Comment by sabarn01
2 years ago
There is an ocean of injustice in the world and this one issue causes more anger than many that are equally abhorrent.
2 years ago
There is an ocean of injustice in the world and this one issue causes more anger than many that are equally abhorrent.
It's one of very very few issues where America and most of the west have stood firmly in support of violence and oppression for decades, even on issues like settlements where the US formally acknowledges the illegality and takes no action.
Of course people care primarily about the actions of their own democratically elected government, that's the whole point. There's no need to protest when people agree with their government.
> There's no need to protest when people agree with their government.
Yet there's large protests in countries that aren't allied with the US or Israel, when no such protests were forthcoming in other analogous scenarios. And there were scarce protests in the US against Saudi Arabia's campaign in Yemen despite US alliance.
I do agree that your thesis is a partial explanation, but it is far from a full explanation. There's two other things going on.
Among Western leftists and minority groups, Israel is a symbol. It's perceived as the last vestige of Western/White colonialism. A symbol of someone with white skin punching down on brown skinned people. It harkens back to the reason that your ancestor was forced (either literally or by material circumstance) into the US in the first place, and why you are living today under systemic racism. Defeating this placeholder is therefore an important milestone in restoring their sense of historical justice. Needless to say this is oversimplified given how many Israeli Jews are indigenous to I/P or were ethnically cleansed from the surrounding MENA area and forced into the I/P area, but people do legitimately hold that dichotomous oppressor/oppressed worldview.
Among Muslim countries, this is an ethnoreligious blood feud. Assad killing Muslims doesn't cause the same anger because it's within the same identity group. So it's a classic case of identity divisions leading to disparate anger. I'm massively oversimplifying here, there are many other factors, but it's part of what's behind the energy.
Settlements are of course wrong, but I don't really see any concrete action that Israel could take other than removing settlements. Even if they did that the fundamental facts on the ground wouldn't change. I don't see how they lift the blockade and any 2 state solution seems a nonstarter.
> Settlements are of course wrong, but I don't really see any concrete action that Israel could take other than removing settlements.
It could do a lot in the West Bank (where the fully or partially PA administered territory is divided into 166 non-contiguous regions), and anything there xould be done in a way that it looks like a win for the Fatah-led PA, weakening the perception that Hamas and its violence is the only entity capable of delivering for the Palestinian people, undermining Hamas politically.
OTOH, the whole reason Israel fostered Hamas during the direct occupation of Gaza was to create an Islamist competitor for the more secular and sympathetic to non-Muslim states PLO, and the reason they've (and government ministers have said this explicitly) continued to support them in between periods of active conflict is to deflect pressure for peace and a two-state solution, so there’s zero chance of the Netanyahu government doing this.
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The Israeli govt can and should halt establishing new settlements or expanding existing settlements, especially when expansion is zero-sum with further displacement (e.g. Hebron). It can also enforce the criminality of extrajudicial settler violence.
Agreed any real solutions are a nonstarter in current situation, but a lack of imagination or will about how to move forward just further normalizes the illegality of it all.
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Every injustice is homomorphic to the Israel-Palestine crisis. Ergo, people will use their opinion about the crisis as a proxy for their own politics.
In much of the west[0], you're pro-Israel because fuck Nazis - NEVER AGAIN. In America, you're pro-Israel if you're Republican, pro-Palestine if you're Democrat, or pro-Israel if you're Democrat. If you're anti-colonial, you're pro-Palestine. In Ireland, you're pro-Palestine because fuck England, or you're pro-Israel because fuck Irish nationalism. If you're Muslim, you're pro-Palestine because Zionism is an existential threat to you[1]. If you're an Islamofascist you're very pro-Palestine, if you're a Christofascist you're very pro-Israel. They're just labels you stick on yourself to signal virtue.
This is, of course, terrible for actually discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict, because anything you say about it gets a bunch of mutually contradictory political positions tacked onto it. It's especially difficult to delivering nuanced takes like "Israel and Palestine both have a lot to answer for and we'd be way closer to an actual peace agreement if every politician in both countries dropped dead tomorrow[2]", because I just stepped on like five different rhetorical landmines with that one sentence.
The homomorphism is also bijective: those political labels you're being slapped with get colored with the side of the conflict they're associated with. The most obvious example being Nazi Germany, whose war crimes and crimes against humanity are viewed through the pro-Israel lens. We talk a lot of the 6 million dead Jews but not so much of Hitler's political opponents, Soviet PoWs, black people, gay people, the Roma[3], Jehovah's Witnesses[4], Freemasons, ethnic Poles, Slovenis, and Slavs, and the mentally ill[5]. That's another 11 million victims that we just... don't even think of as victims of the Holocaust. That's how much we link everything to this one crisis.
[0] Japan inclusive
[1] Or at least this was the case in the 1970s
[2] Ok, maybe this doesn't sound nuanced to you. That's the standard of debate here... :/
[3] In America we still use "gypsy", which is terribly offensive in Europe
[4] Which itself has inspired a meme among JWs that lying to protect the faith is A-OK, which is really strange.
[5] This includes autistic kids, who were sent off to Hans Asperger - YES WE NAMED THE DIAGNOSIS AFTER A NAZI WAR CRIMINAL BECAUSE WE LEARNED NOTHING
I listened to one guy fresh off the boat from Korea who would not hear a good word about Israel. Absolutely refused to hear any nuance or mitigation. His reason? Because his country had been invaded and occupied by Japan and his homomorph was Japan=Israel and Palestine=Korea.
> [3] In America we still use "gypsy", which is terribly offensive in Europe
Is it? In Spain we still call them "gitanos", heck, they even call themselves that: https://www.gitanos.org/
Right now, there is nowhere else in the world where so many civilians are being killed. Nothing else even comes close. 20k deaths in just two months is a massive death toll for such a short conflict. For comparison, it's more than the civilian death toll in the nearly 2-year-old war in Ukraine.
The other thing is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for decades, and many people have formed strong opinions on it. The United States is deeply involved in the conflict, as it is Israel's major international backer. There are both Palestinian and Jewish diasporas all around the world that care deeply about the issue. There are many reasons why this conflict captures so many people's attention.
That's just untrue. Sudan, Yemen and (earlier) Ethiopia had much much more, without even going into Ukraine (nobody should accept the Russian figures) or Syria (death toll exceeding all Israeli-Arab wars combined). Doing a death toll per month analysis is misleading because high intensity can't last very long due to geography alone.
No, it's true. Roughly 1% of Gaza's pre-war population has already been killed by Israel. 81% has been displaced and over 60% of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The amount of destruction Russia was brought upon Ukraine doesn't even come close.
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20k deaths includes Hamas militants. So far the militant to civilian casualty ratio is actually lower than most other modern urban conflicts. Some being as high as 10 civilians for every 1 militant death.
Where does your militant data come from? And does it differentiate between fighters active before the invasion and those after?
Because large numbers of formerly peaceful men will now be engaged in the fight, either from grief at losing their families, or the natural instinct to resist an invader.
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> 20k deaths in just two months is a massive death toll for such a short conflict.
This is the number provided by Hamas. Per Israel, 15k people have been killed, approximately 10k of whom are civilians.
> For comparison, it's more than the civilian death toll in the nearly 2-year-old war in Ukraine.
This is according to numbers sourced from Russians. According to Ukrainians, >20k civilians died in Mariupol’ alone (a city 1/5th the size of Gaza).
> Per Israel, 15k people have been killed, approximately 10k of whom are civilians.
Oh much better! If true, seems perfectly justified and A-ok!
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> equally abohorrent
Comparing it to the Ukraine's invasion and we can see this is so much more "invasive". There's a literal wall around 2M ppl with little agency, while most of them are refugees from the other side of the wall.
To methis is one of the most abohorrent conflicts in earth in this day and age. Given South Africa is no longer segregated, and Rwanda reconciled.
I'd be interested to hear what's equally abhorrent in your view.
> There's a literal wall around 2M ppl with little agency, while most of them are refugees from the other side of the wall.
There is a really very simple solution for them to have all of the dignity, agency, independence, prosperity, peace, sovereignty, stability to raise children, etc that you and I want for the Palestinian people. They only have to - and hear me out - not kill Jews. It really is that simple. Don't kill Jews, not by rockets, nor suicide bomb, nor stabbing attacks, nor stealth attacks by terror tunnels, nor any of the varied and creative ways that Jews have been attacked in the region for more than a century.
Most people think that Free Palestine means independence and sovereignty. It does not. Sovereignty has been proffered many times in the last 75 years. So given that it decidedly does not mean what we Westerners expect it means when we hear Free Somewhere - "Free Tibet" "Free Donbas" or whatever - I would like my fellow Westerners to really meditate on the meaning of the term "free" in "Free Palestine". Really ruminate on what possible meaning that can have.
Then, when you are really ready to hear what it means, read the Hamas charter. Or read about the writings, life and times of al-Husseini, the architect and sire of the Free Palestine movement.
We Westerners, especially we Americans, really impose our own views on others. Let Palestinians speak for themselves. They are very clear what Free Palestine means. We just have to listen without preconception.
So you agree that every Palestinian who has never killed a Jew is being unfairly oppressed and should be allowed to immediately live in freedom. Great, that’s what, 1.999 million of them in Gaza?
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Gaza has been pseudo self governed since 2005, and is ruled by an authoritarian theocratic regime. The situation was intolerable on 10/6 but understood. What exactly should israel do after the 10/7 attacks. To me attempting to degrade Hamas is what any other state would do. War in one of the most densely populated places on earth is going to kill a lot of people. The only other option it would seem to me would be to ignore the attacks which I'm sure wouldn't be acceptable to the citizens of Israel.
I think you're suggesting a false dichotomy here: do nothing or sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people in pursuit of your aims.
Consider what the Israeli response might have looked like if they didn't have access to the munitions that they do (2000 pound bombs, etc). Likely they would have still invaded Gaza and fought a very bloody battle but with many fewer innocents killed at the expense of more of their own soldiers.
Essentially, Israel has made the judgement that the lives of their soldiers are (many times) more important than those of innocent people.
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During Second World War the Czech resistance assassinated Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. To exact revenge the Nazis destroyed the village of Lidice and murdered 340 villagers. If we had social media back then, people would have made the same argument you now do. That the Germans had no choice but to eradicate the village. Because, hey, the only other option would be to ignore the attacks which surely wouldn't have been acceptable to any German.
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The wall wasn’t always there. Just like how the wall trump put between US and Mexico wasn’t always there. Actions have consequences and the West Bank situation regressed from continued suicide bombing and terrorist attackers.
Actions certainly do have consequences, like roughly forty years prior to the wall's construction, arbitrary "military orders" that post-occupation immediately granted the military total authority over every aspect of Palestinian life, declared all water to be the property of Israel, and that land could be seized for any reason - and more which have since made it illegal to do nearly anything without the authorization of the military, which includes everything from planting flowers to doing anything related to water to groups larger than 10 people assembling to attending school to operating a tractor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Order
Afaik there was already a wall pre-Trump
Nelson Mandela has spoken out on the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by Israel[1]. His words are powerful, and worth reading.
> To methis is one of the most abohorrent conflicts in earth in this day and age.
He agrees with you.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/26/gaza-and-the-cr...
And yet, in that entire article I can find no concrete quote of Mandela pointing out a single action that Israel did to criticize. Just general "Israel is the worst".
Interestingly, the idea that Mandela called Israel an apartheid state was debunked on Stack Exchange, you can read that here: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50771/did-nelso...
What Mandela did say about atrocities was directed at the US:
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Gaza borders Egypt and the West Bank borders Jordan.
If they are blockaded by the country that they cant get along with then it is at least partially on Egypt and Jordan that they are given no way out.
Unless the refugees are guaranteed a right to return, then you're just asking for Jordan and Egypt to facilitate ethnic cleansing and finishing the job.
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Israel has a secret* agreement with Egypt which it made Egypt sign as a condition for not occupying the border between Gaza and Egypt, which stipulates what Egypt can and can't let through the border.
*The existence of the agreement is not secret, but the contents are.
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Are there actually many equally abhorrent issues right now? I can think of like, 2, and they're both involving the exact same actors.
Doctors were forced at gunpoint to leave premature babies to rot at Al Nasr hospital. And you're surprised that the world is horrified?!
Journalists and healthcare staff and schools have been targeted at a shocking rate. Civil infrastructure and historic churches blown up without the thinnest veil of a reason. More UN staff killed than any 'conflict' in history. Human rights groups and genocide experts are calling this genocide, ethnic cleansing, and worse.
And this wasn't done by some poor, decimated, tin pot dictatorship. This was done by a nuclear power, and it was supported by England and American politicians against the express wishes of a large majority of their populations.
There's no gain; none. No conceivable good can come from this. Believing that such acts will end Hamas/terror is profoundly delusional.
This comes off as ignorant of events happening elsewhere.
Approximately 600,000 people died in the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia in the two years from November 2020 to November 2022. 40% of the Ethiopian population is children.
The Yemeni civil war (2016-present) had killed at least 377,000 people, as of two years ago. By now, many more than that.
There are mass graves in Mali and Sudan where hundreds of bodies are just piled up on top of each other, visible from space, thanks to collaboration between Wagner Group and the local regime.
Syria is bombing their own population once again at this very moment, in continuation of their 10 year civil war which has killed at least 300,000. Notably, many, many images from the Syrian civil war have been recycled as supposed footage from Gaza (https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/12/08/images-of-syrian-...) for propaganda purposes - not that there isn't plenty of legitimate horrible footage from Gaza too.
None of these events are ones where American bombs, taxpayer funded, make up so much of the deadly weaponry.
None of them have higher civilian death rates per day.
None of them have so many murdered children, journalists, UN workers per capita per day (and often even in absolute terms).
None of them are so drastically David and Goliath, where one clear oppressor and occupier is killing so, so many more people.
Sudan, Libya, and Ethipoia aren't spending tens of millions of dollars funding propaganda to smear anyone who suggests they might stop genociding a people.
Even if these "events happening elsewhere" were as bad, or were as directly funded by the West, or were as one-sided - so what? What exactly is your point? What are you calling ignorant?
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South Sudan, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine/Russia
There is no end to this confit regardless. It will go on as you have 2 groups with claims on the same land. Wars are won when the loser accepts defeat I don't see that ever happening. There have been multiple attempts at a negotiated solution like the Peel commision, the 1948 UN partition, or the oslo accords. All have been rejected.
> Believing that such acts will end Hamas/terror is profoundly delusional.
This is the apocryphal "pounding them into submission" (or, "display of overwhelming force"). The idea is to break them, and discourage them from thinking to ever try something like this again.
Problem is, you need to make sure they had anything to do with it in the first place. If someone launches a false flag op, you're being trolled into committing genocide against civilians.
I fear they're being played but they've become a schizophrenic dealing with their demons via Howitzer. Paranoia is easily exploited.
I don't know if this is really the right word being non native but this seems like whataboutism. Sorry if it is a too loaded term, but it does seem to fit. The fact that there are many other injustice does not make it less of it.