It's just a factual disagreement, nothing more. Never mind the fact that the Palestinian population has grown considerably over the past decade. — BitconnectCarlos

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

Lemkin being the Jewish legal scholar who coined the term, of course.

What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank for decades has been nothing less than genocide, committed by the state of Israel, being accelerated as we speak. That makes you a genocide apologist.

But this does not somehow make any consideration of tactics and the relation between ends and means superfluous. — Echarmion

Presumably you're the kind of person who'd tell a rape victim to sit there and take it if the rapist is stronger.

Israel, as the occupying force, owns the monopoly on colonial violence that takes place in the region. All other forms of violence occur within that sphere and cannot be decontextualized from that sphere. Given this, it's audacious to expect Palestinians to limit modes and mechanisms of emancipation by demanding that they act solely through nonviolent methods and peaceful resistance. — Maw

Once more for the genocide apologists in the back. Like @Echarmion, to name names.

It would put me in a position where I'd be defending Nazis. I can't go on in this conversation. — BitconnectCarlos

This is telling. "I won't call it what it is, because if I do, I would have to recognize the situation for what it is, and that would be unbearable to me".

There is no justification for anything that is happening right now, on either side. Everyone has blood on their hands, but the people with the power to remedy this situation is Israel and Israel alone. I blame both sides for this violence - I rest responsibility for it wholly on Israel.

'The other side' can resist however it deems proper in the face of the genocide happening to its people.

This is total fluff. When I say that the Isreali state should stop murdering children and engaging in settler colonialism, it really does have everything to do with the Isreali state, which is murdering children and engaging in settler colonialism.

Thanks for taking off your mask. — Echarmion

No worries, Mr. the-Palestinians-should-die-in-silence.

for you it's all about who I am as a person, not what my arguments are. — Echarmion

Your arguments show me who you are as a person. A rat.

Better to die in silence than take other innocent people with you. — Echarmion

And there it is.

Not a peep about the violence of settler colonialism of the Isreali state but - 'they should die in silence'.

Fucking warped.

And that connection simply doesn't exist here. The Hamas has no military solution, and as such it cannot justify its military actions as fighting against oppression. — Echarmion

This would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. "If you can't win against a force that is successfully exterminating you bit by bit, then you ought to roll over and die in silence".

Turns out the US does support terrorism, so long as it's their terrorists. Shitty fucking country.

Kinda hilarious how these people with nothing to say all end up turning to stupid little psychological quips. Like @Joshs 'concern' for my emotional health and @BitconnectCarlos's musing on your apparent 'misery'. These guys aren't people with arguments, they are walking, talking tropes void of substance.

It's not radical to oppose Isreal's ethnic cleansing program. It's radical to not.

as shown by their adroitness leading up to the partition of the Raj. — Ciceronianus the White

Oh sweet summer child.

"For over five decades, Israel has denied all rights of the Palestinians under its control, has stolen most of their resources – agricultural land, water and forced taxation which serves only the occupier. Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed, millions of trees were burnt or uprooted, tens of thousands of Palestinians were jailed for trumped-up charges, including thousands of children, and more than 15 thousand innocent Palestinians were killed by the IDF. Ambulances and medical teams were shot at and many were killed in the act of offering medical assistance. Schools and Universities were forced to close for years, and the vulnerable infrastructure of communication, water, health, education, electricity, roads, industry and food production and distribution were destroyed time and again in periodic attacks on Gaze and the West Bank, as well as those of Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.

...The Israeli society have never been more conceited, racist and nationalist than in the last decade under Netanyahu. The four years of the Trump administration have greatly contributed to the illusion of total impunity, and the government has increased the tempo of land confiscation, illegal destruction of houses, and settlement building, proving that they intend to squeeze out as many Palestinians out of their country, and to make the life of the remaining ones so impossible that they will leave to wherever they may be able to. The process is over a century long, and succeeded in granting Israel total control over the whole of Palestine, so why doubt its further success?

...But now the streets are burning. Palestinians – those with the few rights still conferred on them by Israel, or their brothers and sisters in the ‘occupied territories’ (all of Palestine is occupied) who lack any form of rights, are now acting together against the atrocities of Israeli colonial control. What have they got to lose? Only their lives; and their lives are not safe under Israeli rule, for sure. They have had enough, much more than enough, for many generations, and those who advised them to wait, were false messiahs and snake-oil merchants."

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/israels-illusion-of-normality-collapses-may-2021/

Basically Sweden.

I'm not the one waxing lyrical about haggadah readings and pining for the good 'ol days of Zionist factionalism while Israel is leveling buildings and flashbanging mosques.

Don't talk to me about sublimating politics into emotional work outs.

There is no empathy to be had for people defending genocide, no matter how hard you'd like to pull on heart strings.

What's heartening about the recent reactions to present Isreali violence is the near total moral clarity around it. For years discussions of Isreal-Palestine have been bogged down by people reaching for the political anesthetic of 'historical complexity', making out the situation to be this horribly messy and unnavigable morass upon which no straightforward judgement could be made. You still see these attempts, like @Joshs pathos-laden historical warbling.

But more and more it's clear that Isreal is a state with full agency, brimming with state of the art weapons and a fully developed state apparatus which has long been autonomous from whatever history got it to where it is. I suspect it's even a victim of its own propaganda, which has worked tirelessly to portray it as a bastion of civilization surrounded by a sea of hostile barbarians, all waiting to pounce. Yet when push comes to shove it's this supposedly civilized state which has exercized the utmost brutality upon a completely wretched population, all the while bleeting about self-defense.

At issue - and everyone but the most propagandized can recognize this - is the present-day reproduction of violence and opression by the Israeli state that has jack shit to to with its history and everything to do with the exercise of sheer, untrammeled power, visited upon a destitue population, immeserated and left with little other than a hollowed out political vocabulary of violence. This is not about 'history' or 'culture' or 'fledgling democracries'. This is a land grab and slow burn genocide, worked upon the planet's biggest open air concentration camp. The irrelevance of the 'complexities of history' could not be more clear or more stark.

Ha, fair point.

And now everybody can see how brutal it is. What boggles the mind is the excuses they come up with! "Human shields", "They don't want peace", "Move to Jordan", etc. etc. — Manuel

Of all of them, "move to Jordan" has got to be the most mind-numbingly idiotic.

I get the impression you’re not happy with any existing state. That’s a dangerous place to be in from an emotional health point of view. — Joshs

Your concern is touching. And would we all one day turn into Chomsky's the world would be an incomparably better place.

It’s another to produce a never ending stream of rhetoric that isn’t simply about freedom from oppression but about the illegitimacy of another whole population — Joshs

On this we agree, but not for reasons you think.

The US is not a democracy. In any case, if 'utopian idealist' is what one gets labeled for opposing Israeli apartheid, and the systematic, longue durée genocide of its colonial natives, then so be it.

Gee, it's almost like the idea of an 'Isreali form of democracy' is not a form of democracy at all. It's almost as if the state itself is racist to its core, built into its foundations. Axiomatically racist, even.

I don’t recall such threats ever coming from Black South Africans toward the white population. — Joshs

Supposedly if they did, apartheid would have been OK, yes? Because otherwise surely black South Africans under apartheid never once wished ill upon their otherwise lovely oppressors?

Militant black south Africans even attacked government institutions during apartheid, at various points! Civilians too! Can you imagine? The audacity? Can't believe we got rid of apartheid.

Never mind that the Gazans have, quite literally, been driven to the sea - beyond which they face a military blockade of platformed weapon systems - but yes, tell me more about this rhetoric which you are so concerned about. Is there a poem somewhere you might take issue with? An aggressive word, a little harsh on the sensibility? A song perhaps?

Do you think concessions by the Israelis would solve their problems amidst populations explicitly committed to their annihilation? — tim wood

Concessions on apartheid are not concessions. And the state who is demonstrably - and so far successfully - committed to the annihilation of a population is Israel.

Yeah why can't people stay rational instead of *check notes* listing facts?

What's wrong? Justifying apartheid got too much for you?

Yeah why don't they just control themselves while Israel steals their land, demolishes their homes, deny them rights, and gradually box them into an infrastructure hellzone of Israel's making? Why won't they just die in peace?

One imagines some cunt saying that if the Jews in Germany just left it would have solved the problem, but of course, that person would be a cunt.

Great, and I'm here to discuss the flesh and blood murder of Jews who have not faced this type of hate since Nazi Germany. — BitconnectCarlos

Could have fooled me. Perhaps you might want to ask me about Japan again or something to really drill it home.

I'm not going to answer any of your hypotheticals, not one. I'm not here to play masturbatory moral chess games. I'm here to discuss the murder of flesh and blood children by an apartheid state.

:starstruck: :love:

This is one I keep coming back to, it's so, so good.

I'm uncertain whether the government supports them and their expansion for religious reasons or does so because they think it beneficial for other (secular) reasons. — Ciceronianus the White

It certainly doesn't help that Netanyahu, up to his neck in corruption and so weak a leader that he has been unable to secure a stable majority despite four elections in two years, has been pandering to religious nuts out of the sheer calculus of political mechanation. How convenient that there's now a national cause to rally around after all this deadlock! Can't be anything to do with the fact that Nethanyahu's opponent was recently picked by the president to form government?

But somehow I feel it doesn't matter to those whose homes are being demolished to make way for said religious nuts.

What matters is what counts as such deliberate murder. That's why it's difficult for us to converse.

The difference is that I will not search high and low to come up with excuses for the among the world's most sophisticated military for it's war crimes and deliberate murder of children, while it does everything it can to exacerbate resentment among its subject population.

Otherwise I just don't know what your attitude towards military action is. — BitconnectCarlos

I don't have 'an' attitude toward miltary action because I'm not so naive to think one can reason one's way to action from first principles.

Do you have a better idea, then? — BitconnectCarlos

That Isreal stop being an apartheid state and cease its colonial activites immediately. As a start. Ideally, pay for the reconstruction and restituion of the the land it has stolen. And then some.

You're the one who dragged in useless hypotheticals about WWII, let's not forget.

It doesn't help that the US is basically a pair of international arms dealers and a hedge fund in a trench coat. They need to secure their markets.

This is a different issue and I don't have time right now to engage further. All I was seeking to establish was that intention matters in military actions and that civilian casualties are generally unavoidable during military action, but that this should not be confused with the deliberate murder of civilians. — BitconnectCarlos

If you abstract these actions from the context in which they occur you render yourself cognitively incapacitated. And in that context, these actions are the deliberate murder of civilians. The universe doesn't operate on free-floating principles, unembedded in reality.