FunnyUsername
In any case, as a sovereign state, Israel gets to decide on its own immigration policy, regardless of how foreigners feel about it.
There exists a national identity, but the organization that claims to be its government does not enjoy popular support, and more importantly, has never really controlled the territory that it aspires to govern.
> This is pretty ironic considering that israel is pretty explicit about their ambitions of wiping out Palestinians and taking their land, as well as destroying Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
This is false; there's absolutely nothing resembling Iran's, Hamas' or Hezbollah's clear, explicit goals of destroying Israel.
> they initiated a war
This perspective only makes sense if we pretend that proxy warfare doesn't count. Once we acknowledge the fact that Iran funded, armed and trained multiple terrorist groups specifically to attack Israel for years, it becomes very clear who started the Israel-Iran conflict.
> israeli ideological wishes of destroying Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, etc are pretty much in the open
This is pretty ironic considering that Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are all quite explicit about their ambitions of wiping out Israel, while the reverse isn't true at all. Israelis have no desire to kill Persians a thousand kilometers away, they just don't have much choice but to fight foreign armies who attack them.
Nothing you might say after this can justify massacring, kidnapping or raping civilians.
> the denial of clean water, the denial of electricity
This is pretty unreasonable framing. Israel withdrew from Gaza, leaving behind valuable modern infrastructure like desalination plants, and then provided free water and electricity even to an enemy who constantly attacked it.
Hamas, on the other hand, proudly filmed themselves digging up pipes to turn into rockets for terrorizing Israel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04NB27x138Y
> Israel would have bankrupted itself
The Lavi program in particular wasn't really poised for success, but it's likely Israel would have ended up getting into the defense aerospace industry in one way or another. Even if it never productionized its own fighter jets, it could have contributed a lot more to Chinese or other programs. Israel not working with China (among others) is a big opportunity cost to Israel, and valuable to the US.
> "threat" and "preparation" are not mutually exclusive adjectives.
If Israel was making preparations simply because they were necessary for its defense against invaders, that's not a threat. If its intent was to hint at its capabilities, that could be construed as a threat, but we can only speculate about intent.
Israel may not have started the program without US funding, but it was plausible enough to continue without it. After all, the decision to cancel it was only a slim majority, 12–11. If the US position was "we'll stop funding, but feel free to continue the program", it's likely Israel would have continued (at least for some time).
> They later threatened nuclear war in 1973
There was no "threat", just preparations. It's only natural to prepare whatever powerful weapons are available when a state is facing an existential threat and losing.
> What are we paying for
Some very important influence. For example, US thought Israel's Lavi program would compete with F-16, and Israel canceled it. Later it canceled a lucrative Phalcon AEW sale to China, even though Israel had already committed, because of US pressure. Etc.
The UN doesn't adjudicate such matters. The ICJ does, and they have made no such finding. South Africa recently requested an 18-month extension in their "urgent" ICJ case, delaying the inevitable conclusion where the court will not find sufficient evidence of genocidal intent.
> Have you seen before & after photos of Gaza
Have you seen before & after photos of any other city where there was a prolonged modern urban war?
And of course I'll demand the same arbitrary specificity - it needs to be a two-hour-long multi-domain assault. Also it needs to be a VC2-S-AP3 type ship whose name ends with "Liberty". If you don't have such examples, I suppose we can stop entertaining your conspiracy theory?
> there were too many witnesses of Israel doing this
Even if there were no eventual survivors, there would still be people throughout the fleet talking on the radio. They would have noticed and communicated about the movements of large ships from Israeli ports, among other very obvious signs of an Israeli operation. There would have been absolutely zero chance of the US not knowing who was behind it.
> they wanted to blame the attack on Egypt
There was no attempt to blame Egypt, and the idea is completely implausible - a US investigation could very easily distinguish an Israeli vs an Egyptian attack when a variety of boats (coming from Israeli ports) and many other assets are involved.
Friendly fire happens all the time; not everything needs to be a conspiracy.
Also one reservist is not "soldiers", and a video call is not "in their offices".
Such as..?
> Iran has been attacking military targets
Maybe a few, but the vast majority of their strikes illegally targeted civilian infrastructure. Off the top of my head, there was Dubai airport (struck at least 4x), Kuwait airport, various residential neighborhoods of Tel Aviv (with high-altitude cluster munitions that couldn't possibly target military assets), civilian energy infrastructure in several neighboring Gulf states, an MSC container ship, etc. etc.
It seems pretty clear that Israel struck regime targets, and at worst there was relatively minor collateral damage (still unclear), which is a risk with just about any strike.
You do with at least the 95%+ of Jews who support Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland. That's all Zionism is.
If you consider Al Jazeera a reliable source, then we'll probably disagree on this. But I would say Ynet, Times of Israel, and Jerusalem Post and reliable, just to name some of the big ones with lots of English content online. Or Haaretz for a more anti-government-leaning (but still broadly reliable) publication.
Israel never said anything about having accepted an agreement, and in fact stated the opposite. The Pakistani mediator can't just declare Israel part of an agreement without its, well, agreement.
> Hezbollah has founded as a direct reply to the '82 invasion of Lebanon by Israel
Which was a rather necessary response to the PLO attacking Israel from Lebanon. Or what would you have expected Israel to do instead?
Does this refute the notion that Palestinians are from Palestine? I would say no. Similarly Jews are from Judea, despite the existence of a small number of converts with "impure" lineage.
2027 is the expectation, since it's supposed to be at least every ten years.
> Numbers of deaths aren't being estimated from WhatApp chats.
Unfortunately they are. [1] was based on messages in "X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram". An example of content they scraped is [2]; there's no info about who runs that or how.
> The most widely agreed upon estimates are based on morgue data, which if anything should undercount the actual death toll as plenty of bodies never make it to a morgue operated by health professionals.
This isn't the case even for GHM's official counts. Anyone can report a Gazan "martyr" or missing person on a web form right here [3]. Those get included in GHM's counts, if they pass basic checks like the existence of that name and ID.
> That's not what one significant digit means.
I think the concept still applies, though I should have said zero significant digits, since "tens of thousands" implies an exponent but zero digits of the mantissa. But my point is that responsible estimates involve acknowledgement of uncertainty.
> I believe everyone is in agreement that the death toll of the gaza war was likewise in the tens of thousands.
Most of Israel's critics are not satisfied with Hamas' ~70k casualty figure, and seek out higher estimates like the aforementioned one that used WhatsApp chats. For example, a HNer yesterday wrote "They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now."
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And sure, most Zionists are not Jews because the Jewish population is too tiny to be a majority in almost any political category. Similarly most people who support Somaliland independence are not Somalilanders, but probably Indians or Chinese or something.