The problem of applying conventional morality to large groups of people is one of scale. Conventional morality works best in small groups or between individuals, where personal communication is possible; between nation-states, for example, or between large polities and "liberation movements," individuals cease to exist in a practical sense. Armies do not think or function like families.
In the early period of the Nazi regime, before the minds of Gentile Germans were assimilated, many individual Germans, despite holding abstract notions of antisemitism, refused to bully the Jews they knew personally. The kept shopping at stores owned by Jews, kept associating with their Jewish neighbors, and were sure that "their Jews" were not like "the others." Some even pretended to "Aryanize" businesses owned by Jews they knew to enable them to still make a living. It took years of propaganda, and several anti-Jewish laws and policies, to teach "Aryans" to see all Jews as outsiders.
However once TheJews(R) had been separated out individual distinctions were obscured or forgotten. Once two nations were created, the Germans and TheJews(R), most Germans ceased thinking in conventional moral terms, as the scale had been shifted upward and outward. What would have seemed horrible to do to the Rosenblatts across the street was a "perfectly natural" way for the Volk to treat "parasites."
Most people know this already, whether they think about it much or not. In your normal life bombing the house across the street seems "rather extreme" or even just plain wrong, but it was "just part of the war" for the Allies to firebomb Dresden.
This applies to the inhabitants of the former British Mandate of Palestine: when Jews and Arabs know each other personally they remember that everyone concerned is a person. Yet when they are separate by a border and instructed by propaganda people turn into Us and Them. Conventional morality does not scale up that far. It's simply impossible, and you should know that.
What bothers me about the situation in Gaza is that Hamas treats the civilians who live outside the tunnels as "not Us": the "freedom fighters" are perfectly willing to let the noncombatants in Gaza be bombed and shot and starved, as long as "the struggle" continues. The only Palestinians who really matter to Hamas are soldiers for Hamas, and even then individuals are expendable as soldiers always are. Your conventional morality says "nobody should be treated like the civilians in Gaza," and you are right, in conventional terms in conventional situations. Israel is really fucking those people over.
What "anti-Zionists" somehow hide from themselves is that Hamas is colluding in fucking those people over. You don't see this because you think "the Zionist entity" is evil, and "the Palestinians" are noble victims. You forget that to Hamas the "broad masses" of Palestine also cease to be people, because what matters to a "liberation army" is "the cause of The People," not any particular person per se.
In normal times it would be unthinkable to allow TheJews(R) to bomb the family across the street because of something you do, yet while the "freedom fighters" huddle in their tunnels to keep on fighting it's just too bad that whole neighborhoods of human beings have been forced to flee and and starve. What matters is The Cause, i.e. those who actively participate in The Struggle from the tunnels and bunkers.
Israel is really fucking those people over because it sees them as Those People, who are all the same: a large entity like the IDF would fail as an Army if it regarded the Palestinians as individuals they might work beside in peacetime. Group-think takes over. "They are all Hamas."
Yet Hamas has its own version of group-think: "only we are Hamas." Unless you're a "freedom fighter" you simply don't count. That's how soldiers have to think, regardless of which side they're on. When the IDF is bombing Gaza City the people who are not in the tunnels are just collateral to get damaged.
You are doubtless aware, and most of you have always known, that militarily speaking Hamas' current struggle is hopeless. It always as been. By now perhaps even the fighters themselves realize that.
So the fighting should stop so the people who are not in the tunnels can stop suffering.
The Zionist Entity is not about to stop fucking those people over until Hamas admits it's beat. There's nothing you can do about that, you can wave your signs till your arms go numb and it won't do a thing.
So it's about fucking time that Hamas stopped thinking of the Palestinians who are not in the tunnels as "collateral."
Hamas should stop fighting so Israel won't have such an easy time of being mean and nasty.
Yet Hamas in its tunnels is like the top Nazis in Hitler's bunker. The city above them, and everybody in it, can be blown sky high; as long as they are still down there The Struggle continues.
The Soviet army didn't give a damn about ordinary Germans as people. And the High Command in the bunker didn't either, or they would have decided to quit so fewer ordinary Germans would die. That was fine with Hitler: in his Last Will and Testament he said that because the German Volk had lost the struggle against "Judeo-Bolshevism" the German people no longer had any right to exist.
You have a point comparing the IDF to the Nazi army. Both armies are armies: that's what armies do.
But what about the "high command" in the tunnels under Gaza? Don't you see that they resemble the top Nazis in Hitler's bunker?
Do you think the fighters are starving too? Hardly. They have the food and medical care they need to keep fighting. The struggle would stop continuing if that happened.
Hamas is treating ordinary Palestinians like the Nazis treated ordinary Germans. When The Cause is lost, at least for now. It's time for the fighters to stop fighting, for them to once again become ordinary Palestinians who care about ordinary Palestinians.
It's time for Hamas the let their people go.
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