461–470 of 955 posts
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How can anyone view October 7th footage and think that Hamas should survive.
And how can anyone look at Gaza and think Israel should be allowed to carry on as it does? Someone needs to actually try and improve things.
I am in full support of Israel's actions in Gaza, but think Israel is completely out of line and breaking the law with their settlers actions in the West Bank.
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"Precarious" strikes me as a misleading way to describe a nuclear-armed state (and the only nuclear-armed state in its region).
Do you believe Israel's continued existence is assured?
But with nukes it for sure is because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
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we're precedenting it in the united states. our government is deeply ideologically aligned with the people committing the vast majority of domestic terrorism in this country.
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Can someone living in Israel help me understand what is going on right now? What does the political climate look like in Israel? Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this? Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how? I know that the media is all over the place and it…
> Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this? If you are asking specifically about the Hilltop Youth, I believe most people understand them to be somewhere between extremists and jewish terrorists and do not support their actions. The government (well, Ben-Gvir) can continue to support them (within limits of plausible deniability) as long as they are in po…
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> Having two ethno-nationalist states next to each other is bad. Giving them a very complicated border is worse This is the history of the Levant going back millennia.
Based on what? The concept of nations is perhaps two centuries old at best. It is true that there are many differing groups of people living in that area, but they were often simply under the dominion of one imperial power or another. This pat caricature is the equivalent of shrugging one's shoulders and saying "well that's how it's always been."
The modern model of statehood (which is probably what you are referring to) -- sometimes referred to as the "nation-state" model, but it is not actually particularly centered on the coextensiveness of the nations and states, and certainly orthogonal to states being ethnonationalist -- is at least ~300 years old (its often attributed to being ~400 years old and originating in the two peace settlements collectively known as the "Peace of Westphalia", but that's not really accurate.) OTOH, the concept of nations (which are basically the coextension of an ethnic community and a land) is much older.
But, in any case, it has not been the case at all that the history of the Levant is one of two local adjacent coexistent ethnonationalist polities, whether or not they look like modern states. That's just a simply false claim made upthread which needs no reference to the history of models of nations or states to rebut; before 1948, for a very long time, the Levant was more often either under one (multinational, imperial) polity or split between a couple of adjacent ones (often in the process of transitioning from unified control of one to the other), whether it was the British Empire, or the Ottoman Empire, a series of different Arab-led empires, the Eastern Roman Empire, the (pre-split) Roman Empire, various Greek-derived empires, the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, etc.
Can someone living in Israel help me understand what is going on right now? What does the political climate look like in Israel? Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this? Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how? I know that the media is all over the place and it…
Israeli here, can't directly answer your question since I've lived in the US for 99% of my adult life, but I consider myself pro-Israel and resent the way Israel is currently/always being portrayed. I see the key problem as people removing context: Context for why the current situation could easily be different if Hamas acted/acts differently, and context for why there is no "just stop fighting" option that leaves Is…
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> it seems to me that there is an equal amount of people cheering the settlers as there are people against what they're doing Speaking out of my ass here. But I’d guess most people don’t care. A minority cheers. A minority protests. Most go on with their lives.
No offense, but why would you speak about a topic you know little about?
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Israeli jews and their supporters in places like Egypt, engaged in terrorist attacks like bombing bus/train stations. The goal was to turn the population against the jewish populations within these countries, so they would have no choice but to join the European Zionist Jews. Egypt even passed laws protecting Jews from reprisals. Zionists dishonestly call the reprisals to the jewish terrorist attacks "pogroms". Once…
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
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Can you be more specific why you think so? I don't think what the commenter you are responding to said would meet the definition of collective punishment under international law.
Israel is directly causing a mass starvation event in Gaza. Innocent children and women are dying every single day, and if nothing is done soon, scores more will in the near future. The commenter’s position is that the situation in Gaza is justifiable because Israel had to take action against Hamas. This is textbook collective punishment: causing suffering to a massive number of people due to the actions of a minorit…
Asuming all that is true, the person you are responding to never said they supported the policies that lead to that or that state of affairs.
It is possible to imagine that someone could both believe that Israel's continued military operation is neccessary and that changes could be made to relieve the humanitarian situation. I dont know if the person you are responding to actually believes that, but based on their comments there is no reason to think they dont.
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I would also add that the war crime of collective punishment has a specific intent requirement. The perpetrator has to specificly intend to punish the group for an act. Even if the person you were responding to supported all the things you mentioned, unless they supported it as a punishment for oct 7, instead of out of a belief (for example) that it would allow Israel to defeat hamas, then it would not be collective punishment. It would be other war crimes but not collective punishment. See https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/24/a-short-history-of-the-wa... for a summary of what collective punishment is.
P.s. not so fun fact, the ICC lacks juridsiction over collective punishment, and given they are the main legal body investigating this conflict, we probably arent going to see any investigations into collective punishment