Comment by seydor
2 years ago
I think the behavior of the EU is more problematic TBH. Ursula VdL went heavily pro-israel the first day kind of giving carte blanche to israel for the following days
This situation is not a good look for western response in general. The world is watching. Reminder that Srebrenica was 8000 deaths, but 17100 palestinians are justified losses.
She probably destroyed her career with this, since acted way beyond her limits. I still wonder, was she overcompensating due to her being German?
It's very normal for EU to be pro-Israel, that's EU's official position and IMHO it's the correct one but EU's position is also pro-Two states solution and EU has significant humanitarian missions and political support for many of the Palestinian demands. Some EU countries are also very sympathetic towards the Palestinian cause and some countries which have huge importance for EU, like Turkey, the issue is very emotional.
Very wrong of Vdl to act as if EU is all-in for the Zionist aspirations. As EU Commission president, should have strongly condemned the terrorist attack that Israel suffered and offer any help possible and at the same time she should have pushed for a solution of the root cause(Israeli occupation and extremist antisemitic politics seeking the demise of the Israel - both unacceptable).
Maybe the bigger lesson here is that you should never go all-in on one side of a very complex issue. A kind of an issue where the rights and wrongs are quite evenly distributed and there's no way you end up on the correct side of it. Whoever-pro you are, you lose and she lost.
VdL has 'destroyed her career' many times over, during her stint. She repeatedly tried to look decisive rather than wise; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
The truth is that the Commission President continues to be a job in search of political weight and legitimacy, but you can't get that after you are nominated to the post by scheming national rulers - it has to come from the ballot box. She tries hard to compensate for what is a structural weakness that was supposed to be fixed by the spitzenkandidaten process... a process that she blew up herself.
> It's very normal for EU to be pro-Israel, that's EU's official position and IMHO it's the correct one
Why would supporting ethnic cleansing be a correct position? Can you explain?
> the Zionist aspirations
What has the current conflict to do with Zionist aspirations?
Sorry, I'm not going to bite that. Too complex of an issue to go over what happens why.
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Imho, being heavily pro-Israel on the first day was perfectly appropriate. They'd just seen a crapload of innocent civilians butchered, and a bunch of them taken hostage.
Obviously you can still think that Palestinians have legit grievances without supporting massacre, and likewise you can support the Israeli right to defend itself. But at some point the actions of the Israeli military looks less like an effort to root out Hamas and more like ethnic cleansing.
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> Anything other than an unequivocal win over Hamas will be unacceptable and lead to more violence down the line.
Some argue that "unequivocal win over Hamas" should be achieved without wiping out the rest of the population, housing, hospitals, infrastructure, etc
Hamas is not a just stray gang in Gaza. It’s the (once) elected sovereign. It holds all executive positions and runs anything in Gaza. Any hospital in Gaza is controlled by Hamas.
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worse than anything ever perpetrated by Nazis and ISIS alike
I quite agree that the Hamas attacks on civilians that took place on October 7 were an atrocity and should be treated as a war crime. But 'worse than the Nazis' hyperbole doesn't help you make that argument. Massacres of civilians are unfortunately ordinary in wars and by no means unique to a particular region or culture.
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I think it's tragic that you have no sympathy for children and innocent civilians dying. No matter the side.
These types of responses always skip over the most crucial parts of history:
The IDF originally funneled money to the founder of Hamas in order to weaken popular support for Fatah, and Netanyahu facilitated Qatari payments to Hamas when it seemed that support for the Palestinian Authority was rising. His far right defense minister publicly resigned, saying that Netanyahu was financing terrorism against Israel.
Including in these facts into the argument makes it seem less like Israel is fighting a terrorist group, and more like Israel tolerates a terrorist organization as their best alternative to a two state solution.
Yeah, IMO a key idea--which I wish was more popular in the zeitgeist--is this:
The vast majority of Palestinians and Israelis are both being abused by their respective leaderships, which--for many years now--have desired and actively promoted some degree of violent-threat and indefinite strife, because it's how they maintain power and crush political rivals.
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P.S.: For fellow Americans thinking "that can't happen here", there's good evidence that Richard Nixon tried to sabotage--or at least delay--US/Vietnam peace talks in order to get himself elected President. [0] In either case, the war continued for another five years.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/notes-indicate-nix...
It also skipped most of a century of historical context, pretending the conflict started two months ago out of nowhere. The specific origins of hamas are certainly relevant but so is the nakba, the 2018 border protests, the apartheid structure of israeli governance of palestine. etc.
good for you, but this is not about how we feel, but about making peace. The palestine issue won't be solved this time like it was not solved in decades of war. you will just have thousands more new terrorists now, who watched family members die while trying to follow orders that israel had given them to protect them. This is a complex issue and not one for taking sides.
If Hamas wanted peace, they could have it. They don’t. They want to kill the Jews.
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I want to believe that Hamas is hiding among civilians, but there has already been reported major violations where there cannot be any military benefit for Israel about this. A hospital with a children's ward was labeled to be a command center for Hamas, but when the BBC came to examine the command center, they not only found nothing to indicate a major military use but also had video evidence (from previous video taken earlier in the day by Israeli military) that what was there was actively staged for them. And then we find out that the children's ward had babies in incubators-- and the Israeli military did nothing to save those babies despite taking control of the hospital. Like, when Palestinians were able to get back to the hospital they found the babies as corpses rotting in the incubators. This was confirmed by neutral third party reporters. WTF?
How much grace can someone reasonably hold for a military force that repeatedly lies and then allows babies in incubators to die in the hospital they took over? At what point should we hold a much more well funded, a much more democratic, and a much more supposedly civilized civilization to higher standards than the terrorists they're fighting?
Are you talking about the hospital that was actually destroyed accidentally by the Hamas and the Hamas blamed it on Israel?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...
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I don’t think that most (nearly all?) pro Palestine critics are saying that Hamas is in the right. All of the wording I’ve seen was focused on Israel’s and the IDFs response and actions. As you’ve mentioned, killing civilians is a war crime.
Many civilized nations have military installations, such as headquarters and office facilities, co-located and intermixed with civilian facilities. They also have military bases and complexes, but the intermixing is not unique to Hamas.
When the Palestinians in Gaza have been denied elections in nearly 2 decades and have expressed discontent with Hamas as well, it sounds disingenuous to characterize it as “invited […] so deeply into their everyday lives.”
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