> You definitely can kill 2.1 million people by bombing them. It's actually way easier than doing it with a gun

Only if you have enough bombs, which they need to constantly purchase from the US using aid money given to them by the US.

They don't have the stockpiles to eradicate without using their (not so) secret nukes. If they were to do that, there'd be a lot worse follow on effects for Israel. If they simply trickle the deaths over time, people get tired of the horror and need to look away for their own sanity.

Genuinely wondering what terrible effects would there be for Israel if they used nukes? Not morally, internationally. IMO it's perhaps one of the few conflicts in the world where one side could theoretically use nuclear weapons and essentially no one will shoot back. "Trickle the deaths over time" doesn't make any sense - there are probably more births in Gaza than deaths now, and that's not including the general Palestinian population.

The point is to colonize Gaza, they won't irradiate it first.

Well officially Israel doesn't have nukes. They are widely believed to have them ofc but that's something they have to consider. Breaking the ambiguity by using them could spark a lot of 'we told you they were super dangerous' responses(with action) possibly. You might be right tho.

No one will shoot back now. But it is a signal to other countries that using nukes might not be that bad. Even other banned chemical and biological weapons. So either there is complete chaos or the whole world will have to make sure Israel can not profit from this action.

Though probably true, it is irrelevant. Hamas doesn't have the power, and Israel does. This war is almost entirely one sided.

My point was that the comment I was commenting on was false, and that many people who express that sentiment wouldn't be expressing it if the powers were flipped. I'm personally very glad that the powers aren't flipped because I think that if Hamas had F-16s there would many more deaths.

> and that many people who express that sentiment wouldn't be expressing it if the powers were flipped

That is definitely not true.

Do you really genuinely believe that typical american liberal types would ignore a genocide committed against Jewish people by anyone, particularly arabs? In the American liberal mind "genocide" is, essentially, synonymous with The Holocaust, and I think your average liberal is, if anything, sensitive to Jewish discrimination, over and above random people out there in the world. There are definitely anti-semetic Americans and they should be launched into the sun, but I think your sense that people wouldn't care if Jews were being killed in the tens of thousands is extremely off point.

I'm sorry, I live in Europe and I was referring more to the kind of protests and protesters I see around me. The aren't many liberal Americans there. I completely agree that the situation could be different elsewhere.

Jewish groups have been supporting those protests in the US, Europe and Israel.

I have no idea what crowd composition at European protests looks like, but the vast majority of the people upset about the ongoing genocide are not antisemetic.

There is a propaganda campaign in the US trying to conflate being against genocide with being antisemetic. I'm sure similar tactics are being used in Europe.

I am myself supporting many of these protests, and it's exactly from this perspective that I say that many of them are antisemitic. But this is a bit of a useless discussion because neither you nor I can bring any evidence into how antisemitic they are, or how and if they would react if (or when) Palestinians are slaughtering Jews.

If you think it's nonsense, try to go into a anti-war protest with a t-shirt saying that Jews too should be able to live in Middle East. If this thought makes you slightly concerned, you got my point.

Not sure I get your point.

Try the same, but opposite argument.

Something like: Would you wear a t-shirt saying “Palestine is treated unfairly” to oct7 memorial or airport/border crossing?

People are protesting with this kind of shirts in Israel basically every week.

Where do you live in Europe that you believe those opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza would support a genocide of Jewish people anywhere? Because that is an outrageously delusional view.

I don't think that my exact location is very relevant here, but I urge you to ask protesters around you how they see "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" turning into reality, and let me know what happens with the Jews according to their plans.

If the Israeli administration could get away with fire bombing the strip, it'd have done so a long time ago. The whole world is screaming at them to stop the genocide and you think it's them just not "caring about civilians" that's responsible for this. There's no war in Gaza, there's only a genocide. A holocaust.

I'm not Arab, I'm not Muslim. I've never met a Jewish person. I've no reason to have any prejudice against people of Jewish heritage or ethnicity. But it's still a genocide by any definitions of the word. A lot of Jewish people even agree with this. And the reason that you and most Israeli people seem to struggle to grasp it is because they've been drinking on this exact extremist rhetoric that the "other" side only wants to see them slaughtered. By the same measure, you're saying Hamas can justify it's actions since there will always be ultra-Zionist factions of Israeli societies that wants to see Palestinians slaughtered. I implore you to wake up to what is being done in the name of your people.

I am an Arab Jew, and I actually have many friends in Gaza. I don't disagree about the usage of the words Genocide, though I think the terms is a little too easy to apply. I think a Holocaust is a completely different thing. There are Palestinians in the Israeli parliament, in the Supreme Court. No one is gathering Palestinians in gas chambers, and in general the Palestinian population only grew since the establishment of Israel. If there were more Jews in Europe after WW2 than before it, no one would remember it as a Holocaust.

There is war in Gaza in the simple sense that rockets from Gaza still shoot into Israel, that Israeli hostages are still being held, and that Hamas itself (the elected goverenement) says it would attack again. It's a very unbalanced conflict, and in it terrible crimes are committed that you can call genocidal. But Jews in the ghettos weren't bombing Berlin - not during WW2 and not after it.

That's an interpretation of events that I've heard from a lot of Israeli folks that are in some way horrified what's happening in Gaza. I think it's very naive and I don't even think most folks saying this believe in it themselves. What actions from the IDF, what imbalance of power, what civilian casualty rates will you need to see to believe that it's no longer a war? Are you really waiting for the actual mass starvation to take place before accept there's intent? Does it have to be gas chambers? Does the death toll have to pass 1 million? 6 million? Do you really think that the Israeli government wants to brings the hostages back? What do you think would happen after they did bring them back? Will you rescind your support then?

Jews in the Ghetto didn't get the chance to shoot rockets at Berlin but had they been able to fight back, I'd have given them the same understanding that I currently extends to Palestinians that grew up in the concentration camp that is Gaza. Hamas is the direct results of Israeli policies of the past decades. Even if the IDF manages to somehow invent some purity test for Gazans that it can use to confirm there are no longer any Hamas members left and it finally declares it's operations concluded, you'll have people shooting rockets at Israel if they keep their policies with the Gaza strip and the West Bank. But long term solutions come later, right now, Israelis need to wake up and say no to what is unfolding in the name of their security.

I will stop thinking that this conflict is a war when there will be a side in it that doesn't have the motivation to take over all the land, and acts towards it by attempting to kill the other. As long as there are two parties that are constantly trying to kill each other, I call that a war. As I wrote elsewhere - that doesn't mean I disagree with the idea that genocidal actions are being taken during this war.

Your comment about Jews in Ghetto is wrong at every possible level. Jews were killed in the Holocaust _without_ a conflict, _without_ attempting to kill Germans, _without_ fighting with anyone over the land and _without_ having any aspirations to control the other. That is an example of a situation where there is no war, and no, it has nothing to do with the situation between Israelis and Palestinians.

Stop telling lies about Gaza conflict being "war". Israeli military has absolute superiority over Palestinians. What it is is a genocidal campaign meant to wipe them off the face of the Earth.

Also, stop using the Holocaust as a propaganda tool. My grandfather happened to be a Buchenwald concentration camp survival. It didn't give him or anybody else any right to violate Geneva convention.

First, I don't recall you set the rules for discussion here. Now, to your points:

1. Genocidal actions can take place in a war, and no definition of a war ever said that the parties have to be of equal strength. Every war that was ever won by one side or another had some sort of power supremacy. Go read the legal definition for genocide and you'll learn that the question of imbalance of power plays absolutely no role in it.

2. I haven't used it as a propaganda tool, and in fact it wasn't me who brought it up at all. I was only commenting that the current situation in Gaza is not comparable to the Holocaust, and I fully stand behind it. To make it clear, I am very happy that it isn't comparable, and I wouldn't want to see any Palestinian suffering like my ancestors did. Not once in my life have I used it to justify crimes committed by Jews, so please learn to read before commenting on my posts. If anything, I always believed that what Jews went through should serve as a reminder for us to never allow things like that from happening again, and I still see the Holocaust as perhaps one of the main driving forces in my opposition to this war.

I didn't mention any HN rules, so you're mainly arguing with yourself.

Shooting at mothers trying to get humanitarian aid for their starving children does not fulfil any definition of war I am aware of.

Read history books yourself. Once one side of a war becomes dominant, it just ends.

Unless it is not really a war but a hideous genocide campaign cynically carried out by Israeli government under the pretext of self-defensive war.

> Once one side of a war becomes dominant, it just ends.

Sorry for being pedanto, but other side must stop resisting for war to end. Guerrilla warfare is quite usual when there is great power imbalance.

I think I got so upset by people needlessly dying in Gaza that maybe I went too far in this discussion. Obviously, the war and genocide don't necessarily exclude each other.

There were more than 100 armed jewish uprisings in Germany during WWII:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_resistance_in_German-oc...

Going through your criteria in order: Of course they defended themselves, including attempts to kill Nazis. They also attempted to keep their homes, and certainly would have rather Germany have different leadership

Does that somehow mean the concentration camps were a "war"?

I think the parent meant there were no shooting before the genocide started. Jewish resistances were reactive to nazi actions.

I.e. there was not even a possibility that nazis were defending. While somebody from Palestine side did fire the opening salvo on oct7.

> While somebody from Palestine side did fire the opening salvo on oct7.

Now, that's a re-writing of history if I've ever seen one.

> Israeli and Palestinian deaths preceding the 2023 Gaza war. Of the Palestinian deaths 5,360 were in Gaza, 1,007 in the West Bank, 37 in Israel. Most were civilians on both sides.

Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli%E2%80%...

See the chart on the top right with the orange bars

I do understand that it was not the first first salvo.

And that blockading policy and financing of anything but fatah and bunch of other stuff influenced today situation.

But you must admit that oct 7 was unusual escalation. Which now are used as the reason for current idf actions.

I suspect that it's you who have undergone deep mental conditioning if you think that I am justifying this war. One can hold a complex opinion, and nowhere have I said that I think this war is justified.

Not only I do not belittler their suffering, I personally helped some of them out. I also ran an organization that provided thousands of Gazan with electricity, and I was arrested by the Israeli police when encouraging Palestinians in Israel to vote. At the same time I have family members who were killed (and kidnapped) on the first day of this war. Life isn't black and white.

Thank you for sharing your perspective Yoav, it's refreshing to read comments from an actual observer and not an army of armchair warriors.

I am completely OK with being conditioned against siding with a 20 month long genocidal onslaught committed by an apartheid ethnostate against a blockaded territory with no sovereignty and no actual defenses of its own.

I completely agree that life isn’t always black and white. But right now it is, just like it was in countless other situations in the past. You can think it’s “complicated” all you like, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against such a framing, which is where the conditioning comes into the picture.

It is great that you volunteered in Gaza, but it’s also tragic that you fail to see what is happening even after directly interacting with Gazans.

Some day in the future, when free Palestinians can build museums and monuments and make movies to mourn those lost in this genocide, everyone will always have been against this.