lWe're both from the country where most of the planned un-living of the First Holocaust were performed. We recently discussed how in a street poll, half of Polish population couldn't solve a simple math task, a simple language task and one more simple task, placing Poland in the second last position from all the countries taking place. (For comparison, in Norway and Holland only 9%). And how it was likely a consequence of genetic holocaust performed on Poles by both German and Russian nazis during the 2WW. That systematic destruction of elites can behead a country for years to come.
I tried to calm her down, show her that it's just her Instagram bubble that makes her think so. That such things like planned un-living don't happen anymore in the civilized world where we are living, that last time something like that was about to happen, there was a UN action in the Balkans. Or that through the common effort we've managed to halt Russia's advance when they once again attempted to conquer Europe.
But now in the morning the next day I have my own doubts. That people have to use special language to talk about the Holy Land situation to avoid censorship on Youtube or other websites. That this thread got pulled down 30 minutes after posting (even though I was positively surprised when it was reinstated another 30 min later). That just like during the First Holocaust, even though the nations of civilized world are being informed about what's happening, people are ignoring the subject and not beliving that it actually happen.
If we look backwards in time, we come from a very violent history, but politics and technology has continuously reshaped how it happens. For example wars post industrialism were much more murderous than ever before.
The long arch view(?) seems to be that the post-WWII era has ended and something new is coming around the corner. It looks like an era of bigger empires but without the single superpower.
Objecting to the Holocaust because it eugenicized the wrong way is a thing I guess.
I've read up a little more about it now, didn't know it was that complex. (Pretty much 3 or more wars in the 10y period). Since I read up on it now, I noticed some connections to planned un-living of the current second holocaust in The Strip. Just like in Gaza, there were ~140k ppl killed and millions displaced.
You may explain her that this is a different face of the same world where a state has been targeted by hatred and terrorism for 80 years, and everybody insisted on them being patient and just live with it.
What's happening is sad, but it is not sadder than what preceded it.
> You may explain her that this is a different face of the same world where a state has been targeted by hatred and terrorism for 80 years, and everybody insisted on them being patient and just live with it.
Being upset at the world and unwilling to engage in diplomacy is, thankfully, not a valid justification for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
> What's happening is sad, but it is not sadder than what preceded it.
The ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians is definitely sadder than what preceded it.
> Children in Gaza are malnourished and starving, as New York Times reporters and others have documented. We recently ran a story about Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition. We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems. This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation. Our reporters and photographers continue to report from Gaza, bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war.
I hardly think that constitutes a retraction, nor do "pre-existing conditions" make the image of a starving child any less chilling, for me, personally.
The picture, for anyone curious: https://x.com/CallumHoare_/status/1947770415092314506
What does the political climate look like in Israel? Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this?
Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
I know that the media is all over the place and it's hard to figure out what is going on as an outsider.
Either way, I hope that this situation gets resolved. I don't think that it's good for anyone and is costing a lot of money and lives.
“Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
“About three-quarters of Israeli Jews thought that Israel's military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-d...
As far as I can tell, from talking with Israelis both living in Israel and outside, there really isn't one majority thinking a certain way, it seems to me that there is an equal amount of people cheering the settlers as there are people against what they're doing.
Speaking out of my ass here. But I’d guess most people don’t care. A minority cheers. A minority protests. Most go on with their lives.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n13/adam-shatz/the-world...
https://archive.ph/2025.07.19-181407/https://www.lrb.co.uk/t...
"‘If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you,’ the Israeli stand-up comedian Gil Kopatz posted. ‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’ According to a survey commissioned by Penn State, more than 80 per cent of Israeli Jews now support the expulsion of Gazans. Compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists. When Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, posted a tweet celebrating a recent prisoner exchange, he was denounced for seeming to equate the predicament of jailed Palestinians and Jewish hostages: ‘Your presence pollutes the Knesset,’ a colleague told him."
On all levels, including information war. Information war is the only one where hamas is currently winning.
That is why you are already heavily biased based on the tone of your questions. About 90%+ of what you see on mainstream media is either a straightforward lie or carefully designed, massaged and distorted truth (for example hamas counts as casualties everyone, including fully armed terrorists killed in action). Another example is fake news about “starvation” where they post standalone photos of children with generic disorders as a proof. Im just scratching the surface.
This information war is mainly sponsored by quatar and iran with 2 longterm goals in mind 1) destabilizing and undermining USA influence in middle east and worldwide 2) destroying israel and killing as many jews as possible (literally, they don’t hide it if you check anything besides bbc and english al-jazeera)
That is what really going on. That is the brutal truth. Unfortunately it’s not an exaggeration.
Hamas obviously started this but Israel won the war a long time ago. The world deserves an end. The longer it goes on the more Hamas will actually have achieved some kind of lasting positive image of Gaza which is rooted in their actions on Oct 7th and that would be an incredibly bad outcome for all.
Israeli soldiers, politicians, and many civilians are portraying themselves this way. Soldiers post videos sniping a child in the head calling it a "legendary video", politicians say Palestinians should starve, civilians block aid trucks.
Do you resent the way they are portrayed or do you mean you resent what a lot of Israelis are doing?
How can the same country that prides itself in their intel/spying prowess, and has demonstrated sophisticated capabilities and attacks, claim it will be helpless if they don't absolutely disappear another group of people and take their territory?
I seriously doubt the Oct 7 attack caught Israel by surprise, given the scale of it and the level of compromise Israel had on Hamas. Given the disproportionate response Israel was prepared to employ, it was a perfect casus belli to appropriate even more land, as it is happening right now.
Instead Israel could become a democratic state with equal rights for all citizens.
Which context has been stripped from the narrative in your opinion? Maybe you’ll say Israel is the original Jewish homeland and therefore the occupation is justified?
"Give me liberty or give me death" as you say in America, I believe. Or does that only apply to the white man?
ok when is it contextually ok to starve children?
I don't recall many people ever seriously asking for that, though I admit I'm not up-to-date on Israeli affairs. Don't the overwhelming majority of outsiders want a two-state solution, or failing that a more secular Israeli administration?
Through a lens of historical context and not just Oct 7th, it's hard for me to believe that Israelis don't know how to attain regional peace. We know exactly why Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are angry at the Israeli government, and there are simple ways to fix it if the willpower exists.
this is also the main problem with your post; your context goes back to Oct 7, whereas it should go back to 1948 (or earlier).
You cannot drive people from their land into a barren reservation, oppress them for decades, and expect them to not resist or fight back. It's the same colonization tactics that were used on the Native Americans, who launched their Intifadas and occasionally also committed the type of horrible atrocities as Hamas did on Oct 7. You can't justify Oct 7, but the reality is human nature is such that unless you remove the conditions which caused Oct 7 in the first place -- then it will repeat, maybe not Hamas, maybe not in this generation, but the next generation, as we've already seen.
The Israeli government is trying to "solve" the Palestinian problem the same way that the US government "solved" the Native American problem -- kill enough of them, make deals and then break them (this is the Israeli settler problem), and move them far enough away from their original lands, for long enough, that you finally and completely break their spirit and ability to resist. And if that means bombing and starving tens of thousands of women and children, so be it. And the Israeli God-given "right" to the Palestinian land, because it's the "holy land" from 2000 years ago, is very much like the God-given "manifest destiny" that US colonizers invoked to "settle" the West. It was genocide then and it's genocide now.
Also, the situation on the ground seems pretty clear cut. You can literally watch videos of brutal war crimes committed by Israel on Reddit. Everyone has direct proof.
This grants power while losing agency. And it is more, and more common, e.g. in the United States with its "Deep State" myth of the Q-Anon sect.
Now unless you ascribe to that religion or believe that your tribe can do no wrong it all seems simple.
Aside from a vocal minority, the impression I get around from conversations with and reading other Australians is that the Australian people largely agree with your position.
Just war principles are important to observe.
The Nazis were a thuggish and murderous regime with plenty of complicity from the German populace, but the firebombing of Dresden was evil, as were the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Targeting civilians is evil.
If we accept that these are evil, and we ought to, then we must accept that what Israel is doing is unacceptable. Bibi should be punished.
You can target Hamas, and you should, but just war does not allow for the means Israel has used.
The why takes more explanation. I'd suggest you dig through https://xcancel.com/ireallyhateyou/, this person is an israeli with background in leftist activism that recently went into exile. They collect and translate a lot of material from israeli television and other media, and also translate and explain a lot of historical material, both more mainstream like background information on contemporary israeli politicians and the occasional look at punk and leftist activism in Israel during the nineties and -00s.
It's also a good idea to spend time going through the material collected by Younis Tirawi, https://xcancel.com/ytirawi. It shows what IDF personnel believes to be appropriate behaviour that will positively impress their civilian israeli peers, i.e. what they consider to be the political climate.
Diaspora jews are quite heterogenous and splintered. Many support Israel, and many don't. One 'poll' is the democratic mayor primary in New York, where Zohran Mamdani was quite popular among jewish constituents. Adding to this, many jewish institutions are in some sense captured or founded by zionists, and funded because they are loyal to the zionist cause. This includes many summer camps and similar activities for jewish youth. Since 2023 I expect more diaspora jews to have lost sympathy with the zionist movement than it has gained, but it's not something I have polling numbers to support. On the other hand, basically every recurring large protest against Israel has a jewish contingent.
At the moment we're past immediate resolution, because the entire population in the Gaza strip has been permanently, irrevocably harmed by starvation. It would also take a lot of violence to force the israeli society to back down and stop what it's doing to its neighbours, and then likely generations of enforced stabilisation and education to sow seeds of democracy, neither of which Israel's occidental backers are willing to consider. Then there's the questions of colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are illegal and must be dissolved, which in turn would require distinct amounts of force both to achieve and then to keep it from turning into a civil war within Israel when the so called settlers are relocated there.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, one should keep in mind that this is mainly a christian project, most adherents to zionism are christians.
I'm not an Israeli by Israeli standards :) And will never be. But, of course, I'm a citizen, I can read and speak Hebrew well.
Politically, you can say, I came full circle. As many newcomers I was fed a very simplified and one-sided story of Israeli-Arab relationship. The first time I ever cast my vote in elections I voted Shinuj (they are farther right than Likud). In general, immigrants from the former Soviet Union tend to vote right and be pro-settlers.
For non-political reasons I ended up in military jail, where I met some "prisoners of consciousness" who, while didn't convince me to switch my political position entirely, exposed me to the leftist ideas delivered by the leftists. It's very important to see such ideas through the eyes of supporters because the other side virtually always misrepresents them to score points.
I didn't care about elections for a while, but, eventually, when I finally decided to vote, I voted Meretz.
I don't think I will vote in the next elections. Or, maybe, out of habit, I'll vote Democrats (former Labor and Meretz together)... but, really, I don't see a good candidate.
Anyways, what made me depart from the liberal camp is the European liberals. Pathologically bad decisions, or, even more often, the complete lack of any decisions. Gullible and zealous about issues they don't understand... I just don't want to associate myself with people like that. And I see how Israeli liberals parrot the European liberal's believing they know better.
* * *
So... to try to give some sort of a breakdown on who in Israel stands with settlers and why:
* Working class hates Arabs. It's plain and simple: working class often has to work in mixed environments. Construction, hospitality, agriculture. And there Arabs are just danger. You have to look over your shoulder all the time to make sure Mahmud isn't in a bad mood today and didn't bring a knife to work, and isn't going to cut you. I worked in a chain restaurant where a line cook brought a bomb one day to work and killed a bunch of people, himself included. Any Israeli who worked blue collar jobs probably has a story like that. These people don't care about the technicalities or long-term consequences of illegal settlements. Whoever harms Arabs, they are voting for that guy.
* Healthcare holds a special place in white collar jobs because there are a lot of Arabs working in it. But these are not the brutes who come to work with knives and bombs. Also, doctors Jewish doctors are exposed to Arab patients and the other way around... this creates a more friendly atmosphere. You will also find that doctors in Israel are probably the most leftist of any occupation.
* White collar jobs in general want to see Israel copying Europe. People in these jobs tend to want the rule of law, equality, secularism, inclusivity. They see settlers as either crazy or brutish and don't want to associate with them. Even if they may hold right-wing views, they want the implementation to be lawful and non-violent if possible.
* Black-kipah orthodox Jews only care about themselves. For better or for worse. They only wake up when politicians directly address their interests. If settlers go berserk on Arabs or Arabs eviscerate the settlers: they don't care.
* Knitted-kipah orthodox Jews are the settlers (not all of them, but probably a majority). They believe Israel should be restored in some sort of historical borders... as per usual, those borders aren't very certain, but they would quite certainly encompass a place called Judea and a city called Jerusalem. They believe they are doing a favor to the Jewish community by fighting "invaders" (Arabs).
* Israeli Arabs... are a mixed bag. You can find literal jihadists and those who hate other Arabs on the other side of the fence more than settlers do. It's very clanish and way too involved to try to parse it.
* The owners class, the rich people, they despise settlers. See them as an inconvenience / a bunch of lunatics. They don't care about Arabs either.
* Immigrants, especially fresh, tend to overwhelmingly support settlers because they misunderstand their status and genuinely believe the settlers are doing what the country isn't allowed to do due to some political scheming going on.
The Free Press, Call Me Back (podcast), and Breaking Israeli History (podcast) do a good job. Also we will dance again and October 8 (films). I'd also recommend Douglas Murray's On Democracies and Death Cults to get some perspective if you're curious, generally people don't bother on online discussion forums on this topic because it's not productive, but for earnestly curious friends I make the case below. From my perspective, Jews outside of Israel have become more united because the nature of a lot of the western response after 10/7 ironically shows why Jews need a state and an army to protect themselves.
I’m all for high minded debate, but a lot of the anti-Israel protesting isn’t that, the people celebrating or excusing 10/7 on 10/8 before Israel responded, the guy that recently executed two young people leaving a jewish event in DC and then screamed “Free Palestine”, the guy that murdered an old woman at a hostage march in boulder, the “death, death to the IDF” shouted from the stage in Glastonbury to a cheering crowd, the “river to the sea” and “intifada” chants/harassing of jews on college campuses, the repeated negative press narrowly focused on Israel from BBC, Guardian, NYT, the ‘genocide’ claims and other false blood libels, people marching waving islamic republic of Iran and Hezbollah flags in NYC, smashing up jewish owned businesses, etc. - these people are not motivated by some idea of nuanced democratic values or a ‘two state solution’, they’re motivated by old Jewish hatred under a new name. Islamism blended with lefty socialism united in their support of “anti-zionism” i.e. the destruction of Israel.
Many of these media orgs have been hollowed out by an activist ideology that doesn’t understand the history it’s swimming in and doesn’t pursue truth as much as push a political agenda. What ‘genocide’ provides aid to the people they’re supposedly trying to kill? Hamas is driven by a theologically motivated Jihad against the Jews with explicit genocidal intent, The Islamic Republic of Iran (distinct from its people) wants to destroy Israel and then the west and uses terrorism for this purpose and may have used a nuke if not for recent events. It is necessary to use lethal force to defend against this kind of threat. Anyone that cares about a positive future for Palestinians should recognize there is no possibility of such a future while Hamas remains in power.
Europe has largely been protected by the US providing its security and deterrence after WWII. Israel is on the front lines and can’t ignore the reality on the ground, their survival depends on it. You can fight this earlier or wait until the cost is higher to fight it later. Other Arab countries understand these problems, it’s why the UAE has banned the Muslim brotherhood and other extremist organizations, it’s why Saudi is leaning closer towards normalization with Israel and both are allied against Iran. They understand the risks of Islamic terror because they have to deal with it - it forces an accurate understanding. Something Europe (and anti-Israel protestors in the west) don’t grasp, but given Europe’s poor policy on this issue they likely will continue to experience more of first hand.
What Hamas did is joyfully murder, rape, and torture a bunch of lefty kibbutzniks (the kind bringing gaza kids to Israeli hospitals) and music festival kids, took hostages that they’re still holding, while filming it, laughing about it and celebrating it. They have an explicitly genocidal charter interested in killing all the Jews. There is no compatibility between the west and those interested in Islamic Jihad. Every third house in gaza has weapons in it (often hidden in kids rooms), Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian areas to try to maximize civilian casualties despite Israel’s effort to minimize them. They also kill civilians that go against them and have been launching rockets into Israel for years.
That action requires a military response to achieve political goals: return the hostages and destroy hamas / remove them from power. That is unavoidable without civilian deaths (always a tragedy in war), but the fault for this lies squarely with Hamas for starting the war. Few wars have moral grounding as clear as the war started because of 10/7. On October 8th people in the west were celebrating the invasion and killing carried about by Hamas, some mixture of ignorance and useful idiots (primarily on the political left) along with explicitly pro-hamas support. This was popular in American universities and across Europe before Israel had even responded chanting things like “globalize the intifada”. This is, at best, total moral confusion.
Also notice the attention placed on this conflict, but conspicuously absent from others. Why aren’t students protesting Bashar al-Assad? Or the civilian deaths in the conflict in Yemen? Or in Sudan? Why only the one Jewish state that was brutally attacked by a terrorist group that’s still holding its citizens hostage? This isn’t just an issue with Hamas either, it’s more complicated - many Palestinian civilians participated in the kidnapping, looting, and violence on 10/7. They helped harbor hostages. They would have lynched the hostages being returned if Hamas wasn’t preventing that and they of course elected Hamas to power in the first place. The population itself is radicalized with a deep hatred of Jews.
Enormous amounts of foreign aid (hundreds of millions) has flowed into gaza of the last couple of decades. Enough to make the Hamas leaders billionaires whose families can live large in Qatar while supporting their investment of tunnels to support their terrorism. A lot of it is backed by Iran, but a lot of this aid is from western nations to organizations that worked directly with and supported Hamas (UNRWA). This money could have been used to build something after Israel’s "land for peace" withdrawal in 2005, instead it was used for terror. It’s more instructive to look at what motivates the groups today rather than litigate divergent historical narratives (i.e. Nakba was five Arab states attacking Israel and the ‘catastrophe’ was that they lost, the security checkpoints exist because of suicide bombing during the intifadas, etc.). If Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages it would end the fighting they started. If Israel laid down their weapons they’d all be killed. Palestinians have no interest in two states which they’ve repeatedly rejected, they’re interested in killing all the Jews, the destruction of Israel, and more broadly the destruction of the west (as Iran’s proxy). Meanwhile in Israel, Arabs and Jews live together peacefully as Israeli citizens.
Ideally it’d be possible to engage in war with perfect individual targeting and no civilian casualties. Israel does this as much as possible (Hezbollah pager attack was very narrowly targeted, targeted strikes on individuals in specific apartments, other civilian warning strategies), but it’s not perfect and civilian deaths are unavoidable, especially in dense urban conflict zones. The IDF has a better record on this than any other modern western army (including US when we took Mosul against ISIS). I see war as a means to achieve a specific political result when diplomacy is not possible (or after you’ve been attacked). In this case: remove Hamas from power and return the hostages. In the broader conflict: remove the threat from Hezbollah and Iran. I think it’s necessary to achieve these goals in order to achieve any lasting peace.
Some ideologies and enemies require total military defeat. If western civilization is not willing to do this despite its real costs, then power is ceded to enemies that don’t have the same moral concerns, or in this case, explicitly want to maximize civilian death and terror as they did on 10/7 and it'll just happen again. My view is Israel would like to live in peace with its neighbors if that’s a real option (and historically has tried many times), but it’s not. Israel's neighbors (driven by a particular theological view of Islam from the Muslim Brotherhood) are not interested in peaceful coexistence. Israel should not make concessions to an enemy still plotting to destroy them.
If we’re lucky an outcome of this conflict could be normalization with KSA / an extension of the Abraham accords and deeper partnership with other Arab countries in the region - maybe even a shift in some of the public’s ideology if people recognize that trying to destroy Israel/kill Jews leads to ruin (though this is hard with radicalization in the culture/schools, etc.) - it’s a generational project that will take time, but it’s not impossible. Currently, because the goals have not been achieved (Hamas still holds hostages, still wants to remain in power, still will not surrender) the war continues and sadly civilians continue to pay some of the cost. The allies (mostly US) fully administered Japan after WWII for 7 years, Japan lost their sovereignty during that time. An outcome of starting a war and losing it is you may lose your sovereignty and land. It’s possible to defeat evil ideologies, it happened in WWII with both Japan and Germany.
I think it’s very challenging to know what’s true given all the bad actors (UN, Hamas, Pallywood - they film fake videos to (effectively) manipulate western sentiment) and their repeated lying. I think that the GHF has weakened Hamas by removing their control over the aid which has threatened them, and lastly I’m personally not sure what responsibility there is to provide aid at all while hostages remain held in Gaza (this is a more controversial view) - that said, Israel has provided and continues to provide enormous amounts of civilian aid and works to move civilians outside of the areas of fighting despite this being a thankless task. War can be a moral act, the west exercising its power to defend its values against an evil ideology is an important and necessary thing.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-destruction...
We would consider someone fucking uneducated if in 2025 they tried to justify the Iraq/Afghanistan war. The same will be true for everything you wrote as time goes on.
However, there are two aspects of this conflict where Israel is IMO monumentally and unarguably in the wrong.
One is the settler program. It is wholly inconsistent with a desire to live peacefully alongside even savage enemies. If they are so bad, put up fences and put guns on them - as Israel is doing. But the settlement program, with displacements of Palestinian civilians, bulldozing of Palestinian villages, rendering arable land inhospitable, unchecked settler violence, is clearly just a land grab, and against any semblance of desiring a peaceful coexistence. It often gets dismissed as a fringe movement, but election after election, democratic Israeli governments show varying, but always positive amounts of support.
The other is use of famine against civilians. There is no conceivable military goal in sight other than indiscriminate death and misery onto truly random people, half of them below the median age of 19 not even being politically active. It is not an accident either, Ben Gvir and/or Smotrich talk about it openly.
To be clear, Hamas and co are also guilty of horrendous crimes. Thing is, vast majority of reasonable people accept that and point it out. Israel clearly accepts that too, but perceives the mere whiff of criticism as rabid discrimination.
And the two don't cancel out. It's not about restraint, or higher standard, or any uneven field. Any instance of terrorism and genocide is horrendous, unnecessary and unacceptable. They don't serve military or diplomatic deals. They are there to hurt just because you can, and somehow it pleases some basic human instinct.
Anti-Israeli crime is awful and I condemn it. I don't support Hamas, heckling of Jews around the world, the 7th Oct attacks were awful. I mean it. And Israel's actions are also awful and inhumane.
If you are asking specifically about the Hilltop Youth, I believe most people understand them to be somewhere between extremists and jewish terrorists and do not support their actions. The government (well, Ben-Gvir) can continue to support them (within limits of plausible deniability) as long as they are in power and elections aren't until late next year.
If you are asking about Israeli Jews and the ongoing war, I'd remind you that the IDF is the people's army and conscription is mandatory. Everyone (in the mainstream) has either served in the IDF or has family there and so they know first-hand that claims that the IDF is participating in a genocide are absurd. If you're telling me my (in this case fictional) cousing Omri is participating in a genocide, I can very easily ignore that because I know he is a good kid that wouldn't do that, and I can call him up and ask him. Or maybe I'll ask my (fictional) coworker Daniel, the poor guy has been called into reserve duty for over 300 days since the war started.
They've also probably seen at least one of the many lies going around about the war. The documentary that the BBC tried to fake. The UN lying about the amount of aid going into Gaza (at the time when the american temporary pier plan was ongoing, the UN published numbers of trucks that they personally supervised going into Gaza. Conveniently, they had no one present to supervise in one of three checkpoints and "missed" about 1/3rd of the aid going in). UNWRA personnel participating in the OCT-7 attack. UNIFIL providing cover for Hezbollah to fire rockets on Israeli homes (including some Druze children which really shocked people around the country). Some blatant foreign media nonesense I've seen is showing footage of Israeli soccer fans being beaten and recontextualising it as if they are the ones doing the beating. Footage of an Israeli survivor of a terrorist attack (speaking Hebrew, in Israeli media!) being subtitled to describe her as a Palestinian survivor of an Israeli terror attack. Footage of Assad slaughtering his Syrian population broadcast as if it is a slaughter by the IDF, etc. Foreign media has proven itself to Israelis as liars, so they have no reason to listen to them.
They also see it as the #1 priority to return the hostages and see any call to stop the war before they are returned as ridiculous and evil (Though I do believe a majority support a deal of "everyone for everyone and a stop to the war").
In this light, even though many people believe the war could have already ended (with an aforementioned "everyone for everyone" deal) and Netanyahu is cruelly extending the war for his own personal interests, they also understand that any civilian casualties are part of the horrors of war and are purely the fault of Hamas, both for starting the conflict, and for their use of civilians as human shields, their use of civilian infrastructure (schools, mosques, hospitals) as war resources and use of their children as soldiers. They may also be familiar with the data, which last time both sides published semi-reliable information (or equally unreliable information), showed that when compared to other historical conflicts, civilian casualties were actually a smaller part of overall casualties. And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war as the IDF is already doing their duty to fight as ethically as is reasonably possible.
While we're there, we also frequently see news of Israelis and Jews being attacked around the world with no one really giving a shit about it. If the UK shows me that they don't give a shit about the lives of Jews/Israelis in the UK, I'm definitely not going to care what the UK government thinks about the ongoing war.
> Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
If you are in Israel and know of Jews residing elsewhere, they are probably former Israelis, which don't neccesarily represent non-Israeli Jews in those countries. Those I've spoken to have spoken about a sharp rise in antisemitism. Some fear for their lives. From the news and other media I know some Jews feel like Israel is going too far, but they get their opinions from e.g. the BBC, so you can't really take them as well-informed opinions.
- Incidentally, one former UN employee I know has spoken about ingrained and casual antisemitism in the UN much earlier than OCT-7 (of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" kind), so I'd consider any opinion or intervention by the UN as deceitful and unwelcome.
They started the war, but Israel should be expected to behave at a higher standard than terrorists. They are causing the starvation and death that is not needed to protect Israel's interests. The deaths are now on them.
>And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war
I don't believe that one minute.
Your own defense ministers have said there is no military value in continuing the war, and there is no getting the hostages back without a deal with Hamas. This war continues because of far-right bloodlust from the Israeli government, and Bibi's desire to stay in power and out of jail.
Aid could get in, and the starvation could stop, if it was the will of the Israeli government. Hamas is militarily FUBAR, and Oct7 only happened because of the decisions made by Bibi to move IDF to the West Bank and ignore warnings from intelligence. Oct7 will not happen again, even if the fighting stopped this instant.
Instead, they want to see Palestine starve so they can take over Gaza.
Great summary of recent status: https://crooked.com/podcast/tbd-2/
That's pretty irrelevant when they don't put you in front of a firing squad for draft dodging, isn't it? If it is possible to refuse - either by draft dodging or by complying poorly enough that it basically becomes sabotage - the fact that you chose not to do so means you are complicit.
To bring this argument to the extreme: would you murder your own father if there was a $10 fine on not doing so? It's the law, after all! You're just following the law, so you cannot possibly be held accountable for your actions, right?
...
It makes no sense. Yes, antisemitism exists. Two wrongs don't make a right.
trying to explain it, will get you downvoted and flagged. because people find it inconvenient when facts don't correlate with carefully cultivated media picture that they been consuming
edit: just in case somebody cares
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
https://www.jns.org/over-6300-terror-attacks-against-jews-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Price_tag_attack_...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/letter-sanctio...
To me, simply labeling somone as "evil" not feels like a premature termination of the chain of causality, but also circular reasoning (Why does X do evil things? Because X is evil. Why is X evil? Because X does evil things). There has to be more to it than that.
What is happening is definitely "evil" in its purest form, but there are many contributing explanations that don't rely on circular reasoning.
- long-term geopolitical goals of "the West" in the middle east
- a culture defined by a noxious combination of victim complex + ethnoreligious superiority
- a society pampered by foreign financial and military aid (not having to stand on its own)
- a long history of regional violence
The film could not find a U.S. distributor after being picked up for distribution in 24 countries and winning the Oscar, a situation that has been compared to soft censorship.
This is everything you need to know about the world we live in. Palestinian lives simply do not matter.
Israel very much depends on being the dominant power in the region. If they lose US support, things could get ugly indeed. And they are losing support rapidly now.
If anything, currently it looks like Israel's relations with its nearby neighbours (excluding Palestine. Syria is bit unclear also) are improving while its relationship with the broader world is sinking like a stone.
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/29/headlines/palestinian...
> Odeh Muhammad Hadalin’s name was sometimes spelt as Awdah Muhammad Hathaleen.
https://www.kqed.org/news/12043918/feds-detain-2-palestinian...
The last update was
June 13: A previous version of this story named the two Palestinian men who were sent back home. Their names were removed after concerns were raised for their safety.
The Isreali man really should not have been there, but I have to recognise a couple of things.
1) I don't know what anyone is saying except, ironically, plea's of someone near the camera man asking the Israeli man to "Shoot me".
2) I do not know what lead up to this confrontation
3) I have been in a circumstance before where a large group of people are acting frantic and in a threatening way and it's genuinely terrifying, so much so that you will act irrationally - this might be something others on this platform might not be familiar with.
The circumstance could have been avoided by Israel not having any settlers in the west bank, for sure, and it's a tragic situation.
However, I'm sitting here, in Sweden, behind a computer on a site about entrepreneurialism and technology.
I can't possibly say anything on the subject that's meaningful, none of us can. Why is it here?
This western favoritism is new, probably vicariously living Israels dirty work which they would like to do themselves. But the israeli supremacist mindset is nothing new for the chosen ones.
He was arrested by Israeli police for questioning, but was later released on house arrest while an investigation continued.
About a dozen Israeli soldiers raided the mourning tent, pushing those attending out while keeping a thumb on the pin of a stun grenade. Soldiers declared the area a closed military zone and said only residents of the village could be present. They arrested two activists and threw stun grenades at journalists who were too slow to leave.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/palestinian-aw...
1. Hamas doesn't accept a two-state solution.
2. Israel is therefore forced into implementing a one-state solution.
* - 2-state means 2 co-equal states, with equal people, and equal rights (including the equal right to be safe from the other)
[1] https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/dossiers-pays/israel-terri...
Israel is a terrorist organization, not a state.
Arguably it's worse than what is usually meant by terrorism, i.e. civilians or paramilitaries attacking a state by actions against civilians, since it's a state exterminating stateless civilians.
Quite important not to become part of the problem when you discuss this case. And the problem is that such a heated subject is prone to make people ideologically possessed and tribal. To a point where they become emotionally blinded and are unable to listen to people that don't share/fully support their beliefs.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support...
Given Israeli education, support for settlers, the immigration policy which allows anyone with Jewish heritage to claim land there (regardless of any connection to the area, and of any outstanding arrest warrants) and Israelis using their kids to stop aid trucks and so on, there's a lot needed to show the majority what is actually humane and acceptable.
I agree with the sentiment of your second paragraph, but I wish that thought applied in general, and not just to some special case countries. Especially considering the widely differing levels of democratic power people have in these different countries.
If you listen to their “liberal opposition” leaders like the likes of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz they sound just as unhinged as Netanyahu himself [1]
Every poll conducted on Israeli public opinion on the conflict would make have made Nazi officials blush. Majority of Israelis support ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza [2].
Seeing the facts as they are is not being “emotionally blinded”. When genocidal psychopaths scream at the top of their lungs they want to commit genocide and actively work towards that goal, with the results right in front of our eyes, we compelled to believe them.
[1] https://x.com/ghostofbph/status/1948720978378309847?s=46
[2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-03/ty-article/.p...
> Eurasia Poll: 82% of Israelis want to expel Palestinians from Gaza; 47% want to kill every man, woman, child
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/05/30/poll-israelis-exp...
Lives in Palestine get far more attention than Burma, West Africa, Ethiopia and Sudan [1].
The basic truth is lives far removed from us tend to be forgettable.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_confli...
I've lost friends of 15 years for remarking on my horror about bombings and civilian deaths. Nothing more.
I can't even begin to understand a mentality which cannot see the absolute asymmetry of power at work here.
The daily protests happen because they're necessary. And they're clearly not enough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Mu...
> Today, Jews residing in Muslim countries have been reduced to a small fraction of their former sizes, with Iran and Turkey being home to the largest remaining Jewish populations, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Algeria, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq. This was due to Zionist recruitment, religious beliefs, economic reasons, widespread persecution, antisemitism, political instability and curbing of human rights in Muslim-majority countries.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim," they say. Where then, should the Jews be allowed to live? Only in Brooklyn?
> Until the 1960s, approximately one million Jews lived in Iran and other Arab countries having arrived in the region more than 2,000 years before. Nowadays, it is estimated that only around 15,000 remain, as the majority of the Jewish population in Muslim lands were forced to flee their homes
https://sephardicu.com/history/jewish-population-in-10-islam...
Hamas could surrender at any time. They're to blame for everything.
From your source.
It's important to note that in a place like Algeria the French colonists granted Jewish populations citizenship to France, yet denied it to the Arab and Berber populations. [1] This fractured relations between the Sephardic population and the rest of the local population, which is exactly what the French wanted.
I'm not going to say relations were perfect before, or deny that Jewish populations weren't second class citizens, but there was a long history of being neighbors and having cities like Constantine be a place of refuge after the Spanish expulsion of Jews from Andalusia. I mean, in places like Mogador in Morocco, Jewish populations were explicitly invited by the king to settle and set up trading businesses [2].
The founding of Israel completely changed this and fractured relations that went back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9mieux_Decree
Violence begets violence, if Israeli settlers want to fight to displace other people then they will die in that process. Thankfully for Jews, there are other states they can choose to inhabit that are both secular and respect international law. These are, statistically, safer places for Jewish individuals to live than a state that instructs their army on how to commit fratricide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Or more accurately, the world would let the US let it happen. And the US would probably fund it.
And the world would feel so, so sorry as they paved over the mass graves and built AI data centers and luxury hotels in what used to be Gaza.
You could also say that "two-state solution" has been tried in 1948, but (for whatever reasons) didn't work out. So support for 2-state is just a form of delaying the inevitable.
I am now firm believer in one-state solution as the most fair one. Peter Beinart has some good arguments in its favor.
And I think it would be a poetic justice for all the racist settlers (or islamists) to have the people they hate as their neighbors.
The Arab world overwhelmingly rejected the UN Partition Plan in principle, which led directly to the 1948 Palestine war and the first Arab-Israeli war. Likewise, the signing of the Oslo Accords (and the rejection of those accords by Hamas, PIJ and other factions within the PLO) led directly to the Second Intifada. Most of the Arab world has now conceded that Israel isn't going anywhere and huge steps have been made in normalising Arab-Israeli relations, but Palestinian politics is still dominated by a fundamentally futile anti-Zionist absolutism.
A credible option of full statehood and international recognition has been on the table for nearly eighty years, but Palestinians have consistently failed to establish a workable consensus on taking up that option. The PLO's intransigence has alienated most of their allies in the region, primarily because they instigated civil wars in both Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1975).
A one-state solution is no solution at all while there remain extremists on both sides who are simply unwilling to coexist; unless Israel can reign in the religious right and the Palestinians can establish a political consensus in favour of coexistence, it's a straightforward path to war. There's no "poetic justice" in making people who hate each other live together, just an inevitable perpetuation of bloodshed.
The political debates about land rights are intractably complex, but the fundamental realpolitik question is about how much the Palestinians are willing to suffer for the principle of "from the river to the sea". Israel is militarily dominant and is likely to remain so regardless of how much international pressure is brought to bear. In simple practical terms, the ball is in the Palestinian court and it is for them to decide whether to seriously engage in a two (or three) state solution with international support, or whether to continue pursuing an unwinnable conflict. A post-Netanyahu Israel is highly likely to support a serious two-state solution, but simply isn't going to accept a one-state solution; even if you believe a one-state solution to be the only just outcome, it isn't a workable outcome.
More than a one-state solution.
Would it be nice if people could get along and not require militarised borders to keep them from killing each other? Sure. This was essentially the colonial assumption when the Middle East (and Africa’s) modern borders were drawn—that local preferences could be overcome by force of will.
In reality, where you draw borders on a map matters less than the people on the ground’s identities and guns.
This is a problem for the neighbouring countries, isn't it? They don't want to deal with a bunch of new people any more than any other country does.
> let Israel annexate Gaza
This is just admitting that might makes right
> and then imposing strict border controls... severly sanctioned
You would need people to actually believe this
Even so, this plan does not address the fact that both parties really really want to live on the same land. You might as well ask the Israelis why they aren't content to resettle some other place, they wouldn't accept it anymore than the Palestinians would.
To the extent there is consensus among today’s superpower and regional powers, it’s that international peacekeepers don’t work. At best they delay while incubating a conflict.
What’s the solution then? We keep wringing our hands and saying it’s impossible?
Truth is no one wants to fight overseas anymore.
This is a bit misleading.
Israel proposed that it maintain absolute and total military control of Gaza, but that a "peacekeeping force" from three Arab nations, bizarrely to be controlled by the US, would "secure food distribution".
Israel has absolutely zero intention of handing over control of Gaza, and has gone to extraordinary lengths to vilify and delegitimize every international organization at every turn.
An actual peacekeeping force as described above would be about keeping Israel in check as much as ensuring Hamas doesn't re-appear.
Given the history of Israel with the UNIFIL...
If the answer is "None" then Israel did not in fact propose peacekeeping forces.
The original European Jews who founded Israel were even opposed to the German Nazis transferring thousands of Jewish children to other countries to save their lives.
These Zionist Jews thought it would be better for their state building project if these children were all murdered than if the children were sent anywhere except to Palestine.
But, some of the collaboration wasn't really the Zionist Jews' entire fault. E.g., the machine tools the Zionist Jews used to create weaponry to murder Palestinian civilians and ethnically cleans Palestine were all German made, and purchased from the Nazi regime, but this was because the Nazis only allowed the rich jews to leave with German made products, not with cash. So, when the minority of Jews fled to Israel/Palestine instead of to the United States (vast majority went to the US), they were instructed to purchase machine tools from the Germans to bring with them.
But I'm sure they wouldn't have done the same to Gaza if they would've just done the right thing by kicking off Hamas, and stopping any armed resistance !
I mean they didn't literally kill every single arab in Gaza yet so they are very progressive. They'd rather just slowly settle your land and kill you if you resist, as opposed to Hamas who would've done the same but faster. Let's not forget that they have killed tens of thousands of Muslims, but at least they could've killed even more!
If anything being armed in that situation is incredibly stupid, because you'll still panic and now you're acting irrationally with a deadly weapon. The weapon can be used (as this example) or taken off you.
I speak from experience, I got mobbed upon by a local gang, thought it would be smart to arm myself with a prop sword in order to stop them advancing.
It didn't stop them, and in fact the sword was taken off me (because it was a prop, and I wouldn't have used it even if it wasn't to be honest) - and they proceeded to smash it over my head sending me to hospital.
All of this is only obvious with a clear head, and in hindsight. Being in that situation as a human being is just.. awful. I don't recommend it.
EDIT: I'm getting flagged a lot from emotional people; I think this is part of why I really dislike this topic, we know nothing except how we feel and refuse to look at things objectively - and we're not even qualified to do that anyway. So everything becomes pornography to confirm our biases and to drown out anyone who doesn't immediately call for the end of Israel.
If a Russian soldier in Ukrainian territory shot some civilian in the face, I guess you'd also have put yourself in their shoes and given them the benefit of the doubt? I mean, they were terrified!
- About tech
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- About censorship
Genocide by itself, that's just not good enough apparently. That's very weird because there's tons of serious discussion on HN about history. This place cares a lot about history. Whatever is happening right now is just real-time history.
The documentary "Checkpoint" is more than 20 years old by now, the treatment of West Bank's Palestinians has been fucked up for even longer than that, and Netanyahu's government only made it worse.
I wish to see in my lifetime Israel having to reckon with the fact they've become the monster, justifying their actions after the immense suffering their ancestors went through during the Holocaust is impossible...
Edit: according to Yuval Abraham[0], the killer instructed soldiers to arrest the other 4 family members of Awdah Hathaleen which are still in jail, while the murderer was released under house arrest, fucking insane.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/10/video-appears-...
When it does happen, how often does well-intended foreign intervention actually "fix" things - vs. turning into a yet another "park our troops there 'till we finally run out of patience" occupation?
My read is that the many powerful factions which favor (overtly or not) the ongoing violent mess in/around Israel have (generally) very good understandings of the situation and its dynamics. And the benefits & costs - for them - of encouraging it to continue indefinitely. Vs. the opposing side is dominated by sincere but all-too-simple "make horrible things stop happening!!!" emotions.
:(
As it was with the USA, this is a foundational tragedy of Israel.
The innate xenophobic "kill the THEM!" human quality appears to be alive and well, across the world today.
It’s disgusting, and most importantly not at all a matter of propaganda.
A totalitarian ideology throwing its own future into the furnace, not for a tomorrow (all the fertilizer was ammunition, they had sentenced themselves to starvation) but for the hope of killing all your enemies one last time.
How can one venture this deep into defending this regressive madness is beyond me. I hope you heal from whatever hatred is devouring you.
I have such a hard time understanding how such statements can find an accepting audience in this day and age; in Israel of all places.
Replace "Israeli stand-up comedian" with "some Nazi propagandist in the 30s/40s" and "Gazans" with "Jews", and I'm sure it would be a perfectly accurate historical quote.
Caption: “When the vermin are dead, the German oak will flourish once more.” (December 1927)
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/images...
The trauma propagates itself. To break the circle is extraordinary, normal is to continue in it.
If the buildings were booby trapped they wouldn't be walking around casually inside. If there were enemy combatants they wouldn't be walking around inside. The buildings by definition have no military value and have been cleared, but they are blown up anyway. These are self documented war crimes.
The idea for Israel was to have its national criminal jurisdictions prosecute just enough to not be seen as failing by the ICC and meet its 'complementarity' criterion [0]. Even spying on ICC staff to see who it was investigating.
At least that's how it used to be, now they just threaten the ICC.
[0]: https://www.pgaction.org/ilhr/rome-statute/complementarity.h...
Terrorism as a label is a very convenient way to justify committing atrocities, under the name of squashing terrorism.
I remember hearing a radio talk show in which someone said they were against the Iraq war and the response from the pundit was "so you don't want to fight against terrorism?"
When people's actions get reduced to a single label it becomes increasingly easier to hate them.
Who have they bombed recently? I make it Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Gaza (is this bombing themselves? Palestine?).
It’s darkly hilarious how terrible neighbouring Israel would be.
They work for the people whose peace they're keeping. Their benefit to the benefactors is less clear. It's why they're becoming increasingly uncommon [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_peaceke...
i remember half an year ago, during ceasefire when gaza was swamped in aid and food was rotting on the streets, laura coates at prime time said that "hundreds of gazans die from starvation daily". never happened. not even dozens.
or when at abby phillips show yesterday, somebody tried to say that presenting images of children with genetic diseases as image of children who are dying from starvation is manipulative, abby phillips stopped this person and said that it's not important.
nyt for example quietly updated it's story on this topic https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-862667
you must have seen numerous mentions that 500 trucks of food to gaza is minimum (and actually needed even more), because it's the number of trucks that were entering gaza before war ? but did you see even once mention that 500 is total number of trucks that included construction materials, animal feed, etc.. etc.. and maximum of trucks of food that entered gaza in 1 day before war was 72(82?)
you don't get journalism in mainstream media coverage anymore. you get activism https://www.thefp.com/p/friedman-when-we-started-to-lie
If we're dealing with the first level we should compare Hamas and Likud (+coalition); if we're dealing with the second level, we should compare Palestine and Israel. Elevating Hamas to represent the entirety of Palestine in the conflict is twisting the logic.
The Arab countries just called for Hamas to lay down their weapons, thereby proving my point.
Hamas is willing to accept the 1967 borders as Palestine.
No. But some of the important people in Israel were smart enough to pretend they were.
Being raised evangelical, I was taught the land belonged to the Jews since God judged the original inhabitants, and was given to them forever. Those who taught me see modern Israel as righting ancient wrongs and Palestine as occupying Jewish land. They've even visited the West Bank through a food effort with a Christian missionary.
Having left the church, it's much clearer to me that Arabs and Jews have both lived there for thousands of years. Both have a right to exist and the capacity to live peacefully together. Sadly those with guns, reductive beliefs, or (sometimes understandable) grudges just won't stop. I'm ashamed the US is supporting these cycles of violence, especially evangelical Christianity.
Yes, and there was a lot of mixing and slow but gradual conversion to the dominant socio-cultural muslim group that happened over more than a millenium. After the muslim conquest of Levant in about 630 AD, caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab lifted the Christian ban on Jews entering Jerusalem some time later during his reign. We do not have data on how many jews decided to return there, rather than keep living in civilizational centres across the region and in Europe.
What we do know is that the jewish population of Palestine at the time that the British government initiated the process of handing over Palestine to jews in return for Lord Rothschild's money that they needed to keep fighting WW1 [2], was only about 7%. Subsequent immigration of mostly European jews into Palestine, resulted in about 30% jewish population by the time Western powers decided to declare an independent Jewish-dominated state of Israel on top of Palestine in 1947.
> Both have a right to exist and the capacity to live peacefully together
Brutal occupation has no right to exist. The supremacist state has to go. Apartheid South Africa had to go, and now South Africa is a better country. Nazi Germany had to go, and now Germany is a better country. Imperial colonial Japan had to go, and now both itself and its former colonized territories are better countries. Supremacist ethno-nationalist Israel that occupies natives of the land it was established upon with despicable brutality has to go. In the resulting state that comes after it, yes, people of any religion and ethnicity need to be able to live together in peace. After reparations have been made, the right of return has been honored, most of the stolen land has been given back, and apartheid has been dismantled.
In general Jews living in west bank communities they created seems fine, I don’t think it’s acceptable for Palestinians to ban Jews. Arabs and Jews live in peace alongside each other as equals in Israel. I think Israel does police the violence on their own side.
That land is secured by Israel as the result of previous wars, it’s complicated. The result of losing a war you start can be losing sovereignty. 2005 Gaza withdrawal suggests giving up that control as a gesture for peace is a serious mistake.
With the aid, Israel has and continues to give tons of aid which Hamas steals to fund themselves. This is not a trivial problem to solve, GHF is an attempt. The press has since the start lied repeatedly about this. My personal view is it’s not clear to me that giving aid to the enemy is the responsibility of the people that were attacked, especially when your people are still held hostage. But that’s irrelevant because despite my view (and some others in the gov) they have given tons of aid.
The world generally is morally confused on this broadly and thinks because Hamas is weak, that must mean they’re good or it’s some sort of economic issue. They do not understand Islamic Jihad and the nature of this ideology. They look at it with a western lens and make a serious error.
The truth is those of us in the west are all living in Israel, just some of us haven’t realized it yet.
Settlers, aided by army and militias of unknown status (armed settlers? reservists? real army?) expropriate Palestinian land, destroy their property, threaten and shoot locals. The area, which was supposed to be a core of a Palestinian state, is criss-crossed with Jewish-only roads, settlements, farms, military checkpoints or closed military areas. The settlers enjoy rights their Palestinian neighbours don't have. This is not about some kind of "Palestine for Palestinians" chauvinism, this is a systematic eradication of a people in what was supposed to be reserved land.
Israel simply cannot with a straight face claim that it wanted a peaceful coexistence when it was de facto policy from the get go to make the two state solution impossible.
As for aid... it is not that Israel is somehow being forced to feed its enemies. There are plenty of organisations trying to send the aid in, and Israel is actively stopping them. Israel kicked out reputable aid organisations, with decades of experience in delivering aid even surrounded by hostile warlords, replaced them with some no-name military contractors, and now regularly shoots people queuing for the little food there is. More people have now been shot queing for food than have died on 7th Oct.
I don't think many people are confused as to what Hamas is. Some, sure, are, but most see it as an awful terrorist organisation. Criticism of Israel doesn't stem from people thinking Hamas is good, but from Israel acting murderously in bad faith, in ways incompatible with peaceful goals, while demanding unlimited patience and sympathy from the world.
The two Oslo agreements themselves don't contain this sort of earmarking. There was a sort of informal understanding that Oslo would be a stepping stone toward a real Palestinian state, and that hasn't happened, but it would be hard to put most of the blame on Israel. Arafat walked away from a very serious statehood offer in 2000, for example.
From your comments it sounds like you might have been misled by some questionable sources, which would be understandable considering even top UN officials have spread rather blatant disinformation about Israel [1]. E.g. you also mention a famine against civilians, when we're actually about three orders of magnitude short of the number of starvations required to declare a famine.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/debunked-un-off...
Isn't that the point? They declared a genocide before Israel had even seriously responded to the attack. (Year and a half ago is Dec 2023, the attempted genocide by Palestinians was Oct 7, 2023.)
The commenter’s position is that the situation in Gaza is justifiable because Israel had to take action against Hamas.
This is textbook collective punishment: causing suffering to a massive number of people due to the actions of a minority.
Asuming all that is true, the person you are responding to never said they supported the policies that lead to that or that state of affairs.
It is possible to imagine that someone could both believe that Israel's continued military operation is neccessary and that changes could be made to relieve the humanitarian situation. I dont know if the person you are responding to actually believes that, but based on their comments there is no reason to think they dont.
Edit:
I would also add that the war crime of collective punishment has a specific intent requirement. The perpetrator has to specificly intend to punish the group for an act. Even if the person you were responding to supported all the things you mentioned, unless they supported it as a punishment for oct 7, instead of out of a belief (for example) that it would allow Israel to defeat hamas, then it would not be collective punishment. It would be other war crimes but not collective punishment. See https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/24/a-short-history-of-the-wa... for a summary of what collective punishment is.
P.s. not so fun fact, the ICC lacks juridsiction over collective punishment, and given they are the main legal body investigating this conflict, we probably arent going to see any investigations into collective punishment
Too many secretly believe they're Renaissance polymaths, instead of being humble enough to admit they don't know something.
And of course sometimes being deeply involved makes experts less objective and outsider perspective may bring some fresh air to the conversation.
I have knowledge about adjacent topics. I add the caveat in case someone has a source that substantiates or refutes my hypothesis because I’m more interested in learning
I think it’s extremely common to be opinionated about things we don’t know much about. I don’t even know if that’s good or bad, I do find it interesting.
It's exceedingly subtle the way ethno-nationalism gets smuggled into the phrase "as a sovereign Jewish state," but it is no less terrible and ugly than the ethno-nationalism in other parts of the world and eras in history.
So you do not condemn the behavior of the illegal settlements?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-70-of-israelis-support-se... https://en.idi.org.il/articles/58648 https://en.idi.org.il/articles/59019 https://en.idi.org.il/articles/59940 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/art... https://www.inss.org.il/publication/survey-april-2025/
But I'm pretty sure you are only interested in sources that confirm what you already believe.
The section begins halfway down page 59.
0. https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
Edit: The application was submitted on December 28, 2023.
Poe's law working overtime here.
Your point is pretty moot.
That is such a perfect representation of the level of public discourse around this, that I can only thank you for providing a sample. It's not even hard to learn about the Donetsk region's conflicts and the destruction there long before the invasion, but flooding the media and Internet with convenient narratives like "just the Russian desire to own Ukraine" has worked and continues to work very effectively on the general public (likely even more than the censorship does).
And all of this is quite orthogonal to the main fact here, which is that it makes very little sense to blame the population living under an authoritarian government and want them destroyed for that government's actions, and then turn around and give people in a democratic country a pass on their government's actions.
There was none. The conflict in Donetsk was entirely manufactured during the initial stages of the 2014 invasion. When the European Court of Human Rights reviewed a case concerning the downed Malaysian airliner, the Russian side argued that Russia was not involved, claiming that it was the work of "Donetsk rebels". The court found that there was no genuine separatist movement and no rebels of any kind, only unmarked troops operating under direct Russian control from the start.
If anything, the media has been flooded with misrepresentations that promote a "generic ethnic conflict" narrative to mask a straightforward and unprovoked invasion of one country by another country. And the reasons indeed do boil down to one single person, his unchecked power, and unhealthy obsessions - as has been the case with many dictators throughout the history.
https://x.com/davidmryder/status/1746049132027150672
The duration (mostly over already) and death toll are less as well.
Israel has never made a prolonged effort to build the mutual trust necessary to reach a negotiated settlement. During the Oslo Accords, the Israeli settler population nearly doubled.
One only need observe how Palestinian territory has shrunk decade after decade ever since 1948 to see that it is not merely Palestinian intransigence that has prevented peace.
Any party loving a deal has never been a precondition of international relations or, frankly, negotiations as a whole.
So if neither party accepts the partition, the only conclusion is they will have to learn to live together on the same territory. It's not rocket science, everywhere else in the world this is possible.
The problem comes when they only focus on Hamas, and ignore Israel's kidnapping and detention of 10k Palestinians without being charged. AKA, "hostages".
Hamas didn’t counter with a preferred peacekeeping composition, they rejected peacekeeping to retain their monopoly on violence (and Gaza’s resources).
To the extent there are evils in this story, they’re the leadership of Hamas and Likud.
I didn't claim Isreal set forth a realistic peace keeping plan, you did. And you failed to bring the receipts.
What you say here is the equivalent of Russia proposing to Ukraine that the war could be ended if they install the Russian National Guard as peace keepers in their country and then saying: "But Ukraine didn't make a counterproposal".
Yes, because that kind of proposal is an insult to the intelligence of everybody who has to read it. And your point about Hamas means you're waving the flag for one of the war parties here and thus have an entirely untrustworthy position anyways.
Let me clarify: If a party to any war proposes a peacekeeping force that is already fighting in the war, it is not a credible peace offer, period. A credible peace offer involves a peace keeping force that is seen as neutral enough by both sides of the conflict.
This is fair. My point is Hamas has shown zero interest in an international peacekeeping force in Gaza. A lack of enthusiasm possibly only matched by the nations that would have to provide said force.
> I don't recall many people ever seriously asking for that
i live in Canada, literally half a world away. Every street light pole seems to have some sort of "Ceasefire now" sticker on it. I also see similar sentiment in online threads on the topic. I think there is a significant group of people who want Israel to commit to an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza.
> We know exactly why Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are angry at the Israeli government
When people talk about this topic, they are usually referring to the conflict with Palestine.
Many of the people arguing for ceasefire probably wouldn’t be so animated about it if that wasn’t the case, i.e. if Israel was conducting a legal war with targeted strikes. That isn’t the case.
https://youtube.com/shorts/MuPfkxQns1k
I don’t think it’s okay for a bunch of humans to be rallied in the middle of a desert like that. Forget the fact that they are shooting into the crowd, we’ll talk about that later. Let’s just start with not creating a ghetto in the desert and calling it a humanitarian effort.
I have not even seen movie scenes like that, maybe the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan where the Americans were trying to hide on the beach.
The subtext to this conflict is that every avenue leading towards a lasting peace also opens the Netanyahu regime to prosecution.
Israel isn't an ex-Soviet satellite with a dictator propped up by a cold war giant, but their actions become predictable if you think of the state as Netanyahustan.
But ultimately, the current government is what a (small) majority of Israelis want, which is the most depressing part of this entire conflict.
IDF service is mandatory and there appears to be no resistance to this, which supports the point above.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250729-qatar-saudi-e...
Articles like this on purpose blur lines of what happening and meant to generate outrage. Once I traced back article that talked about 48 (or something) palestinians killed by settlers by going through listed sources in the article. when I got to original article (twice removed), I discovered that it talked about 47 killed by IDF and 1 killed in clashes between settlers and palestinians
> After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you.
I think there is a common belief that Israel was "given" the land beyond the Jordan because they were God's chosen people based on their merits.
Deuteronomy seems to imply Israel were just the least bad people.
Israel seems wicked to me now.
Deuteronomy 20:15-18 is more appropriate to the current conflict, as it relates to how the Jews should fight wars in the land of Israel. It commands the utter destruction of the inhabitants of the land, not sparing any that breathe (not just those who “pisseth-on-the-wall”)
Discussions about modern Israel/Palestine are full of shibboleths that reveal where people are drawing their information:
In the Hebrew the word in 20:16 for inheritance is “Nachala”. Worth Googling: Nachala is also the name of a present‑day Israeli settler movement led by Daniella Weiss, whose own literature says it’s “continuing the biblical mandate to settle the land.” In other words, the same term that the Torah uses for a gift that can be forfeited is now used as branding for a modern political project—illustrating how ancient vocabulary still shapes today’s arguments about the land.
For an example from the Palestinian side: you do not have a full understanding of Hamas if you do not know about the Hadith about the Gharqad tree. Hamas charter writers alluded to this story; many Palestinians learn it young, while most Israelis have never heard of it.
Recognizing these code‑words doesn’t require agreeing with the theology behind them. It simply keeps us from talking past each other—and, one hopes, from letting someone else’s apocalyptic script dictate who lives and dies. I think we all agree that the other-sides’ eschatology is a dumb reason to die.
People are being murdered thousands of years later because of the ancient Judea equivalent of 'Harry Potter', and the batshit insane people who still believe it in earnest.
As written by a member of "the least bad people". If you're going to have a historical look at events then, you need to take sources with a grain of salt.
Someone needs to actually try and improve things.
Also there is non stop attempts (some successful and some not) to execute terror attacks from West Bank. It just never appears in Western media
And the Fatah also stopped armed resistance on their own, and fought off Hamas. So while the PA might only exist now because Israel props them up, that wasn't the case 20 years ago, not to the same extent.
The West Bank Palestinians there went for a more pacifist route and in return, got the biggest wave of unbridled settlements in the past 60 years. And they have lost any mean to even scare the settlers off. The settlers know that they are almost entirely defenseless, relatively speaking.
b) i'll suggest you to take a look how many new settlements israel build in last 20 years or so. it may surprise you
c) Fatah didn't stop armed resistance. It military wings got wiped by Israel in second intifada. And it didn't fought off Hamas. It lost to Hamas in Gaza and survived in west bank because Israel is present there
d) west bank palestinians didn't went a more pacifist route [-1]. it's just western media doesn't cover palestinian violence in west bank. as i previously suggested, check out how many new settlements were build in last 20 years.
[-1] https://www.jns.org/over-6300-terror-attacks-against-jews-in...
Look at my proposal above. War didn't happen in postapartheid JAR, despite everybody saying it would. What would people fight for, after all? They are all citizens of the same (biethnic) country, that's the perspective the world "leaders" should bring to the table.
You need to bring some argument.
If not, can you share links to proof that there is something more serious going on, that would deserve to be called genocide against the white population?
Okay, so in your opinion, there is exactly one state that is currently engaged in a civil war. How would world leaders telling them "You are actually one country engaged in a civil war" stop that war?
The Jewish minority in that case would not accept living in a muslim arab state since they consider Israel to be the sole refuge for jews in the world, the only place in the world where they don't have to be a minority. The muslim arab majority would not accept a jewish minority living within them, they consider them foreign colonialists that need to be purged (and you may have heard of one or two groups currently leading those muslim arabs that have that exact official position).
> You need to bring some argument.
When Israel was "a single biethnic country" this was the norm: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre (picked as an example because of the "humour" of having to disambiguate it from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1517_Hebron_attacks ) no one thinks going back to that is viable.
In the modern world, if you accept universal human rights, every minority in the world has to accept that it's a minority, and every majority in the world has to learn to accept the minority. In addition, everyone is a minority is some sense and somewhere - depends on your worldview.
What you're saying is a very condescending (and frankly antisemitic) claim - that Israelis (or Jews) are somehow "special" in being so stupid to never accept this. Of course they can accept it, just like everybody else in the world learns to accept there are other ethnicities and races. Americans, for example, learned to accept it. Likewise, all Jews outside Israel have accepted being a minority. It's not really a problem that racists make it out to be (at the end of the day, people individual differences and conflicts trump most group differences).
> When Israel was "a single biethnic country" this was the norm
That's why modern biethnic countries have laws and other systems that prevent that - see my comment above. A good example is Belgium. The point is, you can change the perception from 2-states to functioning 1-state without having to give up anything related to each ethnicity's cultural heritage. Has been done many times in history.
Israel/Palestine seems to be two groups of people who really do not want to live together, and would prefer to be rid of the other side.
These days though, there is no unclaimed land or unpopulated place to move in to. Practically speaking anyway. No one would want to move into the Yucatan jungles or Boreal Siberia even if the host countries invited them in to settle land.
That is the same situation that exists today. Might makes right is the only rule of nature. Treaties are just hopes that someone will help with defending your borders.
See Russia expanding its borders into what was previously recognized as Ukraine.
In the past you had lots and lots of peoples who just got erased as modern concepts of fairness and justice didn’t work the same way. See the warring states period.
So, while there are people that can present an allegedly reasonable take, the reality is that it’s just a polite smile in front of underlying beliefs and emotions. People in tech should be well acquainted with this type of abuse because we see it all the time in leadership and general corporate nonsense.
Having a back and forth conversation over time is truly violating to one’s self with such people. It’s almost like they think you are stupid. I think given the state of affairs, it’s fine to be more obtuse and blunt with such people so as to draw a red line where they are not allowed to run their manipulation. Genocide is a pretty clear red line.
In short, don’t worry about being so polite. Genocide apologists are running game with the mental gymnastics.
https://youtube.com/shorts/MuPfkxQns1k
I'm having a hard time being nice. What are people supposed to think? We're supposed to walk away from stuff like that and go "yeah there's two sides to this, we should reserve judgement"? There's no two sides to this. Israel over-corrected after Oct 7, the same way America did after 9/11. They destroyed a city, and then funneled it's citizens into a ghetto in the south. Those. Are. The. Facts. I just provided you the definition of ethnic cleansing.
Also, labeling a human as manipulative is not de-humanizing. Manipulation is a property of a human. It's just a matter of how egregious it is, but you won't escape it. Five year olds will manipulate. You've done it, I've done it. Me and you are doing it right now, but we try to do it in good faith and limit it to just persuasion in discussion. It's a spectrum. Some people are using the ability to justify a genocide.
There's a form of normalization that occurs with egregious manipulation (serious manipulation is abuse, so we normalize abuse). For example, it is becoming normalized to discuss two sides to a genocide.
There is the genocide on one side, and then the normalization of "well, what is a self-respecting nation that wants to defend itself supposed to do otherwise?". The whole construct is part of the manipulation. I'll give another example, Rogan normalizes a lot of heavy right-wing opinions around, well, normal discussion. It'll be embedded inside of a discussion about pop culture. This is a very very troubling form of it. It almost makes you think it's "normal" to entertain the absurd extremes. If you were to confront either of them about this normalization, they'd stay consistent and give you a normal response:
Rogan: Hey, I'm just a comedian!
Israel: Hey, just defending ourselves!
As if the rest of us are literally retarded.
This is fair. Claiming Palestinians are being ignored is not.
False. USA continues to ignore the plight of Palestinians and continues to fund and arm the regime that kills them
False monolith. To the extent there is a single foreign policy issue dominating the American public consciousness, it’s Gaza.
Palestinian lives are not being ignored. There isn’t universal compassion for them. But the average American has more developed views on this topic than for any comparable conflict around the world.
I supported arming Ukraine. That didn’t rely on ignorance of Russia.
The charter for Hamas for years called for the total destruction of Israel. That's been recently removed, but their actions haven't changed.
Why would any nation allow such a government to be their neighbor? The best that anyone could hope for would be a North / South Korea or CCP/KMT divide, but those only work because both sides share a common identity.
It’s time for aggressive outside intervention.
He is also the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, he is a real subject matter expert. I could also point you to plenty of similar sources.
From: https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2015/longl...
In a landmark 20 year study, Professor Philip Tetlock showed that even the average expert was only slightly better at predicting the future than random guesswork. Tetlock’s latest project, an unprecedented government funded forecasting tournament involving over a million individual predictions has since shown that there are, however, some people with real demonstrable foresight.
But Israel claims far, far more than "we're more powerful so its our way or the highway". Israel asserts they are in a universally morally superior position, thay it went out of its way to accomodate the Palestinians. And I think this is blatantly untrue. The Palestinians were kicked off their land 70 years ago, for complex reasons, and every year continue to be pushed further by Israel. Theres many ccontradictory things happening in Israel, but this one IMO is a clear indication that Israel is acting in bad faith.
As to your source, let's unpick this. Your link states that a UN representative erroneously claimed 14,000 children will die within 48 hours, due to malnutrition. Instead, he should have said over 12 months. Sure, thats a big difference, but either is beastly - while achieving 0 military or diplomatic effect.
Other sources I follow include the B'tselem institute, who recently called the Israeli governments actions clearly genocidal.
In addition to ~12 months turning into "48 hours", "children aged between six months and five years" turned in "babies", and "acute malnutrition" turned into "death".
When top UN officials are pushing blatant disinformation like this with no consequences, it's hard to know who to trust for unbiased information.
> B'tselem institute, who recently called the Israeli governments actions clearly genocidal
Considering that it's B'tselem, there was never really a possibility of them reaching a different position. I don't think they've ever pushed back on anti-Israeli propaganda, such as the UN statement above.
In any case, "it's not 14,000 babies dead in 48 hours, it is only 14,000 with severe malnutrition over 12 months" isnt an argument I'd like to rely on when my judgment day comes.
By the way, there are hundreds of trucks on the Gaza side of the border, the opposite of blocked, let through by Israel, but the UN refuses to collect them and distribute them: https://x.com/Ostrov_A/article/1950577195153580306
It's impressive how thoroughly Hamas has won the information war when they have made it so heart-wrenchingly emotive that presenting any alternative view point is "bad taste" (at best, it can also be much worse).
17,000 kids killed directly by Isreal.
> the UN refuses to collect them and distribute them
A blatant lie.
Actual news coverage of that border crossing:
https://apnews.com/article/aid-gaza-hunger-united-nations-e7...
I don't think people enjoy starving.
I am more sympathetic to your views regarding Syria, however. That is a less justifiable war with nebulous preventive/preemptive motivations, which is somewhat coherent on a pure self-interested security basis but is likely validly unjust under different frames of reference (morality, modern global norms and taboos, and international law).
It has a series of Basic Laws that serve that function (they are expressly a solution to the failure initially to pass a Constitution and are intended to be compiled once complete into a Constitution), but while some of them are problematic on grounds that touch on the Israel-Palestine conflict, I don't think any of them call for the destruction of Palestine (which isn't to say that most Israeli leaders since Israeli occupied the West Bank and Gaza haven't done something like that, but that's a different issue than the Basic Laws doing it.)
I understand the instinct to treat Bronze‑Age literature like fanciful fiction: engineers are wired to put "myth" in one bucket and "hard data" in another. But for better or worse, the Bible isn't just an ancient novel. It's the source code for a huge fraction of the world's legal systems, ethics, holidays, and political claims, including the one we are discussing. Dismissing it as "Harry Potter" misses the point:
If we're serious about reducing violence, we need to debug the real code people are running in their heads, not the straw‑man version.
and about "puppet". the very funny part is that people that demand for PA to have controls over west bank/gaza as sovereign, don't realize that it physically unable to do so without Israeli support. And Israeli support makes local population regards PA as Israeli puppet. The was major reason for Israel refusing to get into 2007 gaza purge of PA
Of course the PA could not maintain power without Israeli support. They don't represent Palestinian interests.
Second, many do call for Hamas to surrender.
a ceasefire provides room for diplomacy that might lead to concessions from both sides for their atrocities, and thus might lead to peace and equality
we have seen in the west bank what surrender without a ceasefire or sustainable peace looks like, and it is very bad (see this article for an example)
We've had something like 100 years of failed diplomacy at this point. I don't know the solution to this conflict, but i can understand why both sides suspect further diplomacy won't lead anywhere unless something fundamental changes.
You can ignore that underlying moral framing, but it's the basis of the conflict and it's why Israel has a morally superior position.
The Palestinians have over and over again said they don't want two states, they want to destroy Israel and kill Jews - the idea they want two states only exists in the minds of western leftists, it's a failure to understand Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood.
I did separately point out a couple misstatements in your comments. My point with the UN thing was just that I wouldn't blame anyone for getting a few things wrong, when sources we expect to be credible are actually spreading disinformation.
> isnt an argument I'd like to rely on when my judgment day comes.
I don't believe there's any justification for spreading disinformation like Fletcher's, or any situation where it's wrong to correct it, no matter what humanitarian agenda is involved.
How do you square this view with the current situation? The US has poured resources and weapons into Israel. Gaza is levelled, tens of thousands of Gaza’s people are dead.
The US might care about Gaza, but it cares a lot more about Israel.
In many US states it is criminalized to support Palestinian statehood past a certain point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
You can argue that American citizens aren't unaware, but the politicians are born and bred to ignore this catastrophe. We have laws to stop them from caring.
That is a tragedy what happened to Gaza. Even friendly Arab nations don't want them to come as refuges, I'm curious why.
Of course not, for starters there is significantly more than 2 sides of this multifaceted conflict.
You should not reserve judgemdnt. You should still listen and try and understand everyone's perspective before coming to your judgement, otherwise what is the point?
> There's no two sides to this. Israel over-corrected after Oct 7, the same way America did after 9/11
While 9/11 might be a good comparison for how a society can become radicalized after an attack, i dont think its a good comparison in general. The geopolitical situation is totally different. The scale of the attack is different. There was no hostages taken, no sexual violence, etc. They are very different situations. First and foremost because there was basically no possible way for al-qaeda to do a second attack, you can only really fly a plane into a tower once; after that pilots got reenforced cockpit doors. In comparison Hamas is right next door, and does potentially have the capability to do a second attack. That doesn't necessarily mean i think everything Israel does is justified, but self-defense claims should be evaluated in that context.
I think Israel has a reasonable argument for self defense here. That is not a blank cheque, there are limits to what self-defense allows, but it does seem pretty clear that some military action would be justified self defense here given the circumstances.
Vs say usa in iraq which was pretty preposterous as they didnt have anything to do with 9/11.
> I just provided you the definition of ethnic cleansing.
To nitpick here, ethnic cleansing isn't a war crime/crime against humanity. The crime is called "forced displacement". Ethnic cleansing started as a euphamism by war criminals who thought it sounded less bad, but it kind of stuck because it actually sounds worse. That said, i think its better to talk about forced displacement because that has an actual definition, is mentioned in the Geneva convention, etc
> Also, labeling a human as manipulative is not de-humanizing
It depends why you label then that. If you label based on people's words or actions, then of course it is not. If you label them as manipulative based on their membership in a group instead of the person's own actions, i would say it is dehumanizing.
> There is the genocide on one side, and then the normalization of "well, what is a self-respecting nation that wants to defend itself supposed to do otherwise?"
The people who say Israel is defending itself generally dispute the characterization of Israel's actions as a genocide. The vast majority believe (or at least claim to) that genocide is not acceptable in self-defense (im sure you can find some crazies who say otherwise of course).
Quite frankly, this isn't a totally crazy position, things are still a bit up in the air on this. The ICC when it charged israeli leaders with various crimes did not charge them with genocide. The ICJ hasn't ruled yet. Its not like there is a consensus among experts on this topic.
No Hamas in power? Seems like that would give pretty good confidence.
This reminds me of alternate history stories where Japan refused to surrender. The US demanded unconditional surrender in WW2. What would have happened if the axis refused. What would have made the allies confident that the war was over without German and Japanese unconditional surrender.
It seems like Hamas is not surrendering and Israel is demanding that. If Hamas surrendered and left power, would that appease Israel?
Google "Great March of Return" if you want to learn about what happenned when palestinians tried to protest peacefully.
Besides, you've got to remember that a country is more than its government. What's going to stop its citizens from independently creating their own underground Hamas 2.0 terror group? What's going to stop the kids currently growing up and seeing their parents die due to Israeli actions from wanting revenge?
The situation is too far gone. Either Israel is going to learn how to live with the possibility of an attack (which is going to decrease over time as generations grow up who don't inherently hate Israel with every bone in their body for what it has done to them), or Israel is going to have to kill every single person in Gaza to make sure there's nobody left who could hate them. They should probably continue with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt - because they all could attack Israel, after all...
France still has to live with the risk of Germany invading. It's fairly unlikely by now, but that risk exists. Germany has invaded multiple times in the not-too-distant past and done some pretty atrocious things while there. Germany still has a pretty large military, and I would be quite surprised if they didn't have some kind of invasion plan lying around in a drawer somewhere. Yet somehow, I don't think the average French citizen in 2025 loses any sleep over it. If they can live with the risk, why does Israel require absolutes?
No, we do not lose sleep about that. We have also been at war with England, Italy and Spain a lot. Especially England. We keep a close eye on them still that the Hastings battle is not forgotten.
But on the serious side, these concerns are so remote compared with the situation in Israel and Palestine. We do not have any territory claims with Germany. They have their land, we have ours. If you ask a random person in France about territoires we should get back, they would be really confused. The ones historically inclined would consider the 7th and 8th century and Charlemagne's lands.
I guess that this topic in the mind of Israelis and Palestinians is much, much more prevalent.
Geography also matters. Israel is tiny compared to France. Israel has zero strategic depth and population centers could be overrun in a matter of hours if defenses failed. This tends to push their strategic planning towards absolutism. And to be clear I'm not trying to justify Israeli actions, just pointing out the strategic calculus at work and the difficulty of negotiating an agreement acceptable to both sides.
That’s the reason why.
As abundantly mentioned already, the Palestinian survivors will remember and have their revenge someday.
…unless the plan is: “there will be no survivors”.
Have you noticed how shocking the above “plan” is? Events seem to closely align with it. A literal final solution. Equally shocking is how little people care about actual genocide, and - consequently - how normalized this is in practice.
The international community lets Israel get away with far too much.
Why are you asking "what will give the genocidal state confidence", and not bothering for a single second about what will give the hundred of thousands of permanently traumatised, hurt and dead Palestinians confidence that their genocidal neighbours will not do it again ?
>still in Gaza with no options to leave and resent Israel who they will consider to be effectively their jailer.
Which, yes, is the reason for October 7. Seems like oppressing a people (that already doesn't particularly like you for various reasons) has consequences. Unfortunately, these consequences land on civilians. Breeding the conditions for Hamas (and soon enough Hamas 2 provided the Gazan population isn't dead from famine within the next few months)
> I don't like to think that the result of Oct 7 is a more open Gaza but I don't really know what other options Israel has.
Why do you not enjoy the idea of giving a group independence and ownership over the land that has been theirs for centuries ?
>Hamas obviously started this but Israel won the war a long time ago.
Opening history books would tend to show that it started over 70 years ago with the forced resettlement of Palestinians already living within the protectorate (land already stolen from them), the colonization of Gaza, Golan heights, the nakba and the repeated offensives on Gaza and Cisjordania as well as the assassinations of multiple political leaders (both Palestinian and Israeli), but I guess the Israeli propaganda that Oct 7 started it all has taken root.
>The world deserves an end.
Your feelings about seeing this ongoing conflict doesn't really matter. Palestinians deserve an end to this suffering. The Israelis not supporting the ongoing genocide deserve an end to the conflict. The world has nothing to do with this.
>The longer it goes on the more Hamas will actually have achieved some kind of lasting positive image of Gaza which is rooted in their actions on Oct 7th and that would be an incredibly bad outcome for all.
You do realize that Hamas is getting a positive image despite being literal terrorists embezzling money and food from the Gaza population and establishing a dictatorship because the "only democracy in the middle east" is committing a genocide, right ? Genocide supported by the vast majority of the Israeli government, as well as the Knesset ?
This situation ends in two ways: either the Palestinians disappear, or Israel disappears. With their recent actions, they've ensured that a two state solution is impossible. Of course, the likelihood of Israel being destroyed is almost nil, so the only way this happens is a single state where both arabs and jews live equally and freely (and most likely under HEAVY international peacekeeping missions), but the ethnostate proponents are slightly iffy about this proposition.
I think the USA is unlikely to shift for as long as it's one single democratic nation, owing to internal political demographics. Same reasons it hasn't shifted on Cuba. But the USA keeps surprising me by failing to implode despite what all the politicians have been saying about each other, and by the anti-government language often used to justify gun ownership, so if I was in a position to influence Israel, I would be suggesting a diversification of international support.
But many times in history governments have done dumb thnings that backfired.
But with nukes it for sure is because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
Having two ethno-nationalist states next to each other is bad. Giving them a very complicated border is worse. Having them hate each other with centuries of history and territory claims is even worse still. Then giving them both, let alone one, access to the global arms market is asking for never ending wars of annihilation.
If you could design a situation that was maximally terrible for neighboring states, the two state solution would be it.
This is the history of the Levant going back millennia.
Again - I’d love further education about legal definitions.
It's ridiculous and I know the moment I see someone dig into their bag of slander with that they are not arguing in good faith.
JIDF out in force again.
No, Fatah did absolutely stop armed resistance. Getting wiped by Israel hasn't been a reason for Palestinians to stop fighting or laying down the arms before. Fatah stopped fighting, in part due to Israel's military victory, sure. But also because they chose to not further entrench themselves in insurgency. Hamas has been knocked out almost into oblivion, and still manages to fight, and according to what you said, they are even gaining ground in the West Bank.
And yeah, no go zones means that the PA doesn't go there because they are against Hamas, and afaik they don't fight Israel either. Sounds like they did chose the pacific route w.r.t Israel ?
Also, any terror attacks in the West Bank itself against Israelis is by definition an attack against settlers. Rockets aren't getting thrown from there, incursions into Israel are very rare, etc. And even those aren't done by organized groups (like the Fatah used to be), except for Hamas, and again Hamas is seen as an enemy by the Palestinian authorities there. The Fatah did win in the West Bank 20 years ago, against Hamas.
I'm not sure how you are arguing against my original point though. The West Bank authorities and the majority of the people living there aren't engaging in armed resistance against Israel. Groups who do are being treated as criminals and they work with Israel to fight them off. Israel in return keeps expanding their settlements (the scale doesn't matter, that's exactly what they have been doing, and Israel had been vocally pushing for the largest expansion in settlements ever, months before October 2023).
See this is the problem, that kind of thought is why Israel is comfortable allowing the people of Gaza to suffer indefinitely. Hamas and the people of Gaza have zero power in this situation. They can either bend over backwards and appease Israel to try to regain some trust and maybe at some point Israel will slowly loosen restrictions over them. Or Hamas and the people of Gaza can be defiant, say there is no room for both countries and then the obvious choice is for Israel to persecute them indefinitely because what else are they going to do? They are winning and they have that option right now.
Look I am not saying Israel has not done things here that appear from my perspective to be too much but Hamas brought this on Gaza. They murdered innocent people in their homes in a disgusting sneak attack and for that they have brought suffering on their people.
You're not interested in discussing in good faith, pretending that this is only because of October 7. Hope you sleep soundly while tens of thousands of children die at the hand of a genocidal state.
Edit: To elaborate, because there was another comment comparing this to Assad in Syria:
I think the difference is that Assad already belonged to the "enemy" is of the West (rightly so) and was immediately hit with sanctions.
What is special about Israel is that the government and, as it seems, large parts of the population, are displaying the same mentality - but unlike with Assad, no one is putting on the brakes here or threatening sanctions. On the contrary, our governments are protecting and enabling Israel in its behavior.
I think the aggression specifically towards Israel stems from the feeling of being on the wrong side this time.
Israel is modern invention by educated people who themselves have a long history of displacement and oppression. The bottom line is people expect them to "do better" compared to Syria, Myanmar, or China for that matter.
In that sense you could say it's actually racism towards all those other countries because the world just expects them to be violent, genocidal, and uncivilized anyway.
EDIT: There are a couple of axes that helped me get a broader perspective:
1. Whether one supports Israel's continued existence 2. Whether one believes Israel's continued existence is guaranteed
Having started about midway between yes and no on 1, and at yes on 2, it was extremely enlightening to reinterpret my observations from the point of view of yes on 1 and no on 2. All Israeli behaviour that I had previously found incomprehensible finally made sense.
During a surprise attack.
The conflict that was started by Oct 7, according to Wikipedia, has seen 81,526+ dead on the Palestinian and associated side*, vs. 2,053 on the Israeli side.
That said, from the point of view of your edit: the ratio is irrelevant when someone's convinced they're facing an existential threat. Given Oct 7 was proportionally worse for Israel than 9/11 was for the USA, and the USA didn't seem to stop justifying everything through that lens for about a decade afterwards… it's going to suck for everyone that Israel thinks is so much as looking at them funny. (That isn't a joke even if it sounds like one: the people who see Israel as their home and their safe-space are collectively likely to be hyper-vigilant, to their own cost, in this kind of way, for a long time).
* With the footnote that '"Indirect" deaths may be multiple times higher' and 'In addition to direct deaths, armed conflicts result in indirect deaths "attributable to the conflict". Mortality due to indirect deaths could be due to a variety of causes, such as infectious diseases.[27] Indirect deaths range from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths in recent conflicts.[28] In Gaza, estimated 51,000 natural deaths, natural death rate has gone up from 3.5/1000 to 22/1000 (late June 2024)[29]'
- Establish a new, transitional government of Israel/Palestine, nominated by the UN
- Give citizenship to every Israeli and Palestinian for the whole territory
- Mandate a 50/50 ethnic quotas system in the military, police, judiciary and all government institutions, and minimum 30% ethnic quotas in every other employer
- Create a Truth and Reconcilliation Commission, modeled after JAR; it would figure out what reparations are needed to each citizen
- Mandate both hebrew and arabic as official languages, and teach every kid both in school
- Once things would settle down, after 1-2 years, run a new elections but with constitutional provisions (5-10 years) against dismantling the quotas
Heck, even US could do this unilaterally (just like British did), if they wanted to pursue human rights.
- fatah was beaten down. it doesn't say "stopped". it says "lost". hamas wasn't knocked down into oblivion and they were always more popular than fatah
- no go zones means that PA doesn't go there because Hamas/PIJ will kill them there.
- rockets not thrown from there not because due to generosity of local population but because of work of shin bit. in fact since oct 7th there been significant increase in arms smuggling from jordan to west bank to a point that IDF is unable to prevent or monitor it. including heavier weapons. this is probably for cultivation of famously fertile west bank soil, according to you ?
- map showing that hamas won in most areas of west bank as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
- recent polling on elections: But if new legislative elections were held today with the participation of all political forces that participated in the 2006 elections, 62% say they will participate in them, and among the participants in the elections 43% say they will vote for Hamas, 28% for Fatah, 8% for third parties, and 19% have not yet decided. In the Gaza Strip, vote for Hamas among voters participating in the elections stands at 49% , and vote for Fatah among voters participating in the elections stands at 30% . In the West Bank, vote for Hamas stands at 38% and Fatah among voters participating in elections stands at 27%
- link that i posted above more certainly show that population engages in armed and not armed but violent resistance and attacks israeli population and constantly attempts to perform terror acts in Israel. and you still didn't tell me how much exactly israel expanded it settlements. you just claim that it did without any factual backing.
From 1999 to 2018 colonial population in the West Bank grew from ~177000 to ~430000 or so. Since the current israeli government took power they've massively accelerated colonial efforts in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and also moved away from military administration in a blatant rejection of international law. I.e. before the response from Hamas in October 2023.
Hamas are popular because they've achieved results, and are perceived as relatively moderate and flexible in politics. Their main competitor, PIJ, disavows parliamentary politics entirely as long as the occupation is in place, considering it a waste of resources and naive pandering to foreign governments that they have no faith in.
> “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
This may sound superficially true, but it is confusing cause and effect. It's more likely to be the other way around: people seeking violence need to separate themselves from their target. That does not automatically mean that every self-classification carries an implication of violence.
Plus the general idea that humans in general are morally flawed, sinful, etc. But, "Good news!" If you follow the one true god, that'll all be sorted out. Following the classic marketing strategy of creating a need, and then filling it.
What that means is that all of the "run[ning] away" you are talking about is still violently displacing native peoples. So for example, when the Boers flee the Cape Colony to the Transvaal, they aren't moving to virgin, empty land, but rather land inhabited by native Africans (Zulu, I think), who needed to be dispossessed of their land. And such dispossession tends to require violence.
After all there was no "industry" it was 95% + agrarian, pescatarian, pastoral. Many populations had a preference for coastal, riparian settlements and mountainous areas were less favored... but were where displaced peoples could move to. People clumped, they were not evenly distributed so any region would have unsettled areas --just like today you have vast areas in Alaska that are not populated -even Wyoming. There are towns here and there but most areas of those states are not "populated" though they are under local, state and federal control. Government did not work that way back a few hundred years ago.
The Zulu only relatively recently moved into ZA (around the same time as Europeans maybe a bit before --the Khoisan are the native peoples of ZA).
The Western Roman Empire was invaded by people who were fleeing other invaders.
There certainly is rhetoric around the ethnic origin of some Israeli citizens being Northern European rather than middle eastern, so perhaps the original claim has some validity.
In that, given a few years/decades of a two state solution, you'd have a partition occur, whether by force as was in India/Pakistan, or by more natural processes over time.
Honestly, I could see a partition occur as a condition for a two state solution. One side for the muslims, one for the jews.
I guess I should amend my comment to say theocratic ethno-nationalist / ethno-religious states, but I am likely messing up my greek/Plato (?) here. Suffice to say, the state of Palestine would have a super majority of muslim Palestinian citizen voters (currently-ish 87%, ~6M people total, though hard to define really), and the state of Israel would have a slight majority of jewish citizen voters (currently 48% jewish, 48% arab, ~14M people total, but Israeli Arab enfranchisement is a thing). Though 'steady state' numbers would likely shift the voting blocs towards the representative religions due to some partitioning as I described. Just FYI, there are about 6.3M jews and 4.5M muslims in the US currently.
The total numbers of jews and palestinians that would be 'in theatre' is hard to determine, but think about 8M jews and about 9M palestinians for guestimations.
So, I think I'm on pretty stable ground calling the likely resultant two state solution an ethno-religious solution. Other commenters are right in that the definition of 'nation' is a bit difficult with these two groups.
Look either way, the two state solution is like, maximally bad. Having these two people with their histories and hatreds literally sharing walls is just crazy as it stands. Then giving them both access to the global arms market, let alone just Israel, is so crazy.
And no, I haven't the foggiest idea what the hell to do. No one does.
Hell, maybe Germany and Israel make a good comparison here. The jews who lived in mandatory palestine during WW2 were certainly afraid of Germany (and rightfully so), but i don't think Israel loses much sleep over the modern state of Germany.
Our countries have been at war for two millennia (whatever "country" meant across the ages), like the rest of Europe. Then, after WWII, a tremendous effort was made to mend the relationship, and the really good idea was to involve the youth.
When I was a teenager in the 80s, those who had German as a foreign language (sometimes as the first foreign language, before English) had exchanges with peers in Germany (they were coming to us and living with us for a week, and then we were going to them). It was great.
30 years later, my son had the same exchange and I could look at the kids' behaviour more closely. They (the French and the Germans kids) decided to have a football match. I was sure that it would be a Germany vs France one. Not at all: they mixed up, with teams composed of pairs (local and foreign). It was a-ma-zing.
Conflating the Jews with Israel as a whole also makes every single Jew in the world worse off and in danger. I would not advise vomiting out Bibi's propaganda unless you want to see how terrible the consequences can really get
Yes indeed, I'm talking about the surprise attack phase. (Israel has experienced a surprise attack before that has put its continued existence in question: the Yom Kippur war.) And in fact, looking at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks
it seems as though the ratio was closer to 3:2.
In any case, Israel is surrounded by a hostile population of hundreds of millions (yes, still hostile despite the cold peace treaty it has with Egypt and the lukewarm one it has with Jordan), and it itself numbers about 10 million. So it is outnumbered by double figures to one.
I certainly don't see Israel's continued existence as guaranteed despite "nukes" and despite "American support" and despite having the "nth most powerful army in the world". And that point of view has helped me to understand the conflict like no other explanation.
Has nothing to do with Israel.
PS. canada just said that will recognize palestine if it will hold elections (without hamas)
Jews have and had the right to seek refuge from oppression. No one has the right to perpetuate oppression.
And no, I don't believe ethnonationalism is a panacea for anyone. The world would not be a better place if we could only subdivide into a multitude of homogenous little nations. I am grateful for the cultural diversity of my country. Countries like Japan that strive to protect their racial homogeneity will pay a steep cost.
So really these people have no reason to be elevated among similarly displaced people who did have a sovereign nation within much more recent timelines, and they aren’t without safe harbor or communities in safer nations that guarantee their rights.
So if the state of Israel does not exist for the safety of Jewish people as logic has plainly laid out, why does it exist? Easy. Military foothold. This is a modern day crusader state. A beachhead. An airbase. A missile platform. A hidden nuclear arsenal. A prolific defense industry with very little red tape binding it. These are the true foundations of Israel today. Everything else is a fig leaf poorly hiding this when you apply rational logic to the emotional justifications that people use. And everything Israel does makes perfect rational sense in light of its true purpose.
That's a really easy question: no.
Plenty of people don't have sovereign countries for themselves. Some of them persecuted, some of them integrated by force into other countries. Countries are not owed. They simply are. Tibet is being wholly integrated and controlled by China. Catalonia is somewhat asking for it, native americans are being relegated as second class citizens, and aboriginals in Australia are being left to die. Romanis do not have a country based around their culture.
Jews should absolutely be protected, in whichever country they are. That does not make the world owe them a country. Countries are not owed, they just are. As it stands, Israel is, but as a result of what they have done, not because it was owed to them.
No one is questioning the existence of Bulgaria as a separate entity from turkey, when they declared independence after the Russo Turkish war.
We would be if they were actively exterminating Turks living in their territory simply because they aren't Bulgarians.
But even when it does become sovereign, I'm finding it hard to imagine that Scotland would annex Northumberland - which used to be Scotland in the distant past - and rape, murder, and starve the English people living there.
There is no excuse for the kind of barbarisms that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. Not ethnonationalism, not history, not the holocaust, not October 7.
And from an obvious common sense point of view, living in an embattled fortress territory is an eccentric definition of "safe."
It's an outbreak of collective psychopathy and deserves to be labelled as such. The people in charge are basically insane. Extremist ethnonationalism always is, whatever the nationality or background.
And regarding some history on the establishment of Israel, after the UN partition resolution the Arabs started a civil war, where Arabs fled from Jewish territories, and Jews fled from Arab territories (Bethlehem and Hebron for example). So you could say that 2 ethno states were established.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Unit...
Not sure how the colonization of America justifies other colonization's.
Unless you think everyone is owed a 1 free genocide pass?
The appropriate question is does this meet the intent requirements for collective punishment?
All these international crimes do have various requirements. Collective punishment in particular has more intent requirements than many other war crimes. Death and destruction in and of itself is not sufficient.
Let's put Netanyahu in front of the ICC and let the lawyers figure it out.
Edit: That isn't tongue in cheek, I think it is one of the few ways to difuse the cauldron of violence that keeps brewing hotter and hotter. A broad international coalition to hold the leadership on both sides responsible for their war crimes.
More generally though I agree. I'm a big supporter of the ICC and generally believe it to be a fair court. I'd like to see those accused stand trial, present their defense, and let justice be done no matter which way it leads.
> A blatant lie.
Interesting. How are you so sure that the article I linked is a blatant lie and the one you linked isn't?
For Palestine: Either defiant resistance until extermination (or victory whatever it means) or bowing to a group one hates with every fiber of your being? No? Other alternatives? Alternatives they would be willing to accept? How do you even get concensus on such charged matters?
A lot of Palestinians are non-negotiable about wanting all Israelis gone from the region. And a lot of Israeli's may be willing to accept terrible solutions - terrible for the Palestinians. Some say genocide. But how do you choose between genocide or tolerating ongoing attacks?
Other solutions: Outside intervention. Outside world intervenes, but how and at what cost?
And for how long, and will it really be effective? And effective for which side? Is there a way to intervene without tipping the balance in favour of one side over the other? How to intervene in the most fair way to all sides? And is the cost and risk even worth it - unlikely?
I don't see how. I don't see any solutions. I have not heard of any viable solutions acceptable to majorities of populations on both sides, or even acceptable to most impartial outsiders.
Problem is not solved, because it is unsolvable. So it will end badly? Or continue as is for decades more.
I pasted this into Gemini trying to find solutions, the best I can come up with is a two state solution, involving land swaps to clear up the border, and then an international peace keeping force seperating them.
Exploring this solution reveals problems on both sides with proposed land swaps, suggesting basically that outsiders will have to ram a compromise solution down the throats of both sides - which to me sounds rather terrible.
The point of land swaps is to seek an optimal solution, so all it requires for negotiation is israel and palestine starting from a mutually-acceptable (or mutually-unacceptable) set of lands, and swapping until either wants to stop. Not that it's necessarily the best way to do things.
Of course, it might require 3rd parties to arbitrate, which is totally reasonable, because there is not a consistent track record of each "side" treating the other "side" as absolute, inalienable equals, which is a prerequisite to equitable negotiation without intermediaries.
> how do you choose between genocide or tolerating ongoing attacks?
I don't understand how this is even a question. War crimes [and crimes against humanity] are always bad, wrong, and illegal, no matter how much one feels they're being attacked. There is simply no justification for them whatsoever, not even war crimes from "the other side". That's the point of them being war crimes: some crimes are so heinous that even "war" doesn't justify them.
The holocaust did not happen because Jews were sneaking into Berlin and murdering innocent people in their homes. When the current conflict begins in that way then the group who started it needs to beg for forgiveness, especially when that is their only card. Hamas is no match for Israel militarily and have no cards to play here. Their only options is to continue to make their people suffer and hope that somehow that leads to outside powers interjecting and changing their situation for the better. The best way to resolve this is to beg for forgiveness and internally remove Hamas from power. Hamas is the problem here, I'd like to think the average citizen of Gaza could find a way to live in peace with Israel if given the choice.
At the risk of repeating myself: you're not interested in discussing in good faith and are pretending this all started because of Oct 7. But sure, let's play that game: Some jews did kill nazis in Berlin. Maybe even mistakenly killed their innocent wives. Collective punishment was the only option to respond to this behavior, and all the jews needed to suffer from the actions of some.
I don't believe that's a game you want to play, because that's straight up nazi propaganda. It coming from the mouth of an Israeli and targeting Palestinians does not make it any less nazi behavior.
by this logic, if only the nazis had provided an excuse acceptable to germans, like israel has provided one acceptable to israelis, the ethnic cleansing and genocide would have been ok
oh wait, they did, and it was the same excuses: 'the preservation of our ethnicity is more important than them'; 'they’re subhuman'; 'we must wipe them out for the good of our society'; etc; etc
so much for 'never again'
Oops, I killed 17,000 kids, totally an accident, my bad, so I'm just gonna keep doing the same thing, but I said it was an accident so that's totally cool right?
You realize that's more than a order of magnitude more than the total number of people killed on October 7th? If October 7th was justification for this war, what Isreal has done in response justifies so much more. (To be clear, I don't believe in collective punishment so neither is justified.)
> How are you so sure that the article I linked is a blatant lie and the one you linked isn't?
I start by looking at the sources reputations, then look at the amount of context that they include that contradicts their implicit or explicit view point. From there the process gets more complicated if necessary.
In this case you have blog source that clearly elides relevant context against a news article that presents the position of both sides coming from one of the more trustworthy news organizations. I don't necessarily trust the AP to be unbiased or not spread propaganda but in comparison to that blog, it is pretty easy to guess which is more reliable.
An observer following the thread (and maybe this applies to you too) might think "But what I am seeing as so egregious, why does it matter if it's technically 'collective punishment' or not? That's just nitpicking, splitting hairs, and a really awful thing to engage in when such suffering is occurring". Well then, if someone has such a strong argument that it easy for them to make it without leaving hairs that can be split, without leaving anything that could technically be nitpicked then let them make that argument. But so far I haven't found that argument. The arguments that I have found so far have loose ends, and when I pull on the loose ends I find invariably that the whole argument unravels.
So, the number of fatalities is not really relevant to this particular thread of discussion, but if you want to have a discussion on that topic, maybe we can check up front whether we have a reasonable basis for such a discussion: Do you believe that absolute numbers of civilian casualties determine morality in war? I don't.
```
At least 189 Palestinians were killed between 30 March and 31 December 2018.[28]: 6 [29][30] An independent United Nations commission said that at least 29 out of the 189 killed were militants.[5] Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and live ammunition.[31] According to Robert Mardini, head of Middle East for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), more than 13,000 Palestinians were wounded as of 19 June 2018. The majority were wounded severely, with some 1,400 struck by three to five bullets.[32] No Israelis were physically harmed from 30 March to 12 May, until one Israeli soldier was reported as slightly wounded on 14 May,[9] the day the protests peaked. The same day, 59 or 60 Palestinians were shot dead at twelve clash points along the border fence.[33]
```
yea, seems like it was the israelis who weren't peaceful. sorry if we're all starting to see a pattern.
edit: yes, 29 militants out of 189 killed and 130000 wounded. even at the most sympathetic take, Israelis come out looking like a bunch of sociopaths.
you also seems to skipped the beginning of article. for example, day 1 of peaceful march of return:
Hundreds of young Palestinians, however, ignored warnings by the organizers and the Israeli military to avoid the border zone.[74] Some began throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, to which Israel responded by declaring the Gaza border zone a closed military zone and opening fire at them.[55] The events of the day were some of the most violent in recent years.[75] In one incident, two Palestinian gunmen approached the fence, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and hand grenades, and exchanged fire with IDF soldiers. They were killed and their bodies were recovered by the IDF.
but back to the point.
- do you still claim that it was "peaceful march of return" ?
- where do you think the "return" part of the march were leading and what would have happened there ? (just in case, in UN report on Oct 7 documented that in most of places civilians followed armed members of hamas/pij/pflp/etc and engaged in looting, killing (famously thai workers that their heads were chopped off by unarmed civilians with help of hoe) and kidnapping (later sold to hamas/etc)
Here's a clarifying table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...
As you can see it does not include "impacted by tear gas", but a thousand palestinians were harmed by having tear gas canisters shot at them. More than six thousand were maimed by gun fire, and as the numbers show, it was deliberate policy to harm rather than kill.
In comparison, as a measure of the supposed militancy from the palestinians, five israelis were injured and none were killed.
Palestinian refugees have a right to return to their land and homes. That's what the march was about.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20001/number-of-israeli-settl...
https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-dat...
This excludes a few hundreds of thousands in East Jerusalem.
According to international law all of these people must be relocated to israeli territory. If I have understood it correctly the UN GA has given Israel a deadline for this in September.
Could you articulate how much in acres settlements expanded in past 20 years. Year over year or something. Or in total
If the United States launched a land war on Israel and Palestine, Russia and China. It would be an opportunity to bog down the United States in the Middle East for another generation.
If they had to cut down their military to 25% they would collapse from outside attacks. Israel would probably figure out the funding so it wouldn't drop by that much though.
Israel is spending around 30 Billion/yr now US is currently giving them about 18 Billion/yr US historically gave them about 4 Billion/yr
US spending during the war is about 75% as much as internal spending, not 75% of the total.
If US turned off the money tap, Israel would go from winning several wars at once to having to pick its fights.
to be honest, reasons for hamas having following are many, and I doubt that this is the major one
The modern model of statehood (which is probably what you are referring to) -- sometimes referred to as the "nation-state" model, but it is not actually particularly centered on the coextensiveness of the nations and states, and certainly orthogonal to states being ethnonationalist -- is at least ~300 years old (its often attributed to being ~400 years old and originating in the two peace settlements collectively known as the "Peace of Westphalia", but that's not really accurate.) OTOH, the concept of nations (which are basically the coextension of an ethnic community and a land) is much older.
But, in any case, it has not been the case at all that the history of the Levant is one of two local adjacent coexistent ethnonationalist polities, whether or not they look like modern states. That's just a simply false claim made upthread which needs no reference to the history of models of nations or states to rebut; before 1948, for a very long time, the Levant was more often either under one (multinational, imperial) polity or split between a couple of adjacent ones (often in the process of transitioning from unified control of one to the other), whether it was the British Empire, or the Ottoman Empire, a series of different Arab-led empires, the Eastern Roman Empire, the (pre-split) Roman Empire, various Greek-derived empires, the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, etc.
Concept of nation states. Nations and states, separately, are an older concept.
> they were often simply under the dominion of one imperial power or another
For millennia. Often because inter-ethnic conflicts required an external security guarantor to keep a lid on the chaos.
One could argue this history of chaos goes back to the Hittites and Bronze Age collapse.
> One could argue this history of chaos goes back to the Hittites and Bronze Age collapse.
And one could claim that the history of chaos in Central Europe goes back to the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire, or the Ostsiedlung, or perhaps even before the Romans made contact with the Germani.
Nobody said this.
> one could claim that the history of chaos in Central Europe goes back to the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire, or the Ostsiedlung, or perhaps even before the Romans made contact with the Germani
Well, yes. It’s a nexus of navigable waterways. It has taken millennia of negotiating, atrocity and—ultimately—an external security guarantor twinned with mutual forgiveness to attain, for a short period, peace.
Realistically? Maintaining strong border security, erect more walls, prevent Palestinians from crossing into Israel, legally or illegally, control any gate they have with the outside to prevent smuggling of weapons.
Regarding the hostages? Besiege Gaza until they are returned.
>Palestinian accepting the existence of Israel
Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an israeli as he was working toward a two state solution. Yasser Arafat recognized the right of Israel to exist in 1988 was assassinated. (sorry, "died of mysterious causes for no reasons and toxicology report said it was all good no biggie we don't know what Mossad uses anyways.). Israel spent the last 40 years systematically destroying any hope at giving palestinians any chance to ever want to "accept" Israel
>foregoing their demands for the right to return
Promised by God 3000 years ago for me but not for thee. Israel exiled millions of Palestinians from the land they were inhabiting.
>and East Jerusalem
Holy land for all three major abrahamic religions, but I guess it's israeli now. And muslims are banned. Cool cool. Now onto the cool stuff:
>Maintaining strong border security
Which ones, the ones that already existed where IDF soldiers shot children for fun ?
>erect more walls
Build a better prison ?
>prevent Palestinians from crossing into Israel
Let's see. Walls on land. Naval blockade. Yep, building a better prison. And since the IDF is, day after day pushing palestinians into whatever city is left. Khan Yunis is gone, Rafah is gone, Gaza City is gone, Jabalyia is gone, Beit Hanoun is gone. Five of the seven major cities of Gaza are rubble, and palestinians are forced to move to ever smaller encampments with no food, water or health care, while Israel is systematically stopping any attempts at sending aid.
>control any gate they have with the outside to prevent smuggling of weapons.
You already do, and you miserably failed at it. What next, nuke Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt because they might have tunnels ?
>Besiege Gaza until they are returned.
Not only have you ensured that a vast majority of hostages will never be returned by flattening Gaza and burying a vast majority of them, that's something called collective punishment.
Let's tally it up. Collective punishment. Ethnically cleansing a land (which is what the Nakba was). "God given right". Systematic and intentional starving, dehumanization and imprisonment of a group. Military occupation. Concentration camps.
I have great news for you, you're a nazi.
I'll preface that my knowledge of the situation is 'bad'. In that, I think I'm likely not qualified to give informed opinions on it. Okay, that out of the way...
> Ideally? Palestinian accepting the existence of Israel, foregoing their demands for the right to return and East Jerusalem, and then we can peacefully coexist.
Right to return is a tricky one here. It's been very long that they have been 'out' of their homes/locations. So much so that it's difficult to say whose it is now. Which, yeah, that's not good. I come at this from a Native American perspective. In that, my ancestors took land away and had land taken away from them. I can feel that pain still in the family and that listlessness and hurt in me to a (absurdly) small degree.
From what I know, the sticking point of all sticking points is the Temple Mount. Each side wants it to the exclusion of the other. And from what I can see, each side is willing to mortgage their children's and grandchildren's lives on that point. Literally, this is the hill they are willing to die on, and sacrifice their progeny on too, endlessly (ancient allusions come flying out here without much effort).
I used to think that someone could 'Kind David' that land and just nuke it or something. But no, they would fight over the glowing green hole too, like the irradiated wasteland in Fallout 4. To an outsider, it's hopeless, I don't think that either side is willing to ever peacefully relent on the Temple Mount, let alone all the other land.
> Realistically? Maintaining strong border security, erect more walls, prevent Palestinians from crossing into Israel, legally or illegally, control any gate they have with the outside to prevent smuggling of weapons.
I don't see how treating the Palestinians poorly is going to make things better. Their incentives are badly aligned with Israel's if they are treated in such a way. I don't think that trying to forcibly make them a separate entity is going to get them to do what Israel needs. To me, the best way to get Palestinians to stop the violence is to have them 'grow' their way out of it. In that, they are so busy thriving that they no longer care about the past issues. This, I admit, is a very American perspective, and a western American one at that. I know that my idea here is a longer term one, and right now the short term is very critical. But, for me, it's a matter of incentives. If Israel can somehow make it so that the conditions exist that Palestine is more interested in something other than the destruction of Israel, then all the better. I have no feasible way to accomplish this though. I can only say to look at places and times where such things did occur. My terribly brief survey of this says that it's a matter of poverty and growing out of the 'hole' was the solution when it did occur. Still, I know that the deep and long hatreds overshadow it all.
My solution is a glib one. The participants just need to stop being who they are. These ways don't seem to work well. My automatic reaction is that they all just need to do the hard work of true forgiveness. But, again, that's not who the participants are. That is a Christian method for Muslims and Jews; it's not going to happen.
I guess my main disagreement is that the proposed solutions don't deal with the longer term, just the shorter one, and they don't accept the agency and feelings of the Palestinians and their incentives.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss and learn more. Please tell me where I am wrong and missing out on things. Also, sorry for delays in response and I think we're in quite different time zones and schedules.
And I guess this doesn't matter either, it's just the parliament of Israel showing how it treats Palestinians that stop fighting:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/knesset-votes-71-13-for-non-bi...
1. "Not seeing any other reason" doesn't seem to be a particularly strong argument. But let's take it at face value. Estimates of German civilian deaths during WW2 range from 1.5m to 3m people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Was that because the allies were "collectively punishing" or "committing genocide" on Germans? I don't think so, and I don't see any reason that civilian deaths in Gaza imply that either.
2. Do you have a source for your death statistics that doesn't ultimately trace back to the "health ministry" of an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation?
3. Not all children who have died in Gaza since 2023 will have been "killed by Israel". Many will have been killed by Hamas for a variety of reasons, including misfired rockets, booby trapped houses, mosques and schools, and getting caught in the crossfire. Since Hamas knows that every child death will be attributed to Israel it's quite happy for that statistic to rise.
4. As far as I can tell, Israel does not kill children (or any civilians) intentionally. Any civilian killed by Israel in Gaza was unintentional, and civilian deaths occur in any war. This happens all the more in Gaza since Hamas deliberately puts civilians in harms way, and booby traps civil infrastructure or uses it to hide in.
5. Hamas is the government of Gaza, and as such it seems like it is their responsibility, not Israel's, to take action to ensure that harm is prevented to their civilians, up to and including freeing the hostages they hold and unconditionally surrendering. That's what the governments of Germany and Japan ultimately did.
To be fair, I think the allies commited a bunch of war crimes they were never charged with during WWII, and firebombing is high up that list as is dropping nuclear bombs on cities.
That said, WWII was an actual war and Germany (and the axis in general) lost fewer people than their enemies.
This is not a war, this an occupation and slaughter. Isreal has killed 50 times as many people as Hamas.
> Do you have a source for your death statistics that doesn't ultimately trace back to the "health ministry" of an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation?
These numbers are pretty much universally acknowledged as more likely to be too low than too high (including by Isreal.)
Here's a study not done by a Palestinian organization that says that the official Palestinian estimate is 40% too low.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797v...
> 3. Not all children who have died in Gaza since 2023 will have been "killed by Israel". Many will have been killed by Hamas for a variety of reasons, including misfired rockets, booby trapped houses, mosques and schools, and getting caught in the crossfire. Since Hamas knows that every child death will be attributed to Israel it's quite happy for that statistic to rise.
I don't even know what to say to the twisted amount of self deception involved in that sentence. "It's not us, they're just killing themselves guys, not our fault."
> As far as I can tell, Israel does not kill children (or any civilians) intentionally. Any civilian killed by Israel in Gaza was unintentional, and civilian deaths occur in any war. This happens all the more in Gaza since Hamas deliberately puts civilians in harms way, and booby traps civil infrastructure or uses it to hide in.
Isreal happily kills civilians to avoid risks to their soldiers, that's why this "war" has such a disproportionate death toll.
> Hamas is the government of Gaza, and as such it seems like it is their responsibility, not Israel's, to take action to ensure that harm is prevented to their civilians, up to and including freeing the hostages they hold and unconditionally surrendering. That's what the governments of Germany and Japan ultimately did.
Hamas won one election 20 years ago and neither Isreal nor the USA recognize Hamas as the government a sovereign country. It seems pretty bad faith to claim Hamas is the government only when it is convienent to blame them. (To be clear Hamas deserves plenty of blame.)
However, I place the responsibility and the majority of the blame on the group with the vast majority of the power: Isreal.
At a certain point, the comparative death toll and comparative wealth/power imbalance make it clear: Isreal is engaging in genocide, not war.
Not sure how the colonization of America justifies other colonization's.
Unless you think everyone is owed a 1 free genocide pass?"
Most of them died from disease. Far more of them died from disease than died from say, hand to hand combat or warfare on the plains.
The American Indians were toast as soon as the first coughing European stepped ashore. The native Americans had no immunity to the stew of diseases that had been brewing in Europe and Asia for centuries, so the Indians simply died. Once an Indian had a disease (s)he could spread it to other indians (s)he met. The flame front of infection raged ahead of the white man across the continent. The "mountain men" encountered regions where entire societies were struck down: bodies everywhere, tools, lodging, structures left intact but virtually no one was around (and many the infected likely fled to more remote lands, worsening the spread).
One estimate is that 61 million people lived in the Americas prior to European contact. Between 1492 and 1600 about 50 million native Americans died of disease.
"Killed?" Yes but rarely intentionally. "Genocide?" No.
And note this was perpetrated by The United States, not the "American colonists". This was happening in the 1800s, a good 300 years after the initial disease front came through.
If the United States had respected the native populations the American West would look very different today. Compare with current Central and South America for example (which were certainly still victims of both disease and genocide, but it was less thorough due to differences in colonizers and geography).
Not sure i'd be happy to live next to a neighbor illegally occupying my former house.
If you’re not happy, that’s on you. Time moves on, you need to accept the existence of the Israeli state.
israeli citizens didn't have such a good outcome at oct 7 when great march of return succeeded to breach border.
and you seems to be angry that they were harmed and not killed. i am confused here.
now, you surely know that between 1945 and 1950 about 12m to 14.6m ethnic germans were ethnically cleansed (500k to 2.5m dead in process) from eastern europe and some land annexed.
do you support their right to march back and reclaim their land and homes ?
please go on
> do you support their right to march back and reclaim their land and homes ?
considering that they were kicked out by violence in 1948, likud terrorists mass killed entire villages of Palestinians in order to force the rest to flee.
Israelis then forced them to live in an apartheid state
I certainly do support their right of return. Israel has committed multiple oct 7 level atrocities against Palestinians over the last few decades while sweeping them under the rug.
edit: are the descendants of those germans being systematically oppressed with no rights and living under military occupation? if not, whats stopping them from returning currently?
Do you support it and them marching to reclaim their land and homes?
What's your skin in this game? Why are you defending a deeply criminal state?
Hundreds of young Palestinians, however, ignored warnings by the organizers and the Israeli military to avoid the border zone.[74] Some began throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, to which Israel responded by declaring the Gaza border zone a closed military zone and opening fire at them.[55] The events of the day were some of the most violent in recent years.[75] In one incident, two Palestinian gunmen approached the fence, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and hand grenades, and exchanged fire with IDF soldiers. They were killed and their bodies were recovered by the IDF.
Right, so we come back to my original question, which I asked in order to determine whether we have a basis for a discussion: "Do you believe that absolute numbers of civilian casualties determine morality in war? I don't."
In any case, whilst we're looking at multipliers, what do you think of the Battle of Mosul?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016%E2%80%93...
By a variety of accounts the US, UK, France and Turkey participated in a battle that killed maybe 10 or 20 times as many of the opposing side than were killed on their side. According to some estimates they killed 40,000 civilians, more than 20x as many as the number of military that were killed on their side. Was that an "occupation and a slaughter"?
So I'm not sure we really have a basis for discussion. We simply differ on fundamental moral principles. However, I will respond to your points.
> I don't even know what to say to the twisted amount of self deception involved in that sentence. "It's not us, they're just killing themselves guys, not our fault."
Themselves? I'm saying Hamas is killing civilians, be it directly, by deliberately putting them in harms way or by stealing aid, not that civilians are killing themselves. Unless you're saying that the civilians are Hamas, which I don't think you are. And I certainly believe that Israel has responsibility to minimize civilian casualties and the responsibility to ensure aid flows freely, but until the unconditional surrender of Hamas and the release of all hostages I believe that Hamas holds all the moral responsibility for what happens to its people.
> Isreal happily kills civilians to avoid risks to their soldiers, that's why this "war" has such a disproportionate death toll.
This seems very unclear to me. If they had wanted to avoid risk to their soldiers they wouldn't have sent any in, they would have conducted only bombing operations. In fact, one reason to send soldiers in would be for the exact opposite reason: so they could minimize civilian harm.
Why do you think soldiers are on the ground at all, if they want to avoid risks to their soldiers?
> Hamas won one election 20 years ago and neither Isreal nor the USA recognize Hamas as the government a sovereign country. It seems pretty bad faith to claim Hamas is the government only when it is convienent to blame them. (To be clear Hamas deserves plenty of blame.)
It doesn't matter who recognises them. Before Oct 7th they had the monopoly on violence within Gaza. They are the de facto state. Civilian wellbeing is ultimately their responsibility, like German civilian wellbeing was the German government's responsibility in WW2.
Furthermore, normally in times of war, third countries allow civilians to flee to safety. Why won't Egypt? Why won't other countries take in refugees via Egypt? Why do they insist that civilians must stay in harm's way?
Above, in response to my claim that Hamas is responsible for Palestinian civilian deaths, you wrote sarcastically "It's not us, they're just killing themselves guys, not our fault." so it seems you do believe, to some degree, that they are Hamas's people.
> However, I place the responsibility and the majority of the blame on the group with the vast majority of the power: Isreal.
You're in good company. It is very common to believe that "might makes wrong".
> At a certain point, the comparative death toll and comparative wealth/power imbalance make it clear: Isreal is engaging in genocide, not war.
Ah OK, so you're not basing claims of genocide on the legal standard, just a difference in death toll and wealth/power imbalance. You're welcome to do that, of course. You can use words however you want, but that doesn't match the legal standard within international law.
The death toll is appalling. Hamas should be receive the utmost pressure to unconditionally surrender and release the hostages. Egypt should receive the utmost pressure to allow civilians to flee so that Israel can finish off Hamas and destroy the terror infrastructure they have built in Gaza. And by the way, I don't know what's happening there because I'm not there. All I know is what I see in front of me: arguments that don't seem to hold water, and an alternative perspective which is barely seeing the light of day.
I believe it matters how many people you kill. Killing more people is bad.
I think the overall morality is complicated and based on more than that, but yes both the absolute numer if deaths and the ratio of deaths between sides and between combantants / civilians also matters.
> In any case, whilst we're looking at multipliers, what do you think of the Battle of Mosul?
I think any battle where you kill that many more civilians than combatants is deeply problematic. There were war crimes on both sides of that conflict as well.
Technically speaking, the ISIS were the occupying force and this was a "liberation" but I don't think that matters so much practically or morally. The people assuming control had the moral responsibility to keep people safe.
> Furthermore, normally in times of war, third countries allow civilians to flee to safety. Why won't Egypt? Why won't other countries take in refugees via Egypt? Why do they insist that civilians must stay in harm's way?
Isreal has a well established history of refusing to allow refugees to return to their homes.
I agree that Egypth should be allowing them in and does share some moral responsibility.
> It doesn't matter who recognises them. Before Oct 7th they had the monopoly on violence within Gaza. They are the de facto state. Civilian wellbeing is ultimately their responsibility, like German civilian wellbeing was the German government's responsibility in WW2.
When an occupying power destroys all the local infrastructure, deliberately destroys the police force and assume defacto control of the country, they assume the responsibility as well.
> but until the unconditional surrender of Hamas and the release of all hostages I believe that Hamas holds all the moral responsibility for what happens to its people.
The hostages were almost released. It is people like you that insist on unconditional surrender that are the reason they aren't home. That and Netanyahu's malicious desire to hang on to power.
I seriously dont unsterstand the stance that Hamas has ALL moral responsibility for civilian deaths. That doesn't match any moral framework I have ever read or heard about and seems be be just a jingoistic talking point.
> You're in good company. It is very common to believe that "might makes wrong".
I believe power comes with responsibility, yes.
> The death toll is appalling. Hamas should be receive the utmost pressure to unconditionally surrender and release the hostages. Egypt should receive the utmost pressure to allow civilians to flee so that Israel can finish off Hamas and destroy the terror infrastructure they have built in Gaza.
I don't have any support for Hamas or their choices or their war crimes, but then again my government isn't supplying Hamas with weapons to commot those war crimes with.
What I can't understand any moral individual believing what Isreal is doing is ok.
I've answered most of your questions, so I have a question for you: What percentage of the Gaza population needs to be killed before you will call it genocide or even just stop supprting Israel? 2% isn't enough so is it 5%, 20%, 50% or even higher? Will you continue to support Israel until they've killed 100% of the Gazans and achieved peace?
> Isreal has a well established history of refusing to allow refugees to return to their homes.
Hmm, I don't want to put words into your mouth here, but ... surely you can't be saying "I believe those civilians are being slaughtered/collectively punished/genocided and it's better to keep them where they are rather than let them flee to save their lives because they might not be able to come back"?
> I agree that Egypth should be allowing them in and does share some moral responsibility.
Just out of interest, would you say that the proportion of moral responsibility that Egypt has is equal to the proportion of news coverage and Hacker News discussion Egypt gets on this issue? And if not, do you have an idea why not?
> When an occupying power destroys all the local infrastructure, deliberately destroys the police force and assume defacto control of the country, they assume the responsibility as well.
Yes, "when". Israel is not yet in control of the Gaza Strip. Hamas still retains fighting capability and the war is ongoing.
> The hostages were almost released. It is people like you that insist on unconditional surrender that are the reason they aren't home. That and Netanyahu's malicious desire to hang on to power.
Almost? What stopped it? I doubt I had anything to do with it. I don't think Hamas or Israel are listening to me. Furthermore I doubt Netanyahu has any incentive to keep the hostages in Hamas hands. If there's one thing that could make him even more hated, even more punished in the next election, it's hostages remaining in the Gaza Strip.
> I seriously dont unsterstand the stance that Hamas has ALL moral responsibility for civilian deaths. That doesn't match any moral framework I have ever read or heard about and seems be be just a jingoistic talking point.
Well, fair enough. You're welcome to your moral framework. It's one reason I don't think there's much basis for discussion here. We simply disagree on fundamental things. My view is that if Israel is conducting itself according to international norms on war, then any harm that comes to civilians is the moral responsibility of Hamas.
> > You're in good company. It is very common to believe that "might makes wrong".
> I believe power comes with responsibility, yes.
Ah, but that's something different. I agree that power comes with responsibility. There is a common belief that in any conflict the party in the wrong is the more powerful one. I don't agree with that.
> What I can't understand any moral individual believing what Isreal is doing is ok.
I can't understand how any moral individual can believe what Israel is doing is not OK! But I guess there are a few reasons for that, including having different beliefs about what Israel is actually doing. If I believed what I saw on the BBC, Sky News, CNN, NYT, WaPo etc. then I'd probably feel the same as you do.
(Individual actions of Israel or Israeli combat units may not be justifiable. In fact, I don't see how that's realistically avoidable in war. Israel should punish its soldiers that commit war crimes. I think the strategy of limiting aid is flawed: they should flood the Strip with aid so there is no risk of food insecurity.)
> my government isn't supplying Hamas with weapons to commot those war crimes with
Do you live in the west or the middle east? If so then your government probably has funded Hamas, actually. In fact if your country is a member of the UN then it probably has given at least some small amount of funding to Hamas. Billions and billions in (so called) aid have been poured into the Gaza Strip. Who is in charge of how it is spent? Hamas. Is that how they funded their military tunnels and weapons? Yes.
> I've answered most of your questions, so I have a question for you: What percentage of the Gaza population needs to be killed before you will call it genocide or even just stop supprting Israel? 2% isn't enough so is it 5%, 20%, 50% or even higher? Will you continue to support Israel until they've killed 100% of the Gazans and achieved peace?
As I said, I do not believe absolute numbers of casualties determine justifiability in war. I believe war goals and means determine justifiability. I support Israel's just war goal of eliminating Hamas's military capability and securing the release of the hostages. I think that this war goal is the most just I am aware of in my lifetime, and Oct 7th was one of the most abhorrent events of my lifetime. Hamas's military capability must be utterly destroyed. Israel must not deliberately target civilians or civilian infrastructure. According to internationally accepted norms of law if the enemy military hides amongst civilians or uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes (including hiding military tunnel entrances in or booby trapping schools, mosques and hospitals) then they no longer have special protection.
I hope that everyone would agree with me in this point of view, but maybe not, particularly not people who believe that absolute numbers of casualties are a relevant consideration.
Someone might say: "but they're already deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure!". OK, maybe they are, in which case I no longer support Israel. But maybe they're not, in which case I do support them. I don't think any of us here on this thread truly know, because we're not there. We haven't seen it. The best we can do is make a determination of what to believe based on different sources of information that we trust, and the arguments that we hear. Israel has many more detractors than supporters globally (I would guess the ratio is something like 100:1) so I simply don't expect most of the reporting to be fair to Israel. Furthermore, I find that many anti-Israel claims simply don't hold water, such as the one that started my participation in this thread. After such scandals as the so called "Jenin massacre" (which turned out to be just a normal military confrontation) I'm not quick to jump to conclusions.
I.e. the allies forcing germans in the east to go west and leave the nazi colonial project behind. It was arguably atrocious. It is also irrelevant since the territories involved reside within the EU and there is nothing in the way for these people or their descendants relocating back to Poland or whatever.
Which I suspect will be quite popular in the future, given that Poland's economy is doing rather well and Germany's is likely to not do rather well.
>>>
During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Reichsdeutsche (German citizens) and Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside the Nazi state) fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg (Neumark) and Pomerania (Farther Pomerania), which were annexed by Provisional Government of National Unity of Poland and by the Soviet Union.
<<<<
will you support them marching back to reclaim their lands and homes, while been peacefully armed (like palestinians) with molotov cocktails, ak47 and grenades ? do you support their right of return ?
Fair enough, but what happens when the US (inevitably) decide that they're not going to support Israel anymore. Bibi has basically turned support of Israel into a culture war argument, and without consistent US support, I'm not sure Israel will survive in it's current form.
Mind you, climate change could make the whole Middle East uninhabitable before then, so it's possible that the Israeli state will last until then.
And lets be clear, I don't think most people have an issue with the existence of an Israeli state, but what's been happening in Judea and Samaria for the past twenty or so years and Gaza currently is deeply, deeply wrong and reminds me of my favourite phrase, "the only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns from history". One would think that the Jewish people would have learned better lessons from their persecution, but apparently they learnt different lessons than I expected.
Its great that most people don’t have problem with our existence, but our neighbors do. That’s why we have wars.
And comparing it to the holocaust is quite different, in the entire Jewish history we never seeked to destroy anyone, we were always targeted because of antisemitism. The Palestinians? They are taught in schools that we are the devil.
Mmmm, maybe you should read the Bible? Lots of violence committed by the Israelis there.
> comparing it to the holocaust is quite different
Sorry, it's mostly the same (and incredibly similar to Irish history between Catholics and Protestants). Both sides dehumanise each other, and that leads to violence and suffering. How often does Israeli media cover the bombing of Gaza? Like, a lot of the footage didn't appear on most Western media until 12months + into the conflict.
One could also make the argument that what's happening in the West bank/Gaza is basically ghettoization, which was something that happened to the Jews a lot in Western Europe. It's profoundly depressing that all the Jewish people have learned is to inflict this kind of suffering on other people.
And the current plans to basically force all of the Gazans out is again, incredibly similar to historical pogroms and treatment meted out to the Jewish people.
To get a feel for how the IDF perceives the Gaza strip border one can watch https://xcancel.com/Timesofgaza/status/1950748519796797515#m or some of the material collected by https://xcancel.com/ytirawi.
As you show very clearly, it is useless to protest zionism peacefully.
according to who?
Kinda seems like you do since I didn't say anything like that.
> surely you can't be saying "I believe those civilians are being slaughtered/collectively punished/genocided and it's better to keep them where they are rather than let them flee to save their lives because they might not be able to come back"?
I said that Egypt bears some responsibility for the deaths because of they made that choice. I provided historical context because I think Isreal also bears some responsibility for that Egypt's choice because of Isreal's historically poor behavior towards returning refugees with the wrong ethnicity.
> Just out of interest, would you say that the proportion of moral responsibility that Egypt has is equal to the proportion of news coverage and Hacker News discussion Egypt gets on this issue? And if not, do you have an idea why not?
That's a weird question. Moral responsibility isn't something you assign as a fraction and certainly isn't based on how much coverage something gets. That's a bizare way to think about morality, so I'm not even sure why you'd want to ask that in a good faith discussion.
> Furthermore I doubt Netanyahu has any incentive to keep the hostages in Hamas hands
Netanyahu has both a clear lust for power and a slate of corruption charges hanging over his head. This conflict has been quite effective at helping with both, why would he want it to end?
> My view is that if Israel is conducting itself according to international norms on war
They aren't, that's why the ICC has issued arrest warrants. Given your stated stance, you should support Netanyahu turning himself in.
> Ah, but that's something different. I agree that power comes with responsibility. There is a common belief that in any conflict the party in the wrong is the more powerful one.
If a significantly more powerful party is in a conflict with a less power part and is killing way more of them, then yes, the does put the more powerful party in the wrong, reglardless of whatever talking point they have. The more powerful party has the greater responsibility for achieving peace and protecting lives and the failure rests primarily on them.
> As I said, I do not believe absolute numbers of casualties determine justifiability in war. I believe war goals and means determine justifiability.
I didn't ask about absolute number, but a percentage of the population. You seem to be saying that there is no percentage at which you will adjust your point of view. If Isreal kills 90% of the population, that really wouldn't count as ethnic cleansing to you? What about 100%? There's really no point at which you would stop just taking Israel at its word?
> Israel has many more detractors than supporters globally (I would guess the ratio is something like 100:1) so I simply don't expect most of the reporting to be fair to Israel.
If the entire world is telling you to stop murdering children, maybe you should consider listening?
> I simply don't expect most of the reporting to be fair to Israel. Furthermore, I find that many anti-Israel claims simply don't hold water.
Like the Pro-Isreal claim that you made and I debunked? How about casting doubt on the widely accepted death toll numbers?
I've seen the kind of information sources you cite. It's pretty clear you only look for sources that confirm your world view.
> Kinda seems like you do since I didn't say anything like that.
> I said that Egypt bears some responsibility for the deaths because of they made that choice. I provided historical context because I think Isreal also bears some responsibility for that Egypt's choice because of Isreal's historically poor behavior towards returning refugees with the wrong ethnicity.
They're indeed not your words, but I can't understand how what you said can be in contradiction with them. I can't help but conclude that you're describing a world where countries believe a population is suffering genocide, could take them in to save them, yet don't do so because they might not be let back. Please do tell me where I've gone wrong here.
> > Just out of interest, would you say that the proportion of moral responsibility that Egypt has is equal to the proportion of news coverage and Hacker News discussion Egypt gets on this issue? And if not, do you have an idea why not?
> That's a weird question. Moral responsibility isn't something you assign as a fraction and certainly isn't based on how much coverage something gets. That's a bizare way to think about morality, so I'm not even sure why you'd want to ask that in a good faith discussion.
I don't think it's bizarre (and I certainly didn't say moral responsibility is based on news coverage!). News coverage is certainly something you can assign as a fraction. If, when presenting news on a particular topic, only one country gets wall to wall news coverage and forum discussion of its behaviour and there is barely mention of others despite them sharing some degree of responsibility, that seems pretty odd to me, and I'd want to try to understand why!
> > Furthermore I doubt Netanyahu has any incentive to keep the hostages in Hamas hands
> Netanyahu has both a clear lust for power and a slate of corruption charges hanging over his head. This conflict has been quite effective at helping with both, why would he want it to end?
I didn't say he wanted it to end. Elections will come around regardless of whether it has ended. If there are still hostages in Gaza when the election comes he will be judged very harshly by the electorate. Losing the next election puts him at increased risk from corruption charges so if he wants to avoid those charges he'll be trying his best to get the hostages out.
> > My view is that if Israel is conducting itself according to international norms on war
> They aren't, that's why the ICC has issued arrest warrants. Given your stated stance, you should support Netanyahu turning himself in.
Perhaps you are confusing warrants with judgement?
> > Ah, but that's something different. I agree that power comes with responsibility. There is a common belief that in any conflict the party in the wrong is the more powerful one.
> If a significantly more powerful party is in a conflict with a less power part and is killing way more of them, then yes, the does put the more powerful party in the wrong, reglardless of whatever talking point they have. The more powerful party has the greater responsibility for achieving peace and protecting lives and the failure rests primarily on them.
OK! Well, I completely disagree, and as such I don't expect we can make any more progress in this discussion, but I'm glad we managed to at least tease out this critical difference, so I thank you for persevering in the conversation. (We also disagree on how to determine the facts of the matter, but I think that's a less fundamental disagreement.)
> > As I said, I do not believe absolute numbers of casualties determine justifiability in war. I believe war goals and means determine justifiability.
> I didn't ask about absolute number, but a percentage of the population.
A percentage of the (let's say pre-war) population corresponds directly to an absolute number because the pre-war population is a known constant.
> You seem to be saying that there is no percentage at which you will adjust your point of view. If Isreal kills 90% of the population, that really wouldn't count as ethnic cleansing to you? What about 100%? There's really no point at which you would stop just taking Israel at its word?
Correct, I do not judge morality of war by the percentage, or equivalently, absolute number of fatalities. I judge it based on the war goals and war conduct. Theoretically, and it won't happen, but theoretically, if the Gazans fight to the last man, woman and child before giving up the hostages and before disbanding the military capability of Hamas then in my view it is just to pursue the war to that length.
The same would have been true of my view of the conduct of the allies against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. They were entitled to seek unconditional surrender. If Nazi Germany had not capitulated after Hitler's suicide, the allies would have been within their rights to continue to prosecute the war until capitulation, and no doubt more civilians would have been killed and more civilian infrastructure destroyed until they did so. Now, that's not to say that Israel, the US, the UK couldn't choose or have chosen to stop earlier for other reasons, I'm just saying I don't see it as a moral limit. I see Israel's war as just, and I see the allies' war on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as just, so in my mind that allows them to seek total victory.
> > Israel has many more detractors than supporters globally (I would guess the ratio is something like 100:1) so I simply don't expect most of the reporting to be fair to Israel.
> If the entire world is telling you to stop murdering children, maybe you should consider listening?
Yes, I definitely think it's worth listening! In fact I have been listening very hard. But I also don't judge truth based on absolute number of voices either.
> > I simply don't expect most of the reporting to be fair to Israel. Furthermore, I find that many anti-Israel claims simply don't hold water.
> Like the Pro-Isreal claim that you made and I debunked? How about casting doubt on the widely accepted death toll numbers?
> I've seen the kind of information sources you cite. It's pretty clear you only look for sources that confirm your world view.
You're welcome to think whatever you like about what I look for. I'm quite content that my practice of searching for discomfirmatory evidence is a healthy one, and I will continue to engage in it.
so, do you support right of return for 12m of germans and there descendants, restoration of their property rights and dismantling of colonial polish state on occupied lands ?
