> how do you call israeli soldier bulldozing palestinian children?
Technically a war crime, but of the variety that happens in every war and has basically never been punished. Anywhere. It’s horrible. But that’s war. There is no such thing as a clean or just war, it’s always going to be horrible, the aim is literally to kill each other.
It seems once every ten years we find a war and zoom in closely and realise that war is horrible. The lucky ones this time were Ukraine and Palestine. The unlucky ones, basically everyone in Southeast Asia and Africa.
Was the holocaust just war? Was the Warsaw ghetto uprising a war against Germany? It takes 2 armies to have a war, not a colonized people locked up in an open air prison fighting against a sophisticated army, armed by one of the world's superpower, in flip flops while the colonizing army can't even bother to focus on the fighters and so just drops 2000 pound bunker bombs on entire families over and over again for 15 months straight.
South Africa has compiled dozens of pages documenting explicitly genocidal intent from high ranking israeli officials for its ICC case.
"UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war"
> Was the holocaust just war? Was the Warsaw ghetto uprising a war against Germany?
Not a fan of creating caste systems of victimhood. But in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, how many German civilians were killed?
And I never said "just" war. I said it's war. Russia is killing children [1]. We've killed children [2]. There are multiple live conflicts in which children are being targeted and killed [3]. This isn't okay. My point is we haven't found a way to do modern war without this sort of collateral damage.
> a colonized people locked up in an open air prison fighting against a sophisticated army, armed by one of the world's superpower
Hamas is armed by Iran. Not a superpower, but certainly a capable regional power.
Apartheid. Gandhi. Hell, M. L. K. It's a lot harder to claim the moral ground when both sides are committing war crimes.
> You’re saying that if they had the capacity to bomb Berlin and other German cities they would have decided not to do that?
No, I'm saying if they had the capacity to bomb Berlin--and did--the moral case wouldn't be so clear cut.
I'm also saying that if they had the capacity to bomb Berlin, they would have been well advised to focus first on strategic military or final solution targets.
> effectiveness of strategic bombing is of course debatable
Strategic bombing doesn't work [1]. (By and large, it hardens the opposition.)
It's debatable, but pretty much only as a theoretical concern as the history of pure (conventional) strategic bombing is a set of straight failures.
> population of the Warsaw Ghetto had no such option. Therefore anything they could do to harm the Germany state would be fully justifiable
If they had the option to bomb Berlin--particularly repeatedly--they probably also had a way out. (Not necessarily literally. But if you're able to manaeuvre in the enemy's capital, you have resources and thus options at your disposal.)
>But in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, how many German civilians were killed?
You mean like the 25000 Nazi civilians which the UK and US brutally murdered in Dresden? The civilians were the explicit target of the Allied bombings. Or do you mean like the Palestinian civilians, women and children, whom Zionists brutally murdered in the Nakba and Tantura with its mass graves to establish their apartheid state?
>And I never said "just" war. I said it's war. Russia is killing children [1]. We've killed children [2]. There are multiple live conflicts in which children are being targeted and killed [3]. This isn't okay. My point is we haven't found a way to do modern war without this sort of collateral damage.
It's not collateral damage, Israel intentionally targets civilians, they are not collateral damage, they are the target: "The Biden administration has quietly continued to supply arms to Israel. Last week, however, President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged that Israel was losing international legitimacy for what he called its “indiscriminate bombing."[1], "Israel/OPT: New evidence of unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza causing mass civilian casualties amid real risk of genocide"[2] "Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza"[3]
This is only a fraction of the clear evidence proving that Israel targets civilians intentionally and most of these are from months ago. Since then, Israel has become even more brazen in their targeted murder of civilians and entire families[3] and extermination of entire bloodlines.
>Hamas is armed by Iran. Not a superpower, but certainly a capable regional power.
That's a laughable comparison and I should have not even dignified it with a response. There is a world of difference between receiving a bunch of shitty rpgs and receiving $100+ Billion dollars, F-35 fighter jets and 2000 pound bunker buster bombs that wipe out entire families.
>Apartheid. Gandhi. Hell, M. L. K. It's a lot harder to claim the moral ground when both sides are committing war crimes.
Both siding an almost century old brutal colonial occupation and a 15 Month long Genocide is extremely absurd. Jews who took revenge on Nazi civilians were not judged by it because people with common sense knew the full context and trying to "both sides" that would have been seen as absurd and as Nazi apologia. The Gaza prison break was the first time in Palestinian history where Israel has tasted a fraction of its own medicine and they couldn't handle that and whipped themselves into a genocidal frenzy and by that shown the world their real face without its diplomatic hasbara mask.
> You mean like the 25000 Nazi civilians which the UK and US brutally murdered in Dresden? The civilians were the explicit target of the Allied bombings.
Not the Holocaust or Warsaw Uprising?
And there is recognition that strategic (conventional) bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel.
> only a fraction of the clear evidence proving that Israel targets civilians intentionally
"Indiscriminate bombing," "mass civilian casualties," "risk of genocide" (emphasis mine), and "wip[ing] out entire families" are not evidence of "target[ing] civilians intentionally." And as I said, even if they are, that's something every great power has done when it went to war in the last half century.
Again, that doesn't make it okay. It just makes it deeply precedented. You (and I) have a problem with war per se.
> a world of difference between receiving a bunch of shitty rpgs and receiving $100+ Billion dollars
Hamas has received something like $20bn of aid from Iran. That's roughly what the U.S. has provided Israel in the last few years. Of course Israel is a superior fighting force to Hamas. But Hamas wasn't defenceless. (It was still allegedly firing rockets this week.)
There are a set of evil-slash-stupid people in this story. Hamas' leadership is among them. If you're going to cite South Africa and the ICC, you can't clip out the parts that you don't like without either compromising yourself or the source (the ICC).
> Both siding an almost century old brutal colonial occupation and a 15 Month long Genocide is extremely absurd
Excusing one side's war crimes undermines the argument. Like, one of Netanyahu's racists could construct a similar argument about the millenia-old persecution of the Jews and Hamas' explicit aim of not only destroying Israel but exterminating Jews. If war crimes being criminal depends so deeply on context, they're no longer open-and-shut cases that can be judged from afar.
> Jews who took revenge on Nazi civilians were not judged by it
There was no armed-resistance equivalent to Hamas among the Jews.
A better example might be found among the Native Americans. (Or La Résistance.) Even there, the practical lesson is attacking civilians at best doesn't work. (At worst, it galvanises the population against you.)
Why single out that part and avoid mentioning the massacres of Palestinian women and children in the Nakba and Tanatura by Israel's founders to establish an apartheid state on top of the mass graves of Palestinians?
>And there is recognition that strategic (conventional) bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel.
If the bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel, why did America go onto commit the "the single greatest acts of terrorism in human history" by dropping 2(!!!) atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
[https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2015/08/hiroshima-and-nag...]
And if "there is recognition that strategic (conventional) bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel" then why did israeli officials reference the bombing of civilians in Dresden as their model for Gaza before they started the genocide and "dropped 70000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined" and "hit Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs" https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5908/Israel-hits-Gaza-...
>Hamas has received something like $20bn of aid from Iran. That's roughly what the U.S. has provided Israel in the last few years.
That's a figure which you most certainly made up and did not even bother providing any sources for. Any data about that is unreliable anyway because Iran doesn't disclose any figures regarding that while America does, so that is a dishonest argument to make anyway. Any reliable sources quote estimated figures ranging from 20-100 million which is a far cry from $20bn: "Historically (1990-2000), Iranian funding to Hamas ranged from $20-100 million per year" - These are still guesses and US being Israel's ally has also an interest in inflating the numbers to justify its overspending and absurd funding of Israel.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_support_for_Hamas]
The United States has provided Israel with over $160 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, whatever the Palestinian resistance receives pales in comparison because its limited to what can be smuggled into Gaza. Israel has an actual army with tanks and receives fighter jets from the US to exterminate the civilian population of Gaza because they can't reach guerrilla fighter in tunnels like in Vietnam.
> Of course Israel is a superior fighting force to Hamas. But Hamas wasn't defenceless. (It was still allegedly firing rockets this week.)
That's exactly the point, Hamas isnt an army with tanks and fighter jets but they arent completely defenseless, they, like the Vietcong, have tunnels and since Israel can't reach them, Israel instead murders civilians to put pressure on hamas. What do you call it again when an army kills civilians in pursuit of political aims? ter·ror·ism
/ˈterəˌrizəm/
noun
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
>> Both siding an almost century old brutal colonial occupation and a 15 Month long Genocide is extremely absurd
>Excusing one side's war crimes undermines the argument.
It doesnt undermine anything, Jews have committed warcrimes against Germans civilians who had once been Nazis as retribution, but when talking about the Holocaust someone says "both sides committed Warcrimes" it would be seen as Nazi apologia. You are clearly trying your best to "both sides" a century of brutal occupation and now genocide, but it still won't change the fact that the israelis are the colonizers and the Palestinians the resistance with the right to defend themselves against colonization.
>Like, one of Netanyahu's racists could construct a similar argument about the millenia-old persecution of the Jews and Hamas' explicit aim of not only destroying Israel but exterminating Jews. If war crimes being criminal depends so deeply on context, they're no longer open-and-shut cases that can be judged from afar.
This is straight up nonsense and israeli propaganda. Zionists already bend over backwards and invent the most absurd narratives to justify their century old occupation of Palestine akin to "actually our Palestinian slaves are oppressing us from the concentration camp we locked them up in and are disturbing our colonial project, so we're the real victims here". Even the Nazis used a similar narrative to justify their persecution of jews by claiming that Jews actually declared war on Germany first. [The Jewish "Declaration of War" against the Nazis - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4614991]. If a jewish prisoner in Dachau had written in his diary that he will kill all Nazi Germans if he can escape the concentration camp would you accept the narrative of a Nazi claiming "See? The Jews wanted to also genocide us, so the holocaust was justified actually" Of course you wouldn't. You're regurgitating all these zionist narratives because you're clearly a zionist who ignored mountains of evidence of the past 15 Months so you can prevent any cognitive dissonance and uphold your unmaintainable zionist worldview, but it will collapse under the weight of the evidence which you tried to ignore, downplay or subconsciously suppress.
>There was no armed-resistance equivalent to Hamas among the Jews.
Wrong. The Jewish Combat Organization: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Military Union: Żydowski Związek Wojskowy. Not that it matters anyway, if the jews had chosen not to fight back against their oppressors that would have been their choice. the jews suffered under the Nazis for about 12 years, while the Palestinians suffered under zionist terrorism and colonization and now genocide for more than a century now.
>A better example might be found among the Native Americans. (Or La Résistance.) Even there, the practical lesson is attacking civilians at best doesn't work. (At worst, it galvanises the population against you.)
If it really doesnt work Israel shouldn't have done it for 15 months straight.
> If a jewish prisoner in Dachau had written in his diary that he will kill all Nazi Germans if he can escape the concentration camp would you accept the narrative of a Nazi claiming "See? The Jews wanted to also genocide us, so the holocaust was justified actually" Of course you wouldn't
Isn’t it notable that this is a hypothetical? Jews aren’t killing Germans. Native Americans aren’t bombing Americans, Indians aren’t bombing England…there is simply a choice that has been made in the way some groups have prosecuted past persecution that is relevant to present treatment. Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement.
Israel and Palestine is a fucked situation because both sides have hardlined the other as terrorists or genociders. Both side reject the other’s label, and on somewhat credible grounds. As long as those hard lines exist, the people can’t coëxist. (There are people in this thread complaining about millennia-old transgressions. Like, so the Mongolians owe the Turks reparations?!)
And practically speaking, that sort of points—long term—to a single path for the region. (It’s notable, too, that nobody is willing to accept Palestinians as refugees. Both out of security concerns and because the nutter wing would label helping people as facilitating genocide.)
>Isn’t it notable that this is a hypothetical? Jews aren’t killing Germans. Native Americans aren’t bombing Americans, Indians aren’t bombing England…there is simply a choice that has been made in the way some groups have prosecuted past persecution that is relevant to present treatment. Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement.
It's notable that your Zionist sensibilities don't ever allow you to reflect properly on a hypothetical which was suited to your israeli propaganda regarding the inversion of victimhood. Many Jews who escaped the Nazi concentration camp had a natural and immense hatred towards Germans in general and they also acted upon it by killing Germans who had previously been Nazis as retribution.
It's also notable that you intentionally twist and misrepresent any given situation to make dishonest and misleading arguments. Like "Native Americans aren’t bombing Americans" but they did do that during their ongoing oppression and genocide, but now it's over for them because the American colonial project succeeded and made a comeback impossible for them. The Palestinians are still being genocided, we're witnessing their active colonization, so for you to compare post-colonial indians to an ongoing colonization of Palestinians is so asinine that it's indicative of bad faith.
>Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement.
Don't be ridiculous, people could have forgotten something that only happened in the past, but the zionist colonial project has never in its century long presence in Palestine ever stopped murdering, ethnically-cleansing, stealing more land and now genociding Palestinians. It's like you going to Dachau and telling a jew in the camp that "Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement" during their ongoing genocide.
Furthermore, the difference between Palestinians and other groups who have been successfully colonized and diminished is that Palestinians are part of a religion with almost 2 Billion members in a region surrounded by nations of that faith. That's why colonial powers invest huge amounts of money into regional dictators, who against the will of the population, help protect the colonial outpost from being kicked out. The dictators, however, will not be able to hold onto power forever.
>Israel and Palestine is a fucked situation because both sides have hardlined the other as terrorists or genociders. Both side reject the other’s label, and on somewhat credible grounds.
"Germany and Jewry in 1940 is a fucked situation because both sides have hardlined the other as terrorists or genociders. Both side reject the other’s label, and on somewhat credible grounds." [The Jewish "Declaration of War" against the Nazis - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4614991]
Again miss me with your Zionist/Nazi apologia, the Palestinians have been subjected to brutal occupation, ethnic-cleansing and genocide for a century and they have every right to armed resistance. Your "both sides" zionist trash argument is toothless and a disgusting attempt at inversion of victimhood. Israel has been founded on the mass graves of Palestinian women and children by Zionists who even US and UK classified as Jewish-Zionist terrorists: https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...
If you don't want people to develop a genocidal hatred towards you then dont build an apartheid state on the mass graves of their women and children, then commit genocide and pretend that you're actually the victim while you're genociding them. Anyone with a sound mind and a proper education will see through that zionist gaslighting.
>It’s notable, too, that nobody is willing to accept Palestinians as refugees.
You mean notable like the Jewish refugees who nobody was willing to accept?
British support for the Zionist project was even motivated by british antisemitism.
And even the US established a quota system, Immigration Act of 1921, which limited annual immigration from Eastern European countries with large Jewish populations. These restrictions remained in place during the 1930s and 1940s, significantly limiting Jewish refugee admission during the Holocaust era. Interesting behavior for Israel's great "ally" America.
Labelling everyone who disagrees with (or merely doesn’t understand what you’re saying) you a Zionist or genocide sympathiser is satisfying. It’s easy. But it also makes it virtually impossible to distinguish, from a glance, which side is more extreme, the pro-Palestinian side in the West or the Ben-Gvir gang. (I make the former distinction because, again from a distance, the people I know in e.g. Lebanon are much more balanced than what I hear in New York.)
Because if both sides are absolutists on from the river to the sea or whatever, there isn’t a discussion. There is no room to compromise. As Clausewitz said, there is necessity for politics by other means. Those other means are deadly.
And yes, I’m saying that the uncompromising rhetoric being pushed by people thousands of miles away from the conflict is driving up death tolls. Sykes and Picot didn’t kill these people. But they caused the circumstances that lead to their deaths. A lot of foreign activism around this issue is repeating the mistake of drawing boundaries—rhetorical and geographic—from afar, considering only the views of one side or, worse, their own assumptions about what one side should believe.
> Many Jews who escaped the Nazi concentration camp had a natural and immense hatred towards Germans in general and they also acted upon it by killing Germans who had previously been Nazis as retribution
And they were wrong. Understandable. But wrong.
If that had turned into a political movement it would have destroyed sympathy for their cause. (In the same way Israeli extremism is sapping support for Israel today.)
> like you going to Dachau and telling a jew in the camp that "Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement" during their ongoing genocide
If you can’t see the difference between an unarmed concentration camp and a foreign-armed militant group lobbing rockets, sure.
> they did do that during their ongoing oppression and genocide
Which tribes? Because the ones who hit settlers got wiped out more frequently than those who bid for time.
> like the Jewish refugees who nobody was willing to accept
>Labelling everyone who disagrees with you a Zionist or genocide sympathiser is satisfying. It’s easy. But it also makes it virtually impossible to distinguish, from a glance, which side is more extreme, the pro-Palestinian side in the West or the Ben-Gvir gang. (I make the former distinction because, again from a distance, the people I know in e.g. Lebanon are much more balanced than what I hear in New York.)
That's not what's happening and you are consistently misrepresenting the facts and the situation. The initial suspicion of you being a zionist has been confirmed by your consistently bad faith rhetoric trying to justify, deny or downplay the genocide. In some of your other conversations with other people you tried to downplay the death count of children to which they provided the evidence that you're wrong and you ignored it.
> But it also makes it virtually impossible to distinguish, from a glance, which side is more extreme, the pro-Palestinian side in the West or the Ben-Gvir gang.
If you have difficulty deciding which side is more "extreme" after 15 months of continuous genocide, then don't be surprised when you are correctly identified as a zionist. The people defending themselves against a century of brutal colonization and genocide on the other hand have every right to be "extreme" and such smears don't have the silencing and demonization power they used to once have.
>Because if both sides are absolutists on from the river to the sea or whatever, there isn’t a discussion. There is no room to compromise. As Clausewitz said, there is necessity for politics by other means. Those other means are deadly.
"Both sides". If you think that after 15 months of genocide there will ever be permanent "compromise" then you're simply naive. If I were Palestinian I would never stop fighting the genocidal colonizers who subjected the Palestinian people to a century of suffering, vilification and genocide. And it seems that resistance won't either: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-has-another-sinw...
>> Many Jews who escaped the Nazi concentration camp had a natural and immense hatred towards Germans in general and they also acted upon it by killing Germans who had previously been Nazis as retribution
>And they were wrong. Understandable. But wrong.
They weren't wrong and you also admit that it's "understandable" so it's clear that most people sympathize with them in that regard and don't classify it as wrong. that's why there are dozens of hollywood movies and shows of jews taking revenge on Nazis which have become popular blockbusters.
>If that had turned into a political movement it would have destroyed sympathy for their cause. (In the same way Israeli extremism is sapping support for Israel today.)
But it did turn into a movement: Zionism. Zionists weaponized the holocaust to turn zionism from an unpopular movement [as can be seen in pre-zionist jewish culture: Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn - Oh, You Foolish Little Zionists (Yiddish Anti-Zionist Song) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQMRwk8WDd4] into a more appealing one.
The problem is that the twisted ideology of Zionism made the Palestinians pay for the crimes of Nazi-Germany. Zionists even collaborated with Nazis and sabotaged jewish boycott efforts of Nazi-Germany so they can garner support for the colonization of Palestine. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement]
>If you can’t see the difference between an unarmed concentration camp and a foreign-armed militant group lobbing rockets, sure.
Again you completely strip the context to which that statement was attached to so you can make snide and asinine statements. I already corrected you regarding your false claim that jews supposedly never fought back against their oppressors but you clearly don't care to remember because it would ruin the validity of your vapid response. [e.g. Jewish Combat Organization: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Military Union: Żydowski Związek Wojskowy]
>> they did do that during their ongoing oppression and genocide
>Which tribes? Because the ones who hit settlers got wiped out more frequently than those who bid for time.
Apache Nations, Lakota/Dakota, Seminole Nation (which never officially surrendered!) but it doesn't matter which tribes specifically resisted colonization, what matters is that you made a false claim and I corrected you on that.
"Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs of Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel." -Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall.
Technically a war crime, but of the variety that happens in every war and has basically never been punished. Anywhere. It’s horrible. But that’s war. There is no such thing as a clean or just war, it’s always going to be horrible, the aim is literally to kill each other.
It seems once every ten years we find a war and zoom in closely and realise that war is horrible. The lucky ones this time were Ukraine and Palestine. The unlucky ones, basically everyone in Southeast Asia and Africa.