Comment by voisin

> ... the Jewish state... its people experienced...

This is your error. States and peoples are not unitary entities with a single coherent outlook and will. The vast majority of the Israeli population is far too young to have directly experienced the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago. There are plenty of people in Israel who do not want to commit atrocities against Palestinians. There are also people who feel that they have a (literally) god-given right to occupy the territories where Palestinians currently live. If you think of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet as being basically the same people who survived Nazi concentration camps in World War 2, then nothing Israel is doing in 2024 will make much sense.

To my mind, Israel's actions toward Palestinians (both in Gaza and the West Bank) are powerful evidence that nationalism inherently leads to atrocity no matter who's involved. If the cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust won't stop an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime, what will?

> after its people experienced the atrocities of World War II, would act in this manner toward the Palestinians.

That's part of why they're acting this way. Security fears. I'm telling you, the median Israeli isn't motivated by bloodlust or a desire for land, they're motivated by a high level of fear that they will one day be killed by Hamas/Hezbollah/etc. That fear causes them to demand complete "security control" of the West Bank and Gaza. That fear explains why they would not budge on allowing Palestinians an army as part of previous two-state negotiations. That fear explains why they would give back the Sinai but not the geographical high ground of the Golan Heights. That fear explains why the Israeli Left completely collapsed after the Second Intifada. They're happy to give part of the West Bank back in two state negotiations, but they would never, ever, allow Palestine an army. Because of security fears. The Palestine-Israeli conflict is this positive feedback loop caused by a desire for security conflicting with a desire for freedom. We're in the terminal doom spiral phase of this feedback loop right now.

Depends of the lesson you took from it.

If the lesson is "Everybody wants to kill us and the only solution to safety is to have a nation state and defend at all costs against any other group", well it just all make sense. Of course this is not the conclusion of every jew in the world but I fully expect it to be the conclusion of post WWII zionists, even though it was not the case for a lot of them that were influenced by socialist ideas but lost influence and power with time.

Of course the strategy of always planning for aggression in order to come up on top is somewhat self realizing in that defending your dominant position will necessarily mean abuses of power and resistance to it.

So the lesson is "Better safe than sorry" although it's not that simple because there is actually a safety cost to pay to maintain such a strategy.

Israel's tactic has always been deterrence: I will inflict you so much pain that you will think twice before doing this again. Despite being proven wrong, a "realist politician' will automatically think of adding more (and then some) deterrence as the only solution.

I remember 20 years ago, during the first bombing of Gaza, they hit just ONE building and felt pressured enough to apologize for the handful of civilian deaths. Unfortunately, faced with larger threats (real or imaginary) and weak international pressure, Israel has been able to escalate the level of deterrence through the years to what we are witnessing now.

That is why any ruling to curb that "automatic" escalation (like today) is wholeheartedly welcomed.

IMO there are also subtler layers of racism coloring these policies. It's not as blatant as the far-right rhetoric, but a persistent undertone within elements of Israeli society justifies severe deterrence tactics and totally overide any empathy learnt from historical lessons.

If you look at the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention's statement [1], they call both the Hamas attack and the current Israeli action Genocidal. They characterise genocidal attacks in terms of not just their factual effect, but the intentional psychological effect of an "massacre of symbols of group life", in which the genocidaires deliberately try to symbolically erase the other group, in ways which are hugely traumatic: "inversion rituals, such as the killing of children in front of their family members; and desecration rituals, such as the massacre of entire families, the setting fire to homes with families still inside them, and the desecration of dead bodies", which they see evidence of in the Hamas attack. This is all magnified by the existing trauma of the Jewish people, in the holocaust but also events since, in living memory of more people - such as 9/11 (an attack on the city with the largest Jewish population).

So you have to realise that Israelis are not thinking normally right now. Even though the Hamas attack has in military terms "culminated", and Israel's military is many times more powerful, their trauma leads them to believe that there is a real, present threat of extinction of the Israeli state and their own nation and families. Under such conditions, it is very hard for them to see the suffering of 'the enemy' as relevent.

It also doesn't help that basically everyone else is just piling responsibility for a solution on the Israelis, despite the US, UK and Europe having enormous historic responsibility for setting up the situation.

[please note, this is explanation, not justification]

[1] https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/statemen...

It's not about religion, it's about occupation. Zionists got permission to occupy the land from the British with The Balfour Declaration then started the invasion in full in 1948 with Nakba. When you occupy someone's land, there can never be peace until they get their land back or are fully exterminated or controlled militarily. This is why colonization most often leads to genocide or permanent apartheid.

I think this is rooted in a strangely common misconception that Israelis actually want any of this violence. There's a minority who does, but it's no where near as being as common as on the Palestinian side (around 60-70% of Palestinians support the October 7 massacre)

Urban warfare is an ugly and complicated thing. Many of the Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza are moderates risking their life to defend their home and bring back their people.

When individual cases of reckless disregard are discovered (like in videos shared by Israeli soldiers on groups that get leaked out), those soldiers are disciplined.

But globally, it's just not true that the IDF has complete disregard for Palestinians.

Cultural and religious belief that the land belongs to them by divine right, and was stolen. WWII enabled them to resettle in their "home", but the principle of ownership didn't come out of WWII. The treatment of the Jewish people in WWII doesn't mitigate these beliefs, and may even strengthen them (ie, persistence and survival are further evidence of divine right)

(These aren't necessarily my opinions, and I am not Jewish. However I'm very closely connected to people who are, and I'm sharing the perspective I've been given)

In order to qualify for the protection of the rules of war, you must typically abide by them. This means that you don't get to prosecute when people kill your human shields or when they block humanitarian aid that you are stealing.

This is a question you need to ask Jewish people, not HN. The response you'll get here obviously won't answer this question, because the people responding are either not Jewish, or the format doesn't lend itself to a genuine answer.

But, a mistake you make in asking the question is two-fold, one - the Holocaust was not a lesson taught to Jews so they'll learn empathy. It was something horrible and traumatic that was done to them. Two - comparing the Holocaust to what happens in Gaza means you're not aware of what the Holocaust was. Maybe you know highlights such as gas chambers etc, but not what it really was (through no fault of your own I'm sure).

But, to attempt some semblance of an answer. In the same way you wouldn't ask Haitians why their gov did terrible things to the DR and their population - didn't they learn from slavery? Or about India/Pakistan, didn't they learn from the raj? Or any of the African states in conflict - didn't they learn from colonialism? Or Turkey and Syria, Iraq/Iran etc. Then why ask this from Israelis? I hope you get my rhetorical point.

I was in my 20s and remember the feeling in the air after Al Qaeda members hijacked commercial planes and flew them into WTC in 2001. Fear, Anger, A bit of revenge.

Many of Americans, including soviet immigrants, enlisted in the army driven by that feeling.

Israelis lost significantly more of their population percentage-wise during October 7 attack perpetrated by the official government of Gaza AND as we know now, some Gazan civilians. Over 200 Israelis were taken hostage.

With that in mind, its fairly simple for me to empathize with the Israeli public who are angry at the death of their fellow citizens and want Hamas to be punished.

The human mind isn't rational. Don't expect just because they very well know what genocide is, that they can't convince themselves they aren't committing genocide.

You need to replace "after" with "because". Having experienced a mass genocide easily justifies committing one yourself in the name of self preservation.

Internally, denying humanitarian aid is seen as the legitimate and time-honoured strategy of "sieging the enemy state" though not all agree on how legitimate that is (I'm sure you can see the strangeness of sending food and medicine to enemy soldiers). Certainly supplying the enemy with fuel to use in their rockets, vehicles and armaments is seen as foolish (even if that would also provide fuel for the hospitals whose fuel was stolen by Hamas). There is zero desire in killing non-militants (outside of few extremists), but given the extremely horrible inhumane atrocities committed by Hamas (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violen... ), the acceptance of collateral casualties is higher than usual (and Israel already went extremely out of its way to minimize civilian casualties before the Oct 7 attack). Hamas' tactics that intend to maximize the deaths of their own civilians are also a contributing factor to that acceptance. If you believe there is genuine desire or action specifically to kill civilians outside of that then you believe in fake news.

In terms of non-homicidal genocide (i.e. genocide in the sense of dismantling the group without killing its members), certainly a lot more people are fine with something like a Transfer plan (for example, I've heard a proposal that Egypt will take Gazan Palestinians as refugees/civilians and similarly have Jordan absorb the Palestinians in Yehuda and Shomron) and don't see it as much of an atrocity, merely taking back the land those Arabs conquered and colonized starting at around 640AD, without actual harm to those individuals (in fact, their lives could be much improved!). There's also the fact that Israel is very tiny; Even from just the southern part of Gaza, Hamas already fires rockets at Israel's most populated cities, giving them the mountains of Shomron (incidentally, the capital of the Israeli kingdom), simple mortars could rain down on Israeli civilians without warning and could easily lead to an actual genocide of all Israeli Jews, so moving the people a few tens of kilometers east sounds like a peaceful resolution in comparison.

Naturally, there's also the element of a long conflict. Arabs have been killing Jews in Israel during the British Mandate as well as the Ottoman rule of the region (in fact the IDF traces its roots to what are essentially local militias the Jews had to create to defend themselves). Israel's scroll of independence (a document that is considered that closest thing Israel has to a constitution) actually includes two paragraphs calling for the Arab nations surrounding Israel to work together in peaceful cooperation, so literally the very first action Israel took as a state was to call for peace, and literally the first thing that happened in response was an attempt to destroy Israel. After 76 years of war, certainly there's lowered sympathy for the enemy, especially one that elected Hamas (see above) and rejected peace (I've somewhat recently learned that outside of Israel almost no one knows that the Annapolis Conference very nearly resulted in peace via a two-state solution that was refused by Mahmoud Abbas [which I've heard he has later come to regret, not sure how reliable that is]).

Rising anti-semitism around the world (especially how popular it is to call for a genocide against Israeli Jews is in the form of the "From the river to the sea" phrase) also creates a backlash - Israel must act strongly to defend itself since it is the only place in the world where Jews can be in charge of their own fate and their own defense. If the BBC publishes lies about what happens in Israel, and protesters in England are calling for a genocide unopposed, not only should we not listen to what the English want us to do, we should prioritize ourselves even further. This is why IMO something like BDS is counter-productive, it only causes further resentment and defiance in Israelis; If you want peace between Israel and Palestine you should instead work to make sure Israel feels safe enough to be able to relinquish territory to the Palestinians without having another October 7th instead of working to undermine Israel (unless your goal is the destruction of Israel of course).

I’ve been told stories of the German occupation of my grandparent’s village. My grandfather has been a slave worker on the German farm.

The thing is, I personally can’t relate to any of that. It’s just like reading a book or watching a movie. It’s just so far removed from my reality. I think you greatly overestimate the impact of the holocaust on modern day Jews.

First you need to understand that there's no genocide here. Genocide actually means "the murder of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group."[1] There is no question that the Israelis are not trying to kill everyone in Gaza and definitely not specifically because they are a part of an ethnic group.

Additionally, they have not shown "a reckless disregard for Palestinian people" and they would argue that unlike other conflicts in the region (Syria, Yemen, Kurdistan) they've been incredibly efficient in trying to avoid or limit civilian death.

Still, Gazan's have been dealt a pretty raw deal in that they have been ruled by a terrorist organization which has repeatedly stolen their aid to push their own agenda, and living amongst neighboring countries Egypt, Jordan, that are afraid to take them in lest they bring instability to those governments. Note that in the beginning of this conflict the Egyptians wouldn't open the Rafah border to allow refugees.

Rather, many of the holocaust survivors would instead say that the Israelis are being too nice and not defending the people living in the country from a government in Gaza that has the following in it's charter: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" and "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees."(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp)

[1]https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

Millenia of oppression have taught the jewish people that the only way to be treated with respect is through military strength. Theyre applying that lesson here.

This is a very good question.

My understanding is that the colossal tradegy of Holocaust made Jews realise that not fighting back is an existential threat for them.

When Israel was established then Arabs did not accept its existence nor the existence of Jews in the region. What followed was a genocidal war to exterminate Jews in Palestine and destroy Israel. We know this war today as Israel war of independence.

The Arabs who participated against Jews in this war fleed in fear of retribution and were not allowed by Israel to return. We know these people and their descendants today as Palestinian refugees (they have special inheritable status given by UN).

After the war Israel was established nearly within the borders of UN assigned Jewish territories and UN assigned Arab territories were annexed by Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (West Bank). But it was still not tolerable for the Arabs who again in 1967 attempted to exterminate Jewish state with the war.

After the failure Isreal took control over larger territory that was then inhabited largely by Palestinian refugees (Palestinians) - West Bank and Gaza and also part of Egypt over the Suez canal and part of Syria called Golan Heights. The reasons where twofold. First the UN assigned territory was clearly not realistically defendable and second the large part of the previously not controlled territories like Bethlehem or Jerusalem were believed to be Jewish lands (historically Jewish lands were between Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea). Territories belonging to Egypt were later returned by bilateral treatis (but Israel kept control over Gaza).

Fast forward to today and it appears that Palestinians have not abolished the idea of genocide against Jews. It has been clearly established that the 7th October attack was a genocidal act to eliminate as many Jews as possible. Around 3000 Palestinian men took part in it, Hamas had around 40000 fighters. This demonstrates that they had wide support among Palestinians.

This leads us back to Holocaust. Jews promised to themselves that they will not let the genocide happen against themselves ever again. Yet it happened.

What is going on in Gaza is a systematic work to eliminate this threat.

They do this with minimal risk to their soldiers who are mainly reservist e.g. common people with military training. They can't afford to lose thousands of people. Palestinians in contrast value martyrdom and are willing to take very high risks (like attacking an armored vehicle with a RGP within a group of civilians next to the hospital entrance (this has been documented by the video evidence)).

It is not a police operation. It is a military operation against heavily armed and trained opponent. The weapons are chosen accordingly. The urban landscape makes it especially difficult and destructive. Regardless as far I have observed then Jewish military has made great efforts to systemically minimise civilian casualties.

What they did not realise first was that in addition to the military operation on the ground there is also sizeable information war against them and when the enemy can find many willing sympathisers then the enemy can produce what ever claims they please regardless of the truth as was demonstrated by the al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion.

I haven't observed the situation closely for months but by then Jewish armed forces evolved to be more open in their communication and to communicate more clearly the threats they had to fight against.

Homo homini lupus.

I can do my best to explain it, and I will do so with the assumption that people will approach any ensuing discussion in good faith. I'm not going to try and be wikipedia here, rather to just give a high level explanation of *why* a group of people, who were nearly exterminated, are acting this way. It will be very difficult to find the right words that can satisfy people who are very into this, but I will do my best, especially because I don't see a realistic geopolitical view being represented in the comments.

The question is "Why would Israel act like this?"

Israel has offered many times a two state solution. I think in '47, several times in the 90s, and the 2000s. They have all been rejected. The reason is that the Palestinian leadership wants more. How much do they want? They want all of it. "From the river to the sea" is the expression. They have said it over and over again that this is the only thing that matters to them, and they will sacrifice everything to get it.

That is more or less why Israel is doing this. For some, that is enough to explanation and a fair summary, but if you want to understand more details then read on.

The Israelis, obviously, are not going to just leave their country, and so that leaves the Palestinians with war as the only option. And war has happened, like 4-5 times, and each time the invading forces were defeated. Rather than deciding that the welfare of their people is what matters, Palestinian Leadership values complete, total restoration as the only goal and everything they do is to that end.

So, it can be debated from that point of view whether Israel should exist as a country or not. If you however think that Israel should be a country, even a little bit, then you are basically against the Palestinian leadership's raison d'être.

Even then though, I think most Israelis had a hard time believing that this is how it would be forever. Time after time, war after war, they have tried to 'do the right thing' short of just leaving Israel or dying. For example, they were invaded, the fought, the won, and the controlled Sinai, which was part of Egypt. Then they gave it back, and the Egyptians were reasonable and they signed a peace treaty.

The problem is the Palestinian leadership will never do this, and that is what the point of October 7 was. The point of it was to make peace impossible. Remember, just before the October 7th, there were the Abraham Accords. Basically, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel were take the first step in establishing a new direction for the Middle East, with those countries at the center of it. Boom, then you have the October 7th attack.

Let me take a step back and and try to address some things.

It's important to say that in 2005, Israel already militarily occupied Gaza. The corridor that has been used to smuggle in weapons for the terrorist was locked down. Then, due to international pressure, Israel withdrew from that region, and they removed any Israeli settlements. What happened? Immediately after, Hamas took over and there has not been an election since. Now, there is no governance, all of the money is stolen and funneled into weapons, and they're backed by Iran, along with Hezbollah, the Houthi, etc... and it is Iran who has a strategic interest in dividing influence in the Middle East.

So let me be clear. They don't want peace.

It's a very difficult situation because Israel would 100% prefer peace. The trouble is that they have a neighbor, who controls millions of people, that would rather be destitute and keep fighting than to govern responsibly.

A good analogy would be something along the lines of North Korea, but with a very different military strategy. Hamas uses guerrilla warfare, whereas North Korea is going for the long shot of a nuclear weapon.

The Palestinian Authority is not that different, other than strategy. They're also incompetent and they also want to see Israel eliminated. However, their strategy is to pretend to want peace, so they can negotiate territory, in anticipation of an invasion. How do I know this? Because every time that a two state solution has come on the table, they would only accept borders that were militarily impossibly for Israel to defend.

So there you have it. That is why this is happening. Because the Palestinians have these people as their leadership, and it's such a sunk cost at this point that they have nothing left but to fight for the total eradication of Israel. This is what happens when you lose 5 wars and still don't get the hint.

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Imagine you have a Gaza like area where you live. You want to live in peace but the other folk want to wipe out your state on the basis that Islam must rule your area and destroy its current government. Also they occasionally fire rockets at your schools and get out and murder and rape people. Do you not think you might get annoyed with them?

Zionism is an ideology that took inspiration from the British empire. It was intended to be "something colonial" and pre-dated the atrocities of WW2. The fascist atrocities in WW2 can be interpreted as colonial tactics applied to Europeans, after all the British had been doing extremely bloody concentration camps in Africa and starved India during WW2. For some reason, Africa doesn't get the same play. I wonder why.

So people that engage in colonialism end up doing similar crimes. Israel remains probably the only old school colonial project in the present day with present day technology, backed by the U.S. empire to secure geopolitical interests in the oil-rich region among other things.

Something to think about: America is also a genocidal settler-colonial project and is one of the only nations to back Israel in the UN. Our genocide is still ongoing: visit a native american reservation and witness the immense poverty. Similarly to Gaza, the US state will simply say that despite being an occupying power, these are autonomous zones and we have little responsibility.