Lurker > Covenant

Trumble posted...

The problem is Israel's government, the IDF, and Hamas; not either countries' civilians.

Israel is a democracy in which political parties with platforms that explicitly embrace ethnic cleansing or worse get more than 70% of the vote. It's the civilians, too, and we can and should recognize that while still maintaining that killing and displacing them is wrong.

Foppe posted...

Putin: Hello new friends, do you need some ammo?

Seems unlikely. Iran is one of their closest economic and political allies.

SHRlKE posted...

In terms of the last few decades I think so. What we are seeing today has been called out as genocide and I find it hard to disagree with that after seeing whats happened the last six months.

Israel has been rolling tanks into Gaza and murdering children indiscriminately, through that means and many others, for over 20 years. That's not apartheid, it's genocide. It always has been.

Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank are older than you and constitute a state-backed attempt to displace Palestinians through violence. That's not apartheid, it's genocide. You could argue ethnic cleansing, but after years of people not leaving the difference becomes moot and arguing that is more than a little victim-blamey.

DnDer posted...

In the same way America started recovering immediately in the wake of Biden's election (because he had a progressive vision), we could hope/expect to see at least a similar bounce attempted in Israel with the removal of Likud and Netanyahu.

No, we cannot expect anything even remotely resembling recovery just because Netanyahu is removed from power. Israel has no actual left-wing political establishment and 70% of their politicians literally run on, and win on the platform of, making Israel a genocidal ethnostate.

Also, if you get rid of Netanyahu and Likud, things will already instantly get better because the party in power won't be directly supporting, funding, and inviting hamas to be part of the power structure of Palestine.

Removing Netanyahu from power doesn't do much of anything to change the governing coalition and Likud wouldn't magically disappear and have their seats in the Knesset distributed to left-wing parties.

punkfanalways posted...

I see it as unproductive because it can be seen as giving Hamas a free pass

Hamas is an internationally-recognized terrorist organization and Israel assassinated the children and grandchildren of Hamas's leader then called the grandchildren under the age of 10 terrorists and nobody really gives a fuck.

Suggesting that they get a free pass in any capacity is so ridiculous that it can only reasonably be parsed as disingenuous.

According to Abu-Alia, Israeli security forces had informed Palestinian officials that the settlers were looking for an Israeli teenager who had gone missing earlier in the day.

He estimated that between 1,000 and 1,200 settlers surrounded the village, and around 500 stormed it just after midday local time on Friday, blocking all the roads in the area.

1,700 people seems a bit large for a lynch mob. That's about the size of an Israeli battalion!

The settlers attacked the village, raided homes, and fired guns at residents, he said. Videos obtained by CNN show parts of the village burning, with smoke billowing over several buildings and settlers lobbing rocks. Houses and cars are seen completely burned up, with sounds of gunfire and clashes heard in the background.

According to Abu-Alia, the Israeli military arrived at the scene at around 3 p.m. local time, but did not stop the settlers from attacking the village. Instead, Israeli soldiers allowed them to raid homes, prevented Palestinian residents from moving around and blocked ambulances from reaching the injured, he alleged.

And there's the actual army supporting them, to nobody's surprise.

Samurontai posted...

Didn't polls show that the vast majority of Palestinians supported the Oct 7 attack?

No, that isn't what the polls I've seen asked.

I'm not particularly interested in whataboutisms or attempts to paint people being subjected to genocide as responsible for or deserving of the atrocities being committed against them, which is very obviously what you're trying to push here, so feel free to keep your thoughts to yourself. Or make them more explicit so we can just report you.

Zoks posted...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/10/middleeast/hamas-leader-ismail-haniyeh-sons-killed-israel-gaza-intl-hnk/index.html

A lot of effort by CNN to not mention three of those grandchildren are girls.

Yeah, it's a bit of a tradition for Israel to murder the families of political leaders the US pressures them into negotiations with.

Trumble posted...

Not true; there are Israeli civilians who support it too. Just because the leadership are a bunch of genocidal psychopaths doesn't mean all the civilians are too.

Yeah, the 20% of Israel's population that is Arab polls very strongly in favor of ending the war which brings the total polling up to... 25%.

DnDer posted...

Because we know there's been war crimes and crimes against humanity and collective punishment... How has the state dept not found anything violating "international humanitarian law?"

Because they aren't looking. We went over this a couple of months ago:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2024/01/04/us-hasnt-formally-assessed-if-israel-violating-human-rights-00133799

Reimu posted...

The WKC incident should be a wake up call to the world to not support Bibi at all.

Stop scapegoating. This atrocity is consistent with 50 years of Israeli policy, 70% of the Knesset's explicitly stated views, and the majority of Israeli voter's explicitly stated preferences.

cjsdowg posted...

So Bibi hurts Biden. Biden keeps bending over for Bibi. I don't understand this at all.

It's money.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/03/aipac-israel-spending-democratic-primaries-00144552
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/10/congress-member-pro-israel-donations-military-support

Netanyahu doesn't matter. Israel's actions since October 7th are a direct continuation of the last 70 years of Israeli policy backed by overwhelming popular support and his likely successor is just as much of a genocidal lunatic.

Trumble posted...

Let's not generalize the entire population based on a small bunch of assholes.

Political parties that explicitly preach discrimination against Arabs due to their race and religion hold 90 of 120 seats in the Knesset.

Pre-October 7th polling showed that half of all Jewish Israelis believed that all Arabs should be removed from Israel and never allowed to re-enter.

It's very clear that these women are in the majority, and likely a strong majority at this point.

Foppe posted...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/26/palestinian-pm-submits-resignation-to-mahmoud-abbas-over-gaza-aggression
West Bank Government disbands.

Probably wise considering that last time Israel felt the need to decisively reject an offer to work toward a two-state solution they did so by assassinating the political leaders involved.

Zoks posted...

Did you guys see Netanyahu's plan for a future Gaza? The Palestinians should roll over and let it happen, and then demand citizenship and the right to vote.

You seem to have missed the part where Netanyahu's plan for a future Gaza was all of the Palestinians being dead or in Egypt, chief.

Also, Israel would never give them citizenship or the right to vote. Their supreme court is already talking about how they can strip current Arab Israelis of their right to vote if needed to "maintain a Jewish state"

divot1338 posted...

Correct. We have a whole Department of State for that.

Yes, and they will ask very politely.

Then Israel will ignore them because $100 million in campaign funding every election cycle ensures they will see no consequences for doing so.

Foppe posted...

UN have stopped delivered food to Northern Gaza because it is not safe.
They first suspended deliveries to the north three weeks ago after a strike hit an aid truck. It tried resuming deliveries this week but said convoys on Sunday and Monday faced gunfire and crowds of hungry people stripping goods and beating a driver.

Additional context, since this can come off as a little victim-blamey:

https://www.wfp.org/news/un-food-agency-pauses-deliveries-north-gaza

Deliveries resumed on Sunday after a three-week suspension following the strike on an UNRWA truck and due to the absence of a functioning humanitarian notification system.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/un-agency-pauses-gaza-food-aid-deliveries-after-looting-and-gunfire

A UN effort to deliver critical food aid to northern Gaza has been paused because of a breakdown in public order amid acute hunger and desperation across the battered territory.

The UNs World Food Programme was forced to suspend plans to send 10 convoys of food aid into northern Gaza this week after chaotic scenes over the weekend, with crowds looting lorries. A driver was beaten and gunfire was reported.

The agency said in a statement: A large-scale expansion of the flow of assistance to northern Gaza is urgently needed to avoid disaster Gaza is hanging by a thread and WFP must be enabled to reverse the path towards famine for thousands of desperately hungry people.

As for what could have possibly happened to let things get so bad:

The UN has said that between 1 January and 15 February, 77 missions were planned to deliver aid to the north of the Gaza Strip. Of these, the UN said 12 were facilitated by the Israeli authorities, three were partially facilitated, 14 were impeded, 39 were denied access and nine were postponed.

Scardude posted...

He is on the victim side of it though. Or being harassed for being Jewish.

Yeah, the guy who got moderated several times for racist hate speech including a detailed fantasy of rounding up every Arab and Muslim in the world then starving them until they "learn to stop being extremists" is totally the victim here.

divot1338 posted...

Yall need to chill with Eagles. If you cant discuss this in a civil manner then dont discuss it at all.

Genocide apologism isn't civil, so don't expect the response to be civil. Instead, mark the racist troll for being racist and trolling. Problem solved!

Foppe posted...

Benny Gantz, an Israel minister without portfolio, now says that IDF will walk into Rafah at the start of Ramadan unless Hamas releases the hostages.

This is the person most likely to replace Netanyahu threatening military action against civilian targets to coerce Hamas into action. It is literal terrorism with strong genocidal overtones.

Remember this when Netanyahu gets blamed for everything. It's not just him.

DnDer posted...

They'd become America's version of the 3%er militia nuts.

Militia nuts in America don't have oil-rich countries willing to bankroll them.

In the same way Iraq or Afghanistan could point to their out-of-power terrorists

That's the result of a solid decade of the US military conducting its own campaign of largely indiscriminate slaughter and it fell apart as soon as we withdrew. That's not a great solution.

Instead they're *just* committing genocide on foreign soil which I'm sure is going to improve relations with Arab countries. The way you've phrased this tells me that israel doesn't care about its actions (even if that action is genocide) unless they might face negative consequences and also that they think Palestine belongs to israel and thus doesn't count as foreign soil.

No, they're also doing the exact thing Eagles wants to claim they wouldn't:

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-01-03-2024-fc2394531bef8238e86879dd98ea435b

The chief of Israels Mossad intelligence service vowed Wednesday that the agency would hunt down every Hamas member involved in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, no matter where they are. His pledge came a day after the deputy head of the Palestinian militant group was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in Beirut.

And yet another assassination in Lebanon:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-drone-attack-kills-2-in-lebanon-one-of-the-deepest-hits-inside-the-country-in-weeks

Foppe posted...

I mean, if Israel improved the relationships with Palestine and treated them as human beings, then less and less of them would have a reason to fight in the first place.

Israel is committing genocide to steal Palestinian land. They need to be stopped. It is incredibly ignorant and/or disingenuous to try to frame any of this as progress toward solving Israel's security concerns, though.

Hamas has been recruiting and hiring mercenaries across northern Africa and the Middle East for years. Their funding is also primarily external. Israel's actions in regards to Palestinians and/or a Palestinian state are simply not a major part of the equation.

Further, there's zero reason to believe that a Palestinian state would end up any better than Lebanon: harboring or simply being unable to stop terrorist organizations that launch attacks on Israel.

The argument that Israel should change their course of action to advance solving their national security issues will never be accepted because it is simply wrong.

Scardude posted...

So what's the solution here?

There is no solution here. Not even Israel's genocidal military campaign is a solution.

Israel's only choice is between committing genocide to steal land or letting innocent people live. The attacks on Israel continue regardless of which is chosen because Hamas is just a proxy for more or less the entire Middle East that wants Israel gone. If Hamas were to disappear, another militant organization would take its place and the attacks would continue.

If they stopped fighting today. Won't that encourage hamas to continue their attacks on Isreal instead?

Hamas is a proxy. They don't need encouragement to continue attacking Israel because they literally only exist to attack Israel.