There were already hundreds of thousands of anti-government protesters in Israel (albeit with the secret police well up in their business, but at least the sentiment was real though clearly superficial in that it in no way threatened the administration; talk is cheap).
I suppose it’s a logical step to arrest anyone who is really an anti-government protester if only because that does not fit in with flag-waving, camo-clad IDF, “Jews belong to Israel” (so not Muslims, Arabs, etc??) and similar propaganda.
No, Palestinians do not love the Israeli army, at least some of them that I have talked to.
Thx - that was my understanding but, as I said, I’ve made little effort to stay up-to-date WRT what has been an unsettled situations my entire life. This was not the first time I heard the idea that “the Palestinians” ought to be considered separately from “Hamas.” As tho I were to disavow any relation to W’s war on Iraq. No, I didn’t vote for him, but it was my government/country taking the action.
It looks like the conflict has pushed the Senate to fill some vacant ambassador posts in the area. I almost said it’s “surprising” that they’ve been delayed this long, but at least it’s happening now.
There is a valid distinction to be made between Hamas and Palestinians in that Hamas are militants and therefore combatants while Palestinians are a whole people, some of whom are combatants but many of whom are civilians.
But it is true that at the moment Hamas does represent the Palestinian people of Gaza, whether they like it or not - just like how Trump represented Americans, whether or not they had a #notmypresident bumper sticker.
I’ll also point out that many of the same people who are quick to correctly point out that Hamas != Palestinians will then quote Ben Gvir and say “Look what Israel wants”, ignoring that Hamas is far more popular among Palestinians than Ben Gvir’s party is among Israelis (4 out of 120 ministers).
That wasn’t just criticism of the sort that @liirogue felt should be a non-issue. The students whose job offers were rescinded were associated with a letter that supported Palestinians, but also blamed Israel entirely for the Hamas attacks.
An instructor (apparently an aide of some kind?) was teaching a class in Stanford, they had Jewish students get up and stand in the corner before berating them and lecturing them about how “this is what you do to Palestinians”. Obviously that goes far beyond simple statements of support for Palestinian civilians.
More Israeli Jews believe in annexing the West Bank (40%) than striving for peace based on a two-state solution (35%). [Mitvim, 2023 poll]
Netanyahu’s Likud party has been in power for all but two of the last 14 years (one of those two years they weren’t in power was a party even further to the right).
The Harvard letter is an example of “misunderstanding what’s being said”: it’s actually antisemitic to lay the blame for the hundreds of murdered Israelis at Israel’s feet. (It’s also anti-Arab, inasmuch as it denies moral agency to the specific Palestinian Arabs who committed the atrocities).
@What_Exit said he hadn’t “been seeing people getting cancelled.” This is undoubtedly an example of people getting cancelled, even if it’s over something pretty antisemitic.
Just that through opinion polls and electoral history, it would appear that the plurality of Israeli Jews favor the elimination of Palestine on the West Bank, rather than peace based on a two-state solution. From the opinion poll, 30% of Israeli Jews would like to annex the West Bank and “establish a single state with privileged status for Jews”, which effectively sounds like apartheid. That’s a much higher proportion favoring extremist views than the “4 out of 120 ministers” your post suggested.
You did, however, get chances to vote against his party after that war started; and all along could protest against it without risking being jailed or shot just for publicly objecting to it.
The Gazans haven’t gotten to vote since 2006 (at which point most of the current population were too young to vote or not yet born) and apparently anyone who protests Hamas’ being in charge and/or what they’re doing is at genuine risk. So yes, Hamas is the elected government of Gaza; but nevertheless not all the Gazans should be held responsible for how Hamas behaves. (Plus which, quite a lot of them are too young to be held responsible for much of anything.)
None of which means that Israel doesn’t have to do something about Hamas; clearly nobody else is going to. But I very much hope that they do their best to remember that many of the Gazans are also victims of Hamas. It is sometimes necessary to do a wrong thing, when all the alternatives are even more wrong; but it’s important to remember that no matter how necessary it is it’s still wrong, so that it will be stopped as soon as it’s no longer necessary.
Then I’m genuinely not sure what you mean, when you said that you hadn’t been seeing people get canceled. Did you mean you’d only seen people getting canceled over stuff that was actually antisemitic? or something else?
Ah. I thought you were saying you hadn’t seen people getting cancelled at all, so couldn’t judge whether they were non-issues or not. Sorry for my confusion.
I’m not generally a fan of college students getting cancelled for taking regrettable positions in college, but that’s another conversation.
And from the Gallup opinion poll, something like 80% of Palestinians oppose a two state solution. Considering the fate that Jews have suffered in every Arab majority country, that’s also a very extremist stance.
Again, if we aren’t going to conflate Gazans - even Gazans who want to see all Jews gone from Israel but aren’t going to personally fire rockets to accomplish this - with Hamas, then we shouldn’t conflate Israelis with Ben Gvir.