[peddamat]

Thank you for posting this. Honestly, my social media bubble exposed me to exactly 0.5% of the videos on this site.

While I still think Israel is making the same mistake we did after 9/11, these videos help me feel a little of the vitriol fueling the IDF's actions.

[edanm]

> Thank you for posting this. Honestly, my social media bubble exposed me to exactly 0.5% of the videos on this site.

Those are just the tip of iceberg, unfortunately. A lot of the more disturbing stuff was censored to protect the families, but you can see journalists describing seeing a 47-minute compilation of... harder scenes.

> While I still think Israel is making the same mistake we did after 9/11, these videos help me feel a little of the vitriol fueling the IDF's actions.

Quite possibly. Though let me make something clear about my views - revenge is never ok, and doubly not ok if it's carried out against innocent Gazans.

Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered civilians, and in addition effectively shut down the country by launching dozens of rocket attacks every day for weeks, and have promised to do it again if they remain in power. So removing them from power is morally and legally right. But revenge should never be the goal.

[cess11]

OK, so you remove Hamas and al-Qassam brigades. Now what?

Business as usual, for sure. PIJ would likely fill the vacuum, continue _their_ rocket attacks, and not be as restrictive and predictable as the al-Qassam brigades. Mujahideen brigades and DFLP:s and PFLP:s military wings would also fire some rocket salvos when they think it's appropriate, for example when people affiliated with them in the West Bank are arrested or harassed by Israel.

And you could go on, keep starving and bombing and on and on like Israel has done for more than a decade. Either you commit genocide or you endure the violent resistance or you make peace, and every time you 'mow the lawn' you raise the barrier to peace.

You obviously having been following this for more than six months, October 7th is where history starts for you. Very little in the footage on that web site is worse than what palestinians suffer more or less constantly, from the IDF and from settlers. Most palestinians in Palestine know someone who lost a toddler due to very treatable starvation or israeli gun violence or whatever.

[edanm]

> OK, so you remove Hamas and al-Qassam brigades. Now what?

If it were up to me - you help someone who wants peace fill the gap that Hamas left, you:

1. Make every effort to help Gaza recover. Directly as much as possible, and by getting the world involved.

2. Help a better government form in Gaza, one that actually cares about the people, about economic development, and that wants peace.

3. Work towards peace with whoever you can possibly find that is willing to talk peace.

> You obviously having been following this for more than six months, October 7th is where history starts for you.

That's ridiculous. I've lived in Israel for 30 years, do you really think I believe that "history started on October 7th?". In addition, you can find plenty of comments of mine where I am extremely critical of Israel's actions over the last 15-20 years, both in not pursuing peace, and in actively blocking peace in many ways. (I'm also fairly critical of the settler enterprise which goes back much further.)

> Very little in the footage on that web site is worse than what Palestinians suffer more or less constantly, from the IDF and from settlers.

Maybe if you only look at the specific video footage I sent. But in general, that's a pretty wrong statement. The majority of Palestinians, especially Gazans, never interact with the IDF, until the once-every-few-years back-and-forth between Hamas and Israel. And until October 7th, there wasn't any operation near its scale.

Palestinians aren't mass taken hostages, despite lots of rhetoric to the contrary. The IDF doesn't enter random civilian's homes and kill a grandmother they find, while live-streaming the slaughter on her own Facebook account for her friends and family to see. Etc.

I don't understand this constant desire to see everyone as equally bad here. You can think Israel does a lot of bad things (I certainly do) without having to think Hamas is equally bad.

[Tainnor]

> Honestly, my social media bubble exposed me to exactly 0.5% of the videos on this site.

Social media is cancer when it comes to delicate political conflicts and nothing exemplifies this more than the Israeli-Palestinian (formerly Israeli-Arab) war, where both "sides" get stuck in echo chambers. The roots of this conflict go back at least to the end of the 19th century (if you leave out the complex histories of the Jewish and Arab peoples before that) and both sides have legitimate grievances as well as their fair share of blame. For every claim that someone's going to make, somebody else can make a counter-claim.