BUUNNI posted:

TheDisreputableDog posted:

A 4000 year-long land struggle - actually America’s fault.

Lid posted:

ok there is no way this isnt a gimmick

Dr. VooDoo posted:

This is a good post to remind people that a lot of Americans, regardless of political leaning, have accepted the propaganda that’s Israel is thousands of years old because the Bible says so

Kalit posted:

I'm still waiting on proof from you about US using Israel because we want to oppress Palestine and how US is directly responsible for 9/11...

BUUNNI posted:

America gave them lots of money, weapons and training for many years to weaken the USSR. This is a historical fact. If you have proof that we didn’t arm and fund the mujihadeen in Afghanistan then I’d love to see it.

BUUNNI posted:

Do you really need proof that the US likes to oppress Muslim people

fool of sound posted:

The US permits the oppression of palestinians because Israel is useful to its imperial influence in the region. It frankly does not care about them one way or another, beyond probably wishing that they didn’t exist because it is embarrassing to have to cover for Israel.

Modern Israel really has nothing to do with the antique kingdoms in the region beyond using them as part of their national myth. There certainly hasn’t been a 4000 year struggle between anything resembling Israel and Palestine.

Kalit posted:

I'm asking for you to back up the claims that you post. Or it's perfectly acceptable if you want to backtrack those statements.

Kalit posted:

Yea, this is a good summary of US/Israel's relationship.

Ms Adequate posted:

I've been thinking about this since I read about it earlier because I couldn't figure out America's angle here. A near-total comms blackout was a perfect situation for Israel. Why yank the chain over something like this, but not to reel in the actual displacements and killings? If they had sincere humanitarian motives then getting the aid convoys safely back to full capacity, and stopping Israel bombing hospitals, would be vastly more important places to apply diplomatic pressure.

So my thinking now is that the US does not want Israel to keep this up. This is not for humanitarian reasons. Getting rid of Hamas means the question of "what comes next" is suddenly vital, if the atrocities continues the Arab Street becomes unpredictable, if too many Palestinians are forced out of Gaza the consequent humanitarian crisis and general disruption becomes a huge headache, and at any point other actors in the region (namely Hezbollah and Iran) might decide they have no choice but to escalate. The US really doesn't want the consequences of a full scale regional war, let alone one where they have boots on the ground, and even less so if it becomes a war with Iran proper.

However America is either unable or unwilling to directly reign Israel in. My guess is that Washington's calculus is that the attempt would fail and drive a major wedge between them, because Israel is currently far too angry to care and would tell America to go pound sand. So they are hoping that the pressure comes from elsewhere but doing so relies on the world seeing what's happening in Gaza. If the only thing the world sees is a general blackout, then only occasional and difficult to verify information would emerge, and when everything finally ended the atrocities would be in the past and governments would not rock the boat over a fait accompli. Thus, communications have to stay on. While the world can see what is happening, people worldwide can pressure their local politicians to tell Israel to stop, and all of the risks of continuing are sharpened for Israel who might otherwise convince themselves that, with a shroud of secrecy, someone like Hezbollah won't feel confident and/or angry enough to get fully involved, and the world can only get so outraged over speculation. As long as the information is flowing, Israel is forced to keep other factors in mind, and hopefully that will allow backchannel diplomacy to get them to accept a ceasefire.

mannerup posted:

maybe all the footage they took of them slaughtering civilians wasn't the best idea then if they didn't want people to think they were slaughtering civilians

edit: here is Human Rights Watch discussing the footage they have verified of atrocities being committed by Hamas, if you need proof from an independent party that aren't the IDF presenting the idea that Hamas was out to murder civilians.

BUUNNI posted:

Again, America armed, trained, and funded the mujihadeen that planned 9/11 to weaken the USSR during their war in Afghanistan.

Mr. Pickles posted:

I have looked extensively for posts regarding this but found none so here:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/28/protesters-shut-new-yorks-grand-central-station-demanding-gaza-ceasefire

Its about NYC police thwarting peaceful anti-genocide Jew protests by arresting people en masse on Saturday 28th

Good for them standing up for what they believe when they could just sit on the couch and enjoy being victimized by corrupt media

I wish the Israeli people can learn from this and protest this senseless warmongering

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

So what?

Osama Bin Laden's own words along with the rest of the leadership for 9/11 was the support of Israel as a State (they want it destroyed), troops in Saudi Arabi, sanctions against Iraq and general Islamic extremism to kill non-believers. The mujahideen was support to help fight against the USSR occupation, that's it.

VitalSigns posted:

Acknowledging that 9/11 was blowback for decades of American policy towards the Middle East is not justifying Al-Qaeda nor is it saying that the innocent victims in the twin towers deserved it.

It is simply acknowledging reality. They were victims of terrorism which itself was a consequence of violent exploitation of the people and resources of the Middle East. Unfortunately the US government did not recognize that reality and responded by trying as hard as possible to create more terrorists.

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

If it's blowback for supporting Israel as State. The US along with the rest of the West is certainly guilty of that but so what? Are we arguing Israel shouldn't be defended or exist?

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

Are we arguing Israel shouldn't … exist?

Silver2195 posted:

There's a lot of possible courses of action in-between unconditional support for Israel and demanding its destruction!

fool of sound posted:

Yes. The state of Israel in its current form as an avowed ethnostate shouldn’t exist.

Stanley Pain posted:

New War Crimes just dropped.

ik edit: don't watch this video if you don't want to watch someone die!!!!

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

If it's blowback for supporting Israel as State. The US along with the rest of the West is certainly guilty of that but so what? Are we arguing Israel shouldn't be defended or exist?

BUUNNI posted:

America gave them lots of money, weapons and training for many years to weaken the USSR. This is a historical fact. If you have proof that we didn’t arm and fund the mujihadeen in Afghanistan then I’d love to see it.

BougieBitch posted:

People talk about how there's a conflation of Hamas with Palestinians, but to some degree there's the same issue of part = whole within how people talk about Hamas, and specifically participants of Oct 7. It's not clear to me exactly how many people any given person is referring to when they say "Hamas", and the fact that Israel clearly benefits from tarring all adult Palestinians in Gaza with the same brush means that by their framing it might be close to a million people (all adult Palestinians that could reasonably be framed as combatant), or perhaps more like 400,000 if they restrict it to men from 18-65. In any case, when they say their war aims are to "destroy Hamas", we know they are going to redefine that constantly in whatever way benefits their framing (i.e. when they kill 7000 with missiles they will say that 2-3000 of them were Hamas combatants, and when they eventually have to pull out and declare "mission accomplished" after a few months they will say they achieved the destruction of Hamas because they killed some handful of leaders or destroyed their physical infrastructure or their weapon caches).

For our OWN sake, we need to take care to not fall into the same rhetorical trap. When some people are talking about Hamas they seem to be talking specifically about the parts of Hamas that involve missiles and guns. I don't know what percent of people who would self-identify as "part of Hamas" that really is, but it is probably less than half and potentially MUCH less than half. As people have already mentioned, there are also people who are "part of Hamas" who are teachers or part of the ministry of health or doing secretarial work. Those two are not the same thing - I realize the Nazi comparisons are always on a hair-trigger here, but the day-to-day operators are not doing work that leads to the death of Israelis in the way that doing math for Nazis ultimately supported concentration camps. A single act perpetrated suddenly after years and years of relatively little violence is completely difference in scope, scale, and complicity from a years-long project done largely in the open.

When people are being precise about their language they say something like "the Qassam brigades" in the same way that a distinction is drawn between IDF and Israeli members of government, or between the IRGC and the Iranian government. I think, at least to some degree, when we don't make these distinctions we are talking past each other.

There's probably an even finer-grain distinction that we could or should be making between the people who jumped the fence on Oct 7 (who may have had general plans from leadership, but may also have included random opportunists and certainly didn't have fully regimented organization) and people who participated in past conflict or will participate in future conflict - an organization is its members, and in a place with such low life expectancy there might be a complete changing of the guard in 20 years. Certainly, it makes no sense to assume that the Hamas of 1987 is the same as that of 2000 or that the Hamas of 2000 is the same as 2017. Even the Hamas of 2017 has sustained many losses between then and now - and so it isnt odd at all that the somewhat conciliatory wording of the 2017 that emphasized the issue being Zionism rather than Judaism transformed into the current issue. Some people in 2017 who believed that there was a way to a two-state solution got shot in the knees and died from inadequate medical care from 2018 to 2019. Others observed what happened and became cynical. When you kill unarmed targets, you decide that your next generation of opposition will be violent by survivor bias.

On the flip side, when the craziest assholes jumped the fence to go on a suicide mission, their brand of Hamas lost some of its most ideologically fanatic proponents in the fighting that ensued - almost definitionally. The acts they committed almost certainly aren't representative of what the average Hamas soup kitchen worker wanted or hopes for, and if those actions are used as justification for their slaughter then the cycle will repeat.

In sum, when you are talking about Oct 7th participants being war criminals, yes, many are. There probably are people above them that gave orders who also are. To some degree, whoever is responsible for holding the hostages is also directly committing or supporting war crimes. With all that said, there are almost certainly many in Hamas that wanted nothing to do with this plan and now are holding the bag. They didn't know this attack was planned, or else assumed that it would fail and the planners were being grandiose about objectives. Now they have to handle medical care and food and water for hostages, while trying to figure out how they are even going to get the hostages out when Israel won't stop dropping bombs. It's hosed, they know it's hosed, they see there is no way to go back to trying to incrementally improve conditions for Gaza, and so they try to get America to just let them give hostages back, or make a swap to return to the Oct 6 status quo, because the insane fuckers yoked to the opposite side of their cart went apeshit and flipped the whole thing over.

Basically, what I'm saying is that, even without any sort of granular communication or reporting on the internal state of Hamas (partially thanks to Israel killing journalists and blocking communications), it should be obvious that there are groups within it working at cross-purposes. This is true of basically any group of a certain size with relatively loose structure. When people say "oh, Hamas committed this atrocity and now wants a ceasefire? How hypocritical and self-serving" it shows they haven't thought about the possibility that the Hamas that did the atrocities and the Hamas that wants the ceasefire are likely not the same people. Obviously there's little we can do to tell "this" Hamas from "that" Hamas until or unless a faction formally splinters off, and we don't have enough granularity in reporting to identify individual actors in the Oct 7 attack (and may never be able to see things to that degree of resolution), but even still we can be a bit more precise in who we are talking about.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

A group of people slaughter hundreds of other people at a dance party. Why? Because they're "Jews" or "settlers" or "Zionists," the "thinking" goes. And we, the "Palestinians" or "Arabs" or "Muslims," are oppressed by them. The "Jews" are responsible. We kill them. The Israeli response then says "the Palestinians" have "only themselves to blame" for allowing themselves to be ruled by Hamas, and behaving as though two million people in Gaza or all Palestinians are responsible, which is a form of "thinking" that they know to be at the center of anti-Semitism too and an illegitimate justification for wide-scale violence which Israel is now engaged in. And even if I was on the other side of the world when the whole thing happened, any disagreement with the underlying moral ontology can only be to stand in solidarity with and further the annihilation of the other depending on who's responding. But I hope you'll admit that the racism and nationalism of the last couple of centuries haven't really been that wonderful, that millions of people have perished in ethnic cleansings as a result, and that the most evil ideologies lean on it.

Main Paineframe posted:

I'm not really sure what "Yank the chain" is supposed to mean here, because there's no indication that the US did anything coercive besides firmly asking them in private to stop, something they're certainly doing about this whole situation in general. You assume that the communications came back up because the US side pushed harder, but it could very easily be that the Israeli side was just more willing to do so. It could easily be that Israel gauged the international reaction and decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Hell, we don't even know for sure that the communications blackout was intentional (though it's a reasonable assumption). As far as I can tell, Israel doesn't have full control over Palestinian communications lines. According to the Palestinian side, the communications went out because all the fiber links were damaged, and they came back up because the Palestinian telecom companies managed to repair one of them:
https://twitter.com/Paltelco/status/1718007432494911717
https://twitter.com/Paltelco/status/1718469095899779564

VitalSigns posted:

The US support of Israel in the decades leading up to 9/11 went far beyond defending its right to exist. It's also not the only thing the US government did in the Middle East that made people angry, eg supporting the Saudi dictatorship

Darth Walrus posted:

https://x.com/ajplus/status/1718667197847867554?s=46&t=ARI_L-v32Oind1-d9B3a3Q

Deaths from indirect consequences of the siege (disease, starvation, et cetera) really do look set to skyrocket. Wouldn't be surprised if they eventually outstrip violent deaths.

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

I reject the (seeming, to me anyway) implication of your argument that this conflict is one of ancient and maybe intractable racisms, when that is clearly not the case: Jews and Muslims are perfectly capable of living together, and in many cases in share a special solidarity between their communities, especially within Christian-majority areas in Europe and the middle east. I will note that this sort of interethnic/interfaith co-mingling is something that the Zionist entity fights against.

BougieBitch posted:

People talk about how there's a conflation of Hamas with Palestinians, but to some degree there's the same issue of part = whole within how people talk about Hamas, and specifically participants of Oct 7. It's not clear to me exactly how many people any given person is referring to when they say "Hamas", and the fact that Israel clearly benefits from tarring all adult Palestinians in Gaza with the same brush means that by their framing it might be close to a million people (all adult Palestinians that could reasonably be framed as combatant), or perhaps more like 400,000 if they restrict it to men from 18-65. In any case, when they say their war aims are to "destroy Hamas", we know they are going to redefine that constantly in whatever way benefits their framing (i.e. when they kill 7000 with missiles they will say that 2-3000 of them were Hamas combatants, and when they eventually have to pull out and declare "mission accomplished" after a few months they will say they achieved the destruction of Hamas because they killed some handful of leaders or destroyed their physical infrastructure or their weapon caches).

For our OWN sake, we need to take care to not fall into the same rhetorical trap. When some people are talking about Hamas they seem to be talking specifically about the parts of Hamas that involve missiles and guns. I don't know what percent of people who would self-identify as "part of Hamas" that really is, but it is probably less than half and potentially MUCH less than half. As people have already mentioned, there are also people who are "part of Hamas" who are teachers or part of the ministry of health or doing secretarial work. Those two are not the same thing - I realize the Nazi comparisons are always on a hair-trigger here, but the day-to-day operators are not doing work that leads to the death of Israelis in the way that doing math for Nazis ultimately supported concentration camps. A single act perpetrated suddenly after years and years of relatively little violence is completely difference in scope, scale, and complicity from a years-long project done largely in the open.

When people are being precise about their language they say something like "the Qassam brigades" in the same way that a distinction is drawn between IDF and Israeli members of government, or between the IRGC and the Iranian government. I think, at least to some degree, when we don't make these distinctions we are talking past each other.

There's probably an even finer-grain distinction that we could or should be making between the people who jumped the fence on Oct 7 (who may have had general plans from leadership, but may also have included random opportunists and certainly didn't have fully regimented organization) and people who participated in past conflict or will participate in future conflict - an organization is its members, and in a place with such low life expectancy there might be a complete changing of the guard in 20 years. Certainly, it makes no sense to assume that the Hamas of 1987 is the same as that of 2000 or that the Hamas of 2000 is the same as 2017. Even the Hamas of 2017 has sustained many losses between then and now - and so it isnt odd at all that the somewhat conciliatory wording of the 2017 resolution that emphasized the issue being Zionism rather than Judaism transformed into the current issue. Some people in 2017 who believed that there was a way to a two-state solution got shot in the knees and died from inadequate medical care from 2018 to 2019. Others observed what happened and became cynical. When you kill unarmed targets, you decide that your next generation of opposition will be violent by survivor bias.

On the flip side, when the craziest assholes jumped the fence to go on a suicide mission, their brand of Hamas lost some of its most ideologically fanatic proponents in the fighting that ensued - almost definitionally. The acts they committed almost certainly aren't representative of what the average Hamas soup kitchen worker wanted or hopes for, and if those actions are used as justification for their slaughter then the cycle will repeat.

In sum, when you are talking about Oct 7th participants being war criminals, yes, many are. There probably are people above them that gave orders who also are. To some degree, whoever is responsible for holding the hostages is also directly committing or supporting war crimes. With all that said, there are almost certainly many in Hamas that wanted nothing to do with this plan and now are holding the bag. They didn't know this attack was planned, or else assumed that it would fail and the planners were being grandiose about objectives. Now they have to handle medical care and food and water for hostages, while trying to figure out how they are even going to get the hostages out when Israel won't stop dropping bombs. It's hosed, they know it's hosed, they see there is no way to go back to trying to incrementally improve conditions for Gaza, and so they try to get America to just let them give hostages back, or make a swap to return to the Oct 6 status quo, because the insane fuckers yoked to the opposite side of their cart went apeshit and flipped the whole thing over.

Basically, what I'm saying is that, even without any sort of granular communication or reporting on the internal state of Hamas (partially thanks to Israel killing journalists and blocking communications), it should be obvious that there are groups within it working at cross-purposes. This is true of basically any group of a certain size with relatively loose structure. When people say "oh, Hamas committed this atrocity and now wants a ceasefire? How hypocritical and self-serving" it shows they haven't thought about the possibility that the Hamas that did the atrocities and the Hamas that wants the ceasefire are likely not the same people. Obviously there's little we can do to tell "this" Hamas from "that" Hamas until or unless a faction formally splinters off, and we don't have enough granularity in reporting to identify individual actors in the Oct 7 attack (and may never be able to see things to that degree of resolution), but even still we can be a bit more precise in who we are talking about.

ETA: I think the same applies to various degrees in all the convos about the Middle East before 2001, so it probably isn't that useful to talk about things in the "smallest domino armed Afghanistan against the Soviets largest domino 9/11" sense. I think it can be reasonably agreed upon that there were a lot of junctures where American actions contributed to the ultimate outcome, but it certainly isn't "direct" in the sense that A logically leads to B, and I don't know that litigating that really gives us any insight into I/P, even by analogy when talking about Likud and culpability for 10/7. It is sufficient to say that Likud contributed to the structural problems leading to this outcome in various ways and that Israel could have made different choices at a huge number of points in the last 80 years (while also acknowledging that "Israel" doesn't make choices, and the problems are emergent from the structures)

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

I think I'd overstate the case if I said it was ancient. A few hundred years isn't that long. Or call it the early 19th century, with "the nation" really driving the bus at first. Some of these concepts are viciously problematic, and nationalism has caused world wars. Some of them are in-your-face fictional, like races. I doubt we could really tease out very clearly what an "ethnicity" is, but the ethnicities seem to be bottom-line social categories or fictions that are widely accepted.

quote:

Benjamin Netanyahu, Hello, we have been in Hamas captivity for 23 days... Yesterday there was a press conference for the families of the prisoners, and we know that there was supposed to be a ceasefire, and you were supposed to release us, you should have released us, and I promised. To release us. However, we are suffering from your political, security and military failure, because of the “failure” that you caused on the 7th of October, because no soldier was in the place and no one came to us, and no one here defended us, and we are innocent and naive citizens, citizens who pay taxes to a state. Israel, we are now in captivity under “no conditions” conditions. You are killing us. Do you want to kill us all? You want the army to kill us. Isn’t it enough that you slaughtered everyone? Isn’t it enough for you that there were Israeli citizens killed? Release us now. Release their citizens and prisoners now. Release us. Release Everyone, we deserve to go back to our families, now now now!

socialsecurity posted:

So when Ukraine released videos of POWs like this it was decried a warcrime, does this apply to Hamas here?

socialsecurity posted:

So when Ukraine released videos of POWs like this it was decried a warcrime, does this apply to Hamas here?

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

Right, the US Support along with the rest of West has supported Israel way too much but that isn't the point of the conflict. Neither Hamas or Al Qaeda support the existence of Israel. That's the main cause of all of this fighting because they want to destroy it.

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

I completely agree that concepts about nationality and ethnicity/race are inherently problematic and can drive action in an ideological sense, especially on the individual level, but I reject that anything like nationalism "caused" a world war: the engine of history is the actual, physical material of the world. Like the world wars -- like heretofore all human conflict -- the genocide of Palestine is motivated by wealth and power, the literal, physical control of the means of production. The "power" that concepts like race have is a phantom; it's epiphenomenal to material power structures. If the Zionist entity were to disappear tomorrow and the Palestinians free to live their lives without fear of genocide, omnipresent racialized violence, theft and destruction of their lives and livelihood, dehumanization and humiliation, etc., the race-based hatreds between Muslims and Jews would also dissolve, over time.

socialsecurity posted:

So when Ukraine released videos of POWs like this it was decried a warcrime, does this apply to Hamas here?

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

I more or less agree with you. Marx and Engels asserted that the human symbolic order is ultimately a result of the material conditions in which people live, but I'd caution against a square economic reduction in which material power structures are the only determining element and if we just change that then history will just do the work for us. It just happened that they emphasized the economic side at a time when few people were doing that and didn't have the time to give the other element their due. Gramsci tried to re-balance the base/superstructure model, thinking that the order of material production and the order of symbols interacted historically in complex ways, and such thoughts were later extrapolated on by the Frankfurt School. In other words, ideology matters, and while these concepts like "race" and "religion" are ultimately nonsense the social organization they attach themselves to are not.

Anti-Semitism too can function as like a warped version of socialism. I wouldn't call it socialist but it holds that Jews are oppressors who are hiding in the mountains hoarding all the gold. So we kill them and take their gold. It's like a monster hunt. Anger about the imagined power of Jewish capital, as well as fears of treason and racial degeneration, made anti-Semitism a convenient banner behind which social and political factions could fall in line. Anti-Semitic feelings that simmer for decades can come boiling to the surface.

But one of the benefits of making the social relations around wealth the focus is that you can redistribute the wealth without necessarily taking someone's life.

Concerning ideology, one of the gross things I've seen is how Israel is taken by its supporters to be a "Jewish issue," but the comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany end up reproducing the same logic. The people who do that seem highly opportunistic. It's not like Israel doesn't inflict violent collective punishment on people, but the "unity" between these two things -- while existing in a field of tension -- help sustain the other. I remember an image of a man holding up a portrait of a swastika on his phone at a rally in New York, and I'd reckon he was probably doing that to troll the pro-Israel side, like "this is what you are" and then showing them the swastika to call them the new Nazis. Of course this is all over the New York Post and the Jewish press to frighten their readers into thinking anyone who waves a Palestinian flag around are Nazis who want to wipe them out. And that has an effect.