'Western officials in protest over Israel Gaza policy' - not sure of this is just something that has happened before but on a smaller scale, though it seens not. It feels odd that this is the one that has triggered it, as opposed to say the 2nd Iraq War.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68177357
As I and many others have observed before - the Hamas attack on 7th October did not take place in a vacuum. When political solutions seem impossible to people in Palestine because the policies of foreign governments are complicit in enabling the violent apartheid, racist, ethnic cleansing policies of an extreme nationalist Israeli government, there will be many oppressed people who will support violence to overthrow decades of that oppression against them. I'm surprised anyone is surprised that the recent Hamas terrorism happened. Israel's disproportionate response against unarmed Palestinian civilians, including a large proportion of children, will result in more support for terrorism against Israel / Zionists.
I am reminded of the moral dilemmas about the use of terrorism depicted in the recent film Oppenheimer - and they could apply to Hamas /the Palestinians as much as they could apply to Netanyahu's government/ the Israelis.
In the film, Oppenheimer views the atomic bomb he helped build as a terror weapon, as one of its main purposes was to terrify people rather than for tactical advantage (unless you consider terrifying people as a tactical advantage). When there were objections to using this level of indiscriminate bombing on the Japanese people, Oppenheimer's response is to say, “Look, we use this thing, and we’ll never have to use it again. Because it’s so horrible. This will be the end of the war. People will see how terrible these weapons are, and so they won’t use them again.”
Oppenheimer is shown as having pragmatic reasons to help build the bomb, because he knows the Nazis have an 18 month head-start on building their own bomb, and the Nazis are exterminating Jews (his people) in Europe. He decides that as terrible as the bomb is, it is necessary for the US to have it and use it first, before the Nazis acquire the capability of an Atomic bomb. Existentialist threats are used as a justification for abandoning moral qualms about indiscriminate bombing and killing of unarmed civilians, including women and children.
From the Palestinian perspective, the Palestinians have for decades been without a state and face a daily life of mass poverty, loss of homes, livelihoods and personal freedoms, subject to arbitrary IDF kidnappings in Gaza and the West Bank, held in Israeli prisons and denied personal autonomy. It doesn't surprise me that enduring this constant humiliation under Israeli military control feels to them like they face an existentialist threat to their ethnic identity, personal safety, freedom and dignity, and the response by some to this humiliation are acts of terrorism. Israel's feelings of facing an existentialist threat to their ethnic identity caused by the Nazi's Holocaust and the on-going opposition to an apartheid Jewish state that discriminates to favour Jews, are used to justify Israel's acts of terrorism and disproportionate violence , despite Israel having the superior military and economic advantage of billions of dollars of aid from the US and political support from the West over the decades.
Oppenheimer's friend, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Isidor Rabi, despite being a fellow Jew during the time of the Nazi persecution, refuses to help build an Atomic weapon as he says “The bombs fall on the just and the unjust alike,”
Israel's current strategy seems similar to Oppenheimer's terrorism argument for dropping the atomic bomb. Given the number of Palestinian civilians killed over the years due to Israel's disproportionate response to any threats, Israel is the bigger user of terrorism and Hamas terrorism seems small in comparison.
