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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> And more importantly, if you want peace in Gaza, protest against Hamas for terrorism and hostage taking

The Israeli policy of genocide against the Palestinian population is not restricted to Gaza and is older than Hamas. Hamas is, in fact, a direct and deliberate consequence of that policy, its antecedent Islamist networks having been actively fostered in Gaza by Israel during the occupation to create a separate, conflicting, and less internationally-sympathetic (particular to both the West and neighboring Arab regimes) center of Palestinian resistance from the more secular Arab-nationalist groups dominating the PLO, in order to both make local resistance less effective and reduce international diplomatic resistance to Israel’s displacement and eradication of the Palestinian population.

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I am most definitely not justifying Netanyahu and how he's handling this. In fact he helped prop up Hamas and made them as powerful as they are for his own political gain. However, Hamas is a truly awful terrorist organization that definitely has made and continues to make the situation A LOT worse than it needs to be. This is not a peaceful residence movement, it's a terrorist organization that DOES NOT WANT peace, in fact their stated mission is a "holy war" and complete destruction of Israel and all Jews. Hamas is not Gandhi or MLK; they're essentially ISIS.

Also, what IDF is doing is not genocide. Please don't misuse the word. Genocide is systematic killing of people of a certain origin, which has happened during the Holocaust and multiple other times in history, but it's not what's happening here. A huge number of innocent Palestinians have been killed, yes, but it's not due to systematic killing based on origin. The population of Gaza has grown from 650k in 1990 to 2.2M in 2023; if there was actual genocide happening (and Israel most definitely has the capacity to kill every single person in Gaza), the numbers would have gone down, not up.

> Also, what IDF is doing is not genocide.

A total aside here. I wonder for how much longer this kind of speech will be tolerated? I‘m sure jjaksic believes this and is not actively trying to be hateful (or at least I hope so), but when it comes to other genocides we don’t usually tolerate genocide denial, and correctly mark it as hate speech. I wonder what makes the Gaza genocide different?

One reason could be that the Gaza genocide is ongoing, and history has yet to judge it, but I doubt that. Denying an ongoing genocide is much much worse than denying past one. Another possible reason is that we give people slack because of the lax information environment. If so I hope we stop that. Victims of genocide deserve better, and we should not be considering the reason people say such hateful things.

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