It’s not at all credible to me – not remotely – that Netanyahu and his hateful and disgusting allies “carefully weighed options and considered strategy”. Not even close.
Just mostly destroyed.
Interesting, since he was PM in 2014 and after weighing his options he’s the one who decided to avoid engaging ground forces and instead fight a relatively light war from the air. So clearly, he’s fully capable of doing exactly that, whether or not it’s “credible” to you, and even if deciding on an entirely different approach.
Not even.
Is “But Germany didn’t kill all the Jews” a defense?
This presumes that no international coalition is formed; no allies come to offer solutions; basically that the whole world ignores Israel’s pleas for assistance, and I don’t buy that. After Oct 7th Israel actually had the world’s sympathy, by and large, for the first time in maybe decades. It certainly had mine. So no, I don’t remotely accept this.
Can Israel thrive, long term, without rock solid, long-term allyship from the US? We’ll probably find out.
Now that Israel has mostly defeated Hamas, you’re hardly seeing other countries line up to do the easy part and handle the post war occupation… And you think that other countries would have stepped up while Hamas was at full capacity to help? That’s the funniest shit I’ve ever heard.
If America’s allyship was conditional in that way, then it was not really an allyship at all and we are better off figuring that out now rather than when we actually tried to rely on it for our survival.
Actually, that’s a lesson that Europe is learning very well right now - America’s allyship IS conditional, and you ARE better off figuring out how to succeed without it. I bet Europe wishes they could have found that out before they actually needed the US.
The “full capacity” of Hamas is strong enough to kill a bunch of civilians while the IDF had its pants down, and that’s about it. That’s not remotely strong enough to scare any other country. Hamas was always weak as hell, and they still are. It never even posed an existential threat to Israel, much less any other nation. Yes – pre-genocide, in fact pre-any-sort-of-atrocity, Israel could have gotten lots of help (and did!). Their actions since have impacted this support. They lost my support entirely due to reported facts since then (on which we’ve engaged many, many times).
In this poll a few months ago, 77% of Democrats think Israel is committing genocide. The long-term alliance is effectively over. No Democrat will have a chance at the party nomination for the '28 election if they support Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Any alliance is going to be, or should be, conditional on “don’t commit multiple atrocities”.
No one is refusing to send troops to Gaza because they are scared of the military might of Hamas. They refuse to do it because of the political cost of doing so, especially in a world where American and European electorates are totally opposed to interventionism post Iraq, where Arab elctorates oppose the existence of Israel, and China and Russia actively benefit from the disruption to the American led world order caused by the conflict; and the rest of the world has their own problems to deal with.
That political cost is high to the point where countries are just barely willing to consider it when it’s an easy mission. If they had to actively fight Hamas, losing soldiers and killing civilians in the process - it’d be a a complete and total nonstarter.
Bullshit. Military aid is one thing (that’s usually provided by countries whose own interest it is in to do so, and that continues even now) but no one has ever fought Hamas on our behalf. That’s a total fantasy.
I’m not necessarily saying “get others to fight Hamas”, I’m saying something other than what they did. You act as if Israel had no choice but to do exactly what they did, and that’s not remotely credible. If that’s truly what you believe then we’re so far apart we should definitely stop.
Yes, since the very beginning of this conflict, it’s been “do something else! I don’t know what, just something! There must be a better way!”. And then exactly zero practical suggestions of what a “better way” would have been.
There are never any actual alternatives, not ones that hold up for more than a moment’s examination.
There are plenty of details that could have been handled differently. But the overall plan of a ground invasion followed by an occupation (that, thank God, it looks like Israel may not need to be responsible for after all) and then the construction of a new government is the only way to remove Hamas for good. And that invasion was always going to be extremely nasty, because it’s an urban war against a dug in guerilla force with less than zero regard for the lives of their own civilians.
That’s literally the exact same thing I’ve been saying since October of 2023. About the only thing that has surprised me since Oct 8 of that year about this conflict is the fact that Trump’s international occupation plan actually got approved by the UN.
Also:
You said:
What on Earth would an “international coalition” offer if not military assistance? Fucking thoughts and prayers? Screw that. If the world only cares about Jews when we are victims, keep your pity. It didn’t do us any good in the Holocaust. Israel exists precisely so that in the future, Jews don’t have to rely on non-existent pity.
As Golda Meir said, if we have to have a choice between being dead and being pitied or being alive and having a bad image, we will take being alive and having a bad image.
You’re also proving her other quote: The world hates a Jew who hits back. The world loves us only when we are to be pitied.
Right now Israel is making the world more dangerous for Jews. Atrocities by Jews, swept under the rug by Jews, overseen by the Jewish state, increases the risk to Jews like me and my family. Israel sure as fuck is not my ally right now.
I’m sorry that I don’t buy that Netanyahu and co somehow figured out the right way to handle Gaza and the Palestinians (while tolerating and encouraging ongoing brutalization in the WB!), and it just so happens to be the way that keeps Netanyahu in power and kills tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, and decidedly not defeating Hamas after more than two years of fighting.
And while the honor and decency of the US military is already damaged and further at risk after less than a year of Hegseth and Trump, somehow after a decade and more of Netanyahu and his disgusting allies, there’s been no impact on the IDF (except, maybe, completely failing the country on Oct 7th). But now they’re just great! No problems at all. Ignore those IDF members who say they saw and were ordered to do atrocities.
The world is not a cartoon. “Netanyahu and co” didn’t “come up” with anything beyond a strategy for securing their coalition’s majority in the Knesset. The people who came up with the war plan and implemented it are by and large career military personnel.
And no matter how convenient it might be to paint this war as some nefarious plot by Netanyahu to keep himself in power, the overall strategy of a land invasion is not something that anyone seriously questioned. Netanyahu’s biggest political opponents all agreed that it is what was needed.
??? What does that have to do with anything??
Netanyahu isn’t Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister isn’t America’s president nor the Commander in Chief of the IDF.
The point is that honor, honesty, and decency start at the top. I don’t buy that the IDF is immune to this axiom. Nor do I buy that the peculiarities of the Israeli government and military structure somehow mean that over a decade under vile political leadership has no impact on the IDF (aside from, obviously, utterly failing in its duty two years ago).
If Netanyahu’s rivals all agree that the war has gone and is going mostly peachy (though IIRC at least one former Israeli PM strongly disagrees and has long urged an end to the killing that appears to be continuing despite the supposed ceasefire), then it appears that most of the current political class in Israel is comfortable with, if not complicit in, committing and covering up atrocities.
I’m not angry at Israel for “hitting back” at Hamas. I’m angry at Israel for tolerating and even encouraging the brutalization of civilians on the West Bank, for many years, and for the last two years, apparently overseeing multiple atrocities in Gaza, including deliberately withholding aid from starving or near starving people, contributing to tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
No one who’s okay with those things could be an ally or friend of mine. Those are terrible, evil things that must be opposed by all decent people.
Pretty sure we’ve drilled down to the fundamentals of the disagreement, so that’s probably enough for now.
So you say, but then you take them hitting back in a bog standard way for this kind of urban war, and you describe it as: