Comment by incrudible
2 years ago
The question is, what is so special about the Israeli/Palestine conflict that leads to these outsized protests? I do not recollect a similar response to the treatment of ISIS or the war in Yemen, even though both had the unconditional support of the US war machine. Even if the left could be absolved of antisemitism, the resistance groups it is aligning itself with clearly can not.
The free flow of information and lack of government control over access to that information. Much of the early Iraq war and even, to an extent, conflicts with ISIS and Yemen had the benefit of those citizens not having access to the internet. So any information many American citizens were getting was filtered through what the military allowed to be known, then further filtered by the news.
With Palestine and Israel, we were able to see it with our own eyes. I remember specifically watching TikToks of a teenage girl in Gaza posting about the evacuations, hearing the bombs in the background, etc. It felt "real" to us, which is a terrible way to put it, but I believe that is why the protests are much larger than other conflicts.
I remember quite a lot of footage from ISIS around the internet. The difference was that mainstream media didn’t pick them up. Nor there was a widespread support to ISIS. Even though both ISIS was similar to Hamas and dealing with ISIS was as brutal as Gaza invasion with many collaterals.
There were lots of videos from ISIS, but there wasn't much, if any, coming from the citizens of Iraq or Syria. But we're seeing a lot of videos, photos, messages, etc coming from the citizens of Gaza.
We, as a world, are seeing civilian life and casualties during a war in near real-time. This is something that many of us have never experienced before.
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" The question is, what is so special about the Israeli/Palestine conflict that leads to these outsized protests? "
- Jerusalem (and more globally Israel and Palestine) is holly for Jews, Muslims and Christians ; more than half of the word population and more than 90% of US population
- Israel is a key ally of the USA, and this is a topic important in US politics for long time - including for some evangelical voters for religious question
- Westerners have colonized (or inflicted violence to) most of the non western countries on this planet in "recent" history... Israel is seen by some as a Western country colonizing just another developing country, with support of other western countries... echoing recent history for many. It is as such a symbol for a long time.
- USA, France... have had some big Islamist attack, what happened in Israel echoed to this for some people... and echoes to the clash of civilization western word vs Muslim which is central in the ideology of a growing number of westerners
- It is easier to understand, more divisive, with more people or causes we can identify with, than in Syria (everybody hates ISIS) or Yemen (arabs fighting arabs fighting other arabs in a desert ?)... And we have more images
I certainly remember similar sized, if not larger, protests against the Iraq war.
In the UK, the Iraq invasion provoked the biggest protests ever witnessed. The current stuff is small potatoes in comparison.
Iraq never attacked anyone. A better comparison is the war in Afghanistan.
If we compare # of people in each country. 10/07 for Israel was like 15 9/11s (this is a quote from a President Biden speech).
So not only is it worth asking - how many Americans didnt want to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But how many would be against some sort of war like that, if tomorrow morning they woke up to a 9/11 sized attack in 15 of the biggest US cities, happening at the same time
Not only did the US go far from home to destroy Afghanistan, but the whole world joined them to do it together
Yeah, and the war in Afghanistan resulted in nothing but temporary bloody vengeance. 20 years later, and we're all back to where we were before - minus millions of civilians dead or displaced.
The US didn't go to war to 'destroy Afghanistan'. They went to war to fight the Taliban.
> Iraq never attacked anyone
I am not sure Kuwait would agree.
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Iraq never attacked anyone? Have you heard of Kuwait, Iran and Israel?
I think your point is pretty cogent, the comparison is not bad. But it suffers from a pretty big flaw in that the US hadn't spent the preceding several decades subjugating Afghanis or encroaching upon their land; didn't have a government whose members and officials openly issued bigoted and racist statements against Afghanis (though I am sure there were a few Congressional Republicans who may have bucked that trend, I don't remember), etc.
US foreign policy isn't nice or morally sound, but one thing it was not doing in the run-up to 9/11 and its subsequent invasion of Afghanistan was directly fucking up Afghani lives and killing Afghani children. Same can't be said for Israel in its relationship to the Palestinians.
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"what is so special about the Israeli/Palestine conflict that leads to these outsized protests?"
Good question. 75 years of history those other two conflicts lack
Wahabism dates back over 200 years, the Sunni/Shia divide over a thousand years.
One answer is these media efforts. Isreal works hard to draw attention to its conflicts, and to try to turn that attention into support.
I'd note the Ukranians worked very hard to draw attention to their war as well, and they were quite successful at that.
Think of it the other way around - the only real weapon Hamas has against the much stronger Israel is shifting public opinion, so it's in their incentive to bring as much negative attention as possible to Israel in the conflict
No. Israel would like nothing more than to not be the center of attention every time it's attacked and tries to defend itself.
As mentioned in the article, they are paying for social media ad campaigns. That is not the behavior of people wanting to avoid attention.
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My slightly-informed opinion? Two cooperating factors.
1. The extraordinary effective Hamas organization. Hamas has set itself up to benefit from atrocities committed upon the people of Gaza. Every civilian death is a point for Hamas, the more so the better publicized it is. A point for Hamas is obviously not a point for regular people in Gaza. And Hamas provoked Israel as much as it could manage, and continues to provoke Israel by engaging in military operations from civilian sites, leading to:
2. Israel doesn’t understand this, and is entirely willing to play right into Hamas’ hands, in the name of its own security. And it looks really, really bad.
Actions of Western democracies are usually subject to greater scrutiny. Indeed, the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism allowed for this: it says that it is antisemitism to hold Israel to a higher standard than other democracies - not than other nations altogether.
ISIS was defeated by a coalition including western democracies. Well over a thousand civilians died by US bombs alone.
The fact that it wasn't Americans on the ground but other Iraqis is a gigantic difference.
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Religion, hundreds of millions of people feel spiritually invested in that part of the world.
There is something particularly grating about how Israel acts with impunity on the world stage yet continues to receive unfaltering support from the US government.
They secretly introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East and refused to sign any of the treaties which are responsible for humanities current existence.
According to Snowden the NSA provides them with whatever data they'd like, even that on Americans, without any filtering whatsoever.
Bibi clowned all over Obama for years and yet he still had to agree with nearly every policy he pushed. Biden has been practically begging them to cut back on West Bank settlements. They won't even meet us there and still we send over money for them to do whatever they please.
As an American it's embarrassing.
I would say the US has been limp-dicked in the past few weeks with their admonitions and entreaties that Israel try to avoid killing civilians (as if there isn't a strong case to be made that this is part of Israel's goal, both as a matter of simple revenge and also a strat for getting their hostages back).
However, criticizing our government as weak would require believing it cares about Palestinian lives in the first place, which is a highly questionable assumption at this point.
What would you do if you were running the show in Israel? You’re responsible for a group of people that none of your neighbors want, even if they are the same race, ethnicity and religion, and those people have an ongoing campaign to push you out, which has been unsuccessful for as long as it has been going on. Oh yeah, their population is now many multiples higher than when all this started.
The literal answer is that I would resign and move to another country. Given that I've moved to another country a few times already, I'm fairly sure I would do that in the situation you describe.
Answering more to the spirit of the question: I believe that the situation between Israel and Palestinians is broken and can't be fixed until something unexpected happens. Neither side has an acceptable way forward.
As a rule of thumb, people who talk about right and wrong don't want peace. Those concepts are far more useful for justifying wars than ending them. Peace is achieved by compromises that make both parties lose interest in the war. There was a genuine desire for peace in the 90s, but it failed, because nobody could find an acceptable compromise. The leaders of both parties realized that the sacrifices required to make the compromise acceptable to the other side were worse than status quo.
What would I do? Abandon the racist and outdated ethnostate ideal, which is dying all over the world anyway, and enfranchise "those people". Instead of "two people, two states", choose "one land, one humanity". This is the only way we don't all end up nuking each other.
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Yitzhak Rabin had some good ideas, but extremist factions in Israel (now led by Netanyahu) killed him off.
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I don't know maybe give me unfettered access to all the NSAs data and I'll get back to you.
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It went viral on social media, the other conflicts didn't. That's really it. Many people's awareness of the world and the moral weight of what happens there comes directly from social media.
A lot of people were upset about China and the Uyghurs as well, for a while, but not until after it became a thing influencers talked about. And then they stopped caring after social media moved on. Even on HN, where anti-China sentiment is rampant, people no longer seem to mention it.
It's because on the surface it's an interracial conflict (it's not really, I guess, but that is the perception for most), and lots of people are obsessed over racial dynamics and analyzing history through that lens.
There are so many other conflicts going on with many more dead, but if it's not interracial then somehow it is not talked about.
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Yeah it's a silly take, tbh. To clarify I just mean that's the reason people pay attention. That's why there's the colonizer narrative going on that fuels a lot of teh protests. But yeah it's more complicated than just that.