The Palestinians in Gaza are literally the most heroic people on the planet right now. No contest. I like to imagine that if you're in that kind of situation, the urge to lie down and give up leaves you because you can actually go out and do things, whereas we can't do much from our positions other than protest. They can't stop the bombings, of course, but they can dig survivors out of the rubble. It's something to go physically do, which we kinda lack and thus feel awful. That, combined with their strong faith in a religion and a cause, must really help them get through the day-to-day.

Disasters and their aftermath are really where you see the strength and courage of humanity - broadly speaking, people come together and overcome their alienation towards each other and just go out and do. Necessity of immediate action overcomes the tendency of endless pondering about the right course to take. I'm reminded of the aftermath of Katrina, for example:

Ten years ago this week, Americans watched their televisions aghast: It seemed that when New Orleans’s flood-control infrastructure failed, so too did its social order. For a week, the media offered stories of rampant, animalistic violence: of rapes, murders, looting, even of senseless assailants shooting at rescue helicopters. In banner headlines on September 2, 2005, both The New York Times and The Washington Post paired New Orleanians’ “despair and lawlessness,” suggesting that one of these states necessarily led to the other.

The very next week, though, it emerged that the stories broadcast from New Orleans were, at best, exaggerations. Nobody could find the helicopter pilot who had supposedly been shot at. Violence on the ground, too, turned out to be much less common than imagined. “I kept hearing the word animal, and I didn’t see animals,” a woman named Denise Moore told the public-radio program This American Life about her time at the Superdome. Instead, she saw self-organized activities by “gangster guys” who broke into abandoned stores. Although they might have looked like looters, they were salvaging fresh clothes for those who needed them, “juice for the babies, water, beer for the older people, food, raincoats so that they could all be seen by each other.”

...

Such responses to disasters reveal an alternative vision of how to organize society: with ordinary people banding together to help rescue each other and rebuild their communities. When disasters strike, people with greater numbers of formal and informal connections fare better than those who are more isolated. This is true, and unsurprising, on an individual and familial level; people who can rely on friends and relatives for shelter and support will recover faster and more completely.

There's an additional aspect here too, though - Israel isn't even really attempting "hearts and minds" propaganda that could even possibly divide the population. It occasionally references it to the Western audience - we must save Palestine from Hamas! - but nobody in the Israeli government actually really cares to pretend to believe that narrative, instead being content with, or even desiring the total extermination of the Gazans. A smarter, less overtly fascistic state could have manufactured the crisis presented to them on October 7th in a much more devious way - genuinely act like they were with Palestine but against Hamas. Don't indiscriminately bomb the Gaza Strip - what good would that do if they fighters are all in tunnels anyway? Still enact the total siege, cut off all water and food and fuel, and then when desperation kicks in, send in your own massive aid convoys to the hospitals. Force Hamas to blow up aid supply trucks which secretly contain ammunition or weapons for your soldiers alongside food and water and get that on camera. Be genuinely kind to the civilians, don't harm them at all if you can possibly help it, and say that you're just here to get rid of Hamas, and that you'll offer anything - food, money, even more land and less surveillance - if they give up the location of Hamas tunnels. You don't actually have to keep the promise, you just have to try and persuade the Gazans that their best bet is to side with you and not Hamas. If they still refuse, and Hamas is blowing up aid trucks because they must, then you now have carte blanche to start the genocide. You did everything you could! How could anybody remotely reasonable blame you?