This is the middle east, so of course it’s even more complicated than that. I’ll try to give a very compressed answer here, it’s missing a lot of nuance.

First, I’m a humanist, I want no one person to die or suffer. This is not a Utopia so I’d like to have Hamas’ operatives stripped of a few freedoms, i.e. put in jail, for their crimes, However I don’t think their subjects (That’s civilians in dictatorship-speak) should suffer for their wrongdoings.

Once in a while I answer some random person online and it ends up so long it’s worth making a whole post about. This is in response to a Bernie Sanders fanboy that was devastated with his stance on the ceasefire question. Bernie in Jewish, has visited Israel a few times but as far as I gathered, he is not identifying as a Zionist. However he IS a humanist, and therefore his many fans (I suppose mostly self proclaimed young gen Z self-proclaimed socialists) are appalled by his support for the IDF to continue ploughing into Gaza and snuffing out all Ḥamas combatants. The guy actually said Bernie “made him cry” in the replies to this post by Norman Finkelstein, a holocaust survivors’ son who criticizes Israel’s claim for territories. Here’s my answer more or less: