Senseless activism to avoid being labeled as nazis.
The fact that it's even possible to conflate criticism with Israel with anitsemitism just shows to what extent the west has avoided dealing with it's own antisemitism - most westerners don't seem to have the foggiest idea what it even is or isn't. I wonder why the Apartheid-regime never tried deflecting criticism of itself by blaming everyone else of "reverse racism"...
Germany has been one of Israel's staunchest supporters all throughout the Cold War - despite the fact that Germany's security services have been festering swamps of nazi-ideology before all the WW2 rubble had been carted away.
Every country in Europe is flirting with overt far-right ideology... as opposed to just nurturing it covertly (which is the normal state of affairs for Europe, it seems).
Ahhh, the old post-WW2 European dilemma - to hate Jewish people just like they have since the very start of "western civilization", or to love Jewish people (for now) because they murder brown people in the middle-east.
You are absolutely correct... I just read about the horrible massacres Muslim carried out against Jewish people in Jerusalem in 1099. Here's an eyewitness speaking of it...
"...[our men] were killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles..."
Oh. Sorry. My bad. That wasn't Muslims. That was (supposedly) "Christian" Crusaders.
I'm not avoiding the question - you are avoiding the entire reality of the situation. The colonized does not require your approval or oversight to wage war against colonizers.
devising a workable solution to the inherent complexities that exist between the two countries.
What complexities? Why are people all of a sudden pretending that western colonialism - and the resistance against it - is suddenly a "new" thing?
(the impetus for which I can only guess)
Again... there is no mystery here - Israel has always been a western-backed colonialist project. No ifs, ands or buts. Where is the mystery?
but escalation via killing uninvolved civilians
If we cared about "civilians," wouldn't we be concerned about colonialism in the first place? No? Then I guess we're only concerned when said "civilians" belonging to the colonizer side start dying, eh?
Really? Tell that to all the "liberal" regimes that enabled fascists when said liberals couldn't keep working-class revolt in check... Weimar Germany literally did that to crush the "Spartacist" revolt after WW1.
There's a saying amongst leftists - you can't have a harvest of fascism without liberals loosening the ground for it first. Fascism is not some "aberration" of the classical liberal nation state and it never was.
There never was a feeling of invulnerability, but rather of containment and a tolerable level.
I was referring to the propaganda we were fed about Israel during the Cold War - you can still see it in a lot of right-wing narratives about Israel.
You learn to live with a certain amount of risk.
Here in South Africa, we call it "laager mentality" - in the US, wars fade into the background, but in places like Israel (and Apartheid-South Africa) the "open-ended-war-with-no-end-in-sight" cannot fade into the background. And, eventually, it leads to... consequences.
What this attack shattered was the feeling that Hamas is a threat that could simply be managed and ignored.
It's not Hamas - it's Palestinians. Before Hamas it was the PLO, and if Israel (somehow) neutralises Hamas there will be another "big bad" Israelis will have to live in fear of. Israelis know that - they just prefer referring to Hamas to deflect from the fact that their colonial war has always been against the entirety of Palestinians.
But yes... this attack has most definitely shattered the idea of "containment and a tolerable level."
Unfortunately, I think the Israeli leadership will only take the first lesson.
A colonialist project can only act like a colonialist project - if it doesn't, the colonialist state must cease to exist in it's current form and become something else.
The fact that it's even possible to conflate criticism with Israel with anitsemitism just shows to what extent the west has avoided dealing with it's own antisemitism - most westerners don't seem to have the foggiest idea what it even is or isn't. I wonder why the Apartheid-regime never tried deflecting criticism of itself by blaming everyone else of "reverse racism"...