By only condemning human rights violations by Hamas and tacitly approving bigger war crimes by Israel, our American and European leaders are choosing sides in a very obvious and hypocritical manner.

We are unnecessarily antagonizing a billion Muslims and making ourselves a target for terrorism by blindly supporting an unjust apartheid state.

I don't want to on the side of Hamas, but I also don't want to be on the side of Israel.

Why drag us into this?

A refreshing take for sure, and even though Bernie is Jewish he sees this cruel regime for what it really is. There are no excuses for harming innocent civilians, ever!

Religion, and British imperialism

Religion is a plague. It's the reason we're going to destroy ourselves. How many of the people who deny climate change (and every other batshit insane position taken by lunatics) are religious right-wingers? By far, most.

It's unclear.

Hamas clearly and obviously committed crimes against humanity (intentionally murdering civilians, raping, torturing and kidnapping).

Israel, so far, is playing in the gray areas. It's legal, according to international law, to lay siege on a population as long as it has a definitive and declared military purpose. It's illegal to do it to intentionally harm civilians or to intentionally starve them.

The main problem is that Hamas is using the Palestinians and hides amongst them. That makes the legal discussion very difficult because Israel can always say that they target Hamas and everything else is just collateral damage.

Unfortunately the Palestinians are getting f'ed from both sides here.

Before 1943, both Muslims and Jews lived in Palestine in peace, but as immigration increased, so did tension. It wasn't about religion, it was about land.

https://www.cjpme.org/fs_007

There were plenty of Jewish leagues, sports, ect, called the Palestinian Jewish (league name).

So land was simply taken from a torn place that couldn’t protect itself.

I mostly agree, but 'taken' is somewhat reductive, it was more like a forced partition. Jews already lived there and were already emigrating there en masse long before the end of WWII, Zionism ramped up in the late 1800's, 60 years before the Jewish state. There was already violence in that area through a lot of early Zionism and a civil war in the few years leading up to partition.

It would be like if the UK decided tomorrow to give 35% of the US to Hispanic Americans despite them only being ~20% of the population, it just a weird way to split up a country that is bound to cause conflict. (Jews were 30% of the population of Israel/Palestine when it was split in half) No one actually expected Israel to survive the wars at the start, as you said they just wanted to push the 'problem' onto someone else. If you're a displaced population what do you do if no one wants to take you and your under threat of death most places you go? It's important to remember that Jews were pretty much universally hated everywhere in the world prior to WWII, they didn't have many prospects for peace.

I suspect however that if partition never happened, there would still be ethnic conflict in that area and it would have just shifted who was the oppressed group. Which really highlights the real problem as you implied, the inability for many religious communities to live side by side. Look at India, Nigeria, Ireland, etc. Whenever you have 2 prominent religions in large enough numbers living closely together their fanaticism often doesn't allow a shared sense of national unity. Banning religion is a great way to make religion popular again though, not the best way to get rid of it. A secular education is the best way to get rid of religion.

Oh yes of course banning religion is the obvious answer that will lead to harmony. Even in your magical world where religion doesn't exist this conflict would then be on racial lines.

To be fair, extremism flourishes when conditions are bad. Hamas is potentially a product of these conditions, or at least partially. If both peoples would be afforded better conditions, they might seem less incompatible than the two groups seem at the moment.

About time the Palestian issue is put back on the agenda. Strangely enough, Israel is doing everything they can it seems to make that happen.

I don't agree with this guy's hot take on things. He's arguing that because Bush supported the Israeli Prime Minister's idea of pulling out of Gaza, Bush is somehow taking full responsibility for Palestine and has all the blame for Hamas winning the majority vote in Gaza in 2007.

How come nobody is mentioning how President George Bush is the guy who fucked up Gaza?

Maybe because it's a bit of a stretch