it's been awhile since israel last decided it was a good idea to almost-indiscriminately fire into one of the most densely populated areas in the middle east. this literally never goes well for...
it's been awhile since israel last decided it was a good idea to almost-indiscriminately fire into one of the most densely populated areas in the middle east. this literally never goes well for them, so i'm not sure why they engage in this tit-for-tat strategy which usually just kills more innocent people than actual militants, but it's probably not going to go any better for them than it did the last time something like this happened (2009) since people are even less sympathetic to israel now than they were then.
they literally just killed three people including a pregnant woman in an airstrike. this is pretty much always what happens when israel decides to start shelling and bombing gaza: they fuck up and...
These targetted killings of enemy combattants are a far cry from indiscriminate firings, such as those conducted by Hamas. So far, I haven't heard of any civilians being killed in recent Israeli operations in Gaza.
they literally just killed three people including a pregnant woman in an airstrike. this is pretty much always what happens when israel decides to start shelling and bombing gaza: they fuck up and kill a bunch of people, most of whom are not militants, because their shelling and bombing is nowhere near precise enough for the circumstances. gaza is, again, one of the most densely populated areas in the middle east. the population density is 13,069 people per square mile. there is literally no way for them to do "targeted" strikes like this without completely fucking over the people there who have nothing to do with hamas.
Yet if it wasn't for Iron Dome, Israeli civilian fatalities would be much higher than three, last I checked. I'm not sure why it is so difficult to convince progressive westerners that Israelis, of all people, have a right to defend themselves from attacks.
they have a right to defend themselves, sure--but they do not have a right to indiscriminately kill civilians because they can't accurately target militants with their weaponry, which is what they always do (not that they give a shit). far more innocent people die in these sorts of campaigns than actual militants because of that fact.
Israel doesnt have time to focus on the court of Westerner's public opinion when there are actual conflicts that need to be handled.
then they can do that--but they also should not then be surprised when people respond to their flagrant disregard for civilian life with things like boycotts, lol.
I think Israel, as a nation state, should be held to a higher standard than a terrorist organization. Are you implying that boycotts of companies that have contributed to well documented human...
I am willing to concede that it is possible that this pregnant woman was killed due to Israeli fire, as long as you are willing to concede that a Palestinian missile misfired.
I think Israel, as a nation state, should be held to a higher standard than a terrorist organization.
Boycotts of Jews are nothing new.
Are you implying that boycotts of companies that have contributed to well documented human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine is the same thing as ‘Boycotts of Jews’? That seems to be a particularly bad faith reading of @alyaza’s comment and can really only serve to lower the level of discourse here. It is perfectly possible to boycott such companies and not ‘boycott jews’ writ large, unless you mean to imply that only Jewish people run companies that are involved in such cases of human rights violations, which I don’t think you mean to suggest. In any case, in conversations such as this I think we could all benefit from interpreting other’s statements in the most charitable way as possible instead of putting words in their mouths.
I suppose I'm confused what your point is here. Is it that, because the US has committed similar violations, it is okay that Israel does? I agree that there should have been equal condemnation for...
I 100 percent agree, unfortunately many of Israel's more adamant critics, particularly those calling for boycotts of academic institutions, don't seem to hold their own country to the same standard.
I suppose I'm confused what your point is here. Is it that, because the US has committed similar violations, it is okay that Israel does? I agree that there should have been equal condemnation for the US's actions in Syria, but I don't see how the university's failure to provide that condemnation somehow takes away from their valid condemnation of Israeli practices concerning Palestine. Hypocritical to be sure, but I don't see how that is justification to condemn neither - it should be an impetus to condemn both.
In general, BDS tries to boycott anything to do with Israel.
Israel != "jews". You can even boycott anything to do with Israel (although I wouldn't support such an action) and still not be anti-semitic. In fact, there are Jewish people who do not support Israel's actions, and probably even some who support such boycotts. I do not deny that there is a troubling under-current of anti-antisemitism that can manifest itself in some of these protests, but it is just plain wrong to suggest that any such protest is antisemitic.
I take issue with BDS being portrayed as an anti-Jewish movement. Example: https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/jvp-supports-the-bds-movement/ Edit: I should add that it does seem to be exactly aligned...
Boycotts of Jews are nothing new.
I take issue with BDS being portrayed as an anti-Jewish movement.
Edit: I should add that it does seem to be exactly aligned against right-wing Israeli goals. So calling it anti-right wing Israeli seems like the most accurate description to me.
israel owns up to killing civilians about as well as the US does, which is to say not at all. even so, it is laughable to act like hamas is showing any more disregard for civilian life than israel...
Personally, I think the latter scenario is much more likely than the former, and I am more willing to trust Israeli authorities on the issue, who have owned up when civilians are killed instead of combattants, than Hamas, which not only purposefully targets civilians but shows utter disregard for the lives of the people of Gaza, using them as human shields.
israel owns up to killing civilians about as well as the US does, which is to say not at all. even so, it is laughable to act like hamas is showing any more disregard for civilian life than israel does, considering that:
the last time the two got into a serious shooting war, israel killed more civilians and police officers than militants (and more likely, killed hundreds more civilians than either of those groups). the IDF officially acknowledges 295 civilian deaths in the gaza war back in 2008-9; there were an estimated 250 police deaths and 240 militant deaths associated with that conflict (and estimates of up to 1,000 civilian deaths).
during operation pillar of defense in 2014, israeli shelling and air strikes again killed more civilians (57 to over 100) than militants (55) by literally all estimates, ranging from palestinian sources to the UN's estimate to the IDF's estimate.
in the past year, something in the ballpark of 200 palestinians have been killed in border protests by israeli soldiers, and as many as 5,000 or more have been estimated to be injured when the record shows that israeli soldiers have suffered less than 10 casualties (and possibly 0 fatalities, it's ambiguous) in the whole course of the affair.
it's not like we're talking a one-off incident here. israel has a history up to very recently, even by their own counts, of fucking up and blowing up or killing more civilians than actual militants which they claim are firing off rockets and starting shit. and the idea that hamas is using gaza as a human shield is equally ridiculous, because gaza is so densely packed that it basically does not matter. you simply cannot "precisely" target a place with next to no vacant land and one of the most densely packed populations in the world. "precision bombing" and shelling simply is not possible at the resolution israel would need to not kill shit tons of people, and at this point if you give them the benefit of the doubt and say they don't mean to (which is, realistically, pretty dubious given that they're blockading gaza and have never shown much care for the civilians there even without hamas's presence), they should still know better by now. what hamas's policy with respect to civilian life is basically doesn't matter: it's not hamas forcing israel to drop airstrikes on a city with the population density of boston knowing full and well that most of the people there don't even support hamas.
FYI, I don't think you are using the term "indiscriminately" correctly. Indiscriminate would be launching missiles and not caring where they land. That is quite literally the opposite of what Israeli forces are doing. They do care where they land. They want them to hit the combattants. If they wanted to kill civilians you and I both know that they have enough armaments to do so, so clearly they show some restraint, which you are not giving them credit for.
if they cared about where they landed (i.e. were not indiscriminate in their targeting), they would presumably not be killing literally more civilians than actual militants in basically every single tit-for-tat engagement with the gaza strip and its militants that they've gone through in the past decade. one time is maybe understandable within the context of war (if ridiculous because we rake the american government over a much lower collateral damage rate), but we're again talking a repeated pattern of them killing more civilians and uninvolved persons than actual militants while raking intense and irreparable damage to the infrastructure of gaza. moreover, if we assume that they care about gaza and its people and merely want to oust hamas, it's also just a tiny bit bizarre that they continue a policy that wreaks enormous destruction to the people who live there, especially given that they do no infrastructure repair of any kind in the area?
...good at defending itself by killing more civilians in these exchanges than actual hamas militants? what? and also, what people "could do" is a pretty bad way to justify most military actions!...
Just because Israel is good at defending itself doesn't mean that Hamas wouldn't kill as many civilians as it could.
...good at defending itself by killing more civilians in these exchanges than actual hamas militants? what? and also, what people "could do" is a pretty bad way to justify most military actions! hamas "could" theoretically acquire a plutonium bomb or whatever the fuck and detonate it in jerusalem given that they are a terrorist organization. does that mean that israel has free reign to glass the entire area of gaza, just because hamas happens to have a network there? presumably no, but under your standard they basically would (and, incidentally, all of hamas's terrorism would also be justified by the inverse of your standard).
I don't see why Israel has to allow more of its citizens to be killed to make their response seem more justified to you.
their response doesn't have to involve killing more people who are entirely unrelated to hamas than actual hamas members. by the logic we're going on here, the US was justified in killing at least 90,000 entirely-uninvolved iraqi civilians simply because of 9/11, which is patently kinda ridiculous. just because some of your civilians die in a terrorist attack does not give you free reign to blow up or collateral-damage other people who have nothing to do with the people who committed the terrorist act in question.
The fact that Hamas can't find and open field in Gaza (I assure you, they exist) instead of launching missiles at Israeli civilians from an apartment building or school is not a valid excuse. They are using the civilian population both as a human shields and fodder for the international press when their missiles fail, and you are falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
if i, a militant, fire at you from a school, i don't think that justifies you glassing the entire school and all the people in it without regard simply because of that one militant, and i'm pretty sure the UN and most of the international community agrees with me on that one. this "eye-for-an-eye" doctrine thing really only works if most of the people you're killing aren't civilians who have nothing to do with the going-ons of the militants in their midst, and once again, hamas is not the one forcing israel to use airstrikes to smoke them out. that's israel's call.
Last I checked most Palestinians support Hamas
they literally do not. hamas barely won the only election that has been held in the palestinian authority (44% to fatah's 41%), and they only hold power because they refuse to hold another even though they have been mandated to do so. ironically, if most palestinians do support hamas, it'd probably be because israel keeps blowing up civilians without regard for that being kind of an internationally unlawful thing to do, because hamas has not exactly endeared themselves to the palestinian people.
Pray and hope that no civilians are around.
...or israel could just like, not airstrike a city? that's also an option. the US didn't drop an airstrike on osama bin laden's basically-residential compound when they killed him, and i'm pretty sure israel has special forces that are perfectly capable of tracking and taking down hamas militants in a way that is less likely to mass-murder civilians who have nothing to do with hamas considering that israeli special forces have done things like operation entebbe.
You choose to ignore reports of civilians being killed, because you discount the source. That's not the same as "haven't heard of". If you don't trust the public health authorities in Gaza, due to...
I haven't heard of any civilians being killed in recent Israeli operations in Gaza. I don't trust the Hamas run Gaza health ministry.
You choose to ignore reports of civilians being killed, because you discount the source. That's not the same as "haven't heard of".
If you don't trust the public health authorities in Gaza, due to a belief (which you didn't bother to substantiate with evidence) that they're run by Hamas, perhaps you trust Doctors Without Borders?
What evidence, if any, are you basing this statement on? Do you know the actual number, or do you just have a gut feeling that it must be lower than that? From UNWRA (this is their pinned tweet; I...
Regarding border skirmishes, civilians were killed, yes, but not 190. That is an overstatement.
What evidence, if any, are you basing this statement on? Do you know the actual number, or do you just have a gut feeling that it must be lower than that?
From UNWRA (this is their pinned tweet; I didn't exactly have to go digging for it):
Israel certainly has the right to defend itself, but this broken record has run its course 20 years ago. War needs only be used when all diplomacy fails. What diplomatic negotiations have Israel's...
Israel certainly has the right to defend itself, but this broken record has run its course 20 years ago. War needs only be used when all diplomacy fails. What diplomatic negotiations have Israel's previous 4 governments conducted? It keeps a population of 8 million people under occupation with no legal rights, no law, no end in sight for over 50 years. Back in 95, after watching friends of mine explode in buses and dancing halls, I remember telling my friends - the generation that grew up with the peace process - this is nearly over, we're going to be like Ireland, we were all so very hopeful this madness comes to an end. But then Rabin was assassinated, very much thanks to Netanyahu, and it worked - Netanyahu usurped power and shot down all negotiations. Back in 2005, we were all hopeful that Sharon, despite of his shortcomings, will make decisive moves - only a right wing government could achieve peace, the saying went (mainly because they would shoot down any treaties while sitting in the opposition) - peace in 10 years, we said, and he went and got a stroke. Enough with this bloodshed, stop hiding behind this inane "defending ourselves" nonsense and start negotiating for a permanent treaty. Enough with this ridiculous "one state solution" that simply cements and legalises the subjugation of the Palestinians for another 50 years.
it's been awhile since israel last decided it was a good idea to almost-indiscriminately fire into one of the most densely populated areas in the middle east. this literally never goes well for them, so i'm not sure why they engage in this tit-for-tat strategy which usually just kills more innocent people than actual militants, but it's probably not going to go any better for them than it did the last time something like this happened (2009) since people are even less sympathetic to israel now than they were then.
they literally just killed three people including a pregnant woman in an airstrike. this is pretty much always what happens when israel decides to start shelling and bombing gaza: they fuck up and kill a bunch of people, most of whom are not militants, because their shelling and bombing is nowhere near precise enough for the circumstances. gaza is, again, one of the most densely populated areas in the middle east. the population density is 13,069 people per square mile. there is literally no way for them to do "targeted" strikes like this without completely fucking over the people there who have nothing to do with hamas.
they have a right to defend themselves, sure--but they do not have a right to indiscriminately kill civilians because they can't accurately target militants with their weaponry, which is what they always do (not that they give a shit). far more innocent people die in these sorts of campaigns than actual militants because of that fact.
then they can do that--but they also should not then be surprised when people respond to their flagrant disregard for civilian life with things like boycotts, lol.
I think Israel, as a nation state, should be held to a higher standard than a terrorist organization.
Are you implying that boycotts of companies that have contributed to well documented human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine is the same thing as ‘Boycotts of Jews’? That seems to be a particularly bad faith reading of @alyaza’s comment and can really only serve to lower the level of discourse here. It is perfectly possible to boycott such companies and not ‘boycott jews’ writ large, unless you mean to imply that only Jewish people run companies that are involved in such cases of human rights violations, which I don’t think you mean to suggest. In any case, in conversations such as this I think we could all benefit from interpreting other’s statements in the most charitable way as possible instead of putting words in their mouths.
I suppose I'm confused what your point is here. Is it that, because the US has committed similar violations, it is okay that Israel does? I agree that there should have been equal condemnation for the US's actions in Syria, but I don't see how the university's failure to provide that condemnation somehow takes away from their valid condemnation of Israeli practices concerning Palestine. Hypocritical to be sure, but I don't see how that is justification to condemn neither - it should be an impetus to condemn both.
Israel != "jews". You can even boycott anything to do with Israel (although I wouldn't support such an action) and still not be anti-semitic. In fact, there are Jewish people who do not support Israel's actions, and probably even some who support such boycotts. I do not deny that there is a troubling under-current of anti-antisemitism that can manifest itself in some of these protests, but it is just plain wrong to suggest that any such protest is antisemitic.
I take issue with BDS being portrayed as an anti-Jewish movement.
Example: https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/jvp-supports-the-bds-movement/
Edit: I should add that it does seem to be exactly aligned against right-wing Israeli goals. So calling it anti-right wing Israeli seems like the most accurate description to me.
israel owns up to killing civilians about as well as the US does, which is to say not at all. even so, it is laughable to act like hamas is showing any more disregard for civilian life than israel does, considering that:
it's not like we're talking a one-off incident here. israel has a history up to very recently, even by their own counts, of fucking up and blowing up or killing more civilians than actual militants which they claim are firing off rockets and starting shit. and the idea that hamas is using gaza as a human shield is equally ridiculous, because gaza is so densely packed that it basically does not matter. you simply cannot "precisely" target a place with next to no vacant land and one of the most densely packed populations in the world. "precision bombing" and shelling simply is not possible at the resolution israel would need to not kill shit tons of people, and at this point if you give them the benefit of the doubt and say they don't mean to (which is, realistically, pretty dubious given that they're blockading gaza and have never shown much care for the civilians there even without hamas's presence), they should still know better by now. what hamas's policy with respect to civilian life is basically doesn't matter: it's not hamas forcing israel to drop airstrikes on a city with the population density of boston knowing full and well that most of the people there don't even support hamas.
if they cared about where they landed (i.e. were not indiscriminate in their targeting), they would presumably not be killing literally more civilians than actual militants in basically every single tit-for-tat engagement with the gaza strip and its militants that they've gone through in the past decade. one time is maybe understandable within the context of war (if ridiculous because we rake the american government over a much lower collateral damage rate), but we're again talking a repeated pattern of them killing more civilians and uninvolved persons than actual militants while raking intense and irreparable damage to the infrastructure of gaza. moreover, if we assume that they care about gaza and its people and merely want to oust hamas, it's also just a tiny bit bizarre that they continue a policy that wreaks enormous destruction to the people who live there, especially given that they do no infrastructure repair of any kind in the area?
...good at defending itself by killing more civilians in these exchanges than actual hamas militants? what? and also, what people "could do" is a pretty bad way to justify most military actions! hamas "could" theoretically acquire a plutonium bomb or whatever the fuck and detonate it in jerusalem given that they are a terrorist organization. does that mean that israel has free reign to glass the entire area of gaza, just because hamas happens to have a network there? presumably no, but under your standard they basically would (and, incidentally, all of hamas's terrorism would also be justified by the inverse of your standard).
their response doesn't have to involve killing more people who are entirely unrelated to hamas than actual hamas members. by the logic we're going on here, the US was justified in killing at least 90,000 entirely-uninvolved iraqi civilians simply because of 9/11, which is patently kinda ridiculous. just because some of your civilians die in a terrorist attack does not give you free reign to blow up or collateral-damage other people who have nothing to do with the people who committed the terrorist act in question.
if i, a militant, fire at you from a school, i don't think that justifies you glassing the entire school and all the people in it without regard simply because of that one militant, and i'm pretty sure the UN and most of the international community agrees with me on that one. this "eye-for-an-eye" doctrine thing really only works if most of the people you're killing aren't civilians who have nothing to do with the going-ons of the militants in their midst, and once again, hamas is not the one forcing israel to use airstrikes to smoke them out. that's israel's call.
they literally do not. hamas barely won the only election that has been held in the palestinian authority (44% to fatah's 41%), and they only hold power because they refuse to hold another even though they have been mandated to do so. ironically, if most palestinians do support hamas, it'd probably be because israel keeps blowing up civilians without regard for that being kind of an internationally unlawful thing to do, because hamas has not exactly endeared themselves to the palestinian people.
...or israel could just like, not airstrike a city? that's also an option. the US didn't drop an airstrike on osama bin laden's basically-residential compound when they killed him, and i'm pretty sure israel has special forces that are perfectly capable of tracking and taking down hamas militants in a way that is less likely to mass-murder civilians who have nothing to do with hamas considering that israeli special forces have done things like operation entebbe.
You choose to ignore reports of civilians being killed, because you discount the source. That's not the same as "haven't heard of".
If you don't trust the public health authorities in Gaza, due to a belief (which you didn't bother to substantiate with evidence) that they're run by Hamas, perhaps you trust Doctors Without Borders?
What evidence, if any, are you basing this statement on? Do you know the actual number, or do you just have a gut feeling that it must be lower than that?
From UNWRA (this is their pinned tweet; I didn't exactly have to go digging for it):
41 children killed. How many of them were combatants, do you think?
Israel certainly has the right to defend itself, but this broken record has run its course 20 years ago. War needs only be used when all diplomacy fails. What diplomatic negotiations have Israel's previous 4 governments conducted? It keeps a population of 8 million people under occupation with no legal rights, no law, no end in sight for over 50 years. Back in 95, after watching friends of mine explode in buses and dancing halls, I remember telling my friends - the generation that grew up with the peace process - this is nearly over, we're going to be like Ireland, we were all so very hopeful this madness comes to an end. But then Rabin was assassinated, very much thanks to Netanyahu, and it worked - Netanyahu usurped power and shot down all negotiations. Back in 2005, we were all hopeful that Sharon, despite of his shortcomings, will make decisive moves - only a right wing government could achieve peace, the saying went (mainly because they would shoot down any treaties while sitting in the opposition) - peace in 10 years, we said, and he went and got a stroke. Enough with this bloodshed, stop hiding behind this inane "defending ourselves" nonsense and start negotiating for a permanent treaty. Enough with this ridiculous "one state solution" that simply cements and legalises the subjugation of the Palestinians for another 50 years.