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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

> According to a Harvard/Harris poll, 51 percent of Americans ages 18–24 believe Hamas was justified in its brutal terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7.

This was the prompt, from the survey:

> Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?

Note the distinction here. Can be. Not is. The question from the poll is garbage to begin with, IMO, because it's basically the only question anywhere in the poll that even deigns to fathom the idea that maybe Palestinians are suffering as part of the conflict.

But the author is intentionally twisting meaning of the question to turn it into "Young people support terrorism because TikTok!"

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Sorry, I don't see that distinction... Maybe his end result is wrong but "can be" for a brutal murder of 1,300 by now including pretty horrific stuff: https://x.com/EylonALevy/status/1719667140209316316?s=20

Never. If you're response is anything other than "under no circumstances", then there's a serious problem there...

> Never. If you're response is anything other than "under no circumstances", then there's a serious problem there...

Plenty of people believe 9/11 was a heinous act, but are willing to recognize that there were factors that caused it to happen (not just, "Al-Qaeda attacked the US because they hate OUR FREEDOM!"), and can believe that the US's response to completely level Afghanistan and Iraq was far in excess of the provocation.

My point being, once again, to look at the poll, and see that this is the only question anywhere in the poll where "grievances of Palestinians" is mentioned. If you happen to be someone who is sympathetic to their plight, answering "Yes" to this question is the closest you can get to on this. Every other question (including this one) is an intentionally binary choice of "I support Israel in 100% of everything they do" or "I support Hamas and love terrorism".

> Plenty of people believe 9/11 was a heinous act, but are willing to recognize that there were factors that caused it to happen (not just, "Al-Qaeda attacked the US because they hate OUR FREEDOM!")

51% of US young people would think that???

Not on 9/11. Maybe 3% at most.

Unrelated but for context: adjusted to population size the Oct/7 attacks would be on a scale of 48,000 people dying on 9/11 not including all the kidnapped people...

> US's response to completely level Afghanistan and Iraq was far in excess of the provocation.

That's a separate discussion. But take into consideration that those countries were both far and invaded politically. Also the Hamas seems to be pleased with the result and is already promising a repeat: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1y31101m6

> "I support Israel in 100% of everything they do" or "I support Hamas and love terrorism".

I hope this is the case. But it is still disheartening that even for such a bad example people would choose that. I feel that indicates they don't truly understand how awful the Hamas really is.

I want a Palestinian state and have been politically active in various movements for that purpose. The Hamas is by far the biggest roadblock on that road followed by Netanyahu.

> adjusted to population size the Oct/7 attacks would be on a scale of 48,000 people dying

This is a dangerous argument. Each individual's value is the same irrespective of the size of their group or nation.

Also, following the exact same reasoning, we could say that Israel has killed 1.3 million Palestinians in last three weeks, and almost three million in last 15 years. The fact that the proportion is never mentioned in relation to Palestinians, but only Israelis, is revealing.

> The Hamas is by far the biggest roadblock on that road followed by Netanyahu.

Hamas was bolstered by Netanyahu precisely to weaken the more moderate Palestinian liberation movement and to have some useful enemy to point to in order to continue his politics of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. If they remove Hamas, they'll need to invent another one (and they will, if the bombs are not enough to breed a new generation of terrorists).

No. It means that most of us personally know people who died and kidnapped on that day. It means I was on the phone with a woman and her little girls while terrorist were having a gunfight with her husband within the house...

It means everyone knows someone who's still in Gaza. That's the implication of this scale. It's an important metric to understand the severity of the attack and the severity of the reaction. It's also important to understand the reduced empathy from the Israeli side.

Look at how crazy the USA was on 9/11. Imagine every single person knew someone personally... Imagine some of them were still missing. It would have been at a different level.

The distinction is between "do you feel it's justified" and "does someone in the world somewhere feel it's justified".

I'm very empathetic to Palestinians and agree with the cause of the Palestinian state. I even understand some of the armed resistance...

I don't think that's a valid interpretation of the question. I'm guessing the people committing the crime consider it justified. But that doesn't make sense and I didn't read that in the question.

The goal of the Hamas terrorists was to start a war and kill as many innocent civilians as possible. The end goal is to destroy the state of Israel. Thinking that something like this could be justified by anyone doesn't make sense to me.

And yet clearly it is justified by some people, e.g. Hamas. (Not justified to me, for the record.)

Why not just ask the unambiguous question in the poll? That would have been better, I think we can agree.

This is not correct. You have to look at the historical context and the fact that this is an anti-colonial liberation resistance struggle since about 1929. If you don't understand the root cause of the Palestinian Israeli conflict, you've completely missed the cause of the violence. The root cause is the racist Zionist ideology that, in its implementation in Mandatory Palestine, needed (and still needs) to eliminate the Native population in its acquisition of land. This is clear if you look closely at the settler violence in the West Bank. This is a war for land.

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