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.
My own country lost its mind after 2,977 people died in one terrorist attack a quarter of a century ago and we made many many bad decisions for a long time afterwards. It sucked. In October 2023 I had hoped that my country's well publicized example would help your country not make the same choices but it's hard to learn from other people's mistakes.
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.
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.
>"That's an entirely different category of crime" - cut the moralizing bullshit please. You have killed shitload of people and that is all that matters.
This is a false equivalence. 9/11 is not Oct 7 and the US is nothing like Israel, in fact the US was attacked for (amongst other things) it's support of Israel. America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.
Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception. Gaza is a refugee camp of descendents of people displaced from their homes during the Nakba. There's a saying there: "My Grandmother is older than Israel" -- and it is true.
To look at Oct. 7 as some sort of isolated incident ignores the history of the project: After the holocaust Western Jews decided to move to an area already occupied by other people based on some loose notion of having claim to it millennia ago. They used western governments to push this concept forward. Sure, America displaced Native Americans, but Israel did it during modernity... and those natives also happen to have access to modern heavy weaponry... what did they expect to happen?
I think Israeli people are ingenious and talented but they picked the wrong patch of land to occupy -- the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is as sacred as the Vatican and you have 1.5 billion Muslim people revolving around this sacred conceptualization. This is why the common people even of places like UAE/Saudi all back Palestine despite the political actions of such states. It is a recipe destined for disaster, especially with the Iran war de-coupling the Gulf States from the USA.
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.
As someone that’s watched the conflict and learned about the history, the Nakba and the displacement of Palestinians far before the years of Malcolm X and Martin Luther, the conflict with Palestine didn’t start on October 7th as this comment purports.
When I didn’t have any context of the history, I took comments like this one at face value.
However it is difficult to take comments like this in good faith as it frames Israelis as folks who are pushed beyond their conscience by their government, similar to Americans in current America, when the statistics are to the contrary.
This is the typical type of propaganda that many supporters post and write hoping to reinforce the narrative to the uninformed folks of their innocence.
While I can acknowledge that there are genuinely folks who oppose the ongoing genocide, what the world ought to look out for is whether after the next set of elections, an actual change of power and direction occurs.
And when I point to elections, the potential replacement candidates all support the same policies of genocide and expulsion. Some may be less, some are absolutely more, but if nothing changes, that is on the Israeli people.
As Americans hold responsibility for the current state of politics, Israeli’s hold the responsibility for their country as well.
> Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
Destroying all the buildings while only killing 50k civilians out of a population of 2.2M is not a genocide. Insofar as words mean things (and they don’t to most of humanity) it’s not genocide.
When you understand that 99.99% of humanity is only capable of using words to express psychological valence or to manipulate rather than assay truth, then political discourse makes a lot more sense.
The only thing that 99.99% of humanity is capable of navigating and assaying with words is their own personal financial situation, their business, their portfolio, etc. In this domain everyone is a philosopher.
The only requirement to join the world's leading association of genocide scholars is paying a $30 membership fee. No expertise required. This makes it trivial to manipulate the association for propaganda purposes. Its declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was approved by less than 20% of its members. The remaining 80% were never even asked or never voted on it. An acquaintance of mine has been a member since 2013 and is a real scholar with genuine expertise on the Rwandan Genocide. She was not made aware that this resolution was being proposed and learned of its adoption in the press.
Does this help you sleep? Rationalization is a coping mechanism.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k" and destroying everyones home. Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame? That Zionism is a European colonial ideology and at it's very core requires ethnic cleansing? I feel like most of the world has become educated enough to reach this conclusion and thus stands against Israel. The only peaceful way out of the situation Israel is in would be serious and massive reparations (similar to what Germany has given to Jewish people). Is there any support for that?
In what way is a Jewish state in Israel "colonial ideology"? Israel is like if the North American indigenous people suddenly got a country of their own on their ancestral lands. Will Arab states be paying reparations for all the Jewish displacement over the last 100 years[1]? I'm guessing you will say "no".
Israelis generally do learn about the Nakba in school. But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII. We don’t see it in the way you describe. For us it was a matter of the survival of our people.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
I do wonder, isn’t there a sense the Palestinians face the survival of their people today?
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
If that’s the question, it truly is hopeless. Because whoever you think started it, they don’t see it that way. So there can be no shared understanding, ever. It’s just circular blame across centuries.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
How can you simultaneously decide you do not need to care about the lives of a group of people on the basis of a difference of ethnicity as you prioritize the formation of an ethnic state, and simultaneously refuse the premise that the formation of that state is to blame for ethnic strife? Your first and last paragraphs cannot be reconciled.
Should the jews not have a homeland? Should japan not be for the japanese?
I personally think of France as the land of the Franks - nations define citizenship and belonging through a shared culture, a common language, values of what they hold dear, history - all of this is what makes a people and an ethnostate.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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).
Interesting claim. Where did you hear that? The IDF is pretty infamous for crushing people alive with these bulldozers, and also for denying search & rescue access to find civilians buried in the wreckage (and also for just killing said SAR and hiding the bodies and lying about it*).
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.
Sentiments like that are an excuse. You could have said something very similar about the IRA in Ireland before its independence from the UK, or the ANC in South Africa during apartheid. You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression. If it was you, is that really what you’d do?
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
There have been attacks on Israel long before there was "oppression" of Palestine. You're just making a circular argument, you can say the same thing to justify what Israel is doing. I think saying Hamas is justified is actually grotesque, they also starve the people of Palestine. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
That’s an awful false equivalence. We’re not talking about people being arrested by their own government with, presumably, probable cause. We’re talking about people - innocent civilians, including children - being murdered just for existing.
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Sergey Brin, who founded and owns most of Google with Larry Page, said recently (during the genocide) that he visited Ben Shapiro (genocide advocate) and had fun. They show these things in Google Maps, but don't forget that Google is not a 'neutral' company in this conflict.
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...
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.
My own country lost its mind after 2,977 people died in one terrorist attack a quarter of a century ago and we made many many bad decisions for a long time afterwards. It sucked. In October 2023 I had hoped that my country's well publicized example would help your country not make the same choices but it's hard to learn from other people's mistakes.
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.
I mean if the same thing happened to us we'd easily have had 50%+ support for glassing all of Palestine with nukes.
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.
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.
>"That's an entirely different category of crime" - cut the moralizing bullshit please. You have killed shitload of people and that is all that matters.
The world must appear quite monochrome to your simple mind.
This is a false equivalence. 9/11 is not Oct 7 and the US is nothing like Israel, in fact the US was attacked for (amongst other things) it's support of Israel. America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.
Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception. Gaza is a refugee camp of descendents of people displaced from their homes during the Nakba. There's a saying there: "My Grandmother is older than Israel" -- and it is true.
To look at Oct. 7 as some sort of isolated incident ignores the history of the project: After the holocaust Western Jews decided to move to an area already occupied by other people based on some loose notion of having claim to it millennia ago. They used western governments to push this concept forward. Sure, America displaced Native Americans, but Israel did it during modernity... and those natives also happen to have access to modern heavy weaponry... what did they expect to happen?
I think Israeli people are ingenious and talented but they picked the wrong patch of land to occupy -- the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is as sacred as the Vatican and you have 1.5 billion Muslim people revolving around this sacred conceptualization. This is why the common people even of places like UAE/Saudi all back Palestine despite the political actions of such states. It is a recipe destined for disaster, especially with the Iran war de-coupling the Gulf States from the USA.
> 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.
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.
Probably tougher to do politically than me stopping ICE from putting non-violent immigrants in concentration camps
As someone that’s watched the conflict and learned about the history, the Nakba and the displacement of Palestinians far before the years of Malcolm X and Martin Luther, the conflict with Palestine didn’t start on October 7th as this comment purports.
When I didn’t have any context of the history, I took comments like this one at face value.
However it is difficult to take comments like this in good faith as it frames Israelis as folks who are pushed beyond their conscience by their government, similar to Americans in current America, when the statistics are to the contrary.
47% support the genocidal approach - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support...
56/67/82% (depending on the polling method) support expulsion of Palestinians - https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
This is the typical type of propaganda that many supporters post and write hoping to reinforce the narrative to the uninformed folks of their innocence.
While I can acknowledge that there are genuinely folks who oppose the ongoing genocide, what the world ought to look out for is whether after the next set of elections, an actual change of power and direction occurs.
And when I point to elections, the potential replacement candidates all support the same policies of genocide and expulsion. Some may be less, some are absolutely more, but if nothing changes, that is on the Israeli people.
As Americans hold responsibility for the current state of politics, Israeli’s hold the responsibility for their country as well.
Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
What's the point of a democracy if it acts against it's people like the UK does?
> Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
The question is what did the government know before October 7th https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/09/ra-vivian-repor...
It's a genocide and Israel showed the dark side is in everyone even in our modern, supposedly more enlightened time.
Humanity has a deep darkness and no society is immune. USA is a partner in this and as someone living here I'm deeply ashamed.
“Genocide” = this makes me feel bad
Destroying all the buildings while only killing 50k civilians out of a population of 2.2M is not a genocide. Insofar as words mean things (and they don’t to most of humanity) it’s not genocide.
When you understand that 99.99% of humanity is only capable of using words to express psychological valence or to manipulate rather than assay truth, then political discourse makes a lot more sense.
The only thing that 99.99% of humanity is capable of navigating and assaying with words is their own personal financial situation, their business, their portfolio, etc. In this domain everyone is a philosopher.
You, nor I have the credentialing to be able to call something a genocide with any authority. I’ll leave it up to the phd-experts to call it.
“The world's leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
The only requirement to join the world's leading association of genocide scholars is paying a $30 membership fee. No expertise required. This makes it trivial to manipulate the association for propaganda purposes. Its declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was approved by less than 20% of its members. The remaining 80% were never even asked or never voted on it. An acquaintance of mine has been a member since 2013 and is a real scholar with genuine expertise on the Rwandan Genocide. She was not made aware that this resolution was being proposed and learned of its adoption in the press.
Does this help you sleep? Rationalization is a coping mechanism.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k" and destroying everyones home. Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
This "lawyer" mentality is so dumb.
Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame? That Zionism is a European colonial ideology and at it's very core requires ethnic cleansing? I feel like most of the world has become educated enough to reach this conclusion and thus stands against Israel. The only peaceful way out of the situation Israel is in would be serious and massive reparations (similar to what Germany has given to Jewish people). Is there any support for that?
In what way is a Jewish state in Israel "colonial ideology"? Israel is like if the North American indigenous people suddenly got a country of their own on their ancestral lands. Will Arab states be paying reparations for all the Jewish displacement over the last 100 years[1]? I'm guessing you will say "no".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
Israelis generally do learn about the Nakba in school. But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII. We don’t see it in the way you describe. For us it was a matter of the survival of our people.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
I do wonder, isn’t there a sense the Palestinians face the survival of their people today?
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
> There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
As is true in every war.
The question is who started it.
If that’s the question, it truly is hopeless. Because whoever you think started it, they don’t see it that way. So there can be no shared understanding, ever. It’s just circular blame across centuries.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
> Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it!
That’s not what reparations are, that’s ethnic cleansing.
How can you simultaneously decide you do not need to care about the lives of a group of people on the basis of a difference of ethnicity as you prioritize the formation of an ethnic state, and simultaneously refuse the premise that the formation of that state is to blame for ethnic strife? Your first and last paragraphs cannot be reconciled.
An ethno state is a stupid backwards idea.
EDIT: how is anyone downvoting thos. Who thinks it's a good idea?
Depends on what you ascribe to an ethnostate.
Should the jews not have a homeland? Should japan not be for the japanese? I personally think of France as the land of the Franks - nations define citizenship and belonging through a shared culture, a common language, values of what they hold dear, history - all of this is what makes a people and an ethnostate.
Does that help explain the downvotes?
There are black French and Muslim French.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
So is Israel the homeland of the Jews? If so, what does that make Palestinians? Tourists?
Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this
It is outside their zone of interest.
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%...
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
Oh 100%, you can see specific buildings (mostly marked as schools) that are still standing.
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.
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.
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?
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."
If it was genocide, why would you spare the farmers? Doesn’t really make sense.
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
By the time the bulldozers are there civilians have long moved out of the area.
Rachel Corrie would like a word. [0]
I suggest that you learn more about the Nakba, friend. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
That's 2003. Really really relevant.
Only a child thinks 2003 was a long time ago.
Of course it's relevant. Regardless, there are many instances of Israel killing civilians with bulldozers in Gaza.
And then they bomb them in their tent cities while blocking aid, all while murdering hundreds of journalists so no one sees...
Been watching it for years. A great stain on history, with weapons paid for and built by Americans, not to mention a complicit media.
Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.
Let's be clear and honest: Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians and they routinely murder civilians as part of this.
Interesting claim. Where did you hear that? The IDF is pretty infamous for crushing people alive with these bulldozers, and also for denying search & rescue access to find civilians buried in the wreckage (and also for just killing said SAR and hiding the bodies and lying about it*).
* surprise, it was in Rafah, the city formerly located in the wasteland from the article we're discussing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre
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.
I feel like the whole world would sympathise with Palestine much much more if they weren't governed by a terrorist group
Well it sure is a good thing for Netanyahu that the terrorists have far too much power, eh?
Sentiments like that are an excuse. You could have said something very similar about the IRA in Ireland before its independence from the UK, or the ANC in South Africa during apartheid. You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression. If it was you, is that really what you’d do?
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
There have been attacks on Israel long before there was "oppression" of Palestine. You're just making a circular argument, you can say the same thing to justify what Israel is doing. I think saying Hamas is justified is actually grotesque, they also starve the people of Palestine. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
>You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression
When you get arrested, do you fight back and resist?
That’s an awful false equivalence. We’re not talking about people being arrested by their own government with, presumably, probable cause. We’re talking about people - innocent civilians, including children - being murdered just for existing.
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
The whole world does sympathize with the Palestinians. Israel is a pariah.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"
The icons from what was there before are a haunting digital ghost. School, Restaurant, Pharmacy all the city is just rubble.
Atomic dome vibes when looking at some of the few buildings still standing
non-X Google Maps link to ~location of screenshot: https://www.google.com/maps/@31.2857778,34.2533333,1010m
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?
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.
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?
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.
he's referring to the fact that epstein is a mossad agent and that compromised world leaders are being blackmailed to support the genocide
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.
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.
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
Have you been living under a rock? The time when "public statements" used to work is long, long gone.
Sure, the need to self defense against US dangerous neighbors. Looking at you, Canada!
Pretty sure that's not why US administrations support Israel's actions.
Bad phrasing on my part. That is one of many reasons
That is fine! Putin demolished many more Ukrainian cities, and still, there are Hamas leaders coming to Moscow to shake hands with him and Lavrov
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-...
Sergey Brin, who founded and owns most of Google with Larry Page, said recently (during the genocide) that he visited Ben Shapiro (genocide advocate) and had fun. They show these things in Google Maps, but don't forget that Google is not a 'neutral' company in this conflict.
This is not factually accurate to say they own most of Google, the most I’ve seen of the two of them combined owning presently is 12%
Page and Brin together hold over 50% of voting shares, even though their economic share is lower as you suggest. Different share classes.
https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-alphabet/
aerodog (internet forum frivolity engager during the genocide)