A plucky, embattled people who made a difficult migration to cultivate a homeland amid less-civilized neighbors determined to wipe them out, and who became even more determined to survive after a significant portion of their people perished in concentration camps. Of course they built nuclear weapons and fought war ugly yet necessary. Who could rationally not agree?
Of course I’m describing South Africa. Israel would never be anything like that
Israel occupied southern Lebanon for 18 years, from 1982 to 2000, and didn’t found a single settlement - even during the height of the settlement building period in the Territories. What more proof do you need?
A better analogy would be from twenty years ago, when our British cousins were telling us “yes, we saw the towers come down too. And some of us were in there. But we want to stabilize Afghanistan while you Americans are going kill-crazy with drone strikes wiping out entire villages.”
The difference is that we fucking live in Afghanistan. It’s not some bullshit war halfway around the world; it’s a war for our homes and for the lives of our families. America can - and did - just walk away from the war with a shrug and a sigh; we can’t.
Any comparison with the Afghan war is utterly baseless and spurious; we’re fighting a completely different species of struggle here.
Hot damn, this Bush Fatigue or collective Iraq PTSD is fucking annoying. Just because YOU bungled up a pointless war two decades ago doesn’t mean that the entire concept of just war is invalidated. America needs to get the fuck over itself and stop moping in the corner before Russia and China irrevocably fuck up the world, as you’re currently allowing them to do in Ukraine.
Something in the American psyche completely broke after Iraq and Afghanistan. People on both the Right and Left no longer believe that war can ever be justified (maybe they say it can in theory, but they can’t come to say that any example, save maybe WW2, qualifies; and many are iffy even on that). If the Russians invaded Alaska tomorrow, we’d have plenty of useful idiots demanding a ceasefire and proclaiming that Alaska was never ours to begin with.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
And history has shown that there’s been scant consideration for the Jews, so they very much need be for themselves. But Hillel also warns of making one’s self-interest the only interest. There really is a line there. And you really could cross it.
It’s like how the American conclusion from Vietnam was that war is pointless and that they couldn’t have won anyway. No, the fact is that you lost. Deal with it and stop making excuses.
Please don’t make controversial accusations of ethnic cleansing/genocide outside the pit. By “controversial” i mean any accusation which a significant number of posters on this board are on both sides of. I just don’t believe that’s a discussion that can be held productively outside of the pit, and those discussions cause significant problems in MPSIMS.
This is a formal warning for engaging in multiple personal attacks outlined below:
We understand that this is a very personal and difficult discussion for you, but that’s not a basis to engage in the sort of posts quoted. If you feel someone has overstepped the mark, please flag the post and let moderators deal with it. The sorts of statements made above are never acceptable in the MPSIMS forum. Feel free to go crazy in the Pit.