A pro-Palestinian protest action briefly blocked all traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Wednesday morning.
Starting at about 7:45 a.m. Protesters stopped cars and stretched banners across the roadway denouncing Israel’s bombing of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and demanding that the U.S. stop arming Israel.
Northbound and southbound traffic on the bridge was at a standstill as of 8 a.m.
This is the problem with the Palestinian movement. I’d support their movement whole-heartedly if it was a non-violent resistance movement.
But it isn’t.
It’s a movement that’s dominated by people that either support or look the other way about a part of their movement going into villages and massacring people. That’s not a movement a lot of people are going to support. It’s only something that can be supported by psychopaths or people too emotional to think things through because of the things that are being spammed on their social media feeds.
I don’t even think the Palestinian movement would have to be non-violent to get massive support from the world at large. All Hamas needed to do was not go after soft civilian targets, like the October 7th attack.
I think they would have much more support if they kept their military focused on the IDF and Israeli government, not Israeli civilians.
If Israel has shown us anything, Hamas could still get away with killing civilians, as long as they were collateral in an attack on the IDF and Israeli military. They lose people’s support by focusing on terrorizing non-combatants.
None of this is to say that the IDF or Israeli government are the righteous ones in this war. They have done disgusting things to the Palestinians, themselves. Both regimes are terrible in their own ways, and they kind of deserve each other. I just feel terrible for all of the innocent Palestinians and Israelis caught up in this mess.
If they had used the tens of billions of dollars that the world has donated them for building up their societies between 1990s and today instead of endlessly preparing to destroy Israel, that would have helped a lot. It would helped with everything.
Unfortunately, it seems that just pouring money into a society doesn’t help build human capital.
The money donated to Palestine was mostly used to save people from the many crisises and famines that the Palestinians have endured. A lot of it went to rebuilding the education system, providing health care, and social services in a war torn, open air prison. Sure, some bit of it went to building missiles and weapons, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t tried to “build up” Palestine.
This situation is a bit too complicated to solve by just throwing money at it, anyways. Even if Hamas didn’t spend one penny of Palestinian aid on weapons, they would still be in a pretty similar situation.