The vast majority of us are caught between two extremes on Israel-Gaza: those who claim Israel has done nothing wrong and those who claim Hamas has done nothing wrong. They’re both foolish and hypocritical and hateful, and we should do all in our power to reject both.
@charlotteclymer I heard this elsewhere: the real two sides are those who want peace, and those who want conflict. Netanyahu and Hamas are ultimately on the same side, and peace is on the other.
@charlotteclymer I haven’t seen anyone saying Hamas did nothing wrong anywhere. The response is wildly disproportionate. The killing of innocent people anywhere is a fucking crime and should not be allowed to happen indiscriminately because of a terroists attack.
@nicholas_saunders@Tbsa@qualityhammer@charlotteclymer So to clarify… Are you saying that despite Israel taking pains to avoid & minimize civilian casualties, you believe Israel is the one indiscriminately killing women & children? Is that correct?
@Properganda@nicholas_saunders@Tbsa@charlotteclymer I've seen zero evidence of making pains to avoid civilian casualties. They have been repeatedly caught firing into UN groups, aid groups, corridors they have told the population are safe to travel.
For fools believing the PR put out by the IDF you have to look no further than the west bank where Israeli settlers accompanied by police and IDF have continued their campaign of terror on Palestinian civilians, killing over 200 in their homes and towns since Oct 7th. Same as they were doing before October 6th. ( hamas doesn't run West Bank)
The hard right Israeli gvt. leaders have said they will murder every living thing in Gaza or expel it and seize the land. You want to pretend they are not carrying through, eh don't really care. Just have some integrity and own it, because you won't be successful in gaslighting those that have functioning brains.
@qualityhammer@nicholas_saunders@Tbsa@charlotteclymer So you’ve seen no evidence of Israel dropping fliers/leaflets & calling Palestinians & making announcements ahead of strikes & ground invasion to root out #Hamas terrorists? Thanks for admitting that whatever doesn’t fit your preferred narrative, doesn’t permeate your information bubble, or gets ignored.
@Properganda@nicholas_saunders@Tbsa@charlotteclymer the performance exercise of dropping leaflets and making public proclamations of trying to avoid casualties is on par with the republican party campaign ads claiming they are fiscally conservative. I did notice you couldn't counter the actual reality of bodies on the ground from the hard right Israeli gvt.
@qualityhammer@nicholas_saunders@Tbsa@charlotteclymer I noticed you didn’t provide a source, but did notice you moving the goal post & deflecting. Regardless, I’m no fan of the radical right, nor radical left anywhere.
You’re “no fan of the radical left” but use as your avi image the raised fist, an international symbol of radical left politics, in the colors red and black, the colors of anarchist communism, and pretend to be anti-fascist, a leftist position.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both noted that in those instances when the IDF does provide warning of impending attacks—it doesn’t always—that warning is often inadequately circulated, vague, and designed to cause terror. For example, the IDF dropped leaflets on Gaza that warned that anyone who failed to leave their homes within 24 hours could be considered an accomplice to terrorism.
Lots to unpack! This warning was inadequate: it made no accommodation for people who lacked the means to flee, such as the sick, the elderly, or the handicapped. It constituted a mass forced expulsion. It threatened collective punishment on a civilian population by virtue of its presence in a civilian city.
This one guy’s anecdote doesn’t somehow obviate the strategic approach of the Israeli state.
Like his life story is super inspiring and whatever but spamming this video doesn’t constitute a meaningful response to dozens of Israeli officials repeatedly, publicly, and explicitly identifying their intent as maximizing rather than minimizing harm to civilians.
The link is to a list of public quotes by dozens of Israeli officials establishing a consistent policy position, which wasn’t even compiled by Finkelstein, just published on his substack, all of which you’d know if you had clicked the link and given it even a cursory glance. Yes, consistent statements by a wide array of Israeli officials are a better indicator of Israeli policy intent than one guy’s YouTube video about his subjective experience.
Dismissing Finkelstein as “self-hating” because he’s assumed positions different from yours is obscenely anti-Semitic. You don’t own a monopoly on the one true and proper way of being a Jew.
Is your position that Palestinians & Arab-Israelis who say there is no #apartheid or #ethnicCleansing by #Israel fraudulent? Is #Hamas genocidal charter & stated goals, including promise to repeat #oct7massacre over & over, fraudulent?
Statements of government intent by current officials with policy making roles are a better indicator of state intent than just making it up.
Apartheid in Israel is predicated on the Israeli state’s active application of separate and unequal political and legal regimes on the basis on ethno-national identity, not anecdotes.
Hamas is evil and that fact does not somehow excuse Israeli apartheid.
@HeavenlyPossum Correct. Generally, the argument saying that Hamas hides behind civilians gets tiresome as fuck. As if they only have one argument to back the current genocide up. Fucking hell.
Israeli officials have both expressed intent explicitly and demonstrated it implicitly by choosing military options that have killed thousands of children.
So despite giving advanced warnings… What other options are there, when Hamas death cult routine tactic is to use Palestinian civilian infrastructure & people as human shields?
We do not live in a world in which the only options are “massive overreaction without consideration of humanitarian consequences” or “abject surrender.” Negotiations have, unsurprisingly, done more to secure the release of hostages than all those kilotons of explosives dropped on hospitals and schools.
This is an argument in favor of Hamas continuing to murder Israelis to improve its bargaining position.
That aside, Israel is a nuclear-armed regional hegemon with one of the most capable and advanced militaries in the world; that is backing by military might. Mass murdering children in order to bolster a bargaining position to secure the release of other children is sociopathic.
Israel doesn’t need to kill all of the Palestinians to achieve its goal of an apartheid regime and territorial expropriation built on the backs of cheap Palestinian labor—but Israeli officials have spoken openly about the possibility of dropping nuclear weapons on Gaza, using starvation to kill Palestinians and expel the survivors, and genocide.
For variety. .. you're accusing Israel of starving civilians. In so doing you're both ceding the moral ground and failing to acknowledge that food, like money or fuel, can end up in the wrong hands.
Any army has, not just the right, but a duty, to inspect humanitarian aid as well as to ensure that it reaches only civilians.
Israel is responsible for the well-being of the Palestinians it has trapped in Gaza for years as surely as any concentration camp guards are responsible for the well-being of their prisoners.
I am observing that the Israeli state has been deliberately starving the population of Gaza in a manner that amounts to collective punishment, in contravention to international laws of war, as a deliberate strategy, yes.
Belligerents lack the legal or moral right to starve millions of people because they don’t want enemy fighters to acquire food. Israel was not “inspecting” imports; it merely agreed to refrain from blowing up imports amounting to less than a kilogram of all humanitarian resources (food, water, medicine, etc) per person per day.
Your attempt to spin this as “responsible inspection” is obscene and I hope someday you can experience shame for having said this.
Israel’s responsibility to feed Gazans is predicated on Israel’s assumption of control over Gaza, which it has since 1967.
If you wish Palestinians to be free to feed themselves, as I do, then I welcome you to join me in opposing Israel’s total and absolute control of all movement into and out of Gaza.
@HeavenlyPossum You’re displaying how disingenuous you are by ignoring the fact that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 (IDF even forcibly removed Jews) but left greenhouses for Palestinians, only to be rewarded by Hamas getting elected to majority the following year & followed by rockets, terror tunnels, suicide bombers, abductions, etc. But Egypt (which Gaza belonged to & shares border) has no responsibility, right?
The Israeli state did indeed withdraw its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005. Ariel Sharon’s government was explicit at the time that its intent with this “disengagement” was to disrupt the peace process and inhibit the emergence of a Palestinian state or a one-state solution.
Regardless, Israel has since controlled all access in and out of Gaza. It controls Gaza’s land borders and will shoot Palestinians who approach the buffer zone that Israel maintains inside Gaza. It controls Gaza’s airspace and destroyed Gaza’s airport. It controls Gaza’s sea access and mined Gaza’s territorial waters. It controls Gaza’s food, fuel, water, electricity, and medicine access. Palestinians cannot enter or leave except in the unlikely event of receiving Israeli permission.
Israel “disengaged” from Gaza in the same way that apartheid South Africa “disengaged” from the Bantustans—by retaining absolute sovereign control while pretending the territory was somehow independent of its jurisdiction, so it could pretend that the disfranchised population was actually another country’s problem.
Starving two million people is a crime, in both the legal and moral sense. Israel has committed, among many others, a war crime by doing so.
I spent years watching Asad starve Syrians to death and pampered westerners making excuses for it; I’m not interested in going through your obscene apologia again.
@nicholas_saunders Ad Hominem fallacies are sadly typical tactics of a weak/losing argument. So far I’ve been accused of being: a Right winger pretending to be a Leftist, a fascist pretending to be anti-fascist, a Bibi apologist/supporter, a paid (and incompetent israel troll), ignorant of history, etc… I chalk up these accusations & projections as self-owns.
If Hamas fighters had occupied an Israeli school and taken Israeli students hostage, I’d be hard pressed to imagine that you’d advocate starving the student hostages in order to deny food to the Hamas fighters, or the bombardment of the school with 2,000 lb bombs.
If you did, though, advocate for their murder through starvation or air strike in the same way you advocate for the murder of Palestinian children, I’d be comfortable in correctly identifying you both as monsters.
Setting aside the fact that the IDF also uses human shields, the fact that Hamas uses human shields does not create carte blanche to murder children. I’m not even aware of any instance in which the IDF has claimed an imminent need to drop 2000 lb bomb on ie Hamas political leaders in civilian infrastructure.
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