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These shortcuts serve us especially poorly right now wrt Israel and Palestine. In particular, they obscure the straightforward truth:

Antisemitism is on the rise. It has horrific historical precedent. Everyone deserves protection from such horrors. Hamas committed such horrors in October. The Likud government is currently committing such horrors, at massive scale.

No contradiction there. But if you think nations are people and people are either good guys or bad guys, it’s incomprehensible.

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These shortcuts also obscure a subtler point I keep making:

We should view Likud and Hamas as •allies• inasmuch as these are both groups united by a genocidal goal, and both need every path to peace off the table in pursuit of that goal. Both parties need atrocities to justify atrocities. Atrocities by either group thus work in favor of the interests of both.

Keep that in mind. Nations aren’t people. Factions and coalitions can cross national boundaries.

/end

@inthehands i have coworker/friend who is from syria, and i think i managed to get that point accross to her, especially how useful hamas was to the likud and anyone who doesn't want peace (unless it's from total domination/destruction of the other), but it's certainly not easy for one to overcome the prejudice against the other side and accept that the ostensible enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

@inthehands yeah, i know about that, she didn't, i did send her similar resources.

The idea that israel helped hamas become what it is, if not create it, definitely had an effect.

The idea that "hamas = freedom fighters, fatah = the worst corrupted entity possible" was deeply entrenched before that.

@tshirtman Thanks for doing that work. Every bit counts.

@billiglarper @inthehands if it was just that, you could say it's a honest mistake, but he's said more or less openly a few times that the existence of hamas was useful to diminish PA relevance, and since you couldn't negociate with hamas, there was no one to negociate with.

He's built is whole career on preventing a two state solution, and hamas has been instrumental to that.

@tshirtman @inthehands Yes, Hamas was useful for Israel's right. Exactly because of the things you describe. But it just had to exist for that. That was blocker and boogeyman enough. There was no need to prop a genocidal group up or make it more dangerous.

Also, Israel doesn't have many levers in Gaza. Unlike the WB. Israel can't easily make Hamas go away, even if it wanted to. So it was manage and contain.

Sabotaging the peace process in WB, where it was possible, is way more criminal imho.

@billiglarper @inthehands well, i'm not going to say it was planned, i don't know that, but it sure seems like some people see this war as an opportunity to seize part or all of the gaza strip and claim it for israel, and the various reports of ignored intelligence signals are certainly enough to be suspicious.

Letting the money in could have been a negociation token to control what hamas can and can't do, inspect its facilities, either directly or through Qatar.

They just let it become worse.

@tshirtman @inthehands

With regards to the "cases of cash" from #Qatar, ORF described the procedure here:
https://orf-at.translate.goog/stories/3228641/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Direct money transfers were handled via Israelian banks to keep them traceable.

Yes, Hamas thugs could have "taxed" the recipients afterwards. But there's little intelligence gathering to be had there.

Also, why are supposedly left people clinging to this so much? Would you really have advocated for a stronger blockade? For less money reaching #Gazans?

@billiglarper @inthehands For control, yes, but it’s quite obvious that even if all the money is used only to pay for civilian projects, it frees money that would otherwise been allocated to them, and this money can be used for war projects.

The problem is not necessarily letting resources enter the zone, but on the other hand, they kept draconian control of food and other necessities that could enter the country, making people depend more on hamas for survival.

@billiglarper @inthehands What i’m more bothered by is the weaponization of hamas against the PA, the "cutting the grass" mindset, don’t try to solve the situation, just keep oppression and scale it up or down depending on how much fighting back there is.

@billiglarper @inthehands There is absolutely an agenda of preventing peaceful solutions to progress and to use the constant state of war to justify conquering the land over time.

There are definitely villain, even if it’s not a disney movie.

@tshirtman @inthehands But you don't need Hamas or Gaza for that. "We retreated from South Libanon. We retreated from Gaza. There are still rockets being fired at us from there. Our presence in WB keeps rockets being fired from there. If we retreated from there, we would be attacked from there." That's all the narrativ the Israeli right needs. And it's so powerful because there are parts of truth to it. The Hamas massacre now feeds right into it.

@tshirtman @inthehands

I think a lot of people that oppose the use of violence categorically struggle to fit islamo-fascist movements like Hamas, IS, Taliban into their worldview.

Uprising against them would be violent. Outside intervention would be violent. Their rule and expansionism are violent. Ideologically, they are a rusty nail for pacifists.

So there's a strong incentive to:
- perceive them as not that violent and dangerous
- assign some other agenda to the folks fighting them

@tshirtman @inthehands And there are so many excuses that pop up all the time.

- "They are too weak to be genocidal"
- "I don't apply my normal rules to anti-colonialism, so this must be an anti-colonial struggle."

- "The people fighting them created them because they like war"
- "They want the ressources of the land and the land itself. Violence because of greed."
- "They are a US proxy, and the evil US makes them do it"
- "They are racists and want to kill everyone. This is genocide."

@billiglarper @tshirtman Your last point — “They are racists and want to kill everyone” — is thus making a bit of a strawman out of my OP, intentionally or not.

@inthehands @tshirtman What I meant to point out is that quite a few people use "Hamas can't be genocidal. Israel must be genocidal." as a precondition for debate, not as a conclusion. If someone doesn't agree, they will be be screamed at and called a genocide denier.

That doesn't mean that genocides don't happen. But imho, for many, that claim is a way to stick to their worldview and good-bad pattern. And not having to get emotionally involved or having to reconsider stuff.

@inthehands @tshirtman Or as #HannahArendt put it: "The extreme fringe had the unhappy inclination of denouncing as "fascist" or "nazi", whatever, often quite rightly, displeased them, and of calling every massacre a genocide, which obviously it was not; this could only help to produce a mentality that was quite willing to condone massacre and other war crimes so long as they were not genocide."