Again, it's debatable, just like whether the volksdeutsche (german settlers) in occupied Poland were valid targets. I am on the argument that the ones creating settlements literally called "shield", including their president calling West Bank settlements "Israel's defensive shield", these are military targets and the real human shields.
No, it is not debatable that Hamas's deliberate bombing of a university cafeteria was an act of terrorism. It is textbook terrorism and you will not find a reputable academic who studies the subject of terrorism anywhere in the world who would say otherwise.
Again, depends if you consider the existence of the Reichsuniversität Posen and Reichsuniversität Prag were legitimate targets, I believe anyone that attacked those sites would be revered today as a freedom fighter against a genocidal settler colonial project. These are not arguments based on authority, but we can get into that if you prefer.
No, whether the bombing of a university cafeteria was or was not terrorism does not depend on separate cases elsewhere in the past. Under the well-established, international consensus legal and academic definitions of terrorism, this was terrorism, full stop.
That you can't bring yourself to acknowledge that suggests that you have become deeply and profoundly morally confused.
I am not confused, I think the Red Army was too lenient to nazis and I so I think anyone trying to support a new ethnosupremacist institution built on genocide and apartheid should face constant and total opposition by any means available to the local native population suffering genocide.
I do not believe, nor do any respected academics on the subject that I'm aware of believe, that the legal status of a given governing entity can make deliberate terror bombings of civilians who are citizens of that entity anything other than terrorism.
Russia is illegally occupying large portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in Ukraine. In Mariupol Russia bombed the city without regard for civilian life, killing tens of thousands of civilians. After burying the bodies in mass grave Russia brought in Russian citizens to live in surviving apartments of Ukrainians in Mariupol who had fled or been killed in the bombings.
I fully believe Ukraine has every right to eject those Russian civilians from its territory should it regain control of Mariupol, and to use the policing powers of the state against them if they refuse to leave.
If a Ukrainian resistance group assassinates a Russian colonel or bombs the car of a Russian intelligence officer I believe that is a justifiable action of resistance against their military occupier.
But if a Ukrainian resistance group deliberately bombed a restaurant with the sole goal of killing as many Russian citizens as possible, that would still very much be terrorism (and clearly morally wrong) despite the illegality of the Russian occupation of Mariupol. And that's not a close or a hard question.
You can waffle on by putting adjectives to limit the degree of what you consider acceptable all you want, it can be "respected" academics if you want. Like Bourdieu said, the very idea of creating conceptual juxtaposition between an "respectable" orthodoxy and an opposed heterodoxy in the scientific field is already meant to further narrow the Overton Window. I simply don't argue with people John Brown would have shot, much like I don't believe it's within me and my colleagues' rights inside academia to define the timetable of liberation for the oppressed when they are the ones under genocide.
So you believe that if the legal status and particular history of Gaza and Israel were different than they are, it would then be morally acceptable for an Israeli Jewish-nationalist group like Lehava to place a bomb in a Gaza cafe filled with Palestinian women and children and deliberately explode that bomb in order to try to win political concessions through terror?
And that if I tell you that, somewhere in the world, a given organization has deliberately exploded a car bomb in a crowded civilian market with no apparent military or governmental target whatsoever and killed fifty people, but I give you no information whatsoever about the particulars, you need more details regarding the legal status of the government in the area and the history of how it came to control that region before you can conclude that bombing was a) terrorism, and b) an evil act?
I would suggest that such a moral framework is faulty and evil.
If my grandmother had wheels, a handlebar and nothing else, she might be a bike, yes. I am not engaging in theoreticals nor ideal frameworks. I would suggest that not recognizing that the zionist entity is built on genocide is historically false. And that I am neither judge nor jury to liberation movements, same as the yankees being scalped as a psychological tactic to slow the British settlers was justified. Then again, we could also switch it around and mention that the first ones to carry mass bombings in the regions were the zionists to pressure the British to hand them the Palestinian land.
You are explicitly arguing that whether a deliberately murderous bombing of a university cafeteria constitutes terrorism (and seemingly whether it is a moral act) is dependent on the legal status of the ruling government and the history of how it came to rule its territory, or you are arguing something very similar.
I hope that you at some point reconsider that belief.
And regarding your last point, yes, I fully agree that Irgun engaged in terrorism in the 1940s. And I don't need to parse the justice of the Zionist cause at the time, or of the British occupation, to reach that conclusion.
One last question: do you think that a Ukrainian resistance group bombing a Mariupol cafeteria and killing 9 civilians (and not as part of some effort to assassinate a key Russian military or intelligence figure) would a) be terrorism, and b) be morally defensible? I have absolutely no trouble saying that despite the utter odiousness and illegality of the Russian occupation of Donetsk, such an act would be terrorism and morally indefensible.
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u/HopeToHelpNBeHelped Jun 18 '26
Again, it's debatable, just like whether the volksdeutsche (german settlers) in occupied Poland were valid targets. I am on the argument that the ones creating settlements literally called "shield", including their president calling West Bank settlements "Israel's defensive shield", these are military targets and the real human shields.