Comment by dijit
18 hours ago
Most of what you say I don't disagree with. Israel's conduct since October 8th (the civilian death toll, the aid blockade, the flattening of hospitals) is legitimate to call out. The ICJ found the genocide claim plausible enough to issue binding provisional measures, which Israel then ignored [1]. That's not nothing.
But "wholesale genocide" and "the plan is obviously to drive them into the sea" are stronger claims than the evidence supports right now, and that matters a lot because the moment you overreach, everyone who wants to dismiss Palestinian suffering has a rhetorical exit. The ICJ's own careful language exists for a reason.
None of that touches the original argument anyway: that October 7th was not a "small blip." Israel's conduct after October 8th doesn't retroactively change what happened on October 7th. Both things are true simultaneously. That's the whole point I'm making.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/26/israel-not-complying-wor...
No, I think I have to respectfully disagree: in the continuum of the Palestine-Israel conflict, this was a small blip. Israel has been killing civilians indiscriminately for years/decades, annexing territory, bulldozing homes etc.
What was different this time was that it was Israel who was the victim, not the Palestinians. And the only way that Israel knows how to respond to these kinds of things is to kill and to destroy.
"What was different this time was that it was Israel who was the victim."
You've just described the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust [1] as a blip because, in your accounting, it was Israel's turn to absorb one.
The "continuum" framing doesn't hold up numerically either. In non-war years, OCHA records roughly 100–200 Palestinian deaths annually at Israeli hands [2]. Hamas killed 1,139 people before lunchtime. That's not a blip in a continuum, it's five to ten years of equivalent deaths in eight hours.
The youngest victim was 14 hours old [3]. The oldest was a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor [3]. None of those facts change based on who you think had it coming.
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museu...
[2] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/casualties-thousands-killed-...
[3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/youngest-october-7-victim-just-00...
I would have figured the families of the Jews who built Israel would have realized "holocaust bad, never again".
What they learned was "never again to us".
Just because your family had a holocaust executed against them, doesnt give you any (legal, ethical, moral) right to run your own holocaust.
And Israel is running a holocaust in Palestine, and has been for decades.
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