Comment by meowface
1 month ago
Israel has a legitimate reason to want to try to intercept and detect terrorist activity, but given what they've been doing in Gaza for the past year and a half, they simply can't be trusted. They've lost all credibility and benefit of the doubt. So they can't expect other entities to help them do something they say is legitimate, because no one can trust them to do something in a legitimate and ethical way.
I think OP’s point is Israel’s legitimate surveillance needs have risen alongside their credibility crashing. This isn’t a simply reduced problem unless one has a horse in the race.
I understand that, and I am sympathetic to those needs to some degree. They do have increased legitimate surveillance needs. But they've lost all of their good will. Partnering with them is too morally and PR-ily hazardous.
I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, but I think this argument is overall kind of pointless because one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland.
> one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland
This is an interesting comparison—thank you.
That said, did the Poles launch cross-border attacks on German civilians? The closest I can come up with is Bloody Sunday [1], which was an attack on ethnically German civilians, but not a cross-border incursion. (Granted, we can only observe this ex post facto, so your argument still stands.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1939)
17 replies →
>I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany
oh, that's generous of you
1 reply →
[flagged]
Oh, don't worry, there's plenty of lost credibility to go around. Nobody's coming out of this situation smelling like roses, other than maybe some Israeli and Gazan peace activists.
At some point, when basically the entire world is saying one thing and only two countries (the US & Israel) are saying the opposite, you really need something strong to convince someone that basically the whole world is wrong.
This is some lame right-wing outlet whose front page contains things like:
>The assessment, shared exclusively with the Free Beacon, follows mainstream media claims that cuts to global health funding will endanger life-saving programs
While not mentioning that, yes, the Trump administration's USAID cuts absolutely will kill millions of people.
The rest is shitting on Democrats and supporting Trump. Obviously some right-wing site is going to say whatever they can think of to try to defend Israel's actions.
I see the war in radically different terms than you. It's not a battle between who has the better historical claim to the land. It's a religious battle. It's a battle between radical Islam and the secular west.
For a fuller treatment of the defense of Israel from a secular view point.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38926431-what-justice-de...
I'm grateful that what little good pieces are left in the American right their defense of Israel remains in place.
10 replies →
If this was how the world worked, we'd all be using Athenian democracy. There are plenty of things the whole world once believed that turned out to be wrong.
[flagged]
1 reply →
It is obvious that Israel is committing genocide. They don't even try to hide it! Indeed they revel in their cruelty. [1]
This historian[2] argues that openly committing genocide is a feature, not a bug, because it will lead to anti-semitism that will make diaspora Jews feel unsafe and bind them to Israel.
[1]https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/snapins-... [2]https://youtu.be/sS9xidsyxXY?t=330
There is no doubt that people are suffering. But trying to pin that on Israel is only prolonging their suffering.
Let me ask you, who benefits from Palestinians dying? Or did you think that Hamas care about the Palestinian people. They do not - they care only about the Palestinian state.
1 reply →