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Iran funding Hamas is a fact. Israel's settlement expansion making a Palestinian state impossible is also a fact. Both things are true at the same time. Anyone who gives you a one-sentence answer to this question has already decided what they want to believe and is working backwards.
The US vetoed four ceasefire resolutions while publicly saying it wanted peace. The UK sent weapons while calling for restraint. You can't keep one side armed and shielded from consequences and then claim you're a neutral party. Responsibility doesn't stop at whoever fired last.
China and Russia have vetoed resolutions on Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar too. We don't say they're therefore responsible for those conflicts. The veto logic only ever gets applied when it's the US doing the vetoing.
Hamas launched October 7th. Iran funds and arms Hamas. That chain is not complicated. Defending yourself against a massacre is not the same as an occupation policy, and pretending these things are equivalent isn't nuance — it's just avoiding the obvious answer.
Nobody's saying self-defence is wrong. But what caused October 7th didn't start on October 7th. If your whole understanding of this conflict begins in 2023, you're not analysing it — you're just describing the part that confirms what you already believed.
If you go back far enough you can justify anything. Every conflict has prior causes. At some point you have to look at the actual people making actual decisions right now, not just the historical grievance that explains but doesn't excuse what happened.
The Gulf states signing the Abraham Accords basically gave up on the Palestinian issue in exchange for their own security deals with America. That removed the last moderate Arab pressure on Israel and gave Iran a gift — a reason to say the old Arab world sold out. Nobody talks about this but it's a big part of how we got here.
Whoever you think is responsible in this poll tells me more about which news you watch than about the actual conflict. Both populations are going through hell. Both governments have failed them. Anyone who's very confident about who the main villain is has a simpler version of this in their head than what's actually happening.
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