I've seen a lot of takes from the swamp that tiktok is the reason why young people in America aren't supporting Israel.
Well, look at things now. It's a bloodbath. The most radical solution of them all, that the people themselves must rise up and organize and fight back against both Hamas and the Israeli government, is increasingly the only rational solution and the only end to the conflict. But that would also require an international movement and an international struggle. But why should we ask for any less, global warming will come for us all anyway if we don't change the order of the world.
That isn't entirely Israel's fault, history shows that urban warfare has always been a destructive tragedy. It's why we invented rules like clearly separating military and civilian installations. Unfortunately, Hamas turned that on its head by deliberately mixing everything so civvies can't be ignored even moreso than usual.
When you have military (FSVO military) infrastructure located underneath hospitals and UN installations among others, of fucking course it's going to be a bloodbath. It's not like Israel can just not respond to the October attack that triggered this war either.
Moral is that there are reasons why the west has adopted ways to try and be somewhat civilized if we wage war, the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet.
The situation was depraved from the start, as Israel and the US created Hamas in order to control the Gaza strip way back in 2006, thinking that they would never pose a substantial threat like the PLO. Of course the Israelis think its their sovreign right to decimate the territory. They built those bunkers under the hospitals, they created the very conditions which they are fighting in. They will kill as many people as needed to make up for it.
How do you fight a country that is determined to kill you even if it costs them every man, woman and child?
Of course people will disagree that Hamas is actually willing to commit every resource to the fight, but I dunno. They seem pretty ok using them as shields or bait or suicide bombers...
Ok, this sounds bad, but maybe you meant something else? Like not that Hamas can kill/kidnap with impunity, use their own people as human shields, and Israel should just suck it up?
If these were Americans, I wouldn’t fault my government for going all out. It would just set a bad precedent to do otherwise.
(And yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization, but it's also the legitimate government of Gaza. It may not be the de jure government, because the Palestinian National Authority ceased to have one in the aftermath of Hamas winning the 2006 elections.)
Also, if you don’t want to be invaded, don’t elect leaders that think kidnapping people across the border is a good idea. Ya, it’s rarely this simple, since these places are rarely so democratic, but people have some responsibility for their governments even in the case of autocracies.
Justifications similar to yours have been used to support the actions of Hamas. Many Palestinians, maybe even most of them, genuinely believe so. If the same arguments can be used in good faith to support both sides, such arguments must be worthless. They can only lead to more violence and more deaths.
WW2 was a rare war, because it was so conclusive. The Allies didn't only defeat the Axis, but they also had a plan for the aftermath. A plan how to reorganize the states on the losing side and how to win over the people and make them support the new regime. Without such a plan, a war today can only lead to another war tomorrow.
No one is denying that Hamas went into Israel and kidnapped a bunch of people. Maybe Hamas was relying on American pacifists and isolationists to get away with it?
And then, suppose that a militant group of, at most, 100-1000 of those Canadians, out of 5M or so total Canadians, did a parallel to Oct. 7.
By the time we'd killed 20,000 unrelated civilians, I'd be pretty upset. I would be upset at seeing rhetoric on TV saying that Canadians were "animals" or "grass that needed to be mowed." As a Southern American, I'd be upset that my tax dollars were funding this.
It's also worth noting that this really parallels 9/11 quite well. I was slower to be upset at our tactics in Afghanistan/Iraq then, but having seen it all now, Israel's attack is clearly the same fruitless-for-workers, military-industrial-complex-feeding meat grinder as it's evidently always been.
And to be more "objective" about that comparison: 9/11 killed more Americans than Oct. 7 killed Israelis. As of 2023, Afghan civilian deaths from our war on Al Quaeda (the entire period from 2001-2023) number [1] "more than 70,000." In half a year alone, 30-35,000 Palestinians have been killed.
But I'd say that measuring human lives against one another is kinda gross, focused on hindsight, and ineffective. To do the best thing we can in the present, we need to make the choices that maximally preserve human life. And selling/giving them weapons just ain't it.
[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...