It does nothing different than saying "Germany invaded Poland". Do you object to that statement as well?
It is inaccurate to say "Hamas attacked Israel". While Hamas is running Gaza, and is the biggest terror group there, other terror groups, from fellow Islamists of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to Communists of PFLP and DFLP, took part in the attack.
No—“Gaza attacked Israel” is not the same as “Germany invaded Poland.” Germany in 1939 was a sovereign state with a unified government, a formal military, and full control over its population and borders. Gaza is a besieged, occupied enclave with no sovereignty, no army, and fractured factions operating under the weight of blockade and isolation. Equating the two isn’t just inaccurate—it’s reckless.
If your justification for collapsing an entire civilian population into “the enemy” is that multiple factions launched an attack, then you’ve just admitted there is no one entity to declare war on—which makes collective punishment even more indefensible. You don’t get to flatten neighborhoods and say “they started it” when “they” includes infants and elderly civilians who had no say, no vote, and no escape.
Saying “Gaza attacked Israel” isn’t a statement of geography. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand—a way to erase 2.2 million people and replace them with a single, demonized caricature. That’s not clarity. That’s propaganda. And that’s how you justify atrocities.
“Wrong” isn’t an argument—it’s a dodge. You don’t get to deny the implications of your language without owning what that language enables.
When you say “Gaza attacked Israel,” you are linguistically fusing 2.2 million people—half of them children—with the actions of militants. That rhetorical shorthand doesn’t stay harmless. It becomes the logic behind bombings that kill entire families, the blockade of food and medicine, and the justification for saying, “Well, they brought it on themselves.”
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s exactly what has played out: civilians being treated as combatants by proximity, not by action. So if you’re going to defend the phrase, don’t just wave it off—show how it doesn’t reinforce collective guilt and make civilian death seem like justice. Because if you can’t do that, then you’ve proved my point better than I ever could.
Again, Hamas it was not just Hamas. And no, saying "Gaza attacked Israel" does not imply that there is no distinction between militants and civilians.
Then say what it does imply—because if it doesn’t erase the line between militants and civilians, then you should have no problem saying, clearly and consistently, that civilians in Gaza are not responsible for the actions of Hamas or other armed factions.
But you don’t say that. Instead, you double down on phrases like “Gaza attacked Israel” and “they brought it on themselves,” while defending a war strategy that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, many of them children. You can’t hide behind semantics while justifying tactics that treat civilian neighborhoods as legitimate targets. You say “Gaza attacked,” but when Gaza’s children die in the thousands, suddenly you want nuance.
No—language shapes policy. If you talk like civilians are extensions of the militants around them, then that’s exactly how they’ll be treated. And the result isn’t hypothetical. It’s playing out in rubble, in mass graves, in bombed hospitals.
So let’s be honest: if you don’t want to be accused of collapsing civilians and combatants, stop speaking as if they’re indistinguishable. Because if “Gaza attacked Israel” doesn’t mean “Gazans are fair game,” then say it clearly: civilians are not responsible. Israel is not justified in collective punishment. And the suffering of innocent people is not a footnote to your war logic—it’s the indictment of it.
I mean all of them. And they are all part of Gazan society.
Then you’ve made my point for me.
By saying all the armed factions are “part of Gazan society,” you’re not distinguishing between militant groups and the civilian population—they’ve become one and the same in your rhetoric. And that’s the logic that justifies bombing neighborhoods, hospitals, and shelters. That’s the logic that flattens 2.2 million people into a single enemy, and treats children as collateral damage in the name of security.
Yes, Hamas is embedded in Gaza. But Gazans are not embedded in Hamas. They are not a hive mind. They are individuals—students, doctors, shopkeepers, children—most of whom have never picked up a weapon, let alone joined an armed faction. The idea that they “are all part of Gazan society” is not a justification; it’s a dangerous generalization that erases moral and legal boundaries.
If you believe armed groups have support in Gaza, fine—say that. But the moment you use that support to treat an entire civilian population as fair game, you’ve crossed into collective punishment, whether you admit it or not.
You don’t win a moral fight by abandoning morality. You don’t defend civilization by discarding its principles when they’re inconvenient. And if you can’t tell the difference between a fighter and a child—or worse, if you can but just don’t care—then the problem isn’t with Gaza. It’s with what you’ve chosen to become in response.
We use that language all the time when discussing war. Russia attacked Ukraine. That does not make 144 million people complicit by association.
That analogy collapses under scrutiny—because you’re comparing two fundamentally different situations.
When we say “Russia attacked Ukraine,” we’re referring to a nation-state with a centralized military and command structure. Russia is a recognized sovereign state with a defined government and a regular army that answers to it. Ukraine, likewise, is defending itself as a state.
But Gaza is not a state. It has no sovereign army. No internationally recognized government. No uniformed military structure. It’s a besieged, stateless territory under blockade, where armed groups operate alongside—and often in defiance of—civilian institutions. So when you say “Gaza attacked Israel,” you’re not naming a state. You’re naming a population. You’re collapsing a geographic region with 2.2 million civilians into a single combatant.
And let’s not pretend this phrasing is harmless. You yourself just said that “they are all part of Gazan society,” lumping every civilian in with the armed factions. That’s not just semantics—that’s how hospitals get bombed, refugee camps get hit, and the world is told it’s regrettable but somehow necessary.
If you truly mean Hamas, PIJ, or other militant groups, then say that. Precision in language matters—because when your rhetoric blurs the line between fighter and civilian, it’s not just a linguistic shortcut. It becomes a moral shortcut, too. One that leads to real-world consequences, and one that history has seen far too many times.
The "logic" that cost tens of thousands of innocent lives is the logic of attacking Israel and slaughtering people at a music festival and in their own homes.
And here again, you flatten the entire debate into a single, convenient causality: they attacked, so we responded. You invoke October 7 as if it explains and justifies everything that followed—as if the killing of 35,000 people, including thousands of women and children, is a natural, uncontested consequence of that day.
But war isn’t math. It’s not input equals output. The laws of war, and the moral frameworks that underpin them, exist precisely because violence begets more violence unless constrained by principle. You don’t get to point at one atrocity and use it to greenlight ten more.
You’re right that October 7 was horrific. That’s not in dispute. But what you’re doing is using that horror as a shield to make sure no one can ask hard questions about what came after. You’ve created a moral firewall: if you mention Palestinian suffering, you’re “justifying terrorism.” If you question Israel’s tactics, you’re “defending Hamas.” That isn’t clarity—it’s moral cowardice dressed up as outrage.
Yes, the slaughter at the music festival was monstrous. So is bombing a tent full of displaced families. So is starving children. So is dropping 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas and then blaming the victims for living too close to fighters. These are not morally equivalent actions—they are morally compounding ones.
Your logic doesn’t bring justice. It brings impunity. And when you shrug off tens of thousands of deaths as just “the cost of war,” you’re not defending civilization. You’re burying it under the rubble.
Political beliefs do not make civilians legitimate targets. But at the same time, if they support Hamas or PIJ and they end up being collateral damage (i.e. not targeted) because Hamas or PIJ were shooting rockets from next to them, then that's karma.
"Support for" what you euphemistically call "armed resistance" can also be active, and that's different. If they are actively supporting the war effort against Israel, that makes them involved and are thus no longer really civilians.
By the way, "armed resistance" is what Hamas et al call their terrorism. Why are you using terrorist nomenclature?
Your response is a textbook example of how moral language is twisted to justify civilian death—by calling it karma.
Let’s be clear: you just said that if a civilian merely supports Hamas or PIJ and dies as collateral damage, it’s essentially deserved. That’s not a defense of international law. That’s a spiritual rationalization for killing people who weren’t even targeted, based on their presumed beliefs or sympathies. You can try to dress it up as legality, but it’s vengeance with a thesaurus.
You then try to draw a distinction between “support” and “active participation”—which is fair, legally speaking—but immediately blur that distinction by suggesting belief alone makes someone less than a civilian. That is precisely the logic of collective punishment: the idea that one’s political alignment negates their protections as a non-combatant.
And your final swipe—accusing me of using “terrorist nomenclature”—just reveals your discomfort with the facts. “Armed resistance” is a neutral term used in legal and political discourse across conflicts around the world. The phrase appears in UN resolutions, in historical contexts (yes, even when describing Jews in Warsaw), and in discussions of groups both legitimate and illegitimate. It doesn’t mean support. It means acknowledging the vocabulary used globally to describe asymmetric warfare—whether you agree with the cause or not.
If you want to claim moral clarity, then act like it. Because calling civilian deaths karma for holding the wrong political views doesn’t sound like justice. It sounds like moral collapse.
Then you should stop making arguments that follow its exact logic.
You say you’re not endorsing ideological cleansing—but when you claim that civilians who “support Hamas or PIJ” deserve death as “karma,” and that they’re “no longer really civilians,” you’ve already crossed that line. You’ve redefined humanity by ideology. That’s not a misinterpretation on my part—that’s a direct consequence of your words.
International law doesn’t protect civilians based on their beliefs. It protects them based on their actions—and even then, only if those actions amount to direct participation in hostilities. Being angry, resentful, or even politically aligned with a group like Hamas is not a war crime. Dropping a bomb on someone for what you think they believe is.
So no, saying “I’m not” after endorsing death as “karma” doesn’t work. Either you believe civilian protections are universal, or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways.
No, it existed from the moment the State of Israel was first proclaimed.
Yes—and why do you think that is?
The opposition to Israel’s existence didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was a direct response to a process seen by many in the region—not unreasonably—as colonial dispossession. In 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes during the Nakba. Entire villages were depopulated and erased. Those who remained lived under military rule for years. The refugees were never allowed to return. Their lands were confiscated. Their political identity was denied.
So yes, some rejected Israel from day one—but not because Jews existed, or because a state did. They rejected a system that displaced them, erased them, and then insisted they accept that erasure as a permanent condition. That opposition—however toxic in its current forms—is rooted in historical trauma, not random hatred.
If you want to understand how we got here, you can’t skip the causes and only condemn the reaction. Otherwise, you’re just retelling the story from the perspective of the victor and calling it history.
That is not my answer. But population suffering is the natural outcome of starting a war. I do not think a Hamas or PIJ supporter who is a civilian is fair game for targeting. At the same time, I do not have much sympathy for them. They made their bed, now they are lying in it.
And this is where your argument collapses under its own moral weight.
You say civilians aren’t fair game—but you also say you lack sympathy for them, that they “made their bed.” That’s not a neutral observation. That’s a quiet endorsement of collective punishment. Because if a civilian’s suffering is something they “deserve” for living under or supporting the wrong rulers, then you’ve already erased the civilian/combatant distinction that international law—and moral decency—requires.
You can’t simultaneously claim to respect civilian protections while shrugging off their deaths as natural consequences, or worse, deserved outcomes. That’s not just a contradiction. It’s the same rational framework used in every atrocity: “They brought it on themselves.”
We don’t allow this logic when it’s applied to Israeli civilians attacked by rockets. We don’t say, “Well, they elected Netanyahu” or “They support military action, so their deaths are karma.” That would rightly be condemned as grotesque. So why is it suddenly acceptable when applied to Palestinians?
If you truly believe in universal values, then that empathy has to extend beyond your political tribe. Otherwise, it’s not principle you’re defending. It’s power—dressed up as principle.
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