I don't know why it isn't even a moderate view presently to think that "maybe an entire population being actively bombed shouldn't be cut off from water, electricity, food, fuel, and basic humanitarian aid"
That's not just "defending yourself"
I'd rather not all jews be grouped together with Zionism, because that makes it seems like they are representative of all our interests. anti-Zionist jews have existed as an organized political force longer than Israel has existed; The Bund was a larger political organization and more representative of ashkenazi jews than Zionism up until around the 40s, and Bundists stood in staunch opposition to the Zionist project, which they criticized as being explicitly colonialist and imperialist.
So that Palestinians are assaulting people from our group is like if we said that BLM protestors were attacking people from your group, with your group being white christians as represented by Donald Trump and the proud boys. You wouldn't feel like that's right because it wouldn't be.
George Floyd was an uprising against the police that saw unprecedented resistance to the racist state that subjects black people to unbearable violence. Gazans are subjected to circumstances that are unbearable beyond what is possible to express in language. Hamas claims that they did not target any civilians during the attack and my friends in Palestine, who've I've been speaking to every day since the attack, who are not part of Hamas, all agree; the attacks were not carried out in isolation by Hamas, but rather by a coalition of all of the existing militant groups in Gaza: PIJ, PFLP, and the DFLP. take the testimony of a hostage from the Kfar Ada[1], the Kibbutz that was attacked, who states that the Hamas fighters who took her hostage treated her family with respect, even asking if they could have some of the bananas on the counter. now I realize that doesn't mean everyone was treated like that, and atrocities certainly took place, but all my friends are saying that from the psytrance festival to other documented attacks on civilians, its visibly PIJ, and these are honestly totally different entities who have even fought each other at times, and I do not believe its fair to say different forces who participate in a coordinated attack with others are all responsible for the actions of combatants under a different command.
The point of this being, its wrong to simply group people and collectively assign them responsibilities; its wrong to assign the people of Gaza collective responsibility for the actions of militants and then cut all water and electricity and demand 1.1m people evacuate one of the most densely populated places on earth with absolutely nowhere to go, making people who were already subjected to the most desperate and hopeless circumstances totally out of their control pay for the actions of others they never even encountered while alive. And likewise, it's also wrong to assign responsibility to all Jews to defend Israel when a massive number of us feel its our duty speak out while the worst human rights violations happening on the planet are at this moment being carried out in our name.
Jews who believe its their right to subordinate Palestinians & deprive them of rights, trapping them in ever shrinking overpopulated areas of land (Gaza & Area A) without passports or modern hospitals, or the ability to trade with the world, or anything, are definitely comparable to Christian Proud Boys.
@rml Still not getting that. BLM didn't have a history of firing artillery from the school backyards into civilian areas. If anything, the IRA would be closer, although I know even less about them.
Besides, what's even the point of such an analogy? I don't know any good it would make. But it certainly will make people angry about misrepresentation, association and more people will be misled into some flawed but familiar facsimile of an understanding.
@rml (I'm leaving out Christine out of this, perhaps we should even go private not to draw the ire of instance admins and users abroad). (Also, none of this is to justify anything. I want to "compare notes", so to speak, with a live person instead of propaganda outlet. If you're up to it of course.)
The problem with the Bund (and other autonomist movements (with which I somewhat agree, from the cursory glance)) is that the Bund *was*. And... yeah... around the 40s something has happened that made their position unfashionable.
I don't get the colonialism angle either. It looks like "Trail of tears" in reverse in the counterfactual event of US dissolution.
(---) war
@dpwiz @cwebber wait a sec, is this apologetics for collective punishment, which as has been made amply clear is a war crime?