Comment by portaouflop
6 months ago
Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
6 months ago
Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Yes, it's pretty scary that anyone sees things so black and white and would encourage their children to do the same. These are multi-decade conflicts where no one has clean hands.
10 year olds can figure out that killing children for 14 months is evil . That everyone can't see that is the power of propaganda.
People know it’s evil, they are just unwilling to point it out because driving the conflict into some resolution is already hard without these simplistic views which helped no one before and continue to do so. Kid’s naivety is just that, naivety. Put him into a rulers chair (either side), provide all the factual info with zero propaganda and see him trying to escape at all costs, because all decisions including doing nothing make people die or worse. At some point you just have to choose sides without much meaning attached to it.
I suspect most parents would be prepared to risk the lives of strangers' children if it stopped their own from being killed.
Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
> Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are treated as more complicated because people get uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of people by another.
There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force, along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by the West to re-frame it as something else have not been successful for exactly that reason.
And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you" which is what is now happening.
> It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it always has been" both a) does not make that complete horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.
Good, what’s your plan of resolution?
I answered you in the other comment, but my "resolution" would've been not carving out a chunk of a number of middle eastern former colonies and turning it into a Jewish ethnostate. But that's done now, and now Israelis have lived there for so long that simply "packing it up" and moving them elsewhere is now also, if not equally IMO, problematic as an action.
Israel is itself a project of the latter end of colonialism, and like many projects and side-effects and consequences of colonialism, we will be feeling it for hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes with that.
17 replies →
That is not at all the definition of genocide. Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing. Hard to take anyone seriously making such good/evil distinctions, especially when the they are not reckoning with the evil of Hamas & co. beyond “well gee shucks Palestine ain’t perfect either yall!”
Only one side has the state md objective of “ethnic cleansing” and it’s not the Israelis
There's no shortage of material in print calling for the destruction of Gaza, the non personhood of Palestinians, etc. from Israel ministers and commentators from before the October attacks by Hamas.
You can, for example, look to the Journal of Genocide Research at articles that draw parallels between Holocaust scholar Eugene's Finkel's declaration of Ukraine as a genocidal event and his point by point justification and similar parallels with Israel and Gaza.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2024.2...
There's no shortage of evidence of extremists in power on both sides calling for the destruction of the other.
> Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing.
No they're pursuing a strategy of using intelligence and AI to strategically target "Hamas hideouts" which both conveniently for the state of Israel and in fact are often civilian structures, which result in tremendous "accidental" civilian casualties, which Israel is clearly incredibly broken up about as they continue causing them week after week.
In reply to both this and the other person who's asking for my solution: I don't know, because fighting insurgent forces in any area of the globe at virtually any time in human history has only rarely succeeded for the non-insurgent side, and universally that success came at the cost of numerous atrocities perpetrated against the insurgent forces and the civilians they hide amongst. The most powerful military on the planet tried this exact same thing in Iraq, and 2 decades and trillions of dollars later, we left the Taliban and ISIS billions of dollars in U.S. war materiel, and the state of Iraq such as it was was quickly overrun by those same forces which enjoyed at least some level of support among the civilians they were hiding with, probably because it's extremely easy, even if they don't think you give a shit about them, to explain to people that the other side shelling their cities to rubble every day are bad people that are trying to kill them. Shock of shocks, even civilians largely against the ideological positions of organizations like Hamas, end up more or less on their side, because again, the other side is Israel, who is actively killing them, accidentally or not making precious little difference to the people at the wrong end of their missile strikes.
I would say, with a grain of salt as I am not even remotely in this line of work, but I would say: when your enemy combatants are sheltered by a civilian population, do not possess a standing traditional army that would otherwise meet you on a field of battle, and are prepared to carry this out as long as your state is: then there is no solution, apart from killing everyone. The problem is the more civilians you kill in your quest to kill the combatants simply makes your combatants job of recruiting people to their cause even easier, because you killed their family in the previous bombing run. Ergo, the logical endpoint of this cycle is either returning to the stalemate that has persisted for decades now, where Hamas takes pot shots at Israel from neighborhoods, or the Israeli's just finishing the job and turning Palestine and what remains of her people into dust and corpses. Simply openly declaring that one state, Israel, and her people, have a greater right to exist than Palestine and her people do, and let that play out.
However, that is an ethnic cleansing, and IMO, still a heinous crime against humanity unless we're just going to plunk down some UN courts and say, once and for all, that a resistance movement fighting inside a besieged state is such an impossible strategic puzzle to solve, that it's okay to just obliterate the entire fucking thing. Which is an option, though I think it's a pretty horrific one.