A pro-Palestinian protest action briefly blocked all traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Wednesday morning.
Starting at about 7:45 a.m. Protesters stopped cars and stretched banners across the roadway denouncing Israel’s bombing of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and demanding that the U.S. stop arming Israel.
Northbound and southbound traffic on the bridge was at a standstill as of 8 a.m.
I don’t even think the Palestinian movement would have to be non-violent to get massive support from the world at large. All Hamas needed to do was not go after soft civilian targets, like the October 7th attack.
I think they would have much more support if they kept their military focused on the IDF and Israeli government, not Israeli civilians.
If Israel has shown us anything, Hamas could still get away with killing civilians, as long as they were collateral in an attack on the IDF and Israeli military. They lose people’s support by focusing on terrorizing non-combatants.
None of this is to say that the IDF or Israeli government are the righteous ones in this war. They have done disgusting things to the Palestinians, themselves. Both regimes are terrible in their own ways, and they kind of deserve each other. I just feel terrible for all of the innocent Palestinians and Israelis caught up in this mess.
Hamas gets funding from assholes in the region that are bitter over all of the humiliating defeats of Arab countries by Israel. The leadership of Hamas that lives in Qatar are billionaires. If they weren’t routinely fire rockets at Israeli population centers over the last decade and a half, that funding would go to another group. Similarly Iran would be providing weapons to some other group if Hamas didn’t go after civilian targets.
And If Hamas just went after the IDF directly, they’d be dead.
Entities like Hamas obviously don’t exist to protect their people. I mean they’re right now hiding in underground bunkers leaving the civilian population at the mercy of an army they claim to be committing genocide. They only exist to maintain power. They do this by fascist means of propaganda. Gotta keep that money rolling in from bitter old oil rich Arabs. They need there to violence so they can produce propaganda and maintain their power and their funding.
Israel and Saudi Arabia were very close to normalizing relations. In all likelihood that deal would block funding from Saudi Arabia going to Hamas. That’s a game changer. What can Hamas do to prevent the game from changing? It’s gotta be something big…
So no, Hamas just isn’t compatible with a peaceful co-existence. They simply wouldn’t exist without the violence. I was hoping Palestinian groups would denounce Hamas and separate themselves from these violent assholes. I can understand people in Gaza not being able to do this out of fear of reprisals. But Palestinians living in the West?
But unfortunately that didn’t happen. Seems too many people are fine with Hamas continuing to exist which means the violence will continue into the next generation. Unless Israel can succeed in their stated goal of obliterating Hamas, but that’s something that will cost many lives of Palestinians which will also result in the violence continuing into the next generation.
But some Hamas assholes are billionaires living in a life of luxury in Qatar and people in the west get to post memes that get them internet points, so I guess the violence has to continue to keep the assholes of the world happy.
If they had used the tens of billions of dollars that the world has donated them for building up their societies between 1990s and today instead of endlessly preparing to destroy Israel, that would have helped a lot. It would helped with everything.
Unfortunately, it seems that just pouring money into a society doesn’t help build human capital.
The money donated to Palestine was mostly used to save people from the many crisises and famines that the Palestinians have endured. A lot of it went to rebuilding the education system, providing health care, and social services in a war torn, open air prison. Sure, some bit of it went to building missiles and weapons, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t tried to “build up” Palestine.
This situation is a bit too complicated to solve by just throwing money at it, anyways. Even if Hamas didn’t spend one penny of Palestinian aid on weapons, they would still be in a pretty similar situation.