Very odd how a lot of the characterization of the Palestinian fighters as marauding terrorists seems very rooted in a scolding idea that there's such thing as a clean war. One where civilians don't end up being shot by overzealous combatants, or where somebody goes overboard with the power of a gun in their hands stacked against the stress and urgency of being in an active zone of combat. I absolutely think, as inevitably happens in any urban battlefield, even in the most justifiable of wars, some Palestinian fighters shot people they shouldn't have. That is an entirely inevitable aspect of war, because war is conducted by people who get stressed, make mistakes, get tired, get scared, feel the need to intimidate to keep themselves alive. Others, still, see an opportunity and go ballistic. It's fucking war. Conducting warfare is making a series of those decisions in a space lacking the luxury of slowing down enough to act more on deliberate thought than impulse. It strips human beings down to their worst qualities. That, fundamentally, is war. What I find really odd about it is how it's being characterized as an exceptionally brutal and barbaric action, these individuals with guns shooting and killing other individuals, like it violates some sanctity of warfare, as if the act of war isn't purely nihilistic. The way that juxtaposes the "collateral" damage from Israeli airstrikes is something that stands out to me. The general westoid narrative is that those strikes are a measured response to the known presence of Hamas assets. That Hamas are cowards for using civilians as shields, and the civilian death toll is, ostensibly, a bad thing; Shame on them. There's something to be said about how civilians being shot with guns are a sort of unsophisticated, brutal barbarism, while entire families dying when 5000lbs of bombs get dropped on an apartment complex is only a sort of... impolite inconvenience. I think a lot of it has to do with the perceived sophistication of the avenue of violence; GPS-guided iron-bombs being dropped from 63-million-dollar multirole fighter aircraft, something dignified and professional, versus a bullet from god-knows-when from an AK from god-knows-where. As though the collateral damage of dropping JDAMs into a populated area is just an untamable force of nature, which is ostensibly regrettable to unleash, but not enough, because it's far more polite this way.
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