Let’s put it this way. I’d rather send money to North Korea than give a cent to an Israeli business. I wish they’d get served the same dose of humility that made Germany ashamed to make any display of national pride, such as openly waving the flag, for many decades.
But given who their closest ally is, many more people have to die before that wretched country finds a healthier way forward.
All my solidarity to the Jewish people that disavow any connection with the state of Israel. Your voices aren’t loud enough.
The majority of the population in Israel supports this. And the horrifying and surprising thing to me is that a number of my American Jewish friends will just say "they feel conflicted", while their parents (in their 60s by now) overwhelmingly support Israel. Obviously this is anecdotal but I still found it shocking. The scary thing is that this unhinged behavior will only lead to more antisemitism and violence directed back at them. It's so obviously counterproductive from my perspective as someone who hasn't had Israeli indoctrination. We're in a seriously dangerous moment but of course this has been building since the 40s when the country was founded on brutal dispossession and racial superiority.
What is the alternative that Israelis could support instead? Just ignore Hezbollah's attacks? Give up on returning to their homes and schools in northern Israel?
Our voices aren’t loud enough because we are fucking terrified.
Look through this thread and see how many people broadly label Jews - not Israelis, not Zionists, but Jews - as the problem.
I am incredibly opposed to Israel’s evil actions, but I can’t stand to be part of the conversation because of the profound Jewish hate. Opposing Israel is not antisemitic, but these things I have seen written or heard stated, from left leaning Americans, in the last several years definitely are:
> Free Palestine, Kill all Jews
> Save a life, kill a local colonizer
> Hitler should have killed them all when he had the chance
> Zionist propaganda (in response to me saying the above occurred)
> Jewish people in this country (US) should be afraid
I’m not going to come back and read this comment, because I have utter certainty that in spite of vocally denouncing Israel’s violence, I will either be: accused of being a Zionist, talked down to about how this actually is Jews’ fault, or just straight up responded to with hate.
To be clear you aren’t the problem, what you have said is fine. Someone else is going to respond hatefully though.
These people are insane. They scare Jews out of their country, and where do they think they'll go? They're the same kind of people who think that letting Trump win and glass Gaza will somehow force Democratic voters to choose other candidates in their primaries to save Gazans.
All of their actions are against their stated interests, and if you try to point that out to them, even if you also say that you agree with their end goals, they'll call you a fascist. There is an extremism problem on the left, and while it isn't as big as the extremism problem on the right, it still exists and needs to be solved.
funny thing you mention the word 'Lebensraum', it is actually non-ironically being pushed in Israeli society as a justification to lower housing costs.
Lebensraum as a Justification for Israeli Settlements
We were fortunate when we occupied the West Bank because had we not done so, where would we have come to live? And who knows how high housing prices would have risen?
Wars aren't supposed to be even. By this logic, the Nazis were the victims of WWII, and the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War. And if Israel wants to be "better", it should just disable its air defenses to let Hezbollah "catch up".
If we're interested in an actual end to the violence, the focus should be on enforcing UNSC 1701. It's not like Israel can just ignore attacks against it.
Actually, wars are not supposed to be driven by "Dahiya doctrine" or "Rafah model" either, if we're talking about what wars are supposed to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine
And yeah, if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say. Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this. When Israel kills 1 child or more per every active combatant... then that was apparently violated.
Maybe explain how does killing 20 000+ children and counting help Israel? Or how burning/blowing up entire villages and cities in Lebanon and Gaza help them? They did this to hundreds of villages in 1947-48 and that created the whole problem they have now. Continuing the same strategy is supposed to solve it? Seems like Israel got inspired by the whole Nazi style "preventive security" thing.
Heinrich Himmler: "The best political weapon is the weapon of terror... we do not ask for their love; only for their fear." (looks like Himmler could have coauthored Dahiya doctrine and would be fond of it, if still alive by then)
You're also not supposed to initiate aggressive wars against your neighbors either, like Israel did against Syria, Iran, and many others in the past with its "pre-emptive" strikes.
If Israel wants to be better, maybe they should not intentionally murder 10s of thousands of children as a policy (20-300 allowed killed civilians per strike in a population where half of it is children).
You're listing a lot of standard anti-Israel talking points which aren't relevant to the thread. Setting aside all the tangents and returning to the topic at hand -
> if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say
You're not making an argument here. Again, do you think the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War, considering the 1:100 or so ratio there? How about when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, with an "infinitely bad" casualty ratio of 1:0? Does that make NATO infinitely evil?
> Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this.
The principle of proportionality has nothing to do with how many of their own civilians the military in question has lost.
Germany lost fewer civilians than Poland or the Soviet Union, so not really victims by that logic.
And while it's true that German civilian casualties were a couple orders of magnitude higher than American civilian casualties, the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison.
While not directly relevant to the Israel/Lebanon conflict, it's probably also worth drawing a distinction between casualties of war and state-sanctioned killing outside the scope of combat.
Germany killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.
The Allies tried and executed ten high-ranking Nazi officials, including six civilians.
By that measure, the ratio of civilian killings is at least a million to one.
> the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison
What's unfair about it? In both cases, one side suffered less civilian harm because there wasn't much fighting in its own territory.
I think the point stands that "Israel must be bad because it only lost 2 civilians" makes as little sense as "the Nazis must be good because they lost a lot more civilians than Western allies".
If a framework for trying to judge morality penalizes states for effectively protecting their own civilian population, then it's a very bad framework.
nah, israel has been terrorizing all its neighbours non-stop since the creation of the colony, and even before its creation, the IDF's predecessor organizations have been recognized as the terrorist organizations (irgun lehi haganah) due to high profile terrorism (King david's hotel etc).
They actually imported the concept of terrorism from Europe into the middle east, which was pretty peaceful before
A lot of israeli prime ministers were members of these terrorist organizations and were engaged in massive ethnic cleansing (ben gurion, begin, shamir, sharon).
