Of course, Israel is a pure white dove. For instance, they have rallies for "the right to rape prisoners" (and recently to kill them) [0]. Or to willingly mutilate peaceful protesters presenting no risk[1].
The problem is that the total lack of moral limits in Israel only forces their opponents to escalate, or accept to be treated like animals (in the case of the West Bank Palestinians). It also affects the US, since that they have to follow along with Israel' way of doing the war (mainly, war crimes).
The problem is that once a party starts to commit atrocities, all others tend to do it. Atrocities by Israel are not new, and Israel has a long history about it, since its inception:
That is the consequence of a long-term policy. Israel made sure the Palestinian authority was sidelined and helped Hamas get full control of the Gaza Strip. History did not start in October 2023.
As a first step they could give back some of their illegal settlements. Then over time give back more, until they are back in UN recognized borders. That would be a start. They could also start to persecute violent mobs that chased people out of their own homes and the people in the military covering them. They could also release unjustifiably imprisoned people.
You know, things that basic human decency would demand of them.
The war started by Israel, ostensibly as a retaliation for a dispute about a bit of water, which Israel used as a pretext to invade the West Bank? What about it?
This comment is exactly why there is no hope out there. Literally zero understanding of middle-Eastern geopolitics other than trite slogans.
Come on. Do you think everyone is going to suddenly start holding hands and singing kumbaya? Or more realistically, like nearly every other surrounding state it'll be the elimination and exodus of Jews and Israelis?
Hamas didn't have prior knowledge of the festival, and partygoers were also murdered by the Israeli army. And in general flattening entire cities don't leave their habitants very keen toward Israel either. It just reinforces the cycle of aggression, which allows Israel to take more land.
That's a crazy way to defend an ongoing genocide. The scale is so different that the only way to miss it is willful bad faith.
How long and how far do you go with that justification? Does it work the other way too? Are "their" actions justified forever because of something wrong that was done to them? Can anyone in the world do to you anything and everything forever if they were ever wronged by someone born in the same general geographic area as you?
Whenever you find yourself defending any genocide, under any excuse, defending the killing of innocent children because some other guys from the same general area also killed people, you are the bigger problem and no amount of fresh accounts justifying it makes you better.
I didn't defend. I just pointed out that the "freedom fighters" in everyone's minds are raping murdering bastards and I refuse to take a moral position and support or defend them for it.
That in itself is an abhorrent position and I am disgusted at anyone who takes it.
And further extrapolation as you edited it, if a child has a gun pointing at your head and has been trained to fire it at you, which is exactly what they have been doing, then they are legally combatants. But it makes a good statistical and PR job which is just as abhorrent. Legally and statistically speakingh, children... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD2FezhJgqA
Genocide, apartheid, and 50 years of terrorism murder of children, destruction of hospitals, churches, schools, universities and imprisonment of a people’s in a Ghetto (yes, a fucking ghetto) is the moral bottom however. Israel is indefensible morally.
There is one other possibility: Finish the genocide. Finish ethnically cleansing the region and put the remaining Palestinians into reservations. After a while once the current threat is eliminated, Israel can become Greater Israel and the Israelis can do land acknowledgements while they enjoy their new Riviera and Gaza.
It's so sad to see this ridiculous argument every time. Israel is the aggressor, the murder and the main threat to the region's peace, not the victim. This, of course, does not mean that Iran is not another threat, but its actions seem like nothing compared to what Israel is doing.
The only endgame I see for the region is sadly the complete and utter annihilation of all civilizations there, possibly through nuclear means.
I do not say this lightly and I say it with a deep sadness in my heart for the people of the middle east, but also with the sober realization that this is the only end of the path that is currently walked.
There's a much less grim end, probably coming at short term:
If the US stop giving unconditional blank check support to Israel, then the nuisance power of the Jewish supremacists there disappears overnight. The US popular support for Israel is now at an all time low, and the recent war may be the straw that breaks the Camel's back.
All that's needed to stabilize the region is some amount of pushback to the destabilizing country here. Iran have been a destabilizing force for the past decade, but since 2023 Israel is by far the biggest threat to the region, and it's mostly due to Netanyahu's political survival relying on the state of perpetual war he's put the country in.
Should the US put even a modicum amount of pressure to Israel (or even just declare they wouldn't support them should the EU put economic sanctions on Israel), then the current cabinet collapse, Netanyahu ends up in prison for corruption and the middle east is stable for a decade.
All of this madness is happening because the US enables a madman to escape his own judicial system through foreign wars.
As an outsider here's the point of my fear . Looks at democratic countries and muslim unification during gaza issue, this is a threat but as far as Jews are concerned they don't have this type of threat to democracy
> Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls "heroism": a "defiant creation of meaning" expressing "the myth of the significance of human life" as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.
> Such symbolic self-focus takes the form of an individual's "causa sui project", (sometimes called an "immortality project", or a "heroism project"). A person's "causa sui project" acts as their immortality vessel, whereby they subscribe to a particular set of culturally-created meanings and through them gain personal significance beyond that afforded to other mortal animals. This enables the individual to imagine at least some vestige of those meanings continuing beyond their own life-span; thus avoiding the complete "self-negation" we perceive when other biological creatures die in nature.
You can find big similarities such as the promised land as the immortality vessel, heroism as a response to historical trauma and the ongoing attacks on their sovereignty, and the immortality project would be the nation-state. Becker goes on to categorize all of this similar to a mental illness. You can read the wikipedia page here, I find it very helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
TL;DR: If you look through Becker's lens, you start to realize how stupid such wars and expansionist ideals seem. People should focus on what exists now and stop chasing projects that'd span beyond their lifetimes while making life today worse.