International condemnation of Israel is based on an assumption that the countries making the condemnation will never be faced with a military situation like that which Israel faces in Gaza. Zionists perceive this and it strikes them as very unfair, but it’s overwhelmingly likely that they are simply correct. There really aren’t any conceivable circumstances whereby any western country will be faced with a situation where they have two million people in a small area right on their border who are mostly hostile and ruled by a terrorist militia. It’s really unrealistic for Zionists to ask for a special exemption from international norms just because they decided to stick their foot into a hornets’ nest.
The Bundists believed that Jewish safety would be best assured and Jewish culture could best flourish in the context of multi-ethnic liberal democracies. My view from America is that they were/are right.
Don’t get sucked into Babale’s game of distract/divert. He’s more than happy to talk about Bundists or militias, or anything other than the ongoing atrocities.
Herzl’s original idea, that Jews needed a State of their own in order to protect themselves from anti-Semitism, is certainly defensible based on the realities of the late nineteenth century.
Where the Zionists went off the rails IMO was a couple generations later, when they decided that it was crucial that that State had to be located in one particular place, based on the prophecies of a religion none of them actually believed in. They should have found someplace where the native population was sparse, didn’t share a ethno-religious bond with a fifth of humanity, and weren’t already culturally predisposed to anti-Semitism. (The faction of the Zionist movement that rejected literal Zion-ism were called “territorialists”).
Of course, in the modern age of WMD’s, Herzl’s argument that the best way to keep the Jews safe is to gather them all together in one tiny geographic area no longer makes any sense at all.
I actually really like the “Non-Zionist” label, because Zionism is fucked, but calling yourself an “Anti-Zionist” implies that you either support the ethnic cleansing of Jews or believe that a liberal democratic one-State solution is a realistic short-term option, neither of which applies to me.
I don’t think Babale’s a monster – at some point it will sink in and he’ll feel ashamed (I think). I just don’t know if that will be days or weeks or years from now.
I agree with this. For me personally, I was very much inclined to give Israel all the benefits of the doubt at the beginning. If they said they had to bomb the hospital because it was really a Hamas base, OK, I’ll believe them.
Over the last few months, they’ve lost that benefit of the doubt. It turns out they were just bombing hospitals and shooting starving Gazans trying to get food. Hamas wasn’t actually stealing the aid, so that reason to withhold it was bullshit. Over and over, it turned out that the situation on the ground was much worse that Israel let on, and much worse than it could be if Israel allowed sufficient food and medical aid.
It’s insanity.
This thread, of course, was about the pretty useless bombing of Iran, also egged on by Israel’s current leadership. Man, Bibi really wants to stay out of jail!
…I’m not intending to pick on you. Because it isn’t just about you.
But I just don’t get it. Revisiting the discussion back in November 2023 that was just posted, I don’t understand why anyone would give them the benefit of the doubt for so long. That when they claimed “they had to bomb the hospital because it was really a Hamas base” you would just believe them.
Because they did much, much more than just “bomb a few hospitals.” On the dope, I spent a considerable amount of time tracking what Israel did to each of the hospitals.
You can go back and read it. I’d document how Israel would systematically put a hospital under siege for a few days or weeks. Then they would raid that hospital, damaging key infrastructure, abducting members of staff, kicking everyone out, then abandoning that hospital.
And they would do this over and over again, sometimes returning to hospitals multiple times.
Did none of this trigger your spidey sense at all? Not when they deliberately set Al Shifa on fire after they left?
Israel claimed they killed 200 “terrorists” and capture 900 “terrorists” without killing a single civilian in that raid that lasted weeks…and only a single IDF soldier died.
In order to buy that premise, you would have to believe that over a thousand Hamas terrorists just decided to “hang out” at a hospital under siege instead of escaping the moment it was clear the hospital was going to be a target. That these thousands of terrorists that mostly weren’t weren’t armed. Because this is the extent of the evidence the IDF provided:
There was this incident:
That happened in December 2023. You still gave them the benefit of the doubt after that?
Or that time they assassinated Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s son. They had briefly detained Dr Safiya and while they did that a drone shot and killed his son in the hospital.
Then the IDF raided the hospital again, abducted Dr Safiya and has been “beaten, starved, and isolated” ever since.
They didn’t lose your benefit of the doubt, then?
There was the time that this happened:
I watched that one happen in real time. He was alive one minute, walking around. The next minute, he was being mourned by his mother. He was shot dead in front of her.
We can go through each and every one of the attacks here:
I challenged Babale to do that earlier, they declined. Because let’s be quite clear here: the scale of atrocities committed here are off the charts. And we all just pretended it wasn’t happening.
South Africa gathered the evidence for genocide for the International Court of Justice back in December 2023. The ICJ directed Israel to “allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza, ordered the State of Israel to prevent and punish direct incitement of genocide, and to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza” in January, 2024.
Why were we still giving Israel the benefit of the doubt right up until a couple of months ago?
Again: this isn’t directed at you. It’s an open question to everyone here. I noticed the shift around a couple of months ago as well.
Honestly, I wasn’t following it that closely. The threads here got so contentious that I stopped reading them really early on.
I mostly get my news from here and the NY Times. Maybe it was a few months ago that the Times finally started reporting negative news about what Israel was up to in a more direct way.
Anyway, the evidence is really inescapable now. I’m sure it has been that way for some time, but it’s getting out more broadly.
I followed it more closely then. Honestly, I’m worn out. It’s just too depressing. And I don’t believe there’s anything i can do to stop Israel. I don’t think they give a shit what American Jews think.
Except… they do give a shit what American Jews think. They are furious we don’t obey them without question and march in lockstep with them. They have accused us of being antisemitic, dupes, supporters of terrorism, supporters of Hamas, bad Jews, and not “true” or “real” Jews for daring to question Israel. Zero sympathy for the American Jewish blood shed due to blowback from Israel’s actions. Nothing but “See! See! The world hates you, you need to move here to this last haven (which is bombed so frequently bomb shelters are mandated for every home and bus stop) and join our fight!”
Fuck their fight - I will not commit crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide for a country that has never been mine and I have no interest in even visiting, much less living in.
But if you aren’t an American Jew that doesn’t affect you at all.
Much more likely, once the genocide is complete he’ll try to pretend it never happened and avoid mentioning the Palestinians ever existed. That’s the usual pattern with genocide; after it’s complete, willful cultural amnesia.
Headline: " ‘Revenge Is Not a Policy’: Israelis Voice Dissent Against the War in Gaza"
Sub-headline: “After a long silence, prominent Israelis and activists are increasingly raising alarms about potential war crimes being carried out by the government.”
Edit, here’s another article, this one about Israeli rights groups calling what the government is doing genocide:
The two groups were B’Tselem, a rights monitor that documents the effects of Israeli policies on Palestinians, and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel. Their announcement was the first time major Israeli rights groups have publicly concluded that the Gaza war is a genocide, an assessment previously reached by some organizations like Amnesty International.
Well, sure - it’s just that I feel a lot more comfortable discussing the viewpoint of American Jews, being one myself, than the viewpoint of Israeli Jews which I am much less informed about.
Ehud Olmert … decried … the ‘cruel and criminal killing of civilians’…. Moshe Yaalon, a former … defense minister, has warned for months of ethnic cleansing. Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of the military … said the government was killing babies ‘as a hobby.’
And your cite for this is fucking Betzelem? Rofl my fucking ass off, if you think they represent any kind of mainstream, you’re high off your ass.
I’m sure if I only quoted you two words at a time, I’d be able to paint any kind of narrative I wanted to also.
Golan has gone through endless shit because of that comment, which he has explained many many many times was referring to Netanyahu’s policies and not the IDF’s behavior. But that doesn’t stop dishonest pricks from misquoting him.
Honestly, Golan is amazingly based, but his biggest flaw is that he doesn’t think enough about how his words get twisted by people who aren’t Israeli and don’t have his context. If he’s going to rise higher in Israeli politics, and I very much hope he does, he needs to start thinking a little more about that.
