What do you mean by "went to the streets?" If it's just show up at a protest and wave a sign on Saturday and Sunday, and go back to work on Monday, that's not enough. That's not civil resistance. People seriously underestimate the commitment levels necessary to actually matter.

Blocking highways, labor strikes, conscription refusal, and other civil-disobedience tactics were used.

Sorry but not enough.

I agree annoying the population, not those in power does nothing.

I am so tired of middle east protests ( on both sides) in my city i'd be happy if every protester was destroyed and traffic returned to normal.

Their actions don't influence any behaviour from australia, especially the locations where they protest.

How are you going to get stuff done unless you try to get your opinion heard?

I feel we should ban social media and phones, it is a mistake. People stop caring about the things that happens near them.

Truthfully, your opinion matters to the right people, the general public have no influence on the outcome.

Annoy the decision makers, if you're annoying the general public, your cause will be discredited.

I have protest fatigue, i am tired of all the shit involved and just want them to go away.

My big takeaway is that the downvoters are cool with it and part of the problem.

It doesn't work if the opposition is also organized. For example, a March 2003 Gallup poll showed that 5% of the US population had made a public opposition to the Iraq war, but 21% had made a public display to support the war. Small minorities can't go directly against more popular movements.

I agree that's what it's saying but it does make the whole statement a bit meaningless.

Essentially the statement is 3.5% succeed unless there's meaningful opposition.

It's not meaningless, as there is a difference between opposition and status quo.

I don't think those happely going with whatever the elite says counts the same way?

In political parties there are always these members that vote with the leadership. You usually need way more than 50% support among members to go against them. Dunno how much. In the long term to share is probably closer to 60% but in the short term it might be like 90%. (Made up numbers)

Yeah there were way more people on each side who "supported" them and would have voted for them or something. But the demonstrators against the Iraq war were above the 3.5% threshold which the article says "has never failed to bring about change".

So far, if estimates are accurate, neither in Iran with 90 million population, more than five percent turned out.

I have no idea how many Iranians have been involved in the protests, but it seems like they're getting past the 3.5% number as well..

Peaceful protests do not work when the government that you are opposing shoots protesters in the street and/or jails & tortures them. Didn’t work so well in Syria either. Only the government has guns in Iran and they’d rather rule over a hellish cesspool of their own countrymen starving and drying than lose power.

And quite relevantly to the analogy, in Iran, the regime controls most of the economic links to the outside world, including the ability to convert the rial to dollars or euros.

The rule doesn’t really make sense in a small country with proportional representation. The government can stay in power as long as a majority of the country wants it to stay in power.

Do you vote your governement in your country? I only vote president and parlament here, and until elections AFAIK there is no way for a majority of citizens to remove either.

Paper says non-violent is ~50/50 vs one in four for violent. So not a sure thing.

The problem is defining 'non-violent'. Is it just showing up to a protest from 5pm to 6pm with a sign? Is it a general strike that will undoubtedly harm the economy? Is it demonstrating that you could respond to violence effectively and daring them to up the scales?

So there were 323 events investigated but there's some criteria that should be taken into account for violent resistances that is not - for instance zero of the resistances to the Nazi occupations during World War 2 succeeded by their definition, and off the top of my head only the Yugoslavian resistance really put up a substantial dent in the occupation and still required the Soviet army invasion to kick the Nazis out.

> This rule didn't hold in Israel [...]

It did (ie. Revolutionary thresholds) until 10/7 and Hezbollah's shelling of the north changed the calculus.

There was increased pressure from senior IDF careerists, industry titans, and intelligence alums (oftentimes the 3 were the same) against the government's judicial reforms which was about to reach the tip over point (eg. threats of capital outflows, leaking dirty laundry, corporate shutdowns/wildcat strikes, and resignations of extremely senior careerists), but then 10/7 happened along with the mass evacuation of the North, which led everyone to set aside their differences.

Israel is a small country (same population and size as the Bay Area) so everyone either knows someone or was personally affected by the southern massacre or the northern evacuation.

More to the point, despite your downvoters, the judicial reform did not pass as proposed.

> despite your downvoters

It's because I called 10/7 a massacre, which it was.

> the judicial reform did not pass as proposed.

Yep. Exactly.

Was operation cast lead a massacre?

Why do you feel this need to rationalize an equivalence?

I don't quite know what you mean by that phrase. The conversation was about what constitutes a massacre, and I was trying to get a calibrating sense. Surely we both agree that 70-100k dead civilians disproportionately targeting children and medical workers/facilities would be at least one massacre, maybe several dozen.

Pretty fucking stupid to make this about "Jews" when millions of Jews rightfully oppose Zionism, and when plenty of the people enabling it (crikes, just look at the US Congress, not to mention Evangelicals in general) are not even Jewish.

Let's be real, the number of anti-Zionist Jews is vanishingly small and usually consists of only vaguely ethnic Jews who have been completely assimilated into the society they live in, whose only remaining distinguishing feature is one or two members of their family. It's so distant they wouldn't be accepted into Israel under the remigration laws or whatever it's called.

Also, funny you bring up Evangelicals. I've had this same sort of argument brought up when they do some awful shit and are called out for it. "But we don't all believe/do this!" It's implicit in the very core of your religion/ideology. If you truly didn't agree with what they did, you wouldn't be one. Evangelicalism is a plague and should be treated like one. Evangelicals should be sent to quarantine centers and deprogrammed (if possible).

You don't know what Evangelicalism is, since there are multiple forms of Evangelicalism. Its a Christian Cross-denominational protestant movement, not all protestants or evangelicals are fundamentalists nor do they all support Israel. But you seem to be against religion at large, or perhaps anti-western civilization.

Also Belarus in 2020.

In my opinion, 3.5% can affect change if (and only if) the middle-class approve of such a change. The middle-class being the productive power of the country and that includes the military.