Ivo Welch

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Nov 2023: Israel and Gaza: There are many arguable points: ceasefire now or not, use of force, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, short-term and long-term consequences, freedom of speach and hate speech (incl in the US), Apartheid (esp in the Westbank), antisemitism, Islamophobia, settler terror, polarization, right-wing extremist governments, propaganda, the treatment of hospitals, humanitarian aid, one-state and two-state solutions, freedom of dissent, dissidents in the Middle East, LGBTQ+ and women's rights, religious tolerance (and non-Islam survivability) in the Middle East, secularism, viable potential futures, etc.

However, I have no common ground with those who cannot agree to the following two unnegotiable points:

• Hamas is a terror organization and no context could ever excuse their execution-style muders and terror. They are irredeemable evil. Full stop.
• A Palestinian life is as worthy as an Israeli life. There are thousands of Palestinian victims, killed as innocent bystanders, mostly by the IDF, every day. Every single such civilian death is a tragedy. If any of them are not collateral unintended consequences but deliberate targeted killings for the sake of killing a non-combatant Palestinian civilian (by any IDF soldier), the perpetrator should be prosecuted for murder. Even a thousand Israeli civilian murder victims could never justify the deliberate murder of even one innocent Palestinian. Full stop.

If the roles were reversed, and Israelis were the ones in the Gaza strip who had murdered 1,200 Palestinians, and Palestinians were ruling in the rest of Israel and their army had killed 5,000+ innocent bystanders, my views would be exactly the same. (There is also no evidence that Israel has been conducting Genocide [a specific war crime]. On the contrary. Stating otherwise is ignorant or hateful.)