You asked: “Did Hamas murder Israeli civilians in an all-out pogrom in 2023 because Hamas militants are religiously compelled to demonize Jews? Or did they do so because they’re freedom fighters, resisting Israel’s oppression and killing of Palestinians?”
At this point, both seem to go hand-in-hand. Muslims, starting in childhood, in the Middle East (at least) are taught, indoctrinated in, a number of lies about Jews that are nothing short of insane. And, of course, there is the belief that the Jews stole their land and made them outliers. But we can keep pointing back to milestones in history showing that things are not how they are portrayed? And what does any of this mean to someone who is currently living a wretched existence without freedom or acceptance into the mainstream?
No doubt a great deal of the outcry against Israel is thinly veiled antisemitism in the Western world, as well as antiJewish hate in the Muslim world. Within days the Israelis of suffering a horrific massacre of innocent civilians, they were being condemned for taking action against Hamas, with protestors easily and quickly forgetting the atrocities committed by Hamas. If we look at this another way maybe things would be clearer:
If someone kept you in bondage and mistreated you, in retaliation would you murder your captor’s children, rape his wife and hack her to pieces, and behead his family and friends? No sane person would do this, and this is what Hamas did. And this isn’t the first time! Sympathizing with them is equally as insane. But, alas, people really have little knowledge or sense of history.
So now we are left with the eternal question of what it means to defend oneself, or in this case, for a nation to defend itself. Does defense entitle a nation to murder noncombatants? Of course not, except for that gray area of collateral damage to civilians. This is not my belief or conviction, it is a matter of what happens, and it is what makes war so horrible. We could go down the long list of wars and actually take a look at how many noncombatants, civilians, women, children, the elderly, dogs, cats, babies, etc., die a terrible death; these groups make up the majority of who is killed, maimed and left suffering. Is this right or fair? Of course not.
To make matters more complicated, and worse, the people pointing fingers at the Israelis already have blood on their own hands. We can begin with the way the Arab world, in general, treats their own citizens, including women and heretics. And that they offer no religious freedom, having kicked out their population of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and so on. And we can talk about the Americans who have brutally and blindly murdered untold numbers of civilians in wars in the Middle East as well as all over the globe, up to the present day. Who are any of these people to take the moral high ground? I think it was Jesus who said that thing about not casting any stones…
And to make matters worse than worse, Israel, like the US, is beset with religious fanatics steering the policies of their government. And the irony of ironies is that religious fanatics — the ones claiming how God loves everyone — have a track record for the most human rights abuses and atrocities in the name of that God.
Whenever ANY people of the Abrahamic faiths gain control over another people they always end up being the abusers; this is a matter of history. We have seen it with the Christians and Muslims, and now the Jews of Israel.
Although this topic is extremely complex and I won’t rehash the many points used to argue who is right and who is wrong, but I will say that it seems best to approach this whole issue from the perspective of psychology and sociology rather than any other modalities. You can quickly find the answers to why each party does, and believes, what it does — the political left (are they really progressive?), the political right (logic and fact take a back seat to authoritarian impulses), the worldwide Jewish population (traumatized by the Holocaust and 2000 years of abuse, murder, pogroms, antisemitism, second-class citizen status, isolation, and defamation), the Muslim world (incited by the hate they have been taught about Jews and using the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for their own selfish purposes of political leverage and sympathy from the bleeding left), and so on.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is a symptom of severe psychological trauma and the human need to exert power and influence over others.
