The situation in the Middle East is likely going to get worse before it gets better. It is kind of disturbing that there are rallies at Universities, which are indirectly anti-Israel. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am Jewish but I have never had any connection to Israel, other than appreciating it existence just in case Jews become a targeted group in the US.
I do not understand the rationale of being anti-Israel at the moment. Israel was attacked with terrible consequences. What do some people believe should have been their response to the attack? Israel, like any country, has the right to defend itself against a country that attacks it or declares war.
I saw the Harvard Club of Israel delivered a scathing reprimand to Harvard’s leadership for not responding quick enough to the anti-Israel sentiments from Harvard students.
must punish for wrongthink
Crazy how a group of students have been piled up on for basically sharing similar views with the ex-PM of Israel
Ehud Barak blames Binyamin Netanyahu for “the greatest failure in Israel’s history” (economist.com)
Hamas attacked Israel.
Palestinians didn’t attack Israel.
Yet Israel is attacking and killing innocent Palestinians as an excuse to defend itself and occupy whatever land Israelis have yet to steal since 1948. You can’t ignore the history.
I support both Israel and Palestine innocent lives. I condemn Hamas. I am a Caucasian male with no ties to anyone but study the history.
If you see videos, innocent lives are being lost: One by the hand of the Israeli government and the other by the hands of Hamas, a terrorist entity.
Palestinians are being targeted and there is a genocide taking place while the world watches. Hamas is not being eliminated, only Palestinians are.
I’m sure I’ll get MS for my balanced and unbiased view so go ahead.
Hamas attacked and killed innocent Israelis
Agreed. Hamas attacked, not the Palestinians. Think people need to stop thinking Hamas = Palestinians. That’s the point.
Hamas is the government in Gaza. If the government of a country declares war on you, a country should respond with force. Palestinian lives are at risk because Hamas attacked Israel
I totally understand Israel’s reaction, which is understandable. Unfortunately, the only people being defeated are the Palestinians, not Hamas.
Hate to see innocent lives, regardless of nationality, being lost due to politics. It’s sad.
And when was the last time Palestinians had elections? It was in 2007 when Fatah won authority of the West Bank and Hamas became the de facto authority in the Gaza strip effectively seizing control with force. So I'd be cautious using the term "government". Hamas are extreme fundamentalists with no political (or any other form of) agenda other than hard-core Sunni views. Nothing to do with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
This is a dumb point to try splitting hairs over, the members of Hamas are Palestinians. Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza (they were voted in with mass support) and is supported by a large number if not the majority of Palestinians in Gaza. And no, Palestinian civilians are not explicitly being targeted, that's just a flat out lie. The IDF is not just picking off random people who walk outside and bombing random houses, that would be insane (not to say that there still isn't collateral damage, but this war w/ a hostile neighbor is MUCH different than say the collateral murder the US commits in countries 1000s of miles away that aren't a threat). Hamas is the group that deliberately hides themselves and their weapons in/underneath civilian targets (Hamas headquarters in Gaza is literally underneath Al Shifa Hospital, this is not a disputed point). If they were attacking civilians the entire notion of the current evacuation wouldn't even be a thing, they would just level the entire area indiscriminately. These points don't make Israel's planned retaliation the "right" course of action by any means, but lets not rely on really silly instances of nit picking to try and make a case against the current state of affairs.
Your views aren't "balanced and unbiased"--they are moronic. Your post is one of the most idiotic I've ever seen on this site. I actually wouldn't even know where to begin. The Jews haven't stolen any land in Israel. They were given a land grant by the British Empire, which ruled "Palestine" after it took it from the Ottoman Empire after the end of WWI. The surrounding Islamic nations almost immediately launched a war against Israel in 1948, and again in 1967 and again in 1973. New Israeli territory is the spoils of war from victories in wars launched by the Arab Muslims.
The Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas, which has a charter calling for the global extermination of the Jews; Hamas was elected in 2006 by the Palestinians in Gaza; recent polling suggests Hamas still enjoys majority support from the public. The public in Gaza absolutely supports killing Jews. The Gazans are reaping what they have sown, which has been the entire history of Israel since 1948--the Arab Muslims, in an attempt to murder the Jews, continue losing wars.
Lol your post here is almost as idiotic. The land was indeed granted by the Brits and there was indeed an UN resolution granting Israel the right to establish a nation within Palestine, although all Arab nations voted against it. The issue with this resolution is that while it's legal, it's not fair because for one, Israel was granted land with better resources and location and for two, the Palestinian Arabs were the majority of the population of Palestine in 1948 and they wanted the right to self determine without interventions from world powers. Had there been a vote within the population of Palestine then, Israel as a country would unlikely have been established.
Of course, with US support, Israel has won all five wars against the Arab league, but does it legally grant Israel the right to grab land above and beyond what UN permitted back in 1948? I'm not so sure.
And your comment on Gaza civilians supporting Hamas. Not to mention that over half of the current Gaza population were not even born when Hamas came into power, even if Hamas has support from some Gaza population today, what is the relevance of it? If you think it's relevant, your logic is to some extent the same as those of terrorist groups like ISIS who think civilians are responsible for their government's actions because they voted for it.
Your analysis assumes that a method exists for Israel to destroy Hamas without killing civilians. Newsflash, that is not possible considering how Hamas uses the civilian population as human shields. Kind of like shooting at your kids while hiding behind their own kids. So until you present a better solution Hamas is fully liable and responsible for every civilian death in Gaza. To say otherwise is to say that as long as terrorists use human shields, they should not be attacked.
Israel has dealt with Gaza with enormous restraint for the last 20 years given all of the things that have happened. Israel allowed Gaza to have its own rule until the Palestinian Authority government under Fatah collapsed and Hamas came to power. Hamas has launched numerous offensives unilaterally on Israel, most notably in 2008 and 2014. Hamas has developed an enormous subterranean network of tunnels to invade Israel and kill Israeli civilians, as well as endanger the residents of Gaza by using them as human shields in violation of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions which govern international wars.
Hamas massacred 1,300 people in a single day in a country of 9 million people, which numerically is 10x the per capita impact of the 9/11 attacks. Israel has the right to dismantle the bad faith Hamas government which repeatedly launched terror attacks for the last 20+ years.
Dismantling that government requires a significant military offensive, in no small part because Hamas has deliberately put civilians in harm’s way. Hamas has been telling civilians not to evacuate and has been actively blocking them from doing so. Hamas knew that such a terrorist attack would provoke precisely the current response, but they have no regard for the people of Gaza.
The consensus on the Liberty event is that it was an accident.
Hamas has intentionally killed 27 American citizens in the last week, with an additional 14 missing. If any significant fraction of the missing are dead or die in the coming days, then Hamas will have intentionally done more to America a mere week ago than what Israel did accidentally nearly 60 years ago.
Ministry says 2,269 Palestinians killed and 9,814 others wounded in Gaza, West Bank -- https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2023/10/14/Israeli-strik…
This is absolutely NOT ok. The same people that cheering on all of these Palestinians dying will look back 6 months / 1yr later and act all innocent and say "that's not what I meant." The only thing that is going to happen after 100k+ Palestinians end up in the dirt is an entirely new generation of Palestinians becoming radicalized, the entire Arabic world desiring the destruction of the West, and we'll all be back to round 1.
And while Israel has the right to defend itself, you're seriously telling me that for 1k Israeli deaths they should be allowed to eliminate the Palestinian people? Are you seriously arguing to genocide is a justifiable response? Hamas deserves to be eliminated, NOT the rest of the 2ml Palestinians who have been oppressed for generations already. It's honestly sickening to say that self defense = eliminating hundreds of thousands of innocents. America has 0 moral high ground is this is the path we are supporting, this makes us no better than Russia or China
Exactly.
There is no way to eliminate Hamas without doing exactly what they are doing now. Do you have a alternate approach? Just about every republican in the US government agrees with the approach.
And most republicans in the house are hawkish neocons who love getting us into new wars & conflicts...that must change unless we want to get into WW3 in the next decade
The alternate approach is targeting with more surgical strikes rather than just carpet bomb the place
We have 0 right to lecture anyone if we allow this to happen. It's crazy that we're allowing the genocide of the Armenian people right now because Azerbaijan is giving oil to Europe right now. The US can never claim the moral high ground again vs. China when we are supporting the destruction of an entire people that lived in that region long before the modern Israeli state ever came to exist
Inaccurate, a vast majority of today’s Palestinians descend from Arabs who moved to the region from the Arabian peninsula when Jews started moving there at the turn of the 19th century.
I watched a video of 2 little kids, covered in scars and rubble, who ran to a hospital by themselves after they were bombed whilst on the run. They were by themselves - no family or relatives. I've never felt this heartbroken tbh. Some stats say about 40-50% of deaths are children. There is something seriously wrong with the world that this is seen as self-defence or these people are "collateral damage".
What Hamas did was deplorable, full stop.
What is happening now is also deplorable. Hamas intentionally places their locations near as many civilians as possible. They also discourage people from fleeing with force, making the Israeli demands to flee the city difficult to impossible to comply with. The geography of the west bank makes this difficult as well. People think of it as a country. It's not. It's roughly the size of Philly, but with 50% more people. Egypt's also closed the border so it's not like there's anywhere to flee TO either.
Do you mean what Hamas continues to do is deplorable or what Israel is doing is deplorable?
Both. The people who call the Gaza strip an open air prison aren't wrong. (TBH, Philly kinda is an open air prison too, but at least they have cheesesteaks) There's more than enough blame to go around. Can we add Egypt to that list? If they cared they wouldn't have closed the border.
Hamas is in their 'Al-Qaeda post 9/11' moment. They succeeded too well, and are about to get whacked. Israel needs to NOT create another generation of terrorists and over react. The west bank is a success story. The strip is a failure.
Exactly, Israel has bombed our soldiers in 1967 on the USS liberty and is now committing genocide against the Palestinians…yet we have to support those warmongering animals who want to destabilize the Middle East again? Fuck that, they hate America and Israelis even spit at Christians in Jerusalem. Moral of the story: fuck Israel lmao.
The Palestinians celebrated in the streets after 9/11.
The Zionist state must go, just because one day they decided they needed to have a space for Jews only, they basically screwed over the people who were actually living there (Palestinians) and turned them into quasi-slaves. It's literally the worst possible aspects of colonialism with none of the redeeming aspects, Palestinians are treated no better than animals
The level of dishonesty here takes the breath away. The idea that the Jews are colonizing JUDEA and Samaria would be laughable if it wasn't so demonic. The Jews have a history in the area dating back more than 3,000 years. Unlike with the "Palestinians," the Jews have a written history of a nation-state existing in the area whereas there has never been a nation of Palestine. Palestine was ruled by the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire before that, and the Roman Empire before that, and the Jews before that. In Israel, 20% of the population is Arab; over 100 Arabs have served in the Knesset; a member of the Supreme Court is Arab. If a Jew stepped foot in Gaza, where 0% of the population is Jewish, he would be murdered. The actual apartheid is the Arab Muslims' behavior toward the Jews. There are 55 Islamic nations and 1 Jewish nation. I think the reason demonic, evil people like you hate the Jews so much is because this 1 tiny little country is more productive than the other 55 pieces of trash Muslim countries combined. You hate that the God of Israel is Jehovah God.
Lol Zionist giveaway here...
Killing 1k Israelis doesn't give Israel the right to turn around and kill 10k or 100k Palestinians and drive them all from their homes. You are supporting nothing less than genocide
Cool. Cool. Could you be specific? How many Japanese people, specifically, were the United States allowed to kill after Pearl Harbor while the U.S. and Japan were in a declared state of war? Give me a specific number and a logical, moral rationale for how you reached that number. Be specific. And I assume you can be since you're so certain in your outlook on Israel. The Japanese lost 7.3 people for every American. So, should Israel maintain a 7:1 kill ratio? If it allows more of its own people to die, that might be a strategic way to allow Israel to kill more people, under this totally arbitrary rule you'd be setting. Or, we could establish another arbitrary figure like 4.34%, the % of the Japanese population that died during the war. So, that would allow up to ~87,000 or so Gazans to die.
Obviously, since you're not anti-Semitic, you wouldn't hold Israel to a standard that you'd hold no other country to, so I figure America's killing of the Japanese in response to Pearl Harbor might be a good benchmark. So far, I don't see evidence that Israel has breached the "Japanese" rule, so I'm curious as to why you consider Israel's response disproportionate.
The fact that Israel has:
- elected a bunch of genocidal right-wing maniacs, convicted terrorists who are on record chanting "death to Arabs" and are known for agitating the public against PM Rabin for making history & starting a peace process, leading to his murder;
- been so unhinged in expanding its west bank & east Jerusalem (illegal) settlements and using them to drive out Palestinians out of their towns by means of pure terrorism;
- repeatedly and deliberately propping up Hamas to widen cracks within the already unpopular Palestinian leadership;
- and most importantly IGNORED calls from Egypt that something unusual was about to happen
... strips Israel of its "self defence" claims. I dont want to rationalise Hamas' actions, they are absolutely horrible and they should be punished. But unless Israel has a strategy of making amends to these mistakes, there is not working solution here. A military offensive will either lead to a full genocide of 2 MILLION people, most of whom are women and children, or reoccupation of Gaza, and then we're back at square one. The ongoing bombardment of Gaza is a serious crime against humanity. That 2 million people are being killed at a rate of over a dozen every hour is purely criminal and in no way acceptable. There are senior Israeli ministers who were just calling for Palestinian towns to be "wiped off" not a few months ago. I'm struggling to see this awful bombing campaign in a different context. The humanitarian catastrophe in the making could end up being a genocide. That's of course aside from the obvious fact that no workable solution *needs* to involve flaunting your military dick.
Finally someone speaking some sense. Thank you.
How do you feel about Hamas' charter calling for the global extermination of every Jew?
This is just absurd. Israel is at once called evil for its blockade against Hamas and also evil for "propping up" Hamas. Israel wants to invade Gaza and wipe out Hamas at the same time you wacko conspiracy theorists assert Israel is propping up Hamas. This is absolutely deranged behavior.
How do you punish Hamas? How? Be specific. What is the proper punishment for Hamas' atrocities? Be specific. What, specifically, should be done to punish Hamas and how, specifically, should that be pulled off? Be specific.
This is absolutely deranged nonsense. Israel has attempted in the past (and in the present) to get Egypt or Jordan to govern the Gazan strip. Egypt and Jordan have refused. Israel has so little interest in governing Gaza that they (foolishly) allowed a Nazi organization (Hamas) to take it over and govern. Egypt won't permit the Gazans to leave and become refugees in Egypt. Nobody wants the Gazans because they are a bunch of brainwashed, poorly educated fanatics. Talking about the "full genocide of 2 million Gazans" is absolutely ridiculous. A 100% kill rate? Why won't the Arab nations surrounding Israel take them in?
To which law do you reference and to which countries does this law apply? Nazi Germany lost over 7 million people in WW2. Was that unjust? They launched a war of extermination against the Jews and paid with 7.4 million deaths and the complete destruction of their society and 46 years of occupation by the Soviet Union. The gov't of Gaza launched a war of extermination against the Jews and is going to pay the price. And how do you feel about Hamas setting up military installations in civilian areas and actively telling Gazans to not leave? How do you feel about the Arab nations refusing Gazan refugees?
You obviously don't care about genocide. "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is a literal call for genocide. Hamas' charter literally calls for the global extermination of the Jews. The Arabs have already launched 5 wars of extermination against Israel (and lost in humiliating fashion). Your position on genocide is so one-sided that it shows your manifest dishonesty.
You’ve literally misrepresented everything I said. This conflict didn’t start last week. Enough with the moral panic about Hamas. Israel has doubled the score of death and a few days, directly from the air. Hamas is now the new “axis of evil”.
I will just respond to two things:
1. You’re saying that Arab countries don’t want to take Palestinians in Gaza because of a racist bullshit excuse you came up with. That’s false. There are millions of Palestinian refugees in Arab countries, notably Jordan and Lebanon. They were deliberately ethnically cleansed in 1940’s by Zionist militias like lehi and Irgun. Arab countries are simply not letting it happen again, and hand over their land to Israel. It is obvious what Israel wants to do, it is explicitly stated by its government. But somehow people are just acting dumb. And by the way can you show me proof where Israel tried to get Egypt and Jordan to rule Gaza? I can’t find that anywhere.
2. “from the river to the sea” is a simple chant. People want to have freedom and equal rights in a country that did belong to them one point in time. Gaza population is literally descendants of refugees from other parts of mandatory Palestine. Same thing in the West Bank, and for the Palestinian diaspora. Their commitment to returning to their land isn’t genocidal in any reasonable way. This is just Israel scaring off the western audience and I can’t believe some people are falling for it.
Gaza is a mess led by a terrorist government that does not care about its own people. If Hamas does not care about its own people, why should Israel care about the Palestinian people? Israel's main concern should be it what is its own best interests. The best course of action for Israel would be to dismantle Hamas. Yes, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be killed. It is not Israel's job to look out for interests of Palestinians. Israel should and will do whatever serves it own interests. Israel was violently attacked in an act of war and should respond with full force, which is basically what any country would do in a similar situation, if they had the capability.
Hundreds of thousands would be killed is fine with you? Everything you say is irrelevant then.
I mean, what is Israel supposed to do? NOT committing genocide? How is not killing Palestinian civilians going to help erase Hamas terrorists?
Israel has put in no good faith effort to rescue the hostages, most of whom are Israeli citizens.
The far-right Zionist population in Israel has been harassing families of those Israeli citizens who have been demanding the government to negotiate with Hamas to get those hostages released.
Israel has suppressed freedom of speech by arresting people who expressed support of Palestine.
Israel is an apartheid state who treats Palestinian that come to Israel to work as modern day slaves.
Israel has a proven track record of bombing hospitals and refugee camps.
Israel has been bombing civilian airports in Syria and Jordan.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been recorded on video admitting that he wants to keep Hamas in power to keep Palestine separated.
Israel's Irgun is the god father of modern day terrorism.
Israel is as much a terrorist regime as Hamas.
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