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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2216 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Netanyahu is trying to deliver on part of the "Greater Israel" plan by killing or expelling the Palestinians, esp. from Gaza. You're repeating "Israeli" propaganda about things like impeding aid due to weapons and fighting Hamas, when in reality it's clear from things like the evidence presented in the genocide case, it's about killing the Palestinians.

There is not much evidence for those 10K+ dead or captured being actual combatants, and you can see "Israel" hasn't captured many more hostages (not that they actually care about them, recently it was admitted they applied the hannibal directive on Oct 7th). "Israel" needs to flaunt these #'s to make it look like they're succeeding.

"Israel" is trying to escalate with Hezbollah and cause a wider war bringing in the US. It's been unsuccessful so far but tensions continue to rise.

What I keep asking for the crowd which claims Israel wants to get rid of the Gazans and doesn’t care how it does so, ergo genocide- why are civilian casualty figures in the Gaza campaign so much closer to US military operations than to Russian ones? Russia kills more Ukrainian civilians it theoretically wants to incorporate into its citizen body by accident than Israel is doing to Palestinians it wants rid of entirely(and I’m entirely willing to believe reports like Israel negotiating to deport them all to the Congo, even if I think the evidence is in short supply). Why? Israel is going to get about the same amount of condemnation from about the same people no matter what it does short of opening up another Auschwitz, so the balance of evidence is in favor of Israel not trying to commit a genocide and putting at least some effort into avoiding civilian casualties.

I'm broadly sympathetic to this point of view. For example, Mearsheimer has an essay about it, with a bunch of footnotes to back him up: https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/death-and-destruction-in-gaza

It is rather disturbing to see children singing "within a year we will annihilate everyone and then we will return to plough our fields" in a well-made, high-value music production. Even Snopes couldn't find any way to fact check it into the ground.

Why is "Israel" in scare quotes? Whether you believe that the Israeli government should be destroyed or not, it clearly currently exists and clearly currently controls territory.

Some people have their own facts, and denying the existence of Israel is, unfortunately, only a small part of a myriad of falsities from which their worldview is composed. Pretty much everything they know and say about Israel is false, but they can't help themselves and reveal it by denying even the most obvious of facts - such as the very existence of the state of Israel. It is actually a good thing - it clearly indicates people that are not going to be open to reasonable argument.

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