It’s good to be averse to cruelty, yeah. Don’t let anyone tell you that you should try to lose that part of yourself.

When I think of what I want to happen to people who have done terrible things, I think the most satisfying thing to imagine is a future in which they are denied ever having any power over others. Not a future in which they’re tortured or suffering or anything like that.

the only innocent israelis are underage children, palestinians, their pets, and the handful of people who do prison time rather than be conscripted.

I just want to put this out there: from a haaretz poll, 31% of secular israelis believe that when an enemy city is captured, all inhabitants should be killed. That number only goes up as people get more orthodox.

Thats not to say they deserve the inhumane treatment they have visited upon palestinians to be visited upon them. But it is to say that never again is an incomplete sentence. It should read never again, by any means neccessary.

I dont know what dezionification should look like. But im pretty sure that if its done by the west it will look like denazification - that is to say, a small number of elites will be blamed and killed/imprisoned, and the people on the ground committing atrocities will walk free. Their children and grandchildren will receive zionist indoctrination, and no real education about why zionism is bad will take place.

Norman Finkelstein on his parents hating Germans - not Nazis - for the rest of their lives:

“It was unthinkable that they would have a kind word to say about Germans… I accepted, that given their life experience, they had the RIGHT to hate the people who destroyed their lives. And the people of Gaza have the RIGHT to hate the people who destroyed their lives”

This genocide has damaged my soul. I categorically hate Israelis and have no sympathies for their losses. It has made me a worse person.

I pray that one day their fascist society is completely destroyed, and something less monstrous rises from the ashes. Then maybe we can heal together.

But until then, I hate every Israeli.

I will be more sad for the jewish residents of various countries who will inevitably be put in the same pot as the racist entity. Modern day israelis have the "privilege" for actually being able to be more aware of the genocide of palestinians, unlike germans, italians, slovaks, japanese, croats, romanians and hungarians in ww2 who to various degrees had decades of resistance against fascism behind them. You can not compare them, sorry.

Nobody, not even Benjamin Netanyahu or Itamar Ben-Gvir, deserves having to pick up a family member's remains and stuff them in a plastic bag

I think they do deserve that, but it would be bad because the family wouldn't. Like if we could somehow create cruelty-free body parts for them to have to pick up forever as a form of "look what you have inflicted on others"-type punishment, I would be fine with that. If we could somehow Matrix VR them into that situation. But yeah, I agree with your post

IMO it’s not losing your humanity to say that settlers and perpetrators of genocide not only deserve to be fought tooth and nail, but NEED to be, and it should be celebrated when they take hits as it is a step towards decolonization and the end of genocide. If the zionists don’t want to be in harm’s way they can always go home to Brooklyn or wherever and stop occupying. Once the state of “israel” is gone and a secular, just Palestinian state created, then we can talk about reform, reeducation, integration of settlers and their descendants. For now though I have no empathy for anybody there but the children and draft dodgers.

Don't lose that part of yourself otherwise you'll become like me and that is a bad place to be.

I want the genocide to stop. There are different forces that could stop the genocide.

In a perfect world, the genocide wouldn't have started at all because it would have been stopped by the decency of the israeli people carrying it out. That clearly hasn't happened.

In a just world, the genocide would have been stopped through application of international law. However, because , institutions of international law are not stopping the genocide.

In a somewhat just world, the genocide would have been stopped through the resistance of the people being genocided. Despite phenomenal courage and some amazing successes amid the horror, those being genocided have not imposed a sufficient cost on Israel to stop the genocide.

In the unjust world we live in, where neither Israeli decency, international law, or the resistance have been sufficient to stop the genocide, the only thing I can see stopping the genocide is force. Iran isn't striking Israel to stop the genocide, but if their strikes either degrade Israel's ability to execute a genocide or draw their forces away from Palestine, then so much the better.

I don't celebrate these retaliatory strikes for their own sake, but because in the face of a sociopathic Israeli society, empty and racist international law, and resistance that to date has been insufficient to stop the genocide, they are the only foreseeable act that has potential to stop the genocide.

I just want them to have a shred of empathy and understanding they are doing this to others.

Well not JUST.

I feel this a lot too. While I do enjoy and cheer for bombs falling on the fascist regime, there's still the part of me that understands how sickening it is to cheer for violence. Even if that violence is completely called for and is a tiny percentage of the violence the Israelis have inflicted upon others, the bombs weren't even targeted towards civilians and kids, while Israel is literally shooting starved people waiting for food.

There's a part of Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Losurdo that is quite relevant with this. In the process of debunking the deportations and concentration capms that the Soviets did to the Nazis, Losurdo describes the general sentiment the world had against Germans after their defeat. Westerners really went way over the top and wanted to do everything the Nazis did against them, even to their children. Soviets on the other hand were usually much more moderate. While in Czech and Polish concentration camps Germans were left to starve literally, Soviets still saw them as people. The Nazis that were guilty for war crimes would be tried and sentenced while the workers and peasant would be re-educated and reintegrated to society. This goes to show how much an ideology that's rooted in equality and doesn't believe in racial theories affects people in contrast with capitalism.

I hope that when Israel finally gets defeated, we will have the constraint to leave the monstrosities in the past and reintegrate most of the Israelis back to a healthy society without race supremacy and Zionism. People like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir deserve no compassion though. Straight to the wall, the most compassion you can show these monsters is to give them a quick death, something that no Palestinian has had the privilege of.

The israelis and zionists more broadly, have done too much harm and acted too fucking gross about it for me to feel anything but joy at their suffering and death. In cases where it's just distasteful / harmful to others to celebrate their suffering, the best I can give them is to feel nothing.

Honestly, it's kind of like the Romanov kids at this point. It's sad they were killed in a sort of moral vacuum, but it's just so much harder to give a shit in the context of a war in which countless families were slaughtered, mostly by the White army. The invocation of their deaths and the expectation of sympathy becomes almost insulting, because no such concern or compassion, or even historical memory, is granted to the far greater sum of dead that died because of that royal family.

I feel like this all applies to USians too. After all the US is the largest purveyor of misery around the world, including the enablement and encouragement of israel's genocide of the Palestinians.

I honestly believe you are right that we should not lose our humanity over the Israelis. Gotta say, however, that while I logically agree with you, after all the horrors they have already inflicted and everything I've learned in the last almost 2 years about them, it's emotionally difficult, to say the least, to keep this in mind.

I thank you, sincerely, for posting this, because I know I'll have to remind myself regularly that beneath all that propaganda, slaughter, and crimes against humanity, they're still people.

Hating Israelis is inherently justified, just as Russian hatred toward Germans during World War II was born out of wartime atrocities, not ethnicity. But just as that hatred faded and Russians later lived peacefully with Germans in the GDR, emotions driven by conflict don’t define people forever. No group is irredeemable.

"now is the time of monsters"

I read that as what moral people must compromise to face immoral people. You must give up some of your humanity to confront evil.

But I don't want to believe that the majority of people in Israel are ontologically evil, irredeemable psychopaths, I want to believe that they are normal people at their core. The inhumane hatred they feel for the Palestinian people isn't some unique phenomenon exclusive to Jewish settlers or Republican congressmen, but something any of us could experience for another group of people under the wrong circumstances.

I was raised in a somewhat conservative household in a somewhat conservative area and had planned on doing what most male members on both sides of my family going back multiple generations did and serve in the military before embarking on a different path entirely. It wasn't like I was ever expected to serve in the military and it's not like I defied social norms by going off to college. I'd like to think I would've anyway if there had been social or legal requirements, but it's a hypothetical.

So while I can't say I wouldn't be embarking on anti Palestinian pogroms if I had been adopted by a West Bank family as a baby and raised up in that culture, I can't really find it in my heart to care about those folks. Every day I spend in the imperial core makes me a passive participant in any number of unimaginable cruelties. Slavery, child labor, inhumane working conditions, the continued destruction of planetary ecology through pollution and over exploitation. And some folks want to go and pile more suffering on top of that? They need to contribute to the rivers of blood with their own two hands? I'm not going to waste time and energy trying to parse that mindset or try to figure out what quirk of social conditions or genetics separates me from them, or if they'd just be normal, sane-looking burger Americans if they came here. Fact of the matter was they had the choice and they made the wrong one and there should be consequences for that.

I don't know what to do with this rage that I feel all the time.

Israel has shown us some of the absolute worst that humanity is capable of. The cruelty and sadism even normal Israeli civilians have displayed towards the Palestinians has been appalling and shocking. But I don't want to believe that the majority of people in Israel are ontologically evil, irredeemable psychopaths, I want to believe that they are normal people at their core. The inhumane hatred they feel for the Palestinian people isn't some unique phenomenon exclusive to Jewish settlers or Republican congressmen, but something any of us could experience for another group of people under the wrong circumstances.

True and yet also true of Waffen SS. Of Auschwitz guards, of many leadership in Nazi Germany so it rings a bit hollow and academic. In the sense that they were not born this way and if plucked by time travel at age 6 into the USSR and the red army they would have been entirely different individuals. These aren't demons summoned from beyond but humans. But their choices make them monsters as do their thoughts and support of these criminal acts.

Our hate for them is pure. It's not a hate born of who they were born as but who they chose to be. As Marx said, we will not apologize for the terror.

The only innocents are underage children, perhaps those under 24 or so as well as you can't necessarily instantly leave a place once you hit 19, you need money, resources, job prospects. But you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, empires don't fall without good people suffering too. Blowing up the death star may have killed some slaves or janitors who didn't even want to be there and were just trying to work through yet it was the correct thing to do. Shelling Berlin resulted in some kids dying, some people who probably hated the Nazi regime dying, yet it wasn't avoidable, their deaths, their blood is not on our hands and should not be on our conscious, it is on their neighbors and those of the majority around them who supported and created this. We are blameless for taking action to put them down and should feel no guilt over the matter. We should feel relief at the deaths of the fascists and should shrug at the few innocents lost among them, writing them down not as victims of us but of fascism.

We, I, will save pity and sadness and empathy for Gazans, for the Palestinian victims of the genocide, for Iranians now suffering and probably going to suffer more from this war, for those in Lebanon, for the resistance in Yemen and elsewhere. There's not room in my heart for sympathy for the perpetrators, for the aggressors.

I just can't give a fuck about Israel. Between the high rate of military service, the broad public support for the genocide in Gaza, and the fact that so many can literally go somewhere else where they have citizenship... I'll save my sympathy until their cities look like Gaza.

Eh, the Isntrealis can choose peace, just as they claimed (but refused to offer the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians, etc) their victims could. They genuinely can, the Iranians are more civilized than settlers could ever hope to be in a thousand years.

I'm not gonna cry for the Hitler Youth and SS brigades, staunchly holding onto their genocidal ethos, getting mowed down in their entirety. They can always just- leave. Or throw down their weapons, join the other side.

While Israeli's are on the front lines of the expansion and preservation of western interests, and therefore actively committing unspeakable horrors reflexively, the rest of us living within the sphere of western hegemony should not feel like we are much better than the Israelis - while they are the weaponized vassal which is at the end of the chain of imperial brutality, we share in their machinery of imperial exploitation. We cannot distance and absolve ourselves from our own nation's participation in Israel's genocidal mania.

I write the above not to shield Israelis from the retributive justice that they deserve, but to thwart our base compulsions to escape into a focused criticism of Israel rather than organizing against our own governments which enable the acts of terror perpetrated directly by Israel. Even after the fall of Israel, if we do not confront our own ruling class by means of revolution, there will be another militant vassal of western empire in our future.

israelis aren't people and it's good when they die 👍

We don't need to dehumanize settlers; they already willingly amputated their humanity in their violent quest for racial dominance. Should I treat someone who would treat me the way they have treated Palestinians, purely for material gain, as human? I'm not sure. In order to avoid misanthropy, I must consider them an aberration. Self created monsters who have willingly severed our common humanity. Ultimately, pity doesn't win wars, and law and non-violence has done nothing to halt the horror they inflicted on the world. To even consider sparing a mote of pity for such monsters between now and their disempowerment is an insult and injury against the victims of the ongoing gazan holotaphe.

Tel Aviv Delenda Est.

Ugh. You’re right, of course. I’ve been feeling the exact same way about Americans in the last couple years. I need to work on that. It’s hateful and stupid and not the right way to think about things.

The majority of Israel supports genocide so I’m not going to be sad about Israelis reaping their rewards. When the dust settles and Isreal dies, may the survivors grow empathy

In some level it is important to realize that it the Israeli project is founded on their own abuse and exploitation. Take a bunch of traumatized Europeans give them guns and point them at brown people. They were always dogs sent to war to empower the same people that hurt them.

That being said. Nuking the place would be a reasonable way to break the chain of generational trauma. The problem is the west will just invent a new colonial police force once the glass cools. I mean, also that we aren't ever going to get to push the button on this one.

they will let back in the destitute, the Beta Israel, and the members of friendship organizations, and leave all the rest of the Isremovedli citizens to seethe for the rest of their lives in Florida.

Here's how I see it, when you support an agressive war you support dying for your country, now it happens that there are ways for states to wage wars without the war's supporters dying. But when that does happen, it's surprise pikachu face