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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Their strategy seems to consciously be showing everyone that they are craziest mf'ers who don't care about any consequences or collateral damage ever.

I agree with you that there some pretty serious global consequences that will come back to bite them too, but, then, they pretty intentionally don't care, that seems to be the whole deal.

I have heard Trump supporters actually suggest that a similar thing is a winning strategy for Trump too. Of course he seems to be an irrational unpredictable guy who doesn't care about the consequences in foreign policy, that's great for the USA, everyone will be scared to cross him because he's so unpredictable!

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This is probably the historical lowest civilian casualty count ever for taking out this large a number of adversaries in an urban environment.

Boy you have some reading to do. Look up the program called 'Daddy's Home'.

Same in Gaza, it seems they are willing to kill pretty much anybody (children, journalists, humanitarians, hostages) close to a potential target, regardless of whatever their allies may be thinking. Kind of a "godfather" strategy.

They did show that religious fundamentalism, which attacked their country and abducted their people, has to pay a very high price for their terrorism.

This terrorism will hurt innocents and the winning strategy would have been to just not attack Israel.

As much as Israel likes to spread that narrative, religious fundamentalism had nothing to do with October 7th. And the number of innocents murdered, the amount of destruction wrought, the land stolen by Israel in Gaza since then has completely eclipsed the relative few killed by Hamas. Or are Israeli lives worth more?

Israel left Gaza before, I don't think it will happen again soon. Palestinians will also not work in Israel anymore in the foreseeable future at least.

It is not a question about which lives are worth more. There are a lot of indications that Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza for that matter.

To blame this attack on Israel is quite callous and I don't believe you that you care about any lives in that region. It just doesn't add up, but that is just my opinion.

If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?

> If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?

I don't mean to be snarky, but I'm finding it very difficult to take you seriously when you make preposterous comments like "Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza" and "Israel left Gaza before".

Hamas is not a fundamentalist group, and indeed they have frequently called out Islamic extremist groups, such as ISIS, for their murderous behaviour. Probably best we don't discuss ISIS further in the context of Israel though...

I also suspect you know very well the reasons for the October 7th attack, which Hamas have been open about[0]: in essence, it's a battle against:

  - Israel's blockade and control of the Gaza strip
  - Israel's occupation and colonialism of Palestinian lands
  - Israel's continued violence, murder and dehumanisation of Palestinian civilians
  - Continued Israeli aggression and land theft
  - Israel's apartheid regime
  - Israel's complete disregard for human rights, international law and the UN
  - Israel's inhumane treatment of thousands of Palestinian hostages, including institutionalised violence, torture, starvation, amputation, sexual assault and rape[1]

[0] https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-rights-gro...

You are making excuses, Hamas is a fundamentalist group.

We can go back into history on who started the conflict, but even then I come back to the persecutions of Jews that fought for their independence and won. The result of that is the state of Israel. A democracy. Flawed, but in another league than comparable nations in that region.

A victory some are not ready to accept but they ultimately have to. Perhaps after they manage this first step there will be hope for a Palestinian state.

And yes, Israel did leave Gaza in 2005. That there were blockades was due to security concerns, which proved to be justified not only after the October attacks.

> Israel is a sick, apartheid regime that must be stopped.

This is a quote by you in another comment. Together with your excused for Hamas your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected.

> Hamas is a fundamentalist group

You've offered no evidence to support this repeated claim, and haven't refuted the evidence to the contrary.

> your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected

Not obsessive, just consistent; I could just as well call you obsessive for your repeated excuses of Israel's destruction of Gaza and their murder, starvation, torture and rape of Palestinians.

You have a very Israeli view on history, and it's obvious neither of us are going to change our standpoint, so I bid you adieu.

How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there. They adapted that from al-Husseini, which stated it exactly like that. That was before the founding of Israel btw.

I don't think I want to indulge in proving Hamas to be an extremist organization any further.

More lies, and straight out of the Hasbara playbook at that! From the Hamas charter:

"Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."[0]

[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full

I don't think I want to indulge in proving Israel to be an murderous, colonial, terrorist, apartheid regime any further.

How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there.

Not the 2008 charter. The most anyone can point to is the passage that supposedly calls for the "annihilation" of Israel, but that's very clearly a mistranslation. (The actual phrasing predicts Israel will be "invalidated" by Islam, a lot more like Khrushchev's "We will leave you in the dust").

You are making excuses, Israel is a Jewish supremacist state practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected, and whether intentionally or inadvertently acting as if the situation began on October 7th 2023 which it did not.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks. And on top of all that the fact that Israel clearly considered this situation manageable and sustainable. Netanyahu's plan was "managing the conflict", with periodic "mowing of the grass". He didn't see any need to "resolve" the "conflict", and neither did most Israeli citizens, whose lives were not effected by it at all (to the extent they would plan a music festival a mile from Gaza without a second thought).

While Palestinians in both Gaza and West Bank live intolerably. And surrounding countries that promissed not to regularize relations with Israel until the situation were resolved were abandoning Palestinians and regularizing relations anyway (for, among other things, access to Israeli weapons and technology they could use to repress their own and other populations).

This is what motivated the attack, an attempt to find _some_ way to do what other things had not, get Israel to see this as a situation that was not in fact sustainable, that they coudln't just go on like this forever no problem.

I think it is a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally target or kidnap civilians, which I think happened that day. But it was not "unprovoked", and it does not require resorting to the explanation of "they just like violence" to explain motivation.

No, you don't attack the country and murder festival goers to make that political point. That is a perverse rationalization of what happened.

Certainly I don't do that and don't approve of it. I didn't say I was planning on doing it, or approved of it.

In fact, I specifically said I thought it was a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally attack or kidnap civilians. So I'm not sure what you are saying "no" to in response to me?

Talking about motivation is different than talking about if we approve of the choices.

Bad immoral choices that are war crimes and violations of international law do not somehow prove that the motivation is "fundamentalism", right? If the question is what was the motivation for the attack, saying the motivation is something other than "fundamentalism" is not to say attacking or kidnapping civilians is ok. You asked, if not fundamentalism, what is the motivation? We told you. Bad immoral choices that are war crimes on Oct 7th also don't erase the prior decades of history, involving many many violations of international law and war crimes. Which are as we described above.

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