Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

[Thylacine 2000]

What if it looks like an unfalsifiable claim?

 

[Teufel]

Israel evacuated almost a million Palestinians from Rafah before expanding operations against Hamas targets there. They have let hundreds of trucks a day bring supplies into Gaza even though enemy fighters get a hold of them and provide Hamas a lifeline. If this is a genocide it's surely among the most incompetent ever attempted.

Though there are elements of the government, some ministers with significant influence, who have called for what would amount to an actual genocide or at least full scale ethnic cleansing with virtually no consequences to them for saying so.

 

[Ultra Magnus13]

Stop calling it a war. It's a genocide.

Define genocide.

Now articulate how Israel is committing a genocide against Palestine.

 

[Spin-Out]

Define genocide.

Now articulate how Israel is committing a genocide against Palestine.

Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group, Which Israel is, in fact, doing. They are going door-to-door terrorizing civilians. They are kidnapping, murdering and even raping Palestinians. They are dropping ******* WHITE PHOSPHORUS on CIVILIANS.

And on top of that, dehumanizing, violent rhetoric used by Netanyahu and his fascist coalition ("Remember what Amalel did to you," "we are fighting animals," etc.) has made it clear that yes, their intent is to destroy Palestine and to kill as many Palestinians as they can.

It's a ******* genocide.

 

[abates]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1796104535867334818

 

[Ultra Magnus13]

Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group, Which Israel is, in fact, doing. They are going door-to-door terrorizing civilians. They are kidnapping, murdering and even raping Palestinians. They are dropping ******* WHITE PHOSPHORUS on CIVILIANS.

And on top of that, dehumanizing, violent rhetoric used by Netanyahu and his fascist coalition ("Remember what Amalel did to you," "we are fighting animals," etc.) has made it clear that yes, their intent is to destroy Palestine and to kill as many Palestinians as they can.

It's a ******* genocide.

"Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group, Which Israel is, in fact, doing."

Please share links to any data you have, from reputable sources, of the Israeli military intentionally striking an exclusively civilian target. They absolutely have the military superiority and hardware to wipe the entire population out in very short order. They could bomb the entirety of it into rubble. If they wanted to wipe them out, they would not have sent in there troops on the ground. They were sent in, at risk to themselves, to allow more precise actions to be taken and assist in preserving civilian life. The current civilian casualty rate in Gaza is at or below average for a modern war.

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupi...-war-un-revises-death-toll-women-and-children


"They are kidnapping, murdering and even raping Palestinians."

While I'm sure there are instances of this, as is there are in all armed conflicts, anything to back up, that this is something happening in an official capacity, that there are known perpetrators that are not being punished for these actions?

 

[Thylacine 2000]

The current civilian casualty rate in Gaza is at or below average for a modern war.

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupi...-war-un-revises-death-toll-women-and-children

That is an important point.

Hamas themselves admitted that at least 6,000 of their armed combatants are among the dead (and if that's the number they admit, the real number is higher).

Israel Gaza: Checking Israel's claim to have killed 10,000 Hamas fighters

BBC Verify examines the evidence on combatant deaths, as concern grows about the scale of civilian killing.

www.bbc.com

Even sticking to that guaranteed underestimate, it means 1 in every 6 deaths in Gaza is a soldier.

In basically every war you've ever heard of, 1 in every 10 deaths was a soldier.

Ninety Per Cent of War-Time Casualties Are Civilians, Speakers Stress, Pressing Security Council to Fulfil Responsibility, Protect Innocent People in Conflicts | Meetings Coverage and Press Releases

With civilians accounting for nearly 90 per cent of war-time casualties and humanitarians threatened with arrest for providing aid to “the enemy”, the Security Council simply must do more to ensure the protection of innocent people caught amid the conflicts raging around the world, experts from...

press.un.org

I repeat: conflating every war that ever happened with "genocide" is terrible for a wide variety of reasons, just like conflating rape with "liberation," and people really need to stop.

It not "deliberate killing aimed at destroying a nation or ethnic group" if you warn them in advance to evacuate, establish humanitarian evac corridors, send in hundreds of trucks of relief, negotiate and abide by ceasefires, and delay your ground campaign for months while negotiations go on. There is no ethnic difference between Gazans and Israeli Arabs, and no national difference between Gazans and West Bank Palestinians. Nothing is being done to Israeli Arabs or West Bank Palestinians, so there is no campaign against an ethnic or national group. The campaign is against Hamas. Tens of thousands of people are being killed in the process, which likely includes war crimes other than genocide, yet the very fact that people are emphasizing not the more likely crimes but the less likely, far worse one speaks to a need to focus more on attacking Israel than on defending Palestinians.

The "white phosphorus" agitprop has already been discussed here months ago. There is nothing special, nor illegal, about using it to generate smokescreens, and all suggestions of other types of uses by Israel ultimately only come from groups that have been caught lying about this region many, many times.

 

[Teufel]

I think some on the anti-Israel side disingenuously conflate comments about Hamas with the broader Palestinian population when it suits them. If you look at the Amalek quote in the context of Netanyahu's remarks he's talking about Hamas, not all Palestinians.

Link

“We are now entering the second phase of the war, which its objectives are clear: destruction of the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and the return of the hostages back home,” Netanyahu said. “In the last couple of days, I have met with our soldiers in the bases, in the field, in the north and in the south. Remember what Amalek has done to you. We remember, and we are fighting.”

And when you look up the historical/religious context of "remember what Amalek has done to you" it does not mean genocide.

The statement from Netanyahu’s office noted that the phrase “Remember what Amalek has done to you” appears at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum, and is inscribed on a memorial to Dutch Jews murdered during the Holocaust at The Hague, where the court sits. “Obviously neither reference is an incitement to genocide of the German people,” the statement said.

The South African charging document also misattributed the source of Netanyahu’s quote, inaccurately suggesting he was referring to I Samuel 15. Netanyahu, however, did not quote that passage; instead, “Remember what Amalek has done to you” is from Deuteronomy 25, and refers to how God saved the Israelites from the peril posed by the Amalekites in the desert. In the context of Deuteronomy, the phrase appears among a litany of commandments and is seen by Jewish scholars as a commandment to remember that God is with the Jews even in times of peril.

“Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt,” the passage reads, “how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”

The phrase as it appears in Deuteronomy has repeatedly been used since the Holocaust as a call to witness; Yad Vashem features the phrase on a banner, and its archives include letters between European Jews during the Holocaust in which they plead with one another to bear witness should they survive. Commentators said the calls to spare no Amalekites or to blot out their memory were to be understood metaphorically, not literally.

And the key part of the Gallant quote is "fighting." He's clearly talking about Hamas. Even this lefty HuffPost piece accusing Israel of war crimes and apartheid and other horrors concedes that.

Israel’s defence minister on Monday announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, describing the Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel over the weekend as “human animals”

Israel formally declared war on the Hamas militant group on Sunday, pointing to the large military mobilization that has already killed nearly 500 people in Gaza, including women and children. Hamas claims it has taken about 100 captives from the attacks.

“We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” Gallant said.

While it appears that Gallant was specifically referring to Hamas fighters in that comment, the rest of the minister’s remarks called for further oppression of all people in Gaza by denying them basic human needs.

A few days later he was calling for evacuations and explicitly differentiating between Hamas and Gazan civilians.

Asked about the difficulty of the evacuation order, Gallant said it was essential to avoid civilian casualties as Israel retaliates against Hamas, which he characterized as similar in its brutality to the terror group ISIS.

“The camouflage of the terrorists is the civil population,” he said, according to a transcript provided by the Pentagon. “Therefore, we need to separate them. So those who want to save their life, please go south. We are going to destroy Hamas infrastructures, Hamas headquarters, Hamas military establishment, and take these phenomena out of Gaza and out of the Earth. They cannot live among human civilized people.”

I think one could make an argument that using dehumanizing language even for your military enemies could lead to an atmosphere of encouraging war crimes, but on the other hand, Hamas are religious zealots with a bonafide genocidal charter who put it in practice when they went house to house murdering entire kibbutzim, kidnapping civilians, etc filming themselves and reveling in all the stuff you accused Israel of doing. They bragged about the last few years of governance being in service to carrying out October 7th and vowed more to follow. Calling Hamas human animals might actually be too kind.

That is an important point.

Hamas themselves admitted that at least 6,000 of their armed combatants are among the dead (and if that's the number they admit, the real number is higher).

Israel Gaza: Checking Israel's claim to have killed 10,000 Hamas fighters

BBC Verify examines the evidence on combatant deaths, as concern grows about the scale of civilian killing.

www.bbc.com

Erdogan bragged he's treating 1000 hospitalized members of Hamas in Turkey.

Link

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan underscored his support for Hamas, saying more than a thousand members of the organization are being treated in Turkey.

 

[Spin-Out]

Hamas and Netanyahu's coalition are both genocidal zealots. Israel and Palestine would be infinitely better off without both of them. The difference is Israel has more guns, more bombs, and has, at best, waged a disproportionately brutal campaign of reprisal for Hamas' genocidal atrocities, in addition to being an apartheid state for literal decades.

I usually hate "both sides"-ing anything, but both sides of this conflict are led by deranged, murderous, fascist assholes with no interest in peaceful coexistence, and the people of Israel and Palestine are both suffering, moreso Palestine right now.

 

[wonko the sane?]

So what you're telling me is that israel has turned gaza into a barrel to shoot fish, and 5 out of 6 of those fish were not the intended target?

 

[Thylacine 2000]

in addition to being an apartheid state for literal decades.

Just like "genocide," "apartheid" can only be applied to Israel by diluting and redefining it into meaninglessness (both HRW and AI are guilty of this). There is nothing even remotely resembling "apartheid" inside Israel. It is occupying territory outside its borders and dominating people who aren't its citizens. That's bad and some of us have been against this occupation for decades. Even that is not the same thing.

 

[Pale Rider]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1795813951940202938

 

[Pale Rider]

Just like "genocide," "apartheid" can only be applied to Israel by diluting and redefining it into meaninglessness (both HRW and AI are guilty of this). There is nothing even remotely resembling "apartheid" inside Israel. It is occupying territory outside its borders and dominating people who aren't its citizens. That's bad and some of us have been against this occupation for decades. Even that is not the same thing.

Actually, there's plenty inside Israel that looks like apartheid. Arab citizens of Israel, who make up about 20% of the population, face a lot of discrimination. There are more than 50 laws that favor Jewish citizens over Arab ones in areas like housing, education, and even family reunification.

In the West Bank, Palestinians live under military law while Israeli settlers live under civilian law, which is a clear double standard. Groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say this setup is pretty much apartheid, and I'm not seeing how they're wrong.

So, it’s not just about the territories. The discrimination happens inside Israel too.

 

[Pale Rider]

FB friend:

An award-winning nurse in New York named Hesen Jabr was recently fired for referring to the Gaza campaign as "genocide", and yet none of the people who whine about "cancel culture" will ever use her as an example of it.

Oh no, they're too busy worrying about whether aging millionaire comedians are feeling social pressure to update their shopworn racial stereotype jokes.

A nurse honored for compassion is fired after referring to Gaza 'genocide' in speech

A nurse was fired by a New York City hospital after she referred to Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide” during a speech accepting an award.

apnews.com

 

[Ultra Magnus13]

So what you're telling me is that israel has turned gaza into a barrel to shoot fish, and 5 out of 6 of those fish were not the intended target?

As pointed out above that would be based off of questionable stats, and it's still better than average.

The stats that seem more accurate indicate closer to a 1:1 which is an amazing low number.

Gaza War: UN revises death toll for women and children - occupied Palestinian territory

News and Press Release in English on occupied Palestinian territory about Protection and Human Rights; published on 17 May 2024 by AOAV

reliefweb.int

Keep in mind that in most wars, the government does whatever it can to protect its civilian population. In this war they actively use them as shields at every opportunity. All of there military sites are under, or woven into civilian sites like hospitals and schools.

On top of that "children" are counted as anyone below 18. I can assure you a large portion of "children" are enemy combatants.

 

[Thylacine 2000]

Actually, there's plenty inside Israel that looks like apartheid. Arab citizens of Israel, who make up about 20% of the population, face a lot of discrimination. There are more than 50 laws that favor Jewish citizens over Arab ones in areas like housing, education, and even family reunification.

In the West Bank, Palestinians live under military law while Israeli settlers live under civilian law, which is a clear double standard. Groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say this setup is pretty much apartheid, and I'm not seeing how they're wrong.

So, it’s not just about the territories. The discrimination happens inside Israel too.

Israeli Arabs have legal equality. Same rows of the bus, same restaurants, same beaches. I would rank Israel's treatment of minority citizens favorably alongside any country in the world. The so-called "60 discriminatory laws" are put together by one of these activist groups I keep warning people about, Adalah. Look their list up for yourself. Amidst serious-seeming ones, there's also a lot of padding with fake complaints, and a fundamentally sinister approach from the start. Adalah says Israel is "discriminatory / racist / apartheid" because of laws like:

• Jewish holidays are national holidays
• The flag has a Jewish emblem
• So do the postage stamps
• National broadcasters must be bilingual with Hebrew and Arabic (apparently this hides how discriminatory they are, which is proof of discrimination....)
• Arabs in the annexed Golan Heights get citizenship and voting rights (again, by NOT discriminating they only prove how much they are doing it...)
• They reduce child welfare credits if the parents don't vaccinate the children (this goes across the board and certainly impacts Haredi Jews)
• There's a preferential immigration law (people freak out over this, but outside the USA it's quite normal)

Basically, they say anything that would identify Israel as a distinctively Jewish state is inherently racism or apartheid, and it can never get better until the Jewishness is gone.

There is unequal treatment in the West Bank - as I said, it's a military occupation and that's how they work, why they're bad, and why they should be ended. In this case, the anti-occupation movement has made no progress in decades, they've just been stuck. While they've been stuck, in 2020 came the Abraham Accords when 4 Arab nations normalized with Israel as-is. It was those two factors - the stagnant, unchanging nature of the occupation, and the clear sign that Arab states were starting to deprioritize the Palestine issue and move on with life - that led both HRW and AI to rapidly scramble to declare an "apartheid" in terms no one had ever seen before.

Human Rights Watch published an extremely critical report of Israel's treatment of the West Bank in 2010. Dragged them up one wall and down the other. In it they summarized a court case in which Israel had been accused of "apartheid" because West Bank military occupation authorities had banned Palestinians from driving on a particular highway after repeated terrorist attacks. The Israeli Supreme Court reversed the ban, but also said the now-ended ban had not been "apartheid" because it was not based on race, as Israeli Arabs could drive on the roads all throughout (and still can). HRW included that summary without further comment. As bad as they saw Israel's treatment was, they accepted the judgment that it was not apartheid.

But then after the 2020 Abraham Accords, despite there having been no change in the administration of the occupied territories whatsoever, in 2021 HRW declared it "apartheid." Amnesty International followed suit in 2022.

To do this, HRW invented a new definition of "apartheid," saying it meant unequal treatment of people from different national origins even if they AREN'T CITIZENS of the same country. This had never been the definition before because just thinking it over for a minute makes it collapse. They have just made America an "apartheid" state because Mexicans can't vote in its elections.

Amnesty International's declaration went beyond the West Bank to say that all of Israel had been "apartheid" ever since its founding in 1948. Since AI had been founded in 1961, it's fair to ask why they hadn't seen any such "apartheid" that whole time. And again, just like Adalah, they view the very concept, the very phenomenon, of a Jewish state as inherently "apartheid" even if there were no occupation, this "apartheid' only ending with Israel dissolving. Their USA director went full mask-off that Israel itself should not exist.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/amnestys-us-director-israel-shouldnt-exist-as-a-state-for-the-jewish-people/

Oh but wait! Maybe it's not even bad wherever or whenever this supposed "Israeli apartheid" exists, because Amnesty took pains to specify that they were not saying conditions in Israel or the Palestinian Territories was analogous to South Africa at all, so pointing out the differences between Israeli and South African treatment is off-topic and to be ignored.

Amnesty report on Israeli ‘apartheid’ garners bipartisan US fury

Advocates say despite Congressional leaders’ vehement opposition, ‘apartheid’ charge against Israel will not go away.

www.aljazeera.com

They're using the South African word for the South African policy that makes everyone automatically think of South Africa, but then denying it is a comparison with South Africa or that there can be any defense by showing how Israel doesn't treat people anything like South Africa did. Neener neener, no backsies.

I don't have to take that seriously. Neither should you. Pro-Palestine activists should be embarrassed to have to lean on such a weasel-worded, bad-faith lie.

And if you really want to bandy around business cards from NGOs, here is the Red Cross:

ICRC official: Israel is not an apartheid state, but there is occupation

Jacques De Maio, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Israel and the PA, asserts: 'There is no IDF order to shoot suspects to kill,' while at the same time warns of the humanitarian damage caused by occupation.

www.ynetnews.com

“The Red Cross was very familiar with the regime that prevailed in South Africa during the apartheid period, and we are responding to all those who raise their claim of apartheid against Israel: No, there is no apartheid here, no regime of superiority of race, of denial of basic human rights to a group of people because of their alleged racial inferiority. There is a bloody national conflict, whose most prominent and tragic characteristic is its continuation over the years, decades-long, and there is a state of occupation. Not apartheid.”

tl,dr: if you think police departments and organized religion and Congress and the Supreme Court can all be corrupt lying racists, consider that maybe charity groups with nice-sounding names that are syndromically obsessed with where Jews should and shouldn't live might possibly also be corrupt lying racists.

 

[Dekafox]

Knightsbridge Research, Ltd. (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Update: Proposed Ceasefire Deal in Gaza Hamas officials have said they would only proceed with a US-proposed ceasefire deal if it involved a permanent cessation to hostilities, casting doubt on the future of the proposal. A formal rejection has not been issued, and US State...

infosec.exchange

Update: Proposed Ceasefire Deal in Gaza
Hamas officials have said they would only proceed with a US-proposed ceasefire deal if it involved a permanent cessation to hostilities, casting doubt on the future of the proposal. A formal rejection has not been issued, and US State Department officials continue to maintain that the deal could still be accepted.
“We don’t think this ought to be a process that takes a long time for Hamas to consider, given that the proposal that was submitted to them last Thursday evening is virtually identical to one that they had several weeks ago,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in Washington.
“We would hope for a response from them as soon as possible because the benefits that this proposal offers to the Palestinian people are real. They’re tangible. They would be immediate.”
Wednesday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said the group would consider “seriously and positively… any agreement that is based on a comprehensive ending of the aggression and the complete withdrawal and prisoners swap.”
CIA Director William Burns is in Doha, and special envoy Brett McGurk is in Cairo in order to move the potential agreement forward.

 

[Pale Rider]

Israeli settlers in the West Bank were hit with international sanctions. It only emboldened them

More than a dozen Israeli settlers have been targeted by international sanctions over accusations of attacks and harassment against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

apnews.com

Spoiler

 

[Pale Rider]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1798565117845532904

 

[MrBlud]

On top of that "children" are counted as anyone below 18. I can assure you a large portion of "children" are enemy combatants.

Are children *not* anyone below the age of 18? Why the quotations?

A large portion of “anyone below 18” are actually “enemy combatants”?

Well, if the people in charge are using your “reasoning” (and I use the term exceedingly loosely) little wonder they’ve been slaughtering children wholesale…