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Comment by hackerlight | Hacker News Reader

> If Palestine didn't want war they shouldn't have let Hamas initiate acts of war

We should avoid collectivizing the motives and capabilities of heterogeneous individuals, many of them children, and many of them adults who do not support Hamas's atrocities but had no ability to stop them without being killed themselves.

It's one thing to say that the civilian deaths in this war are unfortunate collateral damage, it's another thing to do away with the concept of collateral damage entirely and pretend that every single individual bears moral culpability for Hamas's actions, just for the crime of being born on the wrong side of the fence.

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It's tragic, but there was and is wide support of October 7 attacks in Gaza, as well there was wide participation of the civilian (non-organization aligned) population in the massacres, including looting, killing, kidnapping and probably rape.

Furthermore, Hamas was elected by the population under popular vote, and it is a palestinian organization entrenched in every facet of civilian organizations and life, and strongly stems from palestinian cultural norms (e.g. islamism, martyrdom, etc)

You cannot completely act as if Hamas is not the defacto government in Gaza, and in any war in history, especially urban warfare in civilian setting with non-uniformed combatants, you cannot truly hurt only the military apparatus without also hurting civilians. This is simply a fact of life.

It is a Western trope going as far back as the Nazis to act as if governments have no representation of their citzenship, especially authocratic ones. Even to this day for example, the German government of 1933-1945 are called 'the nazis' rather than germans, as if they came from outer space, and returned to their planet on 1945, leaving none of their members in the Western/Eastern Germany governments.

> It's tragic, but there was and is wide support of October 7 attacks in Gaza, as well there was wide participation of the civilian (non-organization aligned) population in the massacres, including looting, killing, kidnapping and probably rape.

I know. But that doesn't change the fact that ~25% (number is probably wrong) don't support what Hamas did. You can't group up those 25% with the 75% as if they're all morally culpable and "Palestine" is one thing and "Palestine" deserves moral guilt. If you support Israel you probably see the other side do it where "Israel" is evil as if Israel is a single entity and there aren't different views inside Israel. Every single person is a "settler" who deserves it because they are all equally culpable by virtue of their existence inside a particular geographic region. This is a dehumanizing approach of looking at the conflict.

It doesn't mean each one is morally culpable, but it does really hurt the narrative of 'hamas kidnapped the population'.

I think Gaza is going through an enormous tragedy, but Israel did undertake efforts to reduce civilian casualties (such as evacuation), although much less so than previous conflicts. Having said that, war is still terrible and having to fight in such a population dense area with an enemy who is embedded into the population has a huge toll.

About the dehumanizing approach, I agree. I think one of the results of the October 7 attacks is that it heightened that sentiment in the Israeli population, especially among most of the population who did not feel that way previously about the Palestinians. This is due to some of their actions which are frankly inhumane: decapitation, genital mutilation, baby kidnapping, child rape, live burning, and focus on civilian areas

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