There are Street View photos that look like they were taken from someone driving down one of the side streets so you can pretty much walk on it. You can see apartment buildings, local shops, people going about their day... It’s heart-wrenching to contrast that life with the current aerial view, with nothing but rubble and destruction.
How did they get those cameras inside and footage out? Isn't it an open air prison without electricity or internet, where you are shot immediately when trying to approach?
They don't, that's the point. All of the street view footage is from before the start of the current genocide. Gaza is under one of the most complete internet and media blackouts on earth, even the roaming international sim card loophole has been closed.
"We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries."
It's an interesting contrast with Azerbaijan whose soldiers were beheading elderly civilians that did not manage to run away in time, mutilating bodies of female soldiers, making it clear that no Armenian will stay alive under Azerbaijani occupation. As a result when Azerbaijan have occupied Karabakh everyone living there had to leave it and run for life in under a week, without demolishing homes, or getting condemnation from any country.
English media also routinely violates house-style by using the passive voice when reporting actions by Israel: "50 civilians killed in Gaza" vs "Hamas/Syria kills 50 civilians". Boo English media
I've been seeing this kind of argument increasingly often from Israel's defenders and I have to say "Look at this other horrific atrocity that might be even worse than the one we're doing, but gets far less coverage in the US media" is a terrible defense. If that's the best Israel can come up with, and they continue down the path they are on, their western support will be gone before they know it.
To take this example, the Azerbaijani president didn't talk the American one into a major shit show of a war; one that is materially harming American lives. The Azerbaijani government doesn't run a major political influence operation in the US, spending 10s of millions of dollars against candidates for the sin of mildly criticizing them. The Azerbaijani government doesn't receive anything close to the level of military, diplomatic, and financial support from the US that Israel gets. The Azerbaijani prime minister didn't give an address to the US Congress to undermine a major foreign policy agreement, one which has only looked better in hindsight.
So no, it's not at all weird that the citizens of the US care more about Israeli committed atrocities than Azerbaijani ones. The US is far more involved with Israel's actions and has far more influence over them, influence that has so far not been used to try and alleviate the suffering in Gaza.
Yes, that was an atrocity. What does that have to do with what Israel is doing? We shouldn't be ok with atrocities just because worse atrocities that dont get as much media coverage exist.
And they will not stop with Gazans. The plan of the bloodthirsty monsters that compose the Israeli Ethnosupremacist Republic is to rebuild Greater Israel, executing and shedding the blood of anyone and everyone who dare not be a chosen one. The chosen ones are the natural rulers of the world and we're their bitches.
I suggest creating two tabs, one for Google Maps link [1] and another for Apple Maps link [2], then quickly switch between these two pages. It made me realize how much have been destroyed. Heart wrenching.
Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.
They just use bulldozers to flatten whatever the bombs don't. They can drive a bulldozer pretty precisely, especially when they don't care who's in front of it or under it.
Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).
I don't quite understand your argument here. In your first pin I'm struggling to find a single building that isn't leveled, or at least severely damaged. Even buildings far away from the city center in the boonies are leveled.
They are saying that this is genocidal destruction. In a war sometimes civilian infrastructure is hit as collateral. But here, all infrastructure is destroyed and it's clear this wasn't done by 1 or 2 errant bombs but rather because of direct targeting. It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.
He also promotes transphobia. Chomsky was friends with Epstein and acquaintance of Steve Bannon. I don’t think that discredits his entire body of work, but I think we should stop promoting him when there are sources that are less problematic.
You are mixing Chomsky (the subreddit) up with Norm (the book author). Norm was friends with Chomsky but not Epstein or Bannon. I'm unaware of him having transphobic views.
I would caution against uncritical consumption of Finkelstein's work. He is a bit unhinged, and limited in what content he can analyse as he can't read Arabic or Hebrew.
Norman Finkelstein's treatment of sources is dubious at best , dishonest at worst, and he is not very good at defending his position when challenged on them
At least that was my takeaway after watching his debate with Destiny (the streamer) and Benny Morris (the historian):
A war requires at least two militaries. This is what happens when a well armed military engages a mostly unarmed civilian society unable to mount significant opposition.
"Before the October 7, 2023 attacks, the total size of Hamas’s military wing (the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades) was estimated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence agencies to be between 25,000 and 30,000 fighters, with some intelligence assessments placing the upper limit as high as 40,000.
This army was organized into five regional brigades and 24 battalions."
"Hamas's military force prior to October 7, 2023, was roughly 3 to 4.5 times larger than the United States military when measured as a percentage of their respective total populations."
Anyway, IDF as ≈170k active duty personnel and 465k reservists[1].
Literally a different order of magnitude.
Add to it the vast different of resources, access to an air force and nuclear weapons and it become even more clearer that there is no comparison possible.
(And comparing personnel count to the USA is laughable as it is vastly different military type. Both a fighter jet pilot and a foot soldier count as one personnel, but it's neither the same force projection nor the same investment of civilians working for the war machine).
You don't need to compare the military forces. You can compare the casualties on both sides or, for a different perspective, you might count the civilians killed inside their own territories (you might count the West Bank if you really want accurate numbers).
Forced displacement is also considered a war crime and, considering what is happening in Gaza and at the West Bank, it would qualify as genocide as well.
Yeah, there even is this old archaic rule from the bible/torah/quran, "eye for an eye" that is usually considered barbaric and outdated. But here they go by 35:1 ratio.
It is obvious, but it is also to be expected that a significant number of people here, as elsewhere, will rationalize genocide ... and the comment you responded to is particularly crude in its lack of humanity.
The IDF has killed not just a higher number but also a higher percentage of civilians, and a much higher percentage of children, than the October 7 attacks[0]. Even if collective punishment was considered not cruel but moral by the larger community, Israel has far surpassed it.
Wouldn’t it actually be much more efficient to just destroy all the food infrastructure and just have everyone die from hunger instead of destroying all the houses?
there are videos of bulldozer in the West Bank eradicating secular olive trees from Palestinian farmland. There is no Hamas in West Bank, no tunnels, no fighters.
Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."
"Russia is claiming it as theirs for the last four years and has largely rebuilt it" is not really counter-evidence to destruction during the fighting
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
Also the Palestinian buildings are practically made of cardboard because that's all the supplies they can get (because mysteriously supplies keep not arriving, oh well, no way to know why they don't)
> and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position. Everything gets pounded, even forests and tree lines. It’s more like Verdun than anything that happened in Gaza.
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't "actually" exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
It can be (and is imho) true that both Russia and Israel have broadcasted genocidal intent with the consequences being war crimes and still not look identical
It seems like the state of Ukraine frontline cities is due to intense artillery fire and air bombingn whereas gaza cities states seem to be more of systematic bulldozing of entire areas which would erase the marks of actual bombings and make the scale harder to assess
The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
Systematic destruction of urban areas is sadly what modern urban combat operations look like.
When an enemy digs in and choose to fight and die in an urban area, this is how war plays out.
> The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
But that’s not what we see in Gaza. The parents specifically mentioned that only towns were leveled. The destroyed towns are not the only relevant aspect. The other one is that major damage happens only there. And of course it would, because the Israeli forces don’t want to sterilise the land; they want to take it. In contrast, Russia is happy to be king of the rubble as long as Ukrainians eat shells.
If your enemy is dug in in an urban area, you bomb the hell out of it before you send in infantry to clean up. If you don’t use artillery and bombs the defenders will mow down the assault units.
This is how urban war is played out between near peer armies.
Think about this, I’m in a concrete bunker with a machine gun, do you want to charge the bunker and get shot, or do you want to call in an airstrike to destroy the bunker with the machine gun position? I know what I’d do
Or, if you're the IDF, and the bunker is filled with neutral UN Observers monitoring for war crimes, you also send in a laser-guided bunker-busting airstrike. Then you insist it was an "accident" while refusing to cooperate with the subsequent investigations.
Of note, just days before the strike, one of the Observers sent an unencrypted email home to his wife noting that he was observing Israeli war crimes and would be reporting them.
I'm sorry, Ukraine war discussion was labeled political on HN, not allowed, actively moderated and shutdown. Please don't post it here. Only Gaza/Israel get's a special carveout for these sorts of discussions on HN.
Look at Google map of Gaza city, Rafah, Khan-Younes, Al Qarara, ... pretty much all building have been destroyed. You want to try to argue that every one of them was somehow hiding a tunnel ?
You can also see a lot of buildings demolished on the Egyptian side too.
In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.
Yeah, this is not what happened here. You can look up Israeli articles from the time that described that nothing was going on for weeks on end other than demolitions. Basically no fighting. You get Israeli politicians repeating beforehand that Rafah will get leveled.
They wanted to level the city, they did. That's all. There was some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah, but nothing that would justify this. And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them, yet they managed to murder more than a thousand of people.
Prolonged "surgical" strikes continued so long that there is almost nothing left to operate on I guess. And your justification is that some farms are not completely destroyed? What a disingenuous remark.
I did look at them and the destruction in both was horrific. I'm not saying that the conflicts are in anyway comparable, but both include fairly comprehensive destruction of civilian areas.
Mosul still had tons of standing buildings where Rafah has entire neighborhoods demolished down to the ground. The destruction there is far more systematic because it's intentional and systematized to drive Palestinians out of the area.
Interesting. Despite the images of Mosul (e.g. on the NYTimes) being presumably selected to show the areas with largest impacts, the destruction is in patches and you can see many houses still standing. In Rafah, every single house has been razed to the ground.
I'm a little confused by this one, because if you hit the "Show historical imagery" button, and go back through the prior years, I don't really see much or anything of a playground there.
Not only should we be critical of how Israel wages this war, but we should also recognize the role of Hamas. Deliberate killing of non-combatants, civilian abductions, unguided rocket and mortar fire, use of human shields, perfidy and disguise, all war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
Also Russians have just bombed a Dobrobut hospital in Kyiv. One of many war crimes happening every day. We also need to be talking about that conflict as well.
The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations nor is it an ally to most of NATO countries. The gripe many of us have with Israel's actions is that we enable them directly by providing money, weapons and manpower. No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes, whereas just recently we started seeing some manner of blowback to Israel's.
But considerably less than before the war and the EU are making efforts to decouple themselves, it's just not a switch that could be turned off, certainly not in the same way that support for Israel could be or could have been in the past decades.
This war's blood is on your hands. It could have been stopped in January 2022, it could have been stopped several months later. There were other occasions, every time you torpedoed whatever efforts there were. In all cases you pursued your "geopolitical" goals, which is to dismember Russia, take its territory and resources, and do to its people things way worse than what you (yes, you) did to them in the 90-s.
As for the war crimes, "for some reason" you don't tell about the ukranian ones, which are plenty.
As you are - of course - not concerned with their homicidal nationalistic anti Russisn propaganda, which gives further "motivation" to these crimes.
ukranians massacred civilians in Izyum, Kupyanzk, Kursk, just to name a few, for not wanting to side with them. They arbitrarily kill people (elderly, women, children) who want to escape to the Russian side (or if they just want to exclude this possibility). These are facts (source: telegram channels, which, confronted with your "free journalism", are a more reliable source of information).
This is the war, which were not you around, would never happen.
I support Ukraine with all my heart (and a little money) but whatabouting will get you nothing. This is a thread about the hamas-israeli war. There's no reason to change the subject and it doesn't take away ability to talk about Ukraine elsewhere.
Actually some people have mentioned the invasion and occupation of Ukraine in this comment section to draw parallels or make distinctions
It should be noted that Hamas exists because of the occupation and atrocities that Israel has been committing for decades and decades. All war is atrocious, the actions of terrorists are disgusting, BUT you cannot discuss the actions of Hamas in a vacuum and forget why they even formed in the first place and continue to carry out their actions.
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
And yet we can and we should still make distinctions when we talk about those subjects
Estimates for the death toll of US and British strategic bombing, for instance, range from 300,000 to 600,000 in Europe and around 330,000 in Japan (including the atomic bombings)
Now compare that with 12–17 million civilians killed deliberately by Nazi Germany and the around 6 millions killed deliberately by imperial Japan
if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.
> f you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly
Most war is unjustified. Violent resistance is almost never unjustified if one lacks access to elections.
But violent resistance that targets civilians robs itself and its cause of justice until that rot is removed and regretted. It's not only morally wrong. It's strategically stupid. Terrorist tactics do not work–they radicalize the enemy and unfavorably polarize the alliance space.
Remember the videos Ukraine circulated of sharing tea with Russian POWs? Imagine if Hamas had only targeted military outposts and then shared images like that one from its bunkers under Gaza City?
A cause can be fundamentally justified but still piss away its advantages with poor strategy. At the end of the day, Hamas has acted in Iran's interests. Not the Palestinians'. (Same with Hezbollah. Same with the Houthis, though to a marginally lesser degree.)
> What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?
Prioritize a cease fire. If you can’t target you probably can’t run much of a modern economy either. Which raises the question of what you’re actually fighting for.
Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group? Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany.
It seems like a reasonable take. But when we look at any oppressed group, getting murdered at the hands of their oppressors, there often is no negotiation through peaceful means.
History shows us that the threat of violence or violence becomes a necessary point of leverage to bring about change.
American schools have washed the story of the civil rights movement, but MLK only had success because of Malcolm X.
There’s many other historical instances of this. Whether it’s the Indian Independence movement in the 1940s fighting from British rule, the 1500s-1800s of native Americans resisting our ancestors colonialization, our own American revolution, and even labor movements like the battle of Blair mountain in the 1920s.
We like to propagandize American history where non-violence was productive, but violence has always been an unfortunately necessary tool when it comes to changing oppression.
Also, who exactly "loses justification": just the individual perpetrators or their whole collective? I hope you wouldn't say that every black slave lost their right for freedom after Nat Turner's gang killed civilians? [0]
It's a thought that is intuitive and intellectually satisfying but you produce no evidence for your claims.
Blair Mountain was a total defeat for the miners. Union organizing in West Virginia collapsed afterward and only recovered with New Deal labor law in the 30s
For native Americans, well, do you really want to discuss the results ?
For India you could argue that it's not non-violence but the fact the empire was exhausted militarily that worked. But it's hard to make the case that violent uprisings, who were either suppressed or contained well enough, had an effect. If anything the popularity of the insurgents may have done more that the actual violence but you can get that kind of popularity with non-violence too.
The only time when insurgency is working is when you are able to hide, endure and survive until your enemy is down for other reasons. It can be quite long. Think Mao. Was it the case for India ? Maybe but it's not obvious at all
I actually agree about Malcolm X... except it didn't actually use violence. Only violent rethoric and advocating self-defense. Annnnnd biggest wins like the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965) passed before the Watts riot (August 11, 1965) and the wave of urban uprisings that followed
But the West does acknowledge it, almost exclusively. Any criticism of Israel's war crimes are followed by "But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?" and "Do you condemn Hamas and the attack they conducted in Oct 7"? Mainstream media only shows Hamas actions, and only recently started highlighting Israel's war crimes due to increased souring of their reputation among audiences. Hamas actions also shouldn't be taken in isolation, the atrocities of October 7 didn't happen in a vacuum, but as a reaction to a conflict that has been happening for almost 80 years that is overwhelmingly one sided.
> But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?
I've started to think this worry about a particular nation's right to exist is really a great rhetorical trick: nobody is particularly upset the nation of east Germany ceased to exist, and you don't hear Erdogan opposing Kurdish independence with "Doesn't the Turkie have a right to exist?"
There is a basic human right of self determination, but if you think what follows is that you should get your own nation then look at how the soviet policies of providing exactly that worked out. They even created a the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east!
Pin-pointing Hamas and Oct 7 is pretty much a logical trap, because Netanyahu and Hamas had been symbiotic -- which put them in the very same ballpark. Both enjoyed their own external threats, and, through that, established strong political influence.
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
that's non-sense. Symbiotic is a horrible way to put it. You and I may not be supporters of any of them but to call a terror organization with a clear charter of destroying Israel and killing all jews symbiotic with Nethanyhu is just succumbing to a narrative someone is feeding you.
these kind of messages show us how good propaganda and brain washing is.
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
Netanyahu literally created them because their alternative was getting too peaceful and if Gaza was peaceful they wouldn't have a justification to keep destroying it. This is well-known info.
This is one those arguments that has a strong version that is wrong and a weaker version that is true but then it's up to you to assess responsibility and blame
I won't post the answer here but I'd suggest anyone to ask you favorite llm (Opus for me) the following prompt:
Assess the statement that Nethanhyu has been working to prop up Hamas or with Hamas in some sort of "my best ennemy" scheme
I am not going to start copy/pasting llm output here no.
I am just reminding everyone that assessing those kinds of claims with a good llm is a good way to fend off the craziness of some comments while learning more about the new information they just told you about
A new Haaretz investigstion found that on October 7 Hamas offered to release the hostages. Israel said no. That's because Israel needs the hostages to be hostages as a casus belli.
In every such post you have people both-sidesing. Killing almost 100k people is not equivalent to whatever Hamas has done. Hamas bad, Israel worse. It's not very difficult.
Israel is doing colonial violence to steal land and do ethnic cleansing. Hamas is doing anti-colonial violence to free themselves from people oppressing them.
You could argue that Israel is doing this because Hamas is so bad, but then you look at what Israel is doing in the other part of palestine not controlled by Hamas? Daily pogroms and violent ethnic oppression of all kinds.
The problem is that Israel is based on ethnic supremacy. The way the victims (the palestinians) react is not relevant.
It's not a war. It's US/Israeli propaganda to call it as such. Wars occurs between state actors. This is wholesale slaughter of people on land you claim that you've deliberately put in an open air prison and starved.
The level of violence is set by the occupier. Would there be pearl-clutching about the Warsaw Uprising, John Brown or Nat Turner? What about resistance to British occupation of Ireland (or India or any number of other British colonial projects)? The ANC in South Africa was incredibly violent in its resistance to apartheid. Resistance movements in occupied Europe were also incredibly violent (eg killing collaborators).
What you seem to have fallen for is tone policing a 78 year long resistance. A lot of people (generally, not you specifically) have this belief that things began on Oct 7. You will get questions of "why can't they resist peacefully?" Well, they have. Multiple times. Most recently with the March of Return several years earlier. Many don't know about it because it was barely reported on. What happened? For the "crime" of standing within a few hundred yards of the fence, the IOF used protestors as target practice. 500+ dead, 8000+ wounded. "Wounded" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting too because it included deliberately and permanently maiming people by blowing their legs off deliberately [1].
"Terrorism" is a political designation. And the US doesn't face such threats? Really? The police kill over 1000 people every single year. Mass shootings? Why isn't that seen as terrorism? Or the violence committed by ICE against random US citizens or detainees?
I'll leave you with this quote from JFK [2]:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
Hamas has every right to resist. Unguided rockets? There's IDF in nearly every building in Israel. The excuses used to genocide Palestinians far more aptly describe Israel.
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel.
A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
I take a harsher stance: that we should expect division to be sewn among us by our adversaries, and harden ourselves accordingly through open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate (rather than flame wars, especially in popular contexts like tv and social media).
I find it strange that the antidotes to a lot of the bad stuff going on today is basic enlightement stuff: cultivating a citizenry who value evidence-based worldview, education and rule of law. Yet it feels like that is increasingly slipping from our fingers.
The "bad stuff going on today" that you call is the opposite of enlightenment - citizenry based on emotions, tribal and racial affiliations, and rule of strength. There are countries and media that actively promote such a world, since it's easy to get rich and powerful in circumstances like these.
> open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
> The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
So did Netanyahu. His far-right policies require an eternal enemy to distract the people and blame for everything going wrong. The October 7 attack definitely didn't hurt his position in national politics.
I don't have a strong position on this but seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act.
I mean come on... Hamas were seen practising flying hang gliders around the strip and one of the most paranoid states in the world didn't think that merited some investigation?
And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
Well the official story IIRC is the border was more lightly manned than normal (and with more reservists than normal) because it was a national holiday.
But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
Because if that is stupidity then yes, it is very stupid
Official? It is well known in Israel and for it's enemy that on holidays there are less people. Nothing weird or reasons to doubt it.
> But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
No, if they did they wouldn't have anyone on the border.
Dear reader, notice how they shifted their claim from "And everyone just happened to not be at their posts" to the official story (wink wink although I offered no real evidence) is that the border was lightly manned.
Bibi had the advance knowledge and let it happen because he’s fine with collateral damage even if it’s his own countrymen. A few dead Jews are nothing to him if it means More Land To King Over.
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
> seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act
Regardless of the facts in this specific event, you can make much the same argument about many of the major 21st century terror attacks - there were multiple warnings leading up to 9/11, and the FBI and CIA had eyes on several of the perpetrators before the attacks. They didn't "choose not to act" in so much as institutional disfunction prevented the dots from being connected or any preemptive action being taken, but from the outside it looks pretty much the same.
"The sad thing" is that 100k+ humans were brutally killed and the lives of 2 million others were destroyed. The second sad thing is that Germany will never learn. Also, I'd suggest you look up the definition of the word "terrorist".
The Israel stock market is up about 100% since October 7.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
The flip side of your statement is that more nations than before decided to recognize a Palestine state and that it seems for the first time in decades US support for Israel is waning.
Israel is military and economically strong. It’s also a small country in a difficult region that needs trade partners and international connections, probably more so in a future full of climate change.
Maybe they would find it easier to get trade partners if they hadn't spent most of a hundred years murdering the extended families of all their potential trade partners. Somehow I'm finding it hard to have sympathy for their inability to find trade partners.
Eh, those are short term gains. Popular opinion has shifted away from Israel since they've increased their attacks and basically no longer hide the fact they want to eradicate Palestinians wherever they may be. They can't throw antisemitism rhetoric anymore because people have caught on to their victim syndrome. What they're doing is the same thing the US has been doing for decades, creating terrorists by oppressing entire generations and it will end the same way, eventually, when a critical mass opposes their regime or until they elect someone as dumb as the US did and throws all pretenses out the window. They either succeed in their genocide or all they're doing is motivating people who will one day have an impact.
You are wrong, this is the mindset that allows such atrocities to become possible, even from non-psychopaths. Sadly, to a lot of people, there are not "humans" but "enemies", and once that's given, any atrocity follows.
This seems like some serious rose colored outlook. Support for Israel in their patron state has absolutely plummeted in the last year. Support is almost certain to be cut back sharply by the next administration and might go to zero in the near future.
Iran's nuclear program has hardly been destroyed long term and there is almost no chance a durable nuclear agreement comes out of this war. It will almost certainly be a vague memorandum where Iran pinky swears to never build a nuke and then starts building one as soon as the fighting stops. America isn't going to start endless wars to prevent that and Israel can't do it alone. The long term future looks grim for the Middle East, especially for Israel.
I wish I could share your optimism, but the fact of the matter is that American politicians are beholden to their sponsors on both sides of the aisle, and the military industrial complex and American imperialism which Israel is a part of, are both popular initiatives among their primary funding sources.
Meanwhile, most of the voter base (perhaps understandably) cares more about domestic issues than they do about the plight of people on the other side of the world who they are killing and exploiting with their tax dollars.
Given all this, I don't know how you can be so certain that anything will change with a new administration, even with polling demonstrating that voters do disapprove of support for Israel now. Most of the people who disapprove of funding Israel don't care about it strongly enough for it to be a significant factor in their engagement with electoral politics (which for most people is also just limited to voting once every 2 to 4 years)
Also Mileikowsky and the roving gang of international Zionists and Chosen Ones have veto power over 90% of the governments in the world.
The US congress and senate get their laws and edicts directly from the top brass of the IDF.
Every single head of state in the Eurozone (bar Perro Sanxe, who is controlled by Morocco instead) and every single bureaucrat have to follow the rules set down by Israel, lest the union collapse.
They're everywhere you look. You don't have to fall for Hasbara or Unit 8200 propaganda about how this totally means you're an irredeemable monster, they are the ones who are pushing this.
Somehow a powerful state army destroying homes and killing civilians is not "terrorist". It's only "terrorist" if the weak try to respond in kind, using means available to them. It's almost like "terrorist" is a propaganda term used by the strong against the weak who try to resist.
As the saying goes "war is terrorism with a bigger budget".
There's not much of a fissure in Ireland, the consensus there is pro Palestine. They see parallels between how Israel is treating the Palestinians and how the UK treated Ireland. Generally they don't view the bigger country next door trying to take over a smaller country favourably, and that's even without the mention of the word genocide which certainly doesn't help Israel's case.
There are several factors involved as I see it - a lot of money from Qatar flowing to make sure Israel is always shown as the aggressor, anti-semmitism is still prevalent, most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East anyway, people don't understand what living 10km from people who want to kill you looks and, and war is horrible and it's always easier to side with the people who seem to be the underdog.
Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.
This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.
You could say that, but you'd be wrong, like saying indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined mostly by lehalmimmgirwnts, built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy, in South Africa.
The problem is the inexorable logic of war - fighting everyone everywhere all the time - has led to the war expanding until it collides with an enemy that is actually comparable to Israel, i.e. Iran. And that war has now expanded to include the world's supply of oil.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
It's hard to blame Iran when they literally weren't doing anything until we attacked them. You don't blame a child for punching back against the school bully - unless you're also a bully.
I don't think Iran are entirely blameless given their sponsorship of Hezbollah and participation in the Yemeni (and previously Lebanese!) civil wars. They've been maintaining a sort of sub-threshold threat in the area for a long time. Which was why, yes, it was an incredibly bad idea for US/Israeli attacks to escalate that.
Any rocket or bullet turned against Israel for the past 20 years has its roots in Iran. Iran controlled Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and Iraq through its militias.
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
I'm confused about your opening line. First you say the terrorists won, then you continue to elaborate how the terrorists are losing. So they won but now they are losing again?
They have won. The goal is keeping Netanyahu in power and ethic cleansing.
Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) has repeatedly called for the "voluntary emigration" or forced removal of Gazan residents and urged the permanent resettlement of Israelis inside the Gaza Strip.
They don't want to completely destroy Gaza. In the aftermath, they would be held accountable for destroying Gaza, plus they'd have no guinea pigs for the surveillance and military tech. All the big Israeli surveillance firms test their products on Gaza first, it's the most surveilled place in the world.
But they also don't want it to get too big or powerful. Israel calls it "mowing the lawn"[1]. You want to have grass on the lawn, but not too much, so you periodically cut off the excess grass.
Doubt it. Bibi operates above all that noise. Same as Putin.
Accountability isn’t achievable, as far as I can tell. Especially when there’s some lucrative real estate deals for Gaza land on the table. IDF brings bulldozers as part of their attacks on other countries for a reason.
Both Bibi and Putin hold their positions more precariously than you'd think, although they do manage to maintain them.
How easy do you think it would be for anyone close to Putin to slip him some poison or just stab him with a knife? To prevent that happening, a whole lot of stuff has to be kept oriented towards him remaining the president.
One of Bibi's support pillars is the perpetual threat of Israel's destruction. He positions himself as standing between Israel and destruction, so replacing him would be dangerous.
Genocide doesn't actually work as a tactic, especially in an urban setting. It strengthens the victim's resolve. The Palestinian people are not known for giving up on survival.
I'm sorry, but that's quantitatively incorrect. In ancient settings, particularly for pre-agrarian forces, "genocide" was another word for "victory", but we have plenty of examples.
North America of course, but Africa is an overlapping series of successful genocides, Argentina's "Conquest of the Desert", Qing conquest of the Dzungar, Russia's conquest of the Circassians, Athens and Melos 416 BCE, Rome and Carthage, Rome and lots, Mongolians and whew even more than that -- all of them victories but also a "Where are the Khazars?" sort of event. They're just gone. Violence will forever be Mankind's one true Universal Language -- easier to learn than Esperanto.
Post-Trinity, the thermonuclear deterrent has put the kibosh on genocide as a working tactic. For a bit. The evolution post Cold-War might well turn out to be that genocide is back, baby, as long as the genocidee doesn't have a nuclear deterrent. It's cosmically fitting that the great genocidal wars of the 20th century birthed the final perfected weapon for doing genocides.
They did in Gaza. They still have Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, the Sinai Peninsula and Iran to go through before they achieve The Greatest Israel. That's a ton of genocide, over 100M people they have to kill. It's gonna take a while.
Push far enough north and you're also sharing engagement area with Turkey, which has already been a bit of a worry even this year.
I also suspect that the Great Alliance between the Sunni/Arab autocracies and Israel is more fragile than it appears. Or, more accurately, and the Sunni/Arab autocracies themselves are more fragile than they appear.
It's sad that so much of this conversation has devolved into technicalities of whether this is a genocide.
You can't look at this, at reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, at Israel's own government officials' statements, and not, at minimum, believe that brutal war crimes were committed on a massive basis here. Whether it's "Holocaust level" or "genocide" is a red herring. It needs universal condemnation, it needs to stop, and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
It did stop. When the hostages were freed and Hamas gave up. Which they could have done at any point. Or you know, they could not have started the war too.
Eh. First, they made a mistake: the ICC cannot hold anyone accountable - it only will only determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel did, in fact, do a genocide. Despite finding it beyond a shadow of a doubt (which is why it's taking so long), they will be doubted anyway.
I have been watching the atrocities that Israel have been committing since 1987 and there is simply zero argument any supporter of the regime can make to change my mind that they are evil, by every definition of the word.
There is no justification for their actions. There is no justification for the greater Israel project they are pushing. There is no justification for them to be taking a leadership role in the global security technology industry. The whole thing is just absolutely Fkd and I find any person trying to contort the argument in a way to justify this shit to be evil themselves.
The fact that this comment is being upvoted as much as down shows me that evil exists here too.
Have you considered that it's bad to kill Jews and that Jews deserve a homeland? Israel is building a great project there - a Jewish homeland - while Arabs are trying to destroy it.
Never mind that it's also a Palestinian homeland and Muslim homeland. Those ones don't count because uh, we said so.
Maybe you missed the sarcasm. Btw the descendants of the people there 2000 years ago are the current Palestinians; the current Israelis are mostly the descendants of West European colonizers from the 1948 invasion.
I read your full comment and got the sarcasm, but I don't blame people who read the first line and tuned out the rest because it was such a perfect example of the genocide apologia that we've seen so much of already.
I get that in this case the rest of the comment was short and the obvious indicator of sarcasm came quickly, but it's all too common for this to devolve into paragraphs of repetitive, uncreative slopaganda, which has resulted in many who disagree just tuning out early.
Well, like I said, no. And to be clear, you're free to ignore that. But, of course, that's exactly what I wrote and you managed to miss that, so I suppose none of us are communicating very well.
It's sad that most world leaders do nothing to combat such genocide. There are so few sanctions against the state, or specific people, of Israel. Foreign forums are very much still open for business to them.
1) Ultimately, money means more to foreign nations than what happens with internal affairs of their trading partners
2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.
Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).
Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell in particular) are widely believed to have operated as a massive Mossad blackmail operation, collecting (and creating) blackmail material against western politicians and influential individuals to ensure their support for Israel.
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
and it seems pretty likely that's exactly what was happening.
The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say
Didn't he have ties to basically all powerful people? Is there something special about his Israel ties that are different to his Bill Gates ties?
I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:
Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.
Of course. A very valid way to view it, and the same way I would've viewed it in 2016 if you told me there was a global elite pedophile ring that helped get Trump elected.
Epstein is thought to have been working for Mossad. If that's true, they probably have copies of all the video tapes (which we know were made) of all the stuff rich people did on Epstein island. This theory would single-handedly explain why almost everyone in the Epstein files supports Israel so strongly.
> Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
Who's this "we" who dealt with the SA apartheid state?
The international pressure on SA did absolutely nothing to change their mind (I'm old enough to have seen PW Botha's Rubicon speech live on TV). The NP (political party in charge) was slowly and carefully convinced to push out the hardliners.
The people left, like FW De Clerk, actually did the dismantling - unbanned the ANC, released Mandfela from prison, switched to allowing black voters, etc.
The rest of the world's pressure had absolutely no effect on the leadership. Change only came when leadership started changing.
The actual on the ground resistance was of central importance in the end of South African apartheid, but the international pressure and sanctions greatly increased the need for negotiations to begin. The point is to increase the pressure to change leadership through democratic means.
This could hopefully happen somewhat faster with Israel, given that the government isn't a literal Nazi remnant, as the South African government was. (Though, ironically, the main arms supplier to South Africa during the arms embargo was Israel, often reselling weapons from the United States. Sigh.)
"By the late 1980s, the South African state was in profound crisis, crippled by international sanctions, a stagnant economy, and widespread resistance. Recognizing the unsustainable nature of the perpetual conflict, the government under P.W. Botha began tentative, secret contact with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders."
Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed. This is why Hamas changed policies to only give up hostages through 3rd parties. They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored. [1]
So for starters, the US could have pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas to return the hostages.
As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times). The US could have at a minimum threaten to withhold aide. In fact, there are laws on the books that a country such as Israel committing war crimes is ineligible for aide.
Finally, the UN should have deployed peace keepers to gaza specifically to stop the genocide.
Actions could have been taken, but they weren't because our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money as to turn a complete blind eye to it's misdeeds.
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
This is where you notice that the world is more complicated than social media posts.
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
Then you notice world energy markets are going to be effected by a massive conflict etc.
If the UN went into Gaza, got attacked by Iran, then had to respond, next minute they're attacking a close Russian ally, and maybe even China might have to get involved in that.
What would've been good is if October 7 didn't happen, and that goes for both sides.
Iran would WELCOME UN peace keepers in gaza, are you kidding? Hell, I think even Hamas would welcome their presence. UN peace keepers would mean the likes of UNRA could operate once again in Gaza to deliver aid. It would also mean that Israel would have to stop it's aggression.
> Iran is helping Russia
lol, no, other way around. Though the Russia hasn't really been involved with Iran since Ukraine started. It's actually China that's the biggest Iranian trade partner.
The only party that'd be upset over UN peace keepers in Gaza is Israel.
I don't think what you're saying is actually right, if peacekeepers came in, it would (likely) mean a freezing of the current borders / situation, and isn't that what most people say justified October 7, "the theft of land"?
Allowing international journalists in would make the genocide even harder to deny and at that point there's no more returning to the "current situation". Regarding the border, at least for Hamas the 1967 borders would be just fine: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full (article 20).
Only if you think Israel is entirely correct in their assessment that every single civilian building actually houses dangerous hamas terrorists. I don't think that assessment is correct so I don't think the UN peacekeepers would be behaving exactly like Israel and the IDF has behaved in Gaza. Nor do I think the UN would put the same restrictions on aid coming into Gaza. They wouldn't stop peanut butter and baby formula from entering.
Make it make sense. The question is what should have happened. You say I answered what should have happened. But you also say "that's not how the answer was phrased".
How is my "should have" happened not a direct answer to the question?
That would result in the USA going to war against the UN. There is a reason the UN only takes action when the security council agrees. Countries on the security council can plausibly use their military might to prevent any UN action, so to prevent the senseless deaths of peacekeepers, they are given a verbal veto instead.
I tend to agree. The US bears a pretty large amount of blame here and I don't think Israel would have continued their aggression had the US withdrawn aid (or threatened to). But if they had continued, then that's where UN peacekeepers should have been deployed.
> Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed.
This is literally terrorist propaganda, they tried to offer a return of a subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not invading and dealing with the Hamas security threat. Obviously Israel was not going to leave such a severe security threat like Hamas intact.
If you had to guess, what do you think they might do? I feel like questions like this are in bad faith. Think about it for a minute, and try to come up with some things that they might do.
Send all collaborators to the international criminal court. (In the US, especially congress critters and members of the executive branch.)
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
The remaining non-corrupt members of the executive branch (or the state governments) would uphold the oaths they took, lock potus and friend in boxes, and ship them off.
As for Israel, as I understand it, the next election will mean domestic jail time for the incumbents unless the polls are wildly wrong.
At that point, it would be easy for Israel to start climbing out of lawlessness too.
Do not forget that world leaders are heads of sovereign states that are in charge of their self defense. Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies, need to make public statements that are not hypocritical about what they would do for self defense. This is why both U.S. administrations support Israel's actions
> Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies
Sure, but are we going to ignore about the US having to rely on its "helpless" allies to provide staging points and cannon fodder for its illegal imperialistic wars? How much of a superpower would it be without its overseas bases?
My ancestors been to this land long before Muhammad married Aisha and sent the colonizers from the Arab peninsula to the shores of the Mediterranean sea.
Tou cannot "invade" an unoccupied land. Israel pre-48 already had Jews living under a british mandate, and got the declaration of indepence approved by the UN. So either you trust the UN, or support British colonialism, just find your stance.
Ah yeah, one side starved and bombarded civilians for years, cut off their water and food. But only the side that unleashed a day of savage terrorism is the "barbaric" one.
Funny how plenty of people still think if someone defends the barbarism of Hamas (which I'm not doing), this person should be lynched, but if another person defends the barbarism of the Netanyahu regime, it's fine, because (insert justifications here)... What the fuck's the difference?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, don't you think? That "day of savage terrorism" flowed the other way every single day both before and after 7/10/2023.
And so what, yes the Egyptians closed the border, does that mean you consider it fine for Israel to do those things, and they can escape being labelled of "barbaric war criminals", because... why? Because Egypt?
It's like an abusive father beating his kids, and when the neighbor doesn't want to have the burden of taking care of the kids for the foreseeable future (because the police/government clearly prefers to pretend "everything is fine"), you say "Well, it's the neighbor's fault those kids are getting beat up!".
Well, the day I see you protesting against Egypt and blaming them for the situation in Gaza I might consider respecting you more. Until this happens my only suspicion is that "the jews are to blame" chant is from antisemitic reasons.
btw, and regardless of the Egypt issue, I'd argue there was a famine in Gaza before 7/10 and per the UN absolutely not today. Thus the barbaric October 7 attack had nothing to do with the health or wealth state of the people in Gaza. For comparison, the palestinoans in Judea and Samaria who are controlled by the Palestinian Authorithy are living relatively good, so if some to blame for anything in Gaza, is the the Hamas terror organization who violently took over the strip.
Never in history people faked facts as fast as you do now when saying Israel started Oct 7 war. Not to mention it's modern times and everything was live broadcasted to YouTube by the murderers themselves, this makes you even a bigger liar.
The 1948 war between the newly formed Israel vs Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon? Do you notice which imaginary country you suggest about is missing from the list?
It is absolutely fascinating to see how people are justifying a genocide right before your eyes in this comment thread.
From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.
It's no secret that people get blinded by their own belief and faith. They forget how to see, how to smell, how to taste, and how to hear. They get trapped in a virtual world inside their own minds -- a gigantic Matrix, but without sophisticated machinery.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
I don't think its just religious faith and belief, but also like how much people want to believe that the society they are part of, and that provides for their every day life, is a moral, just, and necessary one. And how much that puts on the blinders to questioning things. Israel is simply labeled a "like minded country".. at this point sounds a lot like "we have certain things in common, Jeffery" to me..
This. It's just so much more compelling to follow these discussions as they happen, compared to reading a historical correspondence or something. Of course I'd much prefer if there weren't genocides taking place at all.
Israeli here. Maybe I can give some helpful context.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this - any “support” for Palestinians is seen as a very far-left idea after Oct 7. There are still many here who oppose the extent of the war - I see regular demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for peace. I will note that there seems to be fairly universal agreement that _something_ needed to be done after Oct 7. If you want to understand the Israeli perspective (doesn’t seem like most commenters do, but I’m not writing this for them), you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
But anyways, don’t take my word for anything, pay attention to our upcoming elections. We will see how big the tents are then.
Wishing for peace, for saner voices to rise, and for an end to this cycle of violence.
America didn't do things like this after 9/11, we tried to build democracies in a naive way, failed, and got a lot of people killed unnecessarily. Iraq was completely unjustified and based on fabrications.
But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.
A lot of the stories that came out of Abu Ghraib sure sound like they have very strong parallels to what is happening today. At the level of "poorly trained reservists trying to do something difficult without sufficient oversight and getting frustrated and turning to torture" it sounds very similar.
And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).
Abu Ghraib was a scandal, some people got punished, probably not all of the right ones.
When it came out that Israel was systematically sodomizing detainees with nightsticks, they had protestors come out in favor of the guards. It's still ongoing, all charges have been dropped. Nobody is scandalized by it.
That's a very flat take. That ignores the fact that the doctor that saw the prisoner reported it for investigation or that the military had chose to prosecute it, also you don't mention this was one case, not "systematic"
Even ignoring the fact that protests do not imply popular support, there is no comparison as 9/11 did not include widespread sexual violence and ongoing hostage rape was still going on at the time this happened.
So even if this seemed terrible to most Israelis, it was hard to find someone who will publicly defend a rapist from rape in jail
Sure if you ignore the UN Commission of Inquiry report from March 2025 that concluded sexual and gender-based violence was used systematically against Palestinian detainees.
Except Israel calls all criticism against it biased or anti semitic. Even a bad programmer can spot another bad programmer, sharing the trait doesn't mean you're not qualified to call it out in others.
I don't know, an example, Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese spreading nazi era conspiracy theories about Jews controlling political systems.
And that's from a human rights body, and from its representative to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
The reaction of Americans to Abu Ghraib and the reaction of Israelis to the - larger scale - torture of Palestinian prisoners, is miles apart. It's also why there was always an end in sight to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet there isn't for Gaza until it has not a single Palestinian left.
I support Israel, but not wholeheartedly. I understand how Nakba was a matter of survival of your people. But why is this still going on today? Why is Israel continuing to expand settlements? Can you not understand how Palestinians must feel to constantly live in fear of being pushed out of their own homes? This is what gives me heartache. Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
> Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
"shortly after". Let's just forget for a moment that Israel made that happen, intentionally. What happened during that "shortly", was there a food blockade?
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
I'm a Zionist only in the sense that I believe both the Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) have/had a right to states in their respective majority areas because of secular reasons after studying the history of both sides; not on religious or theological grounds.
It's partly what led me to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy which doesn't believe in "Christian Zionism" as a form of end-of-days prophecy. The level of crazy I saw in Evangelical churches and groups during my time there could become absurd.
Interesting insights, thanks. I was raised Protestant (in Europe) and have similar impression of Evangelicals. I'll never be able to wrap my head around some of that shit.
Nothing makes them more "worthy" of empathy. It's that I have somewhat more of a personal connection to them. During my studies the Arab Christians on the campus in Tel Aviv were some of the most peaceful and kind people I met over there and it influenced me greatly.
They also happen to be caught between a rock and a hard place where both the Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians both oppress them. Quoting from [1]:
I am a Christian by religion, born in Nazareth, Israel to
Arabic-speaking Christian parents and brought up in Kufur Yasief,
the hiding place of Josephus Flavius
Persecution for Christians in Israel and Palestine is not on the
scale it is in Egypt, but it is there nonetheless. It must be added
that there is a growing number of Jewish-background, and Russian
Christians in Israel, who suffer more persecution from the
Jewish state and people.
...
Christian Arabs in Israel/Palestine live in a climate of fear
and therefore hypocrisy. Pressure on Arabic-speaking Christians
to tow the Muslim Arab nationalist line is so great, that we are even
afraid of complaining about injustices against us.
We suffer:
• At the hands of Jews, because we are seen as:
o Arabs: and so enemies, and primitive.
o Christian: and so gentiles. WE are often blamed, by association,
for the European holocaust.
• At the hands of Muslims because we are Christian, and "infidels."
We are often punished for “western” bias towards Israel.
The position you’re describing is essentially the modern left position in Israeli politics. Again, we’ll see in the upcoming election, but not everyone here supports the current goings on in the West Bank. The “Palestinian situation” is a major question in Israeli politics, both wrt Gaza and the wb.
One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
Israel rejects the two-state solution. They seem to be aggressively pursing a one-state solution, incorporating all of former Palestine (and perhaps beyond) into Israel. Obviously this doesn't include taking in the people living there, giving them Israeli citizenship. People will be killed or expelled. All while Israel continually claims to be the victim "look at what those people trying to stop us stealing their land did to us now."
comment said: "rejecting two state solution". poll numbers I see is around half rejects it, not 80%.
comment said: "killing or expelling all people in former palestine". there is no poll numbers for that specifically and the closest numbers for expelling people I see online is less than half, not 80%.
now you say "Palestinian eradication". OK, show the polls about 80-90% of israel supporting "Palestinian eradication".
So this situation is a bit like when the Nazis invaded Poland and then said, we have to destroy Poland because if we don't, they'll kill all our Nazi soldiers.
Isn't the humane solution to move the troops back out, instead? Of course the aggressors in a war will never do so, they will only press forward.
If we have to look at how October 7 shaped Israeli culture, we also have to look at how all of the dates leading up to October 6 shaped Palestinian culture. How many people were killed in the West Bank on October 6 - does that register, anywhere?
I just looked it up and on Oct 6th Israeli 'Settlers' murdered 19-year-old college student named Labib Mohammed Dumaidi. The state of Israel later teargassed his funeral.... Perfect example of needed context if you are truly trying to understand Oct 7th
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
While I vehemently disagree with the IDFs handling and it's hard to deny the genocidal effort, let's not forget Americans reacted very similarly after 9/11. People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Revenge and collective punishment may be natural human reactions to a terror attack but that doesn't make them justified. Especially when those in charge anticipated the attack and deliberately exploited it.
> People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.
Israel, in the worst blunder in its history, disengaged from Gaza and left Gaza to be purely in the control of the Palestinians. The Palestinians elected Hamas, which killed of Fatah and took control of Gaza, leading to the following 20 years of escalating violence which reached a peak in the 7th October.
The only reasonable conclusion from the Gaza experiment of giving control to the Palestinians is that they will only use that to attack Israel. The mistake of the disengagement will not be repeated.
Nobody in Israel is willing to give Palestinians control anymore. We've tried that and we see how it went completely wrong. Thank god it was just Gaza because if 7th october attacks came from the west bank, Israel would be gone.
The most peace that can be achieved is sadly in the current situation where Israel maintains control of the Palestinians and they don't get a chance to organize another 7th of October from the west bank, which is just few kilometers from Tel Aviv.
The Palestinians authority can't even win elections and they have stopped doing elections. If they were to resume elections, presumably Hamas would also take control of the west bank too. The majority of Palestinians would support 7th of October attacks on the rest of Israel. Which is an existential threat to Israel.
It's worth noting that the whole notion of having Palestinian "democratic" regime alongside Israel is as far from arabic culture as possible. There are no arabic democracies. Even after the arabic spring, none of the arabic countries developed a functioning democracy. So the current situation of the Palestinians not having a "fully democratic" regime is actually the norm in all arabic countries. The most democracy that Palestinians could hope for is the current situation under Israeli control. If the entirety of Israel vanished tommorow, and the Palestinians were given democratic elections, they would immediately devolve into an Islamic state with Sharia law where the average Palestinian has less freedom than today.
So anyone judging Israel for the continued control over the Palestinians needs to remember both what would happen to Israel without this control (genocide) and what would have happened to the Palestinians themselves (Sharia theocracy with less rights).
There might be some Tel-Aviv detached people who support the Palestinians, but I guaranty you there are no Palestinian supporters in the Gaza adjacent zones which were hit in the 7th of October.
Hamas used dozens of tunnels beneath homes in Rafah to smuggle weapons across the Egyptian border. The area was demolished to prevent Hamas operatives from using those tunnels again. Civilians were evacuated beforehand.
The Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister have openly stated that the destruction of Rafah was intended as collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of civilians.
https://xxcancel.com/AliAbunimah/status/2103890594137309425
There are Street View photos that look like they were taken from someone driving down one of the side streets so you can pretty much walk on it. You can see apartment buildings, local shops, people going about their day... It’s heart-wrenching to contrast that life with the current aerial view, with nothing but rubble and destruction.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/31%C2%B016'58.6%22N+34%C2%...
How did they get those cameras inside and footage out? Isn't it an open air prison without electricity or internet, where you are shot immediately when trying to approach?
There is a possibility to use https://www.google.com/streetview/contribute/
There was internet connectivity at least before the widespread destruction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Palestine#Ga...
You realize people get cameras and phones into actual prisons, right?
You realise Gaza is more tightly controlled than actual prisons, right?
They don't, that's the point. All of the street view footage is from before the start of the current genocide. Gaza is under one of the most complete internet and media blackouts on earth, even the roaming international sim card loophole has been closed.
"We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries."
—Benjamin Netanyahu, 2025
https://www.maariv.co.il/news/military/article-1195594
It's an interesting contrast with Azerbaijan whose soldiers were beheading elderly civilians that did not manage to run away in time, mutilating bodies of female soldiers, making it clear that no Armenian will stay alive under Azerbaijani occupation. As a result when Azerbaijan have occupied Karabakh everyone living there had to leave it and run for life in under a week, without demolishing homes, or getting condemnation from any country.
Azerbaijan did that with 70% Israeli weapons! BFFs learn from one another
Lots of countries condemned it. Maybe you're just not paying attention?
The Biden administration paused diplomatic relations, put out public states condemning it, and more.
In fact, Azerbaijan came out and complained about the US's "biased" stance against it.
https://asbarez.com/aliyev-criticizes-biden-for-biased-towar...
English media failed to pick up those stories.
English media also routinely violates house-style by using the passive voice when reporting actions by Israel: "50 civilians killed in Gaza" vs "Hamas/Syria kills 50 civilians". Boo English media
I've been seeing this kind of argument increasingly often from Israel's defenders and I have to say "Look at this other horrific atrocity that might be even worse than the one we're doing, but gets far less coverage in the US media" is a terrible defense. If that's the best Israel can come up with, and they continue down the path they are on, their western support will be gone before they know it.
To take this example, the Azerbaijani president didn't talk the American one into a major shit show of a war; one that is materially harming American lives. The Azerbaijani government doesn't run a major political influence operation in the US, spending 10s of millions of dollars against candidates for the sin of mildly criticizing them. The Azerbaijani government doesn't receive anything close to the level of military, diplomatic, and financial support from the US that Israel gets. The Azerbaijani prime minister didn't give an address to the US Congress to undermine a major foreign policy agreement, one which has only looked better in hindsight.
So no, it's not at all weird that the citizens of the US care more about Israeli committed atrocities than Azerbaijani ones. The US is far more involved with Israel's actions and has far more influence over them, influence that has so far not been used to try and alleviate the suffering in Gaza.
This is a typical Israeli harbara pattern. Oh, you anti-semite, I see you are ignoring this other non-Israeli genocide.
Save it.
Yes, that was an atrocity. What does that have to do with what Israel is doing? We shouldn't be ok with atrocities just because worse atrocities that dont get as much media coverage exist.
So you're agreeing the Israelis are shit, and then adding another example of someone else also committing war crimes.
TL;DR: "Azerbaijan's genocide is better than Israel's genocide because they keep the homes".
What an argument.
DOES NOT MAKE THIS OKAY YOU CLOWN
And they will not stop with Gazans. The plan of the bloodthirsty monsters that compose the Israeli Ethnosupremacist Republic is to rebuild Greater Israel, executing and shedding the blood of anyone and everyone who dare not be a chosen one. The chosen ones are the natural rulers of the world and we're their bitches.
And Israhell allies, EU and USA.
I suggest creating two tabs, one for Google Maps link [1] and another for Apple Maps link [2], then quickly switch between these two pages. It made me realize how much have been destroyed. Heart wrenching.
1. https://www.google.com/maps/@31.2963743,34.2449952,1665m
2. https://maps.apple.com/frame?map=satellite¢er=31.296508%...
this is unbelievable!
Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.
For a great example of this, look at this pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZcMbdFcx87PrqoYNA
And here's a pin of where the farms were spared https://maps.app.goo.gl/iZbbTH4iH27FCz4s9
They just use bulldozers to flatten whatever the bombs don't. They can drive a bulldozer pretty precisely, especially when they don't care who's in front of it or under it.
Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9
I don't quite understand your argument here. In your first pin I'm struggling to find a single building that isn't leveled, or at least severely damaged. Even buildings far away from the city center in the boonies are leveled.
They are saying that this is genocidal destruction. In a war sometimes civilian infrastructure is hit as collateral. But here, all infrastructure is destroyed and it's clear this wasn't done by 1 or 2 errant bombs but rather because of direct targeting. It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.
>this is entirely purposeful
Please check Norman Finkelstein's latest book namely Gaza's Gravediggers on this matter [1].
He also has a very telling and chilling interview recently on Palestine and Gaza [2].
[1] Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places [book].
[2] Norman Finkelstein Reveals Shocking Discoveries While Researching History of Israel’s Gaza Obsession [video]:
https://youtu.be/Jmv2h1WYnNo
What a nice, objective guy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/uyqjn2/norman_fink...
He also promotes transphobia. Chomsky was friends with Epstein and acquaintance of Steve Bannon. I don’t think that discredits his entire body of work, but I think we should stop promoting him when there are sources that are less problematic.
You are mixing Chomsky (the subreddit) up with Norm (the book author). Norm was friends with Chomsky but not Epstein or Bannon. I'm unaware of him having transphobic views.
I would caution against uncritical consumption of Finkelstein's work. He is a bit unhinged, and limited in what content he can analyse as he can't read Arabic or Hebrew.
Also Tucker Carlson? Seriously?
Norman Finkelstein's treatment of sources is dubious at best , dishonest at worst, and he is not very good at defending his position when challenged on them
At least that was my takeaway after watching his debate with Destiny (the streamer) and Benny Morris (the historian):
You be the judge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X_KdkoGxSs&list=PLrAXtmErZg...
Save your Hasbara. It is backfiring.
A war requires at least two militaries. This is what happens when a well armed military engages a mostly unarmed civilian society unable to mount significant opposition.
"Before the October 7, 2023 attacks, the total size of Hamas’s military wing (the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades) was estimated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence agencies to be between 25,000 and 30,000 fighters, with some intelligence assessments placing the upper limit as high as 40,000. This army was organized into five regional brigades and 24 battalions."
"Hamas's military force prior to October 7, 2023, was roughly 3 to 4.5 times larger than the United States military when measured as a percentage of their respective total populations."
Source: the aggressors
No link to a source ?
Anyway, IDF as ≈170k active duty personnel and 465k reservists[1]. Literally a different order of magnitude. Add to it the vast different of resources, access to an air force and nuclear weapons and it become even more clearer that there is no comparison possible.
(And comparing personnel count to the USA is laughable as it is vastly different military type. Both a fighter jet pilot and a foot soldier count as one personnel, but it's neither the same force projection nor the same investment of civilians working for the war machine).
1: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/10/14/idf-explai...
You don't need to compare the military forces. You can compare the casualties on both sides or, for a different perspective, you might count the civilians killed inside their own territories (you might count the West Bank if you really want accurate numbers).
Forced displacement is also considered a war crime and, considering what is happening in Gaza and at the West Bank, it would qualify as genocide as well.
comparing the casualties just shows that Hamas are incompetent not that they aren't trying.
I was hoping the numbers would make it obvious the reaction is disproportionate and careless with the lives of civilians.
Yeah, there even is this old archaic rule from the bible/torah/quran, "eye for an eye" that is usually considered barbaric and outdated. But here they go by 35:1 ratio.
new Voight-Kampff test just dropped
I wish I could turn off empathy at my convenience.
It is obvious, but it is also to be expected that a significant number of people here, as elsewhere, will rationalize genocide ... and the comment you responded to is particularly crude in its lack of humanity.
Maybe they should be treated like the festival goers?
The IDF has killed not just a higher number but also a higher percentage of civilians, and a much higher percentage of children, than the October 7 attacks[0]. Even if collective punishment was considered not cruel but moral by the larger community, Israel has far surpassed it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
They would be better off if they were.
If it was genocide, why would you spare the farmers? Doesn’t really make sense.
It’s more efficient to spend your ammo on housing and city buildings.
Wouldn’t it actually be much more efficient to just destroy all the food infrastructure and just have everyone die from hunger instead of destroying all the houses?
You're right, it is, hence the strikes on World Central Kitchen and the blockade on food entering the area.
they send armed settlers for the farms. they can't destroy those
Food production was target, even in different part of Palestine (west bank).
Farmers were killed, even in different part of Palestine.
Killing farmers have nothing to do with the definition of genocide.
Farmland wasn't bombed, but they did use Bulldozers to destroy a lot of fields.
there are videos of bulldozer in the West Bank eradicating secular olive trees from Palestinian farmland. There is no Hamas in West Bank, no tunnels, no fighters.
Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-26/damage-data-reveals-e...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/5/24/satellite-...
And that just from the start of war.
Yeah, we can look at how Mariupol looks on satellite images. It looks nothing like Rafah. You have to be completely blind to not see the difference.
Here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TncezF72LxaWAKYY7
That’s Bahkmut which is still close to the frontline. They were talking about Mariupol which the Russians have actually rebuilt already, see here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mariupol,+Donetsk+Oblast,+...
No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."
"Russia is claiming it as theirs for the last four years and has largely rebuilt it" is not really counter-evidence to destruction during the fighting
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
Also the Palestinian buildings are practically made of cardboard because that's all the supplies they can get (because mysteriously supplies keep not arriving, oh well, no way to know why they don't)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mar'inka,+Donetsk+Oblast,+...
Many of the towns along the front with Russia are also wastelands. Nearly every single building from homes, to schools, to shops are rubble.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/10/28/how-russias-invas...
It does not look the same, at all.
Cities in the heat of the conflict (i.e boots on the ground) sure do look like that
> Looks the same in Ukraine
It does not.
> and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position. Everything gets pounded, even forests and tree lines. It’s more like Verdun than anything that happened in Gaza.
> It does not
In absolutely does [1].
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't "actually" exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ySLyCjNnrI
It can be (and is imho) true that both Russia and Israel have broadcasted genocidal intent with the consequences being war crimes and still not look identical
It seems like the state of Ukraine frontline cities is due to intense artillery fire and air bombingn whereas gaza cities states seem to be more of systematic bulldozing of entire areas which would erase the marks of actual bombings and make the scale harder to assess
> If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too.
Both are the results of aggressive madmen, but both situations are different. And the genocide aspect is not what is discussed here.
Also, why do you think that “Russia is doing the same thing” is some kind of gotcha?
Well, it happened in germany with the hitleryouth and volksturm.
The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
Systematic destruction of urban areas is sadly what modern urban combat operations look like.
When an enemy digs in and choose to fight and die in an urban area, this is how war plays out.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/10/28/how-russias-invas...
WAR IS HELL
Rafah was no village, with 250,000 to 280,000 people.
Similar size to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol
> The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
But that’s not what we see in Gaza. The parents specifically mentioned that only towns were leveled. The destroyed towns are not the only relevant aspect. The other one is that major damage happens only there. And of course it would, because the Israeli forces don’t want to sterilise the land; they want to take it. In contrast, Russia is happy to be king of the rubble as long as Ukrainians eat shells.
If your enemy is dug in in an urban area, you bomb the hell out of it before you send in infantry to clean up. If you don’t use artillery and bombs the defenders will mow down the assault units.
This is how urban war is played out between near peer armies.
Think about this, I’m in a concrete bunker with a machine gun, do you want to charge the bunker and get shot, or do you want to call in an airstrike to destroy the bunker with the machine gun position? I know what I’d do
Or, if you're the IDF, and the bunker is filled with neutral UN Observers monitoring for war crimes, you also send in a laser-guided bunker-busting airstrike. Then you insist it was an "accident" while refusing to cooperate with the subsequent investigations.
https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2015/07/24/history-july-25th-2006-m...
Of note, just days before the strike, one of the Observers sent an unencrypted email home to his wife noting that he was observing Israeli war crimes and would be reporting them.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/un-officer-reported-is...
"When in doubt, send in an airstrike."
I'm sorry, Ukraine war discussion was labeled political on HN, not allowed, actively moderated and shutdown. Please don't post it here. Only Gaza/Israel get's a special carveout for these sorts of discussions on HN.
I’m not sure your point? They are not civilians when they are covering up tunnels in their homes for Hamas to use.
Look at Google map of Gaza city, Rafah, Khan-Younes, Al Qarara, ... pretty much all building have been destroyed. You want to try to argue that every one of them was somehow hiding a tunnel ?
Is having tunnels in their own territory a problem?
You can also see a lot of buildings demolished on the Egyptian side too.
In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.
It also looks similar to Mosul in Iraq before and after the ISIS and Iraq and coalition forces fought:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
Urban warfare is brutal, especially when one side systematically digs in and uses IEDs and booby traps in civilian buildings.
Yeah, this is not what happened here. You can look up Israeli articles from the time that described that nothing was going on for weeks on end other than demolitions. Basically no fighting. You get Israeli politicians repeating beforehand that Rafah will get leveled.
They wanted to level the city, they did. That's all. There was some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah, but nothing that would justify this. And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them, yet they managed to murder more than a thousand of people.
> IEDs and booby traps
Scary! Can we get photos of those? Wait, they look suspiciously like medical equipment and incubators…
(Will the Chosen Ones reclassify radiological equipment as nuclear weapons next? Stay tuned for more!)
Oh 100%, you can see specific buildings (mostly marked as schools) that are still standing.
This wasn't done with strikes, but with (remote controlled) bulldozers. https://idfclub.org/remote-controlled-warfare-how-israels-ro...
Wow. So the next Rachel Corinne will be killed by a robot.
Prolonged "surgical" strikes continued so long that there is almost nothing left to operate on I guess. And your justification is that some farms are not completely destroyed? What a disingenuous remark.
For comparison, here's Mosul in Iraq after the defeat of ISIS:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/middle-east/2016/11/01/battl...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mosul-satellite_n_596d34a3e4b...
This should be higher I think - it is pretty clear that cities get demolished during war, whether purposefully or not.
It's pretty clear you didn't look at the pictures. The destruction in Mosul appears very limited compared to the annihilation of Rafah.
I did look at them and the destruction in both was horrific. I'm not saying that the conflicts are in anyway comparable, but both include fairly comprehensive destruction of civilian areas.
Mosul still had tons of standing buildings where Rafah has entire neighborhoods demolished down to the ground. The destruction there is far more systematic because it's intentional and systematized to drive Palestinians out of the area.
Interesting. Despite the images of Mosul (e.g. on the NYTimes) being presumably selected to show the areas with largest impacts, the destruction is in patches and you can see many houses still standing. In Rafah, every single house has been razed to the ground.
If you want to compare before and after:
https://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649... - then click "show historical imagery" next to the search box.
The horror of the "Playground" marker here: https://earth.google.com/web/@31.28532193,34.25349609,77.611...
I'm a little confused by this one, because if you hit the "Show historical imagery" button, and go back through the prior years, I don't really see much or anything of a playground there.
Usually a football field.
That's a playground when you are poor
idk if it's the same "playground" we found, but honestly just looks like an site prepared for building: https://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649...
The icons from what was there before are a haunting digital ghost. School, Restaurant, Pharmacy all the city is just rubble.
Not only should we be critical of how Israel wages this war, but we should also recognize the role of Hamas. Deliberate killing of non-combatants, civilian abductions, unguided rocket and mortar fire, use of human shields, perfidy and disguise, all war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
Also Russians have just bombed a Dobrobut hospital in Kyiv. One of many war crimes happening every day. We also need to be talking about that conflict as well.
How much more do we need to talk about it?
For one thing, there isn't a major, bi-partisan, pro-Russian-war-crime lobby with a controlling interest currently sitting in government.
The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations nor is it an ally to most of NATO countries. The gripe many of us have with Israel's actions is that we enable them directly by providing money, weapons and manpower. No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes, whereas just recently we started seeing some manner of blowback to Israel's.
The situations are not the same, but western nations are absolutely funding Putin’s actions through oil and gas imports.
Despite a lot of posturing, and a fair amount of presumably sincere effort, billions continue to flow.
But considerably less than before the war and the EU are making efforts to decouple themselves, it's just not a switch that could be turned off, certainly not in the same way that support for Israel could be or could have been in the past decades.
> The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations
Incorrect.
The west still buys Russian gas. Half of Russian gas exports go there.
https://energyandcleanair.org/august-2026-monthly-analysis-o...
> No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes
The US doesn’t condemn Russian aggression, and try get the current administration to say that Russia invaded or is committing war crimes.
This war's blood is on your hands. It could have been stopped in January 2022, it could have been stopped several months later. There were other occasions, every time you torpedoed whatever efforts there were. In all cases you pursued your "geopolitical" goals, which is to dismember Russia, take its territory and resources, and do to its people things way worse than what you (yes, you) did to them in the 90-s.
As for the war crimes, "for some reason" you don't tell about the ukranian ones, which are plenty. As you are - of course - not concerned with their homicidal nationalistic anti Russisn propaganda, which gives further "motivation" to these crimes.
Ah, yes...Russia had no choice but to invade the land of the sovereign nation and bomb civilian targets with hypersonic missiles.
ukranians massacred civilians in Izyum, Kupyanzk, Kursk, just to name a few, for not wanting to side with them. They arbitrarily kill people (elderly, women, children) who want to escape to the Russian side (or if they just want to exclude this possibility). These are facts (source: telegram channels, which, confronted with your "free journalism", are a more reliable source of information).
This is the war, which were not you around, would never happen.
I support Ukraine with all my heart (and a little money) but whatabouting will get you nothing. This is a thread about the hamas-israeli war. There's no reason to change the subject and it doesn't take away ability to talk about Ukraine elsewhere.
Actually some people have mentioned the invasion and occupation of Ukraine in this comment section to draw parallels or make distinctions
It should be noted that Hamas exists because of the occupation and atrocities that Israel has been committing for decades and decades. All war is atrocious, the actions of terrorists are disgusting, BUT you cannot discuss the actions of Hamas in a vacuum and forget why they even formed in the first place and continue to carry out their actions.
As soon as you murder civilians you lose all your justification. I mean both sides.
Correct.
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
In every war civilians are murdered. By both sides: bombing of rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima…
And yet we can and we should still make distinctions when we talk about those subjects
Estimates for the death toll of US and British strategic bombing, for instance, range from 300,000 to 600,000 in Europe and around 330,000 in Japan (including the atomic bombings)
Now compare that with 12–17 million civilians killed deliberately by Nazi Germany and the around 6 millions killed deliberately by imperial Japan
Relevant bluesky thread for HN's dearest historian, Bret Devereaux: https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3mw4...
if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.
> f you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly
Most war is unjustified. Violent resistance is almost never unjustified if one lacks access to elections.
But violent resistance that targets civilians robs itself and its cause of justice until that rot is removed and regretted. It's not only morally wrong. It's strategically stupid. Terrorist tactics do not work–they radicalize the enemy and unfavorably polarize the alliance space.
Remember the videos Ukraine circulated of sharing tea with Russian POWs? Imagine if Hamas had only targeted military outposts and then shared images like that one from its bunkers under Gaza City?
A cause can be fundamentally justified but still piss away its advantages with poor strategy. At the end of the day, Hamas has acted in Iran's interests. Not the Palestinians'. (Same with Hezbollah. Same with the Houthis, though to a marginally lesser degree.)
What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?
> What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?
Prioritize a cease fire. If you can’t target you probably can’t run much of a modern economy either. Which raises the question of what you’re actually fighting for.
Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group? Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany.
I used to believe this.
It seems like a reasonable take. But when we look at any oppressed group, getting murdered at the hands of their oppressors, there often is no negotiation through peaceful means.
History shows us that the threat of violence or violence becomes a necessary point of leverage to bring about change.
American schools have washed the story of the civil rights movement, but MLK only had success because of Malcolm X.
There’s many other historical instances of this. Whether it’s the Indian Independence movement in the 1940s fighting from British rule, the 1500s-1800s of native Americans resisting our ancestors colonialization, our own American revolution, and even labor movements like the battle of Blair mountain in the 1920s.
We like to propagandize American history where non-violence was productive, but violence has always been an unfortunately necessary tool when it comes to changing oppression.
Where did I say non-violence?
I said don't murder civilians
Also, who exactly "loses justification": just the individual perpetrators or their whole collective? I hope you wouldn't say that every black slave lost their right for freedom after Nat Turner's gang killed civilians? [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner#Rebellion
It's a thought that is intuitive and intellectually satisfying but you produce no evidence for your claims.
Blair Mountain was a total defeat for the miners. Union organizing in West Virginia collapsed afterward and only recovered with New Deal labor law in the 30s
For native Americans, well, do you really want to discuss the results ?
For India you could argue that it's not non-violence but the fact the empire was exhausted militarily that worked. But it's hard to make the case that violent uprisings, who were either suppressed or contained well enough, had an effect. If anything the popularity of the insurgents may have done more that the actual violence but you can get that kind of popularity with non-violence too.
The only time when insurgency is working is when you are able to hide, endure and survive until your enemy is down for other reasons. It can be quite long. Think Mao. Was it the case for India ? Maybe but it's not obvious at all
I actually agree about Malcolm X... except it didn't actually use violence. Only violent rethoric and advocating self-defense. Annnnnd biggest wins like the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965) passed before the Watts riot (August 11, 1965) and the wave of urban uprisings that followed
What was there before Hamas?
The PLO, which was getting too peaceful for Netanyahu's tastes so he had to prop up Hamas instead.
Think about how the modern communists love Hamas despite Hamas not being pro LGBT.
Think about how the PLO was a KGB linked terrorist organizations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106419296113226300
Interesting you didn't make any actual point there. On purpose, I assume. You're just doing the Joe Rogan meme of telling us to think about something.
What makes you believe this? Please show hard facts, not just wand waving
Netanyahu said so. Please do a quick Google before commenting, it'll make your propaganda much more effective.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
Also using child soldiers.
Isn't almost everyone in Gaza a child since they tend to starve or get struck by missiles before reaching adulthood?
Are you saying there was mass starvation BEFORE the war now?
Things were very different in 1947, but I assume there was not mass starvation in Palestine back then.
But the West does acknowledge it, almost exclusively. Any criticism of Israel's war crimes are followed by "But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?" and "Do you condemn Hamas and the attack they conducted in Oct 7"? Mainstream media only shows Hamas actions, and only recently started highlighting Israel's war crimes due to increased souring of their reputation among audiences. Hamas actions also shouldn't be taken in isolation, the atrocities of October 7 didn't happen in a vacuum, but as a reaction to a conflict that has been happening for almost 80 years that is overwhelmingly one sided.
> But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?
I've started to think this worry about a particular nation's right to exist is really a great rhetorical trick: nobody is particularly upset the nation of east Germany ceased to exist, and you don't hear Erdogan opposing Kurdish independence with "Doesn't the Turkie have a right to exist?"
There is a basic human right of self determination, but if you think what follows is that you should get your own nation then look at how the soviet policies of providing exactly that worked out. They even created a the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east!
Israel understands that power and diplomacy are what secure your land.
Hamas still thinks a made up God is what does.
You mean, Hamas, one of the only armies that doesn't fight with a uniform and hides artillery in civilian buildings?
Do the settlers wear uniforms when they kill villagers?
The world is aware of the answer to that one.
You really need to quantify each of those things and many more to be able to compare. Otherwise it's meaningless.
Pin-pointing Hamas and Oct 7 is pretty much a logical trap, because Netanyahu and Hamas had been symbiotic -- which put them in the very same ballpark. Both enjoyed their own external threats, and, through that, established strong political influence.
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
that's non-sense. Symbiotic is a horrible way to put it. You and I may not be supporters of any of them but to call a terror organization with a clear charter of destroying Israel and killing all jews symbiotic with Nethanyhu is just succumbing to a narrative someone is feeding you.
these kind of messages show us how good propaganda and brain washing is.
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
Here's a scholarly peer reviewed paper from the Science of Remote Sensing documenting the farm destruction: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266601722... Scroll down to see the photos.
Even right wing news, such as Fox has covered this: https://www.foxnews.com/world/before-after-images-show-devas...
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
Netanyahu literally created them because their alternative was getting too peaceful and if Gaza was peaceful they wouldn't have a justification to keep destroying it. This is well-known info.
This is one those arguments that has a strong version that is wrong and a weaker version that is true but then it's up to you to assess responsibility and blame
I won't post the answer here but I'd suggest anyone to ask you favorite llm (Opus for me) the following prompt:
Assess the statement that Nethanhyu has been working to prop up Hamas or with Hamas in some sort of "my best ennemy" scheme
If you can't bother to write it why would anyone bother to read it?
I am not going to start copy/pasting llm output here no. I am just reminding everyone that assessing those kinds of claims with a good llm is a good way to fend off the craziness of some comments while learning more about the new information they just told you about
A new Haaretz investigstion found that on October 7 Hamas offered to release the hostages. Israel said no. That's because Israel needs the hostages to be hostages as a casus belli.
In every such post you have people both-sidesing. Killing almost 100k people is not equivalent to whatever Hamas has done. Hamas bad, Israel worse. It's not very difficult.
Israel is doing colonial violence to steal land and do ethnic cleansing. Hamas is doing anti-colonial violence to free themselves from people oppressing them.
You could argue that Israel is doing this because Hamas is so bad, but then you look at what Israel is doing in the other part of palestine not controlled by Hamas? Daily pogroms and violent ethnic oppression of all kinds.
The problem is that Israel is based on ethnic supremacy. The way the victims (the palestinians) react is not relevant.
> but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict
Often we don't acknowledge the horror of Israel's multi-decade siege on Gaza¹ and occupation of Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
There, I fixed it for you.
[1] As early as 1967, U.S. Senator Albert Gore Sr. called Gaza “a vast concentration camp on the sand”.
It's not a war. It's US/Israeli propaganda to call it as such. Wars occurs between state actors. This is wholesale slaughter of people on land you claim that you've deliberately put in an open air prison and starved.
The level of violence is set by the occupier. Would there be pearl-clutching about the Warsaw Uprising, John Brown or Nat Turner? What about resistance to British occupation of Ireland (or India or any number of other British colonial projects)? The ANC in South Africa was incredibly violent in its resistance to apartheid. Resistance movements in occupied Europe were also incredibly violent (eg killing collaborators).
What you seem to have fallen for is tone policing a 78 year long resistance. A lot of people (generally, not you specifically) have this belief that things began on Oct 7. You will get questions of "why can't they resist peacefully?" Well, they have. Multiple times. Most recently with the March of Return several years earlier. Many don't know about it because it was barely reported on. What happened? For the "crime" of standing within a few hundred yards of the fence, the IOF used protestors as target practice. 500+ dead, 8000+ wounded. "Wounded" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting too because it included deliberately and permanently maiming people by blowing their legs off deliberately [1].
"Terrorism" is a political designation. And the US doesn't face such threats? Really? The police kill over 1000 people every single year. Mass shootings? Why isn't that seen as terrorism? Or the violence committed by ICE against random US citizens or detainees?
I'll leave you with this quote from JFK [2]:
[1]: https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-snipers-brag-about-deli...
[2]: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...
Hamas has every right to resist. Unguided rockets? There's IDF in nearly every building in Israel. The excuses used to genocide Palestinians far more aptly describe Israel.
The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel. A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
"Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective"
Yes it is, and some countries have become very good at doing that
I take a harsher stance: that we should expect division to be sewn among us by our adversaries, and harden ourselves accordingly through open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate (rather than flame wars, especially in popular contexts like tv and social media).
I find it strange that the antidotes to a lot of the bad stuff going on today is basic enlightement stuff: cultivating a citizenry who value evidence-based worldview, education and rule of law. Yet it feels like that is increasingly slipping from our fingers.
The "bad stuff going on today" that you call is the opposite of enlightenment - citizenry based on emotions, tribal and racial affiliations, and rule of strength. There are countries and media that actively promote such a world, since it's easy to get rich and powerful in circumstances like these.
> open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
> The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
So did Netanyahu. His far-right policies require an eternal enemy to distract the people and blame for everything going wrong. The October 7 attack definitely didn't hurt his position in national politics.
I don't have a strong position on this but seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act.
I mean come on... Hamas were seen practising flying hang gliders around the strip and one of the most paranoid states in the world didn't think that merited some investigation?
And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
> And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
Is wrong. It is kind of you to show you don't know what you are talking about.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Well the official story IIRC is the border was more lightly manned than normal (and with more reservists than normal) because it was a national holiday.
But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
Because if that is stupidity then yes, it is very stupid
Official? It is well known in Israel and for it's enemy that on holidays there are less people. Nothing weird or reasons to doubt it.
> But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
No, if they did they wouldn't have anyone on the border.
Dear reader, notice how they shifted their claim from "And everyone just happened to not be at their posts" to the official story (wink wink although I offered no real evidence) is that the border was lightly manned.
> It is well known in Israel and for it's enemy that on holidays there are less people. Nothing weird or reasons to doubt it.
I'm Israel's enemy and still had no idea about that. Beyond stupid if true.
They are a truly strange people sometimes
Bibi had the advance knowledge and let it happen because he’s fine with collateral damage even if it’s his own countrymen. A few dead Jews are nothing to him if it means More Land To King Over.
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
Yes that would be the basic thesis.
It's a bit too 4D chess for my liking but would also explain some things that otherwise don't add up
> seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act
Regardless of the facts in this specific event, you can make much the same argument about many of the major 21st century terror attacks - there were multiple warnings leading up to 9/11, and the FBI and CIA had eyes on several of the perpetrators before the attacks. They didn't "choose not to act" in so much as institutional disfunction prevented the dots from being connected or any preemptive action being taken, but from the outside it looks pretty much the same.
I would indeed also cast some suspicions on those events, yes, but also with no firm conclusion.
I'm open minded, could see it either way
Several spy agencies also tipped them off about the specific attack, I think it was UAE and Qatar as well as the IDF themselves?
"The sad thing" is that 100k+ humans were brutally killed and the lives of 2 million others were destroyed. The second sad thing is that Germany will never learn. Also, I'd suggest you look up the definition of the word "terrorist".
> The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
That's what the sad thing is?
> A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Interesting interpretation.
The Israel stock market is up about 100% since October 7.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
> Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged
Is that the same program that was compeletly damages last year?
The same program that was two weeks away from completion since the nineties. And will again be two weeks away the next time it's convenient.
Strange way to measure success, reducing everything to a powerpoint with graphs, its almost like humans dont exist.
I have no stake in this conflict.
The flip side of your statement is that more nations than before decided to recognize a Palestine state and that it seems for the first time in decades US support for Israel is waning.
Israel is military and economically strong. It’s also a small country in a difficult region that needs trade partners and international connections, probably more so in a future full of climate change.
Maybe they would find it easier to get trade partners if they hadn't spent most of a hundred years murdering the extended families of all their potential trade partners. Somehow I'm finding it hard to have sympathy for their inability to find trade partners.
> Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
sounds like the terrorists did indeed win
Eh, those are short term gains. Popular opinion has shifted away from Israel since they've increased their attacks and basically no longer hide the fact they want to eradicate Palestinians wherever they may be. They can't throw antisemitism rhetoric anymore because people have caught on to their victim syndrome. What they're doing is the same thing the US has been doing for decades, creating terrorists by oppressing entire generations and it will end the same way, eventually, when a critical mass opposes their regime or until they elect someone as dumb as the US did and throws all pretenses out the window. They either succeed in their genocide or all they're doing is motivating people who will one day have an impact.
"Hamas and Gaza" You mean Palestinians right? But yeah, it seems genocide is a profitable business.
This is a psychopaths measure of success.
Well Israel is also the only developed country on earth with a fertility rate above replacement.
I don’t know what metrics you would consider non-psychopathic.
Getting married, having children, being materially successful, destroying your enemies. These are good things.
> destroying your enemies
This is psychopathic.
You are wrong, this is the mindset that allows such atrocities to become possible, even from non-psychopaths. Sadly, to a lot of people, there are not "humans" but "enemies", and once that's given, any atrocity follows.
This seems like some serious rose colored outlook. Support for Israel in their patron state has absolutely plummeted in the last year. Support is almost certain to be cut back sharply by the next administration and might go to zero in the near future.
Iran's nuclear program has hardly been destroyed long term and there is almost no chance a durable nuclear agreement comes out of this war. It will almost certainly be a vague memorandum where Iran pinky swears to never build a nuke and then starts building one as soon as the fighting stops. America isn't going to start endless wars to prevent that and Israel can't do it alone. The long term future looks grim for the Middle East, especially for Israel.
I wish I could share your optimism, but the fact of the matter is that American politicians are beholden to their sponsors on both sides of the aisle, and the military industrial complex and American imperialism which Israel is a part of, are both popular initiatives among their primary funding sources.
Meanwhile, most of the voter base (perhaps understandably) cares more about domestic issues than they do about the plight of people on the other side of the world who they are killing and exploiting with their tax dollars.
Given all this, I don't know how you can be so certain that anything will change with a new administration, even with polling demonstrating that voters do disapprove of support for Israel now. Most of the people who disapprove of funding Israel don't care about it strongly enough for it to be a significant factor in their engagement with electoral politics (which for most people is also just limited to voting once every 2 to 4 years)
Also Mileikowsky and the roving gang of international Zionists and Chosen Ones have veto power over 90% of the governments in the world.
The US congress and senate get their laws and edicts directly from the top brass of the IDF.
Every single head of state in the Eurozone (bar Perro Sanxe, who is controlled by Morocco instead) and every single bureaucrat have to follow the rules set down by Israel, lest the union collapse.
They're everywhere you look. You don't have to fall for Hasbara or Unit 8200 propaganda about how this totally means you're an irredeemable monster, they are the ones who are pushing this.
Perro is controlled by Morocco because he’s being blackmailed by Morocco for the stuff they found in his phone… using Israeli spyware.
which one you called terrorist?
surely the one creating such destructions and deaths no?
Somehow a powerful state army destroying homes and killing civilians is not "terrorist". It's only "terrorist" if the weak try to respond in kind, using means available to them. It's almost like "terrorist" is a propaganda term used by the strong against the weak who try to resist.
As the saying goes "war is terrorism with a bigger budget".
That's the sad thin? not the destruction and wholescale murder?
There's not much of a fissure in Ireland, the consensus there is pro Palestine. They see parallels between how Israel is treating the Palestinians and how the UK treated Ireland. Generally they don't view the bigger country next door trying to take over a smaller country favourably, and that's even without the mention of the word genocide which certainly doesn't help Israel's case.
There are several factors involved as I see it - a lot of money from Qatar flowing to make sure Israel is always shown as the aggressor, anti-semmitism is still prevalent, most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East anyway, people don't understand what living 10km from people who want to kill you looks and, and war is horrible and it's always easier to side with the people who seem to be the underdog.
> most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East
In your own words, what is the issue in the Middle East?
Unfortunately this is a story as long as time itself, with tons of narratives to it so I can't write as a HN comment.
I wish I was eloquent and knowledgeable enough to write it, I'd probably write a book.
Is it? Here's my summary for you:
In 1948 a colonial mission from West Europe invaded Palestine. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
That’s certainly one way of describing it.
Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.
This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.
You could say that, but you'd be wrong, like saying indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined mostly by lehalmimmgirwnts, built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy, in South Africa.
The problem is the inexorable logic of war - fighting everyone everywhere all the time - has led to the war expanding until it collides with an enemy that is actually comparable to Israel, i.e. Iran. And that war has now expanded to include the world's supply of oil.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
It's hard to blame Iran when they literally weren't doing anything until we attacked them. You don't blame a child for punching back against the school bully - unless you're also a bully.
I don't think Iran are entirely blameless given their sponsorship of Hezbollah and participation in the Yemeni (and previously Lebanese!) civil wars. They've been maintaining a sort of sub-threshold threat in the area for a long time. Which was why, yes, it was an incredibly bad idea for US/Israeli attacks to escalate that.
https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-lebanese-civil-war-in-... (article is rather more favourable to them than I would be, but it describes the basic history)
Any rocket or bullet turned against Israel for the past 20 years has its roots in Iran. Iran controlled Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and Iraq through its militias.
This rhetoric reminds me of how, at one time, everything bad that happened to Germany was said to be orchestrated by you know who.
Those who shall not be named did not fund, arm, train and direct militias that controlled Austria, France and Poland.
German media said they did
Germans believed they did
Look at the pictures from the original post.
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
This wasn't a reaction though, this is what Israel's been doing there since its foundation. Oct 7 only intensified existing patterns.
I'm confused about your opening line. First you say the terrorists won, then you continue to elaborate how the terrorists are losing. So they won but now they are losing again?
Those aren't the same people. I am pro-Palestine, I am not a terrorist.
Israelis largely consider anyone who acknowledges the existence of Arab descendants of the Canaanites as terrorists.
Indeed the terrorists did win, as we can see from these images.
I would honestly say the people committing the genocide won, as it was always their goal
That's what they said - the terrorists.
Israeli regime is pure terror.
https://x.com/AliAbunimah/status/2103890594137309425
Stupid question but if Israel is willing to flatten cities, how have they not won the war yet?
Too many Palestinians have nothing to live for, except revenge.
They have won. The goal is keeping Netanyahu in power and ethic cleansing.
Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) has repeatedly called for the "voluntary emigration" or forced removal of Gazan residents and urged the permanent resettlement of Israelis inside the Gaza Strip.
Not every Palestinian is dead yet. And they've moved on to Lebanon. Not to mention that the war has widened to include Iran.
What would qualify as having won? Every Palestinian dead?
They don't want to completely destroy Gaza. In the aftermath, they would be held accountable for destroying Gaza, plus they'd have no guinea pigs for the surveillance and military tech. All the big Israeli surveillance firms test their products on Gaza first, it's the most surveilled place in the world.
But they also don't want it to get too big or powerful. Israel calls it "mowing the lawn"[1]. You want to have grass on the lawn, but not too much, so you periodically cut off the excess grass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
> In the aftermath, they would be held accountable for destroying Gaza
By who?
The ICC, their own political opposition, their own competitors within their party.
Doubt it. Bibi operates above all that noise. Same as Putin.
Accountability isn’t achievable, as far as I can tell. Especially when there’s some lucrative real estate deals for Gaza land on the table. IDF brings bulldozers as part of their attacks on other countries for a reason.
Both Bibi and Putin hold their positions more precariously than you'd think, although they do manage to maintain them.
How easy do you think it would be for anyone close to Putin to slip him some poison or just stab him with a knife? To prevent that happening, a whole lot of stuff has to be kept oriented towards him remaining the president.
One of Bibi's support pillars is the perpetual threat of Israel's destruction. He positions himself as standing between Israel and destruction, so replacing him would be dangerous.
Has the United States won its "war on terror" yet? Why not?
Some of the people contributing here were born after the "war on terror" started.
Genocide doesn't actually work as a tactic, especially in an urban setting. It strengthens the victim's resolve. The Palestinian people are not known for giving up on survival.
Well, it works if you complete it, because there is nobody left to fight back. But Israel wants a short lawn, not a slab of dirt.
I'm sorry, but that's quantitatively incorrect. In ancient settings, particularly for pre-agrarian forces, "genocide" was another word for "victory", but we have plenty of examples.
North America of course, but Africa is an overlapping series of successful genocides, Argentina's "Conquest of the Desert", Qing conquest of the Dzungar, Russia's conquest of the Circassians, Athens and Melos 416 BCE, Rome and Carthage, Rome and lots, Mongolians and whew even more than that -- all of them victories but also a "Where are the Khazars?" sort of event. They're just gone. Violence will forever be Mankind's one true Universal Language -- easier to learn than Esperanto.
Post-Trinity, the thermonuclear deterrent has put the kibosh on genocide as a working tactic. For a bit. The evolution post Cold-War might well turn out to be that genocide is back, baby, as long as the genocidee doesn't have a nuclear deterrent. It's cosmically fitting that the great genocidal wars of the 20th century birthed the final perfected weapon for doing genocides.
They did in Gaza. They still have Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, the Sinai Peninsula and Iran to go through before they achieve The Greatest Israel. That's a ton of genocide, over 100M people they have to kill. It's gonna take a while.
Push far enough north and you're also sharing engagement area with Turkey, which has already been a bit of a worry even this year.
I also suspect that the Great Alliance between the Sunni/Arab autocracies and Israel is more fragile than it appears. Or, more accurately, and the Sunni/Arab autocracies themselves are more fragile than they appear.
Google Maps acting as a real-time war damage tracker is a sobering use case. The raw satellite data is a stark visual.
Atomic dome vibes when looking at some of the few buildings still standing
It's sad that so much of this conversation has devolved into technicalities of whether this is a genocide.
You can't look at this, at reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, at Israel's own government officials' statements, and not, at minimum, believe that brutal war crimes were committed on a massive basis here. Whether it's "Holocaust level" or "genocide" is a red herring. It needs universal condemnation, it needs to stop, and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
> it needs to stop
It did stop. When the hostages were freed and Hamas gave up. Which they could have done at any point. Or you know, they could not have started the war too.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/18/run-get-away-w...
Maybe look at Hamas own videos on when they started the war too. For comparison.
Hamas offered to free all the hostages on October 7. Israel refused and shot all of the hostages they did release. Why did Israel do that?
What are your sources for both claims?
The Haaretz investigation
Citation needed.
Israel... shot... the hostages. Is this seriously your claim?
The IDF themselves confirmed this. You could easily use chatgpt and check for yourself but you don't seem interested in the truth.
Citation needed. Since there are plenty of freed hostages that have done interviews, this seems falsified on its face.
There are no technicalities, only sophisms written by bots.
> and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
The ICC is trying to do that, but is being impeded by the US.
Sounds like quite the impotent organization then
That is why the ICC needs our help and support.
Rightful people supports the week. Only the depraved laughs when a person without power is being abused.
Eh. First, they made a mistake: the ICC cannot hold anyone accountable - it only will only determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel did, in fact, do a genocide. Despite finding it beyond a shadow of a doubt (which is why it's taking so long), they will be doubted anyway.
I have been watching the atrocities that Israel have been committing since 1987 and there is simply zero argument any supporter of the regime can make to change my mind that they are evil, by every definition of the word.
There is no justification for their actions. There is no justification for the greater Israel project they are pushing. There is no justification for them to be taking a leadership role in the global security technology industry. The whole thing is just absolutely Fkd and I find any person trying to contort the argument in a way to justify this shit to be evil themselves.
The fact that this comment is being upvoted as much as down shows me that evil exists here too.
Have you considered that it's bad to kill Jews and that Jews deserve a homeland? Israel is building a great project there - a Jewish homeland - while Arabs are trying to destroy it.
Never mind that it's also a Palestinian homeland and Muslim homeland. Those ones don't count because uh, we said so.
Are you willing to give up your land so that someone else can have it as their 'homeland'? Who was there 2000 years ago?
Maybe you missed the sarcasm. Btw the descendants of the people there 2000 years ago are the current Palestinians; the current Israelis are mostly the descendants of West European colonizers from the 1948 invasion.
You can take that or leave my feedback, but your comment didn't come across as sarcasm to me until I read this comment.
Poes law or something.
I agree with your position, but it didn't read as sarcasm to me.
> those ones don't count because uh, we said so
wasn't a dead giveaway?
I read your full comment and got the sarcasm, but I don't blame people who read the first line and tuned out the rest because it was such a perfect example of the genocide apologia that we've seen so much of already.
I get that in this case the rest of the comment was short and the obvious indicator of sarcasm came quickly, but it's all too common for this to devolve into paragraphs of repetitive, uncreative slopaganda, which has resulted in many who disagree just tuning out early.
Well, like I said, no. And to be clear, you're free to ignore that. But, of course, that's exactly what I wrote and you managed to miss that, so I suppose none of us are communicating very well.
non-X Google Maps link to ~location of screenshot: https://www.google.com/maps/@31.2857778,34.2533333,1010m
Thank you for putting this together. Free Palestine!
IANAL nor ICJ nor ICC to officially name genxxide but This looks much (MUCH) worse than the worst thing Putin did to Ukraine
Are you afraid to use the word "genocide"? Just curious.
reminded me of this post from earlier this year, also Rafah but from the ground:
https://x.com/MacaesBruno/status/2017251152900079675
It's sad that most world leaders do nothing to combat such genocide. There are so few sanctions against the state, or specific people, of Israel. Foreign forums are very much still open for business to them.
1) Ultimately, money means more to foreign nations than what happens with internal affairs of their trading partners
2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.
What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
The post you are responding to lists several possible actions. Another good start would be to stop providing the weapons that have done this damage.
Cut off weapon gifts+sales to Israel, impose sanctions. Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).
Nuclear weapons sure, but what is this about Epstein?
he's referring to the fact that epstein is a mossad agent and that compromised world leaders are being blackmailed to support the genocide
Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell in particular) are widely believed to have operated as a massive Mossad blackmail operation, collecting (and creating) blackmail material against western politicians and influential individuals to ensure their support for Israel.
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
and it seems pretty likely that's exactly what was happening.
The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say
Why is it likely ? Why not Russia ? I’ve heard it’s Russia ?
Because Epstein had ties to Israel and not to Russia. There might be a similar ring run by Russia as well, who knows.
Didn't he have ties to basically all powerful people? Is there something special about his Israel ties that are different to his Bill Gates ties?
I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:
Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.
He has ties to all powerful people as his clients, but he has ties to Israel that look closer to them being his employer.
Without some pretty good evidence, it sounds like conjecture, which is fine, but nothing of substance is being presented here.
Of course. A very valid way to view it, and the same way I would've viewed it in 2016 if you told me there was a global elite pedophile ring that helped get Trump elected.
Epstein definitely had ties to Russia. I don't know how to assess how important those were but they did exist
Epstein is thought to have been working for Mossad. If that's true, they probably have copies of all the video tapes (which we know were made) of all the stuff rich people did on Epstein island. This theory would single-handedly explain why almost everyone in the Epstein files supports Israel so strongly.
So you're suggesting that Israel would drop a nuke on a Western country imposing a boycott? Somehow, I doubt it.
> Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
Who's this "we" who dealt with the SA apartheid state?
The international pressure on SA did absolutely nothing to change their mind (I'm old enough to have seen PW Botha's Rubicon speech live on TV). The NP (political party in charge) was slowly and carefully convinced to push out the hardliners.
The people left, like FW De Clerk, actually did the dismantling - unbanned the ANC, released Mandfela from prison, switched to allowing black voters, etc.
The rest of the world's pressure had absolutely no effect on the leadership. Change only came when leadership started changing.
See this for more background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiations_to_end_apartheid_...
The actual on the ground resistance was of central importance in the end of South African apartheid, but the international pressure and sanctions greatly increased the need for negotiations to begin. The point is to increase the pressure to change leadership through democratic means.
This could hopefully happen somewhat faster with Israel, given that the government isn't a literal Nazi remnant, as the South African government was. (Though, ironically, the main arms supplier to South Africa during the arms embargo was Israel, often reselling weapons from the United States. Sigh.)
"By the late 1980s, the South African state was in profound crisis, crippled by international sanctions, a stagnant economy, and widespread resistance. Recognizing the unsustainable nature of the perpetual conflict, the government under P.W. Botha began tentative, secret contact with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Africa_(1948%...
A lot.
Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed. This is why Hamas changed policies to only give up hostages through 3rd parties. They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored. [1]
So for starters, the US could have pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas to return the hostages.
As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times). The US could have at a minimum threaten to withhold aide. In fact, there are laws on the books that a country such as Israel committing war crimes is ineligible for aide.
Finally, the UN should have deployed peace keepers to gaza specifically to stop the genocide.
Actions could have been taken, but they weren't because our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money as to turn a complete blind eye to it's misdeeds.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-09-...
So you feel like after October 7, there should've just been a talk about what happened and some form of negotiation ?
Quote exactly where I even implied that.
Well what else do you expect when you subjugate a native population for decades? Just expect perfect victims?
The peaceful route didn't work. Only idiots will think continuing with the status quo will result in anything different.
> Finally, the UN should have deployed
UN has no such power. I am still amazed how people do not get this.
Members need to vote for such things to happen. It wouldn't, not in this climate.
The question was
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
This is where you notice that the world is more complicated than social media posts.
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
Then you notice world energy markets are going to be effected by a massive conflict etc.
If the UN went into Gaza, got attacked by Iran, then had to respond, next minute they're attacking a close Russian ally, and maybe even China might have to get involved in that.
What would've been good is if October 7 didn't happen, and that goes for both sides.
Iran would WELCOME UN peace keepers in gaza, are you kidding? Hell, I think even Hamas would welcome their presence. UN peace keepers would mean the likes of UNRA could operate once again in Gaza to deliver aid. It would also mean that Israel would have to stop it's aggression.
> Iran is helping Russia
lol, no, other way around. Though the Russia hasn't really been involved with Iran since Ukraine started. It's actually China that's the biggest Iranian trade partner.
The only party that'd be upset over UN peace keepers in Gaza is Israel.
I don't think what you're saying is actually right, if peacekeepers came in, it would (likely) mean a freezing of the current borders / situation, and isn't that what most people say justified October 7, "the theft of land"?
Allowing international journalists in would make the genocide even harder to deny and at that point there's no more returning to the "current situation". Regarding the border, at least for Hamas the 1967 borders would be just fine: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full (article 20).
Are you actually sending the Hamas charter and expecting me to read that and think it's reasonable ?
(I have read it before)
By all means please enlighten me, what's so unreasonable about it?
Only if you think Israel is entirely correct in their assessment that every single civilian building actually houses dangerous hamas terrorists. I don't think that assessment is correct so I don't think the UN peacekeepers would be behaving exactly like Israel and the IDF has behaved in Gaza. Nor do I think the UN would put the same restrictions on aid coming into Gaza. They wouldn't stop peanut butter and baby formula from entering.
That's not how that answer was phrased. It directly indicated that the UN should have taken that action.
Make it make sense. The question is what should have happened. You say I answered what should have happened. But you also say "that's not how the answer was phrased".
How is my "should have" happened not a direct answer to the question?
That would result in the USA going to war against the UN. There is a reason the UN only takes action when the security council agrees. Countries on the security council can plausibly use their military might to prevent any UN action, so to prevent the senseless deaths of peacekeepers, they are given a verbal veto instead.
No it wouldn't? We are talking hypotheticals. When talking about what world leaders should do I include the US in world leaders.
I wasn't engaging in what's likely, just what should be. Biden and Trump should have been on board with deploying peace keepers. They were not.
If Biden or Trump would simply cut off funding there probably wouldn't be a need for peace keepers any more.
I tend to agree. The US bears a pretty large amount of blame here and I don't think Israel would have continued their aggression had the US withdrawn aid (or threatened to). But if they had continued, then that's where UN peacekeepers should have been deployed.
> Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed.
This is literally terrorist propaganda, they tried to offer a return of a subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not invading and dealing with the Hamas security threat. Obviously Israel was not going to leave such a severe security threat like Hamas intact.
If you had to guess, what do you think they might do? I feel like questions like this are in bad faith. Think about it for a minute, and try to come up with some things that they might do.
Send all collaborators to the international criminal court. (In the US, especially congress critters and members of the executive branch.)
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
How can they forcibly imprison the leaders of a soverein, nuclear armed state?
The remaining non-corrupt members of the executive branch (or the state governments) would uphold the oaths they took, lock potus and friend in boxes, and ship them off.
As for Israel, as I understand it, the next election will mean domestic jail time for the incumbents unless the polls are wildly wrong.
At that point, it would be easy for Israel to start climbing out of lawlessness too.
At the very least diplomatic condemnation and a South African level sanction.
Immediately stop all exports and money flows to Israel. Food and medical aid should still be allowed to both sides, of course.
Do not forget that world leaders are heads of sovereign states that are in charge of their self defense. Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies, need to make public statements that are not hypocritical about what they would do for self defense. This is why both U.S. administrations support Israel's actions
Pretty sure that's not why US administrations support Israel's actions.
Bad phrasing on my part. That is one of many reasons
wow, you hold a very high opinion of american politics. you must have been reading new from paper news paper for the last 30 years
Sure, the need to self defense against US dangerous neighbors. Looking at you, Canada!
Have you been living under a rock? The time when "public statements" used to work is long, long gone.
> Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies
Sure, but are we going to ignore about the US having to rely on its "helpless" allies to provide staging points and cannon fodder for its illegal imperialistic wars? How much of a superpower would it be without its overseas bases?
jesus fucking christ
Another one to look at is the maps of Ukraine [0]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/google-maps-...
Rafah is like Nazi Germany Dresden. You start a war, You Lose a war, You pay the price.
But Israel started the war, in 1948.
Against whom? The British mandate?
Against the people of Palestine who didn't meet the ethno religious profile of the new state.
My ancestors been to this land long before Muhammad married Aisha and sent the colonizers from the Arab peninsula to the shores of the Mediterranean sea.
That's cool, my ancestors are from Africa. Should I invade?
Tou cannot "invade" an unoccupied land. Israel pre-48 already had Jews living under a british mandate, and got the declaration of indepence approved by the UN. So either you trust the UN, or support British colonialism, just find your stance.
Sorry. I didn't realize there was nobody there before Israel was there. So the Palestinians came later then, what year?
Ah yeah, one side starved and bombarded civilians for years, cut off their water and food. But only the side that unleashed a day of savage terrorism is the "barbaric" one.
Funny how plenty of people still think if someone defends the barbarism of Hamas (which I'm not doing), this person should be lynched, but if another person defends the barbarism of the Netanyahu regime, it's fine, because (insert justifications here)... What the fuck's the difference?
>a day of savage terrorism
This has the tone of "a few minutes of action": https://www.espn.co.uk/college-sports/story/_/id/15997412/br...
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, don't you think? That "day of savage terrorism" flowed the other way every single day both before and after 7/10/2023.
Which side starved and cut water? Are you talking about the Egyptians who have a border with Gaza?
Israel, madam.
And so what, yes the Egyptians closed the border, does that mean you consider it fine for Israel to do those things, and they can escape being labelled of "barbaric war criminals", because... why? Because Egypt?
It's like an abusive father beating his kids, and when the neighbor doesn't want to have the burden of taking care of the kids for the foreseeable future (because the police/government clearly prefers to pretend "everything is fine"), you say "Well, it's the neighbor's fault those kids are getting beat up!".
Well, the day I see you protesting against Egypt and blaming them for the situation in Gaza I might consider respecting you more. Until this happens my only suspicion is that "the jews are to blame" chant is from antisemitic reasons. btw, and regardless of the Egypt issue, I'd argue there was a famine in Gaza before 7/10 and per the UN absolutely not today. Thus the barbaric October 7 attack had nothing to do with the health or wealth state of the people in Gaza. For comparison, the palestinoans in Judea and Samaria who are controlled by the Palestinian Authorithy are living relatively good, so if some to blame for anything in Gaza, is the the Hamas terror organization who violently took over the strip.
Israel started the war, so it's more like Bucha
Never in history people faked facts as fast as you do now when saying Israel started Oct 7 war. Not to mention it's modern times and everything was live broadcasted to YouTube by the murderers themselves, this makes you even a bigger liar.
There's no Oct 7 war. There's the Israel-Palestine war, which has been ongoing since 1948.
The 1948 war between the newly formed Israel vs Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon? Do you notice which imaginary country you suggest about is missing from the list?
Nope, the 1948 war between Israel and the people who were already in that territory before some invaders came and declared that it was Israel.
It is absolutely fascinating to see how people are justifying a genocide right before your eyes in this comment thread.
From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.
It's no secret that people get blinded by their own belief and faith. They forget how to see, how to smell, how to taste, and how to hear. They get trapped in a virtual world inside their own minds -- a gigantic Matrix, but without sophisticated machinery.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
(EDIT: grammar check)
I don't think its just religious faith and belief, but also like how much people want to believe that the society they are part of, and that provides for their every day life, is a moral, just, and necessary one. And how much that puts on the blinders to questioning things. Israel is simply labeled a "like minded country".. at this point sounds a lot like "we have certain things in common, Jeffery" to me..
Well, the first thing that happens is "dehumanization" of the enemy. This is the root of all evil.
This. It's just so much more compelling to follow these discussions as they happen, compared to reading a historical correspondence or something. Of course I'd much prefer if there weren't genocides taking place at all.
Israeli here. Maybe I can give some helpful context.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this - any “support” for Palestinians is seen as a very far-left idea after Oct 7. There are still many here who oppose the extent of the war - I see regular demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for peace. I will note that there seems to be fairly universal agreement that _something_ needed to be done after Oct 7. If you want to understand the Israeli perspective (doesn’t seem like most commenters do, but I’m not writing this for them), you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
But anyways, don’t take my word for anything, pay attention to our upcoming elections. We will see how big the tents are then.
Wishing for peace, for saner voices to rise, and for an end to this cycle of violence.
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America didn't do things like this after 9/11, we tried to build democracies in a naive way, failed, and got a lot of people killed unnecessarily. Iraq was completely unjustified and based on fabrications.
But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.
A lot of the stories that came out of Abu Ghraib sure sound like they have very strong parallels to what is happening today. At the level of "poorly trained reservists trying to do something difficult without sufficient oversight and getting frustrated and turning to torture" it sounds very similar.
And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).
Abu Ghraib was a scandal, some people got punished, probably not all of the right ones.
When it came out that Israel was systematically sodomizing detainees with nightsticks, they had protestors come out in favor of the guards. It's still ongoing, all charges have been dropped. Nobody is scandalized by it.
That's a very flat take. That ignores the fact that the doctor that saw the prisoner reported it for investigation or that the military had chose to prosecute it, also you don't mention this was one case, not "systematic"
Even ignoring the fact that protests do not imply popular support, there is no comparison as 9/11 did not include widespread sexual violence and ongoing hostage rape was still going on at the time this happened.
So even if this seemed terrible to most Israelis, it was hard to find someone who will publicly defend a rapist from rape in jail
Sure if you ignore the UN Commission of Inquiry report from March 2025 that concluded sexual and gender-based violence was used systematically against Palestinian detainees.
the UNHR is comically biased against Israel though and controlled by totalitarian countries with less than stellar human rights records
Except Israel calls all criticism against it biased or anti semitic. Even a bad programmer can spot another bad programmer, sharing the trait doesn't mean you're not qualified to call it out in others.
I don't know, an example, Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese spreading nazi era conspiracy theories about Jews controlling political systems.
And that's from a human rights body, and from its representative to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
Was it Jews or Israelis?
The reaction of Americans to Abu Ghraib and the reaction of Israelis to the - larger scale - torture of Palestinian prisoners, is miles apart. It's also why there was always an end in sight to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet there isn't for Gaza until it has not a single Palestinian left.
I support Israel, but not wholeheartedly. I understand how Nakba was a matter of survival of your people. But why is this still going on today? Why is Israel continuing to expand settlements? Can you not understand how Palestinians must feel to constantly live in fear of being pushed out of their own homes? This is what gives me heartache. Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
Probably tougher to do politically than me stopping ICE from putting non-violent immigrants in concentration camps
> Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
> They [..] left Gaza.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
> Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza,
The answer is in the post you replied to.
>> Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel
"shortly after". Let's just forget for a moment that Israel made that happen, intentionally. What happened during that "shortly", was there a food blockade?
wasn't Egypt in control of southern border? did Egypt participate in the blockade?
Yes.
why did Egypt participate in the blockade? did it have something to do with their president's assassination? i don't have a precise timeline in memory
Probably didn't want to get invaded by Israel
Yes partly; around 2015/2016 according to the Egyptian government and more recently a surge in hamas-linked terrorist groups in the Sinai.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/egypt-court-seeks-deat... https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/the-egyptian-armys-c...
It's more complicated of course:
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/02/27/why-e...
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
What makes Christians more worthy of empathy?
That caught my attention too. It's refreshing to see at least one Christian Zionist showing concern for Arab Christians though.
I don't consider myself a "Christian Zionist".
I'm a Zionist only in the sense that I believe both the Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) have/had a right to states in their respective majority areas because of secular reasons after studying the history of both sides; not on religious or theological grounds.
It's partly what led me to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy which doesn't believe in "Christian Zionism" as a form of end-of-days prophecy. The level of crazy I saw in Evangelical churches and groups during my time there could become absurd.
Interesting insights, thanks. I was raised Protestant (in Europe) and have similar impression of Evangelicals. I'll never be able to wrap my head around some of that shit.
Nothing makes them more "worthy" of empathy. It's that I have somewhat more of a personal connection to them. During my studies the Arab Christians on the campus in Tel Aviv were some of the most peaceful and kind people I met over there and it influenced me greatly.
They also happen to be caught between a rock and a hard place where both the Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians both oppress them. Quoting from [1]:
1: https://christianpersecutionreview.org.uk/storage/2019/09/Is... 2: https://anglicanjournal.com/arab-christians-among-middle-eas... 3: https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-christians-defiant-... 4: https://jcfa.org/article/palestinian-crimes-against-christia...
The position you’re describing is essentially the modern left position in Israeli politics. Again, we’ll see in the upcoming election, but not everyone here supports the current goings on in the West Bank. The “Palestinian situation” is a major question in Israeli politics, both wrt Gaza and the wb.
One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
Israel rejects the two-state solution. They seem to be aggressively pursing a one-state solution, incorporating all of former Palestine (and perhaps beyond) into Israel. Obviously this doesn't include taking in the people living there, giving them Israeli citizenship. People will be killed or expelled. All while Israel continually claims to be the victim "look at what those people trying to stop us stealing their land did to us now."
you're describing what current government does, do you think everyone agrees with them?
Polls in Israel keep showing high numbers of support. 80%, 90%, agree with Palestinian eradication
where else goalposts can be moved?
comment said: "rejecting two state solution". poll numbers I see is around half rejects it, not 80%.
comment said: "killing or expelling all people in former palestine". there is no poll numbers for that specifically and the closest numbers for expelling people I see online is less than half, not 80%.
now you say "Palestinian eradication". OK, show the polls about 80-90% of israel supporting "Palestinian eradication".
So this situation is a bit like when the Nazis invaded Poland and then said, we have to destroy Poland because if we don't, they'll kill all our Nazi soldiers.
Isn't the humane solution to move the troops back out, instead? Of course the aggressors in a war will never do so, they will only press forward.
didn't they do that in South Lebanon and then quickly rockets appear near the border and nearby towns get evacuated semi daily?
also they did it in entire Gaza, unilateral disengagement
Was food prevented from entering Gaza during this "disengagement"?
depends if you consider israel as controlling egypt's border i guess
Why would it depend on that
why did you put "disengagement" in quotes
Because if food was still blockaded, then it wasn't one. So was food blockaded?
The question is what did the government know before October 7th https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/09/ra-vivian-repor...
On the day that it happened both Egypt and the US confirmed that Egypt had informed Isreal in advance.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047
This article is from a few days after that, but I remember that there were confirmations already during the day.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this
It is outside their zone of interest.
> you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
Counterpoint, a more passive turn of phrase is more fitting: How Israeli society was shaped around oct 7.
The event doesn't shape society by itself, political and media response/interest shape the society.
If we have to look at how October 7 shaped Israeli culture, we also have to look at how all of the dates leading up to October 6 shaped Palestinian culture. How many people were killed in the West Bank on October 6 - does that register, anywhere?
I just looked it up and on Oct 6th Israeli 'Settlers' murdered 19-year-old college student named Labib Mohammed Dumaidi. The state of Israel later teargassed his funeral.... Perfect example of needed context if you are truly trying to understand Oct 7th
I understand Israeli perspective already, from what I've seen last few years, and read about the history.
Or is there some other perspective, other than what Israelis can be observed as doing? I assume what I've seen is what Israel is like.
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
While I vehemently disagree with the IDFs handling and it's hard to deny the genocidal effort, let's not forget Americans reacted very similarly after 9/11. People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Revenge and collective punishment may be natural human reactions to a terror attack but that doesn't make them justified. Especially when those in charge anticipated the attack and deliberately exploited it.
> People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.
Israel, in the worst blunder in its history, disengaged from Gaza and left Gaza to be purely in the control of the Palestinians. The Palestinians elected Hamas, which killed of Fatah and took control of Gaza, leading to the following 20 years of escalating violence which reached a peak in the 7th October.
The only reasonable conclusion from the Gaza experiment of giving control to the Palestinians is that they will only use that to attack Israel. The mistake of the disengagement will not be repeated.
Nobody in Israel is willing to give Palestinians control anymore. We've tried that and we see how it went completely wrong. Thank god it was just Gaza because if 7th october attacks came from the west bank, Israel would be gone.
The most peace that can be achieved is sadly in the current situation where Israel maintains control of the Palestinians and they don't get a chance to organize another 7th of October from the west bank, which is just few kilometers from Tel Aviv.
The Palestinians authority can't even win elections and they have stopped doing elections. If they were to resume elections, presumably Hamas would also take control of the west bank too. The majority of Palestinians would support 7th of October attacks on the rest of Israel. Which is an existential threat to Israel.
It's worth noting that the whole notion of having Palestinian "democratic" regime alongside Israel is as far from arabic culture as possible. There are no arabic democracies. Even after the arabic spring, none of the arabic countries developed a functioning democracy. So the current situation of the Palestinians not having a "fully democratic" regime is actually the norm in all arabic countries. The most democracy that Palestinians could hope for is the current situation under Israeli control. If the entirety of Israel vanished tommorow, and the Palestinians were given democratic elections, they would immediately devolve into an Islamic state with Sharia law where the average Palestinian has less freedom than today.
So anyone judging Israel for the continued control over the Palestinians needs to remember both what would happen to Israel without this control (genocide) and what would have happened to the Palestinians themselves (Sharia theocracy with less rights).
There might be some Tel-Aviv detached people who support the Palestinians, but I guaranty you there are no Palestinian supporters in the Gaza adjacent zones which were hit in the 7th of October.
Hamas used dozens of tunnels beneath homes in Rafah to smuggle weapons across the Egyptian border. The area was demolished to prevent Hamas operatives from using those tunnels again. Civilians were evacuated beforehand.
The Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister have openly stated that the destruction of Rafah was intended as collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of civilians.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/pm-said-to-tell...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/warning-of-kidn...