site banner

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.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

The thing that strikes me with the decolonization rhetoric is that so many people espousing it don't seem to recognize the position of intense historical privilege they live in. Yes, there's issues with 2023 society, but the vast majority of people with access to Twitter live in comfort unimaginable even 60 years ago.

The entire 'Indigenous Voice referendum' in Australia discussion has been providing so many examples of this, in which there's a ton of focus on 'English colonization bad' coupled with an unspoken assumption that the Indigenous would otherwise have been left completely unmolested by anybody else and somehow emerged as a Western Multicultural democracy via process of Wakandization by now. It makes a coherent argument difficult.