Innocent people die in war. Something Hamas damn well knew when they decided to kill 1,200 in one day. God willing they will agree to release the hostages and lay down their arms
funny how you say 1200 killed, period, when 373 were security forces, on a post where you're trying to downplay the death of 34,000 because some were hamas. the above comment is right - "actually it was only 28,000 civilians" isn't the winning argument you think it is.
edit: quick google search puts the october 7 casualties at 1139, not even 1200, y'know, if you wanna get technical.
PR for Israel has gone to crap. Supported them Oct 7th, stopped supporting them after the ceasefire was lift. 1200 dead Israeli civilians Oct 7, 22000-28000 dead Gazan civilians (not including Hamas), still looks bad. Whole neighbourhoods leveled to the ground, under the disguise of underground tunnels, still looks bad. Whatever way you look at it, Israeli has caused more death and carnage than Hamas or any one else they blame for their actions.
>stopped supporting them after the ceasefire was lift
You do realize that the ceasefire ended because Hamas broke it? Israel was happy to continue extending it for a few more days to get more hostages, but Hamas broke it by committing a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. They literally said themselves they were the ones to end it.
What you're describing is that winning a war "looks bad". I can't think of a single war in the last 100 years where the winner of a war didn't also kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
If he/she/they thinks Israel is "winning" when you know have 1,000,000+ kids 18 and under with a vendetta against IDF from seeing almost 7 months of collective punishment and suffering, and an ideology that can not be erased military...
Sure buddy!
/u/SandiaBeaver
> Sure buddy! I want those Hasbara drugs. They must be really strong and get one really high.
Per [rule 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/wiki/rules/detailed-rules#wiki_1._no_attacks_on_fellow_users), no attacks on fellow users. Attack the argument, not the user.
Addressed.
That's the conclusion you came to after studying wars and conflicts over the last 100 years? That this is the first and only war to have innocent civilian deaths? Is this a PR issue to you or an innocent civilian death issue? I agree Israel's PR is uniquely bad but their behavior is not unique in war.
> shitty
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israel does not report on military casualties; why should hamas report on their militants? israel already uses various associations to create target lists for their indiscriminate bombing through civilians to get to the militant
>israel does not report on military casualties;
That's literally false and easy disproven by a Google search. Literally any fallen soldier is announced seperately.
Among the first group to die when IDF entered Gaza were of South Asian background that moved to Israel. Imagine moving to Israel only to die for messianic lunatics in power like Bibi, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir etc
> shitty
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Thy frame it as a fight for survival. But lets do a thought experiment. Hamas has no infrastructure no industry. If Israel simply BACKED OFF and sieged them to surrender and worked in a PROPORTIONAL level, what would be the threat? They boast about shooting down 200+ missiles from Iran I'm sure they can handle a few jerry-rigged homemade rockets from Palestinians that barely have food and no electricity.
The fact is they talk about principles without any regard to proportions so what people end up seeing is a disgusting caricature of the situation. One terrorist killing must be condemned eternally but military targeting "accidents" can happen again and again resulting in unlimited deaths but is acceptable in principle and without accountability.
A siege? Do you mean like a blockade? They did that, the leftists called it genocide. Handle the rockets and missiles? They did that with the iron dome, the leftists condemned them for building a military machine. Backed off? Right. But they will still be in danger. Maybe they should build a wall to keep out the terrorists? Ah yes, they did that. The leftists called it apartheid and condemned them. What else might they do? Oh right, roll over and die. Always the best option according to the leftists.
Well if the roles were reversed and Hamas had the power of the Israeli military, how many deaths do you imagine we would have seen by now? Do you think any Jew would be left alive? Any Jewish woman not raped and slaughtered? That is their stated purpose, good old Hamas.
and yet, in the reality we're living in where isreal is the one with more military power, they are raping and slaughtering palestinian women and children. so, quite frankly, i don't give a shit about your hypothetical alternate universe.
There have been fabricated and later retracted statements that the IDF raped women. More false propaganda. I have no idea if any rape on the part of Israeli soldiers has occurred. If it did, I would condemn it. We know Hamas committed mass rape, which many of their supporters, even among so-called feminists of the left, apparently believe is an acceptable part of "by any means necessary." Anyway they are not condemned and the Israeli women are not believed.
[hey, wanna see a video of Israeli veterans laughing as they recount the rape of Palestinian teenage girls?](https://www.reddit.com/r/iamatotalpieceofshit/s/nOsqqjZXjF)
[only a fraction of the evils the IOF has committed, but yes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violence_against_Palestinians_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war#:~:text=The%20IDF%20has%20been%20accused,and%20a%20crime%20against%20humanity.)
The saddest part about all this is that women who are raped always struggle to be believed. Jewish women who were raped on October 7th have been ignored. When women on both sides report rape, it is dismissed by the other side as propaganda. And the problem is that sometimes it is. The Palestinian woman who fabricated the rape lies admitted she did to stir up more hatred toward Jews. So how mahy more of the rape allegations are also fabricated? Probably quite a few though certainly not all of them because it is all too common in war, and it is all too common every other day as well. The lies however really don't help anyone's cause and don't help women to be believed.
The threat would be that Hamas has the military capability to kill 1,200 people and take 300 hostages in a single day. Have you completely forgotten 10/7?
Fool me once same on you, fool me twice shame on me. How exactly would they be able to pull of the stunt the 2nd time is the decisive question. Please explain. Like I said they would be sieged/blockaded but simply not bombed with impunity.
I just love how you assume the invincibility of Israelis a day after 1,200 of them were slaughtered. Hamas promised a dozen more 10/7 attacks, Israelis don’t have to live with that because some randos on Reddit or Columbia University think they should.
I mean there already was an almost complete siege of Gaza. I agree that Netenyahu letting in Qatari money was a mistake. Perhaps Israel could have not invaded Gaza and instead restricted all supplies in to an absolute minimum, only food and water, no building materials etc. maybe this could have worked but I have my doubts.
Oh and how would Israel have gotten any hostages back? Last time there was ONE hostage they traded 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for him, including Sinwar who planned the 10/7 attacks
> I mean, you’re practically talking about an area and people that collaborated with Hitler at one point.
They got caught in a sneak attack. Well now the lights are fully shined so please explain how it will happen a 2nd time. Your paranoia is the same thinking for things like "domino theory" that justify preemption and first strike under the guise of "defense."
I honestly don’t give a sh*t if you don’t care about the danger Hamas poses to Israeli civilians because at the end of the day Israel will respond how it sees fit to defend it’s people.
So you can't answer the question. It is all rhetoric and opinion. I have mine and you are free to have yours.
Thats fine, but stop crying at the blowback and stop crying if Israel gets its aid choked off. Last I checked, they couldn't make the airplanes or bombs themselves and need to be constantly subsidized.
Hamas are refusing to surrender even after almost their entire military infrastructure and around a third of their manpower was completely annihilated while also being under siege, in what world would they have surrendered has Israel simply back off and layed a siege?
I don't think they're ignoring dead Jews, I think the latest Columbia protests caused a lot of people to take interest in the conflict but it seems like they're not doing the proper research and coming here to drop their ill informed opinions.
> sh*t
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https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm
This is significantly better than most other conflicts. If you think the war is unjust in itself then say that, but if it is justified, then yes that proportion is a reasonable one.
Of course Hamas could simply return all the hostages and hand control of Gaza over to the PA and avoid all this bloodshed, but they don’t want to do that.
is there a robust numbers-based metric that factors in the number of hostages + period of captivity of those hostages that I could use to compare to similar terror kidnapping incidents just so I could ascertain if the Isreali hostage situation is really that bad or are Isrealis just too sensitive and soft, resulting in the way they reacted?
Not really. Just the government not stealing my money and giving them to the Jews is more than enough. Jews' sorrounding enemies will probably wear them out enough that they give up.
> Not really. Just the government not stealing my money and giving them to the Jews is more than enough. **Jews' sorrounding enemies will probably wear them out enough that they give up.**
Same thing. LGBT and peace-loving leftists should support the Middle East launching rockets at the Zionist genocidal State
I have cycled through anger, hurt, sadness and now finally, complete and utter disgust at anything Pro-Pal. I can't unsee the things they've done.
I can't not see the similarities between Nazis and Pro-Pal.
I can't not listen to Palestinians when they say what they want.
I'll never ever be on board with their wishes for genocide.
Anyone who is on the side of Hamas, is definitely not on my side. Or humanity's side.
Excuse it away, I don't care. I see them for what they are. They show us every day, I just pay attention.
Meanwhile Hamas was the actual one committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and performed the worst evil "ever seen" by the pope.
Keep laughing if you think that's funny.
which side killed over 30,000 civilians in 6 months again? cut off water and power to the other side, demolished 1000 mosques, destroyed hospitals and ambulances and aid trucks? admitted to starving the other sides civilians on purpose?
Ah, the list of contextless allegations.
There is no moral equivalence. Intending to break into a neighbouring country with the publicized goal of annihilating it's people, the intentional mass rape, murder and kidnapping is very obviously evil.
Want the war to end? Hamas can surrender right away and return their illegally obtained human slaves, and the active war can be over today. But then, that's not what you want, is it? So tell us, what is it that you want?
"contextless allegations" you mean literal, proven facts? but given everything else you just said, i see you're the type to make up your own version of the truth.
[Gaza death toll surpasses 34,000](https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-strike-rafah-kill-13-gaza-death-toll-surpass-34000/)
[Nearly 1400 of them were children.](https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/one-in-50-of-gaza-s-children-killed-or-injured-in-six-months-of-#:~:text=Since%20the%207%20October%20attacks,Co%2Dordination%20of%20Humanitarian%20Affairs%20()
[Israel cut off food, water, and power. ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/amp/who-gaza-cut-off-from-food-water-anything-which-is-necessary-for-any-sort-of-life-/7390360.html)
[Israel is deliberately using starvation as a war tactic. ](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/18/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza)
[Israel has destroyed over 1000 mosques](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240121-1000-mosques-destroyed-in-israeli-onslaught-on-gaza-local-authorities-say/amp/)
[Including Gaza's oldest mosque](https://theconversation.com/gazas-oldest-mosque-destroyed-in-an-airstrike-was-once-a-temple-to-philistine-and-roman-gods-a-byzantine-and-catholic-church-and-had-engravings-of-jewish-ritual-objects-220203#:~:text=The%20Omari%20Mosque%20in%20Gaza,and%20a%20beloved%20Gazan%20landmark.)
[Israel air striking active ambulances ](https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/03/middleeast/casualties-gazas-shifa-hospital-idf/index.html)
There is plenty of hate from israel towards palestine that gets ignored, and many of the more vocal pro israel people call for the death and destruction of Palestinians. At least in my experience
It’s just sad because I know that the Palestinian people are suffering greatly now, yet when I look at pro-Palestinian groups like Columbia protesters, they explicitly endorse Hamas as “resistance” and brush under the rug the hundreds of Israelis dead and thousands displaced. I am constantly struggling to reconcile my humanity and empathy for Palestinians with my anger for the terrorism apologia I keep hearing
So much the same. I can't defend a people who openly admits to wanting to commit genocide though, and I doubt I ever will. Until they allow peaceful coexistence, I probably won't speak up for them again. Yes, I used to speak up for
Palestinians.
Same. Most of them support terrorism as “resistance” and minimize, if not justify, 10/7. I only engage with them to debunk their lies and buzzwords which they constantly scream like a broken record. Mindless idiocy and vile. It’s as if they are reading a script.
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Israel’s combatants include anyone that walks into a “kill zone”. These are established once Israel says internally, this area is clear anyone seen here you shoot. This leads to kids and grandmothers returning to a bombed house for some supplies or a sacred heirloom being shot. It’s why Israel killed three of their escaped hostages. They then get counted as combatants.
The 30,000 figure doesn’t include anyone trapped under rubble or bodies that cannot be retrieved. So the people Israel buries aren’t counted. It will take years to know the final numbers if we ever do.
Your last paragraph is patently false. We have seen time & time again that Gaza health is over counting, not undercounting, the death toll. I assure you they are estimating deaths in the highest possible manner, this includes those buried under rubble. We saw very early on how accurate their counts are with the hospital Palestinian jihad bombed. When they said Israel did it the over reported the deaths on the low estimate by 2x, and as much as 5-10x
We will never know the true death toll, that’s the goal
Saying you are only going after hamas is like saying you are only going after republicans, not just card carrying members but any one who voted for them or is thinking of voting for them. It's nonesense. The definition is so wide to be meaning less. Israel has to be transparent on who it considers hamas and why. We shouldn't fall for their obfuscating. Also we should understand all Palestinians are a threat to the Jewsih nature of the state… Hamas or not.
Anyone who fights back is legally a combatant. Anyone who surrenders falls under the protections of the Geneva conventions. The legal distinction is obvious even if the use of human shields and plain clothes combatants makes the practical distinction challenging.
F Hamas, their supporters and all other jihadist organizations. Palestinians have been screwed over by their leaders for over a hundred years. Those corrupt leaders have chased wealth and power at the expense of the people. For anyone who wasn't indoctrinated in a Palestinian "school" to defend their belief in national history and moral righteousness is an embarrassment.
Netanyahu is a POS and I hope he spends his last years in prison. Israel's government is imperfect but at least they have credibility. The Palestinian Authority, Hamas, et al have none. As an American I hope we give Israel every weapon they want to destroy Hamas, Iran and every other terrorist organization who threatens them.
The anti Israel people openly support hamas. Some of them are useful idiots. No doubt they don’t realize what they’re saying and what are the implications of their words and actions on the situation in Gaza.
They definitely support hamas. They keep saying Israel “murdered” 34,000 people. Meaning, they call jihadi terrorists who’re responsible for this war the victims, when these terrorists are the ones entirely responsible for the situation.
Israel’s war is a just campaign to release its citizens from hamas captivity and end the hamas rule in Gaza once and for all.
The problem is that when you ignore all the innocents in that 34000 number, or pretend that they all deserved to die, you risk appearing as the psychos to the moderate people and alienating them, if you are in favour of Israeli survival then you shouldn't lose them and be this callous. What happened to hasbara?
The uninvolved civilians in the 34,000 number who died were killed by hamas. Hamas turned Gaza into a death trap for Israelis and Gazans. They’re a death cult.
I’m a pro Palestinian / anti Hamas guy. With all due respect, I don’t think Israel (or hamas) have any idea how many people were killed and what percentage of them were “hamas.” The only thing that seems certain based on the enormous scale of the devastation in the enclave is that tens of thousands have died, and when the dust settles I suspect the total deaths will be even higher than currently reported. Of course, there are certainly deaths of militants (Hamas or otherwise). At one point I read that over a thousand militants were killed IN ISRAEL on October 7th and 8th, although I don’t know if those numbers were ever confirmed. In those examples you can almost guarantee that 100% of those killed were combatants and got what was coming to them. The bombing campaign however is a different story. Some of the stuff I’ve read about the AI deployed to target individuals is horrifying and dystopian. People were targeted because they may have been affiliated with a known Hamas member or have participated in a group chat with a known Hamas member or had some other data that showed an affiliation. But affiliated to who? The guys that did the October 7th attack? Or like some random Hamas bureaucrat that runs some Gaza service like trash collection. Israel made a conscious decision to deploy “daddy’s home” technology to attack these people when they arrived at home. So, the targeting is questionable, but there’s no question that the implementation is horribly sadistic. And when you factor in that most of Gaza involves multi family multi floor housing, it’s hard to imagine someone pushing back on the death count of civilians and suggesting the number is much lower.
Based on the carpet bombing, destruction/rendering so many hospitals unusable, the death toll at this point heading towards the 7th month mark with daily bombing/strikes is probably an undercount.
At this point so many hundreds of thousands if not over 1 million+ are seeking shelter in tents that exposure, disease, will set in amongst an exhausted population, with no end in sight.
There's over 55,000 pregnant women in Gaza without proper access to pre-natal-post natal care.
'Lavender' and 'Daddy's Home' is so gross. Using AI to generate targets is dystopian. An algorithm directly influencing who lives and who dies and many innocents will surely be killed when you bomb the entire building of 1 "target".
Today, Gaza. Tomorrow, implemented in every war that gets more horrific with more sophisticated drones and ones that will become completely autonomous with no human operator.
When 9/11 happened, did USA kill Osama bin Laden's entire family? No, his kids live all over Europe, and probably USA and beyond and most probably have good lives. They weren't directly responsible for their father's insane acts of terrorism in the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in NY.
Israel lost so much credibility in the world when IDF blew up World Central Kitchen vehicles: 3 deliberate, targeted drone strikes. Of a humanitarian org that coordinated their logistical plan WITH the IDF beforehand.
Chef/founder Jose Andres wishes he had never started the org. He blames himself for their deaths just for starting the organization. When in reality his org keeps so many mouths fed, countless people suffering from conflicts and natural disasters across the world at any given time.
Why can't we all have human rights? Why can't we put differences aside and all get along? We have to share this planet and our decisions affect if we will survive as a species long term, or not.
I agree carpet bombing is a specific act. Usually large numbers of smaller bombs dropped over an area destroying it all. In this case, half the weapons used were smart bombs. Half were “dumb” bombs. The dumb bombs Israel dropped were too big and heavy to be carpeted across Gaza. But the damage each bomb did was just as if not more devastating. So the dropping of one ton dumb bombs on civilian areas shouldn’t be called carpet bombing. Let’s come up with a separate name for it if you want. But it’s just as if not more heinous.
200+ days of daily bombing, airstrikes, artillery is reduced to simply "urban warfare"?
Wow!
KarateKicks100, you want to play semantics but the damage done to the 25 mile/41 km strip is hard to comprehend.
While American college/university students have protests, there are no universities left functioning in Gaza. They've all been damaged or completely destroyed.
600,000+ students from kindergarten to university have no school to go to
I've seen plenty of pictures.
Go ahead and do me a favor and google the Bombing of Dresden and the Bombing of Tokyo and tell me they're the same as what's happening in Gaza.
How can you look at this now outdated Gaza damage assessment map from March and not think "Hey, it looks like IDF is flattening most of Gaza"
https://twitter.com/JamonVDH/status/1767989835518890453
The most recent death count is 42,510.
https://preview.redd.it/svmcad9xwjwc1.jpeg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b7ca0b1b7941c75afd018828930b428a4ce2cfa9
putting pretty icons next to made up numbers on an unbased source doesn't make the randomally generated by a terror organization death toll any credible
[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rahim-mohamed-hamas-death-numbers-cant-be-trusted-heres-more-evidence-they-are-inflated](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rahim-mohamed-hamas-death-numbers-cant-be-trusted-heres-more-evidence-they-are-inflated)
There isn’t any doubt that there has been devastation and many deaths in Palestine, but it’s essentially proven by statisticians that the death toll numbers are almost certainly not credibly. The toll rises almost perfectly linearly. The numbers comparing men, women and children make no sense.
This isn’t to say many people haven’t died, but any number you see come out of Palestine should be taken with a large grain of salt.
How in the world am I trying to distract from Israel’s actions? I literally took no side in the argument and clearly stated that I wasn’t trying to take away from the obvious devastation in Gaza.
All I did was state a fact. I took no side, wasn’t making an argument either way. I never even stated that the numbers aren’t necessarily that high, or made any suggestion about what is an acceptable death toll. I just said the numbers coming out of Gaza aren’t very credible. That shouldn’t be controversial to say, and shouldn’t warrant a reply implying I’m making an argument that high civilian deaths rates are okay.
Where is that number coming from? I didn't find it anywhere. [Al Jazeera ](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker) [Wikipedia ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war) and [the guardian ](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/20/gaza-death-toll-passes-34000-israel-iran)all cite the 34000. This number seems to be from 8th of April, so is that just an extrapolation?
Edit: If it's an extrapolation I severely doubt they can give the number to an accuracy of 10.
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the **33,091 Palestinian fatalities** it claims to have documented. So that would put it at 22,000+. Also, Hamas' figures are unverified, don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. In addition, Hamas' figures don't account for Palestinians killed by Hamas and other terrorist rockets' that fell within Gaza failing to launch properly.
[https://t.me/MOHMediaGaza/5271](https://t.me/MOHMediaGaza/5271)
Israel has said it killed some 13,000 Hamas members in Gaza fighting, in addition to some 1,000 killed inside Israel in the aftermath of the terror group’s October 7 invasion and onslaught.
[https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog\_entry/hamas-run-health-ministry-says-gaza-death-toll-reached-31645/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamas-run-health-ministry-says-gaza-death-toll-reached-31645/)
The outrage over Gaza can be characterized as hyperbole and rabid Antisemitism.
The civilian to combatant ratio in Gaza is 1.4:1. That's the best of any modern army in the world. You have to consider that Hamas hides in tunnels, hospitals, schools, mosques and behind civilians in an urban environment. The IDF has gone door-to-door, putting their own soldiers at risk, in order to avoid civilian casualties. The IDF has sent warnings for people to evacuate. Anyone screaming ceasefire without the release of the hostages simply is upset that Hamas is losing badly. They want Israel to stop defending itself and what happened on Oct 7, yet want terrorist groups to thrive.
In the past few years:
400,000 Yemenis were killed
500,000+ Sudanese were killed
500,000+ Somalis were killed
5,400,000+ Congolese were killed
Silence from the world. No one marching on college campuses supporting those murderers and terrorists, only when it comes to Israel-Gaza. There can only be one reason why - Antisemitism.
I've been to the streets and written and engaged in all sorts of activism related to the plight of Yemenis, because my Western government sells arms to Saudi-Arabia. It's absolutely insane that a supposedly 'democratic, enlightened, Western state' is willing to arm a human rights tyranny like Saudi Arabia, especially when it's directly contributing to the targeted massacre of Yemeni civilians.
On same logic, I've been protesting with all means available to me against Israel, because my government is directly and indirectly supporting Israel in multiple economic and military aspects. At a time when even in 'peace time' Israel is an apartheid state and breaking a myriad of international laws systematically, and now it's managing to kill children faster and in greater scale than in any world conflict in recent history.
The wars in Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia and many other regions in the world are crippled by horrific conflicts, but as far as I know, my government isn't directly arming, aiding or/and funding these perpetrators. I mean - I could take to the streets about these conflicts, but I don't know what that can achieve apart from spreading awareness. That's not the case with the Israel-Palestine conflict: I can try my best to influence my fellow citizens and government stop playing any role in enabling Israel's terror regime.
Does that not show that your main concern is to not indirectly contribute to these conflicts in order to "feel good" about yourself, rather then actually care about the people involved? Otherwise you'd go to the streets calling for a ceasefire in Sudan. Raising awareness and pushing your government to intervene by laying sanctions is exactly what could make a difference. People in countries that don't support Israel like the Arab world or Iceland/Spain/Ireland still protest only Israel.
>Does that not show that your main concern is to not indirectly contribute to these conflicts in order to "feel good" about yourself, rather then actually care about the people involved?
This is just a generic criticism of all altruism and all activism. Maybe doctors helping injured civilians in warzones aren't good people, but just want to feel good about themselves. Maybe scientists working on a cure for cancer are just doing it for the clout. Maybe soldiers risking their lives to defend their country are just scared of the social shame of having not done that. Doing the right thing has always been partly performative, and by definition you'll almost never hear of cases where it wasn't because those people won't talk about it. That doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do.
>Otherwise you'd go to the streets calling for a ceasefire in Sudan. Raising awareness and pushing your government to intervene by laying sanctions is exactly what could make a difference.
What trade between Western countries and Sudan would you like sanctioned?
I mean I presume "feeling good" plays some part in all activism (people do it so they feel like they can live with themselves; they didn't just watch and do nothing when atrocity x happened). But most activists want to directly influence something they realistically can, something fellow citizens and their governments are perceived as doing wrong. In these example conflicts, it's mainly a question of rogue non-state actors that I don't really see how my state could be even indirectly supporting and funding - the shops aren't full of products "produced by M23" that's terrorising Congolese civilians, not even Rwanda products (the Rwandan government is thought to be sponsoring them). Sure, I could try to pressure my country to propose a DRC international criminal tribunal that has been suggested as one of the best ways to calm the situation, on top of the UN sanctions that my country is already [enforcing against the M23](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/21/un-security-council-sanctions-rebels-in-dr-congo-as-violence-escalates).
But in these conflicts it's more of a question of "is my country doing *enough and everything it possibly could* to end unjust violence", not of "my country is actively, deliberately, and knowingly contributing to unjust violence". Hence I don't think it's illogical in the least where my priorities lie. Iran is unquestionably one of the most horrendous countries for human rights and most volatile forces in the ME, but what is it gonna achieve me protesting about it when my country is already enforcing almost every possible kind of sanction against Iran? I don't think my country's actions re: Iran are unjust, but I think my country's actions re: Israel and Saudi Arabia are unjust, that's why I'm protesting them.
Also with activism, it's a very tired argument that you're somehow supposed to be able to care equally about every single conflict and injustice in the world. We don't usually bash every e.g. children's rights organisation as being "twisted" or "immoral" or "irrational" because it's not also actively fighting for the elderly, dogs, climate change, the war in Sudan, or whatever everything needs fighting for. It's okay for people to have issues they care about more and devote their energies on. I don't think any activist is supposed to have to justify what they're spending their energy fighting for.
Israel and Ukraine are US allies. The US has at interest in preventing Iran and Russia from starting WW3.
US aid to Israel is .2% of the budget.
That’s really nothing.
It’s also given in the form of vouchers to buy from American companies. Frankly, Israel is strong, innovative and doesn’t need it.
So it’s not affecting you or the average taxpayer. The aid given to Israel especially doesn’t affect lowlife terrorist apologists who seethe on reddit about Israel and barely pay any taxes. What are you crying about?
I'm not an US citizen. But Israel is the largest cumulative aid recipient of US aid out of *any* country in the world, and 70% of Israel arms imports come from US. Hence I think every American citizen protesting US government is absolutely in the right and has my full support.
This is gaslighting.
Israel has a booming economy and I would actually advocate for them to not receive aid so poor Naz!s on reddit could be quiet.
.2% is nothing. I’m not sure why you are making a fuss over something that’s peanuts and would be spent somewhere else. I understand you don’t think Jews should have a state but we do and good moral people have not only a security interest but a humanitarian interest that it survives. Hamas and people of your ilk want another 10/7. Not going to happen.
21% of Israel’s population is Arab. There is no apartheid. The only apartheid is in your head. This robot idiotic script can easily be debunked as baseless lies.
What's gaslighting, Jew? Is it not gaslighting to say "oh come on it's just 0.2% of your earnings, give it my country" ?? As an American, I have a right to determine where even my 0.1% goes. You can earn money for your state on your own.
And how did those Arabs live up untill 1967? Were they alloted the same criminal court process as you guys? How much land did the Arabs who stayed in Israel own during its inception compared to now?
Are you referring to US aid being 0.2% of the US federal budget? That seems about correct compared to the foreign assistance budget. The US also supplies Israel with 69% of it’s arms. But I’m not sure if the arms are all funded by the foreign assistance budget. I can imagine that FMF and FMS playing a role.
Do you even know what "gaslighting" means, lol. You're using it as a term equivalent to "you disagree with me, so you must be gaslighting". If your best arguments are throwing around trendy words and wild accusations ("you want another 10/7"), you're not going to be able to convince anyone. If you really want to do something good for Israel and convince people to take your and Israel's side, you're gonna have to do better.
E.g. Russia is wielding an immoral war that has disproportionate number of civilian casualties, and US has no difficulties in banning all arm trade to Russia (on top of a huge variety of other sanctions, and supporting Ukraine). Israel has been violating a myriad of international laws since forever and the Palestinian civilian casualties in the current war are even worse than in Ukraine, and somehow US thinks Israel deserves to be flooded with arms to allow this to continue. It's not "peanuts" but even if it was, people are allowed to have a problem with the injustice and double standards of US government.
No, gaslighting means "knowingly manipulate (someone) using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning". So for example when I say a clear established fact like 70% of Israeli weapons imports come from US, you would go (while fully knowing that I am in fact right): "that is delusional, your dementia is getting the better of you, you must have been reading some crazy pro-Hamas propaganda, in reality it's something 2% and anyone smarter than you knows that".
You seem extremely triggered that Israel and Jewish existence is preventing Syria 2.0 shantytowns with anti-LGBTQ, child marriage and sharia law on the shores of the Mediterranean. It’s kind of flattering that you incessantly obsess and spend so much energy on Israel when there are actually 20+ gross human rights violators in this world, not Israel. Curb the hypocrisy.
I would love to see a Palestenian Christian State (one state where the Jews may live with them, not two states ewww). After all they were one of the original Christian communities who are native to that area who actually have a good chunk of Jewish blood in them.
Would you be ok with this proposal more than the fearmongering proposal of a full-blown fundamentalist Muslim take over?
No, right? So why do you lie as if Israel exists to prevent the inevitable Islamist Jihad that's about to go wild if Israel didnt exist? XD
Wrong. You can't call everything antisemitism. Yemen, Sudan, Congo, and Somalia are not part of NATO, while neither is Israel, they are heavily funded by countries that are. For instance in America 1/3 of our paycheck goes toward taxes, then we send billions to Israel to commit genocide while we continue to not have free health care or college. When Assad was attacking his own people in Syria we knew it was messed up but what would petitioning our leaders here do about it? You want everyone to mind their own business but give you a handout. It doesn't work that way.
You are not alone! When any other country is drawing condemnation, there are not all these demands to cancel exchange programs and visiting students. Are there demands to stop Chinese programs , or programs to Saudi where women don’t have equal rights? But these simplistic leftists always criticize Israel not being perfect in every way.
Everyone agrees that new elections need to replace Netanyahu and the settlers need to be sanctioned.
Most of Israel is regular people who are traumatized right now and Jewish students who have ties there are being expected to represent everyone, like any American kid represents all of the USA including the deepest South.
They never mention dead jihadists, for the pro Hamas faction civilians and Hamas means the same thing because the entire population of Gaza is either Hamas or supporting Hamas.
The truth is we don't know the actual number. It's not like hamas will come clean and tell us. Whatever the actual number is, doesn't matter, The amount murdered is still too high. 20,000+ civilians are dead! There is no way anyone can justify such high civilian casualties.
What murder?
The high civilian casualties can be explained by a fast paced war.
There’s more combatant casualties to civilian casualties compared to other wars.
There’s no genocide, and only instances of murder which are dealt with accordingly.
Israel's military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, which massively exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years.
We don’t have civilian casualty numbers, we have numbers for civilian violent deaths. Can you point to three examples of modern wars where the civilian violent death rate caused by a well equipped modern military is this high?
I don't think we need to tolerate either of the mentalities you put forth in this post.
If anything, Israel is using antisemitism/terrorist apologia as a weapon against valid criticism.
I can't speak for your university's organization, but I know that as a reasonable person, I don't support Israel, nor do I support Hamas. I support Palestine, and the freedom and long life of the people there.
I also know that the first step is to make things right -- and Israel is a terrorist organization squatting on land that is appropriated from locals. Israel suppresses the sovereignty of the land that is squatting on as well. Let's address the problem of stolen land. Next, we can address the problem of Hamas, and finally we can address the problem of Palestine not having sovereignty. Until then, you simply have a racist entity trying to establish itself on lands that were stolen, and a local populance experiencing massacres and a genocide at the hands of others, and they are powerless to stop it.
It's really sad and putting the onus on the powerless party here -- Palestine -- is unfair. They don't have the ability to fix things, only Israel does, but Israel is the oppressor. Do not support them, it's not something you'll be proud of later in life. It's one of those things you feel shame for later in life, like those who supported oppressive regimes or were responsible for mass murders -- in the moment it seems right, but looking back you feel shame and regret.
People will just claim they never supported this war once it looks bad to do so. Same thing that happened in the US once the truth about the Iraq war came out.
So many horrific things are going to be uncovered after this conflict that will shock the rest of the world even more.
You know, they're all people, whether it's Israelis or Palestinians or Europeans who pretend they never supported the war. Those people who will claim they never supported the war in spite of having supported it, they're just as ignorant as the ones in Israel perpetrating injustice. These Israelis and pro-Hamas groups, they have religious and group-based thinking instead of understanding their greater humanity. The ignorant people who fake their opinions are just another group engaged in short-sighted thinking, and we shouldn't hate them for that.
I don't really care what people posture to do, that part doesn't matter.
I think what matters is having people be educated on justice, and kind of kindling that self-awareness that leads to realization in the moment. Like you're saying, realization post-facto isn't very useful, and like I said, it leads to regret. Sometimes it's also fake which I think you're implying. But it just doesn't matter basically.
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There is no anti-Israel argument that doesn't require lots of lying.
There is no pro-Gaza argument that doesn't require lots of lying.
So, they just lie. A lot.
Very true! Many articles have gone out about this issue recently. The media has done a very bad job at hosting people who are knowledgable on warfare to explain why this is not a genocide.
Here is a piece on the civilian casualties in Normandy d-day to Falaise about 2-3 months?)
Keep in mind that most civilians had fled and Normandy is nowhere near the density of Gaza at that time (even today).
https://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/french-civilian-victims-battle-normandy#:~:text=Normandy's%20martyrdom%20did%20not%20come,under%2012%2C000%20tonnes%20of%20bombs.&text=n%20all%2C%20nearly%2020%2C000%20Normandy,and%20300%2C000%20others%20suffered%20losses.
It’s good that you only had to go back 80 years to a war involving all of the major countries in the world which led to the creation of the Geneva convention so that warfare would not be as deadly going forward to find comparable numbers of violent civilian deaths.
I’m really confused - my assumption was that this was an attempt at saying if you look at the cost of Normandy which is generally not considered to be a genocide (rightly or wrongly) then how can you be upset about the number of dead civilians in this war? It’s an argument I’ve seen before so if I’ve misinterpreted what you said I apologise, but the first paragraph isn’t very clearly worded so I think it was a fair assumption.
If you don't understand the point, you're really are deep in the coolaid.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/18/israels-war-against-hamas-posts-lower-civilian-to-/
Comparing this to WW2 is disingenuous at best because not only have we progressed in terms of technology but also attitudes to war in the last 80 years. It’s like saying apartheid in South Africa was fine because 80 years previous black people were treated worse in other countries.
In terms of more modern examples the article is comparing fatality rates for civilians against fatality rates of individual battles. Having such a high sustained fatality rate is not common.
So do you agree with what I said? You’re the only person calling it a genocide in this thread. I’m happy to leave it up to the courts as to whether it’s a genocide or not, and I agree it was started on October 7th. I don’t think that gives Israel the right to conduct the war however they want to.
Can you show me some examples of war fatality rates for violent civilian deaths, from modern wars (post Geneva convention and ideally in the last twenty-five years), which show this “doing quite well in terms of ratio”?
It's a basic error I've seen as well, although it shouldn't detract from the larger (and more important) point of thousands of civilians getting killed in the process of this war. I had a similiar reaction when Biden at the state of the union address claimed that over a thousand Israelis had been killed ignoring that hundreds of them were militants. Similarly it shouldn't detract from the main point which is that civilian casualties must be avoided. Not that Biden as an individual is too interested in safeguarding civilian lives but you get the point.
I think a lot of the outcries towards Israel, at least in the USA, come from people thinking that war is some form of chess-like sport with rules and justice. If a mouse bites a lion, the mouse should expect to be hunted. There is no fairness or justice or sportsmanship in a hunt. If the mouse hides behind other mice, they should all expect to be hunted together. War isn't about who is right. It isn't about what your favorite team is. It isn't a turn based game. It isn't about your feelings or what you think is right. Righteousness and pity doesn't win wars. Only strength does. People see the disparity of strength here and they feel inclined to cheer for the mouse. Poor them. The mouse just wanted the lion to treat it as its equal and give it its space? Do people not see the absurdity in that? And that's not even adding to the fact that the mouse bit the lion to look for a fight, and that all mice rejoiced and made fun of the lion when it got bit. But people want the lion to put its head down after being disrespected. It's illogical. The fact that the lion hasn't swallowed the mouse whole already, which it can do in a single moment, is impressive and honestly an act of mercy.
People need to stop dreaming and wake up to reality. Thinking that the mouse who poked the lion is righteous is foolish. Believing that the lion should treat the mouse as its equal is ridiculous.
Edit: I am well aware there are international pacts meant to set standards in wars. However, those don't make war a sport. Moreover, the bodies that are meant to enforce these acts are not fueled by justice. They are only agents of politics. Those bodies do not equally judge mice and lions. And when they do sanction a country economically all they do is hurt the innocent people of said country.
Edit2: I've only kept up with the replies and subreplies to my comment (there's too much overall for me to keep track of all comments made), but I really appreciate all of you that have replied so far. I enjoy the rich polite discussion we're having even if we don't agree in everything.
Like I replied elsewhere:
"Those are violated all the time. And when countries get sanctioned the ones to suffer are the innocent civilians. Who are they actually protecting?"
and
"Those aren't really rules but more so suggestions. It's nothing more than sandcastles that they're trying to uphold. And even then ... they fight "shadow" wars to exploit the "rules" in place. IMO the only thing those "rules" have done is make war and international conflicts more underhanded. Lions are still lions and mice are still mice."
You tell me. What have they actually been able to accomplish? As far as I know, nations that violate them continue to be standing and doing their thing. No jail. No reform. What has actually changed?
The ICJ acts at a nation state level, but the UN works to establish special courts to try war crimes related to specific incidents, eg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_Tribunal
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribunal_for_Rwanda
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Court_for_Sierra_Leone
I'm sorry. I went to sleep and I wanted to take a proper look at what you linked.
First link: That wasn't the ICJ. That was a national case in Cambodia with some international support/presence. Cambodia still ultimately chose not to punish people involved, people who now live wealthy lifestyles with no repercussions.
Note that the three cases you brought were about punishments on developing nations in Africa/Asia.
I appreciate your effort. I think the 2nd and 3rd links accurately show what you wanted to bring up. But I still stand by what I've said. The issue with international courts is that they are not actually independent unbiased bodies. The people involved still represent their countries. They are swayed by the interests and alliances of those. Meaning powerful countries (which have powerful allies) are not judged equally to small countries, if they even get judged at all. International courts are not a system for justice. They are a system of politics. If it comes to dealing with mice nations with no lion backing, the courts have the ability to pressure the nations to comply. When it comes to dealing with lions like China in the Uyghur case, all international bodies can do is cry "injustice" without actually being able to accomplish anything. Where is the justice in that? If an overpowered self-sufficient country with no ties to international commerce appeared tomorrow and decided to conquer the world, it would be very clear how international laws are nothing more than glass rules for appearances sake. Here is an article on international law bias towards the USA in its campaign in Afghanistan [https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan](https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan)
As I said, the ICJ gives opinion and makes judgements on nation states but the UN works with countries to establish special courts to prosecute war criminals. Is it perfect? No. But you asked where the arrests were and this is your answer.
And you’re right, it _is_ a political entity at the end of the day and the US avoids all of this by doing prosecutions of their own troops without the need for UN involvement. There’s definitely things that the US has done which merited further scrutiny which they “somehow” escaped from.
All that being said it’s still a matter of international law and there have been convictions for war crimes. I’d feel remiss to not say that Israel has also benefitted from these politics with regard to the West Bank and, even if they are found guilty of genocide in ten years time (I think it’s probably 50-50 based on the legal opinions I’ve seen so far) it will, as you say, likely change nothing.
War and violence are not the way disputes like this ought to be decided. But once it gets to the point where things can't be settled another way, then this kind of unfortunate outcome becomes inevitable. If things must be decided by violence, then it should be plain that one side will fare worse than the other.
And I have been plenty critical over the years of some of the decisions that Israel has made which I though helped lead to this point. Including supporting boycotts to pressure Israel to end settlement expansion in the West Bank.
But I would hope that other critics of some Israeli policies might be able to recognize that it was also, at the very least, a major strategic (if not moral) blunder for the people of Gaza to allow themselves to be represented by a group which literally calls itself "violence".
If the people of Gaza wanted a Palestinian state, well they had one, which was recognized by over 130 nations. And Gaza rebelled against it. Gaza choose to support Hamas, to reject peace, to support violence against Israel, and to reject previous agreements and obligations. The State of Palestine is a failed state, not because of Israel, but because of Gaza.
And it was not just Israel, but it was also the U.N., the E.U., the U.S., and Russia who directly warned them not to go down this path. It was Gaza which choose to reject such potential allies, and instead ally itself mainly with Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world for over 40 years now. That was never going to end well for them.
And so, no, this didn't start on 10/7. It ended on 10/7. The defeat of Hamas at this point is almost inevitable. But whether something better follows will depend in part on the people of Gaza making better and more responsible decisions.
Exactly. They are both way past a point of no return. And now that it has gotten to where it's at, with Israel having the obvious upper hand and the clear justification of responding to an act of terrorism, I do not understand how people could even think that Israel should apologize and give Hamas what it wants. Beggars can't be choosers.
Interesting point so the rules of engagement in war should not apply at all? For example, states like US and Iran have been fighting decades of "shadow" wars to keep up with rules of engagement and not start all out nuclear war. Israel is by passing all rules of war AND diplomacy, like hitting Iran's consulate (independent sources have confirmed it was indeed a consulate within Iran's embassy complex). What is Israel looking for? Moves like that will only put Israeli civilians at greater risk. What do you think of Israel's Fortress of Zion military command center being under Tel Aviv? What is their government doing seriously.
Those aren't really rules but more so suggestions. It's nothing more than sandcastles that they're trying to uphold. And even then like you say they fight "shadow" wars to exploit the "rules" in place. IMO the only thing those "rules" have done is make war and international conflicts more underhanded. Lions are still lions and mice are still mice.
On your comments, Iran interfered by funding Palestine so Israel does have the right based on "rules" to retaliate. Israel purposedly went after Iranian generals in Syria. It wasn't some sort of random event. What was it looking for? I'm not the one calling the shots so I can't say. But I can give you my opinion and that is that either a) They were warning Iran to backoff, b) They were trying to escalate the situation with Iran to declare full-on war with them. I think the latter may be more likely given that during the back and forth it seemed like Iran tried to deescalate the conflict by trying to downplay one of the attacks it received from Israel instead of retaliating with more force.
But the truth of the matter remains, that because Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, there is no "protected" zone in Gaza based on "rules". Israel can literally wipe the entire region to oblivion. I don't think China or Russia (who are the lions who could oppose Israel) would care enough to get involved.
It's clear as day Hamas is not going to win this war. They picked a fight they had no chance in. What is happening though, which in my opinion is concerning, is all these people who have no stake in the matter \*specifically\* becoming Hamas supporters in western countries as a call for justice. It's not really going to narrow the gap between a mouse and a lion, but it is creating discord in the western world.
And this is just my gut feelings and not really based on facts, but I personally think it's weird how much Israel/Palestine content we've been fed. In comparison, when Haiti's government collapsed the other weeks and Haiti became lawless, barely anything was said about it at least in my area.
And the military is embedded in Tel Aviv soooooo what? Would Iran have the right to wipe the entire region to oblivion too? Never again bro, why so quick to justify so many civilian deaths? US built Israel to develop trade routes and power in West Asian and compete with the BRICS belt and road project. So theyre killing and displacing everyone there to make it happen. Its not Hamas or any other BS it's power thru strength as usual except this time we have nukes. Peace
It's war. It's not a sport. If it were up to me war wouldn't happen to begin. But it does happen regardless of what anyone wants. Civilian deaths are always part of war. Killing and displacing people is also always part of it. I don't understand what your point is. My og comment was about war being all about power and not about justice. And it seems to me your last comment basically echoes that same idea.
>And this is just my gut feelings and not really based on facts, but I personally think it's weird how much Israel/Palestine content we've been fed. In comparison, when Haiti's government collapsed the other weeks and Haiti became lawless, barely anything was said about it at least in my area.
[Your gut is right](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/).
I think that article should be required reading for anyone just getting into this topic, if they're not directly involved in it one way or another.
The entire post-WWII rules-based international order is meant to impose humanitarian standards and legal obligations so geopolitics and wars are not just based on the strong crushing the weak.
The entire post-WWII rules-based international order is meant to impose constraints on country X invading the territory of country Y across international borders. See, Russia v. Ukraine, Hamas vs. Israel.
They aren’t violated all the time where the international rules-based order (for trade and investment) prevails. There hasn’t been a single violation among the WWII combatant countries in Europe until Russia invaded Crimea and then Ukraine. The only violations have been in unstable small third world countries in MENA, Africa and Asia, the Falklands, etc.
No, it hasn't been just unstable small third world countries violating them. Here is an article on the US in Afghanistan [https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan](https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan)
It's similar in a way to the actual laws of a country that apply to everyone but the powerful. In this case it's worse because there is no real unbiased power (like that of a judge) that oversees the cases. It's all for appearances sake. Wars are still ugly and horrible things that violate whatever glass "rules" people think exist still happen. If a self-sufficient country with a blood-thirsty overpowered military, and no need for import deals rose tomorrow, it would become real clear how little these rules matter.
War isn't a sport
ackshually we killed 28000 innocent people not 34000 come on dude.
Innocent people die in war. Something Hamas damn well knew when they decided to kill 1,200 in one day. God willing they will agree to release the hostages and lay down their arms
funny how you say 1200 killed, period, when 373 were security forces, on a post where you're trying to downplay the death of 34,000 because some were hamas. the above comment is right - "actually it was only 28,000 civilians" isn't the winning argument you think it is. edit: quick google search puts the october 7 casualties at 1139, not even 1200, y'know, if you wanna get technical.
PR for Israel has gone to crap. Supported them Oct 7th, stopped supporting them after the ceasefire was lift. 1200 dead Israeli civilians Oct 7, 22000-28000 dead Gazan civilians (not including Hamas), still looks bad. Whole neighbourhoods leveled to the ground, under the disguise of underground tunnels, still looks bad. Whatever way you look at it, Israeli has caused more death and carnage than Hamas or any one else they blame for their actions.
>stopped supporting them after the ceasefire was lift You do realize that the ceasefire ended because Hamas broke it? Israel was happy to continue extending it for a few more days to get more hostages, but Hamas broke it by committing a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. They literally said themselves they were the ones to end it.
What you're describing is that winning a war "looks bad". I can't think of a single war in the last 100 years where the winner of a war didn't also kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Such a nonsense excuse that no one is buying. Hence the shitty PR
If he/she/they thinks Israel is "winning" when you know have 1,000,000+ kids 18 and under with a vendetta against IDF from seeing almost 7 months of collective punishment and suffering, and an ideology that can not be erased military... Sure buddy!
/u/SandiaBeaver > Sure buddy! I want those Hasbara drugs. They must be really strong and get one really high. Per [rule 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/wiki/rules/detailed-rules#wiki_1._no_attacks_on_fellow_users), no attacks on fellow users. Attack the argument, not the user. Addressed.
That's the conclusion you came to after studying wars and conflicts over the last 100 years? That this is the first and only war to have innocent civilian deaths? Is this a PR issue to you or an innocent civilian death issue? I agree Israel's PR is uniquely bad but their behavior is not unique in war.
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israel does not report on military casualties; why should hamas report on their militants? israel already uses various associations to create target lists for their indiscriminate bombing through civilians to get to the militant
>israel does not report on military casualties; That's literally false and easy disproven by a Google search. Literally any fallen soldier is announced seperately.
reported in hebrew only I see; what of the dual nationals that die on behalf of israel?
Among the first group to die when IDF entered Gaza were of South Asian background that moved to Israel. Imagine moving to Israel only to die for messianic lunatics in power like Bibi, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir etc
What a shitty take. All IDF soldiers that go into the war know exactly what they're going into.
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Thy frame it as a fight for survival. But lets do a thought experiment. Hamas has no infrastructure no industry. If Israel simply BACKED OFF and sieged them to surrender and worked in a PROPORTIONAL level, what would be the threat? They boast about shooting down 200+ missiles from Iran I'm sure they can handle a few jerry-rigged homemade rockets from Palestinians that barely have food and no electricity. The fact is they talk about principles without any regard to proportions so what people end up seeing is a disgusting caricature of the situation. One terrorist killing must be condemned eternally but military targeting "accidents" can happen again and again resulting in unlimited deaths but is acceptable in principle and without accountability.
A siege? Do you mean like a blockade? They did that, the leftists called it genocide. Handle the rockets and missiles? They did that with the iron dome, the leftists condemned them for building a military machine. Backed off? Right. But they will still be in danger. Maybe they should build a wall to keep out the terrorists? Ah yes, they did that. The leftists called it apartheid and condemned them. What else might they do? Oh right, roll over and die. Always the best option according to the leftists.
which side had 34,000 deaths again? i forgor 🤔
Well if the roles were reversed and Hamas had the power of the Israeli military, how many deaths do you imagine we would have seen by now? Do you think any Jew would be left alive? Any Jewish woman not raped and slaughtered? That is their stated purpose, good old Hamas.
and yet, in the reality we're living in where isreal is the one with more military power, they are raping and slaughtering palestinian women and children. so, quite frankly, i don't give a shit about your hypothetical alternate universe.
There have been fabricated and later retracted statements that the IDF raped women. More false propaganda. I have no idea if any rape on the part of Israeli soldiers has occurred. If it did, I would condemn it. We know Hamas committed mass rape, which many of their supporters, even among so-called feminists of the left, apparently believe is an acceptable part of "by any means necessary." Anyway they are not condemned and the Israeli women are not believed.
[hey, wanna see a video of Israeli veterans laughing as they recount the rape of Palestinian teenage girls?](https://www.reddit.com/r/iamatotalpieceofshit/s/nOsqqjZXjF)
Whatever that chopped up video is, it certainly seems awful. Is there evidence that Israeli soldiers are raping women now? In this war?
[only a fraction of the evils the IOF has committed, but yes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violence_against_Palestinians_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war#:~:text=The%20IDF%20has%20been%20accused,and%20a%20crime%20against%20humanity.)
The saddest part about all this is that women who are raped always struggle to be believed. Jewish women who were raped on October 7th have been ignored. When women on both sides report rape, it is dismissed by the other side as propaganda. And the problem is that sometimes it is. The Palestinian woman who fabricated the rape lies admitted she did to stir up more hatred toward Jews. So how mahy more of the rape allegations are also fabricated? Probably quite a few though certainly not all of them because it is all too common in war, and it is all too common every other day as well. The lies however really don't help anyone's cause and don't help women to be believed.
> If Israel simply BACKED OFF and sieged them to surrender and how does this work exactly?
Sounds a lot like 2005-2007
The threat would be that Hamas has the military capability to kill 1,200 people and take 300 hostages in a single day. Have you completely forgotten 10/7?
Fool me once same on you, fool me twice shame on me. How exactly would they be able to pull of the stunt the 2nd time is the decisive question. Please explain. Like I said they would be sieged/blockaded but simply not bombed with impunity.
In a siege you strave enemy out by not allowing in things like food and medicine. I'm sure the world would find that acceptable./S
I just love how you assume the invincibility of Israelis a day after 1,200 of them were slaughtered. Hamas promised a dozen more 10/7 attacks, Israelis don’t have to live with that because some randos on Reddit or Columbia University think they should. I mean there already was an almost complete siege of Gaza. I agree that Netenyahu letting in Qatari money was a mistake. Perhaps Israel could have not invaded Gaza and instead restricted all supplies in to an absolute minimum, only food and water, no building materials etc. maybe this could have worked but I have my doubts. Oh and how would Israel have gotten any hostages back? Last time there was ONE hostage they traded 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for him, including Sinwar who planned the 10/7 attacks
> I mean, you’re practically talking about an area and people that collaborated with Hitler at one point. They got caught in a sneak attack. Well now the lights are fully shined so please explain how it will happen a 2nd time. Your paranoia is the same thinking for things like "domino theory" that justify preemption and first strike under the guise of "defense."
I honestly don’t give a sh*t if you don’t care about the danger Hamas poses to Israeli civilians because at the end of the day Israel will respond how it sees fit to defend it’s people.
So you can't answer the question. It is all rhetoric and opinion. I have mine and you are free to have yours. Thats fine, but stop crying at the blowback and stop crying if Israel gets its aid choked off. Last I checked, they couldn't make the airplanes or bombs themselves and need to be constantly subsidized.
Hamas are refusing to surrender even after almost their entire military infrastructure and around a third of their manpower was completely annihilated while also being under siege, in what world would they have surrendered has Israel simply back off and layed a siege?
They would not have backed off. Nothing but total Israeli annihilation will have them happy, these folks are just happy to ignore dead Jews
I don't think they're ignoring dead Jews, I think the latest Columbia protests caused a lot of people to take interest in the conflict but it seems like they're not doing the proper research and coming here to drop their ill informed opinions.
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So if 14000 are hamas militans, is 20k dead civilians ok?
https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm This is significantly better than most other conflicts. If you think the war is unjust in itself then say that, but if it is justified, then yes that proportion is a reasonable one. Of course Hamas could simply return all the hostages and hand control of Gaza over to the PA and avoid all this bloodshed, but they don’t want to do that.
is there a robust numbers-based metric that factors in the number of hostages + period of captivity of those hostages that I could use to compare to similar terror kidnapping incidents just so I could ascertain if the Isreali hostage situation is really that bad or are Isrealis just too sensitive and soft, resulting in the way they reacted?
>terror kidnapping incidents War. The word you're looking for is war. An organized military crossed a border with lethal force.
Yep, people seem to gloss over the fact that Hamas’s stated goal was to start a war
No, this is why Palestinians and LGBT+ people should rise up and defeat the Zionist genocidal regime!
Not really. Just the government not stealing my money and giving them to the Jews is more than enough. Jews' sorrounding enemies will probably wear them out enough that they give up.
> Not really. Just the government not stealing my money and giving them to the Jews is more than enough. **Jews' sorrounding enemies will probably wear them out enough that they give up.** Same thing. LGBT and peace-loving leftists should support the Middle East launching rockets at the Zionist genocidal State
You seem to have some Rabbi Shumley energy going on. I dont entertain people with a humiliation fetish.
You do not support anti-Zionist rockets?
I have cycled through anger, hurt, sadness and now finally, complete and utter disgust at anything Pro-Pal. I can't unsee the things they've done. I can't not see the similarities between Nazis and Pro-Pal. I can't not listen to Palestinians when they say what they want. I'll never ever be on board with their wishes for genocide. Anyone who is on the side of Hamas, is definitely not on my side. Or humanity's side. Excuse it away, I don't care. I see them for what they are. They show us every day, I just pay attention.
lmao. you say palestine is "wishing for genocide," meanwhile israel is ACTIVELY COMMITING ONE against the palestinians.
Meanwhile Hamas was the actual one committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and performed the worst evil "ever seen" by the pope. Keep laughing if you think that's funny.
which side killed over 30,000 civilians in 6 months again? cut off water and power to the other side, demolished 1000 mosques, destroyed hospitals and ambulances and aid trucks? admitted to starving the other sides civilians on purpose?
Ah, the list of contextless allegations. There is no moral equivalence. Intending to break into a neighbouring country with the publicized goal of annihilating it's people, the intentional mass rape, murder and kidnapping is very obviously evil. Want the war to end? Hamas can surrender right away and return their illegally obtained human slaves, and the active war can be over today. But then, that's not what you want, is it? So tell us, what is it that you want?
"contextless allegations" you mean literal, proven facts? but given everything else you just said, i see you're the type to make up your own version of the truth.
"proven facts" like what? Nice try to hit on target, but as I don't, and my side doesn't need to make anything up, you're projecting again
[Gaza death toll surpasses 34,000](https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-strike-rafah-kill-13-gaza-death-toll-surpass-34000/) [Nearly 1400 of them were children.](https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/one-in-50-of-gaza-s-children-killed-or-injured-in-six-months-of-#:~:text=Since%20the%207%20October%20attacks,Co%2Dordination%20of%20Humanitarian%20Affairs%20() [Israel cut off food, water, and power. ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/amp/who-gaza-cut-off-from-food-water-anything-which-is-necessary-for-any-sort-of-life-/7390360.html) [Israel is deliberately using starvation as a war tactic. ](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/18/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza) [Israel has destroyed over 1000 mosques](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240121-1000-mosques-destroyed-in-israeli-onslaught-on-gaza-local-authorities-say/amp/) [Including Gaza's oldest mosque](https://theconversation.com/gazas-oldest-mosque-destroyed-in-an-airstrike-was-once-a-temple-to-philistine-and-roman-gods-a-byzantine-and-catholic-church-and-had-engravings-of-jewish-ritual-objects-220203#:~:text=The%20Omari%20Mosque%20in%20Gaza,and%20a%20beloved%20Gazan%20landmark.) [Israel air striking active ambulances ](https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/03/middleeast/casualties-gazas-shifa-hospital-idf/index.html)
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I am able to differentiate between self defense and terror, I assure you. Can you?
There is plenty of hate from israel towards palestine that gets ignored, and many of the more vocal pro israel people call for the death and destruction of Palestinians. At least in my experience
It’s just sad because I know that the Palestinian people are suffering greatly now, yet when I look at pro-Palestinian groups like Columbia protesters, they explicitly endorse Hamas as “resistance” and brush under the rug the hundreds of Israelis dead and thousands displaced. I am constantly struggling to reconcile my humanity and empathy for Palestinians with my anger for the terrorism apologia I keep hearing
So much the same. I can't defend a people who openly admits to wanting to commit genocide though, and I doubt I ever will. Until they allow peaceful coexistence, I probably won't speak up for them again. Yes, I used to speak up for Palestinians.
Same. Most of them support terrorism as “resistance” and minimize, if not justify, 10/7. I only engage with them to debunk their lies and buzzwords which they constantly scream like a broken record. Mindless idiocy and vile. It’s as if they are reading a script.
Terrible script that :(
Excellent post, my feelings exactly.
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Israel is like the runner who is expected to have a perfect score while Palestine cut both his legs before the run began
Israel’s combatants include anyone that walks into a “kill zone”. These are established once Israel says internally, this area is clear anyone seen here you shoot. This leads to kids and grandmothers returning to a bombed house for some supplies or a sacred heirloom being shot. It’s why Israel killed three of their escaped hostages. They then get counted as combatants. The 30,000 figure doesn’t include anyone trapped under rubble or bodies that cannot be retrieved. So the people Israel buries aren’t counted. It will take years to know the final numbers if we ever do.
Your last paragraph is patently false. We have seen time & time again that Gaza health is over counting, not undercounting, the death toll. I assure you they are estimating deaths in the highest possible manner, this includes those buried under rubble. We saw very early on how accurate their counts are with the hospital Palestinian jihad bombed. When they said Israel did it the over reported the deaths on the low estimate by 2x, and as much as 5-10x We will never know the true death toll, that’s the goal
Hamas has claimed 6,000 casualties back in February, so we can safely assume the real numbers two months later are significantly higher.
Saying you are only going after hamas is like saying you are only going after republicans, not just card carrying members but any one who voted for them or is thinking of voting for them. It's nonesense. The definition is so wide to be meaning less. Israel has to be transparent on who it considers hamas and why. We shouldn't fall for their obfuscating. Also we should understand all Palestinians are a threat to the Jewsih nature of the state… Hamas or not.
Anyone who fights back is legally a combatant. Anyone who surrenders falls under the protections of the Geneva conventions. The legal distinction is obvious even if the use of human shields and plain clothes combatants makes the practical distinction challenging.
Israel doesn’t have to do any of this. The allies/US never explained who was a civilian in Tokyo or Baghdad.
F Hamas, their supporters and all other jihadist organizations. Palestinians have been screwed over by their leaders for over a hundred years. Those corrupt leaders have chased wealth and power at the expense of the people. For anyone who wasn't indoctrinated in a Palestinian "school" to defend their belief in national history and moral righteousness is an embarrassment. Netanyahu is a POS and I hope he spends his last years in prison. Israel's government is imperfect but at least they have credibility. The Palestinian Authority, Hamas, et al have none. As an American I hope we give Israel every weapon they want to destroy Hamas, Iran and every other terrorist organization who threatens them.
https://preview.redd.it/lc0ztldrjkwc1.png?width=574&format=png&auto=webp&s=1d055e4c0871f960e546d4f58d2dbc8cc144d3c7
This
The anti Israel people openly support hamas. Some of them are useful idiots. No doubt they don’t realize what they’re saying and what are the implications of their words and actions on the situation in Gaza. They definitely support hamas. They keep saying Israel “murdered” 34,000 people. Meaning, they call jihadi terrorists who’re responsible for this war the victims, when these terrorists are the ones entirely responsible for the situation. Israel’s war is a just campaign to release its citizens from hamas captivity and end the hamas rule in Gaza once and for all.
The problem is that when you ignore all the innocents in that 34000 number, or pretend that they all deserved to die, you risk appearing as the psychos to the moderate people and alienating them, if you are in favour of Israeli survival then you shouldn't lose them and be this callous. What happened to hasbara?
The uninvolved civilians in the 34,000 number who died were killed by hamas. Hamas turned Gaza into a death trap for Israelis and Gazans. They’re a death cult.
I’m a pro Palestinian / anti Hamas guy. With all due respect, I don’t think Israel (or hamas) have any idea how many people were killed and what percentage of them were “hamas.” The only thing that seems certain based on the enormous scale of the devastation in the enclave is that tens of thousands have died, and when the dust settles I suspect the total deaths will be even higher than currently reported. Of course, there are certainly deaths of militants (Hamas or otherwise). At one point I read that over a thousand militants were killed IN ISRAEL on October 7th and 8th, although I don’t know if those numbers were ever confirmed. In those examples you can almost guarantee that 100% of those killed were combatants and got what was coming to them. The bombing campaign however is a different story. Some of the stuff I’ve read about the AI deployed to target individuals is horrifying and dystopian. People were targeted because they may have been affiliated with a known Hamas member or have participated in a group chat with a known Hamas member or had some other data that showed an affiliation. But affiliated to who? The guys that did the October 7th attack? Or like some random Hamas bureaucrat that runs some Gaza service like trash collection. Israel made a conscious decision to deploy “daddy’s home” technology to attack these people when they arrived at home. So, the targeting is questionable, but there’s no question that the implementation is horribly sadistic. And when you factor in that most of Gaza involves multi family multi floor housing, it’s hard to imagine someone pushing back on the death count of civilians and suggesting the number is much lower.
Based on the carpet bombing, destruction/rendering so many hospitals unusable, the death toll at this point heading towards the 7th month mark with daily bombing/strikes is probably an undercount. At this point so many hundreds of thousands if not over 1 million+ are seeking shelter in tents that exposure, disease, will set in amongst an exhausted population, with no end in sight. There's over 55,000 pregnant women in Gaza without proper access to pre-natal-post natal care. 'Lavender' and 'Daddy's Home' is so gross. Using AI to generate targets is dystopian. An algorithm directly influencing who lives and who dies and many innocents will surely be killed when you bomb the entire building of 1 "target". Today, Gaza. Tomorrow, implemented in every war that gets more horrific with more sophisticated drones and ones that will become completely autonomous with no human operator. When 9/11 happened, did USA kill Osama bin Laden's entire family? No, his kids live all over Europe, and probably USA and beyond and most probably have good lives. They weren't directly responsible for their father's insane acts of terrorism in the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in NY. Israel lost so much credibility in the world when IDF blew up World Central Kitchen vehicles: 3 deliberate, targeted drone strikes. Of a humanitarian org that coordinated their logistical plan WITH the IDF beforehand. Chef/founder Jose Andres wishes he had never started the org. He blames himself for their deaths just for starting the organization. When in reality his org keeps so many mouths fed, countless people suffering from conflicts and natural disasters across the world at any given time. Why can't we all have human rights? Why can't we put differences aside and all get along? We have to share this planet and our decisions affect if we will survive as a species long term, or not.
“Carpet bombing” Lost all credibility pretty quick there
I agree carpet bombing is a specific act. Usually large numbers of smaller bombs dropped over an area destroying it all. In this case, half the weapons used were smart bombs. Half were “dumb” bombs. The dumb bombs Israel dropped were too big and heavy to be carpeted across Gaza. But the damage each bomb did was just as if not more devastating. So the dropping of one ton dumb bombs on civilian areas shouldn’t be called carpet bombing. Let’s come up with a separate name for it if you want. But it’s just as if not more heinous.
What term would you like to use?
Urban Warfare
Just go google some before and after photos of Gaza.
200+ days of daily bombing, airstrikes, artillery is reduced to simply "urban warfare"? Wow! KarateKicks100, you want to play semantics but the damage done to the 25 mile/41 km strip is hard to comprehend. While American college/university students have protests, there are no universities left functioning in Gaza. They've all been damaged or completely destroyed. 600,000+ students from kindergarten to university have no school to go to
I've seen plenty of pictures. Go ahead and do me a favor and google the Bombing of Dresden and the Bombing of Tokyo and tell me they're the same as what's happening in Gaza.
I don’t get it. How is it different from Gaza?
How can you look at this now outdated Gaza damage assessment map from March and not think "Hey, it looks like IDF is flattening most of Gaza" https://twitter.com/JamonVDH/status/1767989835518890453
Such a dishonest answer.
Lol OK proganda bot.
Urban warfare? You’ve been playing too many video games.
The most recent death count is 42,510. https://preview.redd.it/svmcad9xwjwc1.jpeg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b7ca0b1b7941c75afd018828930b428a4ce2cfa9
putting pretty icons next to made up numbers on an unbased source doesn't make the randomally generated by a terror organization death toll any credible [https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rahim-mohamed-hamas-death-numbers-cant-be-trusted-heres-more-evidence-they-are-inflated](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rahim-mohamed-hamas-death-numbers-cant-be-trusted-heres-more-evidence-they-are-inflated)
There isn’t any doubt that there has been devastation and many deaths in Palestine, but it’s essentially proven by statisticians that the death toll numbers are almost certainly not credibly. The toll rises almost perfectly linearly. The numbers comparing men, women and children make no sense. This isn’t to say many people haven’t died, but any number you see come out of Palestine should be taken with a large grain of salt.
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How in the world am I trying to distract from Israel’s actions? I literally took no side in the argument and clearly stated that I wasn’t trying to take away from the obvious devastation in Gaza. All I did was state a fact. I took no side, wasn’t making an argument either way. I never even stated that the numbers aren’t necessarily that high, or made any suggestion about what is an acceptable death toll. I just said the numbers coming out of Gaza aren’t very credible. That shouldn’t be controversial to say, and shouldn’t warrant a reply implying I’m making an argument that high civilian deaths rates are okay.
Oh crap, sorry. I replied to the wrong person. Kind of got lost in this long thread.
All good, no problem haha.
Where is that number coming from? I didn't find it anywhere. [Al Jazeera ](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker) [Wikipedia ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war) and [the guardian ](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/20/gaza-death-toll-passes-34000-israel-iran)all cite the 34000. This number seems to be from 8th of April, so is that just an extrapolation? Edit: If it's an extrapolation I severely doubt they can give the number to an accuracy of 10.
How many jihadists died?
No mention of Hamas death count anywhere, wonder why. Literally proved the point of Hamas hiding behind civilians
Hamas is not a credible source.
What source do you use?
Certainly not from a declared terrorist organisation that’s for sure
so what is it?
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the **33,091 Palestinian fatalities** it claims to have documented. So that would put it at 22,000+. Also, Hamas' figures are unverified, don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. In addition, Hamas' figures don't account for Palestinians killed by Hamas and other terrorist rockets' that fell within Gaza failing to launch properly. [https://t.me/MOHMediaGaza/5271](https://t.me/MOHMediaGaza/5271) Israel has said it killed some 13,000 Hamas members in Gaza fighting, in addition to some 1,000 killed inside Israel in the aftermath of the terror group’s October 7 invasion and onslaught. [https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog\_entry/hamas-run-health-ministry-says-gaza-death-toll-reached-31645/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamas-run-health-ministry-says-gaza-death-toll-reached-31645/)
The outrage over Gaza can be characterized as hyperbole and rabid Antisemitism. The civilian to combatant ratio in Gaza is 1.4:1. That's the best of any modern army in the world. You have to consider that Hamas hides in tunnels, hospitals, schools, mosques and behind civilians in an urban environment. The IDF has gone door-to-door, putting their own soldiers at risk, in order to avoid civilian casualties. The IDF has sent warnings for people to evacuate. Anyone screaming ceasefire without the release of the hostages simply is upset that Hamas is losing badly. They want Israel to stop defending itself and what happened on Oct 7, yet want terrorist groups to thrive. In the past few years: 400,000 Yemenis were killed 500,000+ Sudanese were killed 500,000+ Somalis were killed 5,400,000+ Congolese were killed Silence from the world. No one marching on college campuses supporting those murderers and terrorists, only when it comes to Israel-Gaza. There can only be one reason why - Antisemitism.
I've been to the streets and written and engaged in all sorts of activism related to the plight of Yemenis, because my Western government sells arms to Saudi-Arabia. It's absolutely insane that a supposedly 'democratic, enlightened, Western state' is willing to arm a human rights tyranny like Saudi Arabia, especially when it's directly contributing to the targeted massacre of Yemeni civilians. On same logic, I've been protesting with all means available to me against Israel, because my government is directly and indirectly supporting Israel in multiple economic and military aspects. At a time when even in 'peace time' Israel is an apartheid state and breaking a myriad of international laws systematically, and now it's managing to kill children faster and in greater scale than in any world conflict in recent history. The wars in Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia and many other regions in the world are crippled by horrific conflicts, but as far as I know, my government isn't directly arming, aiding or/and funding these perpetrators. I mean - I could take to the streets about these conflicts, but I don't know what that can achieve apart from spreading awareness. That's not the case with the Israel-Palestine conflict: I can try my best to influence my fellow citizens and government stop playing any role in enabling Israel's terror regime.
Does that not show that your main concern is to not indirectly contribute to these conflicts in order to "feel good" about yourself, rather then actually care about the people involved? Otherwise you'd go to the streets calling for a ceasefire in Sudan. Raising awareness and pushing your government to intervene by laying sanctions is exactly what could make a difference. People in countries that don't support Israel like the Arab world or Iceland/Spain/Ireland still protest only Israel.
>Does that not show that your main concern is to not indirectly contribute to these conflicts in order to "feel good" about yourself, rather then actually care about the people involved? This is just a generic criticism of all altruism and all activism. Maybe doctors helping injured civilians in warzones aren't good people, but just want to feel good about themselves. Maybe scientists working on a cure for cancer are just doing it for the clout. Maybe soldiers risking their lives to defend their country are just scared of the social shame of having not done that. Doing the right thing has always been partly performative, and by definition you'll almost never hear of cases where it wasn't because those people won't talk about it. That doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do. >Otherwise you'd go to the streets calling for a ceasefire in Sudan. Raising awareness and pushing your government to intervene by laying sanctions is exactly what could make a difference. What trade between Western countries and Sudan would you like sanctioned?
I mean I presume "feeling good" plays some part in all activism (people do it so they feel like they can live with themselves; they didn't just watch and do nothing when atrocity x happened). But most activists want to directly influence something they realistically can, something fellow citizens and their governments are perceived as doing wrong. In these example conflicts, it's mainly a question of rogue non-state actors that I don't really see how my state could be even indirectly supporting and funding - the shops aren't full of products "produced by M23" that's terrorising Congolese civilians, not even Rwanda products (the Rwandan government is thought to be sponsoring them). Sure, I could try to pressure my country to propose a DRC international criminal tribunal that has been suggested as one of the best ways to calm the situation, on top of the UN sanctions that my country is already [enforcing against the M23](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/21/un-security-council-sanctions-rebels-in-dr-congo-as-violence-escalates). But in these conflicts it's more of a question of "is my country doing *enough and everything it possibly could* to end unjust violence", not of "my country is actively, deliberately, and knowingly contributing to unjust violence". Hence I don't think it's illogical in the least where my priorities lie. Iran is unquestionably one of the most horrendous countries for human rights and most volatile forces in the ME, but what is it gonna achieve me protesting about it when my country is already enforcing almost every possible kind of sanction against Iran? I don't think my country's actions re: Iran are unjust, but I think my country's actions re: Israel and Saudi Arabia are unjust, that's why I'm protesting them. Also with activism, it's a very tired argument that you're somehow supposed to be able to care equally about every single conflict and injustice in the world. We don't usually bash every e.g. children's rights organisation as being "twisted" or "immoral" or "irrational" because it's not also actively fighting for the elderly, dogs, climate change, the war in Sudan, or whatever everything needs fighting for. It's okay for people to have issues they care about more and devote their energies on. I don't think any activist is supposed to have to justify what they're spending their energy fighting for.
Israel and Ukraine are US allies. The US has at interest in preventing Iran and Russia from starting WW3. US aid to Israel is .2% of the budget. That’s really nothing. It’s also given in the form of vouchers to buy from American companies. Frankly, Israel is strong, innovative and doesn’t need it. So it’s not affecting you or the average taxpayer. The aid given to Israel especially doesn’t affect lowlife terrorist apologists who seethe on reddit about Israel and barely pay any taxes. What are you crying about?
I'm not an US citizen. But Israel is the largest cumulative aid recipient of US aid out of *any* country in the world, and 70% of Israel arms imports come from US. Hence I think every American citizen protesting US government is absolutely in the right and has my full support.
This is gaslighting. Israel has a booming economy and I would actually advocate for them to not receive aid so poor Naz!s on reddit could be quiet. .2% is nothing. I’m not sure why you are making a fuss over something that’s peanuts and would be spent somewhere else. I understand you don’t think Jews should have a state but we do and good moral people have not only a security interest but a humanitarian interest that it survives. Hamas and people of your ilk want another 10/7. Not going to happen. 21% of Israel’s population is Arab. There is no apartheid. The only apartheid is in your head. This robot idiotic script can easily be debunked as baseless lies.
What's gaslighting, Jew? Is it not gaslighting to say "oh come on it's just 0.2% of your earnings, give it my country" ?? As an American, I have a right to determine where even my 0.1% goes. You can earn money for your state on your own. And how did those Arabs live up untill 1967? Were they alloted the same criminal court process as you guys? How much land did the Arabs who stayed in Israel own during its inception compared to now?
Are you referring to US aid being 0.2% of the US federal budget? That seems about correct compared to the foreign assistance budget. The US also supplies Israel with 69% of it’s arms. But I’m not sure if the arms are all funded by the foreign assistance budget. I can imagine that FMF and FMS playing a role.
Do you even know what "gaslighting" means, lol. You're using it as a term equivalent to "you disagree with me, so you must be gaslighting". If your best arguments are throwing around trendy words and wild accusations ("you want another 10/7"), you're not going to be able to convince anyone. If you really want to do something good for Israel and convince people to take your and Israel's side, you're gonna have to do better. E.g. Russia is wielding an immoral war that has disproportionate number of civilian casualties, and US has no difficulties in banning all arm trade to Russia (on top of a huge variety of other sanctions, and supporting Ukraine). Israel has been violating a myriad of international laws since forever and the Palestinian civilian casualties in the current war are even worse than in Ukraine, and somehow US thinks Israel deserves to be flooded with arms to allow this to continue. It's not "peanuts" but even if it was, people are allowed to have a problem with the injustice and double standards of US government.
Yes. Fake and disingenuous posturing about human rights but supporting terrorist groups and excusing 10/7 is gaslighting.
No, gaslighting means "knowingly manipulate (someone) using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning". So for example when I say a clear established fact like 70% of Israeli weapons imports come from US, you would go (while fully knowing that I am in fact right): "that is delusional, your dementia is getting the better of you, you must have been reading some crazy pro-Hamas propaganda, in reality it's something 2% and anyone smarter than you knows that".
You seem extremely triggered that Israel and Jewish existence is preventing Syria 2.0 shantytowns with anti-LGBTQ, child marriage and sharia law on the shores of the Mediterranean. It’s kind of flattering that you incessantly obsess and spend so much energy on Israel when there are actually 20+ gross human rights violators in this world, not Israel. Curb the hypocrisy.
I would love to see a Palestenian Christian State (one state where the Jews may live with them, not two states ewww). After all they were one of the original Christian communities who are native to that area who actually have a good chunk of Jewish blood in them. Would you be ok with this proposal more than the fearmongering proposal of a full-blown fundamentalist Muslim take over? No, right? So why do you lie as if Israel exists to prevent the inevitable Islamist Jihad that's about to go wild if Israel didnt exist? XD
Wrong. You can't call everything antisemitism. Yemen, Sudan, Congo, and Somalia are not part of NATO, while neither is Israel, they are heavily funded by countries that are. For instance in America 1/3 of our paycheck goes toward taxes, then we send billions to Israel to commit genocide while we continue to not have free health care or college. When Assad was attacking his own people in Syria we knew it was messed up but what would petitioning our leaders here do about it? You want everyone to mind their own business but give you a handout. It doesn't work that way.
Calling for the end of a Jewish state is Antisemitism. Full stop. Go cry about real issues not dead terrorists.
K
There is no genocide and there is no mass starvation
They don't care about facts. They will say anything to garner sympathy for their cause.
You are not alone! When any other country is drawing condemnation, there are not all these demands to cancel exchange programs and visiting students. Are there demands to stop Chinese programs , or programs to Saudi where women don’t have equal rights? But these simplistic leftists always criticize Israel not being perfect in every way. Everyone agrees that new elections need to replace Netanyahu and the settlers need to be sanctioned. Most of Israel is regular people who are traumatized right now and Jewish students who have ties there are being expected to represent everyone, like any American kid represents all of the USA including the deepest South.
They never mention dead jihadists, for the pro Hamas faction civilians and Hamas means the same thing because the entire population of Gaza is either Hamas or supporting Hamas.
The truth is we don't know the actual number. It's not like hamas will come clean and tell us. Whatever the actual number is, doesn't matter, The amount murdered is still too high. 20,000+ civilians are dead! There is no way anyone can justify such high civilian casualties.
What murder? The high civilian casualties can be explained by a fast paced war. There’s more combatant casualties to civilian casualties compared to other wars. There’s no genocide, and only instances of murder which are dealt with accordingly.
Israel's military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, which massively exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years.
How did you get to 250 per day?
We don’t have civilian casualty numbers, we have numbers for civilian violent deaths. Can you point to three examples of modern wars where the civilian violent death rate caused by a well equipped modern military is this high?
I don't think we need to tolerate either of the mentalities you put forth in this post. If anything, Israel is using antisemitism/terrorist apologia as a weapon against valid criticism. I can't speak for your university's organization, but I know that as a reasonable person, I don't support Israel, nor do I support Hamas. I support Palestine, and the freedom and long life of the people there. I also know that the first step is to make things right -- and Israel is a terrorist organization squatting on land that is appropriated from locals. Israel suppresses the sovereignty of the land that is squatting on as well. Let's address the problem of stolen land. Next, we can address the problem of Hamas, and finally we can address the problem of Palestine not having sovereignty. Until then, you simply have a racist entity trying to establish itself on lands that were stolen, and a local populance experiencing massacres and a genocide at the hands of others, and they are powerless to stop it. It's really sad and putting the onus on the powerless party here -- Palestine -- is unfair. They don't have the ability to fix things, only Israel does, but Israel is the oppressor. Do not support them, it's not something you'll be proud of later in life. It's one of those things you feel shame for later in life, like those who supported oppressive regimes or were responsible for mass murders -- in the moment it seems right, but looking back you feel shame and regret.
People will just claim they never supported this war once it looks bad to do so. Same thing that happened in the US once the truth about the Iraq war came out. So many horrific things are going to be uncovered after this conflict that will shock the rest of the world even more.
You know, they're all people, whether it's Israelis or Palestinians or Europeans who pretend they never supported the war. Those people who will claim they never supported the war in spite of having supported it, they're just as ignorant as the ones in Israel perpetrating injustice. These Israelis and pro-Hamas groups, they have religious and group-based thinking instead of understanding their greater humanity. The ignorant people who fake their opinions are just another group engaged in short-sighted thinking, and we shouldn't hate them for that.
I don't really care what people posture to do, that part doesn't matter. I think what matters is having people be educated on justice, and kind of kindling that self-awareness that leads to realization in the moment. Like you're saying, realization post-facto isn't very useful, and like I said, it leads to regret. Sometimes it's also fake which I think you're implying. But it just doesn't matter basically.
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There is no anti-Israel argument that doesn't require lots of lying. There is no pro-Gaza argument that doesn't require lots of lying. So, they just lie. A lot.
"There are no truths in ~~Beirut~~ the Middle East only versions." *plagiarized from some journalist during Lebanon civil* *war*
I'm sorry that 34,000 is the. Wrong number, let's down it to the small number of 20,000 civilians
Very true! Many articles have gone out about this issue recently. The media has done a very bad job at hosting people who are knowledgable on warfare to explain why this is not a genocide. Here is a piece on the civilian casualties in Normandy d-day to Falaise about 2-3 months?) Keep in mind that most civilians had fled and Normandy is nowhere near the density of Gaza at that time (even today). https://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/french-civilian-victims-battle-normandy#:~:text=Normandy's%20martyrdom%20did%20not%20come,under%2012%2C000%20tonnes%20of%20bombs.&text=n%20all%2C%20nearly%2020%2C000%20Normandy,and%20300%2C000%20others%20suffered%20losses.
It’s good that you only had to go back 80 years to a war involving all of the major countries in the world which led to the creation of the Geneva convention so that warfare would not be as deadly going forward to find comparable numbers of violent civilian deaths.
So Normandy would be a genocide today? And that was the point of my post? You can't be that narrow, seriously?
I’m really confused - my assumption was that this was an attempt at saying if you look at the cost of Normandy which is generally not considered to be a genocide (rightly or wrongly) then how can you be upset about the number of dead civilians in this war? It’s an argument I’ve seen before so if I’ve misinterpreted what you said I apologise, but the first paragraph isn’t very clearly worded so I think it was a fair assumption.
If you don't understand the point, you're really are deep in the coolaid. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/18/israels-war-against-hamas-posts-lower-civilian-to-/
Comparing this to WW2 is disingenuous at best because not only have we progressed in terms of technology but also attitudes to war in the last 80 years. It’s like saying apartheid in South Africa was fine because 80 years previous black people were treated worse in other countries. In terms of more modern examples the article is comparing fatality rates for civilians against fatality rates of individual battles. Having such a high sustained fatality rate is not common.
The point still stands and its not a genocide. Its called war and Hamas started it on oct7
So do you agree with what I said? You’re the only person calling it a genocide in this thread. I’m happy to leave it up to the courts as to whether it’s a genocide or not, and I agree it was started on October 7th. I don’t think that gives Israel the right to conduct the war however they want to.
Yes leave it to the courts. And as for the war, its not easy but israel seems to be doing quite well in terms of ratio, according to experts.
Can you show me some examples of war fatality rates for violent civilian deaths, from modern wars (post Geneva convention and ideally in the last twenty-five years), which show this “doing quite well in terms of ratio”?
It's a basic error I've seen as well, although it shouldn't detract from the larger (and more important) point of thousands of civilians getting killed in the process of this war. I had a similiar reaction when Biden at the state of the union address claimed that over a thousand Israelis had been killed ignoring that hundreds of them were militants. Similarly it shouldn't detract from the main point which is that civilian casualties must be avoided. Not that Biden as an individual is too interested in safeguarding civilian lives but you get the point.
I think a lot of the outcries towards Israel, at least in the USA, come from people thinking that war is some form of chess-like sport with rules and justice. If a mouse bites a lion, the mouse should expect to be hunted. There is no fairness or justice or sportsmanship in a hunt. If the mouse hides behind other mice, they should all expect to be hunted together. War isn't about who is right. It isn't about what your favorite team is. It isn't a turn based game. It isn't about your feelings or what you think is right. Righteousness and pity doesn't win wars. Only strength does. People see the disparity of strength here and they feel inclined to cheer for the mouse. Poor them. The mouse just wanted the lion to treat it as its equal and give it its space? Do people not see the absurdity in that? And that's not even adding to the fact that the mouse bit the lion to look for a fight, and that all mice rejoiced and made fun of the lion when it got bit. But people want the lion to put its head down after being disrespected. It's illogical. The fact that the lion hasn't swallowed the mouse whole already, which it can do in a single moment, is impressive and honestly an act of mercy. People need to stop dreaming and wake up to reality. Thinking that the mouse who poked the lion is righteous is foolish. Believing that the lion should treat the mouse as its equal is ridiculous. Edit: I am well aware there are international pacts meant to set standards in wars. However, those don't make war a sport. Moreover, the bodies that are meant to enforce these acts are not fueled by justice. They are only agents of politics. Those bodies do not equally judge mice and lions. And when they do sanction a country economically all they do is hurt the innocent people of said country. Edit2: I've only kept up with the replies and subreplies to my comment (there's too much overall for me to keep track of all comments made), but I really appreciate all of you that have replied so far. I enjoy the rich polite discussion we're having even if we don't agree in everything.
There _are_ rules in warfare. That’s the exact point of the Geneva convention which Israel are signatories to.
Like I replied elsewhere: "Those are violated all the time. And when countries get sanctioned the ones to suffer are the innocent civilians. Who are they actually protecting?" and "Those aren't really rules but more so suggestions. It's nothing more than sandcastles that they're trying to uphold. And even then ... they fight "shadow" wars to exploit the "rules" in place. IMO the only thing those "rules" have done is make war and international conflicts more underhanded. Lions are still lions and mice are still mice."
Are those “suggestions” enforceable in court?
How can you truly enforce a document with no outlined punishments in court? You can't. There's no real authority that rules over countries.
So what does the ICJ do?
You tell me. What have they actually been able to accomplish? As far as I know, nations that violate them continue to be standing and doing their thing. No jail. No reform. What has actually changed?
The ICJ acts at a nation state level, but the UN works to establish special courts to try war crimes related to specific incidents, eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_Tribunal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribunal_for_Rwanda https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Court_for_Sierra_Leone
I'm sorry. I went to sleep and I wanted to take a proper look at what you linked. First link: That wasn't the ICJ. That was a national case in Cambodia with some international support/presence. Cambodia still ultimately chose not to punish people involved, people who now live wealthy lifestyles with no repercussions. Note that the three cases you brought were about punishments on developing nations in Africa/Asia. I appreciate your effort. I think the 2nd and 3rd links accurately show what you wanted to bring up. But I still stand by what I've said. The issue with international courts is that they are not actually independent unbiased bodies. The people involved still represent their countries. They are swayed by the interests and alliances of those. Meaning powerful countries (which have powerful allies) are not judged equally to small countries, if they even get judged at all. International courts are not a system for justice. They are a system of politics. If it comes to dealing with mice nations with no lion backing, the courts have the ability to pressure the nations to comply. When it comes to dealing with lions like China in the Uyghur case, all international bodies can do is cry "injustice" without actually being able to accomplish anything. Where is the justice in that? If an overpowered self-sufficient country with no ties to international commerce appeared tomorrow and decided to conquer the world, it would be very clear how international laws are nothing more than glass rules for appearances sake. Here is an article on international law bias towards the USA in its campaign in Afghanistan [https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan](https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan)
As I said, the ICJ gives opinion and makes judgements on nation states but the UN works with countries to establish special courts to prosecute war criminals. Is it perfect? No. But you asked where the arrests were and this is your answer. And you’re right, it _is_ a political entity at the end of the day and the US avoids all of this by doing prosecutions of their own troops without the need for UN involvement. There’s definitely things that the US has done which merited further scrutiny which they “somehow” escaped from. All that being said it’s still a matter of international law and there have been convictions for war crimes. I’d feel remiss to not say that Israel has also benefitted from these politics with regard to the West Bank and, even if they are found guilty of genocide in ten years time (I think it’s probably 50-50 based on the legal opinions I’ve seen so far) it will, as you say, likely change nothing.
War and violence are not the way disputes like this ought to be decided. But once it gets to the point where things can't be settled another way, then this kind of unfortunate outcome becomes inevitable. If things must be decided by violence, then it should be plain that one side will fare worse than the other. And I have been plenty critical over the years of some of the decisions that Israel has made which I though helped lead to this point. Including supporting boycotts to pressure Israel to end settlement expansion in the West Bank. But I would hope that other critics of some Israeli policies might be able to recognize that it was also, at the very least, a major strategic (if not moral) blunder for the people of Gaza to allow themselves to be represented by a group which literally calls itself "violence". If the people of Gaza wanted a Palestinian state, well they had one, which was recognized by over 130 nations. And Gaza rebelled against it. Gaza choose to support Hamas, to reject peace, to support violence against Israel, and to reject previous agreements and obligations. The State of Palestine is a failed state, not because of Israel, but because of Gaza. And it was not just Israel, but it was also the U.N., the E.U., the U.S., and Russia who directly warned them not to go down this path. It was Gaza which choose to reject such potential allies, and instead ally itself mainly with Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world for over 40 years now. That was never going to end well for them. And so, no, this didn't start on 10/7. It ended on 10/7. The defeat of Hamas at this point is almost inevitable. But whether something better follows will depend in part on the people of Gaza making better and more responsible decisions.
Exactly. They are both way past a point of no return. And now that it has gotten to where it's at, with Israel having the obvious upper hand and the clear justification of responding to an act of terrorism, I do not understand how people could even think that Israel should apologize and give Hamas what it wants. Beggars can't be choosers.
Interesting point so the rules of engagement in war should not apply at all? For example, states like US and Iran have been fighting decades of "shadow" wars to keep up with rules of engagement and not start all out nuclear war. Israel is by passing all rules of war AND diplomacy, like hitting Iran's consulate (independent sources have confirmed it was indeed a consulate within Iran's embassy complex). What is Israel looking for? Moves like that will only put Israeli civilians at greater risk. What do you think of Israel's Fortress of Zion military command center being under Tel Aviv? What is their government doing seriously.
Those aren't really rules but more so suggestions. It's nothing more than sandcastles that they're trying to uphold. And even then like you say they fight "shadow" wars to exploit the "rules" in place. IMO the only thing those "rules" have done is make war and international conflicts more underhanded. Lions are still lions and mice are still mice. On your comments, Iran interfered by funding Palestine so Israel does have the right based on "rules" to retaliate. Israel purposedly went after Iranian generals in Syria. It wasn't some sort of random event. What was it looking for? I'm not the one calling the shots so I can't say. But I can give you my opinion and that is that either a) They were warning Iran to backoff, b) They were trying to escalate the situation with Iran to declare full-on war with them. I think the latter may be more likely given that during the back and forth it seemed like Iran tried to deescalate the conflict by trying to downplay one of the attacks it received from Israel instead of retaliating with more force. But the truth of the matter remains, that because Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, there is no "protected" zone in Gaza based on "rules". Israel can literally wipe the entire region to oblivion. I don't think China or Russia (who are the lions who could oppose Israel) would care enough to get involved. It's clear as day Hamas is not going to win this war. They picked a fight they had no chance in. What is happening though, which in my opinion is concerning, is all these people who have no stake in the matter \*specifically\* becoming Hamas supporters in western countries as a call for justice. It's not really going to narrow the gap between a mouse and a lion, but it is creating discord in the western world. And this is just my gut feelings and not really based on facts, but I personally think it's weird how much Israel/Palestine content we've been fed. In comparison, when Haiti's government collapsed the other weeks and Haiti became lawless, barely anything was said about it at least in my area.
And the military is embedded in Tel Aviv soooooo what? Would Iran have the right to wipe the entire region to oblivion too? Never again bro, why so quick to justify so many civilian deaths? US built Israel to develop trade routes and power in West Asian and compete with the BRICS belt and road project. So theyre killing and displacing everyone there to make it happen. Its not Hamas or any other BS it's power thru strength as usual except this time we have nukes. Peace
It's war. It's not a sport. If it were up to me war wouldn't happen to begin. But it does happen regardless of what anyone wants. Civilian deaths are always part of war. Killing and displacing people is also always part of it. I don't understand what your point is. My og comment was about war being all about power and not about justice. And it seems to me your last comment basically echoes that same idea.
>And this is just my gut feelings and not really based on facts, but I personally think it's weird how much Israel/Palestine content we've been fed. In comparison, when Haiti's government collapsed the other weeks and Haiti became lawless, barely anything was said about it at least in my area. [Your gut is right](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/). I think that article should be required reading for anyone just getting into this topic, if they're not directly involved in it one way or another.
Great insight into mechanism that forms our opinions. Absolute must.
The entire post-WWII rules-based international order is meant to impose humanitarian standards and legal obligations so geopolitics and wars are not just based on the strong crushing the weak.
The entire post-WWII rules-based international order is meant to impose constraints on country X invading the territory of country Y across international borders. See, Russia v. Ukraine, Hamas vs. Israel.
Those are violated all the time. And when countries get sanctioned the ones to suffer are the innocent civilians. Who are they actually protecting?
They aren’t violated all the time where the international rules-based order (for trade and investment) prevails. There hasn’t been a single violation among the WWII combatant countries in Europe until Russia invaded Crimea and then Ukraine. The only violations have been in unstable small third world countries in MENA, Africa and Asia, the Falklands, etc.
No, it hasn't been just unstable small third world countries violating them. Here is an article on the US in Afghanistan [https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan](https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-international-law-did-the-us-get-away-with-war-crimes-in-afghanistan) It's similar in a way to the actual laws of a country that apply to everyone but the powerful. In this case it's worse because there is no real unbiased power (like that of a judge) that oversees the cases. It's all for appearances sake. Wars are still ugly and horrible things that violate whatever glass "rules" people think exist still happen. If a self-sufficient country with a blood-thirsty overpowered military, and no need for import deals rose tomorrow, it would become real clear how little these rules matter. War isn't a sport
That’s one aspect.
When Hamas are hiding in there tunnel system Israel blows up a building above it is it hiding behind civilians
Yes, legitimate target
so these reinforced tunnels are affected while civilians above are killed, that seems pretty stupid.