Standing With Israel and Condemning Hamas

[Ari]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I wouldn't say I believe it, but I think it is believable. And even if it was Hamas fighters who killed some of (or many, or most) of those civilians I understand these things happen in armed conflict.

Hmm, so you either didn't watch the videos of people being murdered, have convinced yourself you don't need to, or that what you saw wasn't really what you saw. I expect the crisis actor stage is coming soon.
This is just sad.

[Ari]

While I would hope I would have been smart enough to not break one of the rules of partying, always invite the neighbors or else the neighbors will invite themselves. As a big psy-party, if I were living in Israel, I would have likely attended if not been working. I almost certainly would have been killed. It's good to know my death would be celebrated here.

[viscousmemories]

I get it. Who wants to live in a world where you can't have a rave a couple miles away from a concentration camp without having to worry about whether the inmates will break out and murder you. It's a tragedy. Maybe take a break from watching Israeli murder porn from October 7th and watch the videos from Gaza of children carrying the parts of their siblings, or the man holding the headless toddler, or the missile strike hitting a schoolyard full of kids playing soccer (that was two days ago), or the remains of the car Hind was in when the IDF murdered her, or any of the other hundreds of hours of video of an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Maybe eventually you'll start seeing Palestinians as humans too and quit whining that I won't condemn Hamas.

[Ari]

No, see, you don't get it. I am not here to argue, I'm not here to fight your little internet battle of pretend justice so you can claim you were in the right and then shrug because it was all for internet points. I am stating the fact that I would have certainly been murdered and you would cheer it as the justice I deserved because winning in the internet means more.

The internet has blackened your heart.

I am dead.
I will not be here again.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by Ari

I will not be here again.

Shit.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Shit.

Yes

[viscousmemories]

71 more Palestinians killed in the bombing of a refugee camp last night, but apparently my heart is blackened because I am not more horrified by the hypothetical murder of Ari or the unfortunate murders of some Israelis ten months ago than I am by the actual death, maiming, and starvation of actual human beings in Gaza actually occurring right now.

This is what the dehumanization of Palestinians looks like.

Israel has been actively trying to cleanse the region of Palestinians since 1948, yet nine months into what is only the latest round of massacres and forced starvation I am supposed to be more outraged that some Palestinians murdered some Israelis almost ten months ago.

Literally tens of thousands of men, women and children have been killed and maimed in Palestine in the past ten months, as many as two-hundred thousand by some estimates, yet if my heart wasn't blackened I would still be lamenting the deaths of a few hundred Israelis at a music festival.

This is not me saying those Israelis "deserved" to die, it is me saying yeah, I'm sorry but I am not willing to center real or hypothetical Israeli victims in a discussion about the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Of course what happened on October 7th was a fucking tragedy, but a predictable and avoidable tragedy that happened ten months ago, and there has been an ongoing tragedy unfolding every single day since then that apparently doesn't warrant any concern. And I'm the one with a blackened heart.

[erimir]

The point of contention here was not that you are refusing to "center" Israeli civilian deaths, but that you went out of your way to claim that Hamas didn't even mean to kill those civilians, or even that they weren't responsible at all!

They just happened upon a music festival and opened fire on an unarmed crowd rather than continuing on in search of military targets by accident or something, I guess. Raves and military bases do look similar. It was just some outside agitators anyway.

You said you wanted to reject "both sides are guilty" - but who was saying that both sides are equally guilty?

The reason we're discussing this aspect more is because this is also the area where we disagree more.

And if you're interested in convincing the Israelis to accept a peace deal, then regardless of how much attention you think their grievances deserve, you're going to have to be willing to address them. Unconditional surrenders don't happen without total defeat, and Israel is nowhere near suffering that, and you certainly have to make at a minimum rhetorical concessions absent that.

In the meantime, suggesting that Hamas didn't intend or wasn't even responsible for the worst massacres on October 7th is damaging to your cause, not helpful.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by erimir

In the meantime, suggesting that Hamas didn't intend or wasn't even responsible for the worst massacres on October 7th is damaging to your cause, not helpful.

I'll add that the suggestion that some notable number of Palestinian civilians not associated with Hamas were both armed and murderous enough to spontaneously attack Israeli civilians when the opportunity presented itself is... uh.... problematic? Requires extraordinary evidence? Sounds like something out of an Israeli supremacist fever dream?

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by erimir

[...] you went out of your way to claim that Hamas didn't even mean to kill those civilians, or even that they weren't responsible at all!

No, I did not say that. I said it is believable that they were not targetting civilians.

In this article I linked to in my earlier post, Hamas leadership claims they were targeting the military installations and personnel, while acknowledging that things "may have gotten out of control" resulting in the killings of civilians. Maybe by Hamas fighters, maybe by others. All I have said is that I find it believable that this is true. That is to say that the plan was not to seek out civilians to kill and kidnap, even though Hamas and/or other armed groups did kill and kidnap civilians when they came upon them. That music festival wasn't even supposed to be there, so it is literally impossible that it was a target of Hamas.

There are numerous other armed factions in Gaza besides Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), who were the organizers of this assault, and there is evidence that representatives of other factions took advantage of the opportunity to cross over. There hasn't been a thorough independent investigation because Israel has refused to allow it and we know that they have lied through their teeth about many things from that day.

This is the most thorough investigative report I have seen yet on the events of October 7th:

October 7 | Al Jazeera Investigations - YouTube

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Good thing he didn’t say Final Solution.

[ShottleBop]

A worthwhile read

Excerpt:

By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.


These were issues that I could only discuss with a very small handful of activists, scholars, experts in international law and, not surprisingly, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Beyond this limited circle, such statements on the illegality of Israeli actions in Gaza are anathema in Israel. Even the vast majority of protesters against the government, those calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, will not countenance them.

Since I returned from my visit, I have been trying to place my experiences there into a larger context. The reality on the ground is so devastating, and the future appears so bleak, that I have allowed myself to indulge in some counter-factual history and to entertain some hopeful speculations about a different future. I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? That same declaration which stated that Israel “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”.

What effect would such a constitution have had on the nature of the state? How would it have tempered the transformation of Zionism from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, expansionism and apartheid? During the few hopeful years of the Oslo peace process, people in Israel began speaking of making it into a “state of all its citizens”, Jews and Palestinians alike. The assassination of prime minister Rabin in 1995 put an end to that dream. Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it – as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace?

[viscousmemories]

I literally just came here to share that article. Here's the author bio from Wikipedia:

Omer Bartov (Hebrew: עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב [ʔoˈmeʁ ˈbaʁtov]; born 1954) is an Israeli-American historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide.

[viscousmemories]

I should note that while I'm happy he eventually came to the conclusion that Israel's actions in Gaza are genocidal, I am more aligned with the view that Israel has been engaged in genocide, with varying degrees of overt violence, since 1948.

I also overlooked the subtle indications of the authors pro-Zionist inclinations, but someone pointed them out to me. For example in the last paragraph quoted above: there is very little evidence that Zionism's founders ever "eloquently envisioned it - as a nation based on freedom, justice, and peace", and lots of evidence that the most prominent Zionists going back to the late 19th century were fully cognizant of its being a colonial project that would necessarily displace the Arab population that had lived there for centuries, violently if necessary.

[viscousmemories]

Wikipedia is actually doing a really good job of documenting the many countries, organizations, and scholars that have identified what Israel is doing in Gaza as a genocide.

Israel has been accused by experts, governments, United Nations agencies and non-governmental organisations of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people during its invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the ongoing Israel–Hamas war. By July 2024, after nine months of attacks, Israeli military action had resulted in nearly 40,000 confirmed Palestinian deaths — 1 out of every 59 people in Gaza — averaging 148 deaths per day. Most of the victims are civilians, of whom at least 50% are women and children, and 103 journalists.

Gaza genocide - Wikipedia

[ShottleBop]

And now the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's security agency, has recognized as "terrorism" the atrocities against Palestinians being committed by settlers in the West Bank: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ar...outh-west-bank

Other members of the Israeli government are calling for his dismissal.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

'This is our land, we deserve it': Dozens of Israelis planning to cross border and settle in Gaza | World News | Sky News

When asked what should happen to the Palestinians currently living in the territory, one Israeli woman replied: "We should kill them. Every last one of them."

[viscousmemories]

This is what the Biden admin working tirelessly behind the scenes to bring an end to the genocide in Gaza looks like:

Readout of Austin call with Gallant

[erimir]

Well, we've got our likely next Secretary of State, Marco Rubio:

The new Secretary of State Marco Rubio is no fan of Hamas pic.twitter.com/0vXIMEgTRB

— John Aziz (@aziz0nomics) November 12, 2024

And Trump just announced that he wants to make Mike Huckabee his Ambassador to Israel. I wonder what that fundamentalist nutjob thinks about Israel?

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Huckabee calls Israel an "ally", "America's greatest friend in the region", and says Israel should have access to advanced weapons and technology. He is a Christian Zionist politician, and has written that, "the Jews have a God-given right to reclaim land given to their ancestors and taken away from them."

Huckabee opposes the notion of Palestinian statehood in the Holy Land. Huckabee encourages West Bank settlements which are illegal under international law, and has gone so far as to deny Israel's existing military occupation in the region. In 2017, at an event in the West Bank, he stated: "There is no such thing as a West Bank - it's Judea and Samaria. There's no such thing as a settlement. They're communities. They're neighborhoods. They're cities. There's no such thing as an occupation."

Huckabee first visited Israel as a teenager, and has returned numerous times since then. During some of his visits he expressed his support for Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, stating that Jews "should be able to live in their own country."

Oh.

ETA: Huckabee has also said "there's no such thing as a Palestinian."

[Stephen Maturin]

Great. Just great. Huckabee is one of those old school fundie whackjobs dedicated to the restoration of the ancient kingdom of Israel so all the Jews can gather together in one place, thereby making it easier for God to slaughter them all when the time comes. Of course, that means slaughtering all the Arab occupiers first.