I can't speak for everyone on the pro-Palestinian side, but from my perspective I do think Hamas's attack was wrong, taking hostages is wrong, and taking money meant for the development of Palestine and using it for war instead is wrong. But they are already a designated terrorist organization, and as far as I know Canada and the US are not selling them weapons or investing in their companies or providing them with funding.
The protesters on campus know that they aren't directly going to convince Israel to stop bombing children and civilians in Gaza, but the pressure is on universities to stop investing in the Israeli war machine and for the US to stop blocking UN resolutions for ceasefires and providing financial and diplomatic support that allows Israel to act with impunity.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels like this conflict was out of sight out of mind for a long time because it didn't impact me directly, but the scale of Israel's retaliation and the number of children and innocents killed, the blocking of aid, the destruction of land, the displacement of civilians has all added up and I don't feel like I can turn a blind eye anymore. I don't want my tax dollars to support the destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people. I get that Israel feels threatened by Hamas, but it doesn't mean they get to attack innocent people and destroy land and property that doesn't belong to them and block any attempt at independence and self-governance in the name of self-defense.
Yep. This is pretty much where I'm at. Fuck Hamas, they are a terrible terrorist organization. But it has been about 35,000 or so mostly women and children killed in Palestine with at least 70,000 injured in reckless and careless attacks by an IDF whose leaders have repeatedly used dehumanizing language when talking about the Palestinian people. If not outright genocide, there are certainly war crimes being committed by Israel and I don't want tax dollars going to help them keep at it.
Given that this war is being fought in a densely populated urban area against an organization that has explicitly embraced using human shields, schools, hospitals, and mosques as military installations (in and of itself a war crime) the level of civilian casualties is relatively low to average compared to other wars.
In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Levy described as “unprecedented killing” for Israeli forces in Gaza. The ratio is significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world from the second world war to the 1990s, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead, according to Levy.
“The broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it,” Levy concluded. “The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand.”
The study confirms an investigation 10 days ago by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, which found Israel was deliberately targeting residential blocks to cause mass civilian casualties in the hope people would turn on their Hamas rulers. The figures will make uneasy reading for the Biden administration, which is facing global criticism and isolation for vetoing a UN security council vote for a ceasefire on Friday.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/09/civilian-toll-israeli-airstrikes-gaza-unprecedented-killing-studyEven using the numbers coming directly from Israel's PR team (saying that they kill about two civilians for every combatant -
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-military-civilian-ratio-killed-intl-hnk/index.html) it doesn't appear that facts really back up your comments here.
Of course, that number of casualties is straight from Hamas and is completely made up as they will claim every fighter killed was an innocent civilian and their counts of women and children is not internally consistent (that happens when you're making up numbers every day).
I would prefer unbiased reports from journalists in the area for an impartial accounting of what's going on. Unfortunately, until the Israeli blockade on information from Gaza is lifted we have to use numbers coming from Gaza's hospitals and doctors. Again, studies seem to indicate that this appears to be a reasonably reliable way to go about getting this information as evidenced by the Lancet's published paper "No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health" -
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)02713-7/fulltext.
Contrast this with Russia shelling apartment blocks in Ukrainian cities with no military targets around for miles - just for the sheer terror effect.
It's just not credible at this point to argue that Israel isn't attempting to punish the Palestinian people with their actions. Israel is currently starving the entire civilian Palestinian population in Gaza (
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/09/gaza-israels-imposed-starvation-deadly-children). They have refused to allow enough aid trucks to get through, and have deliberately bombed aid workers who working closely with the IDF. This is a clear war crime, no different from the Russian shelling of civilian apartment blocks. Is hasn't been denied by Israel - in fact the Israeli minister of defense bragged about how that was the plan from the very beginning while dehumanizing Palestinians:
“We are imposing a complete siege. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Israel's stated plan from their minister of defense was to commit war crimes by preventing civilians from getting food and water. This happened before they even started attacking Hamas in Gaza, and they have carried it through as faithfully as possible despite international condemnation.
When Hamas locates a machine gun bunker in a school or a weapons cache in a mosque or a headquarters on the 4th floor of a 6-story building it's nearly impossible to strike those military targets without civilian casualties.
The aerial bombardment that Israel did at the beginning of the war wasn't striking machine gun bunkers or weapons caches. It was reckless dumb bomb targeting of low ranking people in Hamas in densely populated areas. This is (of course) keeping in line with Netanyahu's comments about the IDF in this war:
"They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world. You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember."
So what exactly is the leader of Israel reminding the Israeli military of here?
2 This is what the LORD Almighty says: `I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.
3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'
Yikes. Certainly in line with what we've seen of the IDF's actions though.
