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OT: World Politics

The other thing I think this does, when you view it geopolitically, is see Hamas and through them, the Palestinian people as a simple piece on the chessboard in the broader Iran vs Everyone conflict in the region. Which we all kind of knew was going on, but this punctuates the fuck out of it. Iran needs/wants chaos so badly that they just sold the Palestinians up the river (because man is the Israeli response going forward going to fucking suck, this isn't going to stop with this initial military response). All because the Iranians didn't want normalized Saudi/Israeli relations, the Saudi's to get more modern US military hardware as part of the deal, etc.

I really hope that Iran has overplayed their hand here and the US starts taking a bit more of a direct interest in countering obvious Iranian alignment with Russia in Ukraine and terrorist groups in the middle east.
 
MindzEye said:
If we were sitting here talking about a Hamas attack on the IDF, and every single fucking target was military in nature....I would get it. I would cringe and hope for a peaceful solution, but I would grasp the justification for violent opposition to what they see as a violent, oppressive regime.

This is where I think Hamas has massively fucked up on a tactical level here. Even for people who want to have sympathy for Palestinians, how the fuck do you justify this? The one place in this conflict that Palestinians have consistently won is the PR conflict. There has always been a large amount of public sentiment against Israeli treatment of Palestinians....but this takes that out at the knees pretty viciously.
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the only thing I can think of is that they did this on such a personal vicious level, not only to strike fear into the hearts of Israeli’s who otherwise felt safe, but to also provoke Bibi into retaliating in such a manner as to fuel stronger hatred across the Muslim world towards Israel. Provide them with propaganda materials of them going over and above killing civilians etc….in an attempt to bring other states into the conflict. I dunno, grasping at straws.

otherwise, I just can’t square away why they’d intentionally make themselves so effusively the villains, in everyone’s eyes
 
Israel will carpet bomb, use white phosphor or bomb up a school that hamas leadership is hunkering which Palestine hopes will turn the tides of the narrative.

but they’ve overlooked the impact of smartphones and HD video. We’ve all seen it and can’t unsee it, and that’s going to be a challenge when it comes to public sympathy.
 
Montana said:
Provide them with propaganda materials of them going over and above killing civilians etc….in an attempt to bring other states into the conflict. I dunno, grasping at straws.

otherwise, I just can’t square away why they’d intentionally make themselves so effusively the villains, in everyone’s eyes
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Yeah, that's where my comment above came from: targeting Israeli citizens in response is fucking vile and counter productive to any realistic set of goals that doesn't include "and on the 7th day of the great war, Allah came down from the heavens and swept the jews in the ocean".

This is just stupid. No state actors are getting directly involved for a few reasons. But the core 4 are this:

1) Israel is easily the most militarily capable country in the region and would boot fuck any of the bordering nations
2) U
3) S
4) A
 
mbow30 said:
Israel will carpet bomb, use white phosphor or bomb up a school that hamas leadership is hunkering which Palestine hopes will turn the tides of the narrative.
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had they only killed/kidnapped military aged men, maybe they could sell themselves on the above…but if everything they did was part of the plan, that’s preposterous to think they could win the narrative in the end.

mbow30 said:
but they’ve overlooked the impact of smartphones and HD video. We’ve all seen it and can’t unsee it, and that’s going to be a challenge when it comes to public sympathy.
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I just don’t know how they could ever overlook that…..especially given we’d all see footage from the festival after the fact, hear about the kidnappings & parading of dead bodies in the back of pickups, or photos of slain families as they went door to door, women, children, elderly…..how could they not know how it would be received world wide.

could they think it make their captives more valuable? Because of the level of brutality they showed, and how focused everyone would be to see them recovered?
 
mbow30 said:
We’ve all seen it and can’t unsee it
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I've generally kept my mouth shut regarding Israel/Palestine because I have natural tendency to dislike authority, and a natural dislike towards whomever I see as the aggressor/oppressor in a situation and I know that this is complicated fuckshow but didn't want my jewish friends (here and in the real world) to mistake that for anti semetism or similar

But fuck me if whatever sympathy I have for the Palestinian cause didn't evaporate when I saw some of those videos man. It's a sympathetic emotional reaction that I don't think I'll ever get back.
 
Hamas, jihad, elements of the PLO - they don’t have a realistic set of goals, though. They don’t want a Jewish state at all. Their goal is chaos, destruction and death to the Zionists. They don’t give a shit about their people. The worse things get for the sap in Gaza the better it is for them by stoking anger internally and sympathy internationally.

when you start from a position (not saying this is your position ME - speaking generally) assuming that Palestinian leadership is interested in any sort of diplomacy or order vis a vis its neighbour you’re putting the Israelis in an impossible no-win situation.
 
What happens in the Middle East is something that I will never fully comprehend, the complete and total hatred of two different types of people based on a specific piece of land they were born on. I don't even want to try to understand.

What really, really bothers me is how so many people, who aren't living there anymore, who you would hope would become more progressive in their thinking because they left that part of the world for a better life, are happy about what happened. They're happy that a bunch of Jewish people were killed. That it wasn't "terrorism", it was "resistance". That one day where a "couple" of Isrealis getting their "comeuppance" is nothing compared of 75 years of what Israel did to them & their family, according to some of them.

And what is this going to lead to? More hatred, more suffering, more killing. It's just so utterly depressing.
 
MindzEye said:
This is where I think Hamas has massively fucked up on a tactical level here. Even for people who want to have sympathy for Palestinians, how the fuck do you justify this? The one place in this conflict that Palestinians have consistently won is the PR conflict. There has always been a large amount of public sentiment against Israeli treatment of Palestinians....but this takes that out at the knees pretty viciously.
Click to expand...
on the surface, it looks like a massive fuckup, ie. the organization called Hamas just committed suicide. I don't know if they thought their Iranian buddies would protect them, but anyone involved in this attack will be hunted down like dogs. And many innocent people will die as a result of collateral damage.

we did see footage of bombs hitting Israeli military outposts. It's unclear if they targeted the music festival or if it just happened to be in the way, but it was a massive own goal that makes it harder for people to sympathize with the Palestinians.

some people say that the Palestinians elected Hamas and get what they deserve, but from what I can tell they haven't been permitted by Israel to have another election for 17 years.
 
axlsalinger said:
www.theatlantic.com

Hamas’s Attack Confounds Middle East Experts

Even those who understand the fundamentalist group best are struggling to understand what they are trying to achieve.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The one thing I'm seeing in this piece and elsewhere is that the response gets spoken about as if it will take weeks.

This is the most damaging event in Jewish history since the fucking holocaust. This is paradigm changing imo because it's a punch right into Israel's "never again" undercurrent that is such a massive part of Israeli national identity.
 
To be clear the Palestinian “children” are a handful of 16-18 year olds who committed crimes, were arrested by police and tried in public courts by an independent judiciary.

the Israeli children include kids under 10 years old.
 
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