Most of us don’t like violence, believe me, we’d love it if the settlers stopped the genocide, returned the stolen homes, paid reparations and helped rebuild the place, etc. The problem is that Israel is incapable and unwilling of any of this, they keep stealing homes to this day and they won’t stop until they have all the land or until the international community makes them stop.

Hamas is a national liberation movement. If Palestinians were treated as people it’d have never gotten this bad, but it’s the logical reaction when you dehumanize people, dismantle their less extreme organizations and keep killing children. Have you never seen that? They kill the children. Of course people will grab guns and try to protect their community. I know a guy (not close to him) who lost about thirty relatives just months after October 7, imagine losing branches of your family tree because they decided to conduct an extermination campaign against you for being part of an ethnic group.

This situation isn’t complicated at all. There are people who we’ve been taught to see as non-human, who are being genocided as we speak. They’re not any less human than you or me. And no matter how misleading the media is in their framing, Palestinians deserve their freedom, their children deserve to be alive long enough to grow and build their own lives, all of them deserve peace and respect, bodily autonomy and sovereignty. And the solution to violence is never genocide.