Hamas' social media following has skyrocketed
cnn.com
cnn.com
Generally I don't recommend watching these. These kinds of videos are incredibly disturbing.
--- Trigger warning: violence.
One thing that struck me is how horror-like all of it seemed and how invisible the opponent in such an engagement is. The invaders would often not see where the defenders were and would get shot seemingly out of nowhere. Vice versa they would shoot into small nudges and windows here or there and its often unclear whether they hit anyone or not.
My cousins who fought in Bosnia would often tell me similar stories. Their enemies were invisible most of the time, while sometimes someone would get hit on their side.
For reference: I once watched Full Metal Jacket with one of my cousins and there was a scene where suddenly, out of nowhere, the protagonists would get attacked in an urban area but they couldn't even see their enemies, just flashes of rifle fire here and there. He said: "This is exactly like war."
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I don't know what to make of it. It all just feels like pointless horror.
A person being confronted so undeniably with their place in the machinery of superorganisms in conflict induces all sorts of problems, including cognitive dissonance, and the mind struggles to form the individually senseless nature of strangers lining up to disassemble each other with kinetic force into some kind of cohesive narrative, usually failing miserably.
So, that's the true horror of it: the deep destruction of the self. That's why what remains of participants are often these psychological husks, their reality model permanently shattered.
Telegram has been a source of war content, both for the Ukraine conflict and this one. I’m not sure why it’s so much more prolific than Twitter, but it definitely is. It might just be a difference of public vs private. Watching the Telegram rooms, you get the impression that someone is reporting to you directly, and that there’s no chance the videos will suddenly disappear. You had to opt in to the room to see it at all. Whereas a bunch of videos were made inaccessible on Twitter when the accounts that posted them got suspended — videos that bubbled up onto the “for you” feed algorithmically, rather than being shared in a private curated channel.
It’s fascinating watching from a distance. Everyone likes to feel the social media forces can be controlled or shaped. To an extent they can be, but most of it is just chaos on both sides. Telegram shows that people will tune in to private channels, though their reach might be limited compared to default-public mediums like Twitter.
Apropos nothing, pg highlighted one of the more interesting takes on the whole situation a few days ago: https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk...
One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor.
> Durov argued that Telegram was different from other platforms because it doesn’t use algorithms to promote content
Is that fair? Is an algorithm the equivalent of an editorial line? And what counts as an algorithm? It seems like there's a continuum from something simple like "most recent posts at the top" to "+5 bonus to Elon's tweets".
The left pane is a list of "channels" sorted by most recent updates. The right pane are the updates from the specific channel, sorted by most recent.
I had joined the two Hamas telegram channels to see what the org was saying. I'm as much a detractor of the org as anyone, and am quite pleased to see their annihilation (though it is incredibly unfortunate that civilian Palestinians pay the greatest price). Their channel has been an exercise in cope while their narrative shifted quickly from arrogant, untouchable boasting about the things they did, to now being effectively a pathetic desperate pleading.
Same goes with Russia. I don't have any sympathy for them if Putin is popular and make decisions like Ukraine invasion.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/hamas-middle-east-science-32095d8...
E.G:
In the link you cite, the numbers come from "the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research". Researching how reliable this source is is a huge and hard work I'm assuming most HN users have neither the resources nor the skill to do. Medias outlet and politicians from all sides have demonstrated little benevolence or competence so trusting them to do that is also a stretch.
Even in France, I'm distrusting statistics from INSEE (!) now because it's so hard to verify neutrality. Condemning people to death based on those information is unwise.
Even if the data is true, where does that lead you? American have elected Bush which lied about WMD and went to war with Irak against the vote of the UN, killing thousands of civilians.
Do Americans deserve to die?
In which case which people from which country would be absolved from that judgement?
To them Jewish lives aren't important. And the fact that Jews are allowed to tell them what to do generates explosive righteous indignation.
Imagine yourself being ruled by chimpanzees. It wouldn't matter to you how benevolent they are, whether you have food or roof above your head. You'd feel like it's absurd, and whoever drove you into the situation where an ape tells you what to do must be brought to justice. This is how the average Gazan feels.
> Head pollster Khalil Shikaki, who has been surveying Palestinian public opinion for more than two decades, called it a “dramatic” shift, but said it also resembles previous swings toward Hamas during times of confrontation. Those all dissipated within three to six months as Hamas failed to deliver on promises of change.
It's like when George W. Bush had 90% approval in the US after 9/11; it doesn't really fairly reflect normal opinion.
The concept of 'total war' follow from the above. It is a foregone conclusion from democratic premises and the incentives of officials.
I would still say it's not wrong to blame American's from Bush's action.
If you offered to blow up the city in order to take out Republican leadership, more than a few would at least be willing to consider that tradeoff.
And American's absolutely do suffer from their President's actions(although not that much).
So the other 47% are culpable? The vast majority of people are victims of their own governments. Indiscriminate war is unconscionable- the biggest losers are always the little people.
Dead civilians are always a tragedy, if they are Israeli or Palestinian. Only if and when peope are tired of killing, will this come to a stop.
It is as simple (and as difficult) as that. You're going to have to sell that to at least one side, probably both.
Let's say 51% of the U.S. voted for a crazy President from party "X" who became a dictator (illegally), and did terrible horrible unspeakable things.
And, let's say the 49% of the U.S. that didn't support said nutjob President, vehemently protested and did everything they could to oppose him[0].
Now, let's the say the rest of the world unites to defeat the U.S. that had gone crazy.
Would you still advocate that "Americans should pay the price for X's crimes against humanity"?
Would you advocate for the collective punishment of Americans, including those who abhor and hate X's actions (and who even attempted to resist X)?
This is the problem with collective punishments. QED
[0] Keep in mind the extreme difficulty of revolting against a government that has the most technologically-advanced military in the world.
There is basically no other option if you think about it. Either we should be fine palestianians choosing Hamas or we can force Palestians to not have a choice in leadership. Second is more violent but that is what is done now.
There's so much nuance and complexity with this topic that online discussion is so tiring to read. People take two points out of twenty and make sweeping judgements and generalizations without having the full picture.
Furthermore: there haven't been elections since 2006 - there are people at fighting age in the entirety of Palestinian Territories who have never seen a voting booth in their life.
I mean, there are many things that could be done to help Palestinians to live a better life. Supporting Hamas is definitely not one of those, not by a large margin.
Most people that voice their opinion on the conflict seem to have very little information / understanding of the reasons and of the current situation.
And so do you.
Most importantly, people don't know what "Palestine" is. Of course, it's not surprising since there were at least three international efforts to define its borders, all of which failed. Not to mention the sequence of successful and failed land grabs, some more justified than others.
So, just to make it more painful for people voicing stupid political opinions:
Palestine isn't about nationality (eg. you can be Afro-Palestinian, at least I met a few who identify as such). While Arabs are probably the majority of those who identify as Palestinians, there are also Bedouin for example.
Palestine isn't about religion. While most people who identify as Palestinians are Muslims, a bunch are Christian as well as non-religious.
Palestine, as a state has no history, so, nobody can trace their roots to some Palestinian ancestry. It's just a romanized Biblical name given by Jews to... iirc the Greek pirates who sometimes pillaged the area around Ashdod / Ashkelon and at some point even had a permanent settlement there, displacing locals. But the knowledge about the pirates wasn't there when the crusaders were in control of that piece of land, and they used the Biblical word for generic "enemy of the kingdom of Israel" to name everything that was not either Jewish or Christian in that general area. Simply because by the time they've arrived in the modern day Israel they've discovered that there aren't a lot of Jews left, so they've assumed that anyone who was there must be the descendant of the enemies of the kingdom of Israel.
The modern-day Palestinians were created by UN in two steps: first by approving the partitioning of the territory previously held by the Brits, and second time by granting perpetual status of refugees to those who fled the area after an attempted pogrom that failed and made the perpetrators fear for their own lives.
The first group of people was briefly under the governance of Jordan and Egypt, but then those lands fell under Israeli rule, which is the occupation Palestinian supporters are so upset about. Israel faces a difficult decision with these territories as no existing state wants to control them. Israeli far right wants to kick out the locals from these territories and re-settle them with Israeli citizens. Even the very far right, like Rehavam Zehevi didn't imagine doing this through military action though. They had the program they called "transfer", which wanted the locals from the West Bank and Gaza to cede territory in exchange for monetary or some other form of compensation. Israeli left has two different programs: the more realistic one is to separate entirely from the occupied territories, the less realistic is to incorporate the occupied territories into the state of Israel by giving the occupied population Israeli citizenship (this is a very small minority within very tiny Israeli left, basically, just Hadash).
So, there are two substantially different groups of people with different motivation: first are the displaced former inhabitants of Yaffo and the like, who want to return to where they used to live in modern day Israel (but they still want to kill all the Jews, so they won't be living in Israel really). And there's the group that lives in the occupied territories, who want to split from Israeli rule (they don't really, but Iran tells them to). Those who live in the occupied territories, if they are smart enough, understand what a shit-show it's going to be when remnants of Israeli governance are removed: poverty amplified by corruption, dysfunctional infrastructure, nonexistent law-enforcement etc. A lot of them try to get Israeli citizenship if they have any chance.
There's also the third group: the so-called "Israeli Arabs". Some of them identify as Palestinians, but their interests usually align with one of the two previous groups, except most of these want Israel to stay as it is.
Israel, for obvious reasons really, really, doesn't want the first group anywhere near its borders. And, geographically, Gaza has the most refugee camps where people from this group live. This also explains why Gaza is a lot more violent and anti-Semitic in its rhetoric then the West Bank.
So, the people who know zilch about the situation on the ground may claim that Hamas only represents 53% or w/e other percentage of Palestinians... they are missing that the other 47% or however many there is are represented by similar but less popular "political" parties, most of which have "liberation of Palestine" in their name. In other words, when it comes to Hamas' goals in terms of vanquishing all the Jews, pretty much everyone in Gaza agrees with them. Their political differences lie along the lines of how much of Sharia law they want to implement or whether communism is good or bad. There isn't a single political entity in Gaza or West Bank for that matter whose political program would be to say "you know what, we are sorry for trying to kill you like three times in fifty years, maybe we should leave that in the past and start fresh as respectful neighbors". That is not in the cards, and as long as this situation is convenient for Iran will never be.
Besides I don't exactly get the feeling here that Hamas would be all to happy to have a peaceful election and step aside if they lost.
Allegedly (and who knows, it may be Israeli propaganda), the rockets they launch are made by pulling up the water pipes.
And to clarify: I don't side with Israel. I just don't think Hamas is on the side of the Palestinians. I know Nethanyahu is not on the side of the Israeli people and ben-gevir basically shares hitlers pov about Jews marrying non-Jews, which should pretty much prove how much he is not on the side of the good guys.
How so? Western nations are full of wackos and nutjobs. Someone protesting does not necessarily mean anything needs to change.