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From actual Israeli supporters to transparent pro-Israel astroturfing, the insistence on the 'terrorist' angle is striking. Does this really resonate with American normies?
I would think 'terrorism' a discredited label, counterproductive in most cases, especially in the context of distant desert squabbles. Is it not the 'common sense', dominant narrative in the US that the 2000's were a mistake born out of lies and a hysteria? Of course the actual costs to the Americans were miniscule, practically irrelevant, so I don't expect emotional investment, just disinterest and cautious 'this will not work on me twice' attitude.
Do you really think any sort of organized group is interested in astroturfing themotte? No organization is paying people to type up comments to be read by ~200 people max.
It's not. Terrorism is pretty consistently using violence targetted specifically at civilians in order to enact political change. Hamas sometimes acts like a legitimate military force, but they also do things like cafe bombings and parading kidnapped naked women through the streets. And notably the leadership doesn't disavow those actions and put any fighters who commit acts like that on trial.
I meant internet in general, especially reddit; it was not my intention to suggest 'transparent pro-Israeli astroturfing' is noticeable themotte, just the genuine supporters.
I meant 'discredited' in the sense of 'terrorist' label being a superweapon abused to the point of ineffectuality. I don't really have an opinion on whether you can formulate a useful definition of terrorism, maybe. Issue is, your formulation I think describes Israeli Gaza operation pretty well, but they are a 'legitimate military force'.
I really wish this sort of labeling would be backed up by videos of something resembling a Roman triumph. But I'm guessing you are referring to the non-naked corpse of a woman on the back of the truck clip? I don't think female Israeli corpses are special, and the amount of attention that is being demanded for them and other Israeli victims (in broad Israeli astroturfing) is disproportional, at times downright deranged.
Israel does not kill civilians for the sake of killing civilians. They take out military targets that unfortunately have civilians nearby, because civilians are nearby everything in Gaza.
There's a debate to be had about how many civilians it's justifiable to kill when taking out an enemy leader or military installation. What Hamas does is different, they kill civilians that are nowhere near any military personnel or installations.
https://zoa.org/2023/10/10448582-sickening-video-shows-disgusting-hamas-terrorists-parading-naked-battered-woman-through-streets/
That's a disgusting video. Even more disgusting is that that sort of thing isn't clearly and unconditionally condemned by Palestinian leadership. All people have some members who are disgusting. But good groups will have their leaders disavow disgusting members.
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America is locked in a constant cycle of “regret war now get excited for the next war”. Vietnam was a tragic and pointless waste of life, but the Global War on Terror is an existential necessity, because Saddam has nukes and the Taliban hate us for our freedom. The Global War on Terror was born out of lies and hysteria, but the Ukraine War is an unambiguously righteous cause that justifies unlimited escalation.
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Maybe? Terrorist is obviously something of a rhetorical term, but not many people view the war in Afghanistan that way anyway, and I don't think many came away with the impression that there were not actually terrorists involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
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Terrorism still probably has purchase among boomers who are Israel's biggest fans in the west anyways. But everyone else can just read about what Israelis say amongst themselves and realize that the distinction is meaningless at this point.
“You entered Gaza (after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught) to take revenge — as much as possible. [Against] women, children — everyone you saw. As much as possible. That’s what you wanted,” said Uriah Ben-Natan, the brother of 22-year-old Sgt. First Class (res.) Shuvael Ben-Natan, from the northern West Bank settlement of Rehelim.
Quotes like this put the Onion out of business:
Yeah Israel has a real problem with all these villainous live quotes. 90% of the time they manage to stick to the approved lines: 'we have a right to defend ourselves' 'counter-terrorism action' 'Iraq Iran Iran WMDs, nukes in 6 months' 'human shields'.
But 10% of the time government officials declare enthusiastic support for torturing prisoners by shoving metal rods up their anuses. Or we see the vigorous anti 'investigating soldiers for rape' protests. Or well-directed music videos where young children sing:
Reminds me a bit of Teufelslied, though it was intended as a marching song and I doubt children got to sing it:
At some point Israel is going to have to take on the villainous role with the face-concealing helmet and the glowing red eyes, accept what they are, what they want and what they'll sacrifice for the path they're on. They can't have it both ways. You can't be both the defender of freedom and justice, the unprovoked righteous who deserves sympathy and aid from others - and also go around burning people's houses down for fun, shooting children in the back as they flee, gunning down unarmed protestors, obliterating your enemies and taking their land.
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Gee, it's almost like the Israelis were angry or something after over a thousand of their countrymen were killed or abducted. Next you're going to tell us U.S. Marines landing on Okinawa had some off-color things to say about Japanese people.
If this is a justification, why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack? There is an obviously truthful reading of the situation, which is that Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out or someone stronger swooping in and separating the combatants, and then there are the two competing narratives that aim to marshal support for one of the sides by selectively word-gaming away the justifications that the other side invokes when turning the ratchet.
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements. Meanwhile the Palestinians continue to refuse to take "yes" for an answer and insist on further fighting. That's not the recipe for "a pox on both their houses."
Settlement expansion, supported by the Israeli state, is essentially enough for me to conclude Israelis were never serious about peace with Palestinians.
Goal always the same - dispossession and/or expulsion. Slowly with settlements, domestic opposition mostly unserious - happy with the end result, only preferring the optics of serious concern and stalwart disapproval. Faster with aerial bombing campaigns.
So the Palestinians get to demand to live in a judenrein society? When did that become a reasonable demand?
This is in transparently bad faith and you're not even making a pretence of trying to argue to understand rather than win. As an honest question, do you actually think that's what mildly_benis was trying to say? That the Palestinians are just antisemites who want to live in a jew-free society, and THAT is the main reason for their opposition to Israeli settlers coming in and settling on their property without compensation?
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If Jewish settlers agree to become Palestinian citizens, obey Palestinian laws, be policed by the Palestinian police, then the Palestinians don't get to demand that.
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I think in a case where this means keeping Jews from coming to them - not even as refugees, but in a settlement campaign under state umbrella - the answer is an unequivocal 'yes, of course'.
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If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7. More were killed by Israel just in 2022, and many more in 2021. I don't think being at a disco festival conveys a uniquely high value to your life, as opposed to, say, just being blown up in your home.
The relevant timeline just around settlements has plenty of evidence to the contrary, including from Israeli sources. Either way, it's easy to offer peace from a position of overwhelming strength.
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework. The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
From your own source:
PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May, attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians, and two Ukrainians. As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed, including journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 3 of those responsible for killings in Israel. On 1 August, Israeli forces arrested the PIJ West Bank leader Bassem al-Saadi. In the aftermath of that operation, amid heightened tensions, roads were closed in the south of Israel by the Israeli-Gaza border wall and reinforcements were sent south after threats of attack were made by PIJ sources in Gaza. The same day, Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown by the military as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Haaretz reported on 2 August that Egyptian intelligence officials "are holding talks with the leaders of the factions in Gaza in order to prevent escalation" and that "all parties told Cairo they aren't looking for escalation." On 3 August, Khaled al-Batsh, head of the politburo of the PIJ in Gaza said: "We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel."
Again, from your own source:
Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip ("joint operations room") would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza.
In each of these incidents, Hamas started the violence. FAFO.
You are the one who started talking about scale, implicitly suggesting that the scale of the Oct 7th attack was what made it sufficient as a justification for Israel killing 43k Palestinians. I just took this implication, as I understood it, at face value. If this is not the argument you intended, then please explain yourself better.
I'm sure the objective of Hamas could also be described by them as the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Palestinians - the Israeli state - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering any individuals that Israel has locked away. Israel says that its mass killings of completely uninvolved civilians are inevitable because it has no better way to break Palestinian organised resistance (Hamas) specifically without putting more of its own people at risk; I'm sure Hamas also sees no better way to break Israeli organised resistance than to spread terror and attack whatever civilians they can get their hands on. If you think it's unfair to demand that Israel restrict itself to surgical operations against Hamas militants that would probably result in 5-10x the military casualties relative to just levelling whole areas, then surely it's also unfair to demand that Hamas restrict itself to surgical operations against the IDF that would probably result in them just getting gunned down ineffectually.
Those seem pretty cherry-picked from the articles. The 2021 article starts with a description of Israeli police sabotaging a religious observance so that it would not disturb a political speech of their PM, and then later of Israel seizing the homes of some Palestinians, which resulted in protests being violently suppressed during which the first deaths occurred on both sides. You (and partially Wikipedia) are doing the same thing here again at smaller scale, taking a fairly uniformly distributed timeline of alternating incidents of Palestinians killing some Israelis and Israelis killing many more Palestinians - inevitably more civilians than militants on either side - and placing arbitrary cutoff points to break the sequence up into single "incidents" that look like they start with Palestinians killing someone and then Israel engaging in totally justified manifold retaliation.
"He randomly punched me, then I broke his arm. Then he randomly punched me again, and I broke his leg in response. Then he randomly kicked me in the nuts for no reason with his other leg. Of course I stabbed his eye out, I mean, who wouldn't? Being kicked in the nuts can have serious consequences and nobody should have to put up with that. What, you say I started it by stabbing him in 1948? Do you realise how crazy you sound, claiming that he has the right to kick me in the nuts over something from 1948? Besides, his dad who was also beating him all the time back in the 1940s said I was free to do to him whatever I wanted!"
You're right, I allowed myself to be distracted by you - after all, the original discussion was over whether or not some heated statements made by a random Israeli after 10/7 meant the entire post-10/7 conflict in Gaza was a sinister plot for Israelis to expropriate Gazan land. So good job; I got snookered.
But even here you're wrong; the unprovoked nature of the 10/7 attack, as well as its breadth and premeditated objectives to deliberately harm Israeli civilians who had done nothing to Gazans, are what justify the Israeli response and anger. It's not some cold math over how many deaths can be dealt out tit-for-tat, which again is not used by ANYONE in any other conflict because it's manifestly silly and has nothing to do with the actual objectives of either party to the conflict.
Nope. Words have meanings.
This is what they are actually doing, probably to their detriment. See, e.g. the analysis of John Spencer, an instructor in urban warfare at West Point.
"Obeying basic laws and norms of war" is not a demand for "surgical" precision. If Hamas can't measure up to the IDF conventionally, perhaps that's a big sign that armed combat is counterproductive to their political aims.
Not a valid basis to wage war or attack random civilians.
Interesting way to describe the outcome of a lawsuit, but even taking the Palestinian argument at face value it's still not a valid reason to wage war or attack random civilians.
Then you should probably have used a source that actually supported what you're claiming, instead of one that does not.
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