[epsters]

Don't know about who exactly are the 'leftists' you are referring to but here's my take :

Palestine : Dont send bombs. Send Aid. Lift blockade so Palestinians dont suffer.

Iran : Dont send bombs. Send Aid. Lift sanctions so Iranian people dont suffer.

Interested to hear your take regarding the same.

[busterarm]

Lifting sanctions just helps the mullahs flex their power on Iranian civilians. Lifted sanctions means more suffering for Iranian people and people abroad suffering from Iran-funded terrorist groups.

[epsters]

'To help the civillians we must starve them with total economic sanctions until they overthow their government' comes off as cynical and depraved (in hindsight of similar actions in Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and also Iran ) and i no longer subscribe to it.

[jopsen]

I'm not sure it's about helping get civilians.

Sanctions for Iran is about limiting their economic growth. So that they are less effective should they try to attack their neighbors.

Civilians in a dictatorship are probably not entirely with responsibility for the regime actions either.

Regimes can rarely survive without supporters.

[js8]

> Lifting sanctions just helps the mullahs flex their power on Iranian civilians

I am not sure how you're imagining this. Showing that they can buy an American iPhone, for example, is a worse "flex of power" than killing 30k protestors? I just don't get what is the supposed power flex without sanctions gonna be.

The purpose of sanctions is (everytime) actually different. It's to break the civilians so they would revolt against the government. So with sanctions, you're hurting civilians by definition. It might be "for the greater good", but it's certainly amoral approach in my book.

[krainboltgreene]

This is such an absurd analysis that it is bewildering anyone would post it.

[busterarm]

Lifting the sanctions doesn't suddenly make their government, regulation or economy stable. Their biggest companies are all government-owned and famously corrupt and mismanaged.

This is criticism given from most of the region when the topic of lifting sanctions comes up. Nothing I said is novel or extreme.

In fact, we have direct evidence of what happens when those sanctions are lifted from when it was done under the Biden administration. They expanded their nuclear program and expanded funding to their regional proxies to carry out terror campaigns. The Houthis attacked global shipping lines and October 7th happened. That's not theoretical.

Btw, I'm of Iranian descent.

[wsve]

> October 7th happened.

This is a weird thing to say to me. You're saying that keeping sanctions on Iran is important to prevent another October 7 because Iran was funding Hamas? Okay, but then wouldn't it be better to put sanctions on Israel, since they're the aggressive, colonizing, occupying force?

[busterarm]

1. Not just funding, but arming and training. 2. On the edge of whataboutism, but definitely victim-blaming regardless of your position on Israel. 3. Sanctions on Israel won't stop Iran from attempting to wipe Israel off the map. It'll only help. 4. Looking at global politics through the lens of black/white, either/or is fucking crazy and stupid.

[wsve]

2. Its not whataboutism, it's addressing the issue (The motivations and ability of Hamas to attack Israel) from a different angle (maybe instead of stopping attacks on Israel in a very roundabout way by sanctioning Iran so they have less ability to arm and train any Palestinian resistance, we reduce the motivation for Hamas/Palestinians to fight Israel by putting pressure on Israel to stop their occupation/apartheid of Palestine? Bonus, it's the right thing to do)

3. Consider that Israel is also interested in wiping most of its neighbors off the map (and has, in the past 2 years, already attacked 5 of its neighbors, often with disproportionate force and brutality), and unlike Iran has far more military might and international support to do so? If we want to reduce violence in the middle east, let's look at the nation most prone to dishing it out, and most able to defend itself from it.

4. When did I look at anything through a black and white lens? I didn't say one or the other, I said my method would be more fruitful (and just)

[ithkuil]

I used to think like you. There is some deeply human in seeking basic justice that even small children have strong reactions even for the minor perceived injustices, let alone for serious stuff.

However when your survival is at stake (and the survival of your own kind and culture) people often stop giving a damn about who was right and who was wrong and they just try to defend themselves.

Many people understand this when the people defending themselves are Palestinians, and somehow are able to forgive senseless violence that they do, all because "they are in the right".

But somehow they cannot imagine that Israeli Jews are living for a long time in a genuine existential threat. Many people just think that all those Jews who live in Israel should just go back where they came from. That's obviously impossible since many fled countries where they didn't feel safe.

It's hard to understand the determination to fight for having just a normal life. We can't understand this because most people in the world have a "nation" a "fatherland" a place where they don't get butchered just because they belong to a given race or speak with an accent or have a long nose.

The situation is not symmetrical at all. Arabs can live in Israel. Arab citizens are not discriminated, there are Arab doctors, Arab justices, Arab members of the parlament. 20% of the Israeli citizens are Arab Muslims.

Israel is the multicultural democratic state that everybody claims to want Palestine to be. Jews need Israel to exist because they need a state that will protect them and not be at the whims of whatever populist government will turn their neighbors against (as it happened many times in many places, not only in Germany)

And yes, Israel did do many crimes directly and indirectly and has mistreated Palestinians in many cases.

But you have to put things in context. Arabs never accepted the Palestinian state and fought with several wars. Which they lost.

These kind of stuff happened many times in history, even recent history. Many borders were redrawen even in Europe and people were displaced. None of that is a good thing for people who suffered it

But Arabs did something that nobody else did for quite a long time: they engaged in a holy war, using suicide bombings and having an utter disregard for their own lives and the lives of their own children, all in the name of martyrdom. This ideology is very hard to fight. Japanese lost and surrendered, Germans lost and surrendered. Palestinian lost and kept blowing up people and making their own women and children dangerous. This increased the tension and created the condition for security checks and a kind of apartheid.

But this can be solved, if only Arabs stopped demanding the destruction of Israel. Of course, Israel cannot accept laying down their arms and letting them be butchered.

There is truth in the quote: if Palestinians laid down their arms there will be peace, if Israelis laid down their arms there would be genocide.

This seems like a crazy statement but this happens every single time Israel lowers their guard.

The only reason Israeli Jews are not dead is because they are efficient at defending themselves.

They are constantly bombed but they blow the rockets out of the air. They have shelters.

That's why there are so few dead Jews. Not for lack of trying on the Arab side.

---

So what is the right thing to do in this case?

Saying "Israel shouldn't have been created in 48 so they are and they always been colonizers so now they just have to go away"?

How can this be reasonable solution? We're talking about millions of people who are born there for a few generations now.

[krainboltgreene]

> Lifting the sanctions doesn't suddenly make their government, regulation or economy stable

True we only sanction them because it's funny.

I don't really care what descent you are, anyone can have a bad opinion of American foreign policy. There are tons of people right now in America who are Iranian that are screaming for a crazy monarch to take power.

[busterarm]

It's fun to be reminded boards like this can have extremists that think they're in the majority.

Sanctions against Iran are imposed by the United Nations (also the US, UK and EU). That means that UN member states think that sanctions against Iran are politically palatable. It's definitionally mainstream opinion that Iran should be sanctioned.

[krainboltgreene]

And? Realizing that you can't convince me that punishing the population is correct, you fall back to "Well a bunch of nation states are kowtowing to American hegemony" which is frankly pathetic.

[namlem]

A lot of Iranians would probably love for us to send weapons. There are videos of Iranians celebrating the bombings of IRGC bases during the 12-day war.

[diedyesterday]

Your simplistic recipe shows you don't understand the situation and way for improvement in either case.

[wsve]

What part of the previous comment do you think is so ridiculous?

[dartharva]

And why should liberal countries trade with genocidal regimes, so that they don't kill their own people? Is that seriously what you're proposing - appease the bully?