That’s why I try to be very deliberate in differentiating between “Israel”, which is a country and government, and “Israelis”, which are the people who live there.
As an American, I’m extremely mindful of this distinction:
Being anti-American is bigotry based on national origin.
Being anti-America is a moral and justified position against an Imperial, settler-colonialist state that kills millions around the globe.
Good thing that basically every other action you could do falls between “do nothing”, and “commit ethnic cleansing”, so they’ve got a lot to choose from!
Too bad they decided to go with the ethnic cleansing instead.
One of the TikTok trends is to show the process of loading a projectile into a tank and firing it. Another is to put trance music to a video, along with the words “2-3, sha-ger.” This is the order that a military drone operator is given to drop a bomb, with the syllables separated so that the message is clear. The trend...
You mean where they found weapons and a tunnel with an armored door with a firing port?
Yes, that one. The one where all that was behind that door was a room with 2 cots and a table, where Israel had claimed (complete with a fancy 3D animation) that there was an entire multi-level command center with tens of rooms, housing potentially hundreds of Hamas fighters. That one, that didn’t exist.
Or the al-Shifa hospital where a surveillance camera recording shows terrorists bringing in a hostage?
This is always such a weird argument. Yeah, of course Hamas brought the hostage there for treatment. They were trying to keep them alive. They’re also the government in Gaza, so it would be no different than Israeli military bringing one of their hostages to an Israeli hospital. Are you under the impression that hospitals that treat war wounded are military targets?
Let me ask you this: How should Israel have reacted to the terror attack on October 7? What would, in your eyes, an appropriate, justified response look like? Please be honest.
Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Then, I’d say they should have conducted a ground invasion backed with actually targeted strikes on Hamas targets using precision weapons that the US is so enamored with.
and also permitted foreign aid through the border crossing with Egypt
Permitted a pittance, after blocking all of it initially.
I’m not Israeli.
That just makes your caping for their genocide and ethnic cleansing even more ridiculous.
No, war crime trials are for their other abuses, like killing a record number of journalists, aid workers, doctors, and of course women and children. War crime trials are for cutting off food and water to civilians, and bombing civilian infrastructure. War crime trials are for funneling civilians into “safe zones”, and then bombing them.
But you know that. You just don’t care, as long as the monsters you support win instead of the monsters you don’t support.
You are either willfully ignorant about how wrong what you’re saying is, or you are truly a lost cause.
I don’t think you are aware of just how small this war is in terms of death toll compared to other wars that are currently going on.
And I don’t think you realize just how many insane ratios this war is producing. For being so small, it is resulting in more aid worker, doctor, and journalist deaths than other, much larger wars. It has resulted in level of destruction (e.g. 60% of homes damaged) that hasn’t existed since WW2. The sheer percentages of children being killed versus adults (nevermind combatants), is just staggering.
If your only defense is to say, “but who cares about ratios and percentages?”, then you’re just arguing that it’s okay to genocide small groups.
But I’m suuuuuure you’re just weeping non-stop for them, right?
Neither is not supplying your enemy with resources
They are denying civilians water and food, and Israel is not the ones supplying those resources anyways, other countries are, and Israel is blocking them.
nor is bombing civilian infrastructure that is being used for military purposes
Which the water infra and power plants were not, but they were bombed anyways (and to be clear, Israel has never claimed that they were used to launch attacks, before you try to pull that out of your bum).
At no point did Israel make the unrealistic promise that they would be safe from bombs.
Ah yes, unrealistic to not bomb civilians. Of course. So smart. Why even have stipulations about war crimes, since apparently no one in a warzone can expect not to be killed indiscriminately anyways? Checkmate, human rights!
Given that Hamas operates from there
Hamas doesn’t “operate” from the 60% of residential buildings that have been damaged in Gaza, any more than the IDF could be said to “operate” from Israeli neighborhoods. Israel has shown no evidence (and in fact has been shown to have been dead wrong with their claims, such as at al-Shifa) that they are using the refugee camps and homes and businesses that Israel bombed to launch rockets (if they were all actually rocket launch sites, where were all the people actually living?). Simply having your soldiers live somewhere doesn’t make it a valid target, otherwise the rocket attacks into Israel are all justified too.
There’s a reason that Israel is rapidly losing support on the world stage, and why it’s going to find itself a pariah state before too long.
You would do the same if you were in their place.
When you wake up and find that most of the world is rejecting your country’s claims of conducting a war legitimately, perhaps you should question why, rather than rushing to spew out half-baked justifications and appeals to empathize with an abused group becoming the abusers.
Why do I suspect that even if we said, “after”, you would still turn around and object to these Israeli assholes being held accountable if tribunals came to pass?
No, police are the enforcers of state power. States are bad. Police are bad.
Community defense groups are not “police”, and “solving neighborly disputes” does not require authority figures to get involved outside of adjudication, which police and/or community defense groups cannot and do not do; that’s what courts are for.
Yes, that is the invasion by Israel to which I am referring. Or are you conflating “Palestinians” and “Arabs”, and trying to make some gotcha about other Arab states trying to intervene in what Israel was doing to the Palestinians? The Palestinians in Palestine weren’t invading anyone, they were defending their land.
Are you under the impression that the Palestinians invaded Israeli lands in 1948, killing thousands of them? Or that it’s Palestinians who put Israelis in an open-air prison and deny them essential supplies? Or that it’s Palestinians who regularly form mobs to run Israelis out of their homes before bulldozing them to build new settlements?
Nothing in those links you provided said that Palestinians invaded Israel, so I’m not sure what relevance they have to the statement of mine that you quoted, unless, as I said, you are conflating the other Arab states which did invade Israel in an attempt to help Palestinians.
But go off, fam.
Also, what part of my comment struck you as ‘riled up’?
The IDF are terrorists who target civilians with vague claims, that they do not allow anyone to review, that their bombs are totally definitely absolutely hitting Hamas and not just civilians.
But also, police are just the internal enforcers of a government’s power. And Israel exerts de facto control over the West Bank and Gaza, so it’s perfectly accurate to call the IDF’s actions there ‘policing’.
I’m sure you thought this was some kinda clever gotcha, but to everyone who is not deep in Israel’s kool-aid, we all can see very well with our own eyes which place has been systematically, indiscriminately bombed, and it ain’t Israel.
Israel’s claim that Hamas resisting the violence and oppression of Palestinians by Israel makes Hamas responsible for said violence and oppression of Palestinians by Israel, doesn’t ring true to anyone objective, much less the Palestinians whose families and friends are dying to Israeli bombs.
these words don’t explain why the support for Hamas is allegedly raising
Israel: “I’m the one killing your loved ones for decades, but really you should blame this other guy (Hamas) for giving me the excuse to do it!”
Yeah, I’m sure you’d totally buy that argument too.
Netanyahu gambled with both Palestinians lives and Israeli ones, and lost that bet badly, so now he’s looking to capitalize on the situation to ethnically cleanse Gaza and set up new settlements there, hoping that will be enough to save himself from the political reckoning coming for him internally.
Turns out when you trap people in a hellhole, they start to resent the people who put them there, and laud the people who seem to be trying to change that shitty status quo.
There’s a significant age gap between most of the vocal critics of Israel in congress right now, and its ardent supporters. In even just 15 years a lot of those ardent supporters will be dead. Younger Democrat congresspersons already have a significantly different set of politics than the old guard, and it’s only going to become more apparent as they become the majority, and don’t have to fear censure by the fogeys.
It’s absolutely hilarious that Putin is still pretending he has any ability to counter NATO militarily outside of nukes.
Russia is estimated to have lost 87% of their pre-war soldiers and 60% of their pre-war armor.
The drafts already drove a massive exodus of their future workforce (estimated at 700k by Forbes Russia, which is around 0.5%, which is a LOT) to flee Russia.
Their ground force modernization (equipment, training, stockpiles, etc) is estimated to have been set back by 15 years (same cnn link above).
If Russia didn’t have nukes, they’d pose almost no threat to NATO. Well on their way to being another North Korea.
Biden says Netanyahu must change, Israel losing global support (www.reuters.com)
On TikTok, the war in Gaza is a game (english.elpais.com)
One of the TikTok trends is to show the process of loading a projectile into a tank and firing it. Another is to put trance music to a video, along with the words “2-3, sha-ger.” This is the order that a military drone operator is given to drop a bomb, with the syllables separated so that the message is clear. The trend...
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Prague shooting: Gunman dead after killing more than 15 at Charles University (www.bbc.com)
US reviewing Amnesty International report that said US-made munitions have killed civilians in Gaza (www.reuters.com)
Putin: Russia will concentrate more military units near Finland (yle.fi)
As a Finn I say this is fine. Every military resource that is tied down and not raping and destroying Ukraine is net positive.
Unguided ‘dumb bombs’ used in almost half of Israeli strikes on Gaza (Gifted article - no pay wall) (wapo.st)