(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Hamas Attack Illustrates the Difference Between Resistance and Terrorism [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-09 My formal foreign policy experience is best described as "scant". As a state legislator, I mostly just voted on creating sister cities around the world. (Emmaus will never forget you Ulan Bator!). With that caveat stated, I have long been a student of the situation in the Middle East. I have been to both Israel and the Palestinian Territories numerous times and met with policy-makers there. On the neophyte-to-expert continuum I am a bit north of center. So knowing that, you can give whatever weight to what I say you feel to be appropriate. Obviously, yesterday's attack on Israel by Hamas didn't occur in a vacuum, and, like all world events, there is historical context to be considered. My purpose is not to opine on said historical context. That is the subject of a separate, much longer and less readable column to come. Whatever your view of the relative merits of each side's position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there can be absolutely no denying the horrific inhumanity of Hamas incursion. Without getting into overly blood-curdling detail, suffice it to say that men, women, children, the elderly, were brutally and indiscriminately murdered in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. Still more untold hundreds were kidnapped to be taken across the border into Gaza and used as hostages. The corpses of the dead were proudly displayed for the cameras and for the benefit of the perpetrators’ cheering and mocking comrades in arms. As I read the reactions on-line and in the comments sections of the various media outlets I am obsessively perusing, I note that there is a not-insignificant number of people who try to justify Hamas's actions by either deflecting blame with a shield of whataboutism ("Israel has killed civilians") or through invocation of the inherent right of people who feel oppressed to resist their repression. But both of these defenses fail to survive any reasonable level of scrutiny. First, while it is certainly true that civilians have been the victims of previous Israeli military operations, they have never been the overt, stated target. Some of what all militaries charmingly call "collateral damage" has been due to the tactic of Hamas militants of using their own civilians as human shields. Israel will surrender dozens of captured terrorists in exchange for one of their civilians, Hamas will put a military operations center in the same building as a hospital. That's just a fact. There are also undeniably cases where individual Israelis have crossed the line and inflicted needless suffering on Palestinian civilians. However, these abusers are sometimes (although not often enough) punished. I am unaware of a single Palestinian who has ever been punished by either Hamas or Fatah for harming an innocent Israeli. On the contrary, both Palestinian governments have been known to pay rewards to the families of those who harm Israeli civilians. Whataboutism doesn't work because there is a difference between civilian harm arising as a consequence of military operations, and civilian harm itself being the goal. And yes, the oppressed do have the right to resist their repression. And again, we'll save for another day any exploration of the causes of what everybody can see is the difficult life that Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza have been living. But historically, there are legitimate and illegitimate ways of resisting perceived oppression. For me, nonviolent resistance is both the most morally acceptable and often most effective way of fighting repression. Ask Martin Luther King and Gandhi who accomplished more for their own people, them or Yasir Arafat, or Ismail Haniyeh. If, for whatever reason, non-violence and peaceful civil disobedience is not seen to be an option, targeting the police and military infrastructure of the oppression is at least a morally rational and tactically logical approach. However, the random slaughter of civilians, most of whom are innocent, and some of whom may actually support your cause is just bad, in a very not-good kind of way. Similarly, the abduction of innocent civilians, the forced separation of them from their families, and the use of threats or torture against them to extract political consessions is never morally defensible, and never a noble or acceptable form of "resistence". It is nothing but blood-thirsty, animalistic behavior, corrosive to the underlying cause and fraying to the very fabric of a livable society. Nobody should voice support for such indiscriminate butchery. In the case of the attack we are watching unfold today on our television screens, the primary targets were not Israeli soldiers or prisons holding Palestinians, or the gain of territory. Hamas militants just rushed over the border, shooting people at random, setting houses on fire with families inside, slitting the throats of people sitting in their cars, I can go on and on, while the scenes I describe get uglier and uglier. Again, none of this is worthy of being called "resistance". [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/9/2198330/-Hamas-Attack-Illustrates-the-Difference-Between-Resistance-and-Terrorism?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/