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Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

haaretz.com

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Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#741
post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I feel like comparing just to china is an unconvincing argument. I think a more reasonable argument would be number of resolutions relative to the behavior in question and the types of behavior that are criticized. Israel has basically been condemed more times than all the other countries combined. At the same time while Israel is not perfect there are objectively much worse countries out there. There are countries o…

Sure. I'm not doing a PhD thesis on this topic. I just came up with one example on the fly. I don't think it's particularly unconvincing but anyways. My main point is that we can actual quantitatively convince ourselves that Israel is singled out.

Re: Golan heights that's a particularly interesting example since if Israel does not let people vote in occupied territories then it's condemned as an "Apartheid State". But if it does then it's condemned for something else. Basically Israel can not win, condamned if it does, condamned if it doesn't.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like comparing just to china is an unconvincing argument. I think a more reasonable argument would be number of resolutions relative to the behavior in question and the types of behavior that are criticized. Israel has basically been condemed more times than all the other countries combined. At the same time while Israel is not perfect there are objectively much worse countries out there. There are countries o…

This is exactly what I'm referring to in the root comment. #1) The China claims are straight up lies. I'm a Zionist, I was willing to believe it, then I googled it. #2) "our human rights abuses aren't relevant because there's others" isn't convincing #3) the implication that other human rights abuses aren't policed is another google-able lie #4) we got slapped on the wrist by the world for being an offender, thus we…

#1 - The China claims are not a lie, e.g.: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/un-body-rejects-historic...

You don't get to say "I Googled it and it's a lie". How many security council resolutions and UN general assembly resolutions are there condemning China vs. how many condemning Israel? If you say it's a lie let's have those numbers.

The best I can find Googling is: "Joint Statement on Behalf of 50 countries in the UN General Assembly" which is very different than the criticism Israel is getting from the UN.

#2 - This is not the argument at all. I'm not even debating "human rights abuses" though I think there's plenty to debate there. Even under the lies propagated by Israel's critics Israel is receiving unfair treatment.

#3 - Show me the proof. Don't say "Googleable lies". How are human rights abuses by Palestinians in the west bank and Gaza enforced by the UN? In Syria? Saudi Arabia? Iran? I mean the list is endless. Give me some measurable criteria that supports your ridiculous claim that equal standards are applied to Israel. Again, without even debating the validity of the claims against Israel, many of which are debatable.

#4 - "We" get attacked by the world for using force to defend "our" citizens. The offense in question is daring to do what other countries have done and what international law allows countries to do to defend themselves. Wars are not a sterile matter. The US and the UK e.g. had many questionable incidents in their various endeavours to guy fight random bad guys around the world. Israel is far from perfect and we can ask for a much better government than the bunch of morons running it and we can be critical of many things, but what we're seeing isn't legitimate criticism, what we're seeing is a political lynch mob.

#5 - So we should have handed it to Syria, without a peace agreement, so we can have Iran's militias on the high ground above Israel's north and more cities in rocket range? Or we should have kept it as "occupied" territory where people would say "Apartheid", how can you not give those guys rights? Make up your mind, either Israel is "Apartheid" for not giving e.g. Palestinians voting rights, or those are occupied territories that are waiting for a peace agreement? And that ignoring the legal debate about the precise status of those territories.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#743
post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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So did Beijing bomb the Uyghurs? Do you see Uyghurs anywhere cry for kins killed by bombs or houses destroyed? How can you compare China with Israel? Also, sure Uyghurs killed Hans in riots, and they sure have conducted terrorist attacks in China.

Let's do a thought experiment. Please give this a honest consideration.

If the Uyghurs had 40,000 combatants. And if they were dug in tunnels under Uyghur cities. And fires 10's of thousands of rockets into Chinese cities. And killed thousands of people with hundreds of suicide bombings. Their cities were mined and booby trapped. Their combatants were well trained, armed with RPGs, sniper rifles, machine guns.

Then the Uyghurs raided some Chinese city, killing 1200 people, taking hundreds of hostages.

What do you think China would do?

China isn't bombing them because it doesn't need to bomb them.

Uyghurs have less people that care about them in the international community, for sure. I'm not sure they're not suffering a lot more than the Palestinians are.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current Hamas charter calls for a 2 state solution with the internationally recognized 1967 borders. But what's written and what leadership would accept might be two different things.

Even what is written is kind of questionable and seems more like wanting it both ways, just look at the beginning of the wikipedia article on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter

And they changed it under pressure and as a PR manoeuvre. They never really changed their views.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#745
post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> Isn't the US a colonialist project from its beginning? Isn't Canada? Isn't all of South and Central America? Australia? New Zealand? Jordan? Saudi Arabia? and the list go on. I mean, yes? And while in a better world we'd have proper solutions to that that would render unto these various peoples the land that was unjustly stolen from them, that is neither practical nor realistically achievable (undoing everything do…

I'm originally from Israel. No Israeli that I know thinks that Palestinians are inferior. Famously the ex-Israeli Prime Minister Barak said that if he were a Palestinian he might have become a terrorist himself. I'm not saying it's not a thing in certain right wing circles but painting all of Israel with this brush is not right. If anything there's a tiny minority in Israel that would consider Palestinians inferior to Israelis (or Muslims inferior to Jews or whatever). Plenty of right wing nazis everywhere in the world.

You're also wrong on the Palestinians willing to move forward. They had plenty of chances. They absolutely do want domination. For the most part the story that land was unjustly stolen is factually wrong. Land was bought by Jews during Ottoman times legally. Palestinians never had a country so that couldn't have been stolen from them either. Palestinians were displaced during 1948, in a war Arabs started against the new state of Israel. Read Israel's declaration of independence to see how Israel would have preferred that play out. Palestinians, and the Arab countries, have inflicted plenty of harm on Jews in the middle east. Jews were ethnically cleansed from most Arab countries and more land was stolen from Jews in the middle east than the entire area of Israel. But sure, the topic of harm and reparations can be discussed once Palestinians decide to stop using violence to pursue their goals (of domination). This is not about reparations anyways.

This fairy tale you're telling yourself here is some westernized story that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground. Sorry if I'm sounding patronizing.

EDIT: and by the way we can totally reverse Canada and New Zealand for example? Let's use those as test cases for your anti-colonialism fix the world sentiment and see how it goes? Those guys have zero claim of any sorts to the land they're on. Israel at least has something.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fortunately the vast majority of exploited peoples, Palestinian and otherwise, share a commonality with the vast majority of the rest of humanity; they don't want revenge or domination, It seems pretty hard to square this with the rhetoric and actions of Palestinian leadership, especially Hamas. Like if this was their goal, why are they so opposed to a two state solution? It seems like they could easily have had th…

Alongside the other comment, Hamas is far from popular in it's leadership position in Palestine. Probably something to do with the last election being in 2006. Saying it is representative of all Palestinians is a pretty tough reach.

Hamas is super popular. This is maybe a biased source but do you own research, there are no shortage of polls: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/03/22/poll-hamas-remains-p...

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel isn't involved in a genocide and it was their homeland once. If they are colonizer so is everyone else involved here at least. It doesn't carry any meaning. Your tensions with Israel might indeed be understandable, meaning the prevalence of such animosity isn't really something new. In that regard I indeed believe that Israel needs to exist. I also disagree that this was a plot by the west. Of course some pret…

That's a laughable argument, comparable to Italian fascists claiming Romania as the legacy of the Roman empire. Israel is built majority on refugees, and secondly on colonizers who hold a tenuous connection to the land. But you don't get to claim 2000 year old grievances, especially if your supposed ancestors share as much genetic material with the current inhabitants. Political zionism always had fascist components,…

Jews maintained a pretty strong connection to the land. They keep praying to be in Jerusalem and Zion. The connection is a central part of their identity and faith. Jews also generally stayed together as a people and a group and genetics do show this connection. It's not exactly a secret that Jews had a country in the region- it's mentioned in the most popular book in existence.

I'd say the connection of Israeli Jews to the land is stronger than the connection of most citizens of most countries to their land. To descibe that as "tenuous" is at best unfair.

[EDIT: erased a bit of not so nice retort]

Israel's right wing isn't very different than right wing parties in other parts of the western world. I'm not a fan of Israel's extreme right but conflating the violence between Israelis and Palestinians with either the rise of fascism or South Africa is just again yield to propaganda. The various governments of the Palestinians, the PA or the Hamas, make the Israeli right wing look centric. Put aside the various labels that are intended to dehumanize the Israelis, after Israel tried in earnest to make peace roughly around the proposed two state solution and was met by a wave of Hamas suicide bombers that impacted at some level every single Israeli, what do you think is an actual solution here?

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#748
post #93

How are those guys not treated as some hostile foreign power and have half their embassy staff expelled is beyond me.

I’ve often pondered the same. Seems like Israel gets a lot of special treatment from the US.

Well, them and Saudi Arabia. It’s useful to have allies in the Middle East to protect trade routes.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Did you know Israelis ran a covert bombing campaign in Lebanon wherein they blew up hundreds of civilians, blamed it on Palestinians, and then used this to justify the 1982 invasion? > [Rise and Kill First] contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right a…

Didn't the FLLF attack Palestinians? [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_for_the_Liberation_of_Le... ]

Did Israel also fire rockets on its north from Lebanon? Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?

Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.

Anyways, in this conflict cherry-picking is a big problem. Pro-Palestinians are very good at cherry picking some questionable Israeli action while totally ignoring the rest of the story. You can't understand reality by cherry picking certain things and spinning a theory to accommodate them. That's how conspiracy theorists think. The scientific method is to try and falsify your theory and really test whether it stands the test of the other events, not the ones' your cherry picking. And naturally for every story check multiple sources to try and get a sense of what really happened. If you're ignoring the rocket attacks on Israel, and other PLO attacks on Israel, and the attempt to assassinate the UK ambassador, as factors in your theory, then maybe your theory is wrong.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#750
post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I'm referring to in the root comment. #1) The China claims are straight up lies. I'm a Zionist, I was willing to believe it, then I googled it. #2) "our human rights abuses aren't relevant because there's others" isn't convincing #3) the implication that other human rights abuses aren't policed is another google-able lie #4) we got slapped on the wrist by the world for being an offender, thus we…

#1 - The China claims are not a lie, e.g.: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/un-body-rejects-historic... You don't get to say "I Googled it and it's a lie". How many security council resolutions and UN general assembly resolutions are there condemning China vs. how many condemning Israel? If you say it's a lie let's have those numbers. The best I can find Googling is: "Joint Statement on Behalf of 50 countries in t…

I'm a Zionist. Please don't troll me about being part of some They screaming apartheid, and please don't troll about how you can't find any security council resolutions on China. It cheapens our cause. Shameful.

People are smart enough to see that, and it's clear you think about this enough to know exactly what you're doing by bemoaning the lack of security council censure of China, and it cheapens our cause to have behavior like that affiliated it with it.

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