Worth considering that in terms of relative size, Israel has a population of 10 million, Jews in the world number ~14 million.
Whereas the Arab world, which tends to be relatively anti-Israel, numbers ~220 million. And Muslims, which tend to be anti-Israel as well, number 1.2 billion.
So just in terms of number of voices, the natural pro-Israel voices [1] are vastly outnumbered by the natural anti-Israel voices.
Think about how this impacts what you hear, how this impacts the votes in the UN (which is not democratic but votes are by country), how this impacts economic reactions (number of consumers), etc.
[1] This is a sweeping generalization, but it is statistically true that Jews are usually pro-Israel and Arabs and Muslims are usually anti-Israel. With other religions/ethnicities it's more complicated.
Though global populations show a larger anti-Israel sentiment, Western media and internet forums don't reflect this balance.
Western media often aligns with Israeli perspectives due to strategic alliances, lobbying influence, and media ownership dynamics, framing Israel’s actions as defensive while sidelining broader Arab or Palestinian views.
Online, pro-Israel narratives are reinforced by organized digital campaigns and moderation practices that shape public discourse. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian voices lack comparable resources and organization in Western spaces, limiting their visibility. This creates a media and digital environment where Western audiences are exposed to narratives that don’t fully represent the global spectrum of perspectives.
> Though global populations show a larger anti-Israel sentiment, Western media and internet forums don't reflect this balance.
I'm not sure you're right. Isn't this a bit hard to judge without first deciding what is true and what constitutes bias? I'm fairly certain we don't agree with on either of these.
Most Israelis consider things like the BBC and the NYT to be biased against Israel. Are you sure they're wrong?
The NYT insisted that a veteran of the Israeli air force, with no prior reporting experience, conduct on the ground research for a massively-significant piece on Hamas sexual abuse allegations.
https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schw...The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did.
Why would you consider the NYT biased against Israel?
1. That's just one interview, I'm not sure it's actually representative.
2. Even if you think it is, that's just the US media specifically. I agree that they tend to be relatively pro-Israel, especially compared to other countries, but there are other countries.
3. If we accept that this is representative, can we also consider Ta-Nehisi Coates's book itself to be representative of the attitude of "intellectuals" in the US on Israel? As he himself said, he came into the topic biased against Israel, went to the West Bank to "study" the issue for 10 days only, chose not to talk to any Israeli at all to get any other side of the issue, and wrote what is likely to be the highest-selling book this year about the topic.
Not exactly a great example of journalistic rigor, IMO.
Sorry—I was focusing on bias in US media. (I live in the US)
> As he himself said, he came into the topic biased against Israel, went to the West Bank to "study" the issue for 10 days only, chose not to talk to any Israeli at all to get any other side of the issue
What is the other side of the issue? He and actually experts who study Israel call it apartheid. Is it not? If it is, is there a justification for implementing it? Or maybe I’m missing your point.
I’ve always had a problem with this statistic. It is at best an irrelevant obfuscation of more plausible explanations, the most plausible—as well as simplest—being the one that your parent offered.
There are plenty of non-zionist Jews among those 10 million. A non significant number of are even anti-zionists (particularly in the USA). There is also plenty of non-jewish zionists. It wouldn’t surprise me actually if non-jewish zionists actually outnumber jewish zionists by a significant margin, maybe even an order of magnitute.
Then there is the deeply problematic aspect of assuming people’s politics based on their ethnicity. Yes there is a correlation, but correlation is not causation and offers no explaination. The 220 million Arabs and the 1.2 billion Muslims around the world probably have a similar opinion about Israel as most people around the world, I bet some of them—albeit a tiny minority—are even zionists.
Your footnote where you explained this does not offer justification. This is a misuse of statistics at best.
The simple explanation here is simply that people empathize with victims. Palestinians have been victims of colonialism for a long time, and are now victims of an ongoing genocide. The simple explanation here is that people follow the news and understand what is happening.
> I’ve always had a problem with this statistic. It is at best an irrelevant obfuscation of more plausible explanations, the most plausible—as well as simplest—being the one that your parent offered.
You think the world feels this way because of the "vast atrocities" committed by Israel.
The problem with this is that there are far, far worse atrocities all over the world, to which no one pays anywhere near this kind of attention. The Syrian civil war found 300,000 civilians killed, an order of magnitude more than in the Gaza war. Since WW2, there have been, I believe, 100 million refugees of ethnic cleansing worldwide. The Uyghurs in China being a recent example of persecution of an ethnic minority, allegedly far worse than anything Israel does.
And if apartheid is what we're talking about - worth mentioning that Palestinians have very few rights in almost every ME country that they are in.
Now let's be clear - I'm not trying to "whatboutism" here - how Palestinians are treated elsewhere, and the existence of other bad things, does not and should not absolve Israel of anything bad it is doing.
But if your belief is that the world thinks badly of Israel because of what it's doing specifically, but there are 100 things that are far worse by almost any metric happening all the time that few people pay attention to - I think you need to reevaluate the real reason here. If you think the UN putting out more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined makes sense by the numbers - then you are just ignorant of what is happening all over the world.
But you are doing whataboutism. But even if we give you that, Israel’s crimes far outweigh those you mentioned, both in time, and in scale. If you want to find any population that has suffered as many atrocities as Palestinians in Gaza, you would have to go to Darfur. But the impunity in which Israel commits these crimes is not comparable to any other oppressor.
People’s reactions are not based on the criminal act void of any context, they look at the past, they look at consequences, etc. Bashar al-Assad’s mass atrocities were met with international condemnation. Israel’s were met with sympathy from our world leaders, and more weapons to continue and further their crimes. People take this into account.
Peoples opinion also reflects what they see. We see in our news everyday some of the worst crimes of the century being committed against a relatively small population. Every day there is another bomb that wipes out a whole family, including children, in Gaza. Every week there is a journalist or a doctor targeted and killed by Israel. We hear no such stories from East Turkistan, or at least not on the same scale nor horror.
> If you think the UN putting out more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined makes sense by the numbers - then you are just ignorant of what is happening all over the world.
I don’t think that, but it is worth noting the history here. In a nibling thread you wanted to go into the history to (seemingly) justify apartheid policies. I want to do the same except to justify the UN behavior here.
Palestine has explicitly been the UN problem since it was decolonized from Britain. The UN had (and still has) a policy of decolonization so this made sense. Unlike most former colonies, full decolonization was never realized for Palestine, so it is still an explicit UN problem. Here is the reason why the UN has focused so much on Israel. It is not helped by the fact that on UN security council member keeps vetoing any potential progress for furthering more decolonization efforts. Resulting in many half measures which ultimately don’t deliver any results towards Palestinian liberation.
I suspect you want to explain these things on a racial line. But I reject all such science. There exists much simpler explanations for these things which don’t require us to go on the dangerous path of racialized demographicial behavior.
I'm not, because the debate is on the comparative feelings towards Israel vs. other countries, so actually comparing to other actions is specifically what is necessary.
> [...] Israel’s crimes far outweigh those you mentioned, both in time, and in scale.
I'll give a more detailed answer, but this is the most important point - you're wrong. I'm not even sure why you think this, since I gave specific numbers for those atrocities.
In what way is the scale of the civilians killed in the Syrian civil war smaller than that of Gaza? It is literally an order of magnitude more civilians killed, as I mentioned. That's 10x more.
In what way is the scale of what's happening to the Uyghurs smaller? An estimated 1 million have been arbitrarily arrested and put into forced labor, per Wikipedia.
However horrible you think what is happening in Gaza is, thinking that it is more horrible in scale than anything else is just wrong and easily disproven by any of a multitude of examples, including the ones I already wrote. What am I misunderstanding in your view here?
Btw, worth mentioning that many of the biggest examples of anti-Israel bias I'm talking about, e.g. the UN sanctions and a lot of ill-will around the world, were all happening before the Gaza war too.
> Bashar al-Assad’s mass atrocities were met with international condemnation. Israel’s were met with sympathy from our world leaders, and more weapons to continue and further their crimes. People take this into account.
I disagree with your characterization of what Israel is doing as crimes, at least not in general (I'm sure specific war crimes have been committed). It is a war. Unless you think war itself is a crime and never justified, in which case that's an entirely separate discussion (I wish I could agree).
In any case, yes, some leaders are standing up for Israel, because unlike many people, they are aware that this is a valid war that needs fighting, if not always agreeing with everything Israel does. I don't think whether the leaders of the US back Israel or not is very strong evidence of morality, but I definitely don't think it's evidence against the morality of the war, as you imply.
> Peoples opinion also reflects what they see. We see in our news everyday some of the worst crimes of the century being committed against a relatively small population.
Oh, I totally agree. People aren't reacting to reality - since these are not even close to "the worst crimes of the century". You could fill 10x the airtime given to what is happening to Gaza with similarly horrible things that have happened in other places (civilians killed in the Iraq war alone - ~120k).
But that's the thing. The news doesn't show anywhere near as much coverage of other "atrocities", which is why people have a skewed perspective of this. It's literally availability bias, and is caused for many reasons. But it simply doesn't reflect reality if you look at the actual numbers.
> Every week there is a journalist or a doctor targeted and killed by Israel. We hear no such stories from East Turkistan, or at least not on the same scale nor horror.
Yes, my point exactly.
> Palestine has explicitly been the UN problem since it was decolonized from Britain. The UN had (and still has) a policy of decolonization so this made sense. Unlike most former colonies, full decolonization was never realized for Palestine, so it is still an explicit UN problem. Here is the reason why the UN has focused so much on Israel.
I mean, yeah that's one explanation, though I don't think it's particularly correct. Mostly because I reject the idea of Israel never having been decolonized- it was, it turned into Jordan and later Israel.
But let's leave that aside and look again at what I think is more correct.
The UN is not a democracy - votes are by country. The Arab states, which have historically been anti Israel (including trying to wipe Israel out, multiple times) - number 22. They also hold a population of 220 million consumers, and vast oil wealth.
So Democracy-wise - they have far more "votes" and "voters". Capitalism-wise - they have far more consumers than Israel. Geo-politics-wise - they have far more importance than Israel because of that oil wealth and for other reasons.
Those are all very good reasons to explain why Israel, which makes up 0.1% of the middle east, is like the 150th country in size and population in the world, and by any objective standards does not commit "atrocities" on anywhere near the scale of other countries, even if you think it does commit atrocities - those are all very good reasons for Israel to have more resolutions against it than all other countries combined.
Plus, it's a convenient scapegoat for lots of countries.
Plus, I didn't even mention the rest of the majority Muslim countries, who tend to also be anti-Israel.
I mean, the effects of "democracy", capitalism and geo-politics certainly seem more relevant in my eyes to explain the UN, rather than some idealistic story about colonialism which doesn't even make sense.
> I suspect you want to explain these things on a racial line. But I reject all such science. There exists much simpler explanations for these things which don’t require us to go on the dangerous path of racialized demographicial behavior.
Just to be clear, I'm not making any racial statements here, unless you consider statements like "the Arab countries are historically against Israel". If you don't accept even statements like that - I don't really think you can analyze any history of politics, at all. (And you'll note I didn't even mention anything about antisemitism, which most people certainly think is at least part of the story here, but we can leave that aside.)
> I disagree with your characterization of what Israel is doing as crimes, at least not in general (I'm sure specific war crimes have been committed). It is a war.
So what is the threshold past which even Israelis would acknowledge that what Israel is doing is both morally repugnant and illegal? What would that look like, in terms of actions on the ground?
The problem is that the crimes do not appear to be one-offs, but systemic, especially when viewed in the context of public statements by senior leadership of the Israeli government explicitly advocating for violence and destruction.
It might be "normal" for soldiers to pose for pictures in a combat zone, but soldiers committing war crimes while doing so should be prosecuted in accordance with international law....and for some reason IDF soldiers do this quite often, from posing while burning down libraries, to scrawling graffiti such as "Nakba 2023" on walls with a smile, to making instructional videos on how to blow up mosques on TikTok.
> However horrible you think what is happening in Gaza is, thinking that it is more horrible in scale than anything else is just wrong and easily disproven by any of a multitude of examples, including the ones I already wrote.
Every single Palestinian in Gaza has lost their home, a family member, or a limb. This is not the case in the Syrian civil war (as horrible as that was) nor among Uyghurs in East Turkistan. As horrible as those atrocities are (particularly the Syrian Civil war) it is still dwarfed by the atrocity which Israel is inflecting on Gaza. Bashar al-Assad never committed a genocide (ISIS tried but were beaten). Israel has been committing a genocide for over a year now, with no end in sight. And we are talking about the Syrian civil war here. One of the worst wars in this century, if this is our baseline of what is acceptable, something horrible is wrong. But even in the Syrian Civil War, which caused millions to flee their homes (by some very plausible estimates half the country), most Syrians kept their homes, family members, and limbs. Like I said, the only comparable scenario is in Darfur, where mass hunger against civilians is used as a weapon and where most people have lost somebody they know in the ongoing genocide.
> Btw, worth mentioning that many of the biggest examples of anti-Israel bias I'm talking about, e.g. the UN sanctions and a lot of ill-will around the world, were all happening before the Gaza war too.
This was also true of South Africa and Rhodesia (the latter of which was met with so much anti-Rhodesian bias that it no longer exists) despite neither of which going on a full on genocidal rampage against their victims of apartheid. Israel has been committing similar crimes against Palestinians for decades now, and sympathy has increased as more and more people are made aware of their crimes. The ongoing genocide only furthers this anti-Israel bias past the scale we ever saw against Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa. The world’s reaction against Israel is consistent with previous cases of apartheid (outside of superpowers like the USA).
> Mostly because I reject the idea of Israel never having been decolonized- it was, it turned into Jordan and later Israel.
What are you saying here? It sounds like you are saying that the nation or territory of Palestine does not exist, and that Israel’s (unambiguously) illegal occupation of Palestinian territory is not just justified, but also complete and absolute. I hope that is me misunderstanding, because if that is what you mean, than you are advocating for the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and on the West Bank.
> "the Arab countries are historically against Israel".
This is factually incorrect. Most Arab countries (as do most countries in the UN, and the UN it self) favor a 2-state solution with an independent Palestine along the 1967 line and a capital in East Jerusalem. There was a short period where this was not true, that most Arab countries wanted a single Palestinian state without the mass-immigration of European Jewish settlers. However that hasn’t been true for a long time and is largely irrelevant to any current discussions. The three or four of decades where this was true have no relevance over the 80 years of the existence of independent Israel. Throughout majority of the existence of Israel, most Arab countries are against the illegal occupation of Israel, and are fine with the existence of Israel.
Today, and for all of this century, and a significant part of the end of the last century Arab countries stance on Israel mirrors what most countries today say. That Israel should end its illegal occupation, and grant Palestine independence with a capital in East Jerusalem.
EDIT: Just to ring the point home about the scale of the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza. I just saw these numbers on Al Jazeera https://aje.io/18noxx?update=3278807 :
- 87% of all housing units in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.
- 80% of all commercial facilities are damaged
- 68% of all cropland is damaged
- 17/36 hospitals in Gaza are only partially functioning, the rest are shut down.
- 68% of all the road network is damaged
- 87% of the schools in Gaza are damaged.
Even if we zoom in the worst affected city of the Syrian Civil war like Aleppo, or Raqqa, you don’t get anywhere near this level of destruction.
EDIT 2: Compare this to Aleppo, which has been (IMO accurately [until Gaza]) described as the worst urban warfare of our century. Aleppo was under siege for four years, with mass atrocities committed on a weekly bases, including bombings of residential neighborhoods, hospital and mosques.
This should absolutely not be a benchmark for what is acceptable in warfare. But even still, a staggering 33,500 of the cities housing units were damaged or destroyed. This was unprecedented before the Gaza genocide. In Gaza we have 87% of the housing units damaged or destroyed.
The battle of Aleppo killed at least 30,000 people, including over 20,000 civilians. Such high civilian casualty numbers were also unprecedented in modern warfare, until the Gaza genocide where over a much shorter period we have at least 42,000 confirmed deaths (most likely a significant undercount), most of whom women or children. So even if we go only by confirmed deaths, and only count women and children as civilians, the civilian deaths after a year of genocide is still greater than the 4 years of the worst urban fighting of our century until Gaza.
I think it has a lot to do with tiktok's rise to power, for the first time there is a platform that is not controlled by the west (Pro-Zionist), which would completely censor out news like Facebook and Instagram does.
Then again Zuck recently donated $125000 to Zaka, the Zionist org responsible for the lies about beheaded babies. Facebook also has several ex-members of the IDF's Unit 8200 on its board.
The first statement is plainly anti-semitic. (Talking about a people and culture) The second is, arguably, against the Israeli state. Israel is a social and political construct. You can change your mind about being Zionist, for example. It’s not an inherent trait like skin color.
Worth considering that in terms of relative size, Israel has a population of 10 million, Jews in the world number ~14 million.
Whereas the Arab world, which tends to be relatively anti-Israel, numbers ~220 million. And Muslims, which tend to be anti-Israel as well, number 1.2 billion.
So just in terms of number of voices, the natural pro-Israel voices [1] are vastly outnumbered by the natural anti-Israel voices.
Think about how this impacts what you hear, how this impacts the votes in the UN (which is not democratic but votes are by country), how this impacts economic reactions (number of consumers), etc.
[1] This is a sweeping generalization, but it is statistically true that Jews are usually pro-Israel and Arabs and Muslims are usually anti-Israel. With other religions/ethnicities it's more complicated.