Hamas is no longer any sort of threat, and requiring written condemnation of their terror attack with every post about the current razing of Gaza indirectly reinforces the purported thesis behind Israel's continued wonton destruction which is that Hamas is a threat, and Hamas will attack the moment the bombs stop.

I've only recently started educating myself them, so this group may have some ugly things in their history I haven't learned about yet, but -

There was/is a nationalist social democratic Palestinian organization that Hamas essentially chased out of town with support from Israeli religious conservatives, and I feel like people who want a free Palestine need to talk more about them, because social democratic sounds a hell of a lot better than whatever the hell Hamas' policies are

I've kind of been completely absent for the past 3+ months

relatable tbh

Mossy your presence is very well appreciated, sporadic as it may be.

turbo based

ok

israel would probably bomb their home so not too long

I don’t decide whether or not bombing children is moral based on how their parents feel about me. 🤷‍♂️

Palestinians are quite liberal and progressive compared to other Arabs, and being gay is legal in the West Bank -- that doesn't mean that there's no issues, this article about a planned LGBT youth camp gives a good impression. There's allies, but keep your head down and out of sight of religious nutjobs. It's pretty much the same thing atheists do over there: Plenty of them around with all that secular history but the religious nutjobs are simply too rabid to allow public discourse about the topic. It's way easier to go the "secular Muslim" route: Fast, but not for Allah.

In Gaza the legal situation is undetermined (scholars disagree on whether British mandate law prohibiting gay sex still applies) but anyway Hamas is in power, they instituted a religious police, tried to enforce headscarfs, go after male hairdressers cutting women's hairs without any legal basis etc. don't look at the statute book Hamas doesn't care and they're crazy. Also you don't want to go to Gaza right now. Also, you probably can't even if you're an UN aid worker.

If an average person is constantly subjected to food insecurity, lacking access to clean water and sanitation, lacking medical treatment, random injury and death through constant bombings, random injury and death of relatives and friends through constant bombings and limited access to education and working opportunities, how likely are they able to concern themselves with social progress?

If we look at western countries, social progress came in times of relative safety and wealth for the broad population, while reactionary politics came in times, where these were lowered or cut. It is no coincidence that reactionary politicians combine economic hardship for the masses with scapegoating and fighting against minorities.

The way to progressive politics in Gaza is paved with working infrastructure, proper access to basic needs and a perspective for social and personal development.

I'm not sure if you are attempting a platitude or are making a point, but to make a point your logic should be sound.

Your logic is that if an average first world person cannot live in a place comfortably, then you have an unstated implication that they should not receive support against death. Please correct if you were implying something else, would have been easier to know if you had spoken less vaguely.

Nonetheless regarding said "logic", (TLDR it's not logical) I don't see the logical connection between the tourism experience of visiting a country under siege and how that determines whether the residents of that country should be exterminated.

If you were making a point, could you elaborate on this connection? If however you were attempting a platitude, no explanation needed, you succeeded.

With all that dysentery, lack of food, shelter, constant threat of getting blown up? Ehh maybe 2 days cuz I'm twice as old as the average person there.

I also support not making polar bears extinct.

IMO that's not very pertinent since we have the privilege of not being in that situation. Here's a quote from something I read that might help reconcile this:

If we understand this sense of negative and positive freedom, what appears as a contradictory stance within anarchism makes perfect sense. An anarchist might firmly believe that the Palestinian people deserve to be liberated from occupation, even if that means that they set up their own state. That same anarchist might also firmly believe that a Palestinian state, like all states, should be opposed in favor of nonstatist institutions. A complete sense of freedom would always include both the negative and positive senses—in this case, liberation from occupation and simultaneously the freedom to self-determine. Otherwise, as both actually existing Communist and liberal regimes have demonstrated, “freedom from” on its own will serve merely to enslave human potentiality, and at its most extreme, humans themselves; self-governance is denied in favor of a few governing over others. And “freedom to,” on its own, as capitalism has shown, will serve merely to promote egotistic individualism and pit each against each; self-determination trumps notions of collective good. Constantly working to bring both liberation and freedom to the table, within moments of resistance and reconstruction, is part of that same juggling act of approximating an increasingly differentiated yet more harmonious world.

-Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (2010)

This is something I just happened to read, but we've been discussing Palestine a lot in my discord server. If anyone would like links to some more readings about Palestine and why things are the way they are, I have a lot of links to free ebooks I'd be happy to share (freely accessible, non-pirated). I'm not sure it would be appropriate to post them here, and I lack the mental bandwidth to deal with the possibility of sea lions and other bad-faith responders, but I'd be happy to share the links in a DM.

They'd end up getting stoned in the not fun way, that's what.

what the fuck does that even mean

How would you suggest doing that and what purpose would it serve?