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Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Gotta say, an ouroboros of "what if we responded to war crimes with our own war crimes" does not lead to great results.

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Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Reminder to be very skeptical of anything sourced from social media right now. There's a lot of fake news spread by people looking to dial the bloodlust up to 11 that is being taken up by news agencies without due vetting.

https://bsky.app/profile/bellingcat.com/post/3kbfyohy6ql2x

Grip it and rip it posted:

You think that all 1500 of the reported killed Hamas Troops were actual combatants?
That particular report mentioned in Israel, not as part of the mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip, so combatants is probably fair.

Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Oct 10, 2023

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Maybe the real Hamas was the friends we made along the way

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Setting aside the dire humanitarian catastrophe unfolding at the moment, I just have to say, what really gets my goat about this is the abject unreadiness of Israel's border troops. This is a relatively small border—how were there not sufficient automated systems in place to detect unusual activity and pull in humans to review and slam the "WAKE THE gently caress UP AND GET YOUR GUN" at the border outposts?

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
I sure hope the proposal would involve an ironclad guarantee of return and recompense, or else the United States would be directly complicit in ethnic cleansing... And I don't see why any Palestinian would trust such promises, even were they issued.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

golden bubble posted:

the warning system for the human soldiers on the second line also gets knocked out.
This is the bizarre part for me, coming from a dumb software background with an ops-heavy culture: if your monitoring systems suddenly stop emitting data such that you no longer have visibility into the integrity of the system, you have high-severity alarms in place to alert on-call humans who should quickly be able sound a maximum-severity alarm that activates everyone.

It sounds like their monitoring systems got destroyed, telemetry stopped emitting, and the right alarming mechanisms either weren't in place or were ignored by a human operator.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Things may be heating up with Hezbollah. Both sides seem like they've tried to hold back in the last few days, with violent incidents being sporadic, but neither side is willing to fully ignore what they perceive as the other's aggression, so retaliation is ramping up. Hopefully won't boil over...

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
There's a weird absence of discussion in the limited Israeli media I have visibility into about what "victory" looks like beyond the overly ambiguous "elimination of Hamas".

I worry that the ground troops will roll in and all it'll take just a handful of soldiers to break the taboo to unleash a flood of retributive violence against the population of Gaza, worse even than the bombing of entire city blocks. And even then, once the blood debt has been repaid by an order of magnitude or three, will creating a wave of martyrs and traumatized orphans "eliminate Hamas"?

I don't know that their stated war goal is achievable without genocide and I'm not entirely confident that's not exactly what will be attempted.

There's also little reflection about why Hamas has the support it does and why Palestinians in the West Bank have been turning increasingly towards violence. Little admission among liberals that the relative peace and prosperity they've won over the last two decades, even with periodic lawn mowing operations, has perhaps blinded them to the urgency of the suffering and anguish inflicted by the apartheid regime. The peace process for many has perhaps been an election issue, something that could sit until they retook the Knesset, not a time bomb that had been waiting to explode. All the while, the youth radicalize ever further toward the right.

I've feared Israel has been on the path to no return for awhile now. I suspect we might see in the months to come that it is in the rear view mirror.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

ThisIsJohnWayne posted:

Dan Carlin, famous for being the most popular history podcaster, is a Nazi by any other word


I think you'd find this sentiment towards Israel among a lot of American liberals and the pro-Israel left, even when they recognize it would be a far-right, racist talking point if spoken by a white American towards our black and brown minorities. A lot of cognitive dissonance on the subject.

Figuring out how to integrate peacefully would be a challenge after decades of bad blood, but... Israel has had had the dominant position for decades and have only exacerbated the situation in that time.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

Discussion Quorum posted:

This has all the signs of a politician demanding that something be made to explode on TV right now
Americans at it, too:

quote:

Republican members of Congress are now openly advocating the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. "Level the place," says Lindsey Graham. "No rules of engagement" says Rep. Max Miller, a former Trump aide.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
https://bsky.app/profile/paulwaldman.bsky.social/post/3kbn3kkkfdf2m

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

quote:

One thing we can all do - right now - is call the White House & tell them that you expect the Biden administration to do everything possible to encourage Israeli restraint & avoid attacks on civilians in Gaza. The comment office is closed on Fridays (!), so call the switchboard: 202-456-1414.
https://bsky.app/profile/texasinafrica.bsky.social/post/3kbno65fqyz2g

(we really need Bluesky embeds)

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

Handsome Ralph posted:

:smith:

This loving sucks poo poo and it's never gonna end.
I mean, if he follows through on his explicitly stated intentions, it absolutely will end, just with 2 million dead Palestinians.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

mllaneza posted:

I'm getting the sense that all the residents of North Gaza gathering in a small area designated by Israel might be a bad idea.
The side of the American media that is not overtly anti-Palestinian is crying "why won't Egypt accept refugees??"

Maybe because Israel has a history of ethnic cleansing, with millions of displaced Palestinians already living in refugee camps in neighboring countries for generations? Maybe because we should be demanding that Israel stop it's genocide?

The only moral action open to the United States foreign policy is to bomb the IDF to stop the genocide.

Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Oct 14, 2023

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

Potato Salad posted:

I don't think we're going to be able to agree. The history of warfare overwhelmingly involves war made for the purposes of statecraft where preservation and even creating favor with a civilian population is the entire war goal, even between ethnicities with longstanding grudges *points toward AD 900 through the Renaissance in Western Europe*

some of the oldest remaining records of human language -- dating to the Sumerians -- involve written accounts of conduct of war between cities. Avoiding non-combatants is an ancient, ancient practice.

it's going to be one of those cases where two people can live on the same planet but have completely different takeaways regarding a major part of the history of that planet
I'm certainly no proper historian, but the idea that those we'd refer to as civilians today were not brutally victimized during historical conflict (and, really, all throughout their short, brutal lives) smacks of ahistorical revisionism that is too eager to find fault with modernity. If anything, I'd venture that the emergence of rules against such violence provide evidence for such widespread brutality—bans on weapons and tactics broadly emerge after the dominant powers are on the receiving end of such and want to minimize the risk of recurrence (and were probably as imperfect at holding to their own rules as we are today).

But this all veers wildly from the topic at hand, which is that Israel is committing atrocities in Gaza and appears on the verge of taking things up a few notches.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
So about Bibi getting the boot...

quote:

Draft emergency regulations from Israel's Communications Minister would "allow him to direct police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property if he believes they have spread information that could harm national morale or served as the basis for enemy propaganda."
https://bsky.app/profile/sarahemclaugh.bsky.social/post/3kbuqgqzd7n2j

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
The Promised Podcast just put out a special episode offering the perspective of a Palestinian Israeli on the last week. Definitely worth a listen as I've not seen similar elsewhere. Sally Abed is a Palestinian-Israeli activist seeking election in Haifa and she describes a visceral fear of a new Nakba of potentially unlimited scope—in Gaza and West Bank, obviously, but even to those 1.8 million Palestinian Israelis who have citizenship. There've been a wave of arrests targeting anyone who makes statements even remotely expressing solidarity with the people of Gaza, there's fear of random acts of violence from Jews against anyone perceived on the street to be Arab, and an unnuanced demand for revenge even from left-wing Israelis. Talk about how the ongoing apartheid regime could have been a causal factor in the attack elicits condemnation as justifying the raid.

Separately, I saw that Blinken was asked about conditions put on aid to Israel to rein in the IDF's violence against civilians and their homes, to which he responded that Israel has an absolute right of self-defence and the United States would never imagine conditioning aid under any circumstances. What a sharp contrast with aid to Ukraine... In the one case, you have a relatively small, poor state scrabbling against an obviously existential threat from (what remains of) one of the world's two superpowers. In the other, you have relatively large, prosperous state engaging a tiny terrorist organization which is fundamentally incapable of posing a significant threat outside the borders it's been corralled into (even last week's raid, atrocious and shocking though it was, hinted at no existential threat and was utterly unachievable without one of the most dire intelligence and military failures in history—Hamas may possess the will, but it obviously lacks the means). Ukraine is burdened with extensive conditions imposed by its suppliers, yet Israel, a country fully capable of funding its own defense, receives none. Publicly, at least.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
60-some Palestinians murdered in the West Bank since 7 Oct. Suspected to be "reprisal" killings carried out by Israelis.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/18/1198908667/palestinians-appear-to-have-been-killed-in-reprisal-attacks-in-the-west-bank

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Saw the "centrist" editor of the Times of Israel referring to Gaza as "Hamastan" today in an oped. Really cool dehumanization of the 2 million civilians Israel has confined to the Strip.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
How could Israel possibly allow fuel into Gaza—do people really expect them to fill the tanks of Hamas's legions of Panzers?!

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

mrmcd posted:

There's a book called The Yiddish Policeman's Union that's a detective novel set in an alternate universe where Israel was setup in a part of coastal Alaska America donated to them instead of Palestine.
I loved this book, but it was contentious at my book club.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Maybe instead of "giving" any group already populated territories, we could call out the whole concept of ethno-states is bankrupt and morally appalling, no matter where they are or what ethnicity asserts dominance? Whether such states actively expel and exterminate other-ized groups, shunt them into ghettos and bantustans, or even grudgingly afford them semi-equal second-class citizen status, it's all vile poo poo.

Western countries are grossly imperfect and we're all well aware of their shortcomings, but they do today offer a level of genuine openness that make them relatively safe to traditionally marginalized groups. Hell, the largest Jewish population in the world is in the United States (and would be even larger if liberals hadn't been complicit for decades in whitewashing the ethno-colonialist enterprise as a noble homecoming). The subtext of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, as I read it, is that home is the family you make along the way and that the messianic, violent retaking of fabled ancestral lands is not just a short-sighted dead-end, but a tragic stoking of a cycle of pain and trauma.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

Alchenar posted:

I'm going to post something a friend of mine posted on Facebook shortly after the attacks.

I think that last paragraph is the thing that most people simply do not understand about the moderate Zionist mindset. It isn't about taking someone else's land. It's not about something promised to them by God. It is about Jewish people getting to decide what their lives are worth, set against two thousand years of others deciding their lives are worth nothing. You are never going to convince them to give that up for 'an acceptable level of antisemitism from the average Western society'.
Their post very much exemplifies why I have such visceral reaction against Israel's ethnonationalist enterprise. Like a lot of folks here, I grew up in a country scarred by a legacy of white supremacy and have watched throughout my life how my society is still struggling to reckon with its persistent, pernicious effects. While white nationalism stands in the shadows as a monster yet to be slain, it seems we at least have reached a point where it's broadly acknowledged you should deck that squishy, privileged white "moderate" who'll say they're not racist, but thinks things were so much simpler and safer in the 1950s where everyone kept to their own "kind".

It's tragic that we've not been able to recognize the evils of ethno-nationalism as universal, not isolated to any individual bullshit construct of race or ethnicity. The only difference between the ethnonationalism of the white supremacist and the Jewish supremacist is that the latter has a historical reference point for when their own group was subject to the abject horror of a maximalist ethnonationalist state. What really gets my goat is that, instead of recognizing that only an open, tolerant society can afford true safety for all, so many have been lured in by the false promise of safety through supremacy and have for decades viciously exploited the long history of the wrongs done to their group to inflict the same depravations on another. That Israelis play this up, inciting fear in Jewish populations abroad to bolster their own state's ethnonationalist agenda is utterly despicable, and, as events have shown, an utter lie: Israel's decades-long occupation and subjugation of the Palestinians has fostered a degree of internal prosperity and bred a great deal of complacency, but there's no true safety to be had while digging a boot into the necks of an otherized minority.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Israel sent a hundred armored vehicles into Jenin in the West Bank and they're tearing up the place. Not entirely clear yet what the ultimate goal is, if any.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/?post_type=liveblog_entry&p=3138831

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
I bet we're going to discover one day that skibidi toilet was a psyop all along.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Just watched a wonderful take which explained with a straight face that Israel's 21st century border defense system was just too modern for Hamas's 20th century infiltration tactics, so Israel can't be blamed too much for failing to mitigate the threat.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Twitter embeds still work for me :shrug:

Really wish we just jumped to Bluesky, though.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

Handsome Ralph posted:

I only went as far as Y3 ROTC but even that was hammered into us early on, and we had cadre who had gone to Iraq that told us about units that relearned that lesson the hard way. So yeah, complacency/under estimating Hamas which, you'd think they would stop doing that due to last month's events and yet.
And complacency in the face of such tactics would be especially negligent given Russia spending the last year getting trounced in Ukraine with some very similar tactics. So much talk of drones presenting a drastic change from the past which militaries need to adapt their defense to, but it's not clear how much that's truly translated into action anywhere, let alone the military which apparently didn't bother alarming on their critical border sensors going down.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
IDF soldier: "What, so if the Hamas raid had crossed the border in ambulances instead of technicals, we'd have had to sit on our hands while they murdered us??"

*uses an advanced drone to track a Gaza ambulance in hi-res 8k, watching it pick up injured children from the unrecognizable devastation of their home, then make its way to the front gates of a hospital overwhelmed with abject human suffering*

IDF soldier: "Would you constrain our ability to defend ourselves from extermination??!"

*reaches lazily toward a big red button, waiting for responders to rush towards the incoming emergency vehicle before pressing it. Outside the hospital, the lives of the last members of a once large family are snuffed out, alongside those desperately trying to save them*

IDF soldier: "These barbarians only understand violence."

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Winning hearts and minds among young Westerners
https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1721457922859729398?s=20

@Israel posted:

"I'm not antisemitic, I'm racist fluid." - random @Columbia student

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Yeah, the former half tragically seems more "this must never happen again to anyone, but our largely rhetorical opposition to our inflicting it will do nothing more than slow-roll the process; when the victims inevitably resist, we'll adopt a slightly softer version of the exterminationist rhetoric" these days.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

Lum_ posted:

Israel doesn't WANT Gaza.
Important distinction: Israel doesn't want the Palestinians in Gaza. At the end of the day, the Israeli PM may just take a page from their founding father's playbook. Yitzahk Rabin's memoirs retell how, when asked how the nascent IDF should handle several troublesome Palestinian towns, the legendary Ben-Gurion refrained from saying anything explicitly, but made a gesture that unmistakably conveyed ethnic cleansing—a cleansing that was carried out and erased from Israeli history books.

We'd like to think that it can't happen again with the whole world watching, but the US, and especially the UK and Germany, give nothing publicly but tepid lip service to humanitarianism while enabling the worst of Israel's excesses.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Given the lack of clarity on what comes next, I worry the public statements that Israel seeks no expulsion will give way to facts on the ground.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
This kind of poo poo creeps me the gently caress out. The unspoken implication of "and we're retaking the land for our religion; all interlopers shall be cast out!" lurks just barely beneath the surface.
https://twitter.com/msfreund/status/1721975029850628104

quote:

Wow! For the first time in decades, #Israeli soldiers prayed in the ancient synagogue in #Gaza which was built in the 6th century and where a beautiful mosaic floor depicting King David was unearthed years ago. #Jews have returned to Gaza!!#Israel #Hamas pic.twitter.com/H9huNA7FVM

— Michael Freund (@msfreund) November 7, 2023

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

PurpleXVI posted:

If I was to give people some benefit of the doubt, rather than just considering them to be utter ghouls, I could see a disregard towards the lives of Israeli settler civilians from the logic that they are directly choosing to benefit from the IDF's crimes(and that if they weren't choosing to move in and settle on the ruins of Palestinian homes, many of those crimes might not happen at all) and that many of them do pick up guns and go commit some war crimes in their spare time.
So the first-level response to this is that the people in the massacred areas are not those most commonly referred to as "settlers"—those Israelis seizing Palestinian land and homes in the West Bank by force in pursuit of Lebensraum—but are instead the two- or three-generations-removed descendants of those Jews who came to the area and are generally center/left-leaning as Israeli politics goes. A lot of folks using this refutation tend to be blind to the fact that it raises its own follow-up questions that aren't exactly favorable to the Israeli position like, "What was there beforehand?" (a cleansed Palestinian village) or "What does it really mean to be 'pro-peace' when you live prosperously next to an open-air prison for decades?". That doesn't justify the massacre or directly conflate the current residents with the West Bank settlers, but certainly helps inform why some Palestinians look to violent extremism after decades of peaceful protest has only tightened the noose.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

Alchenar posted:

The conditions in gaza suck, but they aren't untenable at all. There was no great looming catastrophe that forced their hand - that was Israel's problem, things in fact looked so stable that they took their eye off the ball.
You or I may, sitting comfortably in our homes, look at the conditions in the pre-7 Oct Gaza and declare, "Well, they're not starving, nor crippled by disease; no gunmen stalk their streets looking for the blood of innocents. What is there to inspire such passion to upset a stable status quo?"

But for the average Gazan, and increasingly the average Palestinian, embracing the status quo has meant accepting the inevitable demise of their people under the slow, incessant grind of the occupation. The Palestinians have repeatedly tried peaceful protest to staunch the encroachment of settlers in the West Bank or to call global attention to the prison that is Gaza, but have been violently thwarted at every turn by an Israeli state which is deaf and blind to their pleas and an Israeli population which, to a too significant extent, actively rejoices in the depravation of Palestinian land, liberty, and even life. That some increasingly marginalized Israeli liberals opine wistfully for a equitable peace means little when that peace every day looks more and more like a coping mechanism, a delusional fantasy Israeli liberals tell themselves to absolve themselves of their participation in an enterprise of slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

It's little wonder that some Palestinians look at this situation and choose hope for a better future over either ignoring their own plight or giving fully into despair. The absolute tragedy of that hope is that, for many, the only vehicle for it perceived to be still viable is in the virulent and exterminationist missions of Hamas and other extremist groups.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Ezra Klein actually had a great episode with Amjad Iraqi this week that covered exactly this topic.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
The Times of Israel has had multiple stories in the last weeks exposing the lurid outline of Hamas's brutal plans of total conquest, uncovered as the IDF proceeds further into Gaza. All of it is, of course, obviously silly and non-serious. "IDF uncovers Hamas plot to seize Knesset!!"; "How Hamas planned to push through to the West Bank and start a wider war—what YOU need to know!!!"; "Video recording exposes Hamas leader's plan to escape to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism Zionism, space!". Even if these turn out to be real documents, they're obviously bluster and/or thought exercises by bored extremists without much else to do.

And this is one of the centrist/liberal papers.

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
The IDF assaulted NPR journalists in the West Bank and kidnapped the farmer they were interviewing.

quote:

It's morning as our NPR team is traveling from Tel Aviv to the West Bank to see a small town called Deir Istiya, and to meet a 54-year-old farmer named Ayoub Abuhejleh. Like many Palestinians in the West Bank, he tells us he hasn't been able to access his land and harvest his olives.

He explains that soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and West Bank settlers have blocked him from his land since the war started on Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters attacked Israel.

Our team pulls on helmets and flak jackets marked "PRESS" in big white letters before we begin to walk with Abuhejleh to the spot that he says looks onto his fields. We hear a buzzing sound, and when we look up, we spot a drone hovering about 60 feet above us. A camera flashes green and red – it's clear someone's watching. We're just not sure if it's Israeli military personnel or settlers.

As we walk another 100 or so yards, people in uniform emerge from behind a rocky hillside. More arrive in an SUV.

We stop and announce ourselves: "Media. Press." They're clearly unhappy with us. Some have their faces covered with balaclavas. Soon about a dozen people in uniform are gathering around us – all of them carrying large assault-style guns.

"OK. So get out of here. Take your legs and go all the way back," one soldier says in Hebrew, pointing to the direction from which we came. They tell us we've crossed a barrier, but we point out there is no rope, no signs, nothing to indicate that. They insist the area is restricted, and it's a time of war.

Our local producer Sawsan Khalife, along with Rabbi Dana and Brodsky try to talk to them in Hebrew. Crosstalk evolves into yelling. Abuhejleh is separated from the group, about 20 feet away, accompanied by multiple soldiers. They tell us they need to question him, and it will only take a few minutes.

We say we don't want to leave without him. "Can one of our Israeli friends stay here?" we ask. The soldiers refuse, and a gun is raised. It points straight at us – and we begin to back away. "Move on," we're told.

Soldiers walk Abuhejleh out of sight around a hill, and as we make our way back to where the road was dug up, Rabbi Dana tells us she's worried.

"We've never seen anything like this before," she says. "This is not according to any protocol that we're familiar with or are experienced with."
Abuhejleh was released uninjured later that day, but the obvious effort to strangle Palestinian livelihood is awful enough on its own. gently caress Israel.

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1211987812/israel-hamas-west-bank-gaza-war-conflict-idf

Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA
Uhh...
https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1724392576516600204?s=20

quote:

Shaylee Atary's husband Yahav was murdered by Hamas terrorists.

She did everything in her power to retrieve his sperm so that their dream of having more children would live on even without Yahav.

Unfortunately she was unsuccessful.

There are still so many families that we can save.

Every minute counts.

BRING BACK OUR CHILDREN NOW.
Whoever is running this account is making some interesting choices in content to put out.

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Cugel the Clever
Apr 5, 2009
I LOVE AMERICA AND CAPITALISM DESPITE BEING POOR AS FUCK. I WILL NEVER RETIRE BUT HERE'S ANOTHER 200$ FOR UKRAINE, SLAVA

ranbo das posted:

I mean it wasn't too long ago American soldiers shot American college students to death with American guns, just guns being pointed seems pretty tame on the scale of American atrocities.
If you're referring to Kent State, I have concerns about your definition of "not too long ago" :thunk:

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