FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7hr ago
A world that would turn on Israel for imposing these conditions would not impose these conditions on Israel lest it must turn on itself.
If somebody imprisons innocent people in their dungeon and uses them for slave labor people don't actually find it hypocritical to sentence that person to prison. The world in fact did not object to imposing the same conditions on the nazis (death) that the nazis did to the jews. More importantly, those Israelis could simply flee as refugees or return to the country their parents left from - they're actively choosing to remain in their genocidal (remember that we're still talking about the hypothetical so the argument that they haven't been convicted yet is irrelevant) ethnostate. The fact that they are unable to feed themselves because they prioritised ethnic cleansing over sustainability is not really going to engender much sympathy or charity from the outside world.
Somewhere north of 70% of Israelis were born in Israel.
This isn't actually a statistic that's relevant at all by itself. If you're the descendant of someone from an EU country, you're able to get an EU passport - it doesn't matter where you were born. The actually relevant statistic here would be how many Israelis are able to get a passport/citizenship for another country. All this statistic really does is establish that at least 30% of the country could just immediately fuck off back home if they objected to Israeli policy.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
11hr ago
You can't actually think the world would be willing to starve Israelis to death for the crime of starving Palestinians.
The world was willing to execute Nazis after the holocaust even though their crime was executing jews. Any Israelis who did not voluntarily leave the country and renounce Zionism would be regarded the same as the nazis who didn't give up after the war was lost - they're actively committed to the project and voluntarily taking on responsibility for what Zionism did.
But that said, this wouldn't be the world starving Israel to death - Israel's remaining farmers would be able to produce some food after all. It just wouldn't be able to support a population nearly as large as it currently has, which would be a big problem when their military protection gets cut off as well. Food security is just one of the large number of threats waiting for an isolated Israel, and while it wouldn't be an insurmountable problem by itself the real issue is how it would exacerbate all the other problems they're facing.
FirmWeird
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1d ago
Which is why they're being treated as POWs, with all the rights involved, right? As opposed to being treated as... well, hostages?
If you feel so strongly about people being taken as hostages, I assume you're aware of the vast numbers of Palestinians that have been kept hostage by Israel as prisoners? If that's your actual objection and you're concerned about violations of international law there's actually a lot of ground to go over with regards to Israeli violations of it. If that's your actual point, I'm more than happy to go over it with you.
But if your point is just who/whom (taking hostages is fine and legal when the Israelis do it but a warcrime when the Palestinians take a tenth of that number) then I'm not really interested in a discussion, or what passes for one when your criteria is just "if it is my side it is good, if it is the other side it is bad".
FirmWeird
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1d ago
We're talking about a hypothetical future where Israel has become a pariah state. I don't think it is particularly unlikely that other nations in the region would conspire to interdict shipping, or that Iran/Russia would supply the houthis with enough long-rage ballistics to shut down all shipping to Israel regardless of distance.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
How closely have you been paying attention to the region? This isn't speculation, this is a past event that has already bankrupted one of Israel's ports (Elilat), and the US donated a fighter jet to Poseidon's air force while trying to avoid their missiles (well that or it was just incompetence, which is the official story). There's even a wikipedia article on the topic (Red Sea Crisis).
FirmWeird
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2d ago
They can import as much food as they like from people willing to sell to them.
This is actually not true. There are real limits to the amount of food that can be imported to Israel due to their security situation - and remember that in this case we're talking about an Israel several years into the future from now, where their reputation has been torched and nobody is willing to support or trade with them. No more US money to Egypt and the other nations around them means no more land trade. The US giving up (well more than they have already) at dealing with the houthis means there's no more shipping, either. How does Israel import the materiel and energy required to exist without US support? This is a serious logistical question, and as far as I can tell the answer is that there's no way for them to do so once the US teat is removed.
As we've seen with Russia, both food and energy exports are not constrained.
Russia in the present day is an entirely different beast from a Pariah Israel. Not only was Russia able to continue to trade with China, they kept on trading with Europe as well - via India. Russia is a gigantic country sharing land borders with multiple trading partners that increased their investment in Russian trade after the US attempted to impose sanctions. Not only is Russia not dependent upon imports of any critical requirements, they have a substantial industrial and energy base which is actually superior to the US in several aspects. If Israel had the size and breadth of Russia, I'd agree with you that they wouldn't have anything to fear, but that's not the world we live in. There is a very big difference between having your exports of energy be cut off and having your imports of energy cut off, especially when that specific type of energy is mandatory for modern military equipment and logistics.
On the same note Russia, historically, has been an exporter of food - and there's a big difference between being a net exporter of food and a net importer of food when you get cut off from international trade. How does Israel import food, energy and fertiliser when they are cut off from Western support and largesse? Seriously, how? It can't be over land or sea, and air travel just isn't cheap enough to be viable. Throw in the difficulties of dealing with the black market (mandatory BDS laws seem like a safe assumption in this hypothetical) and you end up with a thoroughly untenable situation.
Sanctions and boycotts have not stopped these countries. Inconvenienced? Yes. But no sanctions regime is airtight.
The cutting off of aid to Israel would be far more significant than the sanctions and boycotts. US support for Israel is more than just the 3 billion number that gets bandied around - there's immense amounts of financial support put into supporting Israel and their security environment. Even if Israel wasn't sanctioned at all, simply cutting off the vast flows of free money will have huge negative impacts on their society. Being forced to accept a worse price on your exported goods is one thing - being unable to import the basic materials required for human life and economic flourishing when you are unable to source them domestically is an entirely different one.
I don't know why you insist on this being the silver bullet that fells the Zionists, but it's clear you in some form or another believe in the priors of BDS.
"My car has been driving for hours since I filled up the petrol tank, so I don't know why you insist on the tank being empty being the silver bullet that stops me from driving."
Beneath all the abstractions of economics are hard material realities. Modern first world societies are reliant upon vast amounts of energy and various other inputs in order to function - and Israel is simply unable to provide those inputs without extensive external support. This does not mean that Israel is going to immediately collapse overnight, but it does mean that Israel will be unable to continue in its present form. This is why I keep asking the questions I do - how does Israel maintain itself when it is unable to import the fertiliser it needs to grow food, let alone the extra food required to make up for the shortfall caused by lack of access to fertiliser and all the other imports required to maintain their agricultural sector?
Sure, that's a crisis they could probably deal with if there was nothing else going on - but when the US military support is cut off at the same time all the money required to fix the farms will be going to guns instead.
Israel will always have American sponsorship, if only because it is where most of the world's Jews live, so it is a hypothetical of hypotheticals.
Israel is currently losing support in the US on both sides of the aisle. Have you looked at recent polling on attitudes towards Israel? I don't think this is nearly as much of a surefire bet as you - assuming present trends continue Israel support is going to be a hard sell for the political right in a few years, let alone the political left. Given that we're talking about a time in the future, what exactly do you think is going to reverse that trend?
My evidence, to counter your 'history', is all of the real-life regimes right now who ignore sanctions and embargos without great difficulty.
How many of them are as reliant on external imports and support as Israel? How many of them are dependent upon security guarantees from other powers? How many of the real-life regimes that got killed by sanctions and isolation have you looked at to compare with Israel? You have the start of a good argument here, but you need to actually point out the points of comparison and why they're a good fit. Claiming that Israel can handle sanctions because Russia can is like saying that a chihuahua can protect a herd of sheep from wolves because a Pyrenean Mountain Dog can do the same thing.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
And after I went to all the trouble of finding non hypothetical points for discussion like food security and energy. Oh well, c'est la vie.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
I think I can roughly guess your political leanings and positions on this matter
I've openly stated my political leanings on the motte in several places - but if you can guess, please do so because I've been called both left and right depending on the day and it'd be nice for someone to be able to correctly identify where I sit on the spectrum.
I'd just say that eighty years of failure and defeat, with Israel consistently prevailing over great numbers and further entrenching itself does not make me believe it will inevitably fall. In fact, it is the opposite.
So if you saw an elite athlete who had been performing excellently for several decades start to falter, would you claim that his fourty years of active athleticism is a compelling argument against the idea that he would grow old and frail? After all, he had 40 years of strength and prevailing over great opposition - why would a few gray hairs and injuries be a sign that he was failing?
You want to wishcast the fate of European African regimes onto Israel.
Wishcast? I'm not sure what you mean by that. What I'm actually doing is comparing the trajectory of nations in similar situations throughout history - and there's actually quite a lot of examples. The Crusader Kingdom of Outremer is an even more apt comparison, complete with the useless scholars that require a lot of material support.
But you do not admit the possibility that the natives are simply destroyed.
No? My actual assumption was that the wiping out of the Palestinians would be what was responsible for Israel becoming a pariah state. Committing genocide (and there's no way you can spin 'the natives are simply destroyed' as non-genocidal) would absolutely be enough to mark Israel as a pariah state and get them cut off from the rest of the world.
But more fundamentally to my point... it doesn't matter if the Palestinians are there or not - Israel is unable to support itself over the long term without extensive inflows of capital and materiel from the external world, and when those flows are shut off the resource limits available to them will exacerbate internal stresses and conflicts.
I reject your narrative of history.
You're not alone - the first lesson of history, after all, is that nobody learns anything from history. But more importantly, what you're tossing out and ignoring from my post are the hard resource limits that international ostracization would place upon Israel. There are serious material concerns which would place hard limits on the ability of Israel to maintain their military effectiveness in the face of a global boycott and abandonment.
Do you know how much food Israel imports? Do you know what kind of other agricultural-based technology they import in order to farm their particular environment? Do you know how much energy they import, or how much of their tech sector is dependent upon foreign investment? How does Israel maintain their military edge when completely cut off from the supply chains required to make their technology work? These are all incredibly serious questions relating to the future of Israel which you have just completely ignored, seemingly because you do not think that there are any lessons to be learned from history.
And I assert this with the same confidence and lack of evidence as you give me.
It is admittedly very hard to provide evidence for exactly how a society breaks down in a hypothetical future world - but honestly, I think you actually have a bit more confidence than me. I'm calling back to history and comparable events in order to buttress my arguments, while you're simply asserting that history has nothing to teach because the Israelis would be much better at genocide than other people, which involves flying much further out from any available evidence than I would on here.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
But there is a sincere core of Zionists who believe that Israel was promised to them by their God and they will stay there to the bitter end.
And is that enough to maintain Israel as it is currently constituted? Does it include the Orthodox population of useless eaters/religious scholars? Being willing to fight on to the bitter end just means that the end will be bitter, not that it never comes.
A impoverished state with nuclear weapons and arms - not that it would ever get that desperate - will never fall. The Arab leadership very well know where those warheads are aimed at.
Did South Africa have nuclear weapons? I'm sure the leadership of all the black nations around them knew where those warheads were aimed at. How effectively did they prevent the fall of South Africa's apartheid regime? I'm confident they'll be just as effective at protecting the Israeli apartheid regime as they were in the past.
The fantasy of the Israeli state dissolving itself after sufficient isolation is simply that.
Fantasy? No, it is simply the most likely course of action based on historical trends. Pariah ethnostates that become liabilities for their imperial sponsors tend not to have particularly long lifespans, historically. Modern states with modern militaries are dependent upon a vast web of interconnected supply chains that simply cannot be replaced with domestic production. Where will Pariah Israel acquire the petroleum that their military needs to run? Where will Pariah Israel get the advanced electronics and armaments required to maintain their qualitative edge? Where will Pariah Israel get the vast amounts of funding that they use to support and maintain their society (someone has to pay for all those orthodox scholars)?
The reason I believe Israel would fall after becoming a pariah state is that there are several huge inflows of capital and materiel from abroad that are currently required to maintain the country in the face of tremendous opposition, and there's no viable domestic replacement for them in the hypothetical future of a Pariah Israel.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
If Israel has to choose between becoming an illiberal pariah state like North Korea or its nonexistence it will go for the former every time.
This isn't actually a choice. Becoming an "illiberal pariah state" is not a long-term stable situation - you can't run a first world economy with Israel's geography while completely cut off from all international trade and support. Take away all the direct and indirect support provided by America, as well as the support provided by diaspora jews (part of becoming a pariah state means that remittances and other sources of funding/support will go away too), and you're looking at a country with a very limited lifespan.
One of the targets of Iran's strikes against Israel was the diamond exchange - the diamond exchange is one of Israel's most profitable trades, despite the fact that they don't actually have any diamond mines in the country. How long is that going to last when Israel is cut off from international trade flows? How long is their tech sector going to last when all foreign investment is pulled? Israel does not have the population demographics or material resources required to sustain themselves when completely cut off from the rest of the world (to say nothing of what their internal politics will look like when the orthodox are forced to work and join the army). Don't forget that the majority of Israelis have the ability to simply fuck off back to their actual home country - and when faced with a choice between grinding poverty in a pariah state and living a first world lifestyle back in the west I think a portion of them will simply leave.
Pariah Israel would simply be a last, desperate grasp before the entire project is swept away into the dustbin of history, and if there's any hope for survival for Israel it means not ending up as a universally despised and hated ethnostate.
FirmWeird
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2d ago
If you think that qualifies as a tidal wave of gasoline what do you think about the vast numbers of Palestinian hostages? Sure, some of the small children they arrest get charged with crimes, but some of the Oct 7 hostages were "kidnapped from their tank" etc - actively serving in the military. October 7th is a rounding error when compared to what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians beforehand, and if you want to claim that it justifies what happened next then you unfortunately also have to justify everything the Palestinians have done in revenge.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
Someone connected to him claimed that Charlie had personally been worrying about his life being in danger over this specific topic - I agree that it has broken a lot of brains, but there's a difference between someone just arbitrarily blaming the jews for everything and being curious about a murder victim's recent thoughts about who wants to murder him.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
I do think it's significant that Kirk reportedly associated criticism of Israel with personal risk
This is exactly why I was curious - after seeing this tweet https://x.com/HarrisonHSmith/status/1955705962964111425 I wanted to know what the anti-semitic right's perspective on it was (forgive me if that's not how you identify yourself), so thank you for the heads up.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
If every war could be fought such that really only the heads of the respective states/organizations were killed it'd be a vast improvement across the board.
Have you seen any pictures out of Gaza recently, or seen any of the stories about what's happening? I don't think you're making the point you think you're making if you've actually seen what the strip looks like now.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
Asking you because you're the poster here I'd trust the most to be aware of this particular issue, but I've seen rumours on social media that Charlie was actually concerned about assassination recently because he'd been pissing off the Israelis. Do you think or have any evidence that this particular aspect is potentially a factor?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
The most recently highlighted instance of Israeli snipers targeting people was explicitly murdering a civilian - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich
“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.
Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.
“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”
I don't think it was a good thing that Charlie died but that doesn't mean he wasn't out there advocating for what happened to him to happen to others.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
I've posted about this before but I firmly believe that the answer to this is the lithium/chemical hunger hypothesis. I experienced the same thing when I was in Japan, but I was eating incredibly rich gourmet beef ramen for breakfast and washing it down with a sweet pastry. Still lost vast amounts of weight.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14d ago
even less sympathetic to the Palestinians
Trump's policy was explicitly kinder to the Palestinians than Biden (and by extension Harris, who said she supported Biden's position and wouldn't change anything) - Trump at least promised and achieved a minute ceasefire for a day or two. Biden and Harris' position was explicitly that they wouldn't do anything at all to stop the Israelis or hold them back.
Because surely that’ll help, somehow.
Yes, it will in fact help. What's the point of voting for the Democrats when there is no functional difference between them and the republicans? Sending a signal that the electorate will not vote for the same old moribund and corrupt geriatrics who have been profiting from business as usual helps to either destroy the party (so it can be replaced) or reform it so that it actually presents a compelling vision for the future. Harris, Schumer, Pelosi - none of these people can inspire the base and every single establishment democrat politician is incapable of creating a compelling vision of the future because their obligations to wealthy donors, lobbyists and interest groups are so strong that they are unable and unwilling to do anything but make existing problems worse.
The only left wing politician in the US right now who is capable of getting people excited is Zohran Mamdani, and the democrats are doing their absolute best to destroy him. Even the "vote blue no matter who" crowd are changing their stripes and doing their best to attack him so the usual sex offenders and genocide-defenders (Cuomo quite literally joined Netanyahu's legal team!) get back into power and keep the gravy train running.
If you actually care about left wing political goals rather than simplistic tribalism the only path forward is to either take a long march through the DNC to realign it with the wills of the left-wing base (which is a path that can most definitely win elections) or completely destroy it and start over, like Mexico did. If you've seen what Morena has done for Mexico, I want that for you in the USA as well - building more hospitals and infrastructure instead of deliberately starving children to death and blowing up Yemeni prayer circles.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
I like this post and think that's a very good read of the situation - but I also think you're leaving out some of the things that got the Bernie base so pissed off. There was real malfeasance on the part of the DNC when it came to Bernie, especially in 2016. Wasserman-Schulz and Donna Brazile were forced to resign from the DNC after Wikileaks released the internal emails showing they were actually conspiring to fuck him over (and then Debbie at least immediately joined the Clinton campaign). The Bernie crowd really were taken for a ride by the DNC and the lawsuit they lost had the party make some really unpleasant (but legally excellent) claims to boot. I am honestly not sure if there was enough support for Bernie to get him elected, but there's no denying that the DNC put a finger on the scale in a way that torched their relationship with his supporters.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
the one seal that hasn't been broken, is actually prosecuting and jailing the people who are best positioned to thwart his power.
Actually this seal has already been broken - but by the democrats when they prosecuted Trump multiple times. I'm on record (though maybe not on this site) saying that these prosecutions were a terrible idea and would be a horrifying weapon in the hands of a vengeful Trump administration. I'd say the DNC were lucky that he's so incredibly merciful, but I think the truth is that actually sending the entire democratic power structure to prison would make the left stronger once all those criminals and shysters were replaced by new blood.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine, that Harris recognized it, and that she also knew supporting them would lose her the election. Why, then, wouldn’t she say it out loud?
She actually did say out loud that she wouldn't do anything to stop them, and high ranking members of Netnyahu's government (Smotrich etc) were open about their plans for ethnic cleansing. If one person says "I think all the jews should be exterminated" there's not really much of a distinction between that and someone else saying "That person talking about exterminating the jews has an opinion that I respect and won't deviate from" - both of them are advocating for a holocaust, there's just a layer of obfuscation to gull credulous and stupid people in front of one of them. She didn't go out of her way to advertise her position on this topic because she knew it was politically toxic with her base, but you'll be hard pressed to find politicians who voluntarily run attack ads against themselves because they want to be honest with the people. I don't think the overton window really matters here because "just exterminate all the Palestinians so we can build luxury hotels" and "Starving those children to death is perfectly fine because they had pre-existing medical conditions" is still inside that window.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
But hey, public was dumb enough to vote him in again, so I guess it’s time for us to collectively reap the whirlwind.
I'm sorry but as someone else on the left the fault here is entirely that of the Democrats. Kamala Harris was one of the worst candidates I have ever seen, and it looks like Biden did his best to sabotage her as well. Trump didn't even need to bust out the worst of the attack ads because Kamala was so disrespectful and contemptuous of her own base - to say nothing of the genocide she ran on supporting (which multiple post-election studies have claimed was enough to swing the election itself). She hurt her numbers by refusing to go on Joe Rogan, but she was such a charisma void that refusing to go on was actually the right answer - she would have melted down and been unable to respond to basic questions about her past actions or present beliefs.
The problem with that election was not that the public was dumb. The problem was that the DNC ran a candidate that was WORSE than Trump - they ran a terrible campaign for a terrible candidate and got a terrible result. If you actually look at the results of that election in greater detail there's actually a lot to be hopeful for as a left-winger. When they weren't tied to the Democrats, a lot of leftist policy proposals actually went through. Left wing values are generally extremely popular with most people - but the DNC is a terrible expression of those values and so nakedly corrupt that anybody with a soul would find it extremely hard to vote for them in good faith. Remember how Schumer attacked Trump? By calling him a coward who chickened out of starting another war and murdering more people in the middle east. The public was actually doing the right thing in this case by voting for the less bloodthirsty candidate!
I agree that Trump term 2 has been very poor (probably for different reasons) but let's not try and blame the public for this happening. The blame for this result rests squarely on the Democratic party and if the public deserve any blame it is for not recognising that the ghouls in charge of the Democrats needed to be removed from power years ago.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
21d ago
Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.
The genocide (thank you for accepting the claim) is taking place with US support and using US manufactured weapons. The genocide in Gaza would be impossible for the Israelis to carry out without extensive western support and American taxpayer dollars. I do not think that you have a very good picture of the average left-winger's thought process if you believe "Oh the brown people we're exterminating for more Lebensraum for white settlers aren't American citizens so you can just ignore all those hospitals we're blowing up" would be compelling to many of them.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
21d ago
How many of them would describe it in those terms?
Depends on the context, but this objection is utterly meaningless. If I was selling influence to political donors and lobby groups, I would not describe what I was doing in those terms. If someone eats a pure carnivore diet but describes their diet as vegetarian you're just being stupid if you invite them to your roast vegetable appreciation society meeting.
As far as I can tell, the closest she got to mentioning the death toll
What she actually said was that she wasn't going to distance herself from Biden's policy and that she wouldn't change anything about it - and the Biden policy was that Israel can do whatever they want and the US will support them no matter what. Trump, when he said that what was happening in Gaza had to stop, was actually further to the left than Kamala Harris.
As someone from a country on the opposite side of the world, US politics are taken seriously down here as well - the US is the western hegemon and the decisions made there have severe consequences for the rest of the world. What matters in the US matters to the rest of the world as well - our Murdoch media whipped up a storm talking positively about Charlie Kirk despite nobody here really caring about him at all.
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