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I for my part find it extremely frustrating to deal with the recurrent tendency of Israel apologists, and you in particular in this case, to treat Oct 7th as having happened in a vacuum, as opposed to being another iteration in a long chain of action and reaction.
We can argue about who escalated more and which reaction by what side was uniquely disproportionate to the preceding ones, or who started the chain and whether they were justified in doing that, but having the same old argument where you start out by pretending that Israelis and Palestinians were living in peace and harmony until Oct 7th and then Hamas attacked out of absolutely nowhere, and you even go as far as painting a picture where your opponents agree with this framing and just have some obviously silly weaksauce arguments that try to justify Oct 7th against that putative backdrop of peace and harmony over and over again is not productive. It is particularly frustrating here because I'm sure you have been involved in past discussions where the same topic came up, and it is kind of looking like you just abandoned those discussions, waited for things to cool down and then reposted the same premise under the guise of a long-form "effortpost" hoping to roll the dice again for a pliant choir of allies and newcomers that you can preach to.
I think that even if this is true, it's not a valid excuse to omit the context of the October 7 attacks themselves when discussing (and criticizing) Israel's recent activities in Gaza.
Moreover, the phrase "long chain of action and reaction" suggests that the October 7 attacks were a response to some misbehavior of Israel. It seems pretty clear to me that this is not the case. My main evidence for this is that (1) from the beginning of its existence, the stated goal of Hamas has been the destruction of (Jewish) Israel and the killing of all Jews everywhere; (2) Hamas acted aggressively towards Israel immediately following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; and (3) there was never strong objection among Palestinian Arabs to the Egyptian occupation of Gaza before 1967. Probably there is more evidence for this.
To put it another way, if you would like to point to some alleged misconduct on the part of Israel which you believe provoked the October 7 attacks, I am pretty sure I can point to evidence which shows that this is not the actual reason for the attacks but rather a rationalization.
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I don't treat the October 7th attacks as having
happened– look at that, you're doing the exact thing I criticised in the OP – having been committed in a vacuum. I'm aware that they were a reopening of hostilities in a conflict which has been ongoing for the guts of a century.But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate. Other things that are not open for debate: Hamas deliberately targeted civilians; most civilians killed were intentionally killed by Hamas and not by the IDF; Hamas intentionally chose to attack Israel. The October 7th attacks were not "inevitable", and to claim that they were is to, ironically, deny the agency of the Palestinian people.
Please show me where I said any such thing.
You're not trotting out the really good October 7th apologia.
Hamas didn't even know about the music festival, which had its hours extended last minute, no raping happened because Palestinian men aren't that sexually confident, all those people at the festival were combatants anyways so it was a valid military target, and the israelis killed more of their own citizens than Hamas did.
Sorry, bad Gaza takes are a guilty pleasure of mine.
I was tempted to mention the people who've claimed in all seriousness that Hamas killed zero civilians on October 7th, and all the footage depicting them doing that is AI-generated. But I decided I've banged that drum plenty of times already.
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Wasn't Gaza under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007? Is a blockade not an ongoing military action that kind of complicates the whole idea of Hamas striking first out of nowhere? Like, even if Israel wasn't killing people, they were preventing a lot of imports and exports under the theory that many kinds of goods are dual use, and restricting the free movement of Palestinians.
It can, of course, be noted that had Hamas just stopped ripping apart everything Israël allowed in to build bombs and shoot them at Israël, thé blockade would have gotten a lot lighter very quickly.
Yes - "how dare you restrict metal pipes for water!" becomes a lot less impactful when the terrorists release propaganda videos of themselves turning the water pipes into rockets to be fired indiscriminately at civilians.
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I don't recall ever claiming that Hamas struck "out of nowhere". I agree that a blockade constitutes an ongoing military action. Another example of a military action is "firing a missile at another country", something Hamas did somewhere in the region of twelve or thirteen thousand times (source 1, source 2, source 3) between the end of the previous "hot war" and the beginning of the most recent one. No one disputes that Israel and Palestine were engaged in an ongoing conflict prior to October 2023, but it's equally indisputable that there was a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities in October 2023. I think the most parsimonious framing of the above is that the immediate catalyst for the escalation in hostilities was Hamas's invasion of Israel on October 7th.
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I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes." And as someone who is on the pro-Israel side of things, I have no objection to including this as context in discussing the October 7 attacks and Israel's response. From my perspective, the main issue here is not that Hamas struck at Israel, but rather that Hamas deliberately engaged in the murder, sexual assault, and hostage-taking of civilians on a large scale.
Yeah, I don't think Hamas attacking civilians was justified in any case, but I think it is more understandable if you don't ignore the constant low level application of military force that had become a part of the status quo in Gaza.
It's similar to how murdering your husband is never right, but it is possible to look back to the days before no fault divorce, and at least understand why some women, who felt trapped in horrible marriages, decided that murder was the best way out. Such a murder didn't come out of nowhere, and it would be silly to say that the wife in such a case "started it" with the murder, even if both participants in the marriage had done their fair share of retaliation and escalation over the years.
I don't think I would use the word "understandable," because it implies something about the mindset of Hamas' leadership which I am pretty sure is inconsistent with reality. I'm pretty confident that even in the absence of a blockade (especially in the absence of a blockade) Hamas would have viciously attacked Israelis given the opportunity.
I think if people genuinely want to understand the situation, they need to take this into account. That Hamas doesn't want to just be left alone to to run Gaza in peace; they want to destroy (Jewish) Israel and kill all Jews everywhere. (Edit: For starters, my evidence for this claim is the Hamas charter.)
Perhaps not, but if the wife's perception of mistreatment was wildly at odds with reality and was mainly a result of her selfishness and narcissism, it might be reasonable to assign full responsibility to her.
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But how we define the boundaries of "the most recent conflict" is itself a subjective, political decision. Hamas supporters would argue that there is no such thing as a peaceful state of affairs between Israel and Palestine, and thus no such thing as a "recent" conflict than began on Oct 7th - there were simply the periods when the Israeli boot was grinding them down so overwhelmingly as to make large-scale resistance efforts impossible.
I have little sympathy for Hamas myself, but as a point of principle I do think it's worth debating. If I keep someone as a slave in my basement under constant threat of beating them to a pulp if they escape - and one day, I carelessly leave the door unlocked, and the slave tries to stab me in my sleep - I don't know that you can state for an objective fact that the escaped slave has initiated violence.
One can characterise the Israel-Palestine conflict as a cold war which periodically gets hot. I don't think anyone is disputing that there was a war in Gaza in 2014, and that the situation in Gaza looked very different before that war began and afterwards. I don't think anyone in Gaza would claim that they didn't notice any difference in their day-to-day experiences before and after that war began. Equally, I don't think anyone would dispute that the 2014 war was just the latest instance of a cold war going hot in a long, long line of them.
By the same logic, I don't think it's controversial to state that the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict went hot in October 2023 and the catalyst for it going hot was the invasion of Israel by Hamas squaddies. Accepting that fact does not require you to sympathise with Israel, believe that Israel aren't committing a genocide, believe that Israel has the right to defend itself, believe that Israel has a right to exist etc. But I don't think it's open to dispute that the most recent instance of this cold conflict going hot was prompted by an action freely undertaken by Hamas.
The characterization I was putting forward is not of a cold war that goes hot, but of a single uninterrupted conflict that moves very slowly because one opponent is much stronger than the other, and keeps the weaker opponent in a headlock for years or decades at a time before said weaker opponent can get their next punch in. I am proposing that at no point in time were a critical mass of Palestinians not trying to destroy Israel, nor Israel not doing things to Palestine that Palestinians perceived as acts of war - Oct 7th was simply the first Palestinian attack in a while that managed to pierce the skin. This is a wholly different question from who's actually morally justified in all of this!
Similar to how Germany and France/England were engaged in "war" for a decent period of time after the fall of Poland (the Phony War, or Sitzkrieg) prior to the successful German invasion of France?
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This is a space centered around debate, and I don't appreciate that attempted consensus-building
Some questions of fact are open for debate. Some are not, and it isn't "consensus-building" to say so. No one would accuse me of "consensus-building" if I said it wasn't open for debate that JFK was assassinated in Dallas in November '63, or that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in September '01.
JFK faked his own death and changed his name to Tupac, he’s still alive in the Illuminati hotel in Cuba.
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Ah, never met a JFK conspiracist or a 9/11 Truther, have you?
Well, I certainly haven't met one who seriously claimed that no one assassinated JFK. But I suppose such a person must exist.
In any case, I suppose strictly speaking it would be "consensus-building" to claim that it's not up for debate that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and that the buildings were not destroyed by explosives. But I view that as "consensus-building" on a par with the claim that "it's not open for debate that heliocentrism is true".
It is not "consensus-building" in the way we apply that rule. Using rhetorical devices like "It's beyond debate" are, perhaps, a little questionable (because literally everything will be debated by someone) but it's not meant to prohibit an assumption of common knowledge. It's meant to prohibit making an argument from the assumption that your opinion is a settled matter.
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JFK conspiracy theorists- a group which includes a majority of Americans- pretty much believe that LBJ/Israel/the KGB/ancient Egyptian deities/the mafia/the KKK killed him. The ‘actually still alive’ niche in American conspiracy lore is reserved for rappers.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of 9/11 truthers claiming thé buildings were never hit by a plane, with explanations ranging from ‘magic’ to convoluted ideas about Air Force stunt pilots and nanothermite.
And Elvis
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