why I think they did OCT 7th and why I think they are Of The People spoiler
They sabotaged normalization because it would also guarantee the extermination of Palestine, because Israel would no longer need to balance the interests of its neighbors against its genocidal plans. Hamas’s plans had little to do with Iran, just like Hezbollah and the Houthis have little to do with Iran. Iran’s just a partner, not some kind of shadowy puppet master. 🙄
Portraying Hamas as an outside agitator is a propaganda trick to make Westerners think Hamas is an illegitimate guerilla movement, because as long as you believe that then you will not see them as the revolutionaries they really are. We see the exact same rhetoric deployed whenever people become violent. It’s never the community that burns down a police station , it’s “outside agitators”. Beyond being a rhetorical trick, making up a hard barrier between “Hamas” and “everyone else” is merely for our own moral convenience and comfort.
Hamas is of the community. Every member comes from the community and the community are the ones that support them. Every time Israel murders a mother’s children, they create another Hamas collaborator. Every time Israel murders a child’s entire family, they create another member of Hamas. This happens over and over until today where Hamas sees mass support among Palestinians, because they are the resistance and they are an expression of rage against the genocidal apartheid system. Hamas is violent because Israel is violent.
This is all irrelevant to my point. My point is that Hamas provides something like a model for community prepping, not that they’re good or righteous or whatever. Whether you are opposed to them or not, this is what it will look like in practice for a community to prep rather than individuals. I’m only saying that we can take lessons from Hamas, not replicate them!
You don’t have to support Hamas to realize that there are lessons we can take from their structure and preparations and tactics. The tunnels, the community stockpiles, the communal skill sharing, recruiting from and supporting the broader community, even the foreign alliances and their online presence: exactly what prepping in a community sense would look like.
An individual prepper can only prepare to flee to safety. Communal preppers have to prepare to become embedded like weeds.
There was a 100+ year period of relative peace and prosperity after the conquest of Constantinople, just like today where Western Europe has had a period of peace and prosperity after the defeat of Nazi Germany. The revolts began when the Ottoman Empire entered stagnation and decline because of warfare with Europe. It has nothing to do with ethnic and cultural conflicts, it’s all economic and political and it always has been. The ethnic and cultural dimensions of the conflicts are merely set dressing for deeper structural causes of war.
Now that we have entered our own period of stagnation and possible decline, be prepared to live in Interesting Times.