…run these what? Your spoiler doesn’t make any sense.
Israel presented their defence on the second day of hearing.
Very nice post, which matches my feeling on this matter almost perfectly, but expressed much more eloquently than I could have, since on this subject I have a tendency to let my emotions get the better of me.
From Bloomberg News, as a matter of fact: a mainstream news organization not known for anti-Israel sentiment, AFAICT.
I’m not sure that one error in that one quote is sufficient to make the “blood libel” case.
Yeah, “blood libel” is a totally inappropriate description, imho, and i do a double take every time i see it. It’s only libel if it’s false, and that term has been applied to too much that is sadly very true. And to things that aren’t very closely related to what “blood libel” traditionally meant.
If you want to tell me that a particular accusation is false or lacks context, do that. Don’t throw “blood libel” around.
Sure there is. It’s called negotiating. You usually do it at a table, with shared food and without guns.
That’s how the Irish terrorism was ended.
Yes, that means that people who think the other side are bloodthirsty murderers have to talk to each other. Yes, that means that a lot of murders go unavenged. But that’s the way to actually move forward.
I agree that it doesn’t work to counter one misleading exaggerated accusation with another misleading exaggerated accusation. If you’ve got a cite that shows that this or that Israeli military leader was talking about eliminating Hamas specifically when Bloomberg quoted them as talking about eliminating Gaza, then definitely that needs to be pointed out. But if you foam at the mouth about the entire report in which that quote appears just being a baseless antisemitic smear and “blood libel” because of (one? several?) such inaccuracies, that makes you look like the unreliable source.
It continues to mystify me how the Israeli government passed up such a huge and guaranteed victory in the war of public opinion, in favor of the mythical goal of “eliminating Hamas”. If Israel had gone hard for a ceasefire and hostage return after maybe a few weeks of bombing, with several thousand Gazan casualties—enough to maintain the deterrence factor of disproportionate reprisals, looking at it from a ruthless realpolitik viewpoint—then they would have remained indisputably the sympathetic party, in the eyes of most of the world. The October 7 victims of Hamas would have been the primary focus of grief and compassion, and not only in Israel.
Active support worldwide for Palestinian rights would have plummeted. Again from a ruthless realpolitik viewpoint, the subset of Israelis who are really invested in oppressing Palestinians and taking over more land in the Palestinian territories would have had basically a free hand for at least the next couple of decades. Unflinching internal investigations into the intelligence and security failures that permitted the Oct. 7 attacks (together with ongoing targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders as opportunities occurred) would have made Israel at least as secure as it has been for the last decade or so, with a lot more latitude to take even stricter repressive measures in the name of security.
And they would have remained basically unchallenged in world popular opinion as the “good guys” in the conflict. (Can you imagine that Israel’s Eden Golen wouldn’t have won Eurovision with the tragic ballad “Hurricane” in that alternate timeline?)
But in this timeline, here we are after an additional six months or so of nonstop slaughter, with 30-40000 Palestinians dead amid endless trauma, and the signature images of the catastrophe are incinerated Palestinian babies buried under acres of rubble, and mown-down aid workers. And Israel is now firmly in the role of the “bad guys” in most of world opinion. (And no, not just because of some irrational compulsion to make up baseless accusations of murder against Jews. Because of 30-40000 slaughtered Palestinians and vast swathes of destruction and devastation, in case you hadn’t noticed.)
Oh, and Hamas forces are continuing to resume activity in northern Gaza and consolidate their hold on what remains of civil society. No outcome of this catastrophe is ever going to be worth what Israel is paying for it.
And mind you, that’s all just from a ruthless realpolitik-type consideration of what would benefit Israel’s own interests, disregarding the plight of the Palestinians. I suppose an argument could be made that there’s a silver lining in the world’s now paying some more attention to Palestinian suffering, and Palestinian rights and justifiable claims. But IMHO, that’s nowhere near worth what the Palestinians are paying for it, either.
(I pass over the obvious issue of the original Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas being counterproductive and evil, because I think we all already agree about that. I’m just thinking about your suggestions regarding what Israel could do/have done instead, given that the Oct. 7 attacks did happen.)
Bullshit. People were already shouting “iSrAeL iS dOiNg a gEnOcIdE” on October 8th. Israel can do no right in the eyes of many.
But those “many” were a tiny vocal minority in comparison to the general sympathy for Israel, including in the corridors of power. France illuminated the fucking Eiffel Tower in Israel’s colors on Oct. 9, for heaven’s sake.
And those “many” would have remained a minority in the alternate scenario I outlined (although, in fairness, some of the more rational among them would still have had a point more generally about injustice in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians). But noooo, the Israeli government thought it had a better idea.
[ETA: And it’s “Eden Golan”, not “Golen”, apologies to her; it’s too late to fix the typo in the previous post.]
Whatever makes you feel better
You’ve just said the atrocities the Yazidis suffered wasn’t genocide but Gaza is a genocide.
You haven’t actually argued that they are wrong. You’ve just declared it. As if the word of an internet rando is supposed to mean anything.
Yet we’re supposed to take your opinion as fact, just because an organisation is right about one thing doesn’t mean it’s right about all.
Is the standard that only the head of the ICJ can declare a genocide? Because what did the court have to say about the Yazidi?
They condemned it as a genocide, I also explained that the UN declared it a genocide as well, hence the citation
Because tunnel infrastructure was constructed beneath them and Hamas hid weapons in the compounds.
They started the current conflict on October 7th.
That’s Hamas fault
That ended because both sides were willing to come to the table, Hamas has shown no willingness to compromise realistically on this so the example isn’t valid.
…no. That wasn’t what I said. READ MY WORDS CAREFULLY.
No. You don’t have to give a fuck about my opinion. But you SHOULD give a fuck about the opinion about what the The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has to say, ESPECIALLY considering they were formed because of the very genocide you’ve been talking about.
Cite please.
So does the ICJ have to make a judgement or not in order for something to be declared a genocide? It appears that they don’t. So you can stop appealing to them now.
Nobody is disputing the existence of tunnels under Al Shifa. Those tunnels, of course, were built by Israel in the 1980s. And the tunnels you just showed me in the video were empty. No sign that Hamas were operating out of them. No weapons found hidden in them.
And you can’t ignore the fact that soon after this video was taken, Israel abandoned the hospital. They damaged the infrastructure to a great extent, making it difficult for it to resume operations as a hospital. But Palestinians are resilient. And they managed to get the hospital partially operational again.
The IDF didn’t set fire to Al Shifa after the first raid. That came after the second. So my question to you stands. Why did they set Al Shifa on fire? That sounds like a remarkably inefficient way to deal with a tunnel network. Under the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian law you can’t just set a hospital on fire.
And the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital wasn’t set on fire. It was the specialist oncology hospital in Gaza, and had to be abandoned in November last year when due to the siege, it ran out of fuel.
This was what it was like a year ago.
Its obviously a promo piece. But it doesn’t look like a hub of Hamas terrorist operations to me.
And here is video of it being demolished.
Can you explain why? What evidence did the IDF have? You can’t just bulldoze a hospital. That’s the very thing the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian law were set up to prevent.
Where is the Hamas infrastructure? Where is the evidence? Walk me through what happened here. Where is the evidence that Hamas had compromised this particular hospital, let alone the entire civilian infrastructure?
Because a few videos of empty tunnels that we’ve all seen, that were originally built by Israel under Al Shifa that were later abandoned by the IDF for months doesn’t make a particularly strong case for the wide-spread destruction of civilian infrastructure in the rest of Gaza.
But this didn’t start on October the 7th.
Israeli leadership have agency. They have chosen how to conduct this “war.” This is on them.
‘Any hospital that runs, is Hamas. Any hospital that stands still, is well-disciplined Hamas!’
It isn’t “one error”. Almost all of their quotes are like that. Like the one where they say Gallant called Palestinians “human animals” but in context he said Hamas is that, not Palestinians.
Here’s another one where they straight up lie:
The real quote reads:
Once again, they simply delete lines that don’t back their case willy nilly until they get the g3NoCiDaL.
At the same press conference he also said this, which I think easily disproves the clear and obvious lie that South Africa is peddling:
Then there’s the way the repeatedly pretend that the Amalek quote shows genocidal intent. This is beyond dishonest. There are literally hundreds of years of history to show how Jews today use the term: to describe someone who wants to wipe us out. Like Hamas, which is who Netanyahu described as Amalek. And his quote was “remember what Amalek has done to you”, which is often used in discussions of the Hollocaust, or of Haman from the Purim story.
Unless you think the Jews have been plotting to genocide the Persians for Purim and the Germans for the Holocaust, you should not pretend that its use here is unusual.
This is not controversial, and was pointed out and cited both here and elsewhere in the media. Of course, facts were pretty much ignored in favor of sensationalism.
Straight up lying isn’t their only dishonest tactic, although they use it for almost every quote from Netanyahu, Gallant, and Herzog. But then they play some other “fun” games, too.
Here’s one:
The quote here is real, and gross. What is dishonest is this part:
Itamar Ben-Gvir clarified the government’s position
What? What the fuck does that mean? Itamar Ben Gvir doesn’t get to decide the government’s position on these matters. He may be Minister for National Security, but he isn’t part of the war cabinet, and as he constantly moans about on Israeli media, he has been cut out of the planning.
In actual fact, soon after Ben Gvir made this idiotic address, Netanyahu berated him in a meeting:
Do you understand the sinister dishonesty here? Israeli policy was quite literally clarified to be the exact opposite of what Ben Gvir states it should be.
There’s a clear pattern of dishonesty here.
1 Samuel 15
1 Samuel said to Saul, "I am the one the LORD sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the LORD.
2 This is what the LORD Almighty says: `I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.
3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"
Maybe if you don’t want to be accused of genocide you shouldn’t reminisce about that time your God commanded you to commit genocide?
That’s not how anyone in Judaism has used the story for about two thousand years. But I’m sure you know Judaism so much better than I do so by all means keep Christplaining to me.
Just curious, how many sermons on the Haftara for Parashat Zachor have you heard, that you are basing your understanding of the term Amalek as used in modern Judaism on? I assume it must be a large number, since you are so confident.
I’m not a Cristian.
If you were raised in the Christian dominant US culture you are fully capable of Christplaining whether or not you personally believe that Jesus has saved you.
A few. That’s an incredibly embarrassing piece of the Bible. It’s ugly enough that i don’t like celebrating Purim, honestly. My Rabbi once gave a sermon that said, in part, “it’s a good thing the Amalekites are no longer around, because otherwise we would be commanded to commit genocide”
I realize that the word is used differently in modern Judaism. And also, it’s still an injunction to genocide.
This is excellent advise.
How, exactly, is quoting from the fucking Book Christplaining?
Look, you’re obviously a Black bird, so he can’t use his other new favourite tactic of accusing you of whitesplaining, so this is the only fallback.