u/ADP_God

I will start by saying that this discussion refers to the question of justification and 'right'. It doesn't undermine the individual human rights of either Jews or Arabs to stay where they are. Peace cannot be built on a basis of enforcing one side's truth on the other. With that said...

The majority of the debate today revolves around a discussion of who is justified in taking what action. There is an active and ongoing effort to demonize Jews and paint Arabs as oppressed resistance fighters who only ever respond, but never act. A major tool used to this end, and the purpose of this discussion, is the misrepresentation of the chronology of the conflict and a selective application of laws/reasons across time.

Put simply, the calls of 'this didn't start on October 7th' are disingenous and part of a broader campaign to conceal the reality of the situation and to skew the discussion one way. They function to paint the conflict as inevitable and damage the potential for coexistance.

It's clear to all that Hamas' invasion of Israel on October 7th was unjustified from the perspective of both Jus ad Bellum (Right cause) and Jus in Bello (right action).

Commentators presenting Hamas' actions as resistance to oppression ignore that Hamas' goals for the invasion were self admittedly genocidal. While resistance to oppression is a legitimate cause for war, Hamas' goals were not directed at achieving freedom for Gaza but at the destruction of the Jewish state entirely.

As for their conduct, Hamas made no distinction between civilian and military targets, failing to meet the required condiiton of distinciton in war necessitated by Jus in Bello requirements.

To properly address the 'didn't start on...' claims however we need to put the facts aside. The implication of such a statement is that Israeli aggression justified the massacres. Specifically, the 'aggression' referred to is the blockade around Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. Again, putting aside the fact that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, the question becomes whether Israel's actions can be considered self defence or 'aggression', which means unjustified military action.

In order for the war to have started before October seventh the Gaza blockade and the Occupaiton of the West Bank would have to have been unjustified. However examining the true chronology shows that Gaza rocket attacks on Israel began in 2001 undermining the assertion that the Israeli blockade, in place since 2006, was an act of aggression. Instead it represents a legitimate use of force to limit the Gazan's ability to threatedn Israel.

But what about the occupation? Under international law an occupation is legal in response to a legitimate threat (there are further provisions that Israel has not met, but that is for a seperate discussion). If we could show that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (prior to the Gazan withdrawal) was unprompted, then we could definitely claim that Israel had instigated the conflict, ant that it really didn't start on October 7th. This however, is not the case. The six day war broke out in 1967 after Israel asserted that closure of the Straights of Tiran to Israeli ships would be an act of war considered a definite Cassus Beli. Nasser proceeded to take exactly this action and mobilized Egyptian troops along the border. It's important to note here that while some consider this war to have been begun by Israel, this intepretation is neither hsitorically accurate, nor entirely relevant for two reasons. The first is the generally accepted contemporary conclusion that Egyptian actions constituted an act of war: Lyndon B. Johnson is quoted as saying 'If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations.' But the second is that even if the war had been started by Israel, there was no reason for Jordan or Syria to interfere. While the Gaza strip had been occupied by Egypt up till that point, the involvement of Jordan and Syria was unecesary and represented aggression that led to Israel taking the West Bank and the Golan heights. As we said before, occupation is a legitimate response to a real threat, and both Jordan and Syria proved that they were willing to attack Israel from the territory that was later occupied.

It's clear then that Israeli occupation was a response to Arab aggression. This implies that if we want to treat the occupation as cause of the October 7th attack, we have to acknowledge that the occupation was again the result of Arab instigated conflict. But perhaps we want to roll it back even further? If we can show that, as most Arabs claim, the mere existence of Israel is an act of aggression then we can justify the 1967 attacks. Unfortunately we enocunter the same problem here again. The Israeli war of Independence, what the Arabs call the 'Nakba' (Meaning tragedy, as is understandable, as they lost) was instigated following Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. There is no question that the Arabs instigated the fighting, having rejected the proposed partition plan (that required no Jew or Arab to move), and so, once again, we can see that the conflict originates with Arab aggression. Some would argue that the war started earlier, with the civil war in mandatory Palestine, but here again we can identify the origins of the violence as directed at Jews, by Arabs, who believed they had the right to the entire land.

The Arab perspective sees Jews as foreign to the region, and with no claim on the land. If this is true, then it would make the assertion of partition unjust, and legitimize the 1948 war of aggression against the newly founded Israeli state. This is built on the premise that the British had no mandate to rule in the region, and that their claim was illegitimate. The British won the land from the Ottomans in war, representing a transition of power from one empire to another. Claims that their control was illegitimate would appear to rest on UN resolution 242, outlining the illegitimacy of claims to land won in war. Ignoring that one cannot apply legal rulings inretrospect (and that Hamas is trying to take the land using violence today), what is odd about this claim, is that the Arabs themselves took the land in war a few hundred years earlier. They admit to being an imperial force, and included the Jerusalem and the land around it in their Caliphate. If it was legitimate for them to take the land in this way, it is legitimate to take the land from them in this way. Indeed, there was little opposition to the Ottoman rulers that came next. So we have two ways to interpret this. Either one can win land in war, which the Jews did in 1948, or we cannot, and it was never legitimate for the Arabs to have taken the land in the first place.

So when did this begin? On October 7th, when Hamas tried to take the country by force? Or in 1967, when Israel was attacked and occupied the territory to prevent further threats? Or in 1948, when the Arabs declined to respect the Briths decision to partition the land in an attempt to actualise the right to self determination for both groups? Or in the 600s, when the Islamic Caliphate took the land by force? Ultimately, Arab violence in the region against Jews long predates the creation of the state of Israel. Claims that the current war didn't begin on October 7th deny the reality that there are legitimate alternatives to violent conflict, and that actions, like the Hamas invasion, distance both sides from eventual coexistance.

The problem with trying to frame the October 7th invasion, or any of the other wars they instiated, as a response to Jewish violence, is that it robs the Arabs of agency at every step. It presumes that they were never responsible for their actions. It doesn't allign with the Arab internal narrative that sees their war as a legitimate continuation of the necessary Jihad to spread Islam across the world (that we're seeing play out in Mali at the moment). And it functions to rob the Arabs of their ability to choose a different way, to accept that they are not the only group that deserves to self determine in the region, and that there are other approaches to voilence. If there is ever to be peace it has to start with a recognition that both sides are responsible for their actions. If this war didn't start on October 7th, then the conditions in Gaza shouldn't be meaningfully different today than they were at the beginnign of 2023. That is clearly false, and highlights the importance of recognizing that the Arabs make choices, and that those choices, and the resulting consequences, are theirs to own, and to remake if they choose to. With this acknowledged we can see that the October 7th invasion was in no way a just response to aggression, which is essential to ensuring that the Arabs are held accuntable for their actions, allowing them to choose differently in the future.