Comment by cess11
2 years ago
Not sure what you're getting at. Contemporary stabbings in Jerusalem and the West Bank are mainly aimed at soldiers, same goes for shootings. There are exceptions, but doesn't seem very common.
I'm not following the conflict in Ukraine as closely but aren't there militia factions there attacking into Russia?
Hamas has been relatively successful, more successful than their competitors. What success in some universal sense would look like, I don't know. Currently Israel has pretty big problems though so it seems kinda successful in some general sense?
What do you mean by "extreme violence"? Reading this I get flashbacks to photos of people run over by israeli tanks and the kid who in november last year filmed himself when experiencing a lack of drones for the first time, so I think that's the kind of violence that has made the strongest impression on me from the last six months or so. Impulsively throwing handgrenades at people in a shelter is gruesome, but it lacks the calculation and sadism of running someone over with a tank and turning them into mush, or forcing kids to grow up under the constant hum of weaponised drones.
As far as hostage taking and 'legitimacy', it's hard to come up with alternatives. Israel routinely takes palestinian kids off the street in occupied territories and put them in military detention centers, commonly abuses or tortures them, and keeps prisoners indefinitely on weak or non-existent grounds. To force Israel to release prisoners through other means than hostage exchange would likely require quite a bit more violence, and I'm not so sure that is preferable.
I didn't call Hamas a charity organisation, I mentioned that they also do social and charity work. Which they do, and that's how they started.
> Contemporary stabbings in Jerusalem and the West Bank are mainly aimed at soldiers, same goes for shootings.
Sweets are handed out for every attack, including for the guy who crushed the skull of a toddler, slashed the throats of elderly etc.
The logic is they are either IDF soldiers now, has been or will become it seems.
It's very common in the area to hand out sweets to other people.
Where can I read about the toddler case and "slashed throats of elderly"? It's somewhat understandable though, almost every palestinian knows about a toddler killed by the occupation, a grandparent killed by the occupation, a family deprived of their home and land on some flimsy justification, and so on. That some of them lash out at anyone should be expected, people tend to become abusive from abuse.
Yes, some palestinians see the conscription as something that makes every israeli guilty in the occupation. Some israeli jewish leftists have a similar view, they see israelis that don't engage themselves politically against the occupation as part of it. Still, as far as I can gather, most of the militant activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem seems to be aimed at soldiers in service at the moment. In Israel there has been some attacks with cars, where at least one, I think in Haifa, hurt civilians.
Still, nothing that compares to deliberately and proudly starving a couple of million people.