Mandela was not a terrorist. That's an indictment of the US government's stupid "watch list," not Mandela.

In terms of land, do you really think they're coming out ahead in that? Before 2012, they had almost no settlements and they regular demolished them. How were they coming out ahead? Do you think the average Israeli is eager to keep the status quo for a few acres of land? Have you ever talked to an Israeli? They don't care about the land. Most Israelis I know are pretty angry about the squatters and just don't want their tax dollars going to bribe them into leaving like last time Israeli settlers were evicted from Gaza.

Do you think that in 1967, facing invasion from every side, the Israeli thinking was "muaahahaha, finally a full-scale invasion we can use as a subterfuge to add a new subdivision in 50 years!"

The military cost of occupying the West Bank is costing Israel many, many times what the land was ever worth many times over.

And keep in mind, the settlements are mostly in the West Bank, not Gaza.

South Africa was not slow or methodical; it was pretty fast, at least legally. And for a whole host of reasons, it's just not an apples to apples comparison. You could go into the fact that Israel was invaded by its Arab neighbors, who were committed to obliterating it, or you could point out that it's a thousand-year feud, etc. It's just not a comparison that's useful because the differences are too great.

But probably the biggest difference is that there is no Palestinian counterpart to Nelson Mandela.

The concession Israel seeks is, basically, for terrorists to stop slaughtering them in the streets. That's it. What they want is peace. To go to the cinema without fear of being kidnapped or murdered. South Africa's government wanted free labor. Israel just wants to not have bombs go off in the street. Nelson Mandela's whole message was of peace, non-violence, and reconciliation, so if a single Palestinian leader were to offer such a message, they would be a hero to Israelis everywhere.

It's not like Israelis are getting rich off the toil of Palestinians. Quite the opposite. The comparison to South Africa really doesn't work.

There's not an Arab lockdown per se. Israeli Arabs are about as free as anyone in Israel. They're members of parliament, serve on the Israeli Supreme Court, all that.

What is true, of course, is that Palestinian Arabs are basically stateless people who live in inhumane conditions with few freedoms and fewer opportunities for dignity. That's a real problem. I don't necessarily have a solution that they would accept though. To live in dignity and liberty, you need to live in peace. To live in peace, you need to accept that your neighbors have a right to exist.

Hamas didn’t always exist, Hamas is a result of the conditions of the people.

Race-hate has existed for a very long time. It isn't a result of the conditions of anyone.

If Hamas were an insurgency against oppression, it would surely be active in the region's other far more oppressive landscapes.

The narrative that oppressed people turn violent and that's what this violence is probably partially true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Much of what fuels Hamas and the main reason the peace process is so challenging in the Middle East isn't the plight of oppressed people; it's plain old bigotry.

If tomorrow, Israel announced that it is now a pacifist state, and it melted down all its weapons, disbanded the IDF, and issued Israeli passports to Palestinians, the result would be a thousand pogroms and millions dead.

After Hamas is destroyed completely apartheid and oppression will cause more systemic violence. The sterile road system in the west bank is a clear demonstration of apartheid.

Repeat after. Hamas. Is. Not. The. Result. Of. Oppression.

You believe that terrorism emerged because of the terrible conditions of Palestine. What you don't seem to realize is that the conditions in Palestine are terrible because of terrorism.

Hamas is not the effect. It is the cause.

A full Israel withdrawal would include no embargo with external trade. Fully isolating some land in your territory and not allowing anyone in or out is not a independent country, at best it’s a prison at worst is a grave yard.

Correct. Like existed for the 19 years leading up to Gaza and the West Bank being used as a platform of aggression against Israel-proper.

But have you thought of the wisdom of that for Israel? Every time they loosen their control of either territory, it results in more Israelis dead in the streets. As was the case in the months leading up to this one -- more permits for Gazas, fewer trade restrictions, more shipments. It seems those were mostly used to smuggle in weapons.

It's good to understand the historical context. All for it.

What historical context doesn't do, however, is forgive the unforgivable.

You can condemn the actions, but if you want to fix the problem, then you better learn the context in which the actions take place.

According to Hamas, their grievance is that Jews are alive. I'm not going to address that grievance.

Otherwise it’s just going to be centuries more of throwing bombs at each other.

That seems likely, but just denying the objectives of Hamas isn't going to bring peace either. For the last 20 years, the international community has been trying to follow the Oslo and Camp David peace accords, but there's been only one even remotely interested partner.

The continued violence is a consequence of the systematic oppression of ethnic Arabs in the Israeli territories.

I don't buy that theory. Hamas says their grievance is that a Jew somewhere has a pulse. I take them at their word.

The question becomes after they’ve removed Hamas, how do they work with the remaining Palestinians? The two-tiered system oppressing ethnic Arabs has to end, or they’ll just be a different group that emerges.

There isn't a two-tiered system. Israeli Arabs enjoy all the same privileges as Israeli Jews.

Now, the conditions in Palestine are inhumane and awful, but I don't see that changing with a full Israeli withdrawal. Keep in mind, Israel did mostly withdrawal from Gaza almost 20 years ago.

It is pretty clearly apartheid, the sterile streets in the West Bank that only one race can use, that is segregation of a population by an ethnicity, for the benefit of a minority.

That's just factually completely incorrect. There are several million ethnic Arabs living in Israel. And benefit? What benefit, exactly, does Israel realize here? Would you think the average Israeli wants to live next to Palestine? Surely you see the difference: White South Africans wanted apartheid. Most Israelis probably want to live as far away from anything having to do with Palestine as possible.

There's no benefit to Israel. There's no exploitation of labor or natural resources or anything like that aside from a few thousand settlers living as unlawful squatters in the West Bank.

It would be like saying that the United States' invasion of Afghanistan, which saw thousands of Americans die and billions of dollars lost, was akin to the British invasion of India, which was a very profitable enterprise.

Just because it's a first world country with a modern military doesn't mean that it's the same thing.

You're the one who, for ego or fake Internet points or whatever, just throws around trite stereotypes without any experience or data. Just lazy shit like, "hurp, derp, Americans dumb." It doesn't make you a bad person, it just means you're lazy and ignorant. That's fine though. You can be lazy and ignorant.

I'm addressing only the person I replied to.

That’s when you can stop them. You can say, actually, yes, you can condemn Hamas without caveat or whataboutism.

No, no you can’t.

I just did.

I'll do it again. I categorically condemn Hamas. There.

Travel more.

Israel did create the situation, Once it conquered the territories of Gaza and the West bank it now occupied a population of people. It could have integrated them into Israel as they have with the Israeli Arabs, or given the territory back to Egypt / Jordan after the war. But regardless, they now were the colonizers of a client population.

Palestinians are generally not interested in being annexed into Israel. In fact, that's probably what they oppose the most. Being consumed and assimilated is what the more religious and more conservative Muslims don't want. That would also be intolerable to Israelis. The very people who voted for Hamas, who carried out 10/7, who suicide-bomb cafes, should be granted citizenship? That's unrealistic. It would be like if the United States responded to 9/11 by making Afghanistan a state.

And giving back the land conquered during the Six Day War? That was more or less proposed in 2000, though most of it was actually going to a new Palestinian state. In Clinton's summit, Barak offered demolition of settlements, a right of return for Palestinians, half of Jerusalem and shared custody of the Temple Mount, and a return to the 1967 borders. Yasser Arafat, in my estimation fearing for his life if he made peace with Israel, rejected that.

In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza anyway, leaving a vacuum of power. In that vacuum, Hamas won an election a year later. This month, more or less as a direct result of giving Gazans more self-rule, a pogrom erupted from Gaza and killed over a thousand civilians. Surely you wouldn't say that's of Israel's design. And what would you have their response be? I can't imagine any country in the world that wouldn't respond militarily.

The living conditions of Palestinians are awful, terrible, inhumane. Especially in Gaza. But I don't see how or when Israel sat down and said "yes, let's create this." It's a consequence of a long series of events, and Israel is involved, but they didn't just sit down one day and design a two-tier society.

In my experience abroad, Americans have a decent handle on it, at least compared to Europeans. I've met more than one Irish person who, for example, did not know that the Six Day War ever happened.

You have two ethnicities living in the same places, with vastly different rules, laws, rights, and freedoms. Whatever label you want to give that, its not a recipe for peace.

Well, that's only half true. You have plenty of Arab Israelis who are living life exactly like Jewish Israelis.

Anyway: I agree that the situation for Palestinian Arabs is completely intolerable and needs to change. But the word just doesn't fit, mostly because the situation in Israel is not of Israel's choosing. The situation in South Africa was very much of the white minority's choosing.

Besides, if you're going to make that comparison, you should probably apply it all around. Consider Lebanon:

Most Palestinians in Lebanon do not have Lebanese citizenship and therefore do not have Lebanese identity cards, which would entitle them to government services, such as health and education. They are also legally barred from owning property or entering a list of desirable occupations. Employment requires a government-issued work permit, and, according to the New York Times in 2011, although "Lebanon hands out and renews hundreds of thousands of work permits every year to people from Africa, Asia and other Arab countries... until now, only a handful have been given" to Palestinians.

I believe Human Rights Watch has also condemned Lebanon's treatment of Palestinians a number of times, FWIW.

EDIT: BTW, you could probably say that mentioning Lebanon is whataboutism. You'd be right. I'm narrowly seeking to observe that the term "apartheid" seems unevenly applied.

I'm bringing up Hamas because they're the belligerent. The same reason I'm bringing up Israel. Who should we be talking about? Fatah? The PLO? They aren't in power.

The apartheid narrative is also a false one. Apartheid was under a racial test. It was a system of South Africa's white minority's choosing. That isn't the case in Palestine. There are millions of Arab Israelis. There were no "Black Whites" in South Africa's apartheid.

From 1948 to 1967, Palestine existed for 19 years as a presumed state. To get UN membership, all they had to do was form a government. Not a single Israeli soldier stepped foot into Palestine during those years. Then, the Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Republic (which included the Gaza Strip), Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait all attacked Israel unprovoked. Since then, Israel is at various levels occupied territories used to launch that war.

At various times, it's eased its occupation, most notably after Oslo and the 2000 Camp David conference. Palestine has held, at various points, elections with Israeli help. Ehud Barak worked earnestly on a Palestinian State. So did the international community.

Then in 2006, Gazans elected Hamas in a relatively democratic election. No election has been held since. Israel has not occupied Gaza since either, though it has controlled its radio waves, airspace, and ports with good reason.

Life in Gaza is intolerable and inhumane. The West Bank is also bad, though obviously not as dire (Israel does directly occupy the West Bank). It's a complex and sad story, with plenty of Palestinian suffering, but apartheid it is not.

you keep falling into this Pro Israeli or Pro Hamas dichotomy, those arnt the only options. We can be anti-apartheid and anti-hamas at the same time, but recognize the systemic nature of the violence that arises because of the oppression.

But see, you're falling into the exact dichotomy you said you wanted to avoid. It's far too simplistic to just frame it as "oppressor" and "oppressed." By labeling one group as the oppressed and another group as the oppressor, you're taking a side.

It's easy to fall into that narrative, because Israel has most of the power. Life in Israel is far better than life in Gaza. In response to 10/7, Israel pushed Gaza into a humanitarian crisis by cutting off power, medicine, food, and even drinking water into Gaza (though Biden managed to get them to turn the water back on).

So it's easy to look at them and say, "oh, one group is oppressed and the other is an oppressor." But it's also naive. Hamas's stated goal is genocide. It's not really an "oppressor and oppressed" situation when the allegedly oppressed are explicitly genocidal.

The Israeli Arabs are a good example of what a integrated Palestine Israel might look like to start with, just expand that to the entire population. Of course there are some outstanding issues to hammer out even with our model Israeli Arab integration wikipedia which ultimately means the government needs to change from being a ethnostate government to a national citizenship based government secular of religion. But I’m not going to let perfection get in the way of good enough, if we could integrate everyone today even with the racism issues, thats a huge win.

But then you're essentially playing the role of a colonial power, telling the locals how it's going to be. That's what George W. Bush tried to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. It didn't work.

If you did a poll people of any ethnic and religious group between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and you asked them, "would you like to live in a secular state with both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs sharing the same land," do you think you'd get a majority? I bet you'd get fewer than 20%.

Probably more Israelis would be open and willing to agree to that than Palestinian Arabs, but I doubt you'd see a majority from either camp. And a "one secular state" solution isn't something any world leader is really talking about. It wasn't part of the Oslo or Camp David accords, isn't what anyone is proposing, etc.

I'm an American living in Europe. In both countries, I'd say people are aware there is a context. Maybe they don't fully know what the context is, but they know there is a context.

But again, you don't need context to condemn Hamas. You might need it to understand Hamas, but you don't need it to condemn Hamas.

Of course it's accurate. All world events, all of them, happen in some kind of context. Everyone knows that. No one believes that there was some kind of parallel universe where Israel and Hamas were just plopped down onto a map with no history and no context. Everyone knows the context.

The problem, however, is when people say stupid shit like, "Well, we can't condemn Hamas without first discussing--..."

That's when you can stop them. You can say, actually, yes, you can condemn Hamas without caveat or whataboutism. It's a really simple thing to do. We do it all the time.

I mean, maybe there was some kind of conspiracy to pit Hamas against Fatah.

To me, it seems more likely that they were trying to treat Hamas as what people here act like it is: some kind of governing party in Gaza to be negotiated with. That was obviously an error.

A lot of people however, are rationally, and correctly, pointing out that organizations like Hamas are a symptom of an oppressed people. Like an apartheid state, or slave state, we can look at history for examples of people striking out over and over again.

You can see it that way, but you also have to take Hamas's stated goal into consideration. Their stated goal is not to liberate their people, it's to be the new oppressor, and a far worse one than that.

Let's put it another way. There are around two million Arab Israelis. They're in the Israeli parliament, they serve in its courts, in the military, etc. Would they be liberated if Hamas achieved its goal? They would probably be viewed as collaborators and executed.

This myth that Hamas are just freedom fighters, like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi, really needs to be dispelled. It has no basis in reality.

There's this weird urge in the minds of people to try to find a hero story. There's no hero story. And if groups like Hamas weren't wreaking havoc in the area for the past 50+ years, realistically, a Palestinian state would probably exist.

I can’t speak for the next 10 to 20 years, but the long-term viable solution in 30 years is going to be a single country encompassing both current Israel and current Palestine, in a secular, non-ethnocentric, non-religious democratic organization. Where people are equal regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or language.

Except no one in the region wants that. Certainly not Hamas.