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.

  • TheOubliette@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    In Western fiction, you are taught to support the scrappy underdogs facing oppression from a racist occupying force. You root for them and cheer when they blow up military facilities and you feel for them when they lose their compatriots to oppressor violence. You know very well who the good guys and bad guys are.

    But then, in Western media, with a mere change of labeling and some paper-thin propaganda, they will have you believing the opposite. All they need to do is call the freedom fighter resistance “terrorists”, say that the occupiers “have a right to defend themselves”, and pretend the “conflict” is “complicated” and really about religion. And they will so this even when the occupier ramps up genocide to unignorable levels.

    The good guys remain those fighting occupation. This is consistent with a basic understanding of liberation, with nearly everyone’s stated beliefs about self-determination, and international law. The bad guys are the ethnic supremacist apartheid settler colonist occupiers doing a genocide as well as their supporters.

      • HomerianSymphony@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        Just to be clear, Hamas does not want to eradicate the Jews. That is a myth propagated by Israel.

        Hamas wants to eliminate Israel, by which they mean they want Israel replaced by an Arab-majority state in which both Jews and Arabs live. (Hamas want the return of 4 million Palestinian refugees to Israel/Palestine, which would make it an Arab-majority state.)

        Furthermore, they have indicated they are open to negotiating a Two-State solution.

        I don’t think it makes any sense to portray Hamas as unreasonable for wanting Arabs to control the whole land (from the river to the sea) when Israel want the same thing for Jews.

        • Greyfoxsolid@lemmy.worldOP
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          20 days ago

          Why does Hamas get to say they want to eradicate Israel as a state and have Arab-majority control over the region, but Israel doesn’t get to say they want to control the entire region? What makes who correct to say that in either case?

          • HomerianSymphony@lemmy.world
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            20 days ago

            but Israel doesn’t get to say they want to control the entire region?

            What do you mean Israel doesn’t “get” to say that?

            Israel does say that, and Israel does control the entire region, and almost every Western power allows them to.

            • Greyfoxsolid@lemmy.worldOP
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              20 days ago

              I guess I meant to ask why is it morally okay for Palestinians to want to do that, but not morally ok for Israelis to want to do that. Is it because Israel is an apartheid, ethnostate?

              • peppers_ghost@lemmy.ml
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                20 days ago

                Palestinians want the right to return from where they were ethnically cleansed, Israel wants to maintain a Jewish majority state.

          • IndustryStandard@lemmy.world
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            19 days ago

            Israel is saying they want to destroy Hamas which is the government of Gaza.

            And they are saying they want to control the region. They call it Greater Israel.

      • TheOubliette@lemmy.ml
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        20 days ago

        Israel is a racist genocidal settler-colonial ethnostate. All good people wish for the destruction of such a thing just like all good people wished for the destruction of the apartheid South African ethnostate. If Hamas wishes this, they should be commended for it, don’t you think? And anyone who disagrees called out for the racial supremacist that they are?