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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.

I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.

Why are you shocked? Support for Israel is Team Red-coded in America.

American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.

I would hope they would update their priors on Palestine and Hamas even just a little bit or at the very least look at the situation and have better PR for a few days and pretend to have a minimum of sympathy even if they didn't change their opinion. At lot of the people they killed and captured weren't even Israelis or Jews.

I think you are, unfortunately, very naive about the human condition.

People who strongly update their priors, beliefs, and are open to admitting that they are wrong tend to not make it very far socially, in elite circles, local or international politics.

I unfortunately understand too well that's how people are when it comes to admitting they are wrong. However, I have an extremely low opinion of DSA type people and I really don't think most have sincerely held beliefs or principles so I thought they'd just react to this and at least pretend to care about Israel civilians for a few days before they go onto their new fashionable belief. And for the ones that do have that sincere belief, I thought they'd at least pretend to care and have good PR for a few days until Israel blows up a hospital with civilians in it and they can walk back their "support" and go back to hating Israel publicly. Neither of these turned out to be true though and these reactions did surprise me. That so many leftists would come out and say that Israelis civilians deserve to die and had this coming is extremely shocking to me. I will straight up admit I am not a fan of these kinds of people, but I actually expected more sympathy out of them. Maybe I am naive.

American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.

But enough about Marina Abramović.