For me, it is alarming when a left-wing intellectual is fighting for the noblest goals, but the actual result is the intensification of the left identity politics, — Number2018

You literally have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. No one is arguing on behalf of Palestinians because of their 'identity'. They are arguing on behalf of Palestinian because they are being genocided. Neoliberal elites? What the fuck are you smoking?

Fuck Israel and anyone who defends her immersartion of the world - including, and especially the United States - including and especially Biden.

Yes but what about Japan's treatment of the elderly? Have you considered that? Huh?

The way I've heard it put is that every building leveled is retroactively Hamas so that makes it OK.

You should have seen my paranoia in public when reading Zizek and Millbank's The Monstrosity of Christ.

Here it is again for those in the cheap seats:

More often [genocide] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong. —

Raphael Lemkin

You couldn't sum up what is happening to the Palestinian people by way of Israeli agency better than this if you tried.

And yet more attempts to change the subject. Your apologetics is tired. You've chosen to stand with war criminals and apartheid mongers. You're a moral vaccum.

There is no genocide. Never has been. What ever happened to our discussion about America's ongoing genocide against its own minorities? — BitconnectCarlos

Genocide denial and more attempts to change the subject. Nice.

I'm not even going to accuse you of being a racist here; I honestly think you just don't like humanity. Like...at all. You have absolutely zero respect for other cultures or traditions, — BitconnectCarlos

Says the person whose sole objective in this thread is to excuse genocide. If that's the 'culture' you'd like to 'respect' then I hope to hell it is universally 'disrespected'. I am fundamentalist about the rejection of Israeli state terrorism.

I feel bad for the Palestinian people — BitconnectCarlos

Your 'feelings' are just about the most irrelevant possible objects of discussion right now. In any case your words of lip service are belied at every turn by what you continually say.

I still haven't heard you talk about the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arabs between '48-'72, by the way. — BitconnectCarlos

Yes, you'd do everything you can to change the subject to further ignore actual suffering taking place in real time at the hands of current-day Israeli murder. You're as transparent as the air in your head is thick.

All I find hateful is Hamas and their insistence on the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. — BitconnectCarlos

As distinct from the actual destruction of the Palestinian people, whose destitution at the hands of Israel you have consistently ignored and or excused.

And I heard Finkelstein mention that the remaining option are to the right and to the far right of Netanyahu. If that's correct, that's pretty nuts. — Manuel

Interesting. I was under the impression that Yair Lapid, is the most likely next candidate, and is more of a centrist. Which is not saying a great deal, but still. If you want to distinguish yourself from a Yahu, leveraging the bubbling condemnation of these attacks would seem to make sense to me. I feel like push comes to shove - and this is shove - nobody really wants violence. But I could be gravely misreading the Israeli propensity to open aggression (like, I do think they'd prefer if the Palestinians to be genocided out of the limelight, and not in it). If you find any good analysis, let me know.

Ok. But what is your deepest desire? Is it identical to what was behind your previous the most intensive debates? — Number2018

Who gives a damn?

Although it's notable that this is like the 3rd or 5th time someone's tried to 'personalize' this and make this about who "I" am (is he happy? is he mentally OK? What's your deepest desire?). I love these questions. They're an an admission of utter substancelessness. They're a sign that one is one the exact right track. It gives me life, right before I ignore this kind of shit entirely.

One of the nice things about discussing Israel-Palestine is just how clear-cut and totally unambiguous the moral lines are. The claims of 'complexity' are nothing more than political demobilizers, meant to muddy the waters and stall out action. There's a clip circulating around of the late, great Michael Brooks, and he makes this point better than I possibly could:

Or for some reading: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/israel-palestine-sheikh-jarrah-al-aqsa-mosque

I don't think any dead Palestinians - victims of present Israeli war crimes - would care for this wordy bullshit justifying their murder, but it's quite easy to see that this proliferation of Symbolic, jargon-filled babble is nothing but a reaction-formation aimed at avoiding at all costs the Real of Isreali genocide. See, I can play this game too! Difference is, someone will actually read this instead of having their eyes glaze over five words in.

One problem Israel faces, aside from those already mentioned, is that it's an extremely paranoid state — Manuel

This is true. And the problem with paranoia is that, as you said, it is self-fulfilling. However the present violence comes to a lull - it won't be an end - Israel will come out on the other side of this even more paranoid than before. Considering that most everyone can see it for the terrorist state that it is, I have no doubt it will double down - because it has no other choice. Things will get worse before they get better.

One thing that's not mentioned as much as it really, really ought to be is the fact that much of the current violence is a cynical election ploy by Netanyahu, who has been stuck at electoral idle for 2 years now and is hoping this nationalist surge will finally break him out of his current political impotence. It's a gamble (a 'good' one, as far as murder goes), and if he wins, he'll take it as a vindication and things will get unimaginably bad. If it doesn't - I dunno, the Israeli political system will stay in it's current black hole and that could take it anywhere.

Videos like these are also why the other unthinking line of justification - "Israel has a right to defend itself" - will be shown to be the hollow, cynical, joke that it is. No one with a working lung and spleen will ever be able to take it seriously again.

This kind of fascism can only hide itself for so long.

Also, I kinda like @Joshs incoherent babbling in this thread. It's all they're reduced to. That, or the obvious racism of someone like twoBit. In all cases their rhetorical game is up. Which unfortunately usually means more violence. Nothing more dangerous than an animal whose time is coming - the Israeli ethnostate, in its current form.

More war crimes. How surprising.

Once that happens Israel will stop responding with its own attacks. — BitconnectCarlos

No they won't. Because Israel has been on the offensive for the past 50 years. Israel does not 'respond' to anything. Israel is the aggressor, through and through.

Do I want the rocket attacks to stop? Yeah, but I don't feel too strongly about it.

Unlike, say, Israeli genocide.

No. But I hold Israel responsible for every single person who dies in this conflict, including Israeli civilians.

With the Covid situation a lot of countries in the Middle East are struggling more than usual. So who could possibly help the Palestinians now? Turkey? Egypt? Looks unlikely.

The US is still behind Israel. Biden on foreign policy has not been a big change, which is sad. — Manuel

Israel is a client state of the US. Nothing they do happens without the latter's backing. The game to be played is a long one. And one can taste the current in the air, and I'm not convinced it's carrying Israel's way.

It seems clear to me that - as of these recent actions - the reflexive line of 'criticism of Israel is anti-semitism' has withered away like the dead vine it is. Not even the propagandists like twoBit or Joshs can make the accusation - Joshs at least acknowledging, however cynically and insincerely - that Gaza is a hellscape that owes alot to Israel for it's condition, and twoBit doing acrobatics to avoid talking about it because he knows he has nothing to say. I think these kinds of things are emblematic. Boomers like Tim Hill recycle talking points from 30 years ago, but he and others like him will keel over and die soon enough. Everyone knows the playbook now. In that sense I think threads like these are emblematic. Watching Andrew Yang get torn a new one has been pretty satisfying - although one wishes it were Nancy Pelosi instead. Biden remains a spineless coward - as he is in everything he does - but as Greenwald notes, if you pay attention, the politics is changing too, whatever happens at the top level.

Israel is in a race against time. Their accelerating brutality attests to it. It may be that the winds of change - which are real and present - will not blow fast enough, but that would only mean that Israel will go full mask-off in the time they have left before that happens and simply bring their genocide to its logical conclusion. That could happen too. But I'm hopeful. But it will still mean that thousands of Palestinians will continue to die and suffer at the hands of Israel for at least the near future.

He's made it clear enough. When someone tell you who they are, believe them. And he's a shill for a genocidal state whose actions are unimpeachable.

But real Palestinian lives don't matter to twoBit, whose unrealized fantasies justify ongoing genocide.

But then again they are the weaker group compared to Israel — BitconnectCarlos

Well considering Israel murders Palestinians on a scale of orders of magnitude higher, while keeping the rest of them in concentration camp conditions, yes.

We're at the pogrom stage of genocide now I guess.

Not the quality post one would expect from a moderator. — Bitter Crank

Apologies. Having to wrangle with genocide apologists is unnerving. No less American chauvinism wrapped in ignorance.

Condemnation is easy and doesn’t require thought so much as visceral reaction. You don’t do yourself a service by taking this easy route. The most difficult thing in the world to do is be open to the possibility that the one you are instinctively driven to hate , to condemn, to criminalize, construes the world though an entirely different lens than you do. You think all that separate us is our moral compass , but that is what binds us. What separates us is the almost impossible difficulty of bridging alien systems of interpretation of fact. — Joshs

Opposing genocide really doesn't require these vapid brain loop-de-loops. Maybe Israel shouldn't be "instinctively driven" to demolish Palestinian housing, stealing Palestinian land, and bombing Palestinian civilians.

You have to wonder why people risk their lives to come to America and not Australia or France. — Harry Hindu

:rofl:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_migrant_vessel_incidents_on_the_Mediterranean_Sea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_European_migrant_crisis

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/record-number-of-asylum-seeker-deaths-at-sea-in-2014-international-organisation-for-migration-20141217-12903h.html

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/10/refu-o24.html

I knew you were a fucking moron but I didn't think you'd be quite so ready to hang your ignorance out for display like a fucking show boat.

Demographic ethnic diversity <> state racial institutionalization.

Sorry that you need something so basic explained to you.

The only people who think the massive death toll of Israeli aggression is - time and time again - 'accidental', are racist little shits who continually deny genocide. Half a century of continual 'collateral damage' is not 'collateral damage' - it is deliberate policy.

"Collateral" from artillery shelling densely packed buildings, "collateral" from a ground invasion armed to the teeth. Israel continually carries out terrorist attacks and the distinction between 'collateral' and 'deliberate' simply does not exist for it. It is is distinction without a difference for a state that doesn't give a shit who it kills.

Oh that makes Israeli murder OK then you apologist fuck.

Yeah, gee, as Israel rains down fire upon Gaza in which a quarter of the dead are children, I wonder why the focus is on the Israeli murderers? What a complete fucking mystery.

And having been victims of ethic cleansing does not give one some kind of special licence to engage it after the fact. If anything, those who are all too quick to cry victim ought to be more, not less, vigilant against ever enacting such atrocities ever again. Yet here we here, with Isreali fascism murdering people left, right, and centre, being excused by genocide apologists like you. Pathetic.

The 'self-defense' of Isreali fascism.

Come on over the states and we can protest together. — BitconnectCarlos

It's quite alright, we have enough problems with our treatment of aboriginals to deal with right here. And of course, more whataboutism from you. Expected from a racist, but there you go.

Whataboutist rubbish. And the upshot is obviously for Isreal not to treat is Arab citizens like 5th class citizens. But kinda hard to do when you're a racist ethnostate built on principles of racial political superiority.

Before I even start with this we really need to address this term "ethnic cleansing." It can be used for both genocide and banishment/expulsion, and while these are obviously both bad things the two are not the same at all and should not be used interchangeably. — BitconnectCarlos

Maybe if Isreal wasn't involved in exactly both, it would be slightly harder to use the term. But of course insofar as it is engaged in both settler colonialism and genocide - in one in service of the other - 'ethnic cleansing' is quite the rather apt term.

Imagine thinking it's 'woke' to oppose genocide. This is your brain on propaganda.

One day you will say something of substance.

But it isn't today.