Bombing in the south of the tiny, crowded Gaza Strip killed scores of people overnight, local authorities said, and the Abu Marasa family is one of several Reuters spoke to that have concluded they may as well go back to their homes in the north.
More than a dozen members of the family were crowded into a car on the edge of Khan Younis, the main city of southern Gaza, their belongings strapped to the roof for the perilous journey back north through the bombardment.
“Why should we be martyrs in Khan Younis? We would better die as martyrs in our houses. Let the whole building fall on our heads,” said Saleem Abu Marasa, preparing to drive back.
Hamas decided to be terrorists and killed innocent Israelis. Israeli leadership decided to be terrorists and killed innocent Palestinians. Both are killing innocent to send messages instead of doing anything that actually solves the issue peacefully and respectfully.
FFS
I would argue that Israel is killing civilians so they can move colonists in to replace them. It’s been their MO for about 100 years.
The problem is using religiosity as the rationale for their respective positions, that makes them irrational and intransigent from the outset. This is why religious states/theocracies are incompatible with modernity.
Both the Israeli government and Hamas start from the position that the supposed creator of existence chose THEM to have dominion over this shitty plot of desert. You can’t reason with that. You can’t negotiate with that.
The truth is, there are 2 countries where 1 should be, and without guaranteed secular, representative inclusion in that government, which neither side largely wants including civilians because magical thinking, there can be no peace.
Im sorry, I see any nation state beholden to or dictated by religious dogma to be regressive and even primitive. We know too much about the nature and composition of the universe to defer to dead people’s high fantasy delusions that were obvious attempts to explain a complex world without the tools or knowledge to pursue the logical, complex answers.
Religion isn’t the actual cause of most conflict, that would be power/wealth, but it is by far the most popular, and most widely accepted blank check for rationalizing conflict.
Respecting your beliefs is unimportant in the face of kids being killed in the name of those beliefs. I don’t care if you pray to Pikachu every morning at 2am, you do you. The moment you kill, oppress, or sanction such acts against real people in the name of Pikachu, fuck you and fuck your pokemon religion.
That, and oil.
That’s often the actual reason for conflict in modernity, religion is one possible validation, but America’s favorite is “Look at those suffering, oppressed people who happen to be sitting on billions of oil dollars in bubbling crude. WE MUST USE OUR BENEVOLENT MIGHT TO BRING 🇺🇸FREEDOM🇺🇸 TO THESE PEOPLE…and integrate their oil, I mean their people, into the virtuous, global, free market!”
What about suffering, oppressed people not sitting on petrochemicals/rare earth metals/etc?
“Fuck em. We can’t be the world’s police after all🇺🇸.”
I agree wholeheartedly with religious governments can go f themselves but disagree on none of them should exist. If the holocaust demonstrated anything, when minorities don’t have national representation their oppression is ignored by the entire world until its too late. The Jews need some sort of safehaven. Claiming Israel was a bit of a dick move tho, although I’m more inclined to blame the British for just sorta washing their hands of the mess they made of this situation. Also sadly even today it isn’t entirely affective, the uighurs for example are oppressed and no one cares (perhaps because they don’t have an uighur government petitioning for release or freedoms, I’d hope Muslim countries would support them but their also pretty much all corrupt at the political level so who can really make the difference).
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As is tradition.