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.
Israel are absolutely and undeniably the bad guys. To use an analogy, imagine a school bully who is stronger and gets the support of the teachers and principal of the school, and the bully beats up the smaller kid every day until they hit a breaking point and throws a punch back. A reasonable school would support the bullied kid, but in this case, the principal just gives the bully a gun and looks away.
Israel has been dehumanizing and oppressing the Palestinian people since it’s inception and things have been getting worse. When October 7th happen, it was indeed horrible and many civilians got hurt, but Israel’s response was so completely disproportionately mad that they are actively committing genocide, treating the list of warcrimes like a to-do list.
Up until 1967, the bad guys were Britain.
Britain seized Palestine from the Ottomans during WWI with the help of the local Palestinians, promising the Palestinians sovereignty in exchange for their help overthrowing the Ottomans.
At the same time, Britain promised to create a homeland for Jews in Palestine (in the Balfour Declaration), and Jewish refugees from Europe began settling in Palestine. Britain did this because they thought they might gain the support of Jewish financiers for their war efforts.
The Balfour Declaration was deliberately vague about whether Britain was giving all of the land to the Jews or just some of the land. It was vague because Britain wanted to appeal to Jewish Zionists (who wanted all of Palestine) while not alienating the Palestinians.
Britain never did divide the land, resulting in two different populations who felt they legally owned the land, one who had always been there, and one who mostly arrived as refugees.
When Britain left following WWII, a civil war broke out for control of the land. A border was eventually drawn at the line of control (which ran through the middle of Jerusalem), and Israelis declared the new State of Israel, while Palestinian refugees fled to their side of the border or neighbouring states. That was in 1948.
So, up until then, it’s a messy situation created by Britain, but one which eventually resulted in the land being split (albeit violently), with both Israelis and Palestinians having a state, and each having part of Jerusalem. The world accepted this as the new status quo and hoped it would be sustained peacefully.
That changed in 1967 when Israel annexed the Palestinian lands (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) in the Six Days War. Since then, Palestinians have been living under a harsh Israeli occcupation as a stateless people (meaning no citizenship), with their rights and freedoms strictly curtailed. Palestinians have been resisting through a number of resistance movements, usually designated as terrorist groups in the Western media.
There was a political movement towards peace and repartitioning of the land that peaked in the 1990s, but since then it has been held up by a series of right-wing governments in Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has been aggressively building Jewish neighbourhoods (called settlements) in the formerly Palestinian lands of the West Bank.
So since 1967, Israel has pretty clearly been the bad guy.
The terrorist attack that killed 1200 young Israelis was horrific, and we should all hope nothing like that ever happens again. But the root cause of the attack was Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The way to prevent future terror attacks is to end the oppression of the Palestinian people.
This is what Israel defending itself actually means
The fact that somebody would be asking this question after a year of genocide is phenomenal.
Reminder that at the outbreak of WWII, TONS of people in the US supported the Nazi regime right up until they started invading Western Europe AKA “the countries that matter”
Also worth noting that the US continued to do business with the nazis well into the war, and IBM famously facilitated the holocaust.
The humanitarian aide workers.
The good guys are aid workers and Palestinian and Israeli civilians who do not like the conflict.
💯 this. The people doing the kidnapping, murdering, and genocide are the bad guys. The people trying to help are the good guys.
The people violently resisting a genocide are also good guys.
If someone is trying to kill you and everyone who looks like you, shooting back is good.
Shooting back is not only good, but necessary for survival.
Folks throughout these threads would’ve been wringing their hands over occupier civilians killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, acting like they just can’t tell who’s right or wrong.
About the Warsaw Uprising, I thought the targets were purely German military, so while a close analogy to how Hamas framed their action, it’s not exact.
The Warsaw Uprising was an open air prison/ghetto break with a wide number of participants, both organized and not. Those facing violence by the people seeking to fight their genociders were not just those in the military. It was anyone in the way or supporting them, per individuals’ wonts.
In addition, Hamas et al (Hamas was not the only organized group participating 10/7) did also focus on military targets while also taking hostages from a wider set. It is important to note that kibbutzim, little settler colonies, are often militarized and fired on them and others.
The good guys are the humanitarian aid workers risking their lives bringing food and medical care into the region.
The same folks being killed by Israel? Those ones?
You know it!
The resistance including Hamas, Ansar Allah, Iraqi resistance, Hezbollah, etc.
but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
lol what. You do realize gaza is a concentration camp right? That’s like saying the Jews who fought back during the warsaw ghetto uprising were bad guys. Also they aren’t trying to get their hostages back at all. On oct 7 the IDF was responsible for the MAJORITY of deaths. Look up hannibal directive.
The bad guys are Zionists. Simply put they think they are superior to anyone that’s not Jewish. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews.
