[troupo]

Two things are valid at once:

- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.

- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

[slg]

Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.

[LightBug1]

Tens of millions protested the US response.

Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.

You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.

Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".

[pcthrowaway]

This is a fair criticism of the U.S., though I'll also point out that millions of Palestinians have lived out their entire lives under occupation now, and history didn't start on October 7. To me, all of the evidence going back to 1948 points emphatically to genocide.

Also, I'm not clear on whether there was a precursor to 9/11 comparable to Israel's response to Gaza's 2018 non-violent protest, the Great March of Return.

[abdelhousni]

You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.

[slg]

>the local indigenous people called Palestinians

While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.

[h33t-l4x0r]

Obviously Palestinians were displaced and that needs to be addressed, but ethnic cleansing is a tough sell. Their population has multiplied by 20x since then.

[xdennis]

Arabs are not indigenous to Palestine. Palestine was Roman when it was colonized by the Arabs. Before Palestine, Judea was a Jewish state which was colonized by the Romans.

[throwaway27448]

You can call hamas whatever you'd like, but it's certainly not hamas doing most of the terrorizing in palestine....

[ceejayoz]

I am entirely behind this take.

[bdhe]

> and it quickly grew beyond any reason

Why did it quickly grow?

[troupo]

Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?

For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.

[tdeck]

The correct answer is: because the Biden administration told them there were no red lines. Israel is completely dependent on the US, Reagan picked up the phone and got them to stop bombing Lebanon in 1982. As Israel continued to ramp up the atrocities, they discovered that nothing would cause them to lose patronage from the US.

[sophacles]

Because there were children to starve. Brown children.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.

Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.

The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.

This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.

[tartoran]

We should stop using this term terror/terrorist, it's lost any meaning. If Hamas are terrorists because they're terrorizing Israeli population then so are Israelis' IDF or whatever force kills other country's population. And the list extends beyond that. To paint a resisting force/army as terrorists is just charged language to emotionally manipulate and pollute discourse. It would be more useful to put in balance what each side is fighting for.

[rexpop]

Netanyahu is very clearly on the record supporting and defending a policy of allowing Qatari money into Hamas‑run Gaza, including publicly defending those payments to his own party as a way to keep Hamas and the PA separated.

There is real evidence that Israeli authorities helped the Islamist network that later became Hamas to grow and organize, but not good evidence that Israel secretly “founded” Hamas in the sense of designing or controlling the group. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Israel allowed and at times supported Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist charity Mujama al‑Islamiya in Gaza (the Muslim Brotherhood–linked precursor to Hamas), seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO. eg From 1967 to 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza reportedly tripled, with Mujama heavily involved and benefiting from Israeli recognition and Gulf funding; Israeli officials hoped Islamist forces would weaken leftist, PLO‑aligned groups.

Scholars and former officials describe this as “blowback”: Israel strengthened the Brotherhood‑type infrastructure, which then reorganized itself into Hamas and turned violently against Israel.

There is no credible evidence that Israeli intelligence drew up Hamas’s founding charter, appointed its leaders, or covertly directed its formation in 1987; the group was an initiative of Palestinian Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

To reiterate: Israel did not secretly found Hamas, but it surreptitiously facilitated the growth of its Islamist precursor networks and tolerated them for strategic reasons, and several former Israeli officials now openly say that this policy helped “create” Hamas in hindsight.

[guerrilla]

You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.

> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.

[tw1984]

> and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

you still refuse to call it a crime against humanity? shame on you.