this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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The UN and EU consider lots of things Israel does illegal. We just don't do anything about it and they don't care.
This is true. But it is also because there isn't a much better alternative.
The Palestinians don't have a Nelson Mandela, MLK or Mahatma Gandhi kind of person that the western world can rally around and support.
Like, I'm sitting here at home in Europe, thoroughly disapproving of Israel, while being also fully disgusted by what Hamas did.
And I understand why Palestinians fight. I can understand that they can't be fully pacifist and that they don't have the capability to wage a normal war, so they result to asymmetric warfare.
But if they had just cleanly killed or kidnapped the adults and spared the children, that would have been the minimum to not fully alienate a lot of people who are sympathetic to their cause.
I guess Yasser Arafat was the best they had and it only went downhill after that.
The problem I have with the "both sides" argument is while I agree we should not approve of Hamas' actions, Israel routinely murders civilians without consequence. We tut and tsk but we still send them basically unlimited aid and approval.
Yes both sides behave badly but one side does so with our explicit support.
Don't forget how Israel sells world-class spyware to despots and dictators, who use it to terrorise journalists and political opponents.
Including their supposed arch nemesis in Saudi Arabia, who used their tech to kill Khashoggi
There's a bit of a moral difference though. When you say 'routinely murders civilians', in a lot of cases we're talking about protestors throwing rocks or molotovs at police or soldiers. Or when Hamas is firing missiles from a schoolyard or the roof of a hospital. Where do you draw the line where police/army/country has the right to defend themselves? Of course it creates a tense situation and Israel is going to close ranks around those who are far too trigger happy.
But there's still a huge difference with Hamas' stated and demonstrated goal to kill off all jews. Israel is trying to bully the muslims so that they would emigrate, but they're not killing civilians to wipe them out (if that were the case they would be failing).
As a comparison Israel is acting more like Morocco colonising the Western Sahara and Hamas is acting like Europeans genociding the Native Americans
IDF soldiers have murdered plenty of children. It is routine and I don't care if they are protesting, they are entitled to protest oppression.
Hamas are disgusting and Israel are cunts but Hamas is because of what Israel does.
Well if you casually leave out that part it becomes a lie by omission. And there's a reason you have to use this lie both to yourself and to others. It has a whole different ring to it when you say "IDF regularly shoot teenagers throwing molotov cocktails in protest" instead of "routinely murdering children".
Siblings Ali and Mayar ed-Din, who were killed in an IDF airstrike on May 9, 2023
Damn teenagers get younger with every cull.
Mohammed Tamimi is the youngest Palestinian killed in the conflict this year (June 2023)
Shot in the head by Israeli forces.
He was 2.
Israel made those men kill hundreds of people at a concert. They had no other choice. Brave protestors. Do you even listen to yourself?
We (the EU at least) also send a lot of aid to Palestinians.
Israel should be sanctioned and decolonized like South Africa was.
And I, for one, believe that that would have happened a long time ago if the Palestinians had followed the Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi playbook.
Perhaps I am wrong. Like the rest of the world, I also don't have the solution for this quagmire.
The experiment has actually been running already. The Gaza Strip is run by Hamas, which is violent and pushes back against Israel however they can. The West Bank is run by Fatah, which has been attempting to keep good relations with Israel and work with them.
Despite that, the West Bank has seen a continuing encroachment of illegal Israeli settlers, continuing violence directed at Palestinians, both by the settlers moving in there and by the Israeli army. The reason the border with Gaza was so ill-defended was because Netanyahu had moved much of the force usually stationed there into the West Bank. Palestinian deaths in the West Bank has been rising.
I don't think the Mahatma Ghandi approach is likely to work in the Middle East. At least no better than any other approach people have been trying has been working there.
The US sends aid to palestine as well, just nowhere near as much as we do to israel.
And there isn't a good solution. No matter what, everybody will be mad. Mad and not violent would be nice, though.
Development aid, not weapons as the west supplies to Israel. But otherwise you're right. The whole region should be disarmed.
The only way to disarm "the whole region" would be to basically level all of it and make it totally uninhabitable.
That thought also crossed my mind.
I’m not saying it’s the right move
But it would solve a whole lot of issues.
Thing also is that those people were also hated during thier time and also called terrorists. There’s no good options for a leader sadly.
I was alive when Nelson Mandela was active, and he wasn't called a terrorist in the west.
He was revered as a hero by many in the West, just like Navalny is revered today.
By Reagan and the establishment, yes.
But many western people and institutions were definitely promoting and supporting him from the very beginning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_honours_received_by_Nelson_Mandela
Lol fucking what? The USSR militarily supported the Nazis until they were attacked
He literally WAS a terrorist. He ran the ANC’s terrorist wing. People called him a terrorist and it was accurate.
A lot of people seem the think he was only regarded well once released from prison. I certainly didn't know much about him until then.
Yet Only Fools and Horses was made in 1981, and they lived in Nelson Mandela House. So even in the UK we knew South Africa was on the wrong side of history. And we should know, we wrote most of it...
But Hamas does very textbook terrorist things, seems to me like they are actually terrorists.
So were the IRA...
And yet now here we are with Sinn Fein holding elected positions.
At some point there has to be dialogue otherwise you just keep killing one another.
As opposed to the ANC? Who literally had a terrorist wing run by Mandela?
As opposed to the IDF that’s been terrorizing Palestinians constantly?
It’s terrorists in both sides. Unfortunately civilians are the ones caught in the crossfire.
As opposed to the resistants (including many Jews) during WW2 who were literally called terrorists by Nazis ?
The West called Mandela a terrorist until he won and they killed MLK
So
The West being one single hive mind like the bugs in Starship Troopers
Oh sure, there is some factions within the West, but on the whole they agree on the big stuff. It's why they're all allied with eachother in the first place. It's not a hive mind, it's a team.
And Gandhi was a black-hating Mussolini sympathiser.
This is the sort of thing that reminds me never to trust the accepted wisdom of internet groups.
Gandhi after being educated in England was only a little less racist then everyone else when he first went to South Africa and made the famous comment you're referring to... He then had his awakening against oppression and began to fight for an end to racism, one of the main popular scandals against Gandhi in South Africa was that the medical corp he set up would give aid to whoever needed it first regardless of rank, colour or ethnicity. The rest of his life he wrote and fought for the rights of all.
But of course 'popular person was actually bad' is a fun hot take so of course it's going to be banded around without any nuance.
They dont need a Palestinian Mandela to stop military and civil aid and cooperation when Israel commits war crimes.
The UN condemns Israel as a pastime activity. Nobody in Israel cares what they say at this point.
Because they are the West’s military outpost in the Middle East A
I guess sanctions only make sense when Israel is out of the picture.