The US is complicit in the intentional starvation of gaza’s people by israel. At least 15 people have starved to death in the last 24 hours, including an infant.
For whatever reason, the Palestine/Israel conflict causes people to just stop being rational. Like, the facts are there, both parties attack each other as part of the conflict throughout history, but for whatever reason, people really want to pick sides on this one, and Im not sure why.
Its not the genocide aspect - there are other genocides that are happening (Myanmar for example) that don't cause this reaction. Don't think its anti antisemitism either, as you don't see a lot of narratives that come with traditional rhetoric of that type.
Whoever is pushing media out on this is must have figured something out in the format to make people this polarized.
Nobody has been able to explain to me how the Israel/Palestine issue is fundamentally different from the Serbia/Bosnia/Kosovo issue of the 1990s. Its weird the mental gymnastics people will go through to qualify any position in either of these events.
The major difference is Israel is one of the only modern states that cannot and will not extend citizenship and property rights to the majority of people under their control who existed there when the nation was founded because it would upend the ethnic makeup of the country. They will also not allow the creation of a state for those people, forcing them to be stateless.
None of that applies in Serbia / Bosnia / Kosovo, as far as I can tell. That is more like a separatist movement situation like what you see in Kurdistan, Kashmir, etc.
27% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, but Arabs. They have full citizenship, vote, hold office, etc.
Gaza is a competely separate country/territory. They have no connection to the modern Israeli state. If anything they should be asking for Egyptian or Jordanian citizenship since the majority have kin relationships and history from there.
If Gaza were a separate country then why would Israel restrict and regulate access to Gaza without an international embargo? For all practical considerations Gaza looks like a territory fully controlled by Israel. That begs the further question that if Gaza is controlled by Israel why is Israel so opposed to treating these people more equitably?
The reason this looks like some tribal/racial/dominance thing is because these questions and conditions apply almost equally to the West Bank. There is video evidence of multiple settler pogroms in the West Bank.
All of the rest of the world sees basically the same violent conclusions. The only people making excuses for it are some Israelis the rest of the world refers to as extremists.
> 27% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, but Arabs. They have full citizenship, vote, hold office, etc.
How does that have anything to do with the conflict? Could there ever be 51% of Israeli citizens who are non-Jewish Arabs? That tells you why Israel will not extend rights to the majority of subjects under it's territorial control.
> Gaza is a competely separate country/territory
It is not. Israel does not recognize it as such, and Israel controls all the borders, all the electricity, all the water, all the Internet and essentially all the external commerce of the region, it even controls the waters off shore of the region.
Egypt had only one elected head of state, who was anti-Israel, and he has since died in prison overthrown by an autocrat who sides with the US and Israel and does their bidding. Also, at this moment, Israel controls that border completely, and they have vetoed hostage deals that would require relinquishing that control.
But you of course didn't answer anything else I said, despite being wrong about the one thing you picked out of my response
Palestine is used as a proxy by Iran to essentially wage war on Israel, because or a lack of better term, they are still salty about a different religious group being on "their" land (and to be accurate, was technically taken from them, but it was because they were on the losing side of WW1)
But Iran cannot engage in war directly, as they would be seen as aggressors.
Israel on the other hand is forced into basically a lose/lose/lose situation. Its either suck it up and wait for Oct 7 part deux to happen, be genocided themselves if one state is implemented, or be seen as the bad guys in pushing further and further, hoping to take over enough land to make the former 2 not an issue.
I call bullshit. If you use your imagination hard enough then just maybe you could explain the military action in Gaza as warfare… but how does that extend to the West Bank? There is no warfare in the West Bank, but there are Israeli settlers murdering Palestinians without consequences while stealing land in illegal settlements.
> Israel is forced
Again, that’s bullshit. Nobody is forcing Israel to be an asshole to their neighbors. Israel was the victim in 1967, nearly 60 years. It’s not 1967 anymore. A universal rule of life is if you don’t want people to think of you as an asshole then start by not being an asshole, not with a bunch of excuses and sad equivocations.
I suspect Israel would try much harder to be less of a belligerent asshole if they were placed on a weapons embargo. Israel is often seen as the bad guy, because their actions make them the bad guy.
If Israel really didn’t want Iran to use the Palestinian people as a puppet they could solve the problem by not giving the Palestinian people cause to be puppets. For example, Iran would lose all political influence around Israel if Israel annexed the Palestinian people with rights, protections, and citizenship.
I really don’t think Israel wants this issue solved. I really think it’s about tribalism and conquest. That’s why I cannot see any difference between Israel/Palestine and Serbia/Bosnia/Kosovo. It’s all sociopathic tribalism with lots of military aggression against civilians while claiming to be victims.
Exactly what I mean about seeing things from one side.
>but how does that extend to the West Bank?
When your country history includes all of your surrounding neighbors going to war to try to exterminate you, and that sentiment hasn't changed, you are going to be probably very expansionist. Not that the west bank settlements are morally right and they certainly don't help the cause, but the actions are somewhat understandable.
>Again, that’s bullshit. Nobody is forcing Israel to be an asshole to their neighbors.
Oct 7th kinda is. Nothing really significant happened much other than minor land grabs in the West Bank and standard counter terrorism stuff with occasional rockets being launched by Hamas. Oct 7th highlighted the clear and present danger that still exists, where Hamas doesn't care about fighting a war and care more about killing non-muslims, civilians and military personnel alike.
> Israel is often seen as the bad guy, because their actions make them the bad guy.
Because most people who consume online media tend to only hear about the bad things Israel does. Goes back to the discussion about other genocides and how those are never talked. Like I said, the media narrative on this is insanely effective to make people polarized.
>Israel annexed the Palestinian people with rights, protections, and citizenship.
Try to be rational about this. The last thing they want is giving potential Hamas members or radical extremists free access to the country + citizenship. Majority of Palestinians are still pro Hamas.
>I really think it’s about tribalism and conquest.
Again, try to be rational. Is it tribalism, or do they just want a future where citizens don't have to worry about terrorist attacks or getting rocketed anymore? Its not like Israel never tried peaceful solutions - most all of them get shot down because Palestinians want "their" land back, or at the least in control of the majority of that region ("from the river to the sea") that puts Israel at a huge disadvantage and greater risks for attacks.
> Again, try to be rational. Is it tribalism, or do they just want a future where citizens don't have to worry about terrorist attacks or getting rocketed anymore?
That’s exactly what Milosevic argued to justify attacking his neighbors. We have to get them before they get us
I am being rational and cannot imagine any justification for the complete eradication of Gaza or the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
If this is, after all, only about safety and security then why isn’t Israel annexing those people into citizenship? Rationally speaking it would eliminate most of the domestic threat simultaneously legally qualify the West Bank settlements. Again, it really appears Israel would rather have tribalism than security.
It’s not difficult. I apparently guessed your sentiment accurately even though I was actually describing the first head of state to be convicted of war crimes for promoting genocide and ethnic cleansing.
But, let’s make this even less difficult. Is the goal here security or dominance? Security suggests reducing hostilities but dominance suggests removing a group of people from an area of land. I really don’t see any reduction of hostilities.
Illegal according to who? The concept of legal doesn’t apply to nation states. “Legal” presupposes an enforcement framework and process which simply doesn’t exist as it applies to sovereign countries.
But more to the point you can’t claim to be rational while using terms like “the complete eradication of Gaza”. The population in Gaza has grown since the war started.
Meanwhile in southern Syria the Druze are actually being exterminated by self-proclaimed jihadis (and Palestinian “refugees”) and the whole world is turning a blind eye while Israel desperately tries to prevent a larger catastrophe. Now the Syrian Druze are requesting to be annexed by Israel and to be under IDF protection. You don’t care about Palestinians, you just hate Jews.
Don't be disingenuous. Its far from "just a press release"; its the official position of the government of the United States. There are many other instances where different parts of the government call it illegal.
It is just a press release and regardless, what any country’s official position is, is irrelevant. Legality generally doesn’t apply to international relations as each state makes their own determination on what does and doesn’t apply to them.
For example the current US ambassador to Israel just announced that France will be partitioned into two states, one for France and one for Palestine, France isn’t bound by that.
I can use terms like complete eradication. What percentage of buildings in Gaza remain in safe enough conditions for people to live in? The entire strip looks like a flattened dust pile.
Yes, killing civilians is bad regardless of their identity. It seems like you are trying to shift ground to something unrelated because you have nothing of actual substance.
Now how is the conduct by Israel not tribal warfare on a nearly genocidal scale?
When someone is asked to stop being evil and their response is to deflect and then lie, we can conclude that they are gonna continue doing that evil thing.
Defending colonization and genocide is evil. You are defending both, while accusing others of heinous atrocities without any demonstrable evidence, qed.
One cannot colonize their own land. Arabs and Muslims are not indigenous to Judea and Samaria, they are colonizers who invaded and ethnically cleansed the area and then hilariously refer to it as a part of a different country (west bank of what?).
If that were true it would be a problem, since it’s just lies told by hamas that you are now repeating for some reason we don’t have to worry about it.
Here are your starving gazans: https://x.com/DocumentIsrael/status/1948045924099367359 they have fresh fruit that looks perfectly ripe… so interesting that no aid is getting in and yet somehow they’re holding fruit I sometimes have trouble finding in my supermarket here in the US…
Again, read that article lol, it doesn’t actually support the thing you’re saying. It has a claim by a soldier without any supporting proof. Same with the CNN article, there is literally zero video evidence supporting your claim in the most recorded war in history, ask yourself why that is? Why do we have video of hamas shooting their own people, video of basically every single missile landing, but this event that has apparently resulted in 500+ deaths has literally no video evidence. You would think if it was happening someone would be pointing cameras at the idf position and just watching, but somehow they’re never seem to have any evidence of it. All we have are drs making claims in hospitals… somehow the drs in field hospitals know where all their patients came from and exactly what happened to them, but no one else has any idea.
As always the question is for you: why do you hate Jews so much? Why do you want all the Jews to be killed?
Just so we’re clear I showed an actual video of Hamas with fresh fruit, the UN just shared a video of literal tons of aid they’re refusing to distribute. you shared a paywalled article quoting an anonymous source with zero verification.
You're just insulting people at this point. The OP did not say he hates Jews or want them to be killed. You should be banned by making disgusting accusations without any connection with reality.
There's overwhelming proof of intentional starvation in Gaza, by multiple different sources -- sources that don't agree with each other on pretty much anything else, by the way. Every major news outlet in the planet is reporting the same thing, but in your evil, twisted, human-hating logic, all of them are wrong and only the openly fascist government of Israel is right because they say so.
I never disagreed that some children aren’t getting food, my point always was that the UN and Hamas are responsible for this problem, the IDF in partnership with GHF are the only organizations facilitating alleviating the suffering.
The UN has literal tons of food that they’re refusing to distribute. Hamas clearly has access to fresh fruit as recently as 2 days ago and yet they refuse to share any of it with their constituents. Egypt is refusing to allow anyone to leave Gaza as a refugee. When Israel and Trump proposed resettling the refugees temporarily until the war ended they were accused by you, the UN, and every single “humanitarian” org of ethnic cleansing.
Israel is not responsible for a problem they didn’t create, don’t want and are trying very hard to prevent and end. The only people responsible for this are the ones refusing to solve it unless it allows for a genocide of Jews.
The OP and you are both determined to only consider solutions that allow for further Arab colonization and may result in the death of millions of Jews. This is why I accuse you of genocide.
I will also add, Israel is not responsible for the health and welfare of even a single Gazan citizen, that responsibility falls on Hamas, so literally anything Israel does to help the gazan citizenry is already going above and beyond. If you have a problem with the welfare of Hamas’s constituents, take it up with them. Tell them to unconditionally surrender and return the kidnapped hostages. Instead of agitating for the wholesale slaughter of Jews.
Political propaganda is a amazingly powerful thing. This bullshit above is simply a brainless regurgitation of the 70s Golda Meir quote:
"Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us."
That's all there is to it - pure propaganda. No data, no evidence, no science, just pure, unadulterated propaganda from half a century ago, still very much alive and kicking.
If gazans want the war to end all they have to do is return the people they so gleefully kidnapped and continue to torture and hold hostage. Instead they point fingers and depend on brainwashed westerners without any knowledge of the conflict or history to get them out of the mess they themselves created.
I wasn’t directly referencing that but it’s literally the strongest proof, data, evidence science that she was 10000% right. Stop defending monsters because you literally have no clue what you’re talking about.
Hamas shared the videos… not sure what else you’d call it when a violent mob made up of both young and old people jostles and jeers and attacks innocent civilians and then throws rocks and chases their car. This don’t happen just once, it was a crowd of 1000s every time.
I didn't mention capitalism? I mentioned it is one of the only genocides where attempts to sanction and hold the perpetrators to account are failing on a global level. Myanmar, on the other hand, is under heavy international sanctions.
You're talking about the most documented genocide in human history. The whole world is watching; Israel's crimes against humanity will never be forgotten.
He knows exactly what he is doing. That’s what makes this disgusting. He knows that 50.000 women and children dead is most likely a lower bound as there are likely hundred thousand plus buried under the rubble.
He also knows that his government is starving a million people to try to eliminate the 10.000 fighters that are surviving.
There are other genocides happening in Myanmar and Sudan that nobody talks about.
And as far as US, you had a distinct movement that was against Kamala specifically because she was pro Israel.
I really don't understand the obsession with this particular conflict to the point where you feel like you are in the moral right by essentially punishing US people and making it worse for the people you care about (in terms of Republicans being way more pro Israel), specifically because the democratic party, didn't offer up a candidate that is EXPLICITLY against Israel.
You don’t get why people would be upset that their politicians are green lighting a genocide? The Americans have blood on their hands when it comes to Gaza and the same cannot be said about other conflicts.
In voting, you had 3 choices, vote Dem, vote Rep, or abstain.
When it comes to Palestine, you had 2 choices, vote Dem, which is arguably the better choice as Dems overall are more humanitarian minded, or the other 2, which both increase chances of Trump winning, which is way worse for Palestine.
I don't get what mental gymnastics one has to do to find that abstaining is the morally justified position. Its not like if enough people abstain, nobody becomes president.
>The Americans have blood on their hands when it comes to Gaza and the same cannot be said about other conflicts.
Uh.....lol?
The other big thing is that I dunno how one can support people that actively murder people for being gay, but thats just me.
>There are other genocides happening in Myanmar and Sudan that nobody talks about.
Sounds a lot like whataboutism. I heard a lot of that term going around whenever anyone dared mention any non-mainstream talking point about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but funnily enough, no one seems to talk about now.
Lol its not whataboutism. You can't do this thing where you just throw in fallacies at something randomly do discredit.
Whataboutism is when you justify the wrongdoing of X by pointing out that Y is also wrong and nothing is being done about it.
Im simply pointing out that if your outrage about Palestine is genocide, then you should be outraged about the other genocides. You can either agree, or you can further narrow down your position on why specifically Palestine conflict is the one you chose to place your outrage on, and not others.
It absolutely is about whataboutism insofar as people here (not you specifically) use it as a pseudo-argument that automatically wins a discussion, but applying it only when convenient for their political preferences or worldview.
"I can think of one very powerful country doing exactly that for over half a century. Hope we're all collectively raging against anything coming from that country."
and
"There are other genocides happening in Myanmar and Sudan that nobody talks about."
Please be honest and fair. Don't you agree both of these arguments are more or less in the same vein? We're both pointing out that Bad Shit is happening elsewhere in time or space, and for some reason we think that public attention/outrage is unfairly shifted towards a specific conflict. We both imply that there is a deliberate political reason leading to that specific conflict being in the limelight and not any other conflict.
Given our little discussion here, I probably strongly disagree with you on the specifics of this specific conflict (Gaza). But we both have made the same argument, coming from diametrically opposed points of view: we both think (correct me if I'm wrong) that people/media/society etc have pet conflicts to be outraged with in detriment of all other ongoing conflicts. Or in short -- hypocrisy. Although I disagree with you, I very much think this specific argument is absolutely valid.
My point is that media and online people (HN) were very eager to scream Whataboutism when the exact same comment was made in another context (Ukraine), but everyone seems to have forgotten about Whataboutism in this conflict when people like yourself make comments in the same vein.
A big difference is that in 2022, an estimated five million Ukrainian refugees fled to other parts of Europe - which is more than twice as large as Gaza's entire population. Similarly, many Syrians fled the war there.
We could ask why there aren't more Palestinian refugees who fled to other countries? As far as I can tell, leaving Gaza is very difficult, and nobody really talks about making it easier.
it's not that it's hard to leave gaza. it's just nobody willing to accept gazans. and trumps plan that talks about voluntary migration out of gaza is been described as genocide and ethnic cleansing (btw, 75% of them actually registered as refugees by unrwa for past many decades)
i never saw anybody been against migration of population out of war zone to safety. in case of ukrainian refugees it was widely discussed that people need to get to safety and entire europe helped.
> it's not that it's hard to leave gaza. it's just nobody willing to accept gazans.
Isn't it both? I'm not an expert on this by any means, but it seems like anyone who's born on that land will find it almost impossible to leave. Both countries that have land borders with Gaza will usually not admit locals, except in very few exceptions. Even someone trying to transit through Israel to other countries would probably not be able to. Their sea and airspace, things that are seen in other countries as open windows to the rest of the world, are controlled by Israel. And their own government sometimes acts to prevent people from leaving. So, even if some countries accepted their refugees, I don't see how an average Gazan would be able to get there. It's not quite North Korea-level of difficulty, but it's up there.
around 100k gazans left through egypt in last 2 years. they needed to pay bribes to egyptian officials.
when israel after trump announcement said that idf will help people (who want to leave) to leave through israel, everybody screamed that it's literally proof that israel executes genocide and ethnic cleansing
typically to be refugee you need to get to country and request this status. you can't get refugee status remotely.
he wasn't talking about forced migration. he was talking about giving people housing/etc in other countries while gaza been rebuild, and later if they want they can come back.
at no point he was saying that gazans will be rounded up and moved out.
the way that conversation is going now is (and i am not trump fan):
- everybody: gaza is destroyed and nobody can live there. conditions are inhumane
- trump: lets allow to people move out to different countries, provide them with housing/jobs/etc while gaza is rebuild
- israel: we will help to people who want to leave - to leave
- everybody: this is literal genocide and ethnic cleansing. gazans should stay in gaza
I don't know any details about what the Trump administration proposed. Is there more to it than a few tweets?
A US administration that was serious about this would propose a deal to take some refugees from Gaza as a sign of good will. Something like "we will take 25% if other countries agree to take 75%." To say that other countries should take all the refugees, when they've shown no interest in it, is deeply cynical. So I didn't bother to look further.
Of course we'd never see that from the Trump administration. Unfortunately the Biden administration wasn't imaginative enough to suggest such a thing.
what i typed is pretty much as much as was said. forced expulsion was never mention. only facilitating relocation for those who want better life/new opportunities. as I posted below, 50% are interested in this.
i saw some interviews with gazans that said, that in case EU/USA/Canada will accept refugees, Gaza will become empty overnight.
i never saw anybody been against migration of population out of war zone to safety.
I can't think of any comparable historical example of declaring a people's entire territory a war zone and migrating a substantial/majority of the entire population out. Can you? The reality is they'd be unlikely to ever be able/allowed to return, and as such the actual purpose of such a project would be ethnically cleansing the territory.
My guess is that many people wouldn't want to leave, but helping some people to leave also helps those who stay: fewer mouths to feed, less work for very strained medical facilities, and so on.
Look at the demographics of Palestine. They are very young. Most of them weren't even born when most of those supposed things supposedly happened. Are you implying that parent's sins transfer to their children?
> Are you implying that parent's sins transfer to their children?
OP isn't making a moral argument. They're making a practical one. It's practical for a potential host to be wary about accepting refugees given the positions of their predecessors. Particularly when the current popuations are engaged in decades (centuries?) old disputes based on ancestral rights.
It's not that many people if divided up among many countries. These don't seem like reasons not to accept women and children from a war zone as refugees. Perhaps with some limits.
Exactly. It's not that many people and they still get into a ton of trouble. That seems like an excellent reason to either not accept them, or to enforce that they need to be dispersed widely enough to prevent forming a community and conducting violence in its name until they're back in palestine.
Like we can even blame the way things are on the israelis, or at least majorly on them, but that doesn't change the calculus for other arab states.
european countries run as fast as possible to acknowledge new syrian government in order to declare that syria is safe/stable so all syrian refugees will leave
I know you did. I'm saying that, by your standards, UNESCO is complicit, because they are not doing enough to stop the war in Ukraine. (See other comments about how focused they are on Palestine as opposed to Ukraine.)
I don’t see other comments that say that, but it seems incorrect. They have done very little on palestine AND ukraine. They have released statements on both. That’s about all I can see.
There have been reports from Israeli soldiers about surplus killing of citizens which you can find on YouTube. It’s unlikely these people are lying, but their reports may not be entirely representative of the war effort either. I think we need to avoid turning ethic cleansing into some sort of binary where you have it or don’t. It exists on a continuum and is a side effect of war that we should assume exists in some tacit degree wherever there are wars involving ethnic groups.
It’s wild to question numbers, but not question the country preventing independent verification of those numbers.
You can be skeptical of the gaza MoH all you want, but unless you’re demanding independent verification you’re just enabling what we have to assume is a genocide.
Why do you think they kill journalists? If they were innocent, they would invite everyone to send their journalists in and verify that Israel's position is valid. What Iareal does is not just a lack of assistance, it is active prevention of uncovering whatever happens there. With all due respect, you have to be an idiot to not assume that a crime happened.
Guilty implies conviction & punishment. You don’t punish people who’ve not been proven guilty (like say idk palestinians being punished for hamas’ actions)
What I’m saying is if there is the credible possibility of genocide (which there is), then inaction is complacency. Stop the violence, asses if there has been genocide, prevent any further.
Israel doesn’t have a plan to clean up the mess. What is the end goal here? Seriously. They’ve invaded and now what?
Options are:
1. Regime change, which I have seen no effort to attempt to effectuate
2. Withdrawal, which seems unlikely at this point.
3. Permanent occupation, which seems like the default. It may end up falling short of full genocide but it’s definitely violently upheld apartheid at a minimum.
If the third option is “cleaning up a mess” then that’s uh… pretty bad.
Israel's plan is, and has always been, to settle the whole of ethnically cleansed Palestine. Their strategy in Gaza was to promote the mess (propping up Hamas, imposing life conditions calculated to fuel anger, dismissing any long-term truce offer from Hamas) in order to have the excuse to "clean it up". Now they're in the last phase of the clean up, they just have to resist the (weak) indignation of the EU and US leaders.
In October 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser, Dov Weissglass, explained the meaning of Sharon's statement further:
"The significance of the disengagement plan [from Gaza] is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term 'peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Addendum: In 2005, Israel evacuated approximately 8,000 to 9,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza. Since then, there was an increase of approximately 250,000 settlers in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) since 2005 - or roughly 28 times more than the number evacuated from Gaza.
No, I think you should reflect a bit more. If they have to sacrifice a few settlements in Gaza today to be able to create 30 times more in the West Bank tomorrow, it makes perfect sense. And, it doesn't mean at all giving up Gaza for good: in fact, soon after that, they closed Gaza under a total siege that lasted 20 years, until they found a good excuse to retake that one too.
In chess you sacrifice pieces. Only a really naive player would think "well, if he sacrificed that piece, that proves he doesn't want to win the game".
Israel’s disengagement plan was a huge topic of internal debate before being approved by the Knesset. Arguments for it were about demographics and security. I don’t recall any proponents of the plan saying that it was a temporary measure (though some argued Israel could easily regain control if required, as a backup), so that seems like a farfetched explanation.
Indeed, Wikipedia gives security challenges and demographics as the main drivers:
[WP] According to Sharon, the disengagement plan was aimed at addressing Israel's long-term security challenges by shifting the country's resources to focus on strengthening the areas that "will constitute an inseparable part of the State of Israel in any future agreement" with the Palestinians.
So this was the immediate motivation: to give up some small, expensive and challenging settlements to focus resources on occupying more land in a more important place. Notice: not an ethical argument, not a peace offer. No. "Let's use our resources to take from the same people more, better land somewhere else."
And of course Israel managed to spin this with the US in such a way that basically they got a green light to settle as much as they wanted of the West Bank.
There have always been people, in Israel, who had the long term goal of annexing the whole "Greater Israel". They might not be a majority, but that doesn't matter because they have no meaningful opposition, as most Israelis are indifferent to Palestinians and to the idea of equity and justice.
And what's happening now is clear. There's no military goal whatsoever to the ongoing flattening of the Gaza strip. The purpose is only to make the place unliveable and to kill time in wait for the final green light to the ethnic cleansing.
What they mean by "cleaning up the mess" is killing, starving or displacing all Palestinians in the Gaza strip and developing Israeli settlements while simultaneously expanding into the west bank as well.
> To ask Palestine government to do anything meaningful, yes, they have done a lot
Yes, but still not enough, or its people's survival will not depend on the kindness of others. In my opinion, it's not a competent government, at least based on its performance so far.
Palestine has been under illegal military occupation for 58 years [1], it is not exactly an independent government in control of its territory.
It is the duty of the occupying power to ensure the safety of the civilians within the territory it has occupied. A duty Israel, with its use of starvation as a weapon of war and habit of shooting medics in the back of the head, is obviously not fulfilling.
The PLO hasn't even run elections for a couple decades. It is notoriously corrupt. I don't really see how ignoring that out of "solidarity" is supposed to practically help the palestinians.
Wow!!! You are not contributing to this discussion whatsoever!
+1 for me to quit posting on hn
This type of word spinning is distasteful, and more importantly, it's a sign of significantly weaker mind capacity than past level I recall joined hn 10ish years ago.
The first thing you should be doing, is to read the link, fire up AI deep research with some neutrally toned question to gather information.
The reason hn drew me in, was people actually always aim for contributing to the discussion constructively. That's not the norm nowadays.
I do not know exactly, since I do not work there. Those in charge and empowered have a duty to find a way out and protect their people (forgiveness and peace).
As for me, I’m just an ordinary person, believing that all lives matter worldwide. And if many innocents continue to die meaninglessly, I consider their governments incompetent for the job.
Are you suggesting that they (just to clarify, I’m referring to the government leaders, not the maliciously misinterpreted starving innocents) are competent and that all the other governments are to blame?
This is an extremely naive statement. You might want to do some more research before blaming the victims of a multi-decade multibillion dollar assault any further.
I understand the frustration with Hamas, but I think it's important to consider the reality on the ground. Most Palestinians in Gaza are unarmed, displaced, and struggling to survive under extreme conditions - with limited food, water, and medical care. Expecting them to rise up against a heavily armed and entrenched group like Hamas, especially while under bombardment, seems unrealistic. It's not that they don't want change - it's that they lack the means and safety to pursue it. I think we should be careful not to blame civilians for the actions of those in power, especially when they’re already suffering so much.
Maybe, but the entire story we are seeing here is supposed to be Palestinian armed "resistance against an occupation", willing to fight against a stronger enemy for almost a century now.
Why do you think in the at least six different armed groups in Gaza, there is not one ready to fight against the people who have effectively taken them hostages?
Why in the around half of million extended families of the 100,000 people associated with Hamas in Gaza, there is not enough political pressure to stop?
Even if one believes the people of Gaza bear some responsibility for not overthrowing Hamas, that doesn't justify Israel for violating international humanitarian law. Collective punishment, targeting civilians, or blocking humanitarian aid are considered war crimes regardless of who governs a territory. Accountability for one party doesn't erase the legal and moral obligations of the other.
Yes and that's why there's an effort to transfer food as I quoted above. However, I believe most arguments on this subject presuppose Palestinians as people without agency, Hamas as a non-Palestinian organization which is incidentally the government of Gaza
"The United Nations, the European Commission and major international aid organizations have said they have no evidence that Hamas has systematically stolen their aid, and the Israeli government has not provided proof.
>This is enough under international law to prevent Israel from passing any aid, as it works to assist its enemy's forces.
No. Article 54 of the additional protocol I (https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...) only allows destruction of objects etc. necessary for the sustenance of the civilian population if they are solely used for the members of the armed forces.
So even if Hamas stole the vast majority of the aid, as long as there is starvation, destroying it is forbidden.
I think you are quoting the wrong article, yours talk about attacking humanitarian aid, this one concerns free passage of food, is more relevant and it does not always apply
Mine talks about destroying greenhouses, fields, food, etc. as has in fact been done.
I'm thinking that as long as there's food, maybe you can destroy them, but if you then, having destroyed them while there is food, restricts the supply you are still breaking the treaty.
There's also article 54 §1 of additional protocol I.
Say it ain’t so- a right winger who is either intentionally lying or can’t do basic math.
Will it be someone else’s fault? Will they admit their mistakes and change their opinions? Or will they brush aside their published reasoning and say it doesn’t change anything. Check back at 11.
This is utter misinformation. Israeli apologists pin everything on Palestine. However, I recently sat down and wanted to look at as many videos as possible on this topic. The videos I saw coming out from Palestine, in particular children getting mutilated, made me question everything. Israel took out Chef Andreas's volunteers, clearly labeled vehicles of aid. They then exerted an effort to discredit the man, whose medal was taken by POTUS. Israelis post on tiktok videos that are reminiscient of Nazis descriptions of the Jews. They refer to Palestinians as animals, and joke on babies getting killed (and raped). Tiktok's web interface shows the ip address of OP, which means everything I saw was indeed coming out of Israel. Coupled with their generals calling for the cleansing of Palestine, and people like breppp will close their ears while barking at the command of their masters. I have lost any confidence in Israel, and I have no doubt their propaganda is being lost (including by apologists like breppp). Israel today is not a Western country (as an American, I reject that label). It is an apartheid, genocidal state, reaping our hard earned taxes to mutilate children and aid workers with impunity. The difference is AIPAC and the president's Jewish daughter regard it as the Holy Land, and would excuse Israel if it took out facilities inside our country. They are traitors to everything America stands for, and I urge everyone here to reach out to your representatives, and make it known. Do not allow bad actors and foreign actors like Israel to destroy the beacon of hope that we stand for. America is NOT and will never be an ally of Israel regardless of what Bill Ackman and rich Israelis want you to believe. Every American (left, or right, Sam Seder or Tucker Carlson) should agree on this. There are forces (in particular, Jews and Evangelicals, like Ben Shapiro for instance), that believe and make it known, that America's purpose (our taxes, our soldiers' blood) is for Israel's security. Reject this with all your might. I called my representative this mroning, and gave their office a clear piece of mind. I will continue to do so. But again: Israel is apartheid. It is a genocidal state, that steals and dislocates families. They have a goddamn program called Aaliya here in the US, where they practically admit it! You get a piece of Palestinian land, the IDF will escort you and the gov will pay you! Absolutely repugnant nation. Finally, we must ask ourselves. When ICJ, Unesco et al., find Israel a genocidal state, are they all wrong? I think you will find our politicans are complicit, because AIPAC and Propaganda has worked so well for Israel. It is only when we stand up to genocide and tyranny that cowards like Bibi bend the knee. We have also come to accept them blowing up Syrians who just achieved liberation and Iran. It is normal to mutilate children. It is normal to have a problem with everyone of your neighbors, including those that just achieved their freedom (and allowed you to use their airspace in a recent war). It is normal to kill Americans (USS Liberty, Rachel Corrie, most recently an American in the West Bank). It is normal to hunt American aid workers in clearly labeled vehicles and discredit the man helping others. It is normal for two political parties that disagree on most things, to suck up to one foreign nation. It is normal for the richest nation on earth to send billions to a nation with healthcare, so they can build a dome and call us when they need to hit bunkers. It is normal for America to serve a master. That is sarcasm, that I bet is lost on Israeli apologists.
It's what happened to Japan, but at least the emperor had the wherewithal to not kill japans civilian population, which had been trained and armed for a mainland invasion.
I think it’s reasonable to conclude that Israel is more willing to continue to commit atrocities against the Palestinians than the US was against the Japanese.
Like, I genuinely think Netanyahu is perusing a “ Lebensraum” strategy with Palestine. This is evidenced by their support of right wing Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory.
I’ve come to this realization as a Jewish person who was brought up on “Israel has a right to defend itself” during the second intafada. Israel has genuinely changed for the worse in a way that’s hard for a lot of people to see.
Japan surrendered before the US had the chance to play Israel in Japan. But Japan had the same strategy that Hamas uses - train civilians to attack to put the US in a position of having to decide if that mother is just a mother, or if that mother is gonna pull out a rifle.
I don’t think Israel believes that there is anyone that could “surrender” on behalf of the Palestinians. Also, given the nature of the conflict, surrender would inevitably lead back to the same problems that started it, which is that Israel cannot annex Palestine without either apartheid or genocide, and regime change is unlikely to lead to a stable two state solution since legitimate regimes haven’t been able to reach agreement in the past.
That's an odd point of view. With Operation Downfall, the Americans were planning literal genocide against the Japanese. If they hadn't surrendered after the atomic bombs, the projections were as high as 5-10 MILLION Japanese casualties (with several hundred thousand on the Allied side), precisely because Japanese policy had been to arm the citizenry with rakes and hoes if it came to that - i.e., the Japanese refusal to surrender despite there being no possible path to victory was going to cost the lives of many millions of their citizens. And America had little choice but to pursue that.
That America was willing to do this, if the bombs didn't work, seems to contradict your claim. (And I think the Americans had little choice to do so.)
I fully agree that America was very willing to commit atrocities, especially using atomic bombs (obviously) and firebombing civilian centers.
The key difference is that the US recognized that Japan could surrender, accepted that surrender, and instituted regime change with a goal of democratic prosperity.
I’m not convinced Israel would do the same. They certainly haven’t said anything about actual regime change and setting up a legitimate government.
> Operation Downfall, the Americans were planning literal genocide against the Japanese.
If you're at war and your opponent has lost but is foreign to the idea of surrender and fights to the last man, and you oblige him, you are pursuing war not genocide.
Aside from your despicable lack of humanity you aren’t even making a valid comparison to begin with. You are comparing fighting an armed nation (Japan) to refugees exercising their right to resist a foreign occupation.
My friend, if Hamas surrendered tomorrow, the death would stop. They have no allies, they have no support, the war is over. It's now just how much of their own people they are willing to grind up. Western liberals on the keyboards are not going to stop Israel. The fractured and shattered Islamic middle east is not going to stop Israel.
End the war, give up the land, and take the offer from Israel for first class tickets for every Palestinian to go live in Iran. Get your diplomacy and ideology straight, and maybe in 50 years your will have the economy and military needed to go take it back from Israel, and then they can be the ones to bend over for peace.
No we haven’t. But he won’t admit that. He wants nothing other than the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Don’t you worry — once that is achieved they will ethnically cleanse West Bank.
Again, Palestine has no cards left. They are powerless and have no friends with power. They completely failed at diplomacy over the last 50 years and completely failed at building an economy (other than weapons manufacturing).
They lost and lost badly. They can go regroup somewhere else and try to capture the land again in the future. But for now they should stop using their civilians as fodder to childishly delay the inevitable.
They do have a card to play: expose the savage, heart of darkness in Tel Aviv to the world. My guess is this will lead to a global revolt against Israel that will be impossible to overcome in today’s globalized world. Israel cannot be a pariah state and survive in the same way that North Korea can.
We have a bunch of liberal first world children screaming online about it*, but that's not going to do much. They were unaware of the conflict 5 years ago when they were 15. The people who move things know the story going way further back than Oct 8 2023. The adults are sick of the conflict and hold no more respect for Israel than they do for Palestine. Both sides have egregious violations, and tallying them is a futile and time wasting ordeal.
So the adults are ready for this to end. There is no choice winner, so the winner will just be the one who is stronger. The same way every other war has been decided.
*Granted, the Muslim world obviously has huge support for Palestine. But it's in word only. Palestine's "allies" pretty much said "Good luck bro" and then closed their doors. Probably because Palestine has the diplomatic skills of a toddler. Don't be fooled, Israel won this with diplomacy. Making friends with the right people and being a good friend to them will carry you far.
I’m not sure there is a government that can surrender at this point. Israel may very well have taken out any “leadership” that they view as being able to legitimately speak for a Palestinian state, if they ever thought there was one.
There has always been a question of what Israel’s strategic goal is here because it doesn’t make any sense. An at least rational answer would be “regime change”, but no evidence has come up to indicate this is the plan.
Since Israel isn’t attempting to stand up a legitimate Palestinian government, all that’s left is permanent occupation and/or genocide.
I agree. It's painfully obvious that nobody has a plan or even an idea what could be done. But that's because all options are garbage. Stay in Gaza? Guerilla warfare forever and more civilian deaths. Pull out of Gaza? Hamas rearms in a few years, starts shooting rockets again, Israel retaliates and more civilians casualties. Regime change? Good luck, all moderate voices are toothless against the Jihadists.
The fundamental problem here is Hamas. There is just nothing in this world you can offer them to stop this suicide mission. All they care about is destroying Israel. No matter the cost. And that has nothing to do with Israels conduct. I'm sure it's compounding after decades of bloodshed but deep down they just hate Jews.
This was less true before Trump’s return. It’s frustrating that people said they wouldn’t support Biden/Harris over this and now instead we get essentially full-throated endorsement of genocide instead.
Like there were always practical limits to how much the US could constrain Israel, especially due to its relative popularity until recently. A bunch of activists didn’t recognize that and tacitly endorsed letting Trump win and now here we are.
Please make your comments productive versus snide.
Here is a more productive way to phrase your comment:
> I personally believe there is not a genocide, and the reason why I believe that is because I heard from ___________ [fill in the blank] that the population has increased over the past 2 years, and I personally believe that makes it not a genocide because ____________ [fill in the blank]
"KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip—Thousands of hungry Palestinians amassed last Tuesday morning outside a barbed-wire fence surrounding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid center here. The moment the gates cracked open, the crowd surged forward.
American security contractors tried to keep control, but scores of men pushed through barricades and snatched boxes of food awaiting distribution. Others sprinted in behind them. Men on speeding motorcycles raced past the pedestrians to grab whatever food they could. Gunshots rang out—it wasn’t clear from where. Within about 15 minutes, all the food was gone."
What are you implying? Genuinely I can’t tell who you think these “men on speeding motorcycles” are?
I don’t see anything obviously suspicious in that - if your family was starving would you sit back and let them die? Or maybe hop on a motorcycle and cut to the front of the queue?
But they are storable, far more stable than food. So it should be no suprise that motorcycles continue to function long after the food has run out. And gaza is tiny. It doesnt take more than a cup of fuel to cover considerable distance on these bikes.
If only there was some way to exchange one type of an asset, such a motorcycle, to another, such as food... Too bad nothing like this was invented yet.
There's no food smart guy, who's he going to buy food from?? [0] His motorcycle is also his only means of transportation and thus his livelihood likely depends on it. Even if he could pawn it for 2 days of food for his family, should he?
Jesus christ.
[0] Reminds me of someone saying to a rapt audience that people in coastal areas flooded by sea level rise would just "sell their houses and move" (sell their houses to whom, fucking aquaman?).
I am not implying, I am literally saying that. Obese people can easily live for six months to one year without suffering health issues. Gaza has a clean water problem, not a food problem.
And what's the blatant lie? Gaza inhabitants are not suffering from obesity at incredibly high rates? Is Wikipedia lying about this? If you have credible figures indicating that Wikipedia is wrong on this matter, I would be very interested to see them and I would change my opinion on the "starvation" question immediately.
I find it weird that you are immediately accusing me of lying instead of assuming that I am wrong in good faith, let alone thinking that you may in fact be wrong.
> A meta-analysis study in Middle East countries found that the prevalence of obesity and overweight was 21.17 and 33.14%, respectively (9). A recent survey conducted in Palestine concluded that the prevalence of overweight and obesity is 23.6 and 19.5% in the Gaza Strip
Norm is 33.14% overweight and 21.17% obese, palestine was (before 2021) 23.6% overweight and 19.5% obese.
So, no, Gazans are not suffering from obesity at “incredibly high rates”.
Malnutrition and obesity can also co-exist in the same person at the same time. Most of the articles on obesity in gaza point this out.
> Obese people can easily live for six months to one year without suffering health issues
Jesus christ. Are you really saying forced starvation is ok because some people have the fat reserves to not die from it??
Even if all the obese people in gaza had the fat reserves to last 6 months - which they don’t - you’re still giving the thumbs up to starving the other 80.5% of the population.
Not to mention, aid has been blocked since march so the other 19.5% has two months left of their supposed six months of “no health consequences”.
And for the record, I am so fucking disgusted I had to write this.
During the Bosnian war even gold jewelry was worth less than food and cigarettes in weight, after the initial period. (I read it directly from a survivor's accounts.) You've got no idea how the combo of urban + isolation + starvation looks.
> I know it's easy to judge being far away, but seriously, men on speeding motorcycles?
Why wouldn't they be on "speeding" motorcycles? They have a family to feed. They're probably coming from some distance away. People travel on motorcycles.
Dude. People will trample their neighbors for a black friday deal on a tv. Your family is starving, there’s not enough food for everyone - and you’re queuing up? I don’t think so.
Sweden and the US are “kinda cozy” (I would say at least, from an inside perspective on how Sweden seems to lean in to US interests including copyright enforcements and so forth).
However Sweden was the first country to recognise Palestine.
Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff, similar to the threats of pulling out of NATO and the actual pulling out of the Paris Accords.
I’m aware that there has still been some US interference in the middle-east, I’m just not sure I’m drawing the same connections as you.
Also, and I mean this in the best way I can: I don’t really trust anything coming out of Gaza’s health ministry. That doesn’t mean I side with Israel as they are also distorting facts very often.
If you don't believe Gaza's health ministry, how about Agence France-Presse?
The journalists' association of the French wire service Agence France-Presse (AFP) warned on Monday that staff working with the agency in Gaza are at risk of starvation and that "without intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die."
In the statement, the SDJ said that AFP's journalists in Gaza have warned that they no longer have strength to report, with one photographer, Bashar Taleb, saying in a post on Facebook: "My body is thin and I can no longer work."
"Since AFP was founded in August 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks, but none of us can recall seeing a colleague die of hunger," the SDJ said in a post on X.
Israel controls 80% of the territory in Gaza and all the aid posts. This is a complete fabrication by the media that has no correspondence to what people in the ground are saying.
And that has nothing to do with israel blocking aid agencies from bringing in food?
Nothing to do with israel destroying farms and crops?
Hamas bad. We can all agree hamas bad. But to blame starvation on hamas when israel is in control of the food supply… how do you mental gymnastics your way to that??
I wasn’t aware of that media outlet, just FYI (and to reinforce your point) it seems that while there is a significant left bias, generally AFP’s journalism is considered reliable and credible.
AFP is previously unknown to me, and yes I did because its actually reinforcing the parents point about being a reliable source.
Maybe read before commenting, or perhaps allow people to be ignorant and admit that openly; jumping down my throat because I don’t already know your favourite news outlet solves what exactly?
(also don’t think I don’t see the irony of your bio being: “I usually don't know what I'm talking about.”)
I wasn't trying to jump down your throat for not knowing AFP, I just thought it was a somewhat funny-absurdist situation to have a major news agency ranked for reliability by some website with a name that's basically a maga dogwhistle (not saying it is affiliated, as it predates maga). I can see that my phrasing was quite bad.
Oh, I don't doubt for a minute that the are starving people. The whole reason for Palestinian people to exist is to flip the script (hey it's tiny Israel against the whole giant Arab world) into it's evil Israel against Palestinian people who just want freedom. They are waging the CNN war after they lost, you know, the war war. If there are no starving people to produce for the France Presse cameras, they will create some.
Do you have a link to a recent picture of this Bashar Taleb? I've found the Gaza famine to be very different from any other famine I've ever looked into - people seem to go from healthy to "died from starvation" without ever getting thin.
If you google for "famine yemen", you see very thin children, with just skin on bone - all the fat and muscle is gone. If you google for "famine gaza", they just seem a lot healthier.
Have you ever watched the TV show Alone? It’s an outdoor survival competition reality show. In it people regularly end up medically evacuated due to starvation or malnutrition.
Sometimes you can tell by looking at someone’s face they’re starving - but usually you can’t. Usually it’s when they strip down for the periodic medical exam when you can actually tell how starved they are.
Do you want a recent photo of this man, or do you want him to strip naked for you to judge his weight loss?
Why is one man stripping naked for you something you need before you’ll believe the hundreds of different people saying that people are starving?
Like, seriously. What if he’s lying? He could be, of course - but would you then believe everyone is lying? Or what if he’s telling the truth about weight loss, and you see proof - will you then turn around and say well yeah but he’s probably just starving himself for attention?
You need proof one man is starving to believe hundreds?
> Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff
That would be great (?), except the stated reason for pulling out was "anti-Israel bias". It's about kowtowing to a foreign terror regime, not standing up for America.
>Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff, similar to the threats of pulling out of NATO and the actual pulling out of the Paris Accords.
Why would you give them the benefit of the doubt when they directly state that they're withdrawing over the decision to admit Palestine?
So far all independent verifications of the gaza health ministry’s numbers have found that they under-report the death toll.
And i’m not sure how your sweden example says anything about the US supporting israel’s genocide? Was there something you expected to happen when sweden recognized palestine?
It is hard/impossible to come up with an accurate death toll.
The Gaza Health Ministry systemically underreports the death toll by only counting bodies that they have directly observed.
Some third parties have tried to extrapolate from the reported numbers to get to the actual numbers; but that is a highly speculative endeavor under the best circumstances.
> by only counting bodies that they have directly observed
This was only true in an early phase of the conflict; they've long since been adding casualties reported by "reliable media sources" as well as a Google form.
The facts on the ground are extremely clear if you read what the aid agencies on the ground say instead of what gets passed off as news by American media.
In short: gazans are all issued ID numbers at birth. The ministry of health has published id numbers of the dead, which means you can do stats and tell if the data is fake. On top of that, so far (afaik since 2009 when hamas came to power) nobody has caught them in a lie. So they’ve a track record of telling the truth, and give us data that we can smell-test for fraud and it passes.
So yes, nobody else is on the ground to produce independent numbers, so the numbers can’t be fully verified. But using that doubt as an excuse for inaction in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is fucking disgusting.
> The ministry of health has published id numbers of the dead, which means you can do stats and tell if the data is fake. On top of that, so far (afaik since 2009 when hamas came to power) nobody has caught them in a lie. So they’ve a track record of telling the truth, and give us data that we can smell-test for fraud and it passes.
If you comment that they give us this data, surely you have a link to said data?
Surely you have the ability to google and find out for yourself. I don’t know if the data is available to the public, or just to journalists - but numerous reputable outlets have reported on this.
Yeah, we really need more verification that people are starving in Gaza. Why would people starve in Gaza? It's not like anybody has been bombing the city and blocking supply routes. Why would anybody starve there? We are going to need more proof than people saying that they don't have enough food.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I don't think he's saying to dismiss the Ministry's numbers, but more that the death toll is actually even higher than the Ministry's numbers, in opposition to Israeli claims that the Ministry is making up deaths.
It’s really not my fight, I’m Swedish - not American.
You’ll always be disappointed if you continue with this mindset though, the world will not bend to you because of your moral outrage, the best you can hope for is to open peoples eyes with understanding - not by calling everyone inhumane, disgusting or laying expectations at their feet.
I think mass murder is one area where we can safely feel moral outrage. It might not work, but it probably has a better chance of influencing the outcome than shrugging and saying "well, that's just how it is".
I felt moral outrage after October 7th, but my moral outrage only served to give Israel a bit more justification for actions which are increasingly and ultimately turning out in a way that provokes similar outrage. Outrage begets outrage, blood will have blood.
To be completely fair with you which mass murder should I be outraged at?
I was outraged with Uyghurs, I was outraged with Rwandans, I was outraged about the Tamils, Burma, the ISIL occupation, Boko Haram etc;etc;etc;
I’m old now, my outrage did nothing to prevent or assuage these conflicts and this conflict seems too muddy for me to get involved with, I can’t pick a side, both sides are killing each other and one is more successful than the other.
I don’t feel like beating people over the head with the conflict will actually stop anyone dying, even if we decided all of us together to bomb Israel off the map: that’s bad too. Nobody is coming to the table with anything even resembling a solution.
So, kindly, I will reserve my moral outrage to situations whereby I can make a difference, where I don’t have to watch both sides chanting death threats in schools about each other. I will not morally side with either.
Kids being murdered is just as awful in Palestine, as it is in Africa, Asia, the Americas or anywhere else in the world. But, at what point does the rest of the world get to run out of "fucks" to give about their conflicts.
I think the US should absolutely stop giving money to Israel, there seems to be no benefit at all and it supports their genocide. But I also see no reason to actually support Palestine. The current conflict can be traced back to the October attacks, but then those attacks can be traced back to some attacks Israel did and back and forth until you get to the Old Testament and probably before that.
It's a religious conflict that won't go away unless you remove religion from it. I don't expect that to happen during my lifetime so I'd rather we just pull the tax dollars out of the region.
This isn't some deep seated religious conflict. The few Jews and other people's lived largely in peace under the ottoman empire. Modern Israel is a joint US and European imperialist settler project where the founders of that movement outright said they intend to take over the area for their ethnostate.
Most of the problems in the middle east can be traced back to European and American meddling.
Like the other reply, this shit really isn't as black and white and people make it out to be. There is a ton of history and fighting. They both suck. Anyone taking a hard stance with either side only has a surface level view of the situation.
Pretty much all atrocities in the middle east can be traced back Europeans (mainly UK) carving up the area after ww1 and theirs and American imperialism since ww2. Israel is a project of this.
So you want Israel to cease to exist?
Germany did the Holocaust, nobody said Germany can't exist.
Russia attacks Ukraine in an emperialistic power move, no one suggest Russia shouldn't exist.
But Israel is a "project" that needs to end. More like a scape goat.
I'm israeli. This war is bad, my government is evil. But I deserve to have a nation to call home, so do the Palestinians.
If you disagree with me, think about it a bit and what it says about you.
> Russia attacks Ukraine in an emperialistic power move, no one suggest Russia shouldn't exist.
But people do suggest russia should give back the territory they’ve taken by force. That’s most (if not all depending on your take) of israel.
Historically - in my opinion in the wake of ww2 a jewish state should have been carved out of germany, rather than england giving away land that wasn’t theirs to give away. So in a sense Germany as we know it should have ceased to exist.
Just as now, i believe for there to be peace in the region israel as we know it must cease to exist. Either by radically changing and becoming a place where palestinians and jews live together in peace and shared governance, or by giving up a huge chunk of land they stole in ‘48 to create two states.
Alas hamas killed that one in The 90s when they decided to send suicide bombers to Israeli busses during the peace process that Israel initiated.
Also Israel accepted the two state solution in 1948, alas all Arab countries decided to attack the newly idndependent country.
Saying "we" stole the land is a bit odd. The arabs leaving in Israel didn't call themselves Palestinians until after 1948.
Israel is not in the Arab peninsula, arabs living here came from there, hence they are Arabs.
I still support their right to their national claim. But pretending it's some ancient construct that "we" stole from is not historical. Palestinian nationalism is a modern construct.
Who has the right to exist in that area? The people that already lived there and their offspring, who are now refugees in Gaza. People do have the right to form their own states, but on land they already own legally and ethically, not when you colonize land already occupied by others.
I did not call for the end of Israel as a project, I do disagree with it's creation, considering how it turned out, especially since it was more or less the intention of Zionism as stated by it's founders.
I don't know how to solve it. But I do know that Israels actions since it was founded has worked against any kind of solution that is not a takeover of the area and the creation of their ethnostate.
You domknownthat Palestinians are mostly Arabs and not native to the region.
The Israeli founders accepted the UN partition resolution. all Arab countries attacked Israel to destroy and create their pan Arabian fantasy.
In the 90s Israel initiated the peace process and gave self rule to the Palestinians with an end goal to create a Palestinian state. Hamas decided to send suicide bombers to bomb Israeli busses killing thousands.
This caused a massive shift right in israeli politics. And gave power to those saying we can't afford to give land. I don't agree with them.
Whos's native then? Only jews? What about the peoples that lived in that region before them? Or the people that moved through the area after leaving Africa? This is a nonsense argument, people lived there and others colonized the area and has operated like most European colonies. This is what happened in recent times, not 2000 years ago.
In private letters from the founders they write about their true intent of accepting the 48 deal just to get a foothold and then keep taking over the rest of the land, you can look it up yourself. And what a deal, Jews owned like 7% of the land and was handed 55%? Why would anyone be angry about that. By an organization that was basically three countries in a trenchcoat and without the support of most the people who lived there.
I know Hamas is bad, I can call them terrorist without a problem. Netanyahu however is also a fan of Hamas as he has stated its critical to prop them up as that allows them to divide and conquer the Palestinians and create more chaos that they can use. Exactly like how they are using Oct 7 in both Gaza and the West Bank now.
I understand that Israel is in the grips of far right zionist fanatics, but a large part of their population does support some kind of genocide.
If the only way that Israel can continue to exist is as an apartheid state where a large proportion of the population has to be forcibly kept in a status with no political rights, or else expelled or killed altogether, then yes, Israel doesn't deserve to exist.
Now, I don't know whether that is true. It seems to be the argument that the Israeli government and the right-wing majority of its population are making now - that if they give Palestinians actual freedom, Israel will just cease to be, so they have to starve people to death, bomb them etc. The more they do that, the stronger the argument that Israel should cease to exist.
If there is another option that allows Israel to continue to exist, that's great. But it's really up to Israel to come up with a viable option for that, because Israel is an alien entity that forcefully imposed itself on this territory to begin with.
Regarding Russia, I'm a Russian citizen, and the invasion of Ukraine did, in fact, made me reach the conclusion that Russia should not exist as a state. It's not that this particular war is especially damning; it's that Russia has a very long track record of imperialist wars, and, more importantly, it doesn't change - it keeps doing it. Arguably Russia as it exists today is inevitably imperialistic simply because it's a polity that is cobbled together and still largely held by force or threat of it - it never really fully de-colonized, and if it ever does, it'd be an order of magnitude smaller. So from that perspective it really cannot change - and if so, then yes, it should cease to exist.
If Israel is alien to the region, so are Arabs which is what Palestinians are.
That's nonsense.
The Jewish people have a long (2000years) of calling Israel territory as home. Does it mean I deny the Palestinians national claim, no. But it sure as hell mean Jews have a claim atleast as much as Arab immigrants and conquerers
The vast majority of Jews who settled in modern Israel didn't have a 2000-year history of Israel as their home. They have a 2000-year history of religious beliefs that center around Israel and date back to their very distant ancestors living in that place, but that's not at all the same thing. I mean, can you imagine what the world map would look like if we were to apply this criteria to other nations today?
Palestinians, on the other hand, have actually been physically living in that place for well over a millennium. Not only that, but dismissing them as "Arab invaders" is also rather misleading - while the language and the culture is Arabic, the Palestinian population is mostly descendants of the same people who lived in this area 2000 years ago (Canaanites etc), with Arabic culture imposed on them during the early Islamic conquests. And again, if you're willing to look back that far to establish a link that translates to right of possession, then should we go back another 1000 years and talk about Torah's vivid descriptions of the invasion of Canaan by Jewish tribes and genocide of the local population?
I think it's foolish to try to derive some kind of meaningful claim today from what happened 2000-3000 years ago, though. And looking at the more recent history, what is today Israel was explicitly a settler colonialist project. Here's Ze'ev Jabotinsky writing in 1923, not mincing words about Palestinians being the native population that he wants to displace:
"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. ... Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. ... Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-gaza-war-hunger-childre...
Ragequitting UNESCO over their recognition of palestine is a small part of the project of supporting the ethnic cleansing of gaza and the west bank.