In late 1947, their militias begun a campaign of massacring and expelling Palestinians from mostly defenseless villages. These refuges pouring into neighboring Arab countries is what prompted the 1948 war. When the war ended, they murdered any civilians trying to return to their homes.
Gaza was originally a refugee camp created for receiving these expelled people.
The ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since. The current Gaza war is not when the crimes against humanity started. Israel has been commiting crimes against humanity throughout its entire existence.
Or is it only in areas where Hamas still keeps Israeli hostages?
There were 3 days of idf bombing in gaza in september 2023.
Bringing up “hostages” as a reason for anything is a lie, a distortion, and a laundering of genocide.
Netanyahu is not supported by all israelis, no question. But israeli isn’t a dictatorship - the actions of the state have been varying degrees of genocide and ethnic cleansing for 75+ years, and pinning that all on one man is bonkers. Do you also consider the war in Iraq a war between Bush and the Ba’ath?
Calling what I said “one siding” is similarly bonkers. My point is just to be consistent with the actions of both sides: israel had hostages before oct 7th - if hamas hostages are justification for mass murder of palestinian civilians, then israeli hostages before oct 7th justify the oct 7th attacks. To say otherwise is to one-side the situation.
To be clear: i don’t believe that hostages justify killing civilians. Doesn’t matter who’s hostages they are.
It is, however, casus belli. And I don’t know how one fights a guerilla force without significant collateral damage.(This order, to be clear, wouldn’t count as collateral damage if accurately presented.)
If you cannot conduct war against a guerilla force without murdering hundreds of thousands, destroying every piece of peaceful infrastructure, and blockading aid - then the truth is it’s wrong to conduct that war.
> If you cannot conduct war against a guerilla force without murdering hundreds of thousands, destroying every piece of peaceful infrastructure, and blockading aid - then the truth is it’s wrong to conduct that war
If that force is conducting operations in your borders and against your citizens it’s no longer that clear cut. (This goes both ways in this case.)
Both Hamas and Israel have grounds for war. Both of them have conducted it badly. But in both cases, it’s not easy to see how they could have managed it that much better. (Well, actually, for Palestine it is. They should be suing for peace and handing over their hostages. Neither side looks smart when it takes innocent hostages.)
These are your opinions. They have no legitimacy except in the eyes of people who share your opinions.
> If that force is conducting operations in your borders
If you build your borders on other people’s homes, it’s pretty clear cut actually.
The indifference shown to the fate of the hostages could have fooled me. But yes, Hamas and PJ treat their civilian population expendably in a way Tel Aviv does not.
(excuse me for ignoring the history trolling)
Westerners with no connection to the Middle East deciding they know best for the people actually there has been a popular opinion for a long time.
Annexing one's neighbors sure fosters some queer international consequences.
So what? I don't get your point.
Israel has continuously been oppressing the Palestinians for almost 80 years. That is immoral. Israel is in the wrong.
> They are widely considered to posses a right of existence, and even expected to defend their citizens.
You are just jumping to a different topic. I said nothing about its right to exist.
Israel is the last stand against a Holocaust that has been going on a lot longer than eighty years.
Have the Palestinians been ethnically cleansed? Yes or no? Have they been oppressed for almost 80 years? Yes or no?
What Palestinians need is what Israelis got: a state. To the extent there is an argument maximally antithetical to that cause, it’s arguing that Israel shouldn’t exist.
Palestinians had several opportunities to get that, especially with Oslo agreements, but their leadership refused that everytime.
I don’t think it’s fair to extend that to “Palestinians had several opportunities.”
Unfortunately Palestinians have an huge responsibility on the actual situation.
That was a generation ago.
> as we saw immediately after 7/11, most of them was cheering for the slaughterings and the rapes
One, it’s unclear how widespread this was. But also two, you see similar dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israelis today. That’s just how human psychology works in a war footing—I think we and chimpanzees are the only species that will go out of our way to exterminate a threat.
> Palestinians have an huge responsibility on the actual situation
Oh sure. And I think whether a future Palestinian state could exist peacefully bordering Israel is a real question. But I would push back on the notion that a plebiscite today requiring recognition of Israel as a sovereign state within its current borders in exchange for a Palestinian state (with West Bank settlements transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction) wouldn’t pass.
Some surveys estimated that Hamas consensus was more than 60% before the 7/11. And this is the main reason why there is no other elections in West Bank since than: Fatah leadership is scared to lose elections.
> you see similar dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israelis today
I have many colleagues and friends in Israel and nobody of them is cheering about the civilian killings. At the opposite, they just demand peace and freedom for hostages. This is the main difference: while in Israel a large part of population is against war and atrocity, Hamas is still supported by an huge part of Palestinian population.
> But I would push back on the notion that a plebiscite today requiring recognition of Israel as a sovereign state within its current borders in exchange for a Palestinian state (with West Bank settlements transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction) wouldn’t pass.
This was mostly the proposal of Oslo agreements and Arafat, as Palestinian representative, refused that. Do you really think that a public opinion supporting Hamas() , will accept that now?
() Hamas wrote in his statuta that any sionistic state must be unacceptable and Israel must be erased from the heart.
I think it’s worth a shot. (I wouldn’t put much worth in any polling in Gaza, let alone recent polling.)
One could even throw in a reparation fund for the lands Israel conquered since ‘48 as well as those which the French and British gave away. (Hell, eminent domain the West Bank settlers and pay them out, too.)
Even if it will win, having a state, means also to have an army. And guess what will happens immediately? The problem is also the education: in Gaza, the school system (also the one by ONU/UNWRA paid by us) is completely rotten: they are not preparing people to improve their country, they are preparing people to become martyr and hate Israel.
> One could even throw in a reparation fund for the lands Israel conquered since ‘48 as well as those which the French and British gave away.
Do you have any idea about how many money the Western country put in Gaza for humanitarian and development projects? Well, a big part of those funds are spent on building tunnels, buying weapons and building rockets. There is no any way to change the situation until Hamas would be there.
> Hell, eminent domain the West Bank settlers and pay them out, too
Israeli settlers are a big obstacle to peace and should be stopped and repressed with force. Unfortunately it will not happen until Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are part of the government
Sure. Hence why having such a referendum is important. Also, Lebanon has an army as does Egypt, and both are fine neighbours to Israel now.
> Do you have any idea about how many money the Western country put in Gaza for humanitarian and development projects?
Reparations would have to be distributed directly to individuals and be contingent on such a plebescite recognising Israel passing. If Palestinians decide to squander it again, yes, we’ll see another war, but at that point we can begin treating it like we did Nazi Germany versus the non-state with mixed attribution it has today.
> it will not happen until Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are part of the government
If Palestine gave up its hostages and sued for peace, I don’t think these fucks would have a say anymore.
Would you please apologize on-record or edit that out? Thanks
And every state that has done that has given back equal rights to those they conquered.
In any case, Israel doesn't even have the right to exist. It's a nation founded on war. It has never won its war. And you know that because Israelis have to build bomb shelters for every home, since it has been in a constant state of war since 1948, and never winning that war. The Palestinians have never surrendered, and have always continued to defend their land against the European attackers.
We should all be inspired by Hamas and their resiliency. Hamas are the bravest heroes today, fighting an evil enemy that would happily kill children.
I honestly can't believe there's an entire country playing Squid Games on real people right now.
It does: UN resolution, 1967.
That you do not recognize an entire state to exist is an admission to preparing a genocide. The fact that 4 countries around Israel are preparing genocide justifies Israel’s measures are reasonable to maintain peace.
What is reasonable?
Well it’s not like Gaza didn’t start the shooting with 7000 rockets pre-October festival (I was myself surprised that Israel didn’t respond pre-October). Those rockets were indiscriminate against population centers, each of them were a war crime. So it’s reasonable to reduce the neighbor’s ability to wage war to dust.
Are the Gazans exempt from responsibility of their state’s actions?
To answer, we need to check whether the Hamas was imposed to the Gazans or whether they voted for it and, in a broader sense, whether the Gazans wish the genocide of Israel. It turns out the 2006 elections were almost the last ones in Gaza, and that’s when the Hamas was elected (and the opponents were not better). So the Gazans are aligned with the actions performed by the collective group of their nation, it’s not a small group of extremists, it represents the will of the nation, and therefore the facilities and support network of the Hamas are part of the war logistics, and deserves to be reduced to dust.
Did Israel act with restraint?
Israel has the nuclear bomb and has enough power to genocide if they want. The fact that they perform spot actions instead of sweeping actions is proof that Israel tries to discriminate the military, its support network with genocide intent against Israel (=pretty much everyone) and tries to spare the innocents, is proof that Israel is not committing a genocide.
Israel doesn't recognise Palestine as a state, so by your own definition Israel is preparing a genocide.
> What is reasonable?
Not instituting so many decrees ("militaty orders") that even the military authority responsible for 'ruling' the area can't produce an accurate or complete list of all of said decrees. Decrees which, I might add, forbid planting flowers, raising a flag, operating a farm tractor, going to school, or making a bank account withdrawal without the permission of the Israeli military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Order
Let that sink in: if you're a Palestianian you can't go to the bank and take out your own money without permission of the Israeli military.
Another military order allows the Israeli military to seize your business if you don't open during regular business hours.
Those decrees also allow Jews to "buy" (seize) land from Palestinians who refuse to sell to them, merely by asserting "power of attorney"
Not having snipers executing children. Not conducting missile and gun attacks on ambulances and independent worldwide-recognized medical aid organizations, and then attacking rescuers who show up to render aid. Not slaughtering an entire hospital's worth of patients and burying them in mass graves. Not slaughtering people lined up to get food aid. Not purposefully starving millions of people.
Not using a black-box AI to decide who is a "terrorist" and then blowing up their entire house, thus killing not only the supposed terrorist, but the entire family, or possibly the neighbor - because a "smart" bomb would be too expensive.
An UN agreement is still the highest rank of agreements for whether a state exists.
UN is shock-full of anti-Israeli militants, so it is also unsurprising that Israel doesn’t respect all of it.
> Let that sink in: if you're a Palestianian you can't go to the bank and take out your own money without permission of the Israeli military.
Is this money used for the war against Israel? If yes, it can be legitimately seized. If Palestinians didn’t swear the death of Israel, that would be another story.
Both parties wage a war to death. If Israel gets feable, it gets genocide.
The only way out is peace, but you are actively arguing for the entire eradication of Israel, with the entire weight of the Western Civilization behind you, so… oh man that doesn’t help at all.
> Not having snipers executing children
Depends what the children are doing. Without context, it seems horrible, and yet every time we’re filled in on the context that was conveniently forgotten by “journalists” (who are a certain socio demographic of Western youths, surprisingly), then we notice there’s more to it than “Israel kills blindly”.
If Israel killed blindly, they wouldn’t take so many precautions.
And the funny thing is, I’m not even pro-Israel. I’m just here to show the balance that you have forgotten.
Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us. And please don't include previously warring peoples whose leaders agreed on a population exchange and imposed that mandatory trauma on their own people.
Palestine, Cyprus, and India had the unenviable luck of being long-term victims of a last gasp British empire's farewell divide-and-conquer gambit.
(and excuse me for ignoring the deflection trolling)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Greeks_from_Istan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_of_Turks_from_Bulgaria_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istrian%E2%80%93Dalmatian_exod...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_expulsion_of_Italians_fro...
It was quite common and very accepted method in the 1940s, hell, expelling 15 million germans, some living there for hundreds of years, was proposed by Churchill.
The reason you never heard about the rest of these is because the people were resettled, not kept in a state of permanent inheritable refugee state financed by the UN with financial incentives to be kept that way.
(proceeds to list examples of countries which were already founded before the ethnic cleansing events they mention or events I already alluded to)
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to list Libyans expelling italians as a comparable example, when Libya was a colony of Italy. Ditto Germans, a people of belonging to the aggressor country. Bulgaria declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. And you have to explain why you included the pakistan link, as I already mentioned it in my post.
The idea that people of different ethnicities live, unmixed, divided by neat borders of nation-states is pretty recent. This was the case neither in Europe, nor in Middle East for a very long time before the advent of state-based nationalism in the 19th century. It was quite normal for people of different ethnicities, languages, and even faiths to live intermixed in certain regions, especially areas of intense trade, which the entire Mediterranean coast used to be. Borders were more about economic and political control than ethnic identity.
(The ethnic unity purportedly achieved by nation-states formed in 19th and early 20th centuries is also often more by fiat: look at the variety of German or Italian languages prior to unification of Germany or Italy, for instance, to say nothing about India.)
Most germans were living in their respected newly founded Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia for hundreds of years if not more when expelled.
Italians, even if they were colonialists, were expelled from their homes, by people who previously have been colonialists themselves, some when arriving with the arab conquests.
Bulgaria expelled the turks in the 1950s, and the partition of india, forming pakistan and india, were two newly formed countries around the time of israel and palestine, included ethnic cleansing from both sides
Do you think that these examples of ethnic cleansing post ww2 are irrelevant when no new country was formed?
Violent conflicts between Jewish settlers and local Arab populations have started long before that, pretty much as soon as the initial settlement began in the 19th century. Nor was it some kind of isolated incidents - Jabotinsky wrote https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot in 1923, and he wasn't alone in such views:
> 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 in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."
You seem to quote him to prove the Palestinians had no choice but to do what the laws of history has ordained for them. But even though you don't quote the extreme or moderate Palestinians of the time, there were both views and as humans capable of agency they had a choice, and they repeatedly chose war until they had created a Jewish force much more capable than they were
Regarding court, there is a very valid defense in court called selective enforcement, and this is exactly for situations when someone is scape goated
I think it makes a lot of sense to be more incensed about the genocide in Palestine vs. the Myanmar civil war if you're an American citizen. Americans are struggling and the government is sending billions of our tax dollars to war criminals overseas.
There's a reason that your example includes mass civilian executions, rapes, ethnic cleansing and burning villages, largely hamas' tactics, rather than precision bombs and evacuation calls in different channels.
Because Israeli tactics are extremely counterproductive for a genocide. There's reasons why genocide is usually done by concentrating populations rather than dispersing, and why aerial bombing can't be used, as victims would flee, or why the victims aren't forewarned..
It seems this entire popular argument rests solely on propaganda and redefining words without any shred of critical thinking
What's going on now IS a genocide and it's not being done by bombs but by starvation, which tracks exactly with what you said about "concentrating" people.
Regarding the "State founded on ethnic cleaning", in recent times this includes entire South America, parts of Africa, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Other examples from the late 1940s when Israel was founded is Pakistan, India, Greece, Turkey and Germany. Apart for it, as well as countless other examples from history, including the colonization of Judea/Palestine by the Arabs.
The "founded on ethnic cleansing" is not the most important bit from the previous post. It's the "ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since" that's important.
While the Palestinian population in Israel proper is around 25% with full rights, while those under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have rights in their respective political entity.
Again there are other examples of countries where the population lost all rights and were expelled like germans in czechoslovakia and poland or greeks from turkey
That's simply not true. It's very obviously not true. Are you denying that Māoris and Native Americans exist today? I cannot phantom why you would say such obvious nonsense.
I no longer believe you are engaging in good faith. Good day.
People don't leave their homes voluntarily. They leave because of violence or fear of violence. The fact is there were Palestinians living all over the map at the "before" stage. Settlers came to form an ethno-state. The orders given to the Zionist militia commanders were literally "cleanse" this or that village. In the "after" stage, all these people are gone from most of the map and the ones trying to return to their homes are shot dead.
That is ethnic cleansing period. The goal was to create an ethno-state in a place where people already lived. These people have been getting confined to smaller and smaller areas ever since. And the oppression continues to this day.
> Regarding the "State founded on ethnic cleaning", in recent times this includes entire South America, parts of Africa, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
So what? What's your point?
Zionists like most national movement of the same time goal was to form an ethnostate, just like the palestinian national movement goal was to form an ethnostate, or the czech, polish, ukraine, etc that's pretty obvious
> People don't leave their homes voluntarily
People flee war torn zones, that's not the same thing as ethnic cleansing.
> The orders given to the Zionist militia commanders were literally to "cleanse" that village
Yes, that happened, that doesn't change the fact that most of the population fled on their own accord, that a very sizeable part of the palestinian population remains in Israel to this day, and that the Palestinians were trying to cleanse the Israel population as well (and were successful in a few instances)
> So what? what's your point?
My point is that the horrors you cite are nothing compared to what your very own country was founded on (and that's an educated guess on where you are from, or all countries of the world founding story really)
Well the same applies to the Mizrahi Jews who fled Arab countries to Israel.
The Arab countries then seized their properties, which are estimated to add up to multiple times the size of Israel itself.
So on the larger ledger of who owes who reparations, the Arab states clearly owe Israelis more than the other way around.
Have you been to Hebron? I'd highly encourage it because you will see literally the most vile state sponsored racists in the western world.
The ethnic cleansing is not as violent as the gazan genocide but it ought to make any person with a conscience sick to the stomach. You walk around looking up at the settlement guards (more of them than there are settlers) pointing guns at you from guard towers as the racist settlers living above literally throw trash down on the Palestinian untermensch living below them.
Every year they squeeze Palestinians who live and work there further and further out.
It's also the home of the venerated terrorist Baruch Goldstein (10% of Israelis consider him a hero because he shot up a mosque), his shrine and Itamir ben Gvir - the national security minister who idolized him.
After seeing that place I became convinced that if anywhere was going to commit a nazi style genocide it would be israel. 8 years later thats exactly what happened.
Including a sizeable Jewish minority.
The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region. But it’s a continuation of outsiders (in particular Westerners, though the Iranians also bought this settler-colonialist nonsense which led to their recent miscalculations) with no connection to the land drawing up broad moral claims for how the Middle East should be divided up.
There was a Jewish community in Palestine (mostly centered around Jerusalem) but they did not come up with the Zionist project. Actually, many were opposed and some of their descendants still do so to this day.
> The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region
The (European) architects of the Zionist project literally called it colonialism.
"You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial." -Theodor Herzl
Ze'ev Jabotinsky literally compared the Zionist project to other colonial projects when arguing the people living there would fight back against their colonizers and the need for numbers and strength to counter them.
The Jewish connection to Israel or Zion is fundamental. It is part of Jewish identity. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion
"The Jewish longing for Zion, starting with the deportation and enslavement of Jews during the Babylonian captivity, was adopted as a metaphor by Christian black slaves in the United States.[citation needed][year needed] Thus, Zion symbolizes a longing by wandering peoples for a safe homeland. This could be an actual place such as Ethiopia for Rastafari or Israel for the Jews. Rastafari, while not identifying as "Jews", identify themselves and Africa as Zion. Specifically, Ethiopia is acknowledged as the mountains of Zion. Further, Rastafari ontology views all Africans as God's Chosen People. This differs from Judaic narratives.[22]"
We also shouldn't forget pre 1948 proportions of Arabs vs. Jews was partly a result of ethnic cleansing of Jews from the area. Hebron, Jerusalem, Gaza, Safed and others used to have a lot more Jewish people:
https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/pogroms-in-palestine-befor...
The other thing we shouldn't forget is the ethnic cleansing of Jewish people from the rest of the middle east, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria all used to have large Jewish communities. Not only were they mostly expelled under violence or the threat of violence, after lives under discrimination for centuries, they were also robbed of their land and possessions. Typical treatment of Jewish people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
Always good to remember that most Jews aren't religious crazies- although the crazies breed faster unfortunately.
I mean we know you guys run the media, control the money, run the US government, and fire space lasers from Mars. It's all fun and game until they burn your house and worse.
I'm also worried about Israel in many ways (re: ultra-orthodox ethno state) but if you think that living in Christian states or states of other ethnicity is somehow safer I'm not too sure about that. Even the European Jews that thought they were just Europeans found out they're not. And that story has repeated throughout history. To me a successful, democratic, moral, and Jewish, Israel is important part of the future of the Jewish people. And I'm not going to join the mob that wants it destroyed.
The Zionist Project is comparable to colonialism. That doesn’t make it settler-colonialism. (And Jabotinsky isn’t the final word on anything other than himself.)
… fuck I hate politics :(
"Outsiders" like the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association that funded Zionist settlement in Palestine? The problem with folks who try to claim that this is ahistorical is that contemporary Zionists talked all the time about colonizing Palestine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Jewish_Colonizatio...
Given how every group claims it is a holy place, I'd expect each group would want it held in a state of peace, prosperity, and reverence for the benefits of creation. Instead they all seem bent on holding their holy lands in states of violence, discord, and waste.
You're not wrong that there is deep external interference but wouldn't holy peoples rise above any of that to do better from every side?
I’m not. I’m arguing that one can oppose what’s happening in Gaza without careening into counterproductiveness and calling for the destruction of Israel.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/2025-06-27/ty-... (archive: https://archive.is/0qEg9)
One could blame this crackdown on Israel, sure. But that absolves the countries perpetuating persecution of Jews from their own share of responsibility in it. After all, when the American Government interned all those Japanese-Americans - did we blame Japan for it, or did we rightfully blame the American government?
I do not seek to defend Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, but to say that the Jews live "peacefully and with dignity" in places where they often are scapegoated, persecuted, and killed out of hand is not the way. Look at what happened to the Jewish populations of the region between the 40s and now, and you will see a grim picture of persecution, killings, and exodus.
" In July 2007, Iran's Jewish community rejected financial emigration incentives to leave Iran. Offers ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 British pounds, financed by a wealthy expatriate Jew with the support of the Israeli government, were turned down by Iran's Jewish leaders.[90][106][107] To place the incentives in perspective, the sums offered were up to 3 times or more than the average annual income for an Iranian.[108] However, in late 2007 at least forty Iranian Jews accepted financial incentives offered by Jewish charities for immigrating to Israel.[109]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bo...
You’re stating a supposition as a fact.
That's not my take from 2000 years of Jewish prosecution, in muslim countries or europe
Whatever else you think, this is some massive misunderstanding of history.
Historically, the lack of a state for Jews was one of the main reasons Jews experienced the Holocaust, which originated the term Genocide. Half of the Jewish population, making up (iirc) 90% of the population of Europe, died, because they had nowhere else to go.
And of the ones that survived, they still had nowhere else to go, no one wanted to take them in. The only place they could go, and what was agreed to worldwide, was to go to then-Palestine. Then, the hundreds of thousands of Jews "living peacefully" in Arab countries were ethnically cleansed from their countries, which they'd lived in for generations, and also largely had nowhere to go except Palestine.
Sort of irrelevant. The state of Israel exists. Israelis who call that land their home exist.
Those calling for the destruction of Israel are advocating for a holy war in the Levant. A war that would lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties.
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.” - Theodore Herzl , Father of Zionism in 1895.
"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]. I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." - David Ben Gurion, Father of Israel.
"the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. … Hitler – as odious as he is to us – has given this idea a good name in the world." - Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Founder of Revisionist Zionism, 1940.
Zionism is textbook settler-colonialism. I dont see it worth even arguing the point.
Isn't that just history repeating itself? Even in the old testament, they had to clear the current inhabitants of their promised land after wander the desert for 40 years.
Similarly Arabs colonized Palestine 1000 years ago and US colonized its lands 200-400 years ago. Why are you not raving against that? Why do you target only Jews?
You nicely sidestepped the case of US where Native people are still fighting for their rights and would be killed the same way if they try to perpetrate against Non-Native Americans the things like October 7.
Palestinians perpetrated October 7, Native Americans don't do such things, thus no surprise that the situation is different.
>Maybe because it happened 1000 years ago
So, how old it should be for you to dismiss an ethnic cleansing?
As horrible as the Israeli mindset is, their subjective viewpoint is at least somewhat relatable: An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead - and will with very high likelihood experience terror attacks themselves. That this upbringing doesn't exactly make you want to engage with the other side is psychologically understandable.
(I'm imaging this as the universal experience of all Jewish Israelis, religious or secular, left or right. I'm excluding the religious and Zionist-ideological angles here, because those are a whole different matter once again)
What I absolutely cannot understand is the behavior of our states. We're pretending to be neutral mediators who want nothing more than to end the conflict, yet in reality, we're doing everything to keep the conflict going. We're fully subscribed to Zionist narrative of an exclusive Israeli right to the land (the justifications ranging from ostensibly antifascist to openly religious) and we're even throwing our own values about universal human rights and national sovereignty under the bus to follow the narrative.
If the messianic and dehumanizing tendencies of Israelis are answered by nothing else than full support and encouragement of their allies, I don't find it exactly surprising that they will grow.
But yeah, in practice, we seem to want it to end with full Israeli dominance, and the Palestinians either emigrating to Egypt and Jordan or vanishing into thin air, I suppose.
As long as there are outside forces, such as Iran, willing to embed & fund militants among the Gazan population, the -only- practical solution towards peace is assimilation: have Gazans broken up & spread out through Israel until law enforcement can be practically achieved.
Now assimilation sucks & will likely result in all sorts of social injustice, but I consider it a better alternative to the current ethnic cleansing.
EDIT: @casspipe suggested the option of subsidized resettlement and I agree that is another option that should be explored.
In general, Arab states and Palestinian leadership argue that naturalizing refugees would undermine their right to return to their original homes. You can interpret this cynically: because many Arab states are not too friendly with Israel, having a massive class of refugees putting political pressure on them could be advantageous, and is probably one of the only ways to "defeat" Israel as a jewish state (because if all of those refugees had the right to live in Israel, jews might become a minority.) But it is true that removing refugee status without a just solution would erase Palestinian claims and rights under international law.
Seriously though, if you look back far enough, all land is stolen. I think it's more prudent to focus on the present day.
Why not?
While much smaller tragedies are used to justify forever war by Hamas against Israel.
Sure.
But if you go over to where a stranger lives and build a wall around them. You are responsible if they then starve to death.
If another stranger is delivering food to a different stranger and you kill the food deliverer. You are responsible for that mans death.
These analogies are much more relevant to the discussion. Isreal is disallowing people from delivering food and has even killed people that do (leading to organizations like word food kitchen to leave).
You do realize that a significant fraction of Israel's military budget comes from the US?
The Arab states seized properties from Mizrahi Jews fleeing to Israel decades ago, land that adds up to multiple times the size of Israel. They have plenty of space to resettle refugees without asking Israel to "buy" their own stolen land back!
The degree to which France and the UK have dodged the question of reparations in this debate is frankly surprising to me.
I agree that subsidized resettlement should be another option explored by middle east nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_insurgency_in_Sout...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinai_insurgency#Gaza_Strip_sp...
Still a dick move, but much less so than wiping out an entire group of people.
What exactly ARE the goals / demands of every side. Both what they say in public, and what's generally accepted as the rational real goals each side requests / demands / etc via peace talks as well as through violence.
The breakdown could even focus on factions within the nebulous term of 'sides'. An average citizen is likely to have looser criteria than a government / terrorist.
Israel stated goals of war:
1. Return the hostages
2. Remove Hamas regime from Gaza
3. (arguably done) bring north-Israel communities safely back home
Unstated goals:
1. Open Egypt-Gaza border. This had failed.
2. Create safe zone on the Gaza-Israeli border. This is mostly done in practice. This goal cannot be stated (though it'll save many lives)
Hamas goals:
Read Hamas chapter, or see interviews with captured Hamas militants post 7/10 attack (if you believe it's not scripted)
Gazan who are not part of Hamas regime goals: survive
If not a genocide, at the very least an ethnocide.
Next step: Riviera Gaza!
All those jew death camps in Gaza must be closed down, for sure.
All those Gaza tanks and those Gaza fighter jets must be taken down.
And don't forget the Gaza navy patrolling the sea, preventing the israelis from fishing for their subsistence.
Totally agree with you.
Now... back to reality...
There are a lot of atrocities being committed in this conflict. But bombing a school that was used as a missile launch site really isn’t one of them.
Mostly Israel due to a firepower disadvantage. But Hamas seems to be about as into committing war crimes as Netanyahu.
In terms of indifference to suffering, the people dying are in Gaza. Not Israel. Hamas should be suing for peace, not posturing because some fucks in Doha would prefer to punt the question. (Palestine unilaterally turning over its hostages would rob Israel of a tremendous amount of leverage.)
Also, the Germans sent untrained 15 year olds to fight Soviet tanks. That's as close to total battlefield defeat as has ever happened in history.
And no British person was pubished as war criminal for the war crime of attacking Dresden. :-(
I say this as someone whose family endured 6 years of Nazi German and Soviet crimes, including genocide, violence, rape, large scale looting and destruction of cultural heritage, and mass destruction of cities (85% of Warsaw alone was reduced to rubble, intentionally and systematically).
Why do I mention that? I mention that to underscore that just war is not utilitarian. You cannot justify Dresden or Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It doesn't mean you can't take strong measures, or that circumstances don't make a difference, only that the circumstances did not morally justify these acts. And it seems that the behavior of the Allies in Dresden and Hiroshima serve as precedent that is used to justify crimes like the leveling of Gaza and treating its civilians like cattle.
Half the cabinet of the current Israeli government has made public statements to the effect of wanting to starve everyone or kill all the kids.
We've seen the videos and, with !gt, we can read the translations.
There's a database tracking those: https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...
It found that 82% of Israelis want to expel Gazans, and 47% of support killing all Palestinians in Gaza.
Article was featured in Haaretz - linked to here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/poll-82-of-israelis-wan...
Let's not forget Israel's domestic orthodox/right-wing Jewish terrorism and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.
Ergo, there's even more incentive for leaders to continually espouse positions they know will never happen, but which play well at home.
As a violence in poli sci professor of mine once quipped, this is a 'the only solution is killing the grandmothers' conflict. Because generational narratives of victimization are so ingrained in large parts of both societies that there is no room for compromise.
Silence extremist voices forcefully, wait a generation, and then there might be a path to peace. :(
Maybe there are some parallels in this situation and late 1800’s-mid 1900’s Western Europe. The civil war on the European continent between Germanic states on one hand and French/British ended when two powerful outsiders (US and Soviet Russia) invaded and split the continent. During this occupation west Europeans nations learned how to live with themselves and to atone for their mistakes and to not repeat these mistakes. But they only learned this because they were under military occupation.
This scenario will most likely not happen in the Middle East and so I think there will not be peace there for generations.
As a colleague from Bahrain once quipped, 'the countries of the Arab world love to use Palestinians as propaganda for domestic purposes, but none of them actually give enough of a shit to make hard choices to solve the problem.'
The individual Gazans almost certainly have one in mind, likely some variant of the two state solution. But Hamas is in charge, and there is nobody else to talk to about it. Ordinary Gazans don't much like Hamas but they are the only thing standing between them and Israel, who as you know is attacking with impunity.
Israel's nominal goal is to remove Hamas and engage such a negotiation, though there is significant doubt that this tactic is going to lead there. And they know that.
Israelis are roughly equally divided on what they want. About half want to wipe out Gaza and have control of (but not responsibility for) the West Bank. They are the ones in government.
The other half is much more amenable to a two state solution, but they are extremely skeptical of finding it. Long before the October 7 attacks, Israelis routinely have to shelter from rocket attacks. We hear little about them because they are largely ineffective, but it does not give Israelis a lot of confidence in any kind of negotiated settlement. That side is also happy to have Gaza walled off.
And all of these sides are backed by powerful outside forces for whom the conflict itself is their goal.
That is an extremely high level breakdown, as neutral as I can be.
They also murdered the Gazan opposition after they were voted into power and have not really allowed voting since. They are pretty much not interested in increasing the situation for the people in Gaza. That's also why they are a terror organization.
No, the majority of the West strongly wants a two-state solution (on the 1967 border, roughly). So did many Israelis, who voted people into office intent on achieving that goal many times.
The problem is, Israel and Palestine never managed to sign an agreement leading to a two-state solution. And in parallel to the peace process, some Palestinians launched the second intifada, a terror campaign which killed many hundreds of Israelis. This eventually lead most Israelis to think that a two-state solution is impossible.
1. You call it "The Israeli PM who pushed for a two state solution" (referring to Rabin), but actually there were other PMs who were negotiating a two state solution with the Palestinians and were elected after - Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert (Ehud Olmert was ten years after the assasination of Rabin).
2. The PM the succeeded Rabin, Ariel Sharon, a long-time right-wing hawk, didn't negotiate with the Palestinians, but did shift Israeli policy to simply leaving the territory without a negotiated settlement. He's the one who pulled Israel out of Gaza, and by all counts, he was poised to do the same and leave the West Bank before he had a stroke.
Olmert, also a historic right-wing hawk, succeeded Sharon, and campaigned openly on the idea of starting to pull settlements out of the West Bank. And he won, with this campaign.
Olmert, btw, to this day is a big peace-advocate, working together with Palestinian partners on trying to bring about a two-state solution. He's also a big critic of the current Israeli government (and famously wrote a piece saying that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza).
3. Funny enough, another way in which you're technically wrong is that Rabin himself didn't directly advocate for a two-state solution, at least not officially. That was probably his direction, but both Barak and Olmert went much further than him in what they were offering the Palestinian leadership in terms of a deal.
Bonus 4th point: Worth mentioning that calling the person who assassinated Rabin a "right wing Israeli" is pretty wrong too. He was a member of a very extremist right-wing group that did not and does not have any broad support in Israel, as opposed to standard "right wing" positions which do have broad support.
I don't like the prospect of hospitals being attacked, but if Hamas houses combatants or arms inside a hospital, attacking Hamas therein does not appear to be a war crime, provided Israel has issued a warning and allowed a reasonable time for Hamas to vacate the hospital.
And you know what? You can document the torture, sexual assault and murder of innocent prisoners without getting a proper investigation from the ICC. Many US citizens will remember that from Abu Ghraib! Lord only knows how much the CIA is shielding Israel from the fallout of SAVAK. You might as well drop the moralizing pretenses and admit that you don't think a fair trial would be desirable.
Let's say in order to return the hostages (considered popular amongst the Zionists).
Now what is the practical way to execute the war without the abovementioned consequences?
However, war crimes are not a solution.
As far as I'm aware, the citizens of Israel are free to leave that country* (free to enter another country is another issue, but they're also free to move about). It's terrorism and illegal military action to knowingly fire upon civilians. I agree with that for all sides of a conflict. The issue with the other side(s) in this conflict is that they do not present as a clearly identified military force. IMO the most proper solution is the same as evaporatively purifying water. Issue sufficient (<< heavy lifting here) warnings for civilians to leave an area, with an area for them to move to. Then any who remain in the military action area are combatants. Probably just like in the anime episode that showcases this circumstance. (war is hell, that's one of the hells.)
>> In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/world/middleeast/israel-h...
The very existence of guidance change on civilian casualties should constitute a war crime, because to put it another way, the IDF decided that Palestinian civilian lives were worth less after the terror attacks.
In other metrics, the October attacks killed 1,200 Israelis, plus 1,700 killed in the war. Versus 50,000+ Palestinian fatalities.
So we're at ~1:17 Israeli: Palestinian killed.
I feel like any human can agree there should be an ethical ceiling to that number. Maybe it's lower or higher than the current number, but it being unlimited is genocide.
Surely a change in tactics by Hamas could lead to a legitimate reason to change the proportion of civilian risks.
Imagine if Hamas were scrupulously avoiding all civilians and civilian structures by 200 meters before date X and changed tactics on date X to freely intermingle with civilians and occupy civilian structures with military units and arms.
I'd expect before date X for Israel to have minimal civilian casualties be considered acceptable and proportional, but after that change in tactics I would see justification for a change in the math to justify a higher figure as being the lowest reasonable amount of civilian risk.
Furthermore, even if Israel has a justification for large numbers of civilian casualties, there are other portions of the Geneva Convention it's obviously breaching:
>> ART. 53. — Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or co-operative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.
>> ART. 55. — To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.
>> ART. 56. — To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the co-operation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
One is that Hamas governs Gaza and Israel is not occupying Gaza via a sustained and continuous military control of the territory and population, but rather has intermittent military operations and is otherwise more akin to an embargo. (The US was not "occupying Cuba" at the height of the Cuban embargo, for example.)
The other is that Israel is occupying Gaza, notwithstanding Hamas' claim to be independently governing the territory and the lack of continuous occupying military forces holding territory on the ground.
Whether Israel or Hamas has effective control over the territory and its population does not appear to me to have a bright-line/clear-cut answer. I don't think either side has less than 10% control, but I don't think they have more than 90% control either.
Iff they are an Occupying Power, then they have those obligations. Many of those obligations presume an effective control by an on-the-ground occupying force.
Israel certainly has the military capability to control aid, ergo they have the responsibility to facilitate it.
Ergo, the majority of those casualties could be attributed to military:military.
Given the nature of the Gaza conflict, trying to sub-classify casualties leads inevitably to the 'military aged male' problem.
Civilian casualty ratios are more relevant to ethics, but we don't know that number since Hamas doesn't report their losses.
When one military force blends in with the civilian populace, actual civilian casualties will fall somewhere inbetween extremes (100% of those killed and 0%).
Ergo, excessive casualty ratios indicate that either (a) the enemy military force is larger, (b) the IDF is exceedingly good at killing only enemy combatants without taking casualties, or (c) a large number of civilians are being killed.
I don't think anyone would argue that Hamas has as many fighters as the IDF?
When Hamas fighters repeatedly, strategically, and intentionally fail to do so, I think they bear significant (and even the majority) responsibility for the resulting increase in what you call "actual civilian casualties".
Just because the enemy is harder to find doesn't give blanket license to level apartment blocks because it's easier.
You've earned it.
And also, killing mostly "military aged males" is not a clean tactic as you think it is not to mention that it doesn't justify killing a lot of women and children as collateral.
Do I call it sexist? Stereotyping? What? It entirely denies the existence of males as anything other than enemies, and these are still children we’re talking about.
This argument betrays your bias: that the land is yours (Jewish I mean), and "Arabs" stole it and want to steal it again.
Of course, the other side sees it differently. They see a half a century of immigration to their land culminating in a partition that was imposed from the outside in Western colonialist fashion without the consent of the people living there. They saw massacres and expulsions and ethnic cleansing. That is the root of the conflict.
Of course now 80 years and many complications have passed; both sides have legitimate complaints about the other and many people have been born in both territories making them natives and not part of either colonisation or expulsion. It's difficult.
> All of the death toll coming out of Gaza are from Hamas and they revised the numbers back in April to show 72% of the deaths are military aged males.
This betrays it even more. Not only do you cite a non-credible source going against the consensus, but your argument is literally "Palestinian males between 16 and 45 are fair game for extermination". Not sure what to reply to that.
Pro-Palestinian commenters usually start with the Balfour Declaration or Theodor Herzl's books, I believe.
I found 1881/1882 a good starting point, because this was the first time there was organized immigration that explicitly followed Zionist plans and ideology - I.e. people were not abstractly thinking about "returning to Jerusalem" and they weren't immigrating into the Ottoman empire for other reasons, but they were deliberately immigrating with the intention of (re-)establishing a "Jewish homeland" in the biblical Land of Israel.
in this sense Jews are in a much better position because their presence in specifically that area many hundreds of years before Muslim conquest is archeologically documented. Unlike presence of Europeans in Americas or Australia.
What I say does not justify war atrocities. Just that "you are wrong to call it your land" is not a good working logic
Maybe somebody would if they could? Or how about not kicked out but just made subordinate to government by native original owners, how would you like that?
I guess somebody else can say but Americans developed land, built infrastructure and democracy and did good more. But then the same can be said about Israel. And unlike Americans Jews did not invade somewhere new because they were there in BC era
I don't defend bad stuff done by Israel gov but I suggest condemning specifically bad stuff instead of suggesting "bias" that you did. It's a bit more complicated.
Anti-terrorism rhetorics has indeed previously led to terrible crimes, but I wouldn't suppose that's a reason to support pro-terrorism rhetorics. It's probably best to look at the content instead of the type of rhetorics.
And if we're talking about terrorism, IDF and Mossad are very much known to deploy terror tactics across a lot of their historical engagements. The definition of the word doesn't hinge on designation by a Western organization. And the vast majority of "pro-palestine" people in the world are not Iran proxies and secret anti-semites. They're actually, for the most part, young people that are working from a place of empathy and horror. The most blatant and harmful propganda in this whole mess is the attempt to designate pro-palestine protestors anti-semites and secretly in support of Iran and Hamas policies. What a terrible cheapening of the word. Point is, the ones using the most pro-terror rhetoric are those trying to defend the IDF right now.
Propaganda? I am not very familiar with the details and frankly I don’t really care, but at the two pro-Palestinian rallies that I saw were used "From the river to the sea" slogans, and like all protesters were okay with that.
To Zionists, Zionism means that Jews have the right to have a homeland, free of persecution. To non-Zionists, it means that Zionists think that they have the right to a specific area of land (Israel) and that that land is their god-given right, and that they are free to use violence to obtain it. To a secular person, the idea of someone having a "god-given" right to a piece of land is insanity.
"From the river to the sea" has been used to mean "Palestinians will be free everywhere" and also "the Jews that are violently occupying Palestine will be killed from the river to the sea".
I can't speak for specific protestors you encountered, but the majority of people I know that are anti-Israel don't want "all Jews to die" or even any of them. They just want the genocide to stop, for people to stop dying. It's really that simple. Protestors are protesting violence.
I respect that very much, but I think that the problem is exactly that it _isn't_ that simple. If they don't want any of the Jews to die, they should be saying also, alongside "stop the war", how can it be assured that Jews won't die later.
Stopping genocide shouldn't require first providing some solution to Israel's existential anxiety. Israel should simply stop doing a genocide, right now.
Opposing genocide is not supporting terrorism. Labelling support for basic human rights as being pro-terrorism is, well, part of the genocide.
The parent comment was dismissing anti-terrorism rhetorics because previously they were used to committing crimes. That sounds illogical to me, and that's what I was commenting on.
Jews have disproportionate levels of soft power in the US. Israel receives billions in support every year. Anti Muslim propaganda is pushed out every year in Hollywood. The medias coverage of Gaza is essentially one big lie by omission. Many states pass laws aimed to deter criticism of Israel.
I don’t see any other group in America that receives this level of support.
I'm not an expert on US politics and the reasoning for why the US supports Israel. I do however think that it's sensible to see Israel, with its relatively free elections, women rights, entrepreneurship etc as a more natural ally to the US than other countries in the Middle East, regardless of the "soft-power" you're referring to. The fact that some of its enemies also threaten the US probably plays a role too.
This "entirety of the surrounding population want them dead" language is both dehumanizing, false, and (perhaps not intended by you) genocidal.
The "surrounding population" is not a monolith. I imagine only a very small minority of people want all Jewish Israelis dead. I do Palestinian liberation work with many non-Jewish people from the middle east (I'm Jewish) and have yet to meet a single one who wants me dead.
They all want an end to Zionism.
Some may want it replaced with an Islamic government (which at its best is not different from the ideal "Zionism" you may hear defended by liberal Zionists, and at its worst is no different from the Zionism instituted by the modern state of Israel today)
Most want it replaced with a secular state where everyone has equal rights.
If your intent was to explain the mindset of an "ordinary Israeli citizen" who supports Zionism, then I agree with you, but it's dangerous to say something like this without distinguishing why this is a flawed mindset which can only exist due to an extensive system of propaganda.
I believe that this is true of most of the people you've worked with. However, polling in the West Bank and Gaza finds that to be a fairly unpopular position. Quoting https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/what-do-... :
> These numbers are not the same as popular support for a single state “from the river to the sea” with equal rights accorded to Arab and Jewish citizens, as in recent international proposals. In 2020 polls, only about 10 percent of West Bank and Gazan respondents favored this option over either a Palestinian state or two states. Notably, a theological premise underpins the one-state preference: A majority of the Palestinian respondents believe that “eventually, the Palestinians will control almost all of Palestine, because God is on their side”—that is, not because Palestinian control will flow from demographic changes or from a joint arrangement with Israel.
I agree with you that it's not accurate to say that the entirety of Jordan or Egypt want Israelis dead. However, if we're trading anecdote for anecdote: I know someone who grew up in Saudi, and he told me that when he was growing up it was completely normal to insult someone by calling them a jew (especially someone you perceive as being stingy, scammy, or reneging on a deal). He said it was so normalized that when he came to North America, he had an awkward adjustment period before he realized that was considered unacceptable here.
Now, there's a big difference between calling someone a jew as an insult and wanting all jews dead, but I have no trouble believing that antisemitism is very common within the middle east. Don't forget that it wasn't so long ago that there was a mass exodus of jews from the Middle East and North Africa to Israel, which can only be explained by some degree of "push factor" pushing them away from those countries. So while "wants them dead" is probably an exaggeration, you have to empathize a bit with the fact that almost every other middle eastern country was quite hostile towards jews in the past 100 years, and there's not an especially good guarantee that they would not be hostile again.
Late response on my part, but it sounds like we're mostly in agreement.
I will add that I think what people would accept is different from what they will tell interviewers they want.
I agree that there will be antisemitism everywhere, and as a Jewish person doing organizing work with Jewish groups, there will certainly selection/sampling bias among the Palestinians I interact with.
I'll also say that the prejudice of the oppressed shouldn't be seen the same as the prejudice of the oppressor.
If a slave in the U.S. in 1840 believed white people were inherently incapable of empathy, I imagine that the only people focusing on their "anti-white racism" would be doing so to defend the status quo of slavery.
When Palestinians living under occupation talk about "Jews" it's likely that the only interactions they've had with Jewish people were with IDF soldiers enforcing their occupation, perhaps shooting at them during peaceful protests, killing their friends, their family members, and so on.
The focus should be on liberation, even if people with problematic beliefs are among the oppressed.
Even if it's the case that most people in Gaza and/or in the West Bank are antisemitic (and even if it was the case that most of them "wanted all Jews dead", which I think is a gross mischaracterization of the situation) that doesn't mean they would turn down a justice-oriented plan which would allow them to participate with full equality under the political systems that dictates their freedoms.
I understand the circumstances that lead Palestinians to be antisemitic. That said fair, the person you responded to said this:
> the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead
I admit that it's a ridiculously hyperbolic comment, but most of Israel's surrounding countries do have an environment that's extremely inhospitable to jews and that can't really be attributed to Israel oppressing them all. They were ethnically cleansed from nearly every other country in the middle east - I think that just as we can understand why Palestinians ended up antisemitic, we can understand why jews in Israel ended up being uncomfortable with the idea of Israel not being an explicitly jewish state. Two wrongs don't make a right, but to make any progress towards a single state solution with equal rights for everyone, Israelis will need to be convinced that it won't result in a "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner" situation.
I understand that you are talking about the recent era, but I wonder if you could speak to the history of the creation of Israel. Is there any discussion about the European role in the creation of Israel? After the end of the war, it isn’t as if there was a movement to return property and a place to live to European Jews. If anything, the powers in Europe after the war (and, in the case of Eichman, pre war as well) saw Zionism as a solution for what to do with the Jews.
Is there any sympathy or responsibility felt in European communities for essentially using Zionism as a solution?
If we did an honest accounting of who stole land from whom and calculated reparations, Israelis would be owed far more than they owe.
Sometimes discussion goes back a bit further about how the area was a "League of Nations Mandatory Area" before, that was for some reason was administered by the British.
That's usually it.
An interesting detail is that the legitimacy of Israel here is usually explained with the UN (the Partition Plan resolutions and the accepted membership) - not with any kind of divine right. I think that's quite different from how (right wing) Israelis see the source of legitimacy themselves.
I was basically getting at how does Europe see its role in the fact that a big part of what made Israel possible was the more or less complete displacement of European jewry during the war, and the complete lack of will to create a place in post-war europe for their own Jewish community.
This perspective comes from my own family history where a few relatives managed to survive the war in Nazi custody, but then spent longer in Western European refugee camps postwar than they spent in the concentration and death camps during the war. The entire family ended up outside of Europe (USA and Israel) since it was the most viable path out of the camps.
Basically the success of Zionism is due in no small part to the active support from Europe in the years after the war, and my question is, do Europeans see that in as self-interested terms as it can look. More succinctly, does the Western European community realize that creating Israel was a solution to the post-war "Jewish Problem" that conveniently did not require those nations to create a hospitable place for jewish communities within their own borders.
The Arab states clearly owe Israelis more reparations than the other way around.
Do you have some life experience you would be willing to share that could help me understand why my desire to help people in the ways that I can elicits such a response?
I would like to understand.
Now you are saying that I offered something that wasn’t mine to give. And that I should be condemned for it. I promise you, my living room is mine, and it is open to those who need it.
I really feel that you are not understanding me (hopefully), or that alternatively you are misinterpreting my words intentionally.
I didn’t volunteer anyone else’s home. I volunteered mine.
I’m not talking about moving an entire continents worth of genocide survivors to occupied land that I don’t control because I wasn’t asked about that. I wasn’t asked about what o would do if those people set up a system that perpetuated a new human tragedy. That seems to be what you want to engage on, but I haven’t said anything about that, I have only had related statements extended in ways that simply do not represent me or anything I have said to you.
I wanted to have an honest and open discussion, but that doesn’t seem to align with your actions and words. The world is better when we assume good intent instead of ill (it’s the only reason I keep engaging with you to be honest). If you want to do that, please engage with the words I have spoken, not the words or intent I haven’t expressed. Alternatively, if you want to keep attributing to me things I haven’t said and breaking the rules of discourse for HN, please stop.
That was certainly the topic of discussion.
I can't really say.
From what I see here, there is not a lot of discussion in that area. (That was the first time I heard about those refugee camps, but that may just be me)
From what I understand, the discussion for a long time was more about whether Jews would even want to come back to.Germany, after all the other Germans did to them.
German reflection on the Nazi period also happened in multiple stages. From what I know, the initial phase, right after the war, was quite inadequate. Yes, there were the Nuremberg Trials, but both Allies and Germans were interested in quickly getting back to some kind of "normal" and rebuilding the country - the US and the Soviets in particular in preparation for the imminent conflict between them. So a lot of Nazi personnel stayed in office.
I believe, support of Israel in that time was seen as a sort of reparation that conveniently made it unnecessary to engage with the Nazi past on a deeper level. (I did wonder when learning more about the conflict recently, why the Allies didn't designate some are inside former Germany as a Jewish state - let's say the Rhineland. That would have been entirely justified IMO. But of course the question of Israel was already settled at that time.)
There was a sort of "second stage" a generation later, during the Civil Rights movement, where students forced a revisit of the Nazi past. I believe, a lot of the currently known details of the Holocaust are coming from that phase. But I think they didn't say a lot about Israel and just saw it as an emancipatory, left-wing project.
Today, people here are enormously proud that Jewish communities exist again in Germany, though it's understood that it's still a lot less than before the war.
It would be an interesting question how the sentiment of German leadership towards Jews was in the 50s and 60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_pos...
From a recent review in the LRB of a book (Lost Souls) about those camps and their inhabitants. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n10/susan-pedersen/owner...
Europeans were eager to see Jews gone, one way or another. “Pogroms and hatred” sounds pretty violent.
In early 2024, I was chatting with a German colleague of mine. Great guy, politically we were the most aligned out of anyone in our team. The genocide in Gaza was already well under way, so the topic came up. He told me, as if it was incredibly obvious "Well of course as Germany we couldn't possibly say anything about Gaza, given our history." For the rest of my life I will remember exactly that moment, where we were stood, the scene, because it came as a shock; this belief that I'd had since childhood turned out to be entirely wrong. It was the exact opposite - Germany had learnt nothing, in fact they'd learnt even less than the countries they had occupied. It was all a complete ruse, and I really lost all respect I had for how Germany has dealt with it all. A country like Japan at least doesn't even pretend to have learnt anything, and I'm not convinced that's the worse option.
I should've known the second news started flowing out of Germany such as "Award ceremony set to honor novel by Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled “due to the war in Israel,", along with stuff like designating B.D.S as "antisemitic" but I wanted to believe that was just a tiny minority of ignorant people.
Yes, I know that now "the narrative inside Germany has been turning around" but imo it's far too late, and can't possibly be sincere, being entirely fuelled by external pressure rather than any kind of actual realization.
Fully agreeing with your post - and also, it's not. Maybe for parts of the population (though even there, many are extremely conflicted) but definitely not for the current (conservative) leadership. What worries them is that they find the country increasingly isolated and there is a growing risk they could become personally liable - this forces them to make some concerned noises if the atrocities become undeniable.
But they never stopped practically supporting Israel wherever they can, be it with military aid or preventing EU actions that might put pressure on it. They will also snap back into the unequivocally pro-Israel narrative as soon as they can get away with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre_denial https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gb94m1/why_...
I was under the impression that Japanese people don't so much deny war crimes, as they just don't talk/learn about the uglier parts of what happened during the first half of the 20th century. Is the Rape of Nanking a well known event in Japan? Are the significant battles and general tactics of the war(s) talked about? Do they talk about the Japanese Army's general treatment of foreign civilians?
I guess, what I'm wondering is if I asked the average person on the street these questions, would they know at all what I'm talking about? Would they have the knowledge to talk about it in more detail?
Is this like in the US where most people have no idea about American intervention in Cuba, and the rest of the meddling that the US was involved in in Latin America?
They would, yes, but mostly because South Korea won’t shut up about it nearly a century and several ‘final’ sets of reparations later. It seems to be about as popular a political crutch in SK as it is to kill Palestinians in Israel.
I don’t know. It is about as relevant to current Japanese as the Dutch colonial past is to me. I’m sure we did plenty of bad stuff, but feeling remorse for it now is just bizarre. People several generations before me committed those crimes.
It isn't that long ago.
There are still women alive who were used as sex slaves by the Japanese Army. I can see why their (SK) government is unwilling to let the issue be forgotten. Paying reparations does not mean that you can now forget the attrocity. Should the US not teach about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it was our grandfathers who did it, and we feel like we have made it up by rebuilding Japan? Should we tell the Hibakusha that its time for them to shut-up, and there is no point in talking about what happened since the people who made those attacks are all dead?
The point of this knowledge, at least in the west, isn't to make you feel badly, or remorseful. The point is to remember that there are monsters lurking beneath the surface, even in the modern era. The Banality of Evil (the book) is about demonstrating that even a mediocre, non-fanatical, reluctant Nazi bureaucrat like Eichmann can be a pivotal figure in a genocide. We remember so that we don't repeat. Should we not learn from experiences?
If it’s before my lifetime it’s not something I’m going to feel responsible for.
I completely agree we should ‘learn’ from history. Even teach what happened in school, but we shouldn’t harp on it forever, or manufacture grudges based on it.
At least, not in the way that’s currently happening in Japan anyway. The crux of the issue seems to be they don’t think people that were never involved aren’t sorry enough.
Also if you care about national interest, it would be counterproductive to "shut up" or forget about past failures for an ego boost. That would make the country detached from reality, isolated from the rest of the world, and prone to the same failures.
Last but not least, it's very insensitive and inconsiderate of you to label South Korean trauma as a mere "political crutch" or the Dutch colonial past as no longer "relevant." Historical injustices can carry on to today's injustices much more than you think. You should try to see the perspective from the other side more before dismissing these things.
It's true that the far right, disproportionately loud in online circles, tries to downplay all of this like in the sibling comment. It's concerning how social media amplifies these voices, but it's still not mainstream opinion.
Japan obviously learn nothing.
The United States - who made the constitution that banned the military - does exercises with and supports the JDF. Idk if that fits unconstitutional anymore.
Their denial of horrid events and their attempts to suppress the fact that comfort women happened is undeniably awful though and shows many did not learn.
Germany has indeed still have a ‘vaccination’. How well it works, and whether it is not exploited by politics, is another matter.
Lastly, the conflict in the Middle East is one of the most complex conflicts in recent human history - and there is no easy way out. That also applies to the situation in Gaza.
The late Michael Brooks shared a small thought experiment that might help elucidate this: https://youtu.be/7ebPj_FqM5Q
Usually when people call something complex they mean that the solution is complex.
The idea that the injustice & domination should continue because there is no clear cut solution is pure evil.
Imagine saying that South African apartheid needs to be maintained because there is no “simple” solution, or that African colonies must continue to be subjugated because the solution to the settler problem is not “simple”.
Regardless, the solution here has been regurgitated endlessly: end the blockade of Gaza, end apartheid in the West Bank, either as one state with equal rights for all, or as two states (with full sovereignty) and right of return extended to all Palestinians and not just to Jews.
It’s prioritisation. There are multiple horrible civil wars, rebellions and displacements happening around the world right now. Every person doesn’t need to have a position on each one; there is an argument that’s counterproductive. (Exhibit A: the Columbia protests.)
Fewer than you’d think [1]. (We send aid to Sudan and are practically uninvolved in Myanmar.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_confli...
So it makes sense that there would be more attention and pushback on this one versus others.
(It’s interesting because it requires disentangling anti-American sentiments from the equation.)
Just because I can’t do anything to improve the situation does not mean that I am in favour of the status quo. That does not make me evil either.
How do you think apartheid South Africa ended? How does any country pressure another?
In a supposedly democratic nation like Germany, how would citizens pressure their government to stop supporting & providing diplomatic cover for another to commit a genocide & maintain apartheid?
It does. The Germans who stood aside when the Nazis rose to power and the soldiers just "executing orders" were as much to blame for the rise of Hitler as the ones supporting it. Not taking a side against evil is taking evil's side. And you of all peoples should have learned from your history. Genocide is bad.
> How does Germany end apartheid in the West Bank?
By applying pressure on the international community to boycott Israel. Same way Germany is applying pressure on the international community to boycott Russia.
Those lands were the property of Jordan and Egypt...
Instead, please make your substantive points thoughtfully, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
I don’t see any rules against profanity in general, or the use of profanity to respond to an argument. I also took the time to clarify why the argument is “bullshit”. But maybe I am missing something.
"You can try all you want to erase [etc.]" is a form of personal attack. You don't need that.
A friend of mine even ended up talking to a German diplomat in Israel, who said much the same thing: they could cosign other nations' condemnations of Israeli actions when they happened, but they couldn't condemn Israeli actions unilaterally. Obviously that was just his opinion and not an official viewpoint of the German government, but I found it fascinating that Germany still felt this sense of needing to make things right to Israel specifically.
Further, they’re going to lengths no other European country is going to in pursuit of this goal of covering for a genocide, all out of national guilt? It is a delusional position to take.
Now, if they actually were holding their tongue on this instead of providing unconditional support and cover, no one would be bringing up that these are the grandchildren of Nazis lecturing us about the right thing to do here :)
What a bad take. Germany, if it learned its lessons from the Holocaust, which was a genocide they did on the Jewish population, is absolutely the FIRST country in the world to teach Israel that what it's doing is absolutely abhorrent. Don't repeat my mistakes, so to say.
It clearly did not, because it is actively supporting a genocide right now.
Anyhow, I can’t be bothered to spend too much time expanding on this position - so you’ll have to either get it or not. I don’t care either way tbh.
If they want to support a genocide - regardless of who the perpetrator is - then they’re tacitly admitting that they have learnt nothing and are just following in the footsteps of their Third Reich forefathers.
At least the Japanese didn’t drown us with hypocritical bullshit about guilt and repentance.
Yes, because they haven't learned shit from their past.
There's 8 billion people in the world who aren't German. If there's one topic that Germans don't chip in on, it won't move the needle.
Whatever we as Germans say on Israel/Palestine will be taken the wrong way by someone. Critical of Israel? Still an antisemite! Supportive of Israel? Pathological guilt!
It super sucks, but I too will leave it to others to voice strong opinions in this matter. And there's no shortage of that.
The lesson here is not: "Jew always right", it's "Genocide always bad". If you don't have a stance, you are still helping Israel to do a genocide on the Palestinian people.
So this is actually a super-nice position to be in, you can support your ally no matter what they do, while still looking contrite and morally superior by pulling the "we are Germany, we are not allowed to have a say in the matter" card.
I think what grates me is the dishonesty: We want to do both at the same time: A neutral mediator that advocates for the two state solution and the world's (second-)closest ally of Israel. That's like wanting to be both the coach and the referee. At some point it just becomes an insult to everyone's intelligence.
(The US does the same spiel)
I'm not sure why you think that any of this makes Germany look morally superior. I certainly don't feel that way.
Also, Israel is a trade partner, which is important because the non-western countries are hesitant to trade with them. Israel is culturally integrated into certain European institutions, in part due to German support (soccer, Eurovision, other sports).
How does that distinguish Israel/Palestine from any other issue?
> Whatever we as Germans say on Israel/Palestine will be taken the wrong way by someone. Critical of Israel? Still an antisemite! Supportive of Israel? Pathological guilt!
Do you think this does not apply to others? Especially the antisemite thing is extremely commonplace in the US and UK.
If Germany had learnt, then yes, they would be voicing strong opinions. That's the thing - fine, do whatever you want, but don't claim to have learnt.
That worked when Germany was occupied, or split in half, or broke.
Now that a unified Germany is in a position of leadership, rethinking history in terms of absolute right and wrong is probably a good idea.
To be children of ethnic cleansing (obviously I’m describing the Holocaust lightly here) and still commit the same crime in Gaza is profound.
It’s a great point you bring up, that being, what have we learned?
Can I ask why you think that American Jews are any more responsible for the crimes of Israel in Gaza than non-Jews, or Jews elsewhere in the world? Do you think that Judaism is a monolith, or that American Jews are the same as all Jews?
I ask because blaming Jews elsewhere for the acts of Israel, and conflating all of Jewry with Israel is a common tactic of anti-Semitic movements. I can't tell if you are doing that intentionally, or if you have just made your point poorly.
Assuming you are acting in good faith, you should look at the history of Black/Jewish relations in the civil rights eras. There was a disproportionate amount of support from American Jews (compared to the population at large) towards the civil rights movement.
MLK himself was outspoken about the support from American Jews:
"How could there be anti-Semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice. Can we ever express our appreciation to the rabbis who chose to give moral witness with us in St. Augustine during our recent protest against segregation in that unhappy city? Need I remind anyone of the awful beating suffered by Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland when he joined the civil rights workers there in Hattiesburg, Mississippi? And who can ever forget the sacrifice of two Jewish lives, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, in the swamps of Mississippi? It would be impossible to record the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the Negro's struggle for freedom—it has been so great."
It does not matter that someone claims to represent a population, if in obvious fact, they do not.
I was under the impression that they had a lot to say about how WWII taught them the virtues of pacifism?
To the best of my knowledge, they are the only Western country in which there are far left groups that proactively support Israel specifically wrt what it's doing in Gaza. And by "support" I mean e.g. posters encouraging to drop more bombs on "Hamas Nazis".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Germans_(political_curren...
Or is it the leader class in most western countries have no sense of duty , are effectively cowards, and are in it just to have a profitable, white-collar career ?
People are just numb to the whole area.
The most difficult part is the fact Israel is wealthy and aggressive while (both) Palestine government has been the definition of dysfunction and tribalism for decades, even during peace times. Diplomatic solutions have became harder and harder since the 90s.
You can read the history the political bodies in West Bank and even they seem to not care to fix anything either. They have their own leadership issues (like never electing new leaders).
There’s a major gap between a western savior wanting something bad to stop and actually going there and accomplishing something.
They are cowards who are just in it to enrich themselves by bribery, theft, and extortion.
You are looking in the right direction and not seeing just how far our society has gone.
It's not Russia or terrorism they are afraid of.
What is the unpopular, necessary decision? GP is commenting on the US/EUs continual campaigns to arm and fund Israel's efforts in Gaza without pushback. I don't wish to misinterpret you, but this read to me, that funding/aiding human rights violations and genocide in Gaza is a "necessary" act.
For a long time, that made some sense - it's starting to shift into quite horrific territory though, if leaders and communities interpret this obligation as some sort of absolute fealty towards the Israeli government, at the exclusion of everything else - even if that government itself is repeating the path of Nazi Germany. Yet this seems to be how a lot of German politicians interpret it.
I found the distinction exemplified in the "Never again" vs "Never again for anyone" slogans.
I don't understand what exactly is going on in the US, but there seems to have been a similar taboo, though maybe stemming from different sources (like that Evangelical end-of-days prophecy that sees Israel literally as part of a divine plan that trumps everything else).
I find it notable that part of Trump's voter support in the election were actually pro-Palestinian groups - because they saw Trump as the only alternative to a complicit Harris administration. Of course, Trump turned out to be even more complicit and openly embracing the Evangelical narrative.
So as far as US voters were concerned, there was no pro-Palestinian or even neutral options to vote for. There was just secular pro-Israel and religious pro-Israel. (Well, there was also Jill Stein, but she had no realistic chance of winning)
Of course there are other voices saying that all those justifications - Holocaust, biblical prophecy, etc - are just show and the real reason for the unconditional support is just ordinary geopolitics. The image of Israel as the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" that guarantees US dominance in the region.
It's also that the American mythos that they were the saviors of WWII requires there to be villains and innocent damsels. If you acknowledge that those damsels are themselves capable of being villains then it makes the whole thing much more "complicated".
That and simply the fact that lots of Jews hold positions of power in the US.
> "unsinkable aircraft carrier" [...] in the region
The IDF might disagree.
You have to look at the other side too. Palestinian's are born knowing that Israeli's have taken lots of their land through violent force. And they want to take more of it. And while the Israeli's live in a well developed wealthy nation they are condemned to poverty.
Consider the King David Hotel Bombing[1]. Israeli terrorists murdered nearly 100 people. In 2006 Netanyahu presided over the unveiling of a memorial plaque, alongside some of the terrorists involved in it, with the plaque specifically remembering the terrorist who died in the attack. So Israeli terrorism is fine, even worthy of praise.
And while the Israelis may grow up scared that the Palestinian's want them dead, 10's of thousands of Palestinian children won't grow up at all.
>> I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well
I agree. It seems that all over Europe at least, the governments are largely going against public opinion on this issue. But it's not the first time we've seen this (Iraq being a recent example).
I found it a remarkable detail that from the shore of Gaza, you see the port of and industrial zone of Ashdod, only a few kilometers away. It seems almost like a permanent reminder that the entire area is in fact well-developed - the wasteland only exists where they live.
Formerly: South Lebanon, the entire Sinai peninsula.
New and improved: Mt. Hermon, UN buffer zone in the Eastern Golan Heights.
American Evangelical Protestants believe that the continued existence of Israel is a prophesied necessary prerequisite for the resurrection of Jesus, who will then start the Apocalypse. They think they can force prophecy by defending Israel. It doesn't matter how badly Israel behaves, they think the ends justify all of it.
Not really. That ignores all the important nuance. Half of the current American right is America first and or ideologically libertarian, and are being pretty heavily vilified in the press and pundit circles because they want less aid to Israel and fewer forever wars. That’s it, I think they’re called woke-MAGA by detractors. Hillary even suggested Tulsi (who claimed Iran wasn’t building nukes) was a Russian asset.
Israel has a lot of soft power in the west, because our shared history (Jesus was a Jew) and because many of the greatest Americans have been Jewish. We love the Jews because they are great people, and siding with them when they are attacked is what people with western values will do when friends are attacked.
>We're fully subscribed to Zionist narrative of an exclusive Israeli right to the land...
The land in almost all of the world has changed hands in wars with different people making claims to historic ownership of different bits, but the general solution is for people to live peacefully on whatever bit of land they live on and if there is a land dispute they can go to court rather than try to shoot their neighbours due to some historic grudge.
Prior to this both sides were living reasonably peacefully in Israel and Gaza and Hamas started the current round of killing the neighbours due to a historic grudge so that leads to the forces of keeping the peace leaning towards the Israeli side. It now seems the Israelis have gone over the top hitting back which is another problem.
That's simply not true. Israel never gave up control over airspace, land and sea borders after the disengagement and effectively put the strip under siege after Hamas came to power.
The west bank is cut up into hundreds of small Palestinian enclaves that are separated and controlled by the IDF. There is also a policy of systematically denying Palestinians in the West Bank resources and on the other hand priorizing the settlers.
Both areas have been under siege for decades, just with different intensity.
When the current government was elected - a year before Oct.7 - it made speeding up the land grabs and eventual full annexation of the West Bank a priority. Look at the ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich: Both have deep connections to the settlers and have made deeply dehumanizing statements towards the Palestinians. (Smotrich officially published his "Decisive Plan" in 2017 about his proposal for a "permanent solution": Either "encourage emigration", allow them to live as non-citizens with restricted rights in isolated enclaves or "let the army deal with them". Both ministers are fully on board with the current starvation policy - or rather, it's still too lenient for them)
Ben Gvir is now head of the Israeli police. Smotrich is finance minister and "Minister in the defense ministry", a special role that gives him the ultimate authority about anything that concerns the West Bank.
All that happened before Oct.7.
When westerners and people like Bill Clinton have got involved they have mostly proposed having a Palestinian state with their own land but the Palestinians have mostly objected to Israel existing so we have the current stuff.
Yes, there was an exchange of job seekers, however even that was among a deliberately resource-constrained Gaza, with no hope of the situation improving.
Hamas was definitely not helping in those regards and Oct.7 cannot be excused. But Israel also never did anything to support an alternative to Hamas.
It was not the Palestinians who killed Rabin.
They know perfectly well that their settlers are conducting daily pogroms against Palestinian villages in the West Bank, protected by their own army. They know perfectly well that thousands of Palestinians are detained for years without due process, trialled by military courts, kept in a state of apartheid.
They just don't care.
So naturally, the logical response is to wish that on others. Seriously, wat?
The reasoning for this is action about nuclear weapons programs. Israel gets to have nukes, developed by sending US expertise to Israel, while Israel has not been subject to nuclear investigation programs.
If things ever got bad, the US doesn't want to nuke the world, then face retribution, they want Israel to shoulder that burden.
“The people of Gaza” have about as much chance of doing this as the ICC has of arresting and putting Netanyahu on trial.
... You have evidence of this? Or, are you making things up without any evidence at all to smear the UN; as we've seen Israel do countless times during this holocaust?
They say, “just surrender and it will all be over.” Are you going to trust that?
Olmert, who was the 12th prime minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009, wrote in an opinion piece for the Israeli newspaper and website Haaretz that “the government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success”.
He added: “Never since its establishment has the state of Israel waged such a war … The criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has set a precedent without equal in Israel’s history in this area, too.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-05-27/ty-article-opinio...
Why do you think the Israelis want to keep their tanks in Gaza even after all the hostages come back? Why won’t they offer a full and permanent ceasefire? I think this hostage justification is just Israelis buying time so they can keep on doing what they actually always wanted, full ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
If they wanted to ethnically cleanse gaza they would have done so long before October 7. You don't seem to understand the reality of war and the consequences of being on the losing side. Nor of the constraints Israel would be forced to work with if they had total control of Gaza.
>Israel's campaign has four stated goals: to destroy Hamas, to free the hostages, to ensure Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel, and to return displaced residents of Northern Israel.
Pretty clear and i never suggested otherwise. I'm not sure where you got that idea from
“And the fact is that the people of Gaza could end the conflict whenever they want. All they need to do is surrender and hand over the hostages”
So no, Israel decides how and when the killing ends and apparently that’s when “Gaza no longer poses a threat”. Who knows what that means but apparently it involves mass starvation, firing tank rounds into crowds, and destroying every hospital.
Gaza was a pretty enormous threat, so neutralising it takes an enormous amount of effort. If you cared about the death and destruction of gaza you would be calling for the end of Hamas. It's not like Israel wants to be stuck in an endless conflict in Gaza i think it has shown many times in the recent past that it is prefers peace to war.
The word surrender is carrying quite a lot of meaning but it's still good faith on my part.
Is this a “reality of war”? Complete destruction of infrastructure? Perhaps every uninhabited house is actually Hamas.
If this isn’t ethnic cleansing, what is it?
The same has been true for Iran, only up until now (and probably still) we have always had a more nuanced discussion - its the Iranian government, not the people of Iran.
Come on, the government of many countries does not necessarily represent the people.
Funny you say this because you don’t have to look far for people saying that “Gazans deserve what’s happening” because the average Gazan should fight back against Hamas.
* The majority of the Palestinian population are minors (< 18)
* The last nationwide election in Palestine was 2006
In other words, the last time an election was held, the majority of Palestinians weren't yet born, let alone old enough to vote in it. So, it's difficult to hold the Palestinian people en masse responsible for Hamas in the same way we'd hold Israelis responsible for their current government, who held their last election in 2022.
Well anyway, it is still crazy to me that somebody is making a decision about the entire population of a country based on the governments actions in 2025.
I'm also baffled by the suggestion that democracy truly represents a majority and the apparent belief that dissent is quickly processed and rectified by democracy. Which country do you think shows this is working well?
Democracy need not represent the majority, but if it works against the majority without any repercussions then who is to blame? Will the leadership be held accountable?
This war was started because the government knew they can get away with it. Every citizen is complicit in every crime committed by their government. Don't the citizens enjoy the fruits of crime even after claiming to oppose the actions of their government?
Israelis are protesting, for better or worse this is what democracy looks like.
Another question to ask, does every Russian support the war in Ukraine? What can they do about it?
Only when a crime is acknowledge, we can talk about punishments. Will Israeli people not profit from this war? Protests will have some teeth if steps be taken so this will not repeat itself. I don't see this happening.
Look at USA, war after war. Presidents are blamed but not punished and the population enjoys the economical hegemony that is the fruit of war.
In a similar vein, I'm ethnically Russian and a Russian citizen. I don't support the Russian invasion of Ukraine in any way, shape, or form, and I don't think that I am responsible for it as a Russian. However, it is also clear to me that the majority of Russians do support it (or at least think that it's fine), and on that basis I don't consider myself to be a part of that nation anymore, regardless of ethnicity.
Today, we see Israelis who are taught to perceive Palestinians as enemies. They see the Palestinian flag during birthrights and are taught by the IDF to hate it. And they are also taught that the west bank is dangerous and they are not to go there. Then we see IDF operations in West Bank and we see silence. We know Gaza is in a plight caused by Israel and we see silence and ignorance. Israel is bad. Israelis are bad too. And the polls have shown that 80% wish for Gaza to be cleansed, 56% support the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel, 47% want the IDF to act according to the Biblical war against Jericho. That is effectively 47% want murder while 33% want expulsion (equivalent of the ghettos+concentration camps). The benefit of doubt is disappearing rapidly fast.
And the west has been supporting Israel for decades in this campaign. This is the second millenial crusade of Europe (aka the west).
And if that view is manipulated by people way more powerful than you...
I'm all for personal responsibility but we have laws against certain practices because companies can hack brains so well. You don't think states can do it just as well if not better?
Edit: where do you draw the line? Is an immigrant from a 'bad' country a bad person? Why didn't we try more Germans if what you say about support is true?
It’s not exactly that they consciously want cover to commit atrocities. It’s more that they can’t really conceive of people they don’t identify with as people. They’ll fiercely defend people they know, and they’ll side with people like them, but everyone else is a sort of vague abstract mass.
We see this in the US today with people who support harsh measures against illegal immigrants while they themselves have friends or family who are the targets (or they are themselves). Then they get very confused when their friends or family get arrested and deported, because “illegal immigrants” is this amorphous mass of bad people, not Jose and Clara down the street. You see it with racists who defend themselves with “I’m not racist, I have black friends.”
Such a person doesn’t automatically think ill of the “other,” but it doesn’t take too much to convince them that the “other” is evil and dangerous and must be dealt with harshly.
You're either being disingenuous or have never experienced real dictatorship. I lived under theocracy in IRAN for more than half my life and I promise you that the Westerns screaming from the back "just revolt!" have no clue what they are talking about.
These regimes control communication, the media, intact laws that punishes any kind of dissent and often has multi layered of security forces to keep the population in check (not including the regular army and police).
It's easy to shout this when it's not your life, your sibling, your child or significant other's life on the line. These regimes will not hesitate to murder their own citizens to stay in power.
I don't know enough about Israel's internal politics and their society to make an assertive comment but what I _can_ say, is that from my interactions with them, they seem like ordinary and kind people who have no intention of harming me or my family.
Unless you are psychopath, you are not going to wake up one day and decide to murder people.
In most cases the only thing standing between you and the target is inconvenience of obtaining a descent firearm.
Unfortunately religious zionism isn't limited to Jews. Christian evangelicals also support it, and they make up a huge percentage of voting americans (and even worse, elected officials).
https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-hav...
https://theconversation.com/christian-zionism-hasnt-always-b...
With the continued persecution of Palestinians, whether its the illegal occupation of the west bank or the siege of Gaza which was essentially a concentration camp, that was "mowed" like grass every few years in terrorist bombing campaigns by Israel, its no surprise that organisations like Hamas, originally a humanitarian charity, exist.
Israelis want peace through domination, just like the French in Algeria. Be aware that Jews are not native to Palestine, except those that had been living there before the state was founded. They are living as colonialists on stolen land, and are continually denying the native Palestinians the right to return, which is part of the definition ethnic cleansing.
I say this as Jewish person originally born in Palestine (or Israel) and who had grandparents that survivide the Holocaust. Once I read about what really happened in 1948, that it was zionist terrorist militias that started the conflict and that Palestinians did not "simply leave", I became an anti zionist. I don't think Israel has the right to exist. People have the right to exist and they have the right to fight back against jewish supremacism.
Not true, many Semitic Jews who fled from those lands due to persecution went to Europe and North Africa, that includes Ashkenazi and Sephardim Jews.
The difficulty I have with your statement is akin to denying a white, blue eyed aboriginal in Australia their heritage to the land just because one of their ancestors slept with a European colonialist - its fundamentally racist. White skinned blue eyed Australian aboriginals exist.
The state of Israel is just another example of euro white colonialism.
Thank you for pointing this fact, if this is true it makes the Israel govt as self-hating Jews, and is very sad and ironic at the same time. The Israel govt should perform thorough DNA test on the Palestinian people. Potentially many Palestinians can have higher Jews ancestors percentage than the emigrants themselves.
Judaism is an ethno-religion, so while some people may have no connection to semitic people, others will have a closer connection and its discriminatory to simply say “they are not native” which my original post was critical of.
Heritage that is so remote that it doesn't matter anymore. Most of their ancestors left centuries ago.
It is like me claiming the land of any country between Ethiopia and Botswana, installing a government and colonies, seizing lands and forcing their inhabitants to flee in a small strip of land along a rontier because modern human is claimed to come from this area so I declare it my home.
Im not talking about claiming land - I’m talking about culture, racial identity and their heritage to lands. You keep bringing this as a talking point, but I already said heritage does not equate to or justify nationalism.
> Heritage that is so remote that it doesn't matter anymore. Most of their ancestors left centuries ago.
It doesn't matter? Obviously it does matter. I wonder if you think the same of African Americans and your willingness to deny them of African heritage.
What about eastern european Jews that actually look semitic, that have middle eastern features? Do you also negate them of heritage, or just white skinned Jews?
Your bias is palpable.
Having heritage is one thing, migrating there as well. But landing somewhere, installing a new flag and government and pushing people out of their land through force is completely out of line.
> What about eastern european Jews that actually look semitic, that have middle eastern features? Do you also negate them of heritage, or just white skinned Jews?
I am not negating heritage, I am negating the appropriation of a land at the expense of others.
Nobody is debating that.
Not sure if you can read, so I’ll reiterate - the debate here is the willingness of people to use sweeping and discriminatory terminology to categorise all the different types of Jew's as being “non-native” which is categorically false and frankly offensive.
Yes. The white colonialism of jews fleeing pogroms in Russian Empire. lol
Or did you mean the white colonialism of jews cleansed from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and other middle eastern countries?
Jews outside of Palestine are not uniquely descended from Jews that lived there 2000 years ago. Also the idea of Jews as a homogeneous people is a fairly recent phenomenon, people married into Jewish families, converted etc...
Even having mixed parentage can make you an oppressor. During slavery, mixed race people were often used in Brazil to hunt escaped slaves. At the end of the day its not about people's parentage but to what group they get put into and whether they choose to use any privilege they have to fight against oppression.
I don't make a claim that they should or should not be allowed to live there. My statement isnt about rights to land, oppressing others or national zionism.
My statement is about heritage and what it means to be “native”, obviously what that means for people and genetic links to semitic peoples varies greatly, and as such, you cannot make blanket statements that “jews are not native” just because you disagree with the nationalist movement.
Although the book was published back in 2020 prior to the current conflict, he correctly labeled the many years siege on Gaza by Israel as the act of war against Palestinian people, and it turn out to be manifested in the all out war in 2024.
1] The Hundred Years' War on Palestine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Years%27_War_on_Pa...
[2] A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine (2024):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/11/a-new-abyss-ga...
How did this amazing scholar labeled the rockets launched from Gaza (and no, the rockets did not start in 2023)?
You don't have to have sympathy for them. Their religion literally tells them to kill children to steal their land:
"However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you." - Deuteronomy 20:16-17
And now they are literally doing it.
I wondered how an entire ethnic group could be so depraved and removed from humanity, where literally hundreds of thousands of their members in Hebrew Telegram channels cheer on children being burned alive. And now I know that, it was always their religion that caused their depraved behavior. From a philosophy of racial superiority to literally commands to kill children to steal their land. It was always going to come to this genocidal conclusion.
It's perfectly fine to say Judaism should be canceled, given how Jews are behaving publicly and without shame in their desire to steal land and kill children. They literally don't know that they're not supposed to steal land and kill children. They believe that's completely fine.
In 2025 USA is supporting russian dictator more than Ukrainian democratic government.
Are they? I see USA still supplying Ukraine with weapons, how many weapons have Russia gotten from USA? None, USA is not selling any weapons to Russia still.
Yes, after the 7/10 Hamas attack, there's a huge wave of hate towards the Palestinians from Israelis. No doubt about that.
But we are living in a half dictatorship trying to turn into a full dictatorship.
There's around 70% percent support to end the war in Gaza ,for more than a year. It still goes on.
There's around 70% support to keep Israel as a liberal democracy. Currently it seems that we are losing.
We are just almost powerless to control all the chaos we live in. The only possible move is to get foreign citizenship to create an option to leave. And many, many have done so. Even though we love and are deeply connected to our country. But it seems there's no choice.
I have ideas, but their value is mostly in making me sound smart.
In reality I don't have realistic, implementable ideas on how to get out of this mess. Just wishes.
I don't think it's just propaganda. These folks know they'll materially benefit from Palestinians being dispossessed of their remaining land.
It’s no different with the American military.
It’s wrong to single out Israel. The US is funding this mass murder of children and blocking attempts to stop it. It should correctly be called the US-Israeli genocide of Gaza.
For my part, as an American and a nobody, I feel helpless to stop the atrocities my government is participating in.
But I’ve found, for myself, the reason to fight the genocide - however I can - isn’t because I expect to stop it. I am powerless to do that. For me it’s to maintain a sense of human dignity in the face of evil.
Knowing my country’s role in the mass murder of children, shrugging my shoulders would feel like I’m surrendering something precious.
Do you apply the same standard to Palestinians for not overthrowing Hamas, to Americans for the US being the key enabler of Israel's military operations, to the citizens of any Western country for not adding Israel next to Russia in all their sanction laws? If not, why?
Or maybe we should be careful with assigning collective guilt and not throw stones in glass house?
When this Gaza conflict started, I saw how the Israeli protested against their government and demanded peace, so I thought there is a semblance of an excuse for glimpses of abhorrence being reported - "it's a small number of people in power, not the Israeli nation doing it, and also there are always 2 sides to the story".
Since then, there have been unfathomable horrors and crimes against humanity done from the Israel side, with extreme intensity and one-sidedness, and it's now been going for so long. I can find no excuse of any kind anymore, for what has been and is being done in Gaza. I don't think any normal person could. The weight of these things, in my mind at least, is such that if the Israeli people really wanted anything different, it was their human duty and utmost responsibility to stop this by now, in whatever way needed. They didn't... It's sad that people who have suffered so much as well, let themselves become the villains to this depth and extent.