B/c if Israel just stops like it’s trendy to demand, then Hamas will regroup and go again

That’s an interesting prediction I’d like to see tested, honestly. What if, (hear me out here) the only thing keeping air in Hamas’s sails is the perceived need to resist the occupation? Hamas isn’t and never has been popular among Palestinians, in much the same way that Likud is really only politically relevant because someone needs to take a firm hand with Hamas.

Also, if Israel doesn’t stop, like it hasn’t for the last 70 years, then Hamas will regroup and go again, right?

Honestly this has all the same energy of the ‘defund the police/thin blue line’ rhetoric we’ve seen sail through our political spaces; if you listen to the law-and-order narrative the logic is that force must be escalated until those thugs learn their lesson, while that seems to drive up protest movements and that in turn gets the thin-blue-line crowd frothing for cops to use real bullets instead of rubber bullets and tear gas.

There was peace between Jews and Palestinians before the state of Israel began its occupation and settlements. The beef here isn’t religious or cultural, the issue is the occupation and the dispossession of Palestinians of their family homes. One thing Israel could try (that it hasn’t) is not doing that

Just because there were all sorts of people living in historic Palestine that used the word “Palestinian” to mean a geographic origin does not mean that the people that are known today as Palestinians do not exist as a people with the right to its own self determination and nationhood. Saying that kind of thing because Palestinian Jews existed (who today in their vast majority clearly identify as blue-passport Israeli, and no longer as Palestinian) is at best as ludicrous as the stupid claim that “Arabs cannot possibly be anti-Semitic as they are themselves Semites”. At worst the denial of the existence of Palestinians as a people is Putin style genocidal language.

I don’t know of any Jewish people genuinely identifying themselves with that people. When Golda Meir was saying she is a Palestinian she was not identifying the Arabs, Muslims and Christians as her compatriots, she was doing it to deny them peoplehood. And again, no, the existence of the Mizrahim, the Arab Jews does not imply that the term Arab does not today have a specific meaning in the Israeli-Palestinian context. When Israeli fascists chant “death to Arabs” the don’t mean the Mizrahim…

On the other hand I know plenty Muslims, Christians and atheists who do identify as Palestinian. The Israeli state does the same thing giving these people green passports and prohibiting their descendants from entering.

I’m Greek. My country made a huge stupid stink about the Macedonians. The fact that historic Macedon was Greek does not mean that Macedonians as a people don’t exist. The fact that Macedonia the region contains Macedonian Greeks, Macedonian Albanians, Macedonian Bulgarians does not mean that the Macedonian people don’t exist. I’m an anti-nationalist from the Balkans, buddy, not some naive amerikanaki, ready to swallow national ideologies and mythologies with wide eyes.