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Jackaloftheazuresand Thank you for asking. I think I was wrong about you on a personal level and I want to apologise for being a smart arse. I respect that you are prepared to listen to my reasoning, so here you go:
Firstly, I take the principle that all lives matter equally. Throughout the history of this conflict (and especially now), a lot more Palestinians have died than Israelis. I don't see violence done by a state as more or less ethical - of itself - than violence done by paramilitaries.
Even if we take at face value that Israel is primarily concerned with security, they are killing ten to a hundred people to protect every Israeli life. The most powerful party does not want a ceasefire and a lot more will die, almost all of them on one side.
When mainstream politicians say "Israel has the right to defend itself," that sounds reasonable at face value. I think that Israel has a right to defend itself. What Israel is actually doing is attacking. They are bombing civilian areas and cutting off food and power to a city of two million people. So the narrative that Israel is defending itself is dangerously disingenuous. Those words of our leaders give diplomatic cover for the Israelis to kill scores of thousands of people.
Also, the language that Hamas is using human shields is dangerous because it blurs the line between civilians and combatants. If you are a Palestinian family and a Hamas unit moves into the next street, you don't really have control of that situation. Then an Israeli air strike wipes out fifty people and their government goes on TV telling the world that you and your dead family were human shields.
When ordinary people repeat these narratives, they do not usually realise what these words are giving cover to. This rhetoric gives an excuse for the mass death of ordinary people, most of them from Muslim families who are already living in awful third-world conditions. Bomb the ghetto and watch it burn, in the name of defence.
When the girl called out by the OP called Hamas "freedom fighters," she is probably doing so because of this and because she thinks that Hamas is the only active military force resisting an apartheid-style military occupation imposed on her Muslim brothers and sisters. She is not saying that because she wants to kill Jews.
However, IMO she is wrong to defend Hamas because one of their strategies is to kill Israeli civilians. The young people killed at the festival and the kibbutz residents are people, with lives hopes and dreams as much as the Gaza residents. They did not deserve to die.
So she
is wrong about that but no more wrong than all of the people who are (however unwittingly) giving cover for a brutal military force that is currently laying waste to an impoverished city.
