#hamas exists because of israel

[satoriberry]

dont you just love it when you get pro-israeli anti-hamas ads on your TL 😍😍😍

[givemearmstopraywith]

anon who is "not a zionist" and "not a jew": you need to educate yourself and stop uncritically inhaling every piece of pro-imperialist, pro-zionist propaganda that falls into your lap. you are living in a state of fear that is completely fabricated and i feel sorry for you. also this?

is a truly insane thing to say to me, a jew, when i have been very open about my immediately family members having survived the holocaust, as in my mother is named after a baby who was murdered by the nazis in dachau, as in i have uncles and aunts who lived in ghettos, and the fact that i have to air out MY generational trauma on this stupid website to get people like you to back off is truly fucking insane. you should not be weaponizing the trauma of an entire ethnic group against us while simultaneously claiming you care so much about how we are oppressed. newsflash: you are being antisemitic. jews created anti-zionism. jews were religiously against the creation of an israeli state the moment we entered the diaspora and again the moment it become a political movement. anti-zionism was a jewish movement before it became anything else.

how dare you come into my space spreading propaganda about something you clearly know nothing about, how dare you claim to care about jews while accusing me of not caring about my own generational trauma and my own people and trying to weaponize one genocide against another.

how are you care so little about the lives of palestinians that you can dismiss their suffering because you cling so much to this bizarre idea of "western values." western values killed jews. western values are killing palestinians. the fact that you are able to dismiss the dignity and right to life of palestinian people and ignore their suffering shows me that you do not care about jews at all, you care about your precious moral high ground and sense of individualism, because if this situation were reversed and it was jews suffering and it was jews who were the target of vicious, baseless, hateful propaganda, you would swallow it uncritically. you are not a good person. you are as good as a nazi in 1945 because you are a zionist in 2024.

[mewlabu]

Is it irony that the people who keep screaming at Ukranian to not be "Russiaphobic" because "not all Russians" have demonized everyone even vaguely related to Israel, let alone just Jewish people existing in the last few months?

I'm well aware there are people still on the left who are actual functioning human beings who have capacity to be self critical and self reflect. But I feel like they are increasingly the baffled minority wondering wtf happened that people in the world of political inclinations meant to be a more humane and kinder approach to humanity have become so blood thirsty and ghoulish.

[hummingbird-hunter]

The fact that I can have a more rational, coherent conversation about i/p (and really most of political/social issues) with my 70 year old grandma than with most of the westerners here is really telling.

[ofdinosanddais1]

Hamas doesn't exist for funsies. It exists because Israel has been systemically oppressing Palestinians for decades for the mere audacity of their existence. I'm pretty sure Hamas members don't even want to exist. It just exists because Israel hates Palestinians.

[artemisiatridentata]

Damn people are really on this site freely admitting their lack of critical thinking about the last 80-odd years of Palestinian and Zionist history huh. Do y'all think Palestinians had safety and dignity during the 30 years under Israeli occupation before Hamas was founded? No. It was and continues to be hell on earth, because of the violent actions of the settler-colonial state of Israel. Why the fuck do you think Hamas, al-Qassam, and similar orgs exist in the first place? They didn't spring up out of nowhere; they were formed by orphans and survivors of the decades of brutal, systemic violence inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli occupation, in direct response to said violence.

And btw Palestinians have tried nonviolence; do none of you remember the Great March of Return several years ago? Israel murdered and maimed unarmed/peaceful Palestinian protestors. The gall of some of y'all to criticize the tactics colonized people use to defend themselves against an occupation... my god. As Arundhati Roy said, people have the right to resist annihilation.

[gingerswagfreckles]

Not really loving how my post about the left's love affair with eugenics and blood and soil ideology framed as "decolonization" got coopted into another "wait it's all Christianity??" "It always has been" post." Y'all are sticking your heads in the sand if you think this is a problem with "cultural Christianity." This is the exact same pattern we saw play out in the 1979 Iranian revolution and much of this ideology was coopted from the Nazis by the Soviets and reframed as progressive. This is not an issue with Western "cultural Christianity" and it would be great if Jumblr could stop engaging in the same "there's actually one secret root cause of every problem in the world and if we get rid of it we will have utopia" thing that antisemites have been using against Jews for 2000 years.

[okjuuzu]

Its always funny to me when zionists come on this app to try and make hamas look bad with think pieces and they accuse them of things that their own government and the american government does too.

"Hamas tortures and excutes spies" "hamas uses propaganda" "hamas spends alot of money on its military" blah blah blah boy let me tell you something...

[lias-archive]

"do you condemn Hamas?" is a meme at this point.

[anthropomorphicbeancake]

Atrocities happening to innocents that are a part of the oppressor state or group, is still the fault of the oppressor, not the oppressed for using the same tactics in their defense.

[nightwingsnightblog]

I'm sorry, but I have McFucking lost it. You are all seething with such hatred built on a colossal lie. Fuck war and fuck you.

[weirdloverwilde]

the eu is beyond fucking annoying

[the--sound--of--rain]

Can we hold Hamas, and only Hamas, responsible for Israel is doing now in Gaza? (Because this is what some Western newspapers and politicians are claiming.)

No, of course not. It's nonsense in any context to solely hold a person or group responsible for the reaction of another person or group to their actions. If this were a valid stance, we wouldn't be expected to condemn Hamas for their actions on October the 7th, despite these actions being a reaction to the Israeli occupation.

Every person and group is responsible, at least in part, for their reaction to an action of another person or group, as long as they have another choice. No matter how understandable that reaction may be.

Hamas did have another choice. Logically it would not be possible for them to wage a "classical" war on Israel as they are inferior in number, weaponry and sovereignty (because remember Israel holds the most power over the Gaza strip), but they could have decided to not resist, give up their land, and let Israel continue controlling the lives of people in the Gaza strip, randomly taking people (including women and children) prisoner, and killing Palestinians every now and then. You may argue that this would have been a better option.

And this is why Hamas should be tried in an international court for what they have done.

In what world would you not apply the same rules to Israel? They had an array of choices other than what they are doing now. They could have sent in special forces to get to Hamas fighters, they could have tried to negotiate to get their hostages out – the list goes on. Carpet bombing an entire area and cutting off all supplies (electricity, water, food) to hospitals and households, then bombing those hospitals and and houses and bombing the refugee camps that people have fled to in order to escape the bombing and then driving in and running over civillians and shooting at rooms with newborns in them should have been the last one on the list of all the choices they had. And you may argue, even, that every single one of Israel's choices other than to do what they are doing now, would have been more favourable to them than it would have been to Hamas and Palestinians to simply surrender to the occupation.

Is Hamas solely responsible for everything following October the 7th? If you follow that logic, it's not Hamas responsible at all: Israel would be solely responsible for everything following the 1948 Nakba.

[rainbowgod666]

Defend itself against what exactly even

palestine is in a complete and utter blackout with israel launching hundreds of its heaviest airstrikes so far across gaza. this is a mass slaughter and we won't even know the extent of the casualties until it's over; israel have cut off telecommunications so they can commit their atrocities in the dark. there is a genocide happening right in front of our eyes and every person who has ever defended israel's "right to defend itself" has the blood of palestinians on their hands. we cannot ignore what is one of the most devastating massacres in human history.

[bisexualfaggotry]

I have a hard time telling if you actually want a free palestine or not ngl

[jewishvitya]

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.