politics

They see them as freedom fighters or militants.

I think people relate the Palestinian movement as being something like BLM or various indigenous rights movements. "Apartheid state!" and all that. They're not thinking about the distinction that BLM is a non-violent movement. The indigenous rights movements they're familiar with are non-violent movements. The Palestinian movement is most certainly not a non-violent movement. But they're non-violent and want so much for the rest of that movement to be non-violent they ignore the violence that others in the movement commit.

I mean I'd support the Palestinian cause if it were a non-violent resistance campaign. But it's not. When people choose violence the only thing that matters is which side has a greater capability to exercise violence on the other. I'm no military expert, but it seems to me Israel has a greater capability in that regard. So what's the point? Palestinians would achieve a lot more with non-violent resistance and negotiating. They just keep losing when they use violence. The only reason to continue to be violent towards Israel is to maintain a perpetual cycle of violence that keeps psychopaths like Hamas in power.

I really don’t understand why the line of “conquered land” is drawn at Israel, but that’s just the way it is.

Most people live in conquered land. There's very little land on Earth that hasn't been conquered at some point in history. Basically just a few isolated islands in the middle of the ocean.

No one wants to be accused of being a criminal for living where they were born. But they feel upset about the wrongdoings of the past. To reconcile these to conflicting emotions people decide to be most angry over the land that was most recently conquered. That somehow makes it more acceptable to be angry at other people for being born on conquered land while they're living on conquered land themselves. Since they're angry other at people for being born on conquered land, they've proven they care about the bad things in history enough they can live guilt free on conquered land themselves. Maybe also rename a sports team so it no longer references an indigenous group or something. Whatever it takes to not feel guilt.

It's all emotion so it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

And there's the thing where a reporter have a conversation with an elderly Palestinian person where that person pulls out a deed or a key to a house that they claim proves they used to live in Ashkelon. But someone else has lived on that same land their whole life. So that's a problem. But what people fail to recognize is that after October 7, right of return isn't going to happen this generation. Sure anything is possible with enough time, but with enough time there will be no more Palestinians with deeds and keys claiming to have lived in Ashkelon.

So Hamas destroyed the possibility of a right of return. The dream of a Palestinian state is on life support now. But the Palestinian movement seems incapable of separating itself from Hamas.

So it's devolved into screaming on the internet and raw emotion. And nothing creates emotions like the feeling that you're is complicit in something horrible. If you accuse Israel of genocide loudly enough, then maybe no one is going to talk about how you supported a cause that actually committed genocide.