I agree with your first sentence.

The rest is the messy middle around which negotiation is required for any form of minimal co-existence.

The argument that all Palestinans deserve to be genocided because of the actions of a terrorist organisation is so asinine that people should be ashamed of themselves.

It is the same reasoning Americans used for their war against the Apaches.

Wait, you mean there is “no excuse for what Israel is doing” and “Hamas kidnapping and murdering Israelis” was just a distraction?

This is why we should just move on to EVs and stop getting involved at all in the Middle East. I see no morally right way of engaging with either side. Both positions seem to end in “let one side genocide the other side.”

Tell me about it!

While I actually have sympathy for people on both sides of the struggle, I also find it hard to answer "yes" to both questions, mostly because of how muddied the definitions of everything are. It's obvious to me, that both the Israeli government and Hamas are both committing serious warcrimes, and that there no good actors here, here are some questions I don't have an answer to.

For example, is Palestine its own country? Is Hamas is its rightful government? Does that extend to the West Bank or only in Gaza? Palestinians seem to say that Palestine is its own country, Israelis say that Palestinians are not a part of Israel - so how can it be an apartheid state if BOTH sides say they aren't part of the same country at all?

Is Israel committing a genocide? Well, what does a genocide look like? Israel is still distributing food in Gaza, to this day. I don't think it would look like this, but at the same time, there are terrorists on both sides (Itamar ben-Gvir being the most prominent on the Israeli side, in my opinion).

There are more issues and questions and uncertainty around the problems in Israel, Palestine, the Levant as a whole, Iran's involvement and so on.

Even worse, for most Israelis (who are 70% of Arab descent), the country of Israel no longer existing could mean a real genocide for the Israel side! (A counter-genocide?) Regardless, if this issue were easy to solve, it would have been solved already.

Honestly, the situation seems to complicated to boil down to two "simple" questions and I admire that you can have such an "obvious" outlook, but the more I look at Israel and the Middle East (and read, and research), the more questions I have.

Hamas has unilaterally broken every ceasefire and peace treaty. This war started with them unilaterally breaking a peace treaty, invading, kidnapping 1000+ civilians, and raping and murdering most of them.[1]

Does this justify what Israel is doing to the West Bank? Most people would say no. On the other hand, before the invasion normal Palestinians were chanting "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" on a daily basis, and they still refuse to recognize the existence of the nation of Israel. If your counterparty doesn't agree that you have a right to exist, there's no negotiating.

[https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/12/middleeast/report-sexual-viol...]

One MAGA hat at a Republican rally doesn't mean all Republicans are MAGA.

If anything is to be learnt, it is that individuals should be judged as individuals, or at least that individuals should not be judged by the worst actions of a group that they may (only appear to) be a part of.

A good way for "one side" to trivialise or demonise "the other side" would be to seed "the other side" with extremist messaging.

"democratically elected" being an extremely load bearing sentiment if you know anything about what people's lives are actually like on the ground. did you know a large majority of the populace didn't even vote in 2006? since 2006? there hasn't been elections since. The median age is 18.

Pulled all their military out? Oh, they still controlled their airspace, critical infra, borders tho? Sounds very self determined!

Serious, bad faith or extremely reductive misrepresentation that I can't tell is borne from ignorance willful or accidental.

your comment is the equivalent of acting like cuba's economy is all their own choosing, without analyzing the immense damage sanctions (and why sanctions were there in the first place) have done to the country, or accosting haiti without knowing why their struggles exist. context matters.

2006 is 20(!) years ago, the elections had a 70% turnout, and Hamas received only 44% of the vote.

Considering that about 60% of the Gaza population is age 20 or younger, that means about 18% of the current population voted for Hamas.

And of course Israel directly helped this by arresting a huge number of Hamas politicians right before the elections, and openly interfering with the election process in general.

So no, Hamas does not represent the will of the people in Gaza, and calling it "democratically elected" is at this point a straight-up lie.

This argument you make is the same one Osama bin Laden uses in his 2004 “Letter to the American People”: he argues that because the American people re-elected George W. Bush, the populace was complicit in the policy consequences, self-rationalizing 2001.

Congratulations for using a heuristic that resulted in 9/11! Osama’s rationalization at least had a more accurate premise that the American people continued to be able to vote — unlike in Palestine. So congrats on having either a worse moral compass or worse reasoning skills than Bin Laden!

Support for Hamas also came from Netanyahu[0], he explicitly gave support to be used as wedge for the Palestinian cause, to perpetuate the conflict giving casus belli to Israeli actions against Palestinians in Gaza.

[0] https://www.972mag.com/netanyahu-hamas-october-7-adam-raz/

That's a weird way of saying there hasn't been an election in 20 years.

I've never seen any protest by students that protested against Palestine.

In fact, at University of Washington, a protest was organized to support Palestine after the Oct 7 massacre on Oct 8; they chose to show support Palestine after Palestine did a massacre. And there was a very little criticism on that kind of actions.

They could. But they would never.

We both know they wouldn't, though.

I think you mean one of the two governments works tirelessly to minimize casualties, especially children.

The other of the two governments works tirelessly to maximize casualties, especially children.

Both sides, of course, occasionally fuck it up too.

You don't become rich by having morals.

your current employer funds the Israelis

> Only one side is being armed and funded by our tax dollars

I mean, yeah, I would heavily prefer for one of the sides in this conflict to be much better funded and armed than the other. Specifically, the side that I consider to be fundamentally in the right in the conflict.

Whichever side I am talking about is not relevant to the point. What's relevant to the actual point I am trying to make, is that I don't think that one side being better armed and funded serves as a reasonable indicator of which side is right/wrong in a given conflict.

> you clearly think the Palestine side are worse

You only think that in order to fit your narrative... even I already stated the contrary.

> that’s good enough reason to protest.

Clearly, this protest isn't about that. The protest is about criticizing Israel's actions.

It's you who should stop being disingenuous

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If they did that by slaughtering civilians? Yes. Absolutely.

You sound more out of touch...