A Boring Dystopia

I do think the situation is more complicated than Lemmy would have you believe.

Both Iran and Hamas have been geopolitical issues for a long time. And it's worth remembering that all of this was kicked off by a large scale terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas.

It's also worth noting that Iran is a Russian puppet, and Europe obviously has some "neighbor problems" with Russia at the moment, so there's a sort of baked in desire to oppose their vassal states.

And, while I think everyone would agree that the loss of civilian life is terrible, there is a huge amount of misinformation that makes it hard to be sure what's going on. Hamas does have a long history of screwing over the civilian Palestinian population to further it's political goals, and so people are willing to give Israel a little more credence than they deserve when they claim things like "Hamas was hiding in that hospital" or "we're blocking aid because Hamas is hoarding it all to drive up tensions" or "it was Hamas who shot those civilians," because it actually wouldn't be the first time any of that had credibly happened. Something of a boy-cried-wolf scenario.

Add into that genuine desire to combat real anti-Semitism that's been a fallout of this whole situation (a problem that hits pretty close to home in Europe due to events of the past century), and you can see why some people might be a bit over-eager to support Israel in this conflict.

It's worth noting there are no good guys here. Israel is obviously in the wrong, and are committing horrible atrocities. I think that much is plain on its face. But Hamas and Iran have both had "the destruction of the state of Israel" as stated policy goals for the past 80 years. The reason Israel has the Iron Dome is because they've been getting missiles lobbed at them non-stop for decades.

And when there are no good guys, people tend to just align themselves with who they like more, or who they owe more to.

Let's be honest: No country would act different from Israel when facing a situation as with Gaza. No country could tolerate an attack like Oct 7th on its territory, esp with everything that happened before with all the rocket and suicide attacks. Just think about how the Americans reacted to 9/11. They started bombing Afghanistan and Iraq even if both countries really didn't have much to do with 9/11. In this case it would be a scenario like "9/11 was done by a narco cartel in a small part of Mexico where central authority lost control" or something like that.

Combine it with the fact that all western states have no sympathies for islamist extremists like Hamas, because they are not muslim and also because most western states suffered from islamist attacks. Most states also see Hamas (an Hezbollah) as an Iranian proxy militia (which they are) and have also no sympathies to Iran, its theocratic dictatorship, its nuclear program and its military alliance with Russia.

The idea that the actions of world powers are in any way governed by morality is largely a myth. Politicians will try to twist reality and use morality to justify killing people abroad and sometimes morality does align with their interests by coincidence.

But the motivations are always about furthering financial and strategic interests. See the overthrow of the Iranian regime in 1953 to protect oil interests, CIA coups and supporting murderous dictators in countless South American and other countries around the world, the recent Iraq war etc. If a government gets elected somewhere that would threaten our business interests (by taxing or nationalising them for example), we have historically supported bloody coups to remove them and install murderous facist regimes that enable us to keep making money at the cost of countless innocent lives.

Strategic in the sense that we prevent other powers in a region from becoming strong enough to challenge us. Keeping ourselves on top and in charge by keeping others down. Israel is a valuable ally in this regard - they maintain power in the region by keeping others down and keep them focused more on destroying Israel than attacking us.

Palestinian lives aren't important to our governments. They have no real power and there's no real profit to be made from them. Our strategic interest in supporting Israel will always trump any humanitarian interest in preventing genocide.

Most western countries have committed genocide or invasion in very recent history. Either in the context of WWII, colonialism or economic interests. Countries don't magically change over night. Wouldn't it be more surprising if they didn't support their ally?

Big Israeli lobby. Bribes and Epstein blackmail.