dx1 @ dx1 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It's so hard to response to comments like this, because honestly your whole perspective is so out of whack. Let's start from the top -

Israel has organized, funded armed forces wearing uniforms. Hamas has teenagers in street clothes hiding in hospitals, schools, and houses.

Israel has a modern army, U.S. supplied munitions to the tunes of billions of dollars a year, war planes, nuclear bombs, that it uses against teenagers in street clothes. Not in an effort to deescalate violence, but in an effort to deal retribution for it 10 times over each time, which statistics back up.

Israel attempts to protect it’s citizens, Hamas uses human shields.

First, Haaretz reported the IDF fired on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7 to take out the Hamas militants.

Second, the Israeli state and military - to whatever extent they actually care about their own citizen's lives - does not care about the lives of Palestinians. You state that Hamas "uses human shields". First, in a military situation, when you don't have air superiority or arms superiority, or really any other advantage, there is no other choice. If you have standalone military facilities, they'll just be destroyed. Second, Israel, in response to whatever degree they're actually "using human shields", just kills everyone. See OP. Take this same example - if they killed 50 civilians to kill one Hamas member, multiply that by 25,000 Hamas members and you would end up with 1,250,000 casualties. That is "terrorism", if anything is. Rather, the term would be "genocide" - something Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu himself, have openly been signalling to the public. Both sides of this conflict, at the extremes, are indeed calling for the genocide of the other side - but one has killed 6 times more than the other.

If you agree with the actions of Hamas, which are designed to maximize fear and force Israeli troops to make hard decisions during combat, you support terrorists.

I get how people think explanations like this are about "justification", or even "support". They are not. I'm a pacifist.

The exercise here is to fully understand the circumstances, and why people actually behave in the ways they do, and how they actually fare on objective, universally applied moral standards. It is enough to say that Israel does not come out ahead.

It is also impossible not to apply the same logic to dropping 25,000 bombs on a city, to order a forced evacuation and displace a million people, something which was immediately denounced internationally as a war crime. It boggles my mind how people don't think that "terrorizes" people - but people with these perspectives have rarely considered the actual experience of somebody who's made to live in an active warzone.

Make no mistake, I denounce their violence and targeting of civilians without a second thought. The same criteria I apply to anyone. But to portray only them as "terrorists" - while Israel enjoys designations like "democracy" - is not based in reality. Israel has taken more lives by an order of magnitude, aired equally horrific genocidal rhetoric on public TV in the last month alone, and stolen the land of the Palestinian people in what I can only describe as a psychotically self-centered and racist act of ethnic cleansing. One rooted in deep trauma, but nonetheless. And not in some trivial way, but literally to bring the modern state of Israel into existence.

To use a term like that, given the history of Palestinians being dispossessed of their land, shoved into ghettos and starved of all resources, for the "crimes" of existing and of self-defense, or because finally a tiny contingent of them use the very same rhetoric of genocide as the nation extinguishing their civilization, and applied the same indiscriminate targeting of civilians that they had experienced done to them their entire lives - I can only call that racism. You apply the term "terrorist" to the historical victims, but not to the victimizers.

For the record, here's the actual list of designators of Hamas as a "terrorist" group:

Hamas European Union,[109][150] Australia,[151] Canada,[7] Israel,[152] Japan,[51][17] Paraguay,[54] United Kingdom,[153] United States,[15] Organization of American States[154]

Hamas – Al-Qassam Brigades[L] European Union,[109] Australia,[16] Canada,[7] Israel,[155] Japan,[17] New Zealand,[113] United Kingdom,[14] United States[15]Organization of American States[154]

Notice the entire world outside of the sphere of Western states doesn't even participate in this. This is a political term, a stereotype that's used against Muslims, it's never accurately applied objectively in terms of what organizations cause destruction and death for political aims.

To tack on to all of that - the word has pejoratively being used in the last month to describe the entire population of the Gaza Strip. In the same way we stopped using the various "n" words because people had been beaten to death or hung behind them, we should not be using terminology that's actively being weaponized in service of genocide. It's an extremely dangerous thing to participate in.

Startling quote from the beginning of the documentary:

Aug 11, 1919 - Lord Balfour (author of the Balfour Declaration, the original British declaration of intent to create Israel) to his successor, George Curzon:

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are [...]

The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

The more I read up on the history, the more I understand Israel's "right to exist" took a huge bite out of Palestine's "right to exist". The Nakba in 1948 most prominently, and annexations in Gaza, Sinai, West Bank and Golan Heights ever since (some temporary - Sinai and former settlements in Gaza - and the rest very much permanent).

It's one thing to say an annexation of land is ancient history, but there are people alive who were displaced by Israel 75 years ago and are still living in refugee camps. We have two very incompatible things going on right now - Israel is basically screaming for blood because of Oct 7, and they are also living on recently stolen land that calls for reparations to be made to the Palestinian people - if you brought up the latter in this environment, you'd probably be accused of "supporting Hamas", but it's something that's been true for decades. Really exhausting dynamic.

"Terrorist', "in attempt" are both editorialized in their own sense. "Terrorist" is a biased term in a conflict like this, which basically pick sides between two actors, both of which use genocidal rhetoric, target civilians, and want the annihilation of the other (but, bears mentioning, one is a U.S. backed nuclear power, one definitely isn't). "In attempt" subjectively presents a claimed motive as fact, which doesn't belong in journalism. An impartial one would read something like, "IDF airstrikes refugee camp in Jabalia, claiming to target Hamas leader, acknowledges civilian presence was known".

I got special Stylish CSS blocking half the shit on Fandom. IDK about any politics about them but the site is borderline unusable.

This sounds so absolutely fucked to literally anyone who doesn't live in Dagestan. I've pored over maps of Russia and I didn't even know that existed.

I'm not laughing.

I'll tell you one thing - I've been on reddit just trying to provide some counters to the (extremely genocidal) conversation going on over there, but the censorship is just out of control. /r/worldnews mods will straight up permaban you for a comment like "I just wish everyone would try to resolve this peacefully". You look at the front of /r/worldnews any day, it's 60% articles from Israeli newspapers and the comments are just 75% "[removed]".

One of the biggest discussion sites on the internet and they've basically weaponized it into a propaganda tool. Shameful time we live in.

You say that, but, I'm going to go ahead and listen to my training in international relations and law, the well-reasoned arguments based on established legal definitions, and a first-hand witnessing of the evidence in favor of the conclusion, instead of you.

People view relationships as too disposable, therefore the government should lock them into relationships that aren't working, for any reason from drifting apart to not being able to demonstrate the legal standard for physical abuse. Got it, sounds totally reasonable and not at all like you're a fucking lunatic.

Go look up articles that explain why this qualifies as genocide instead of trying to incorrectly nitpick what qualifies as genocide.

More war crimes

Just pick someone who isn't completely fucking insane. And then vote for him. Problem solved.

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It was under Israeli occupation following the Six-Day War until the PNA was given a kind of on-paper authority over it according to the Oslo Accords (which, along with the EUBAM agreements and such, basically gave Israel full siege power over Gaza on all sides). It's a whopping 141 square miles, I don't know what pointing to a population increase is supposed to demonstrate.

The situation before October 7th was that of a clear division between Palestinian population inside the Gaza strip and Israeli population to the north and east. Now:

Israeli minister without portfolio Gideon Sa'ar told Channel 12 News that Gaza "must be smaller at the end of the war" and that "there should be an area that is classified as a security zone where whoever enters is intercepted." He added: "We must make the end of our campaign clear to everyone around us. Whoever starts a war against Israel must lose territory."[260][261]

In the context of several past instances where Israel has, in order: (a) claimed a territory citing military purposes (b) settlements were built on the military area (c) claimed the area as its own land because it has Israeli settlements on it - we have absolutely no reason to expect otherwise, particularly given that figures in the Israeli government and media *have been explicitly calling for this:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-warns-new-instance-mass-ethnic-cleansing-palestinians-calls

She noted that Israeli public officials have openly advocated for another Nakba, the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and lands during the hostilities that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. The Naksa, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, displaced 350,000 Palestinians.

https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2023/10/08/Israeli-Knesset-member-calls-for-second-Nakba-amid-ongoing-conflict-with-Hamas

Israeli member of Knesset Ariel Kallner on Sunday called for a second ‘Nakba’ to take place in Gaza amid ongoing armed conflict between Hamas and the Israeli army.

“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join! their Nakba, because like then in 1948, the alternative is clear,” Kallner wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Nobody does. Even someone with the best reputation could be lying, too. People need to stop taking governments on faith like that, it's absolutely moronic. If they didn't present evidence that you took the time to evaluate for yourself whether or not it was proof, you just don't know at all.

I spent most of today trying to get to the bottom of this. I don't have the answer.

On some level I'm just like, what frigging difference does it even make, it's all caused by this idiotic conflict. Give the Palestinians some of the land back, arrange a change in power on both sides, release the hostages, get this god damn thing over with already. Fuck Hamas, fuck genocidal Netanyahu, you leave it up to them and these people will be killing each other forever.

Where is the vision to bring this apartheid/conflict/whatever to an end FOREVER?

Appeal to majority fallacy. Though yes that guy is full of it.

Israel ambassador to the UN literally gave the cancer analogy a couple hours ago IIRC. Didn't say "kill good cells" though.