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Notes -
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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