Israel is Coming Apart at the Seams, It Seems

If you had any actual interest in the numbers (which represent actual children dying FFS) you might find that there are different numbers around for good reason. Firstly, yes - it's increasing. Secondly, there are deaths caused directly by the IDF and those caused by starvation, disease and so forth. Thirdly there are actual counted deaths and presumed ones - as thousands of bodies are still under the rubble.

This is the discourse on Israeli TV.

And here's a really good piece on the situation and on Hamas from a Gazan-American, written at the end of November. His entire family in Gaza was wiped out by the IDF yesterday, but so it goes.

There is no solution to this problem until Hamas is gone.

There is absolutely no chance any Israeli government is going to give them yet another chance.

Israel hasn't even been sanctioned by any government that it cares about or would impact it's trade or internal politics. The only sanctions that are actually being proposed are against individual settler groups.

People can protest all the want. The West is with Israel, and the Arabs don't care about the Palestinians. If they did they could have intervened, they haven't done a single thing except talk, because they want to appease their own radicals.

Hamas has fled Qatar, as they know Israel is coming for their leadership next.

Large scale warfare as we've seen since about 10/15 will be over in the fairly short term.

As no one is going to take in the Palestinians because no one wants to bring in terrorists in their borders who have attacked their host countries time and time again, the only assured outcome is a dominant Israel and a dismantled Hamas.

And in other real news, the US has warned the Houthis to stop the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea that so delights @RickDeckard.

Houthi attacks have been indiscriminate, targeting several ships not even heading to Israel. The last attack was on a Liberian flagged merchant ship. Previously they targeted a Chinese registered vessel, a Danish vessel, and a Maltan vessel.

The US is forming a multinational task force that is going to engage Houthi forces that continue to attack international shipping.

Which of course was always going to be the response, as any person with a modicum of critical thinking would have foreseen.

Israel has agreed to not intervene in Yemen expanding the war, pending the international task force response, at the urging of US diplomats.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/14/us-warns-yemens-houthis-stop-red-sea-attacks

Hey, that's a good idea, piss off the Chinese and the Americans. That'll end well.

Ongoing war in Sudan that has already claimed 2-3 million lives is reaching the catastrophic famine stage. 30 million are believed to be at near critical levels of hunger as the harvest has dramatically failed. UN aid convoys have only reached Darfur once in the last three months, and both sides are using food as a weapon.

https://www.newarab.com/news/war-pushes-sudan-towards-catastrophic-famine-conditions

I haven't posted in this shit show of a thread for three days and there are now 8 pages of garbage for me to catch up on?

Fuck that.

I assume Wordforge's favourite anti-semites are still supporting Hamas?

They're opening an additional aid crossing, from the Israeli side. Something they said earlier that they wouldn't do. Pressure works.

So today in the most pussified army in the world, they targetted Al Jazeera journalists, and then prevented medical teams from reaching the wounded cameraman, leaving him to bleed out for five hours and then die.

Separately they managed to kill three of the people they're meant to be rescuing. Current count of rescued hostages remains at zero.

Can't we just beam Hamas, the IDF, and Netanyahu to an island to kill each other, and leave everyone else who just wants to live their lives alone?
No? No beamers yet?
Fuck.

Nah because then you give colonialism credence. I don’t rate colonialism as anything at all really. It’s done, it happened, it will never be somehow reversed, get over it

People who still harp on about it need to get a life and a clue and move on

Damn, I didn't read the last 8 pages so didn't realize T'Bonz came back to throw a few grenades into this thread. Wow.

The simple fact of the matter is that humans have been taking land from other humans (either by force or barter) since we all crawled out of the ocean. The whole notion of "colonialism" is just one giant con to make some folks feel better about themselves. George Carlin has a great line about most environmentalists being a bunch of white, bourgeois liberals who are full of narrow, unenlightened self-interest. The same idea applies here.

Or maybe we should just give everything back to the amoeba?

I get so tired of the ‘Colonialism’ BS.
Israel is supposedly a colony of what country?

As has been pointed out (and ignored) MULTIPLE times the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim. Middle Eastern and North African Jews kicked out of their countries after the establishment of Israel and their descendants.

They don’t have a country to ‘go back to’.

Israel is a Refugee Nation, not a Colonial one.

Free water!

Lots to discuss here but I’m on my lunch so just a driveby to say that the Westphalian System (including the concept of a nation state) goes back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648) a bit more than 100 years.

Those things are not mutually exclusive, and this question is not clearcut.

22% of Israeli citizens are dual passport holders. The Israeli state offers incentives for Jews to come settle there from anywhere else in the world. There is ongoing settlement activity on stolen land, and ongoing stealing of land.

There are certainly elements of colonialism at play.

I said that it was fully established 100 years ago, not that that was it's origin. Although the original concept was vastly different to what we've ended up with.

Fully established? I know some Uighurs, Tibetans, Chechens, Dagistanis, Tuvans, Baluchi, Azeri, Kurds, Basques, Catalans, among many others (including some folks in the NE corner of a island in NW Europe) who might disagree that it was ‘fully established’ 100 years ago.

Sure there are some ’aspects’ but it is still just dumb.

Again, Israel is a colony of what country? That’s what Colonalism is about, one country setting up a colony in another land. Colonialism, colony, it isn’t that hard.

Not to mention it completely ignores the political reality of Israel. Hands down the best thing that could happen to the Palestinians would be for all Ashkenazim outside Israel to magically teleport to Tel Aviv.

Lukid (and the even crazier righties) are mostly Mizrahim (Middle East and North African Jews). The most pro-peace Israelis are mostly Ashkenazim (descendants of European and American Jews).

Yep, point taken. Anyway, I'm also now without access to a keyboard so it might be a while before I'm able to do anything in detail on any of this.

A terrific article by Caitlin Johnstone on propaganda, the mental narrative, and why people are convinced to believe what they're told rather than what they see.

All The Propaganda Is Splattering Against A Solid Wall Of Reality

Source: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/all-the-propaganda-is-splattering

For me, this quote is the crux of it all for me:

You cannot persuade me to believe the obliteration of a child can ever be justified. Ever. You cannot. Quite frankly, I lose trust in anyone who tries to convince me of such, because I have to wonder what in their minds allows them to make this mental leap and call it reasonable.

Man, the irony...

George, for all his faults, was certainly right when it came to the softening and changing of language to better fit imperialist (and especially US) narratives.

Wow. The excuse that the IDF are going with for killing the hostages is that they looked like Palestinians. Which is effectively an admission that it's open season on those.

Now Netanyahu has reversed course on negotiations and his guy is back in Qatar to see if a deal can be made for the others.

Oh, and the hostages families are threatening to go on a hunger strike.

Okay, back to another drive by (to be clear I agree with a lot of what you say).

Strong Federalism along ethnic lines is an interesting concept that I haven’t really thought about in this context.

There would definitely have to be some kind of setup along the lines of the Grundgesetz (german: Basic Law/Foundational Law - effectively their constitution) that outlines certain basic rights that cannot be amended and the protection of which is the purpose of government.

How you work the IDF, Shin Bet and Mossad (Never Again isn’t just a slogan - the Israeli/Jewish security services aren’t going away/out of their control) into this is also a sticky wicket.

However to sidetrack or maybe not, I was gonna say ‘Strong Federalism works until it doesn’t’ and then post a link to the Tigray War thread.

You know the 2020-22 civil war* in which the general consensus is that between 250-500 THOUSAND people were killed the vast majority of which were Tigray civilians killed by the Federal Government cutting off all humanitarian aid supplies while firebombing Tigray fields?

Yeah, that war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Tigray_War?wprov=sfti1#

And ya know the weird thing?

I couldn’t find the thread.

Wanna know a weirder thing?

Not only wasn’t there a 64+ page thread only one, ONE, poster even talked about it.

In fact going back to 2008 (far back as search goes) only one poster has used the words Tigray, Oromo, Amhara (the three major ethnic groups involved) Ethiopia or Eritrea AT ALL.

That’s just plain weird. I bet some admin deleted the very long thread we had on the ACTUAL genocide there.

No way all the keyboard human rights heroes in this thread would just ignore it.

We should try and figure out who deleted the thread.

*kinda? I mean the Eritreans were just as bad as the Ethiopian Defense Forces, worse in some cases, but considering they only became their own country after their own civil war/war of independence against Ethiopia in the 90s [which not coincidentally is when the Tigrays controlled the Federal Government - some folks can hold a grudge] does this make it an interstate war or just a continuation of a civil/ethnic one?

Not really concerned with who Caitlin Johnstone is, but there is nothing made up about the line this is a war of defense and Israel has a right to defend itself. That’s the objective reality. And it would be helpful for the entire peace process if everyone waiving a Palestinian flag learned to accept this.

Otherwise, you are going to have the endless cycle of Hamas or <insert terrorist group here> lobbing missiles into southern Israel and the IDF responding with force that far exceeds what started the skirmish.

It's easy for you to say that. Your family isn't getting murdered in the name of "defense."

You will never have to worry about being a second class citizen living under an occupation. It is a colonizer's mindset to suggest they get used to their oppression.

Indeed, since those entities are as unacceptable to the Palestinians as Hamas are to the Israelis. There is some hard compromising to be done.

How many of the denizens of this fine place are located in countries which have deep complicity in the crimes committed in the Tigray War? Because that is the case with regard to Gaza for almost all of us (US, UK, EU).
And of course, this is a discussion board. Given the relative lack of visibility we have of Ethiopia and the fact that pretty much everyone is going to agree about the essentials, if there were a thread it wouldn't generate heated debate and wouldn't run to 64 pages. It'd probably get about a half dozen posts. I mean, there are lots of things that I myself care about that I just don't post here because it won't interest others and will generate zero interaction. That's probably the case for everyone.

I did raise an equivalent point in the Ukraine discussion. In that case, it was about why the noble struggle for freedom which so animated efforts in that country was apparently absent when it came to others, why the same parties felt entitled to take the opposite approach in other regions of the world and why the same posters felt it acceptable to ignore that. I was accused of whataboutery and IIRC you personally pos-repped the posters doing so.

Let's look at the comparison between Gaza and that as an "actual" genocide though. It's not clear if there's a magic number that the Israelis need to hit before you decide that their intentions are clear. But there are 20,000 people dead in 2 months in Gaza. The Tigray War lasted 2 years. Exact number of deaths are unclear for the latter but it is obvious that if the killing in Gaza goes on for 2 years at the same rate, there will by then be 240,000 dead, which is certainly in the same ballpark. Add to that the fact that the number of people living in the affected areas of Ethiopia was several times higher than those in Gaza, and we see that the proportion being killed is Gaza is much higher.