• epicspongee [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I mean no, it’s not. The main anti-colonial group left in Gaza, which is massively popular, is an organization whose primary driving force is Islam. Religion is an incredibly important cultural force that is a key driving factor for Gazans and other Palestinian people in this fight. That is a materialist analysis of the situation lol because that is what the Palestinians themselves are saying. Just look at the wording used by the people there: the dead aren’t the dead but ‘martyrs’, and this isn’t just a conflict but a ‘jihad’ (righteous fight).

    Hakim is very correctly noting the obvious here in that a vast majority of the Palestinians are Muslim and that their faith is a primary driver of this conflict for them. Painting in broad strokes isn’t denying that there aren’t any secular Palestinians, but talking about how Palestinians are fighting back and resisting in aggregate / at a zoomed out level.

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Yeah, and what happened to the secular forces, I wonder? Did they just lack the stick-to-it-ness powers granted by religion, or were they actively trampled by forces that wanted the conflict in the region to have an ethnoreligious character?

    • bestagoner [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      an organization whose primary driving force is Islam

      What Islam? A collection of beliefs? A set of believers?

      The defining contention of materialism is that ideas are not the primary driver of history. Hakim’s post says, without qualification, that Islam is the driving force of the resistance.

      The backflips folks are doing in this thread (including obliterating the very distinction between the ideal and the material, which is revisionism) to reconcile these two blindingly obvious, incompatible things are incredible.

      That is a materialist analysis of the situation lol because that is what the Palestinians themselves are saying

      Self-report (unadorned by any commentary or context, even) is ‘material analysis’ now? What?

    • Tommasi [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Saying that the primary driving force behind Hamas is Islam is literally the exact opposite of material analysis.

      Colonized people will resist their occupiers regardless of beliefs. The point isn’t that religion isn’t important to the people of Palestine, or that they can’t or shouldn’t find purpose or comfort in it. We should still not pretend that it’s the specific ideas they believe in that compels them to resist their occupiers.