my patience with the idf will not be permanent, but this police operation is required and they should be supported by all thinking people until hamas ceases to exist. proper leftist criticism should be directed against any support for hamas, including against hospital and school workers that shield militants in vulnerable spaces instead of chasing them out of them.
this is different than what happened after 2001 because it is actually directed at the attackers. i am not a terrorist sympathizer, but the point was that iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11 and that iraqi civilians bore no responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. i supported actions that were actually targeted against al-qaeda and against osama bin laden, but the reality is that very little of what the united states did after 9/11 actually targeted those that were responsible for it.
unlike the invasion of iraq, an attack on hamas is actually targeting those that are responsible for the oct 7 attacks. hamas should not exist. criticism of specific actions by the idf may be justified on specific levels , but the priority of the left should be on abolishing hamas first and foremost, and not on the protection of palestinian civilians. it's a hard truth that is currently necessary.
the people of gaza bear some responsibility for voting for hamas. there haven't been many elections in gaza recently, granted, but the reality is that they elected a terrorist group to represent them and are consequently somewhat liable for their actions. they are not completely innocent bystanders; it's not even a question of if silence means consensus, it's a situation where they have actively voted in favour of terrorists to represent them, democratically. they were asked who they wanted to represent them, and they picked an organized crime syndicate, by overwhelming consensus. empathy should not be entirely suspended, but it should be muted.
yes, a discourse about root causes is relevant, but it's not the primary issue at the moment, the primary issue is abolishing the terrorist organized crime network running gaza, which is a periodic necessary state action in a capitalist society. we can't accept organized crime just because we don't like capitalism, or just because we realize that organized crime is a function of capitalism. the thugs need to be taken out. it becomes a question of lesser and greater evils.
i can tolerate some criticism of the details of the action, and i'd likely have them myself if i was to analyze the situation at a granular level, which i'm not going to do. but, i am never on the side of terrorism as a tactic, and when groups of terrorist thugs like hamas arise (that are also serious threats to free expression amongst palestinians), everything else must be put aside in order to destroy them. hamas would almost certainly sentence you to death for a trivial reason if it could.
Capital punishment in the Gaza Strip has been practiced by the Hamas Administration since it assumed power in 2007. The punishment is given for offenses such as crimes against Islamic law, land sales to Israelis, and treason.
one of the crimes that hamas has executed people for is "homosexual behaviour", because it is stated in the koran that the crime for being gay is punishment by death. they're a slightly less crazy isis, which aligns them with the extreme fringes of the christian right. naive western liberals flatly do not know that and are broadly just ignorant about what they're supporting. there is a long list of so-called crimes under islamic law that hamas would execute you for, if they could, including dancing and wearing makeup in public. that was the basis for the october 7th attack in the first place - they were dancing and engaging in "unislamic activity". it wasn't about "anti-colonialism", it was an attack on some people at a party by some right-wing extremists for engaging in what they interpreted as "indecent behaviour".
they didn't attack an army outpost, or some group of soldiers restricting the flow of people or goods. they slaughtered defenseless kids at a party because they weren't following islamic behavioural codes.
there was a giant error made in the spanish revolution by certain naive actors that aligned with the stalinists because they were the enemy of their enemies. it was the stalinists that slaughtered the anarchists. i want to learn from that mistake and not to repeat it.
hamas must be annihilated, and that must be the current priority. we can talk about what a post-hamas gaza strip looks like after that has been accomplished, but what i support is a singular secular state (a one state solution with a democratic and secular constitution) where all people have equal rights, not one where people are segregated by ethnicity or religion.