this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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LANDBACK Organizing Principles
- Don’t burn bridges: even when there is conflict between groups or organizers remember that we are fighting for all of our peoples and we will continue to be in community even after this battle
- Don’t defend our ways
- Organize to win
- Move from abundance – We come from a space of scarcity. We must work from a place of abundance
- We bring our people with us
- Deep relationships by attraction, not promotion
- Divest/invest
- We value our warriors
- Room for grace—be able to be human
- We cannot let our oppressors inhumanity take away from ours
- Strategy includes guidance
- Realness: Sometimes the truth hurts
- Unapologetic but keep it classy
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The chart is true...
...but the way Hamas does things (currently to Israelis, unless they have already lost - but most of time to fellow Palestinians, particularly those who oppose how they rule Gaza) is brain-dead. They practise torture, extrajudicial imprisonment and executions without trial, not to mention mild stuff like suppressing freedom of press and public discourse.
Hamas is a political zombie whom nobody dares to approach or touch. To me it seems that they bring much avoidable misfortune to the people whom they rule. They got to power with a democratic mandate (Fatah was spectacularly corrupt), but there cannot be a democratic mandate for ignoring human rights or initiating avoidable war.
Starting war is especially irrational if the opponent is many time stronger and their counterstrike will bring great suffering to a densely inhabited urban area. Especially if deliberate war crimes are committed right from the first hour, to give the opponent every diplomatic advantage and moral excuse for striking back hard.
I don't know why they started this round of fighting. I only speculate that war builds cohesion, and maybe they felt they were losing cohesion and needed some blood spilled to regain it.
You could replace Hamas with Likud/Occupational Force and this paragraph would still be true. But this is not a "both sides" thing; Israel is the one with most of the power in the toxic relationship, and has consistently chosen escalation over peace. When the PLO threatened Israel's justification for domination of Palestine with peace agreements, there's evidence Israel created Hamas as the spider to catch the fly. The occupation has killed vastly more people than this bloody incursion, and that doesn't begin to measure the human suffering experienced while living under IDF's boot. And it appears Israel's reprisal aims to escalate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza even more.
You're correct that war builds cohesion, but not just for Hamas. The rally around the flag against a terrorist threat is exactly the narrative "Israeli Trump" Netanyahu needs to consolidate power, and everyone should fight it for the future of both Israelis and Palestinians. Hamas chose this, but Netanyahu did everything in his power to make it successful, from meddling in the 2016 election to get Trump elected resulting in an incompetent American leader sharing Israeli intelligence with its enemies, to supporting continued settlements in violation of international law and other acts to increase the siege mentality of the Palestinian people, to ignoring Egyptian intelligence an attack was eminent.
The solution, as it always has been, is empathy and de-escalation. If Hamas' graphic display of inhuman violence is enough to get so many privileged people to express indifference to the suffering of Palestinians, imagine how years of Israeli violence and occupation have harmed the Palestinian ability to feel empathy for Israelis. This is how Hamas can recruit so many murderers.
All true, or likely to be so (I'm not up-to-date on some matters).
I thought something would change in the early nineties, but then an Israeli extremist shot their own prime minister Rabin, sabotaging the peace negotiations. Subsequently, Fatah spent all of its political capital without achieving tangible results. Israel didn't give things back, at least not considerably. Life did get better, but only marginally. Hamas rose in popularity.
I haven't paid attention to which factions helped prop up Trump, but I've followed Netanyahu's corruption story for a long while, and I'm dismayed to see that he's still prime minister (they managed to oust him for a while, but he climbed back into office). The comparison between the two is adequate.
So, one one side, we've got Hamas calling shots - a bunch of people's whose high ideal is probably the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their competitor is Fatah - only a bit more moderate, but perfectly capable of fighting a civil war with Hamas, they are such friendly competitors.
On the other side, there's Neanyahu, who whole-heartedly welcomes a war when offered one - since his corruption trial then doesn't get the spotlight. War would likely decrease mass protest in Israel too (they've had mass protest since spring due to constitutional issues - that's one thing which is possible in Israel but not in Palestine, they still have democracy but it's not great)... and historically, even before there was a politician named Netanyahu, Israeli tactics have played into the hands of Palestinian extremists.
Both sides have surely been aware that the opposing negotiator must be able to bring tangible results to their people (a lack of attacks, a removal of blockade measures, a clear map of which settlements stay and which ones go) - this is needed for negotiation to gain legitimacy and become the preferred method.
If they stonewall each other, negotiation loses legitimacy and those who want to fight can see if it helps. Then they will find out it doesn't - at great cost. :(
P.S.
I hope that the West Bank of Jordan is still not involved, and doesn't get involved in fighting. Many people there are likely sympathetic to Hamas and opposed to Israel, but hopefully smart enough to stay out of it.