• @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Both sides have done some super shitty things, but if you want to be objective about it, they’re not balanced at all.

    Still seems like a crazy own goal to issue a statement that doesn’t condemn attacks on civilians, but I can understand why people feel driven to take a side. Especially when virtually all the bars on the top part of that graph got effectively zero news coverage.

    • @assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s in our nature to take sides, and it’s unfortunate because this is a really complicated issue. You can trace this back centuries to try and understand why everything has happened, and you’ll find devils and angels in every group involved.

      After Russian pogroms of Jews around the Russian Revolution time period, a prominent European Jewish thinker concluded that they would never have safety or respect unless they had their own nation. Being scapegoated and killed in Russia was just one of many instances where they were persecuted. Flash forward to the early 1900s, and you have Zionist insurgents in Mandated Palestine who want their own Jewish state, and are carrying out terrorist attacks against the British colonial authority.

      We’re both well aware of what Palestinians are suffering right now. I believe I just read that an Israeli airstrike killed 600 in a hospital. A few weeks ago, extremists associated with Palestine killed and kidnapped a lot of people at a concert.

      Civilians just want to live in peace and freedom. They’re surrounded by violence they don’t remotely deserve, and that just keeps getting perpetuated. Each side kills innocent people that the other side takes as justification to kill other innocent people, and so forth.

      By the numbers, Israel is worse because they’ve caused more casualties, I agree. But I really don’t think that’s important here. Significant numbers of innocent people are being killed by Hamas and also by Israel’s government. Identifying both as major problems and the “bad guys”, while viewing the civilians as the “good guys”, is what’s important I think.

      Edit: Forgot to say, the problem wasn’t that this guy supported Palestinians, but that they pointedly refused to condemn killing and kidnapping innocent people.