Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
The dividing line is not easy at all. The Israeli Army forces Palestinians off their land and gives it to settlers. You say, might makes right, such is life. Hamas comes back over the fence and massacres the settlers. You say, this is uniquely awful! Uh, no it is isn't. It is a long-running tragedy of two peoples, each convinced (not without reason!) that they are uniquely world-historical victims, and that that justifies their doing awful things to the other side. Both are aggressor and victim, each in their own unique and incommensurable way. To the Israelis, they are few, the victims of centuries of anti-Semitism and then the Holocaust, and the Arabs are many. To the Palestinians, they are powerless and abandoned by other Arabs, victims of a form of European colonialism that is no longer tolerated anywhere else in the world. Each absolutely and justifiably sees the conflict as existential.
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Could you imagine Israelis entering Gaza and raping and murdering people, gleefully, in a celebratory fashion?
Something has gone haywire in the mind of people who do things like that. It's the reason we have a thing called war crimes. Soldiers just being soldiers does not explain My Lai, or Rwanda, or the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia.
Hamas knew there was a line between what they'd been and ISIS. They knowingly stepped over it. They wanted to shock and horrify. They wanted to be extreme.
Our decision to torture people after 9/11 is a good analogy. We'd blown a lot of goodwill attacking Iraq, an innocent nation. But we still had some shreds of respect in the international community. Then the torture stuff came out, and every foreign nation (save those hosting our black sites) said, "Nope. That's a step too far. No bueno. Not acceptable."
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