Israel

Recently, Hamas, an organization that is constituted of the most anti-Israel members of the Palestinian population, launched an attack on Israeli civilians—on October 7th—which involved killing many Israeli civilians, and kidnapping hundreds more, and taking them into Gaza.

Immediately, Israeli forces retaliated by launching massive counter-attacks, which killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, including hospitals. 

While responding to these attacks, Americans—people living in the USA—have condemned the Israeli military, and those who have condemned the Israeli military action are being labeled "antisemites", and those who condemn the Hamas attack are being labeled "anti-palastinian", and so on and so forth.  The anger of all parties is increasing, and it's all exacerbated by the vagueness of the terms antisemite, zionist, accusations wanting to eliminate Israel, wanting to eliminate the Palestinian people, and similar motives.

Responding to each accusation is difficult, because as outsiders, with little knowledge of the facts, shooting from the hip we're more than likely to say the wrong thing.  Confusion helps Hamas, who clearly hoped that the world population would take one side or another, and thus infuriate either moslems worldwide, or jews worldwide, and certainly US jews, who are powerful in the US.  The Hamas attack was clearly planned to cause anger everywhere.  But Hamas, though it consists of Palestinians, does not speak for all Palestinians, nor do Palestinians have a means of controlling Hamas.

I urge my readers not to take sides on the issue of who is at fault in this conflict, except that Hamas—but not the entire Palestinian population!—is culpable for triggering off the hostilities. 

There's plenty of blame to go around. Palestinians are continually singer to Jewish homesteaders driving them off their properties and setting up their own farms in their places.  Palestinians are forced to live in poverty, in ghettos.  No doubt, Palestinians would have briefly rejoiced in the Hamas attack, but would have known that it would only result in massive retaliation.  But Hamas does not care; they want all out war, and they want the entire middle east to be involved.  (I don't know this; I'm just guessing.)  But taking sides does not help the situation.  I don't think taking sides is required here.  The only intelligent thing to do is to say that it's too complicated to take a side. 

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