Israel’s strategy with the West Bank is masterful. Wholly and completely evil, but masterful.
Either the Palestinians just accept their lot, in which case Israel incrementally takes their land through their “settler” proxies, or the Palestinians (entirely justifiably) try to fight back, in which case the IDF goes in and kills a bunch of them, and Israel takes their land anyway.
It’s fucking despicable, but it works, and if one is devoid of morality, empathy or simple human decency, that’s all that matters.
No it wasn’t. Stealing land? Sure. Forced religious conversion? Sure. Invasion and occupation? Sure.
Genocide, though, only really started in this millennia. Before that, land conquest would just involve replacing the government and institutions, not killing/displacing the local population to have them replaced with settlers. It just didn’t make sense for most of human history.
Not to say things were good! Instead of genocide, the more common tactic throughout history was mass enslavement.
“Started this millennia” is not the same thing as “USA was the first to ever do that”. Of course groups expanded into territory held by others and pushed them out and killed them. I mean, there’s tales of similar things in the Bible. It’s also not really the same as what is happening in Gaza at all.
I would say the concept of genocide didn’t really exist before the concept of the nation-state, which is a relatively recent development that happened to coincide with the so-called “discovery” of the New World. That’s hardly the USA’s invention though! Europe pioneered the concept and used it to colonize all over the world.
That just isn’t true, the majority of the population of American Indians died via disease without ever meeting a European. Also, Americans on many occaisons had virtually no qualms with just committing outright genocide, whereas Israel actually needs “tactics” to try to cover it up.
I agree, but just for clarity’s sake most of the deaths due to disease weren’t strictly intentional until long after we were genociding them. I’m not saying it’s a mirror image of the US genocides, I’m saying that the Israeli government is modeling their methods after the US, and playing politics about their genocide.
I love that you name-drop the US when it was the English, Spanish, Dutch, and French that raped every continent and genocided entire cultures before the idea of the United States even existed.
Ok. But the US did exist during westward expansion. America is a pretty modern look at colonialism. The “USA” territory was originally untouched by westward expansion. It therefore functions as a super recent, unmuddied, look at colonialism. It’s a good example.
But America just kept pushing the survivors west a couple thousand miles at a time, and at least they got some land. Even if there was no where to displace them to, America would have just killed them all.
Israel is compacting people in a box, physically and psychologically it’s torture. Then, when some snap and do some crazy shit, they kill a bunch of people and make the box smaller
They’ve been doing it for the whole 70 years Israel has existed.
And it gives right wing extremist politicians a constant Boogeyman and without any real threat to themselves, and keeps them in power. So its never going to change.
That’s an analysis I hadn’t considered. I was thinking about instances like Wounded Knee, the 1862 Sioux Uprising, etc and the aftermath of US colonialism that resulted in the small plots of land they were forcibly exiled to.
Modelled after the settler colonial tactics of the Americans, British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Boer, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Chinese, Germans etc etc
Settler colonialism is an old evil, we saw it do immense damage in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of us live with its legacy and are still picking up the pieces.
That’s actually not how modern China gained territory. The settlements in Xinjiang were explicitly designed to not step on the traditional Uyghur economic/cultural center of Kashgar. Instead, settlement surrounded Urumqi, a place that used to be a backwater of backwaters (the name meaning “beautiful pasture”). Even today, Kashgar and it’s surrounding areas are majority Uyghur (by far), while Urumqi is majority Han.
Oh, and don't forget that the IDF have been reported on (and even video taped themselves) stealing money, jewelry, and anything else valuable they can grab in Gaza while they're there.
It’s funny, it’s pretty similar to what the US government did when they sent in settlers out to the west. Once over enough settlers staking out clams of land, it ended up crowding out the native Americans which led to conflict, and then you ended up with Custer killing bison on the Great plains.
I think the significant part there though is that it’s what the US government did almost 200 years ago. Not that that excuses it, but it was a much more primitive and ignorant world then, and at least some of it can be ascribed to that primitiveness and ignorance.
Doing the same thing in the modern world though - that’s just pure, unmitigated evil.
Ultimately all the Nazi’s scapegoating was merely a means for for those they saw as the best people to expand their power and dominion as well.
I don’t take this as a lesson about the Jewish people specifically being bad, I take this as the historically belabored lesson that humanity at large isn’t worth saving from its own many self-inflicted crises brought on by greed and power lust using technologies we never, ever cared to respect since their inceptions. We don’t respect or care for this earth, or even ourselves amongst ourselves, despite our great power of invention we wield as irresponsibly as a orangutan with a shotgun.
Bring on the climate change. Bring on the AGI. The Earth will weather it as it has every prior mass extinction. Hell, the Devonian mass extinction was ALSO the result of a runaway evolutionary mistake, we aren’t the first attack on Earth’s biome from within due to catastrophic evolutionary consequences, and we likely won’t be the last. Other creatures will suffer, yes, but at least if we are thwarted, that suffering will have an end at some point. Plus they already are. We decimate ecosystems to build strip malls, and stick the handful of species we find cute or some utility in in cages for humans to gawk at and/or labs to bisect. Then we declare them protected.
As long as we continue to have dominion over surface life, including ourselves, the needless suffering of this planet and most of humanity BY the privileged class of humans dejour will be without end, because we are deeply, intrinsically, irrevocably broken, cruel, and self-destructive.
Oh and this current conflict, here’s further evidence we also refuse to learn even from recent, intimate, traumatic history. Everyone biding their time, waiting for their turn to punch down. A whole bunch of new cruel people, being cruel to some other people, who’ll end up being cruel to them.
Then we dream of cooperating to a degree that we can develop a presence on other more hostile worlds, when we can’t even consider peace on the only one, and an abundant one at that, perfectly suited to our biological needs. What a joke.
^At 1:43:50, Finklestein asserts that Israel would bomb a residential area, wait for people to come out and call an ambulance, and then bomb the ambulance.
^At 00:24:15, Ali asserts that Israel is willing to shoot their own civilians as evidenced by the Hannibal Directive, verifiable events, and testimonies such as Yasmin Porat’s where the IDF was shooting indiscriminately and even fired tank shells into Israeli homes.
so says, Qatari, funders of Hamas, and dedicated to all things Jew targeting and Israel destructing, single purpose, Muslim terrorist propaganda mouthpiece, Al Jazeera?
We already know it's true and has been reported on by numerous news outlets for years. Trying to downplay it is rather telling on the kind of terrible person you are.
Some clowns are down voting the comments here. I suspect that they see this as some righteous reclaiming of land that is infested with vermin. Oh sorry, I mistakenly used the Nazi explanation for when the did the same thing.
As much as I’m appalled at the violence (from both sides), it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone (least of all Isreal) that Palestinian factions would eventually respond with violence to constantly being pushed further into a corner.
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