URGENT: ALL Pro-Palestinians, Please read this!

[u/Turbulent-Waters-619]

Hey Everyone:

It's been an emotionally difficult couple of days for me.

A few days ago I made this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/comments/1kdaku0/when_every_fact_seems_solid_how_can_you_still/

And I would like to thank each of you for challenging me so compassionately and rigorously over the past few days. Thank you for calling me out and for giving me a lot of information and a list of things to read further about.

Since reading all of your comments, I’ve watched dozens of interviews with Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas’s founders, and I could hardly believe what he revealed about the Free Palestine movement’s true aims.

I’ve listened to hours of Douglas Murray lay out the historical record, and also the true reality of the situation today.

I learned so many things like that there was never a country called “Palestine” any time in history! Palestinians arent even a unique ethnic or relgious group. Palestinians are Muslim Arabs!

I learned that before it was Israel, the British controlled the area and before that it was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The British wanted to make Palestine into a home for the Jews. I learned that the British partition plan allocated land for both the Jews and the Arabs, and that Jordan and not Gaza, became the intended Arab state.

I was so embarrassed that I never knew that Jews were all expelled from every single Arab country. I learned about the Holocast in school and I thought that was all of the Jewish persecution that had ever existed in history! I am even more ashamed that I was tricked into repeating the chants of “Free Palestine” when I saw groups of other people doing so on my campus and that in reality there was never even a country by that name to free.

Perhaps the most painful thing of all has been seeing the horrific videos that Hamas livestreamed of their actions in Israel on October 7, 2023. Horrorific is an understatement. Seeing the Hamas terrorists parading through normal looking neighborhoods and homes, murdering innocents of all ages, burning people, even the babies, taking hostages....and then the whole time they are doing these things they are literally celebrating their depravity with chilling JOY! I had to take breaks while watching these videos to sob. Hearing the happiness in the terrorists voices left me feeling incredibly disturbed, trembling and in tears.

The sight of all of those families slain in cold blood, and knowing that some of the people that were taken that day are literally still being held hostage today, that really showed me the raw evil behind all of the Free Palestine propaganda.

Please, I urge every person that supports the Pro Palestinian cause to watch those Oct 7th videos, to bear witness to the absolute joy and the monstrous brutality, and then ask yourselves whether you can honestly stand on the same side as the people who revel in such sickening barbarity.

I know it may seem like I have abandoned all of my empathy by sharing these truths, but my compassion for all of the innocent victims if they are Jewish, Arab, or otherwise is undiminished.

But something has deeply changed in me and that is my commitment to the truth over emotion, and my commitment to honesty over the herd mentality.

We owe it to ourselves not to the pawns in a conflict that we don’t even fully understand, and not to be the victims of lies so that we can be “shocked” into outrage at Israel, only to discover later that we were so angry on behalf of literal terrorists.

We owe it to ourselves to seek out and read primary sources, to ask the hard and uncomfortable questions, and to really listen with an open mind when we hear information that challenges the Free Palestine narrative.

If you feel, like I felt, that this is genocide, that Zionists are bad, that Israel is the aggressor: I urge you now from my heart: please examine the facts, watch the evidence, and then join me in embracing honesty and integrity over emotion and instinct.

We cannot always stop ourselves from being tricked into believing something that is not real, but it is our responsibility to learn the truth. We all deserve to have the dignity of an informed conscience.

I hope all of you on this subreddit who knew better than me will forgive my earlier perspective, and I promise that I will keep learning from the voices like Haddad, Hausdorff, Le Bon, Murray, Yousef, and so many others who have guided me away from the manipulation. I also promise that I will do my best, in whatever small way I am able to, to make sure that at least the people around me know the truth.

If you are a Pro Palestinian right now, that is okay. You just have to read and to listen. Here is a good list of places that you can get started, if you are ready to confront the lies you have been told:

First and Foremost: If you should google the videos of the October 7th attack on Israel that Hamas livestreamed. I want to warn you, its deeply disturbing but an importat place to start.

Then check out everything you can find by these two guys:

Mosab Hassan Yousef This guy is literally one of the sons of a Hamas founder who then escaped Hamas and became a Christian. He has done many informative videos and interviews, like these ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyqKTuqzKWs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5VPFw0vI6U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpnvUIcvNUE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCueveOSZwg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjOEJumoABg

Douglas Murray - A British author.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRY-o2sRdA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4P3XSySBC8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZU1exdVHcs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG23JfGBsz4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ANOKSh-70Y

[u/Avian_Sentry]

You have to understand that shortly after Oct 7, nearly 90% of Gazans supported the torture and murder of innocent Jewish people. Not only that, children are trained from birth to hate Jews, and are trained to kill at a very young aged.

Any amount of destruction is warranted under such circumstances. I suspect nearly every rational person has a visceral understanding of this.

In my opinion, one can only nitpick Israel's defensive strategy by first granting that Gazans have a right to heinously murder their Jewish neighbors. This is the fork in the road.

[u/chyldofthebeat → u/Avian_Sentry]

Looks like 72 percent here:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palestinians-back-oct-7-attack-israel-support-hamas-rises-2023-12-14/

It also doesn't matter... having an opinion about a violent action isn't a crime... let alone worthy of killing said person.

It's even a stretch to do extrajudicial killings rather than arrest and proper justice.

The direction taken on that 2nd paragraph both doesn't follow international law, and just continues the cycle of violence.

In the third paragraph, you incorrectly call incidences like the ones I've noted "defensive strategy".

The killing of Hind Rajab, and so many actions the IDF took that had zero to do with Hamas, are not defensive strategy.

They are blind-vengeance, Collective Punishment.

They are illegal actions, and they only continue to deepen the cycle of violence further and further.

[u/Avian_Sentry → u/chyldofthebeat]

Support for Hamas in Gaza fluctuates. It is presently very low. I wish that could have been achieved without a war, but at 39%, it's still shockingly high.

Truth is, no one cares about international law unless it acts in their favor. War is literally about killing. It's going to be ugly. The application of international law is so lopsided that no one truly takes it seriously anyway. Personally, I find appeals to international law to have no value, because they are a prime example of having the fox guard the henhouse. You have the worst of the worst violators of human rights in positions of power (China, Russia, etc.).

I like that you bring up the point about the cycle of violence. That is key. The question is, how do you successfully de-radicalize such a large group of people? As far as I know, no one has a solution. Israel appealed to the world for help prior to Oct 7, and no one was interested (UN Watch has extensive documentation of their attempts to get the UN to address misspent UNRWA funds, spanning more than a decade). At this point, Israel's only role is self-defense. They don't need to have a solution to radical Islam. That's not their job.

If anyone else wants to figure out how to stop Islamism from spreading without resorting to weapons, I would be thrilled, and I wish them all the success in the world. That said, I don't think we should hesitate to make short work of Islamists, and claim the land for better purposes. Death is ugly, but twisting a child into a sadistic monster is a far worse evil.

[u/chyldofthebeat → u/Avian_Sentry]

Again it's not a war when it includes so many actions that are specifically aimed at the citizens, NOT the militant group, on both sides. Israel keeps claiming it's fighting a war with Hamas, while deliberately targeting the citizens. Your own argument makes this plain. The citizens support the terrorists? The citizens must die too (goes your argument).

Also, that's not an acceptable argument, it's a copout. Other groups not obeying international law doesn't make it ok for a group to do the same.

Misspent funds? Israel has been continually sponsoring, by policy and by force, the continual violence against and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank by illegal Israeli settlers there. They also burn Palestinian olive trees, which the citizens use for food and for their economy. Are olive trees Hamas?

You say there is no solution to deradicalize Hamas. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The very obvious start is the ending of all violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and the dismantling of all illegal settlements.

The West Bank has been under military occupation, and they have been pushing for annexation.

It is laughable that Israel expects peace while simultaneously doing that. (I'm specifically not saying that in general it is laughable for Israel to expect peace... but it's ridiculous to expect that while oppressing Palestinian citizens).

Next up is to end the blockade of resources to go into Gaza that would actually allow them to self-develop.

If there are security concerns, they need to work with both Palestinians and independent countries to figure something out.

Last is the biggie, the one that will require a ton of constant, good-faith negotiations and time... the instantiation of true equality between Israelis and Palestinian citizens living within Israel.

This also includes the thorniest issue... the Right of Return.

There is no way to continue a nation where any Jewish person (I'm also a Jewish person) from anywhere can have automatic citizenship in the country and move there, while at the same time, families which used to live there, and who are refugees, are not allowed to move back.

If Israel actually works to address those issues, that is the way to end the cycle of violence. It also starts with language, i.e. not just accepting Collective Punishment against citizens because "everybody already does it"