I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I’m an idiot.
Okay:
In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.
Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.
Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).
Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.
Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.
It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.
In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.
Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.
In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.
The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.
Fuck Israel.
In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with
That’s not what happened.
Firstly, the Balfour Declaration was in 1917, during World War I. By 1948, the Jews were already living there, and fighting for the land.
Secondly, Britain never partitioned the land, and never announced any intention to partition the land. (Things might have been very different if they had.) I think you’re getting confused with the UN’s partition plan, which was never implemented.
