• neeshie@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    If Hamas was freedom fighters, then your exact same defense applies to the Israeli military, and it’s a neverending cycle of “justified” violence.

    Yeah. That’s true. There will be continued death and destruction until Israel tries for peace by undermining Hamas politically, not violently. Or until Israel ethnically cleanses the vast majority of Palestinians, which it seems like they’re trying to do.

    Hamas is a resistance group, even if their tactics are awful. Their goal isn’t to provoke the most awful Israeli responses possible, but to retaliate for the violence that the IDF does. This has been the case for a while, and October 7th is really the main exception because I doubt Hamas predicted how far they’d get. Even with the Oct 7 attack, Hamas literally tried to trade their hostages for women and children in Israeli prisons. They tried to use their hostages as leverage to get Israel to stop bombing civilians as much. They have to care about Palestinians to some extent, because if enough citizens of Gaza decide the PA is a lot better, Hamas won’t exist anymore, or at least lose power.

    Because they are a terrorist group.

    You say this like it means anything. The ANC (fought apartheid south africa) was also a terrorist group. So was the FLN (fought french in the Algerian revolution), the Viet Minh (first Indochina war, against the french), and many other resistance groups.