The Palestinians through years of Israeli reinforcements have chosen Hamas, an organization that thinks that sacrificing them all is beneficial, and it is actually partially working for them on international opinion.
Unfortunately both sides now needs to pay for their choices
From the article: Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I was very wrong.
In his latest blog posting, he explains that the current situation in Gaza is analogous to an evil murderer kidnapping your child and strapping her to train tracks before an oncoming train. If you pull a lever to divert the train it will instead kill five of the murderer’s children. This situation provides for him a definition of Zionism:
> Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob…
> Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have.
Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.
Source: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15191
And how do you even know that there have been 60k deaths in Gaza? That number is likely a vast underestimate.
And yet it's Israel that is illegally occupying parts of Palestine, not the other way around; it's Israel that has closed Gaza in a total blockade for twenty years and bombarded it any time it liked, claiming many more civilian lives that Oct 7 did; it's Israel that imposes apartheid on Palestinians in the West Bank. It's Israel that constantly builds new illegal settlements in other people's territory. It's Jewish colonists that invaded a land to build an ethno-religious state that excludes the natives.
It's the whole victimhood narrative that justifies the apparently immoral solution to the ethical dilemma: "fuck it, I'm done being a victim, I will not uphold high moral principles when I'm constantly being beaten by others"- except that Israel is a nuclear power that has enjoyed for the past 50 years at least the complete economic, military and diplomatic support of the US and the West, is illegally occupying other people's land, implementing apartheid and building new settlements with the obvious long-term goal of ethnically cleansing the whole land. And has obviously no trouble whatsoever reducing to rubble all of Palestine and the capitals of a few neighbouring countries- at the same time.
Whenever someone says "I'm done being a victim, I will only look after my own interest from now on" remember- that's exactly how Nazism justified itself.
Even if this war continues in the exact same trajectory for another two years, do you see an obvious destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza?
"Never Again!" - really, Israelis? It's only okay if it's you doing the killing?
...the fact that you have walled him and everyone he knows into an open-air prison, where nothing goes in or out without your approval, systematically keeping him, his family, his friends, his children, and everyone around him just this side of starvation, with no hope of release, for decades on end?
If I were him, I'd hurt you as hard as I possibly could, at every opportunity, with any means I could come by.
Thanks for all your thoughtful, level-headed and incredibly patient replies!
