If you want to argue that Jews don't necessarily deserve their own little country to live in (and to defend it with utmost reciprocity), then why has Islam spread around the world and killed millions of dissenting Africans or Asians?
Sure, Islam /=/ Palestine... then in that case, eliminate Hamas, which is an extremist Islamic agenda which got innocent Palestinians into this situation in the first place!
How can you ignore Gaza leadership as their stated own purpose as a fundamental Islamic fucking Jihadists and then discount them from the crimes of Islam throughout history?
Sorry, missed this post with my last reply. I think this is just whataboutism though. I don't think Muslims "deserve" their own country any more than Jews do. I think extremist Israelis (Zionists?) would like to turn Israel into yet another Abramahamic theocracy in the Middle East, and I think all the problems with those theocracies as far as the overall murderousness and religious discrimination are already playing out in Israel, and are a big contributing factor to the current problem which has largely arisen from Israel's aggressively expansionist policies.
Violence begets violence, of course 2 wrongs don't make a right and condemning the wrongs of Israel isn't the same as endorsing the violence of Hamas, but equally the brutality of conditions in Palestine for decades is exactly the kind of situation that breeds more extremism, and Israel is the entity in this conflict which holds, essentially, all the power, as a technologically superior, heavily militarized and nuclear state with apparently unlimited financial backing from the US, and thus has a far greater responsibility as far as how they choose to deal with this issue because they can do, essentially, whatever they want to do.
Options for Palestinians are extremely limited, I'm not endorsing the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians who in all probability had roughly zero to do with those aforementioned decades of occupation and oppression, neither am I endorsing any other forms of fundamentalist Islam, but honestly what did they expect to happen?
What other option do young people in Palestine have, when almost everyone lives in poverty, with limited education or even opportunities to become educated, no opportunity to progress in their lives, to leave, and almost everyone having lost members of their family or friends to indiscriminate Israeli "lawn mowing" campaigns, realistically what exactly does anyone expect them to do except to join an extremist organisation that advertises itself primarily as a movement to resist the artificial hardship imposed by their occupiers, which for many of it's members is probably all they can remember?
Two wrongs don't make a right but on the other hand it's human nature to be angry and laughably easy for coddled Westerners living in relative comfort to just look at the reactive violence in a vacuum and condemn it while ignoring the conditions that lead to that violence in the firstplace, it's like an abusive relationship with a narcissist who continually provokes and gaslights their partner until they finally lash out and they use this to retroactively justify all their controlling behaviour and generally fucked up abuse.
If the situation was reversed and Israel was a somewhat Westernized but Muslim-majority nation that had been blockading and gradually occupying Palestine - a majority Jewish nation in this alternate reality with conditions arguably not too dissimilar from a Holocaust-era concentration camp - and, strangely, it appeared that extremist views were rampant, blahblah, would we not say well, that is obviously just wrong, primarily a consequence of the actions of the nation with much more power?
Religion has fuck-all to do with it except as a convenient justification for massively disproportionate violence from Israel because, what about the many problems perpetrated by Muslims and Islamic nations throughout history? But, what about them? Those Palestinians who elect to join Hamas aren't thinking about whatever historical events by other Muslims in a different time or elsewhere in the world, they're just thinking about the fact they're imprisoned in a brutally poor, tiny, disappearing fragment of land while their friends and family die around them. They're also most likely not thinking about the fact that Israel is essentially a Judaic theocracy in disguise, or at least they wouldn't be pre-Jihadist indoctrination by existing Hamas members, they're just thinking about the fact that it is Israel that appears to be the reason they and everyone they know is sufferring.
Obviously I think there are a lot of problems with Islam and I did used to lean more towards the idea that maybe Islam is just more problematic than other Abrahamic religions, and it still might be, but actually this conflict has someone changed my mind seeing the weirdness and obvious bias of people seemingly turning a blind eye to Israeli violence while constantly invoking violence perpetrated by other Muslims elsewhere in the world in a different era as if that somehow makes the massively disproportionate Israeli reaction not morally abhorrent.
I don't think we really know enough as a species to say for sure that Islam is inherently more problematic than other religions or if all religions are equally prone to extremist ideas incompatible with a bright future for all humanity but simply due to some weird historical quirk Islam just happens to appear to be more commonly extremist, currently, we just don't have a large enough sample size of major religions or, indeed, the evolution of global civilizations to say for sure. But even if Islam IS inherently more prone to problematic extremism, I still don't really see that as particularly relevant to current conflict. Say Israel succeeds in absolutely obliterating and occupying all of Palestine, forcing refugees into Egypt and/or Jordan against the wishes of either or both of those nations - does that mean the end of Islamic extremism? Certainly not. Will that event be remembered in history as not ideal but on the whole the best thing that could have happened for the future of humanity? Harder to say perhaps, but almost certainly not.
If Israel cease hostilities, gradually withdraw to some reasonable border, and gradually lift the various harsh blockades on Palestine, enabling younger people to have better access to education, better lives, and to LEAVE if they want to - does that mean Hamas suddenly become capable of destroying or even inflicting particularly significant damage on Israel? Almost definitely not. Would MORE people decide to join Hamas as a result, with other options available to them, other lives available to them? Surely not.
I am generally in favour of Western interventions in many cases and think there are many situations where absolute categorical military defeat of extremist groups probably is the best option for the future state of humanity, but the way Israel is going about this is just absurd and not going to lead to an outcome that history is going to be kind to, IMHO.
