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I think they’re referring to the 240 US military personnel who were killed by Hezbollah (or rather its immediate precursor) in Beirut in 1983, which is the single highest one-day death toll for the US marines since Iwo Jima and for the entire US military since Vietnam.
Israel has a neighboring territory flooded with jihadists who are downright and openly genocidal towards Israelis of Jewish ethnic and religious background, so I’m glad you’ve come around on the war in Gaza. In any case, Syrian jihadists were never particularly set on conquering Lebanon, it wasn’t a primary target for them and it would be just about the only thing that could unite the Maronites and the Shiites.
The analogy only holds weight if you buy into the argument that Israel/people of Jewish ethnic and religious background have as much right to stay on the Middle Eastern clay as the Syrians do, which I doubt is the case for the protesters or most of those who sympathise with them. The communicative strategy of the pro-Israel powers regarding its legitimacy seems to continue being limited to "all polite people in the room will gasp and assert that you just did something beyond the pale if you deny Israel's right to existence", but this is clearly fragile and dependent on an unbroken chain of respect for the opinion for "polite people", which evidently broke at some point upstream from the pro-Palestine left.
The commitment to this strategy to the exclusion of all others boggles my mind - at least come up with some apologia involving how Palestinians are really also culpable for the Holocaust because Hitler admired Islam, or some body of Foucaldian jargon-laden papers churned out by a network of Jewish Studies departments which purport to present a critical theory of how occupying the Holy Land was just. Most successful movements in history that depend on a claim (such as an assertion of morality) that can't be strictly proven seemed to recognize that you need to maintain multiple lines of persuasion to cover different audiences - Christianity had the social censure for those who think judgement by the elites makes right, charitable organizations for those who thought displays of altruism do, tales of miracles for those who thought a God better have godlike powers, theological faculties for those who were most impressed by the trappings of scholarship, and smoke-filled community rituals for those who were most swayed by gut feeling and dissolving the self in a crowd.
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That was before Hezbollah. Secondly, they had no business being in Lebanon. The endless warmongering in the middle east has not had a benefit and has had a huge cost. If there were hundreds of foreign soldiers in Lebanon the Lebanese have a full right to hit back. Giving weapons to Ukraine but not acknowledging that the Lebanese have the right to defend their country is hypocritical.
Palestinians have a hostile nation occupying their territory, and they have every right to armed resistance.
And what, in your opinion, constitutes 'their territory'?
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They have (like the Native Americans) a right to resist, but they also must accept being utterly vanquished in response.
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