NoneOfUrBusiness @ NoneOfUrBusiness @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Man I wish this were the onion.

They're against Israel but when you say you'll vote third party or sit out the vote you get people jumping at your throat and trying to deny reality by telling you to fall in like or we'll get another Trump term. I don't see it as much now but it was pretty common even just a couple of weeks ago.

I still think that taking a strong stance against Israel will harm Biden more than help.

I actually don't understand this stance. Pro-Israel people tend to be one of these groups:

1-People who simply grew up with the propaganda and are still believing it. These lost the majority of democratic voters recently, and they're only decrease more, but more importantly to them this isn't an election-deciding issue. I think we can agree that this group doesn't care as much about Israel as they do about Trump not becoming president. There's just not much for them at stake.

2-Zionist Jews. This is usually pointed to as the demographic Biden will lose if he doesn't support Israel, but the thing is: Jews are less likely to support Israel than the general population. If anything being tougher on Israel might win Biden Jewish votes.

3-Evangelicals. These are the real deal here, but let's face it: How many of these were voting democrat to begin with?

Yes a very large number of people support Israel, but that's not the number we need to worry about. The really important question is: How many people on either side will take it as an election-defining issue and how likely are those people to lose Biden the election? Given that losing Muslims alone is liable to make Biden lose, and he's losing (mainly young) progressives on top of that, I think we can see the answer to that question.

when the problem is that civilian settlements should not be targeted to begin with.

I don't, don't get me wrong. But a lot of comparisons paint Hamas as an unsalvageable terrorist organization that should be wiped off the face of the Earth and the IDF as a "legitimate" army running rampant. You'll see this in people saying Hamas should be dismantled while the IDF should be forced to respect international law, which is wrong. Both should be dismantled, and if anything I'd be more comfortable with Hamas continuing to exist than the IDF, since Hamas at least has done the absolute bare minimum to try to end the fighting before (see: 2008, 2012-2013, more 2013). What I want to say is that the IDF and its genocidal Apartheid state Israel is even less compatible with peace than Hamas. Either a one state solution or a complete restructuring of Israeli law and government are necessary here.

when the problem is that civilian settlements should not be targeted to begin with.

The goal of the operation was taking hostages and dealing damage to the IDF, not attacking civilians. They then attacked civilians, but we have no reason to believe that was a goal of the operation.

The comparison will be apt if Israel succeeds, but fortunately it hasn't yet. "This has the potential to be as bad as the Holocaust" and "this is as bad as the Holocaust" are different statements and mixing them up only hurts the cause.

What are you trying to say?

The worst part is that I actually thought you were serious for a second (please tell me you're joking).

They could have, you know, not done that. Like they hadn’t done shit like that up to now.

You have to count, again, IDF-inflicted casualties and crossfire deaths. We have evidence of houses that were just blown up by the IDF with their residents inside.

It doesn't seem like corruption; the man just ran unopposed. He was probably just as surprised at the outcome as we are.

China, Russia, Saudi Arabia have started to dominate the UN while doing stuff like this and vetoing things that affect their long term goals

Not to sound like a tankie (I hate the US and Russia equally, and China only slightly less), but isn't that what the West has been doing since forever?

and a surprising amount of muslim israeli arabs and bedouins who vote for shas.

Okay what? Why? Also I don't know Shas but I'm assuming it's in Netanyahu's coalition?

I have zero interest to comparing the awfulness of the IDF with the awfulness of Hamas.

It's worth pointing out because many people still hold the implicit assumption that the IDF is just an overzealous army or some other whitewashed nonsense while Hamas is an unsalvageable terrorist organization. Because of that it's important to establish that in terms of terror IDF = Hamas, and not at all Hamas IDF.

Also I'm not saying no children died; that's just impossible. I'm saying that instances of a Hamas soldier intentionally shooting a child when they could've just not are very few, if any. I mean hell it says right in your link: 29. That's out of 1139 people, 2/3 of which are civilians, and after the IDF shot and bombed their own civilians to get Hamas fighters. This puts the number of children casualties among civilian casualties at about 5%. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think it's clear evidence that Hamas was at least avoiding children casualties as a conscious decision.

What? At least on October 7th there were multiple cases of Hamas soldiers entering a home, shooting the parents and sparing the children. I mean they shouldn't have shot the parents either but they're a bit above IDF snipers actively aiming at and shooting children.

You cannot look at what’s happening while ignoring the past 600+ years.

600? I mean there were Jews in Palestine then too, and very occasionally unforgiveable things were done to them, but the people who are now running Israel weren't there for any of that. These are people who migrated to Israel less than 100 years ago and their descendants.

True, but:

1-It helps them find "terrorists" to blow up, and

2-This isn't going away. Even after this "war" ends what remains of Gaza will be perpetually under surveillance (more than they already are). Even if the war ends today, Gaza just became even more of an open-air concentration camp.

Say what you want about Hamas; they at least have the basic decency to not shoot children.

the current coalition got 49.5% of the votes.

Yeah fair. I should've specified Jewish Israelis.

I believe we should be very careful to stick the label nazism to everything we find abhorrent. I’d like to judge situations on their own merit, not compare them to other atrocities in our history. The socio-political situation in Gaza is so different than 1930’s Germany

True enough, but the ideology itself is very similar. The methods and forms of injustice differ, but the idea that the ubermench have the right to kill the untermench/enslave them/drive them from their homes/all of the above (also known as Lebensraum) is a very important point of similarity that actually allows us to better understand Israel's actions and ground them in reality. Comparisons with Nazis are usually unproductive, but in this case they serve to take away the air of Israeli exceptionalism Israel has spent 70 years creating, in the sense that if you logically evaluate the proposition that Israel = Nazi you find it having a lot more merit than you'd expect at first glance. Way too much merit to coexist with the idea that Israel is acting in self-defense. Gonna go on a bit of a tangent, but you'll find Israeli ideology similar to Manifest Destiny, aka the Nazis' inspiration. In the end it's all settler colonialism.

Even experts are having a hard time really putting the finger on all the mess that has been Israel-Palestine situations for the past 600 years.

Why specifically 600 years? AFAIK the modern conflict started about 100 years ago with the Balfour declaration.

Normally they'd need to think more about this shit, but unfortunately a certain country has sent aircraft carriers to protect them from retaliation.

So, hot take here: preface this with saying I absolutely condone the surveillance by Israel here.

I think you mean condemn.

It is not reasonable to keep pointing at the holocaust and nazi germany as a stick of " look, you became the thing you suffered under", unless in a context of learning from history.

I mean when a country does Nazi things usually other countries point out that that's Nazism. It's not something unique to Israel (see: Trump's rhetoric being compared to Hitler's); it's just that Israel's philosophy shares a lot with Nazism so the similarity is pointed out a lot.