“I support the Palestinians, but I’m against Hamas.”
I want to roll my eyes every time I see somebody take this stance, not simply because it is tiresome and it takes no courage to say, but mostly because it ignores the context. Every time. It not only overlooks how and whyneocolonialism lead to Hamas, it overlooks why Hamas would resort to crude tactics like taking hostages (as if the Zionist régime was always open to dialogue), it overlooks why a substantial percentage of Palestinian adults support Hamas, it overlooks the decades of atrocities that Zionist authorities have been committing against the Palestinians since day one, and most of all, it overlooks the overwhelming amount of power that the Zionist ruling class has in this situation.
My response: fine, you don’t have to like Hamas, but to focus on condemning it repeatedly is to lose sight of the very conditions and the ruling class that gave rise to Hamas in the first place; it’s a bland inaction that gets us nowhere. If you say ‘Hamas is the real problem’ or ‘Hamas is just as bad as the IDF’ then I’m afraid that you have missed the point completely.
I support Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the Lions Den, the Syrian Arab Army, the SSNP, the IRGC, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ansarallah, and the Hashd Al-Shabi.
I support any and all and every form of armed Resistance against the cancerous zionist entity occupying Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian lands. Each and every one.
And if you claim to care about what is Right and Just then you should too. It's not 2013 anymore The battle lines are drawn.
United front means united front. It doesn't matter that every single resistance coalition doesn't agree perfectly on what should happen next. I see it compared to the Chinese revolution all the time, and that's correct. This would be like criticizing the communists for allying with the KMT to resist Japan. Not comparing hamas to the kmt just making a point yk
“I support the Palestinians, but I’m against Hamas.”
If this is somebody's take, then they're categorically not with the Palestinians. Outsiders, especially not the crackers who put Palestine in this situation, do not get to choose Palestine's allies for her-- and the fact that they chose Hamas should speak MEASURES AND VOLUMES to the level of brutality the Zionist Axis has visited upon them.
Precisely. Palestinian revolutionaries don't give a fuck what these dumbass westoids think. You don't get to oppress them and then police how they resist.
Why though? In its current state, whether they (the people) support their government or not, they don't have a say in political decisions made by said government, so the differentiation is really important. Otherwise, if we treat them as one in the same, we would make a mistake of believing in "collective punishment", which is the exact tactic Isn'treal uses.
Westoids will naturally support any segment in a given population that are willing to abide and collaborate with their shitty colonial rule, while being against those that are actually a threat to it. It's like when redditors say they hate the Chinese government but not the people, of course they would be fine with Chinese people once they are broken up into a 100 different colonized countries and are powerlessly trapped producing Iphones in factories forever.
It's also ridiculous to me to separate the resistance movement from the people. Like okay you support the Palestinians when they're oppressed but when they get brave and start fighting back it's "whoa whoa this is NAWT okay bro" fuck outta here.
These people are not about it. The silver lining in all of this is seeing who's really down for revolution and who understands what that means and who is not.
Also, since October 7th, the entire world has been watching Palestine. This is what had to be done in order to bring any overwhelming attention to the conditions that Palestinians have been living under since 1948 and prior to that honestly. I've been saying "What's sad is that it has had to come to this" instead of focusing on Hamas bad with people.
Let's also not forget that Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed on multiple occasions his de-facto support of Hamas in what he hoped would hinder hopes of reconciliation between the Palestinian factions-
“Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he said during a meeting with his Likud party-members in 2019!
This is literally just one instance.
As far as I'm concerned, if you oppose Hamas but support the IOF then you're either a scumbag or absolutely ignorant. The IOF have been terrorizing the people of Palestine for decades, Gaza included. Long before October 7, the IOF had been shooting children in Gaza.
Stand your ground and keep calling this shit out. Lots of people who claim to support Palestine and originally held these views are learning the flaw in that line of thinking.
Hamas is of the people. They aren't from a different class or country or region or anything, they'll all just Gaza residents that lost everything and chose to join up. A true guerilla movement and the legitimate elected government at the same time.
If you say "I support Palestinians, but I'm against Hamas" you need to reconcile with the fact that Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas.
Admitting this fact does not discredit Hamas, it is simply a part of history. Just because today’s Palestinian authority got co-opted and is today cringe doesn’t mean the PLO wasn’t an important force earlier on in the struggle.
Edit: I forgot the second half of an important contraction
I have an imagined response, I don't know if it is intelligible though...
Blaming Palestinians for October 7 is like blaming Afghans for the 9/11 attack. 9/11 was a response by one unaffiliated with Afghanistan to decades of violent military interference to multiple sovereign nations' agency and, compared to the actions of the US Government, the response was hardly measurable on the same scale of "terror".
Hamas is a people's movement, not Wahhabist, and literally decolonized their territory by expelling occupiers.
It's a harmful comparison that reflects the larger community of leftist ignorance about the history of imperialism in West Asia and the Islamic Resistance.
so if I'm understanding the correctly the point you're making, the article you linked, and the smidgen I read of the nature of nature of Wahhabism, I'm comparing two events that are similar only in that they involved humans.
One was a strategic response by those involved in a conflict, the other was astroturfed theater.
tbf i can sort of see why brian berletic takes this stance and i agree that normalization would probably have been the easier regional W for the anti-imperialist bloc as well as likely the better option for overall development in the region, but telling me that normalization is the best way to pressure israel to provide a two state solution def smells like
i know fuck all about the middle east but at least to me normalization here is uncomfortably close to capitulation and the end of palestine as a polity.