Freed Israeli hostages erupted in anger during a tense meeting on Tuesday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that they were terrified they would be killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza instead of their Hamas captors.
“We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you,” the woman from the southern Israeli village of Nir Oz near the Gaza border said
Either you believe that killing can be justified in a non-zero set of circumstances, or that it can never be justified.
The vast majority of people fall into the first camp, and most in the second camp will change their minds when a gun is pointed at them.
You seem to be ignoring the existence of objective reality and responding to the strawman of literally everything just being subjective vibes, which isn’t worth the time it’d take to respond further.
so you present a false dichotomy of accepting the most depraved realpolitik understanding of the world or radical self-destructive pacifism
This isn’t about “objective reality” though, it’s about subjective thought. You present a case that justifies killing that has no bearing on the situation. Israel is not under existential threat from Hamas, no matter what rhetoric they spawn. They’re not fighting for life, for existence. They’re killing to control. To have ultimate say of everything in what they perceive as their domain. That’s not self-defense, that’s aggression, pure and simple.
You can justify self-defense when your life is truly in danger, but that wasn’t the case. The case was that they found an excuse to kill people to justify their own authority. To blame someone else for all the evils of the world, and take no blame themselves. They killed for the glory, for the power, for the control. Not for defense. That’s a cheap excuse to shield from objective reality.