is important.
Yeah, in terms of materiel and cash, but you don't get credit for posting on hexbear.
Then open up the wallet and get donating piggy
I'm not the one pretending like I'm helping them here.
Yes you are, you just go about it in a smug disaffected and condescending manner where you act above it all. Then you are now acting like that’s a virtue of yours and not yet another symptom of your privilege and chauvinism.
So odd how you often speak up telling others how they are posting is wrong, and it’s always on behalf of some centrist/Liberal/imperialist topic. There are things you will not abide, such as slurs or islamophobia or “celebration of violence” - you do act moralistically about these particular topics. Yet when it comes to the primary contradiction suddenly nothing matters again. How convenient how everything lines up exactly as one would expect for a chauvinist
I'm not above this conflict, I'm away from it, all of us are. I don't have the arrogance to believe I'm involved in it as part of some cyber front like you apparently do.
You want to take the Palestinians struggle and claim it as yours despite not having any skin in the game and without any acknowledgement of the real human toll it's going to have. You're not at any risk, so yeah, I am going to open up my liberal maw when I see it treated like a football match.
I don’t think I’m in some cyber front, but you think being thousands of miles from a conflict gives you a right to both sides and take the chauvinist position. It’s the quintessential chauvinist error of the western left and you just can’t stop doing it. You are addicted to being wrong on imperialism.
Real Palestinians are cheering. Westoid shits like you are whinging. You have no perspective as to what you are
I haven't both sides anything, I've said we shouldn't get giddy on the eve of a massacre.
Palestinians are cheering and western “leftists” are moaning and crying
Yeah and tomorrow you're going to be posting photos of Israeli war crimes. Forgive me for not popping a cork at the prospect.
Why are you so consistently shit on anti-imperialism?
Cause I hate dead Palestinians.
You hate Palestinians standing up for themselves instead of quietly getting choked out over decades. You do have to have a viable alternative if you are gonna shit on Palestinian resistance, unlike what you stated. You are an idealist
I fail to see how getting it over with in one mass slaughter is an improvement. Look if you're going to use your political ends to justify violent slaughter of civilians, you have to have a plausible path forward to showing how it achieves your political ends. So I'm telling you right now, walk me through this. How does today get us closer to Palestinians liberation? If you can't or won't do that, I'm absolutely going to treat you as though your just a spectator at a horrific sporting match.
I in fact, do not have to. Just because this shit plan is the only one being discussed at the moment doesn't mean I have to pretend it isn't shit.
Hamas and Palestinian forces on the ground know the conditions and stakes better than you do. They have made their decision. It is not your role to question it, only to support it. You have a really hard time accepting your role and instead you want to be an idealist from the heavens, I have interacted with you before and I know this is how you are.
They know them differently, but considering they're not operating from the same political or moral framework as leftists, being specifically islamist, I don't feel the need to defer to their views on the matter.
No one here is supporting it, they're posting about it on a shit posting website. My role in the shit posting charade is to shitpost whatever I feel like.
Two nimrods argued in the heavens and the former was better than the latter because the former actually thought he was helping in battle.
You always use this “it’s just posting none of it actually matters” defense to defend your half-baked liberalism and imperialist both-sidesism. If posting doesn’t matter, why can’t you post correctly instead of like a Liberal coward?
There's only one way to post correctly, and that's not to.
Haha so funny, dodge the point like always and retreat to your smug chamber of “nothing matters but I need to speak up all the time to talk about how nothing matters”
Seriously you should take your own motto more seriously and shut the fuck up
Look, when people start popping corks in the prelude to 10,000 dead Palesitans, I'm going to open up my gaping maw of liberalism and you're just going to have to come to terms with that fact, if you can be bothered when you're not busy celebrating the imminent deaths of 10,000 Palestians for no foreseeable gain.
If you can't post correctly, then don't post.
That is in fact the only way to.
Good then get to work shitlib
You're gonna make me tap the sign
Just shut up dude nobody thinks you are funny. Go back in the hole
Gotta strongly disagree with you there.
Odd how according to you “celebrating Palestinian violence” is a bad way to post, you are going around criticizing other people’s comments. So you do care about what people say and you do admit we should strive to comment in a certain way - but only us. You get to say whatever libshit you want and you are exempt from criticism “cause posting doesn’t matter”
You are a hypocrite and bad faith user
How I am exempt from criticism? I'm exempt from your orders telling me to shut up, but that's because you're not my mother.
No anytime I point out your lack on principles and lack of adherence to the anti-imperialist line you always have some excuse about how posting doesn’t matter so you don’t have to exercise discipline
And you're welcome to criticize me for that, just don't expect me to pretend to care about your half baked notions of discipline.
Go away you have nothing interesting to say
Look I've already informed someone about Israel's horrible Hannibal directive so I'm once again take my liberty to disagrees with you there as well.
I'm failing to see how your concern trolling is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not we should be expressing support for Palestinian resistance.
Your protestations can basically be summed up as "I know what's best for the Palestinians and their resistance better than they know themselves. Our job as distant observers should not be to support the decisions that those resisting oppression have made, we should instead concern ourselves with armchair quarterbacking and second guessing them out of an abundance of caution that we might end up backing the wrong horse and get egg on our faces."
You don't seem to be in possession of any specialized knowledge that would make you a higher authority on matters of strategy and tactics than the people actually organizing a resistance movement who have access to all the same information that you do plus an entire life of living in those conditions and an intimate familiarity with the on the ground reality. This isn't a rogue group doing some adventurism, this is an effort organized across several different Palestinian resistance groups who will have already discussed the exact concerns you're bringing up before committing to a joint plan of action.
I'll listen to your concerns about whether there is a more effective strategy for resistance once you are the one putting your life on the line. In the mean time, I'm going to assume that the people who are actually living through that struggle have a better grasp on their situation than I do, and I'm not going to treat it like it's my job to second guess them.
I'm not telling the Palestinian resistors anything, I'm telling everyone here who is repeating the exact same folly celebrating at the breakout of ever hostility that has played out throughout history that there excitement and celebration is premature.
It's the same "we'll whip johnny reb and send him crying" arrogance and disconnection that absolutely destroyed morale when it turned out into a bloody years long slog. Literally tens of thousands of Palestinians are about to die and pointing that out has a lot of piss babies here up in arms because I'm yuking their yum.
You are once again conflating messages of support with celebration.
Yes there will be horror. There has been horror for the past several decades. Resistance is an act of hope. No one engages in resistance because they are under some false pretense that they will come out unscathed, but because what they are fighting for is worth the sacrifice.
So it falls incredibly flat for you to come in here and tell people "Why are you sharing in the hopefulness displayed by the people resisting? Don't you know how much sacrifice they are risking?!?!"
This is what I responded to.
Not support. The right to loudly be 'happy'. There are 300 other people in this thread expressing support for Palestine and I haven't said a peep against any of them. One can and many have shown support without acting like it's Christmas morning and that there are nothing but candy and nuts on the horizon.
Oh, so you didn't actually find some celebrating to reply to, you found someone mocking someone else for their both sidesism and used the word happy as the slightest bit of pretext to go on a comment spree ranting about people celebrating the loss of life.
I'm sorry, your moral crusade is so clear to me now.
Look if no on is happy then don't worry about me, but given I'm getting the exact same "let people have their treats" response doesn't do much to convince me that's the case.
I guess I just don't understand what end you hope to achieve by policing people having a positive response to resistance against genocide and colonization.
Are you just hoping to extol the virtues of stoicism?
Because the point you keep trying to make over and over again is "you shouldn't be happy, do you know that resisting oppression will actually incite even more oppression?"
Which is barely half a step away from a general defeatist attitude. Your position is basically "You're allowed to show support, but remember to couch it in extreme pessimism about the hopelessness of ever changing the world for the better." With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I just don't understand why that's the hill you're choosing to die on. The most charitable interpretation I have is that you just picked a bad position to defend, and you need to stop trying to post through it
I'm extolling the virtue of sobriety, not stoicism. This isn't a football game where we get to cheer when good team score and bad team fumble. These are real lives at stake, and we should actually wait to see that this current uprising improves their lives before we decide it actually was a good thing.
If Israel launches a ground invasion (which they will) and kills 200,000 Palestinians, and you ask us "was this good" everyone here will rightly answer no. That won't stop the uprising from being justified and understandable, but it will from being good.
Liberationary struggle is not hopeless, that's clearly evidenced throughout history, but pretending every revolutionary act of violence no matter how ineffectual it is is good is exactly how you breed adventurism. We know this in a leftist context I don't know why it's so hard to transfer that to a Palestinian context.
You're just using the logic that rationalizes pessimism as a virtue.
"If I'm pessimistic and I'm right then I avoid disappointment, but if I'm pessimistic and I'm wrong then I can be pleasantly surprised."
Which, if that's the the worldview you want to adhere to them more power to you. But if the only thing at stake is whether or not you have egg on your face for something that is incredibly good and justified in principle but might maybe later turn out to have been a blunder tactically, then I don't see what's so important about making sure everyone else is as pessimistic as you choose to be.
The "real lives at stake" will be at stake no matter how we feel about it, because our input has literally no bearing on how Palestinians choose to resist. And I don't see how second guessing the people who are putting their lives at stake is the more principled stance to take which you must endure everyone adheres to. The fact they have enough hope and revolutionary optimism to take action despite suffering under decades of genocide occupation is itself worthy of hope and optimism.
I don't see how "wait and see" is pessimism. There are lots of immediate consequences that can be reasonable inferred (like the death toll from a Israeli land invasion), and those immediate consequences are on the whole bad, so a realistic, not pessimist take on the situation is that the next few days are going to be very unpleasant for the Palestinians even if they do achieve strategic victories in the end. Maybe I'm taking a more consequentialist tack than you, but a move that is justified on principles but strategically folly is still a bad deal in the end.
At least we agree on that.
I don't see how "wait and see" is so important of a principle that you must ensure everyone adheres to it.
But you don't have any special knowledge to evaluate whether it's a bad deal at this current moment. That's what's I'm describing as pessimism, and that pessimism is no more justified than optimism is.
To say that we all must share that pessimism does not seem to be necessary as a matter of principle, especially when the people who are putting their lives on the line clearly must have some degree of revolutionary optimism themselves or else they would not have acted. And they are in a much better position to judge whether their course of action is strategically sound than you or I are in.
I don't get to ensure everyone adheres to it, but if someone asks the hypothetical "why shouldn't I be happy about this right now", I'm going to chime in.
The bad aspects are baked into the cake. The only thing certain right now is that Israel is about to kill thousands of Palestinians, and I take it that we both agree on that. That's going to happen whether or not they achieve any strategic aims. It's not pessimism to acknowledge that any gains are going to have a steep cost, and that such gains are no where near as certain as the cost. Maybe they will come out on top, but they've taken a gamble and I don't feel bad for saying we should wait to see which side the coin comes up before celebrating.
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Sure sounds like you are apologizing for the terror
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If I was a civilian benefiting from and supporting an apartheid regime, it would be very tragic for the brutal savages we keep locked up in a city sized cage to escape and kill me.
No, only the dead Jews/Communists/Slavs/Roma/Disabled/ are a tragedy, the Germans deserve whatever they get because they aren't people
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none at all.
Prove it or shove it.
yeah how about you prove it if you're going to accuse people here of being bloodthirsty monsters? "c'mon man" isn't very compelling
Why are you taking this moment to start up your little civility lib crusade against hexbears? Seriously shut the fuck up
Literally no one here would be disappointed at that.
Way to build up a strawman of hexbear, what's your problem?
these accusations are unhinged.
lol lmao even - new site tagline please mods
Quick question though, if Israel's gov't was gone and replaced, would it be better to name it "Palestine" or "Israel-Palestine" to be more inclusive, like how Rhodesia was once temporarily "Zimbabwe-Rhodesia"... ?
Palestine.
people's republic of the levant
But it doesn't include Lebanon yet, doesn't it, let alone Jordan, or Syria? So, what would you call it at the moment...
US of A doesn't include most of the Americas (on paper), the Democratic People's Republic of Korea only includes half the Korean peninsula.
Fair enough...
I think a lot of people here would say Palestine because they are imagining an outcome without any Jewish people still living there.
Jewish people lived in Palestine before Israel was created
Fuck off with this projection shit
The strawest of mans ever conceived! Wowza!
Guess what! Palestinian Jews are also treated as second class citizens under Zionism!
Pretending that Zionism is equivalent to being Jewish is antisemitism.
Nah
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I can only come to the same conclusion. Its one thing to attack a military checkpoint directly on the border with your territory, heck it's even another thing to occupy the territory of your oppressors, but I don't see how anyone can excuse going out of your way to target random civilians in their homes or to shoot at any moving human you can see.
The palestinians do not have territory. They do not have borders to defend nor any standing as human beings before the regime in Tel Aviv. They live in open air concentration camps under permanent blockade of water, supplies and electricty. It's not surprising that you enjoy misrepresenting the conflict given that your only recourse so far has been a knee jerk reaction to anyone who even so much smells as pro palestinian.
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'rooting for the underdog in a war' is a rather inhuman way of putting it. this isn't a sports game. this is a reaction to a monstrous apartheid regime.
I'm not the one acting like every injured Israeli is a point towards Palestinian liberation
Yes, you're the one acting like with levity towards every murdered palestinian in this decades long american-israeli war of extermination.
'what am i to say to this injured occupier family i've seen in every news media around the world?' 'oh no the minorities will be really genocided now they shouldn't have reacted!' 'what will they tell that poor occupation soldier's family?? this will only make them more vengeful!'. gaslight after gaslight. we've heard it all before. from ireland to pretoria.
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you're never going to get me to care about dead colonizers
REAL