[edanm]

> But you are doing whataboutism.

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.)

[CapricornNoble]

> 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 is not normal wartime activity for a bulldozer to drive over LIVING human beings: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israe...

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.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/israeli-soldier-burning-bo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/1cuujzz/two_isra...

https://archive.is/HTC4J (NYT)

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2024/02/15/exp-amanpour...

It's a pattern of callous destruction that makes the razing of Lidice ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre ) look positively quaint.

[edanm]

> 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?

I can't speak for Israelis in general. I certainly think some of the things Israel is doing are morally repugnant, especially some of the actions in the WB (or lack of stopping settlers from their actions), and especially any of the things Israel has done to withhold aid from Gaza.

I don't think that makes the war itself a crime or most of the things happening in it crimes. I do think, like most Israelis do, that one of the reasons the war is going on so long is because of Netanyahu's particular political needs, which is obviously extremely immoral.

It's war. It's complicated. There are no easy answers.

> 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.

Some officials have made clearly awful and genocidal statements. Most of the ones in charge have not, except for the first few weeks after the Hamas attacks, and have made thousands more statements that explicitly speak against any kind of genocidal intent. I think it's important to look at statements in their totality.

> 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.

Those soldiers are obviously doing terrible and stupid things, and often face some form of military trials. This is unacceptable behavior in my mind and is rightly condemned.

[CapricornNoble]

Overall this is a pretty balanced take. I still think we have different interpretations of what is "normal" for a war but I don't expect we'll close the gap on that.

Now to introduce some levity into the conversation:

> It's war. It's complicated. There are no easy answers.

When I was a Senior Watch Officer at the Operations Center of a 3-star command, our Operations Chief was lifelong infantryman and Fallujah veteran. I haven't been in combat. But I used to frequently rant "Why do we always make this stuff so complicated?!?! It can't be this hard to kill people!" For those lacking context I'm complaining about how I felt that our approach to command & control was needlessly diffusing our core Marine Corps function of efficiently killing our enemies.

...and one time the Chief just looked at me and responded plainly: "Trust me, it's not."

[runarberg]

Nothing here is “normal” war behavior, even by the standards of war. And people see that and correctly judge Israel for it.

I remember growing up in Europe during the Iraq war. Even though I was young, I got that USA was obviously on the wrong, and so did most people around me. I remember not just hating the American government for what they were doing, but Americans in general. When Bush was reelected in 2004 it was seen as a damning proof that it wasn’t just the American government that was bad, but every American. It took me personally a few years to erase this prejudges from my head.

I also remember being in Europe during the Syrian civil war. Syrian refugees had a huge sympathy from most people around me. This was compounded by how many European governments treated Syrian refugees horrible (and still do), such injustice only grew our sympathy for Syrian people.

I no longer live in Europe, but I see the same sentiment for Ukrainians who are obviously wronged by a heinous Russian invasion into their country.

Palestinians have had to suffer injustice for a long time, and awareness of this injustice has grown rapidly over, with the ongoing genocide, support for Palestinians among the people (not governments) has also grown massively. This is consistent with previous victims of war.

During the Iraq war Bush’s lies played a factor in anti-American sentiment, so did the Patriot act, the Guantanamo Bay prison, the Abu Ghraib torture revelations, and the number of massacres (particularly the Nisour Square massacre, and the “Collateral Murder” as leaked by Chelsea Manning).

During the Iraq war we heard of those atrocities on a weekly to a monthly basis, and they were all a big deal, and we all hated Americans for it. Compounded were with the emotion was the impunity in which these crimes were committed. Americans were very seldomly (and very selectively) punished for these crimes. Individual soldiers were arrested, tried, received minimal (if any) punishment, and later pardoned or acquitted. But we all knew the crimes were systemic and that generals, cabinet members, and presidents were equally, of not more guilty of those crimes. The problem was with American policy, and nobody was being arrested for that.

Now compare this to Gaza. Israel has been committing the crime of Apartheid for a very long time. They have been subjugating Palestinians with an illegal occupation, a border wall (in Europe we know all to well of the infamous Berlin wall), shooting at protestors with much more impunity than UK soldiers in Belfast. Gaza was illegally blockaded and systematically bombed every few years (something the reminded us all to well of Sarajevo).

And now during the Gaza genocide we see the same kinds of atrocities as during the Iraq wars (including torture and sexual abuses of prisoners) except now, instead of them being reviled every few weeks or months, we see every day another massacre, another neighborhood bombed, another hospital sieged, another torture camp exposed, etc. This is not normal, not acceptable, and people don’t accept it.

There was a time where Israel had it relatively good compared to other oppressors, that people made a fine distinction between the government and the people (unlike with America). But I don’t think this is true any more. The crimes of Israel are far to severe, and the impunity far too great. Hardly any of these soldiers committing the crimes are ever prosecuted, none of the war crimes are investigated, no general is questioned, and no politician is impeached. People see this and (IMO correctly) judge Israeli society along with their government for the impunity of how those crimes are committed.

[runarberg]

> 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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161224165001/https://www.washi...

[edanm]

Look. We're discussing horrible things here. I want to make sure it's clear that I think every civilian death is a tragedy. Hell, almost every non-civilian death is a tragedy too - Hamas militants were born in a pretty awful situation, all things considered. I'm taking a pro-Israel side in these comments, because I honestly disagree with your characterization of most things Israel is doing, especially as compared to other wars. (Though I do thank you for discussing fairly horrible topics in a civil manner.)

But as a disclaimer for everything else - I consider myself firmly in the Israeli left, possible far-left. I think Israel has done a lot of morally wrong things for (at least) the last 15 years. And while I think the war's aims are absolutely legitimate, I think it has gone on far, far longer than it should and that Israel has done many immoral things as part of that war. (And to make this all worse - I think one of the main reasons it has gone on this long isn't even because it's good for Israel - it's just that it's good for Netanyahu personally.)

That all said, I will answer your specific points that I disagree with -

> 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.

To parse what you're saying here - you honestly think killing 600k civilians is not worse than killing ~30k civilians? Because there are less total civilians so this needs to be measured in percentage of the population? I don't agree with that kind of calculus, at all.

Also, Israel is not targeting civilians, as opposed to many of the other situations I mentioned. This doesn't matter much to the civilians killed, but it is very different morally speaking.

And yes, most Gazans know someone who was killed. That's awful and will absolutely traumatize them even more. I wish it were possible to wipe stop Hamas with no one dying. Hamas has made it impossible. They've said so, in their own words, many times - which is why most Gazans despise Hamas at this point.

But you know what - many if not most Israelis know someone who was killed on October 7th too, and everyone hears daily of the 100 hostages still in Gaza. That's awful too. But I don't think that is proof that the number of dead Israelis is somehow a bigger atrocity than other things, just because Israel is small. Lives are lives.

> 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.

I don't agree with your characterization of what Israel is doing. But even if you think it is a genocide - that's not a separate claim to what you were saying above. You're saying, as I parse it - Israel has killed far fewer civilians than in other situations, but it is doing a genocide so that makes it worse. But that's nonsensical - the death of the civilians is what genocide means.

And btw, you call it an ongoing genocide, which I really disagree with. There are very few civilians killed on an ongoing basis right now, and there hasn't been for months. It's certainly an ongoing case of mass displacement, which I really hope is temporary as Gaza is rebuilt.

And it really is relevant to say - Israel has lost hundreds of soldiers in Gaza. It could easily lose zero soldiers by attacking more from the air, with a 10x higher civilian death toll. That is relevant to considering whether killing civilians is Israel's goal - because it could easily do so with minimal losses if it didn't care about civilian casualties.

> 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,

It is true that one of the main things Israel has done in Gaza that is objectively worse is the destruction of much civilian infrastructure and homes. That's bad. A lot of it is because of the cynical use Hamas has made of civilian spaces, making it impossible to stop Hamas without destroying massive civilian infrastructure. But it's entirely possible that Israel has gone far beyond this in the destruction it has wrought.

I personally think lives are more important than property, so looking at the actual civilian death toll is a far more important metric.

> > Mostly because I reject the idea of Israel never having been decolonized- it was, it turned into Jordan and later Israel.

> [...] 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.

I'm absolutely not advocating any such thing, and I have no idea how you got there.

Historically speaking, there was no nation of Palestine. That's not a POV - that's a historical fact. The territories Israel occupies were not Palestinian territories - they were Jordan's and Egypt's territories at the time that Israel captured them. That is Israel's position on why this isn't an occupation, iirc - that the countries don't want those territories back.

That all said, of course a relatively new and distinct national identity of Palestinian now exists, they existed in the territories of Palestine before, and they deserve to have their national aspirations met, which is why I am a big advocate for a two-state solution. It is the obvious and only solution to the conflict - two peoples with legitimate claims on the same territory, so they should each have a state on that territory.

> > "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.

I was more referring to how they vote in terms of the UN and how their people perceive Israel, which influences a lot of policy etc.

And I don't think favoring a 2-state solution is being against Israel, btw - it's just common sense.

I do completely agree that Israelis tend to overlook the real progress made in relations with the Arab world. Israel is no longer quite as surrounded by enemies as it used to be, and that's a huge and important shift that most Israelis have not internalized, IMO.

[runarberg]

My university background is not in CS but it psychology and statistics, and even though I’m an expert in neither, I know at least one thing, that humans are horrible at statistics. We don’t think neither in absolute terms nor in proportional terms (although between the two we are more likely to think in [heavily biased; and nonsensically; inconsistently non-linear] proportional terms). What the human mind likes to do is to zoom in on the most extreme parts, and apply that to the whole population, that is we love to think in details, find patterns, and extrapolate. Like I said, humans are very bad at statistics.

In the Syrian civil war this manifested in use zooming in on cities like Aleppo or Raqqa, see the horrors there and apply those to the rest of Syria. So when we see the horrors in Gaza, we are not comparing 600k vs. 40k. nor 10% of the housing units in Aleppo vs. 85% of the housing units in Gaza. What we see is the absolute horrors that was Aleppo, and see it repeat in Gaza and think, this is unacceptable, and people don’t accept it.

Even though humans are very bad at statistics, humans are also smart. We are very good at spotting patterns and we can tell when we are being lied to, and we don’t like it. The Israeli government has been constantly lying to us throughout the genocide. They have been lying to us about about Hamas’ command centers, about their war goals, about their concerns for the hostages, etc.

We humans see that and can easily spot it, and it makes us mad. When the Israeli government tells us that all this destruction is because of Hamas’ presence there, we don’t believe it, that all those civilian deaths are just collateral damage we don’t believe that either. We know what collateral damage looks like, and see that Gaza does not fit it. Instead we see that civilians aren’t just accidentally killed, but they are actually targeted. I’ve seen interviews with experts on the news (mainly Democracy Now!) and they pretty much all agree that you don’t see this level of death and destruction among civilians unless they are actively targeted. This was also true of Aleppo btw.

We also spot the rhetoric among Israeli officials, and see similarities with history, we spot the racism and the hatred and it rings alarm bells. That is why we call this a genocide. Humans are good at spotting patterns, and the conduct of Israel is consistent with the patterns of genocide, so we call it a genocide. A case in point. As we were debating this, the Israeli Knesset voted overwhelmingly in favor of banning the main avenue for Palestinians to get aid. The only reason I personally see for this is genocidal intentions among 92 of the 120 members of the Israeli Knesset. That pretty much the whole Israeli legislator is on board with an ongoing genocide. The lies about UNWRA being connected with terrorism compounds mine (and most people’s) reaction, which further our anti-Israel bias. And you personally downplaying the history of the nation of Palestine also plays into this. Though not as extreme as what I initially feared (nor as extreme as the rhetoric of your government) it is still pretty damning and speaks of the complicity of the whole nation of Israel (not just the government) in the ongoing genocide.

It is not unusual for citizens of perpetrators of genocide to deny that genocide. I psychology this is called cognitive dissonance. Many Serbians today deny that the Bosnian genocide happened (or deny the very obvious Serbian involvement in it). Indonesians deny the genocide in East-Timor (despite the fact that there has been a political revolution in Indonesian since then). We even have quite a few Americans that deny the horrors of slavery, and probably most Europeans who deny (or downscale) the horrors of European colonialism.

Now, lets move away from peoples perception and the reason for why anti-Israel bias is increasing in the public consciousness, and onto the future and international law.

Like the the human brain, international law doesn’t compare atrocities with statistics. International law actually goes further and doesn’t compare them at all. International law takes into account which agreements a country has signed on to, and judges whether or not the country is in violation of those. This is the reason why the international community is giving Iran shit about their nuclear program but not Israel, despite the latter being a far worse offender. Iran has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treat, but Israel hasn’t so international law can’t do anything about the latter.

Israel is however a member of quite a few treaties of international humanitarian rights, and has been in violation of quite a few of them for a long time (the most obvious example being the apartheid wall on the West Bank). Very few countries (except superpowers like the USA or China) have disregarded international law for such a long time with impunity. And since the Gaza genocide, Israel has only doubled down in this behavior, the UNWRA ban is a prime example of this. I very much doubt the in 2026 Israel will remain a member of the UN if it keeps doing this (which [as a human] I think they will).

We are probably seeing Israel’s last moments as a non-pariah state. The anti-Israel bias is increasing among the public consciousness plus blatant disregard of international law is Israel’s own doing, and the time of impunity has come to an end. This prediction is consistent with the fate of other (non-superpower) oppressors and violators of international law.