• You don’t lash out against oppression by massacring, raping and abducting civilians. Hamas are not resistance fighters. They deliberately attacked small, peaceful communities that were far-left and extremely pro-Palestine, the very opposite of the current Israeli government and its policies. One of the most well-known Israeli pro-Palestinian advocates was among the victims:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Silver

    Read the article. She was the kind of exemplary human being that is instrumental in bringing Palestinians and Israelis together. Her death alone was a terrible blow to the peace process.

    This is not a coincidence - Hamas targeted these communities in order to make peaceful coexistence unpopular in Israel, push voters to the right, because they know this would result in more heavy-handed reactions by the Israeli state. One of their many miscalculations was just how destructive to their organization this response would be.

    Hamas relationship with the Israeli government in general is far more complicated than how you are trying to describe it. For starters, this off-shoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood began as a less militant religious alternative to the far more dangerous secular PLO, which is why there was initial clandestine Israeli support for them. The far more recent influx of Qatari cash that Israel signed off on happened after significant international pressure against Israel - and Netanyahu sold it to his power base as some kind of “divide and conquer” strategy after the fact. In reality, the Israeli government was under the delusion that Hamas were growing fat and lazy in power, that the billions in misappropriated aid money enabling a luxury lifestyle for the leadership would make this leadership less militant and thereby pacify Gaza. This was a foolish miscalculation.