You think you’re going to get a better answer by asking that here rather than by reading the Wikipedia article or a media company’s summary of what Hamas is?!
As neutrally as possible:
Hamas is an organization in the area of historical Palestine. It has been governing the Gaza Strip, a small piece of land between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, since 2007.
Ever since then, Israel has been blockading the Gaza Strip. Every few years, eg. in 2014 and 2021 and now again, Hamas fires rockets at Israel or otherwise attacks it, to which Israel responds with airstrikes.
Palestinian narrative: Israel is a settler colonial state that has taken away Palestinian land and is imprisoning Gazans in Gaza. Fighting against that is legitimate resistance against oppression. Israel’s goal is ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Israeli narrative: Israel is a safe haven for the historically oppressed Jewish people. Arabs have plenty of other countries for themselves. The aim of Hamas is to eliminate the Jewish state and maybe even the Jewish people. Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties in its airstrikes against Gaza.
The actual truth: There is no such thing as the actual truth. There is a reason why this is the most difficult conflict in the world.
inb4 people with strong opinions on both sides tell me their opinion is obviously right and the above is nowhere near neutral
Adding onto this: the conflict has been going on since way earlier than hamas emergence.
Of course. If you read older history, you’ll notice that this used to be an Arab-Israeli conflict with Arab states on one side and Israel on the other. They fought wars against each other like in 1948, 1967 and whenever the Yom Kippur War was.
Nowadays Arab states and Israel aren’t anywhere near as hostile to each other as they used to be, so the conflict now is mostly between Israel and Palestinian organizations (PLO, Hamas).
Tom Kippur war was 1973
Ideologically Muslim Arab states by in large.
If you go back a bit further, you realize this started with a genocide of Palestinians in 48 by Israeli forces, in the Nakba. And if you go further a bit even, you see that it started with terror campaigns by far-right Zionist militias in British Palestine.
And if you go further just a tiny bit you will see that the jews were being genocided all over the world in WW2 and if you go further even more you will see that jews were being targeted by Muslims for religious reasons and if you go further…
We get it. Your world starts way after ww2 so you can have an excuse for supporting antisemitism and in general religious wars.
This conflict started way before 1920.Naaaah my friend. You are actually getting things backwards.
Ottoman Palestine and British Palestine both had Arab Muslims and Arab Jews living there. And they lived in peace. In fact, Jews and Muslims lived in peace for most of their histories in Iraq, Syria, Palestine etc.
The British, with their divide and conquer tactics, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, started to put Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Sikh, all an any religious or ethnic groups against each other.
There was no conflicts between Muslims and Jews in Palestine before the British allowed the European Zionists to colonise it, armed and trained their right-wing militias and allowed them to form a government (the only dual colonial government in British history). The Zionist militias attacked and terrorised Palestinians (Muslims, Christians and even Arab Jews) under British oversight for decades before WW2.
There was mass migration of Jews from Europe to British Palestine (and other places) right before, during and after WW2 (understandably of course). This increased tensions, as Palestinians already felt they were being slowly colonised.
But only when the British officially left Palestine, and the Zionists declared the State of Israel that true violence began. There was a literal genocide of the Palestinians by the Zionists.
70% of all Palestinian villages and cities were destroyed. More than half of the people were expelled from the land, with a good portion also being killed, which is ethnic cleansing.
This is the start of the conflict.
Before it was the prelude. And now we live the epilogue.
Israel always intended on genociding the Palestinians, since the state was first created. It was in fact, built on top of genocide.
Yeah, it is infuriating that this history is being down voted. In fact, the secular Plastinian national movements (PLO and its constituent organizations) considered Plastinian Jews (ie, indigenous Jews living in the British Mandate prior to 1948) to be Palestinians.
The truth is infuriating if all you live by is ideology spoon-fed to you by the mainstream media. And it’s not even their fault. The system really is set up for the vast majority of people to fall into this brain melting rot.
But there is hope. I do believe this event is radicalizing people and making them question things a lot more than most others before…
Yeah, I really don’t understand why people always repeat the line that “Jews and Muslims have been fighting forever”. This conflict is a direct result of outside interference, and it seems difficult to understand why things were set up the way they were. I need to do much more reading, because from what I understand, there doesn’t seem to be a plausible explanation, other than the powers that be wanted endless conflict. Generations later, you can’t ask Israelis to give up everything they’ve known, but the Palestinians were made to do the same thing, already. It makes sense for Israel to do most of what it does, now, in defense of itself, but it doesn’t make sense that we’re here, in the first place. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are screwed over and over. There doesn’t seem to be a way out of this that doesn’t involve one group wiping the other group out. Nobody is going to come along and say “screw ethnic and religious histories, let’s just be human and share the land”.
The more and more I read and study about it, it does seem the main root of this issue really was anti-semitism. But maybe not in the way most people would think.
When the Zionist movement first started, it had a lot of opponents within the Jewish communities of Europe. Many thought it was “giving up against anti-semitism”. To in essence, accept that Jews and non-Jews really couldn’t live together.
One of the earlier and main proponents of Zionism, Herzl, said that Zionism and anti-semitism had the same goals. To separate the Jews from the non-Jews. He believed Jews were incapable of assimilating, and would always bring hatred to themselves. The dude was pretty much an anti-semite himself… (see evidence).
He is now a hero and considered one of the spiritual founders of Israel…
I really don’t think we’ll ever see peace in the region as long as the Zionist ideology has a stronghold there. It’s a racist, supremacists, chauvinist ideology.
The only way to peace is for a state to exist in the region for all peoples, religions and cultures to live together in peace and equality.
I know it might not seem like it from the mainstream media, but that really is what the vast majority of Palestinians want too.
You can ask anyone who lived there, and worked or lived among them. They are FAR more progressive and peaceful than they should be. Any other people would’ve been turned into much harsher and more bigoted angry people. But they are just sad. And it’s so fucking sad. To think that we will be witness to an entire people maybe stopping to exist. Just for the crime of existing.
See? I wrote above I would get answers from people with strong opinions insisting that their narrative was the only correct one. Thank you for confirming that.
Prove me wrong lmao. Just saying shit like this is worthless buddy.
Bravo. This is the right answer.
No matter what “narrative” you seek to believe, the fact is that Hamas hasn’t been firing every once in awhile - They have been firing rockets and mortars regularly. Sometimes daily. You can see a list here and more info here
These attacks almost exclusively target civilians. more than 20,000 rockets in the past 20 years.
Additionally, airborne arson attacks are carried out…
edit:fixed links
You fucked up your links by putting bangs in front of them. Don’t put bangs in front of your links. That’s for embedding images
Thanks, just started using boost and I used it’s link function. either I don’t know what I’m doing (probably), or it’s a big.
Point taken. The point was mainly that the escalations (to which Israel responds with airstrikes or invasions) happen every few years. Most of the time, people in other parts of the world don’t really hear about what’s going on there in the media. The times when we do are probably because such an escalation happens (e.g. now).
Your links don’t work for me by the way, I can see in the source code what you meant to link to, but they don’t display as links for me.
Imagine if Germany launched V2 rockets at Britain for so long the British had built automated defenses to shoot them down.
Largely ineffective rocket attacks. See these charts for what near daily rocket attacks and near daily snipers, police beatings, etc, do for relative casualties between Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
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No, that’s hummus. Hamas are a domesticated South American camelid.
no, that’s llamas – hamas is the dark organic matter in soil
No that’s humus - hamas are big pickups/SUV’s made for civilians, based on the Humvee’s design.
No that’s Hummers. Hamas are tools used to pound nails.
No, that’s hammers. Hamas is how to spell “never” in Spanish.
no, that’s jamás, Hamas is what Einstein exclaimed when he figured out what was missing in his famous equation.
No! Thats a mass, Hamas is the last name of the star of the upcoming john wick spin off “ballerina”.
This one is so dumb lmao
What is hummus?
Correct, you get to pick the next category.
Terrorist groups!
This terrorist group wants the destruction of Israel and is centered in the Gaza strip.
Let’s keep going with Delicious Dips Ken.
Some kind of dip made from chickpeas. 🤷🏻♂️
Try to keep up…
edit: Shit,my bad. I replied on the wrong comment. Intended to comment the above on the reply that asked “what is hummus”.
Whooosh
deleted by creator
They were trying to make the joke go in a single-definition circle, which destroys the joke’s format. 🤷♂️
The joke continuing in its normal format proves your attestment to be wrong.
Nope you’re wrong, in fact, the jokes continued on a different comment thread where users understood the format. No further jokes came from this comment thread where they commented “what is hummus”.
I’m the one who wrote that comment and the joke train continued on from it up until everything was removed by the mods. 🤦♂️
Hamas is a terrorist organization currently engaged in a war with Israel. They are the defacto rulers of the Gaza strip, and most of their members are in Gaza. However, many Hamas leaders live outside of Gaza.
They are listed as a terrorist organization by the US, Canada, UK, the EU, and more.
Their charter declares their goals to be the violent destruction of Israel, the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in the land of Palestine, and killing all Jews worldwide.
Their charter doesnt state that. It was changed in 2017. Their current charter clearly states their conflict isn’t with Jewish people.
“Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise (the Balfour Declaration),”
The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means. “
https://palwatch.org/storage/documents/hamas new policy document 010517.pdf
Netanyahu helped Hamas get their funding so the moderate party in Palestine would get less support
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/israel-gaza-netanyahu/675597/
Bruh, how can you say that and not immediately start thinking “maybe i shouldnt”???
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas-Charta
The 2017 edit of it is just propaganda. Otherwise they wouldnt keep killing civiliansBecause the narrative that Israel is white colonizers oppressing poor brown locals is the predominant American liberal narrative for how power is structured everywhere in the world, even if it is of course never that simple.
Found the Hamas propagandist.
They are listed as a terrorist organization by the US, Canada, UK, the EU, and more.
Not hard to see how we are clearly taking sides in this conflict. Sickening.
Palestine and Israel are both awful to each other, and here we pretend to make Israel the good guys and Palestine the bad. As if that’s even possible to say which is worse.
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
Hamas (Arabic: حماس, acronym of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, Arabic: حركة المقاومة الاسلامية, literally “Islamic Resistance Movement”) is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist militant group. It was started in 1987 during the First Intifada by Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi as the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Egypt. In the 2006 Palestinian election, Hamas got 74 of 132 seats in parliament and controls the Gaza Strip. The group wants to build a Palestinian state based on Sharia law in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. Hamas does not recognize the State of Israel.[2] it has been designated a terrorist organization by many countries due to its attacks, including suicide bombings and rocket attacks.
Depending on the narrator, they’re either freedom fighters or terrorists. The question should be why and how does Hamas exist? They didn’t pop up one moment and started killing people.
If you’re really interested, read some different sources or listen to some podcasts from both sides and you’ll have a bigger sense of things.
or listen to some podcasts from both sides
And listen to podcasts from a third party. Try to find sources that are as objective as possible.
Yes, I have Podcast addict and just subscribed to various news podcasts, some European, some American, British, middle eastern, …
I still have to find one Israeli source to see their point of view and one Palestinian or pro Palestinian.
It’s an organization that controls the palestinian people. It’s a government, but there hasn’t been an election in seventeen years.
That’s about all I know
Well sorta, technically they’re only the adhoc government of occupied Gaza.
Basically what right wingers think antifa is, except in Palestine
the meanest guy in the prison yard
Hamas is a red herring that has it’s importance exemplified in western media by the zionist apartheid regime of Israel.
no one believes you
Not in this circlejerk they don’t.
I do
