“A 2021 poll, conducted after a smaller Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, found a slim majority of Palestinians, 53 percent, believed Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.” This was a crisis-prompted lurch toward Hamas, pollster Khalil Shikaki told the Associated Press, likely to prove short-lived as Hamas failed to materially improve Palestinians’ lives. Still, that number is not a wild outlier. Another poll by Shikaki’s organization, conducted this past summer, found 52 percent Palestinian support for armed resistance to Israel.”
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“A Reutersreport published Thursday told the story of a 31-year-old Palestinian man named Ala al-Kafarneh. He fled his home “with his pregnant wife, his father, brothers, cousins, and in-laws,” first to a coastal refugee camp, then elsewhere, after Israeli airstrikes hit around the camp. “On Tuesday night, an airstrike hit the building where Kafarneh and his family were sheltering, killing all of them except him.”
Kafarneh’s position is unfathomable—a pregnant wife and unborn child, dead and recorded, nameless, in the list of family casualties. Would it surprise anyone if he turns to violence now?
That is not to say he would be justified in seeking a violent revenge. To say that is to take a step toward moral madness, toward a cycle of escalation and chaos, not justice, mercy, or any other good. But it is to say that violence, by its nature, tends to spread. Once loose, it overruns moral boundaries and bends our souls into grotesque shapes. We are each responsible for the violence we commit, each to blame for the wrong we do, each apt to respond to evil with evil. Blood is on the hands that shed it, but it tends to spill all over.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/16/blaming-hamas-shouldnt-mean-ignoring-the-palestinians-plight/