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Not Another I/P fight diary. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-30  

I keep seeing, and dipping in and out of, diaries about Israel and Gaza, horrified by the one-sidedness of almost all of them. Clearly Hamas was successful in helping Putin by dividing the progressives in our nation. We are bitterly fighting each other instead of fighting our common enemy.

I don’t understand why people are so quick to jump to an either/or conclusion — either you condemn Hamas for mass murder OR you condemn the obliteration of Gaza.

Why not both?

There is no way to rationalize, excuse, or otherwise justify Hamas’s horrible murders and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, of Israeli children! This vicious attack was meant to elicit the internalized fear we Jews have lived with since the Holocaust (and the destruction we endured for centuries before that) when 2/3 of European Jews were killed. Hamas was sickeningly successful in making us suffer. I have American Jewish relatives who are traumatized and acting in ways I’ve never seen before.

And the retaliatory attacks by Israel on Gaza have killed many thousands of Palestinian civilians, a large percentage of whom are children. It’s ongoing, causing more death and destruction and misery every hour. It’s hard to be a parent and not empathize with the horror Gazan parents are feeling as they watch their children suffer and die, even though as a Jew, I feel endless hatred for Hamas.

We should recognize that the same forces are behind all the killing. There are plenty of articles about how fascistic Netanyahu helped prop-up and fund Hamas in order to sabotage any chance of a Palestinian state. That same Israeli right wing wants to level Gaza and bristles with anti-Palestinian hatred. Here in our nation, the right-wing spews both antisemitic and anti-Muslim vileness. The same people calling for bombing Gaza into nothingness spread antisemitic posts on social media and happily gather with neo-Nazis at rallies and events. They would not lift a finger to protect American Jews.

Here on Daily Kos, we should be unequivocally against terrorist attacks and the killing of innocents, whether those innocents are Israeli or Palestinian. We should be united in recognizing who the real enemy is. We should be on the side of protection of civilians, restoring peace.

Will the bombing of Gaza destroy Hamas? I seriously doubt it. In fact, I would suggest that it will lead to growth of Hamas as the bitterness breeds even more ugly hatred, just as the Hamas attack on members of my ethnic community has led to fury and desire for revenge by people I’m close to.

I have long said that being truly pro-Israel requires advocating for a Palestinian state. But recently Jon Lovett (former Clinton & Obama speechwriter and one of the creators of Pod Save America) made a statement that encapsulates this perfectly:

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