well that escalated quickly! Business as usual or the tip of the iceberg?

They elected a group that put in their charter that Allah will cause every tree to cry out so Muslims can find the Jews hiding behind them to murder them.

I think the 'Never Again' folks are beyond giving a shit.

And quite frankly, if they felt the same way, there'd be no more Palestinians, period.

Sure, but I have a hard time imaging Hamas not having implicit support at government level.

Biden has demanded a deescalation. Israel will fall into line, thus demonstrating yet again who really holds the power to change this dynamic.

When I was a little kid I thought "never again" referred to genocide never happening to anyone ever again.

But then Israel just kept bombing children while ignoring ethnic cleansing all over the world, and I realized how very wrong I was.

Haaretz is kind of known for anti-Israel bias on this topic, so it's not like they are a paragon of even-minded reporting.

Both Israel and Hamas continue to use violence to achieve political goals. Meanwhile, innocents on both sides are killed. There's no 'good guy' in this situation. Both sides need to negotiate in good faith and accept that nobody is going to get everything they want. But they won't, and innocent people who are just trying to live their lives will continue to die.

A pox on both their houses.

"There's no good guy" is a simplistic view when one of the bad guys has access to extremely precise weapons and has used them to has kill 200 people (a third of them children) in the last week, while the other side is armed with crude imprecise weapons has only killed 10, two of which were children.

When the guys that are basically firing blind somehow manage to murder children at a much lower rate, you know which side has gleefully embraced evil.

If true (and it might very well be) then can somebody explain to me why Israel would ever consider taking their foot off the gas pedal at this point? They are surrounded by nations that want to see them utterly destroyed (with constant enthusiastic support from Iran) and could have the means to do so if they ever joined forces. If you were Israel would you show even a smidgen of weakness?

We all understand the massive power disparity between Hamas and Israel. But both sides are using violence to achieve political goals. And it's not working.

agree with you there! But until a solution is worked out what kind of leader wouldn't fight back?

Do you understand what caused this latest round of atrocities? Do you know why Palestinians were protesting in the first place?

Alternatively, what kind of leader wouldn't attack the occupying forces? Goes both ways.

Intent is still the same and you could argue that the imprecise nature of their weapons put ordinary citizens at more risk. They've launched 3,700 of them and if not for the Iron Dome there's a good chance there's a similar death toll on the Israeli side. It's not for lack of trying...

I mean you can go round and round in circular arguments about the two sides until you're blue in the face, but "there's no good guy here" is actually a pretty applicable, if simplistic, stance in this instance

Saying that, Netanyahu should probably be removed from office because this whole current conflict does seem rooted in him trying to maintain his power, not for the "greater good of Israel" or whatever

Look, man, I know you mean well. But the misunderstanding inherent in that post of the sheer scope of the Holocaust... It really underscores Stalin's 'One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.'

There's no single authoritative source for deaths in the various Palestine-Israeli conflicts. But piecing together states from the Polynational War Memorial, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affair, the upper boundary appears to be around 25,000 - since 1948. Look up 'Fatalities' here, you can check the individual sources as you should, as it's wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli–Palestinian_conflict

Even if that was off by a factor of TWO HUNDRED, it wouldn't equate with the Shoah. And that's over 78 years, not 4.

If that number is anywhere near right, you'd have to have the Israeli occupation go on until the year 20,000 AD to get a similar death count.

Look at the demographics. 75% of all Jews in western Europe were murdered in the Holocaust. To equate that in your home country as a percentage, murder the population of every province and territory save Quebec. That's 75% of Canadians.

What are the demographics in Palestine? There were 660,000 Arab Palestinians in the 1922 British census.

There's 6 million a hundred years later - more than half of that time under Israeli rule after the series of failed wars launched by the Arabs to destroy Israel. That's faster population growth than either the US or Canada in that century.

There's another 6 million spread out through the world, the majority in other Arab countries. There are more Palestinians than Israelis.

And no, before your need for hyperbole explodes, of course I'm not saying that things are wonderful them. They are an occupied people, fully half in their homeland live as refugees, and they are caught between warring factions that hate each other. Their suffering is real, and yes, each death is a tragedy.

But that doesn't make it in any way comparable to the Holocaust. I'm sorry, it just doesn't.

And because the Holocaust IS a singular event of horror, compressed in just 4 years, where virtually an entire people were eliminated (and just as many other 'non-desirables' such as gypsies, communists, and LGBTQ), 'NEVER AGAIN' means a hell of a lot more than you are giving it credit for.

It means no more death camps running Zyklon-B showers 24-7 every day for years. No more crematoriums raining ash endlessly down on the people waiting in the camps. No hundreds of thousands intentionally worked to death. No piles of gold filings and lampshades made of human skin. No intentional experimentation on the extent of human suffering and the limits of human pain. I won't put up pictures of it.

Yes, things are very bad in Palestine and we all want to see peace.

But it isn't that, and you do a grave injustice to suggest it. Not to mention, you don't understand what 'kill all the Jews' means to the Jews. It isn't an idle threat, it's something people alive have seen actually implemented.

A card they are willing to play time and again whilst doing exactly the same fucking thing.

Reminds me of something Woody Allen said in a movie - paraphrasing here but I'm pretty close: "no I'm not one of those self loathing Jews. Yes I believe Hitler killed six million Jews, and I also believe that records are made to be broken!"

It DOES deserve a facepalm, Demiurge.

So the Palestinians exploding in population by 10 times what they were a century ago (three times faster than population growth in the US over that time) is the same thing as the Holocaust, where the population of Jews in Europe dropped by 75% in 4 years?

I know you feel that way, but it doesn't make it true.

Edit: Sorry, I should refrain from this type of comment.

Yes, I know everyone who wants to see the end of the conflict and all the civilian deaths is speaking with nothing but the purest of motives.

But the hyperbole that we are seeing another holocaust is extremely problematic. We aren't, even if what we are seeing is awful and should end ASAP.

Let's just get it on record: is violence initiated by Hamas against Israel morally justifiable based on the Israeli occupation of Palestine?

Put another way, if Israel is justified in defending itself against Hamas, why isn't Hamas justified in defending (by way of resisting an occupation) itself against Israel?

It's complicated.

You can find evil on both sides pretty easily (though no, the Israelis aren't engaged in a genocide). But Netanyahu I think we can all agree is scum. The narrative these days is largely pro-Hamas, which IMO is unwarranted.

Then there's this gent - Mosab Hussan Yousef. He's the son of one of the cofounders of Hamas, Sheikh Hassan Yousef. He categorically denounces Hamas, saying they don't care for the people of Palestine and actively use the suffering of Palestinians for political goals. He believes everyone should seek peace.

Here's his speech before the UN in 2017.

https://imgur.com/gallery/oZ3fxwu

He was a Hamas fighter until he was captured by the IDF. There he was interrogated. He was shocked that the IDF treated it's prisoners more humanely than Hamas did, who was imprisoning their own and torturing them. He became an informant for Israel, and helped them capture several prominent Hamas leaders. He did so only on the condition that none of them were killed. He did so for several years, and eventually fled to the United States and gained sanctuary, as he had converted to Christianity and under the apostate rules of Hamas was threatened with imprisonment or death just for his conversion alone.

Agreed. But in the end, a simple decision must be made: engage in violence, or don't. Use violence to achieve your aims, or try something else.

I was parodying the usual refrain.

Oh, sorry.

Personally, I think the Palestinians have been clearly getting the shit end of the stick for a long time. But Hamas clearly doesn't have the answers.

IMO, one who knew they had no hope of victory and wanted to see the best for their children and their descendents.

If I was born in Palestine, I'd absolutely be urging peace and a change to the stated goals of the government, which goes beyond getting the partition back and explicitly states they want to see the destruction of Israel and the murder of the Jews.

But then, there was a real chance I'd end up assassinated or imprisoned and tortured for holding those views.

Because that's literally how Hamas came to power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah–Hamas_conflict

This. "Both sides are bad" doesn't work in situations like this. It would be like saying "both sides are bad" if a transgender woman threw a punch at a cop because he tried to beat her into submission like at the Stonewall riots. Yes, both sides are currently fighting, but one side is literally fighting for their lives, while the other is fighting for the supremacy of the State.