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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Moving to the right and calling it the center is why the "good" party is supporting genocide.
Israel has the equivalent of Donald Trump at the helm right now. And Hamas staged the equivalent of ten 9/11s, handing a deeply unpopular conservative PM an extension on his political power for the foreseeable future.
Netanyahu and Hamas both want this conflict to go on as long as possible. Netanyahu because it lets him keep power, Hamas because they want to use the 2 million people in Gaza as a pawn to shift the world against Israel. Their end goal is to wipe out the 20 million people living in Israel, and their own founders have stated that that's not where it ends. They're not going to stop until the whole world is under an Islamic Caliphate.
Hamas absolutely does not give a damn about anyone living in Gaza. And they'll continue to brainwash and sacrifice the children, either as meat shields when they're young, or as soldiers when they get older. Israel grants asylum to gay Palestinians that escape from Gaza or the West Bank. Sometimes their families will kidnap them, bring them back and behead them.
I don't think it's pure coincidence they go looking for Pride Parades.
Terrorists do terrorist things. If we want this to ever end, realistically the only way to do it would be to kill the Hamas leadership in any way possible and somehow undo 20 years of brainwashing they inflicted on the Gaza population. As for Israel, think how racist the average American living in a border state is. How much worse do you think they'd be if Mexico was shooting rockets at our border towns every few days? Even without the rockets, we've been messing with South America for a hundred years, making sure we'd never have competition on this side of the pond.
Are they racist? Absolutely. We'd be way worse under similar circumstances. Can you imagine what we'd do if Mexico invaded Texas and killed 20,000 people and kidnapped another 4000 and took them as hostages?
The US claimed everything from California to Texas after a war with Mexico. Technically they were here before we were. Should we all pack up and leave too? Why are we expecting folks to do things we'd never do ourselves?
I think Israel not running n apartheid state would do a hell of a lot more to change the minds of Palestinians than anything Hamas says
We put them there to draw aggro for all the messed up things we do in the region so we can steal their oil.
They've been doing that for 60 years. Every rocket, every terrorist attack they took in that timeframe should have been ours to take. We engineered the whole thing.
We got all the benefit, while they took all the losses. You want to blame them for being racist to the people trying to kill them every day? When we, as Americans are pretty much the entire reason it's happening?
Have you seen pictures of Iran in the 70s?
We did this. All of it. We don't get to wash our hands and pretend this isn't all on us.
What did Mexico do to us? Guatamala? We overthrow governments for fruit companies on this side of the pond. The idea of US taking the moral high ground on a situation we created is insane.
If you actually want the moral high ground, know what we should be doing? Campaign to bring the 2 million Palestinians HERE. You think people living in Gaza right now wouldn’t immediately accept an offer to come live in America? And they’d acclimate to secular society a lot faster here than they ever would living in Gaza which has been blown to bits already.
Sure, we’d have all the problems that we were so eager to inflict on the Israelis. We’ll get bombed, people will die, and we’ll probably finally get our share of the terrorist attacks Israel and Europe have been dealing with for decades. But unlike them, we’d actually deserve it. Last I checked, OPEC isn't selling oil in Euros.
Let Israel have the whole thing, and lets see if that changes a damn thing. It's the LEAST we could do after using them as cannon fodder for the past 60 years. And these performative leftists will actually learn WHY Jordan and Egypt refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. (Hint: It’s called assassinations and coup attempts)
You're just making complete straw man arguments right now because I never defended the US once in my statement. I said Israel is running an apartheid state and maybe Hamas wouldn't be an issue if they weren't.
Yes the US is distinctly involved in Israel and the repression and genocide of the Palestinian people, and has been since 1948. However, that does not take away any blame from the Israelis being a violent apartheid state committing a genocide. And yes, I absolutely do blame them for being racist because Israel was the one who has created the conditions for this and every previous war in the region.
It is absolutely not unreasonable for people who were living in that land and were dispossessed of their land through no fault of their own, who are currently still being dispossessed of their land, and who are living in an apartheid, as they have been since Israels formation, to fight back against their oppressors.
By that logic the native Americans should never have fought against the colonialists and the Indians should never have fought back and killed any British. More recently by your logic Ukraine should not have fought back against Russia.
You have a right and an obligation to fight an invading power.
And we committed genocide against the Native Americans and put the few that were left in barren strips of land no one wanted to fend for themselves.
Fine, let's give them back everything first. Then demand others do the same. To this day we impose more rules on the Native Americans than Israel does to Palestine.
We should pray that Israel doesn't do to Palestine what we did to the Native Americans because there would be about 500 of them left, and they'd be stuffed into a piece of land the size of a Walmart parking lot.
And yet... despite the absolutely horrific shit we inflicted on the Native Americans... if your local tribe started kidnapping Americans and beheading them do you think anyone will care why?
You don't see the irony in this?
I'm not saying the Palestinians aren't justified in trying to take back their lands. I'm saying the Israelis are there because WE carved out that piece of land and told them they could go there. I'm saying WE decided to destabilize the entire region and sowed division so we could steal their oil afterwards. And WE directed the resulting (entirely justified) resentment towards Israel, using them as a convenient scapegoat to take the target off of our own backs.
We do not have the moral high ground here, and pearl clutching about the Israelis being racist towards people who are trying to kill them (because of us) and trying to say we should cut off all military aid and leave them to die is a morally abhorrent position to take for someone who lived their whole life steeped in the wealth that we extracted from their blood.
Because if that's your solution for Israel, applying that same standard to us would mean we'd have to collectively commit mass suicide first. We've done a lot worse for a lot less.
Those who live in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones. Our house isn't even glass. It's made out of single sheets of phyllo dough.
And the scary thing is, we weren't even the worst of the lot. Look at what world dominating empires have done historically and most of them were so, so much worse than us. Hell, look what China and Russia is doing NOW. As horrible as we were/are, just about everyone else who attained this level of power has done worse.
There is no way to atone for everything we did. But even if you wanted to start, letting 20 million people die in a death-trap we created because it's no longer convenient for us to maintain it is certainly not the way to start things.
Zionism is a settler colonialism project was able to start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a 'modern' way to 'solve' the 'Jewish Question' of Europe. Since at least the 1860's, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it's backing of the movement in order to 'solve' the 'Jewish Question' while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources. That's when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948
10 myths of Israel by Ilan Pappe, summerized and full book
Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.
Ending the current genocide means stopping military support for that genocide. The only way for everyone to live peacefully is a secular One State with equal rights and Right of Return for all Palestinians and Israelis
Make your own arguments instead of copy pasting things. It's lazy, and you haven't addressed any of my arguments.
If you care enough about the issue to have a discussion about it, at least use your own words and arguments that show you at least thought about the issues at hand.
I laid out my argument for why we can't unilaterally cut support to Israel clearly and repeatedly. Least you can do is attempt the same if you want to convince anyone.
Those are my words. I just provided sources to back it up
And that's why you completely sidestepped my assertion that we'd never do what you're asking of Israel right now?
Not without major public pressure on the Democratic administration. That doesn't change the fact that it is the correct stance both morally and even politically in terms of receiving major support from hundreds of thousands of voters in swing states.
Which is why they have your support. The rest of your screed of genocide apologia just reinforces this.
Clearly, because reading my comments it isn't immediately obvious what my political inclinations are.
How do they propose to do that with North America? There's just no way
If your argument is that we shouldn't care because there's no way to accomplish that in North America, why should we care when a suicidal terrorist group complains they're being oppressed while they're trying to kill 20 million people in Israel?
They got exactly what they wanted. Even the appeal to our humanity in an attempt to get us to stop supporting Israel was planned out from day 1. The end goal of which, is to make it easier to wipe Israel off the map.
Its not, please don't make assumptions on that little. I'm simply poking a hole in how absurd the overall project is. Its a grift, designed to run in perpetuity because the stated endgame is a pipe dream.
You think ending Israel and killing everyone in it is just something Hamas pays lip service to?
It's not like every country around them immediately invaded them the moment they were founded, right? Don't get me wrong, we should never have put them there in the first place. It was the 1950s, nobody else wanted the Jews in their own countries either. But they're there now. We put them there.
Hell, the whole reason the region is full of religious fundamentalist freaks is because we made a point of destabilizing the entire region so we could steal their oil without having to pay for it.
We did that. We put them there, screwed over the entire region and gave the locals an easy scapegoat to project their grievances onto, and after 60 years of it, you want to complain that they're now too mean to their neighbors so we should leave em out to dry so they can all get killed? While we sit here getting fat off the riches we stole?
You want to wash our hands of it now? Well that's convenient. It's not like we don't owe everything we take for granted to our ability to print money and force the entire world to buy oil using our currency.
Honestly, I think we should take a little responsibility. For once in our miserable lives.
Israel is the one that was founded on ethnic cleansing, used the peace process to expand it's settlements, and is currently engaged in genocide. Both Hamas and Fatah have agreed to a Two-State solution based on the 1967 borders for decades. Oslo and Camp David were used by Israel to continue settlements in the West Bank and maintain an Apartheid, while preventing any actual Two-State solution
Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ
How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
One State Solution, Foreign Affairs
I know I wrote a lot and I wouldn't expect you to read it all, but I addressed this as well, using the US-Mexico war as an example.
We haven't given back Texas and California yet. If you invade a country and they take your territory, you can ask for a do-over, but it's probably not going to happen.
As I've noted, WE created this whole mess. And we shouldn't expect others to comply to standards we would never accept ourselves.
If you want to take it a step further, I posited a hypothetical situation where Mexico invaded and killed 20,000 Americans and took another 4000 hostage.
And what our response would likely be. If you aren't lying to yourself, you know exactly what we would do, especially if we have someone like Donald Trump at the helm when it happens.
The Zionist Settler colonists were the in invaders, what are you talking about. Are you trying to paint all Arab/Muslims in the region as the same? Or do you recognize that the surrounding countries invaded the newly founded Israel after months of Israel ethnicly cleansing hundreds of Palestinian towns and also for their own interests? Transjordan colluded with Ben-Gurion to acquire the West Bank. Egypt also had their own ambitions. In 1967 Israel started the war in order to gain control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to gain control over all of historic Palestine. It's been a permanent occupation so the ethnostate that is Israel can continue settlements while rejecting the humanity and citizenship of Palestinians to solve it's 'demografic problem.'
I can't tell if you just aren't bothering to read what I wrote or if you are just looking for the closest tangentially related thing to copy-paste.
I just said expecting them to return land when we're keeping Texas and California is a case of "Do as I say, not as I do."
Yes, Israel removed Palestinian settlements. At our behest. We told them that land was now theirs. And the countries surrounding Israel telegraphed invasion plans for days before the six day war.
Revisionism aside, are you still trying to lay this at the feet of the Israelis instead of ours? We did that. It's cowardly to try to pretend otherwise.
Israel has been the one doing the settler Colonialism and ethnic cleansing, the fact that the US and other western countries have financially and militarily supported it for decades does not mean that Israel is not the one responsible for it.
Yes, the US was founded on genocide of the natives and continues to disparage them to this day with reservations. Obviously I don't support that, they deserve reparations and yes that includes land and financial compensation.
The Israeli plan to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip were planned for years. That's not revisionism, 1967 war: Haaretz, Forward . Forcible 'Transfer' (ethnic cleansing) is fundamental to Zionism since the 1880's long before the US had a major role in the region since the 1960s.
The whole point of the Uncommitted and other anti-genocide movements is to end US military support for the genocide. That's what is needed to start pressuring Israel to end being an Apartheid State.
You say that and yet, we have protests about Israel/Palestine and not a peep about reparations for Native Americans. We killed 99.9% of their population. It's easy to pay lip service after the fact, it's done.
Guess it's easier to pretend you care when you don't have settlements being raided and entire families being scalped. And you killed so many of them that there aren't enough of them left to complain about their treatment. We know what we did do when that was the reality though.
I ask again, what would we do if a tribe went rogue and started doing that now?
Do you think we've grown over the past 200 years? Think we'd react differently today?
Be honest.
The fact that our genocide of the natives happened hundreds of years ago is our of my control. Meanwhile, we are currently funding an ongoing genocide.
These aren't mutually exclusive either, you're deflecting from our support for an ongoing genocide with this kind of rhetoric.
Do you think we'd react differently today? That's a super straight forward question.
If anyone anywhere, regardless of the horrific shit we visited upon them attacked a US territory and killed 20,000 people and took another 4,000 hostage, and we had a Donald Trump in office at the time, what would we do?
This isn't one of those, "Rules for thee, but not for me" kind of situations, is it? Because I'm not doing this to deflect things from Israel, I'm saying WE did it, so at bare minimum we have an obligation to protect the lives of the 20 million people we placed in a death-trap of our making.
About your made up scenario where Natives result to armed resistance in response to an ongoing genocide and decades of violent occupation? I don't care, I would still support their emancipation. Yes, if people knew the full extent of what how we were treating them as subhumans, people would react differently.
9/11 was just my imagination I guess.
Wait... no it wasn't. We killed some 940,000 directly and our wars resulted in a cumulative loss of some 4.5 million people.
What... Americans didn't know we were mucking about in the middle east for decades?
You think we wouldn't do that now, if we lost ten times as many people?
....With Donald Trump as president?
I didn't ask you if you were a conscientious objector. Unless your name is Donald Trump that means diddly squat. I asked what America would do in that situation if you weren't lying to yourself.
And when that day comes to pass, do we deserve the death sentence you want to inflict on Israelis? Cause... we already showed what we'd do in those circumstances.
Dude, you're all over the place. Yeah, I know Manufacturing Consent is a thing. I have literally never advocated for Donald Trump. I advocate for Democratic voters to demand more from their representatives, because that's fundamental to a democracy
Don't change the subject, man.
What would we do? You know the answer.
Netanyahu is Israel's Donald Trump. Hamas knew exactly what would happen and did it anyway. Just like you know exactly what would happen if the above scenario happened in America.
You just don't want to say it. Because that would make you a hypocrite. Because accepting your first position, that we need to leave Israel high and dry, applying the same moral standards to us, you might as well be saying, "Death to America."
If you don't wanna go that far, guess what. You've got double standards. And that is a moral conundrum only WE have. Most other countries that have a terrorist attack don't invade sovereign nations and murder millions of people.
When France had their huge terrorist attack, their PM went on stage and said, "This will not change us." They still accept more Muslim refugees than we ever will.
If anyone doesn't get to talk shit, it's us. Especially, ESPECIALLY regarding anything in the middle east, because we engineered the whole thing for our benefit. Abandoning 20 million Jews we propped up specifically to draw aggro for us is cowardly. Denying the reality of what we did because you want to pretend you're really a 'good' person is laughable.
You live in a house with potable water that comes out of the tap. You have any idea how insane that sounds to most of the world? Just wasting drinking water like that?
All the things you take for granted was built on the blood of others. You live in America, get off your high horse. The name of the game is harm mitigation. You want to cosplay a goody-two-shoes? That's nice. Tell it to the 4.5 million people that died because we couldn't be bothered to make sure Florida got another thousand Gore votes. If you're an American, you're ruining things for everyone else, just by existing.
The US has 1/20th of the global population and produces 1/4 of global emissions and waste. 5x the global average. Know those billions that are going to die in places like Africa as global warming accelerates in the coming decades?
That's us.
So, if you wanna know why I think your phariasaic platitudes are gag inducingly vile, it's because your vapid single-issue hot take is ACTUALLY harmful to humanity as a whole. Republicans should never be in power. And no, you wanting to play brinkmanship with democracy itself at stake isn't funny to anyone actually paying attention.
Your lifestyle is only possible because of the absolutely heinous shit we visited upon others. You want them to pack up and leave? First find them a place to go.
Better yet, campaign to bring the 2 million Palestinians HERE. You think people living in Gaza right now wouldn't immediately accept an offer to come live in America?
Sure, we'd have all the problems that we were so eager to inflict on the Israelis. We'll get bombed, people will die, and we'll probably finally get our share of the terrorist attacks Israel and Europe have been dealing with for decades. But unlike them, we'd actually deserve it. And they'd acclimate to secular society a lot faster here than they ever would living there.
Let Israel have the whole thing, and lets see if that changes a damn thing. It won't, but at least you will actually learn WHY Jordan and Egypt refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. (Hint: It's called assassinations and coup attempts)