Former President Barack Obama said a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only possible if people acknowledge the “complexity” of the situation.
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And … that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
The former president’s comments come as the Israeli military focuses its offensive against Hamas in Gaza City and northern parts of the enclave.
There are complex issues to solve, sure, but there’s nothing complicated about the fact that we need to let humanitarian aid in and stop killing children, right this fucking minute. There are no excuses for what is happening right now.
I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated.
History is always complicated
Present events are always complicated
But the way this is reported in the western media is as though one needs a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights including the right that we treasure most the franchise the right to vote and then declaring that state a democracy
is actually not that hard to understand.
It’s actually pretty easy if you stop requiring support for settler colonialism. The rest of the world left that behind 70 years ago. Israel doesn’t get to be special they can either give Palestinians voting rights (which would obliterate the idea of a Jewish state) or submit to a UN peacekeeping force between them and the Palestinians on the 1949 borders.
The only reason this is hard is because we keep bending over backwards to support their Apartheid. We know these answers. They’ve been done before.
“Genocide is bad and we should halt donated weapons to countries committing genocide” - very easy policy most people will agree on.
The problem is that no American has any credibility: historically fucking over poor and indigenous communities has been an average Tuesday for the US. There is no path out of this that makes anyone happy. Killing people is never okay and trying to justify it based upon “complexity” is insulting. Fuck religious zealots.
uh yeah. no. what people need to acknowledge is that israel shouldn’t be there and that dipshits shouldn’t use the bible to create nations. how the fuck did you think it would turn out. blood blood blood
More breaking news. Obama says breathing is good for your health.
Sadly, there is no way forward. The leaders of both sides want the complete elimination of the other.
So remove the leaders of both sides.
Unfortunately Hamas hasn’t held a single election since they were elected in 2006, and Netanyahu is looking similarly autocratic. The recent escalation is only going to make both sides more antagonistic.
In other words, this shit ain’t going away any time soon.
Exactly. I’ve been recently thinking that maybe Israel and Palestine become a new country run by the world. It becomes a neutral globally enforced and patrolled market or exchange. Almost like a U.N. country, but somehow better because the U.N seems like a fucking joke. I’m not sure exactly what I mean here, but essentially, the world removes the two and force them to be one.
Even though it is complex, there are obvious crimes, let alone war crimes happening there. Looking at you IDF with your repeated bombing of civilians and the wounded.
I think you’ve just created a tinderbox of like…well…biblical proportions.
Umm… it’s already burning.
Just saying.
Exactly, change the leader or change the leader
It’s a never-ending organic entity. You have to keep at it The problem with the insanity analogy is that it takes a billion times to do something sometimes before even beginning to see the start of a change.
Seriously, you Americans had one great president. He also seems plenty young (when compared to other presidents) enough to be one again. Can’t you elect him again or something? He needs more time as boss to do his thing.
Reddit probably rotted my brain, but I’m struggling to determine how this is anything but “everyone sucks here.” On this matter, I don’t think anyone has been truly in the right in a century. Can anyone provide a convincing argument otherwise?
The victims. They are in the right. But they have no voice. Ironically though, as toxic as social media is, governments can’t get by with the same shit that they did 50 years ago (Sauce: US in Central America).
I think he’s trying to get around the black and white viewpoints, and bring up the idea that Israel is committing war crimes here, which is outside the Overton window on the subject currently in US politics.
What’s the complexity?
If Israelis stop killing Palestinians, then American military contractors can’t take billions of dollars from the federal government laundered through Israel in the form of arms deals.
That would make the military industrial complex very sad.
That complexity.
You think that’s all there is to it, really? Or are you just being trite?
I think there is more to it, but if it weren’t for US military industrial complex corruption, a genocide wouldn’t be occurring.
For context, in 2023, the US has sent aid to Israel that equals roughly half their total GDP.
If The Party weren’t using Israel to enrich American war contractor billionaires, what is occurring in Gaza would be little more than a squabble. Both sides would be too broke to do anything of note.
The Party wants to keep their billionaire overlords happy, so genocide is occurring.
That is not only one-sided, but highly reductive of one of the most byzantine and politically convoluted conflicts happening in the world today.
Hey, I just want to stop an active genocide.
Then we can wax philosophical about how complex this conflict is.
Fuck me, right?
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Probably one of the most complex issues that I don’t see being brought up is Gaza’s culture built around Sharia law.
Yeah, there are plenty of innocent people are children suffering. This still doesn’t mean that if Gazans had there way, Israel would be a better place.
That said, the US should end all aid to Israel and let them fund their own genocide. They can afford it. They have a fucking intel fab for fuck’s sake.
Do you have any understanding of the Palestinian history? Isreal funded religious extremism in order to opposed the leftist secularist political organizing within Gaza.
Do you have any understanding of the Palestinian history?
why would they? it’s not like the west has painted muslims and the middle east people as the bad guy for decadessss. From media to hollywood, middle east is a lawless hellhole and they had no hand it making it that way. like at all…
most of them probably can’t even find them in a map, but once they see a middle eastern anywhere, they know they have to instantly hate on them.
If he is talking about the complexity of the human, tribal brain, I agree.
