Hamas attacks Israel
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@Mik said in Hamas attacks Israel:
If it were genocide it would have been over a year or so ago.
It all depends on whether one uses a personal definition or the one that the UN, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Holocaust Museum, The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR - U.S.), The International Court of Justice (ICJ), B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace - to name a few entities who have defined Israel's activities as a genocide.
Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar of the Palestine situation, notes that 47% of Jews in Israel supported genocide in Gaza - i.e. asking if everyone in a city should be killed, answered "yes". Asked if there are "any innocents in Gaza?", 70% of Jewish Israelis answered "no". He also notes that's why the IDF "targets" toddlers. A member of the Jewish opposition stated that IDF soldiers kill children as a "hobby".
But one can argue that an alternative definition as employed by many mainstream Jewish organizations in the US don't accept that Israel is committing genocide. It's a bit like the word "myth" - one can say that Christianity is based on myth - meaning a narrative which need not be based on fact, but some would argue that "myth" is a falsehood. One's definition leads to different answers.
Genocide - using the above definition, has been pervasive throughout history. The US is based on genocide of many native peoples. The early Zionists knew that genocide would be necessary and discussed it openly - though avoiding the term. Ugly business. Good luck to all involved.
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Honestly it’s like calling a glance at a black woman’s hair ‘white supremacy’.
You take a word with a well understood and emotionally charged meaning and apply it to something very different with the hopes of getting some of the stink of the word on the new thing.
Of course it also cheapens the word if you’re successful.
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. After all, there’s hunger, and there’s release-the-hostages hunger. Their famine seems to be somewhere between the two.
If you don't take it, it can only good happen.
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Imagine if Germany had won WWII and as part of an agreement with Mexico - California, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arizona were returned to Mexico. Individuals living in those states would be confined to a narrow area along the coast of California - would Americans accept that that the native Indians had lived here for 14000 years and were rightfully occupying their land? Yeah, I'm sure. Not to say that Genocide isn't the answer- but it was always going to be an ugly business - and Israel's founders as well as many throughout the world knew it would be a problem.
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As Yuval Noah Harari has said it’s not a border dispute, there’s enough land for both peoples. It’s a conflict of narratives and as such is intractable.
While two states is the only eventual solution (since neither people are going anywhere) it seems like we’ve never been further from that in my lifetime.
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As Yuval Noah Harari has said it’s not a border dispute, there’s enough land for both peoples. It’s a conflict of narratives and as such is intractable.
While two states is the only eventual solution (since neither people are going anywhere) it seems like we’ve never been further from that in my lifetime.
@jon-nyc said in Hamas attacks Israel:
As Yuval Noah Harari has said it’s not a border dispute, there’s enough land for both peoples. It’s a conflict of narratives and as such is intractable.
While two states is the only eventual solution (since neither people are going anywhere) it seems like we’ve never been further from that in my lifetime.
Not entirely true. Look at the West Bank - settlers continue to
stealsecure additional land for no compensation. Listen to the Israeli officials and view the patches on Israeli soldiers showing a "greater Israel" comprising territory of several nations.Israel has a blank check of armament and support from the most powerful nation in the world.
Truth be told, Israel will get whatever it wants - BUT, there will be a cost even if Israel manages to influence/edit/quash/purchase social and mainstream media.
Like many on the right, I preferred the days of watching a world based on the principles of Andy Griffith and Mayberry - and maybe we'll get there - just no time soon. It's just hard to drink the Kool-Aid of good guys vs. bad guys in a more interconnected world.
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Honestly it’s like calling a glance at a black woman’s hair ‘white supremacy’.
You take a word with a well understood and emotionally charged meaning and apply it to something very different with the hopes of getting some of the stink of the word on the new thing.
Of course it also cheapens the word if you’re successful.
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. After all, there’s hunger, and there’s release-the-hostages hunger. Their famine seems to be somewhere between the two.
@jon-nyc said in Hamas attacks Israel:
Honestly it’s like calling a glance at a black woman’s hair ‘white supremacy’.
You take a word with a well understood and emotionally charged meaning and apply it to something very different with the hopes of getting some of the stink of the word on the new thing.
Of course it also cheapens the word if you’re successful.
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. After all, there’s hunger, and there’s release-the-hostages hunger. Their famine seems to be somewhere between the two.
Exactly.
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Honestly it’s like calling a glance at a black woman’s hair ‘white supremacy’.
You take a word with a well understood and emotionally charged meaning and apply it to something very different with the hopes of getting some of the stink of the word on the new thing.
Of course it also cheapens the word if you’re successful.
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. After all, there’s hunger, and there’s release-the-hostages hunger. Their famine seems to be somewhere between the two.
@jon-nyc said in Hamas attacks Israel:
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. .
You must have missed it, but Hamas signed onto the deal as of last Friday.
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I thought that the agreement meant that Hamas would not be allowed to exist as a government. I would be surprised if they easily signed on to this.
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Honestly it’s like calling a glance at a black woman’s hair ‘white supremacy’.
You take a word with a well understood and emotionally charged meaning and apply it to something very different with the hopes of getting some of the stink of the word on the new thing.
Of course it also cheapens the word if you’re successful.
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. After all, there’s hunger, and there’s release-the-hostages hunger. Their famine seems to be somewhere between the two.
@jon-nyc said in Hamas attacks Israel:
Honestly it’s like calling a glance at a black woman’s hair ‘white supremacy’.
You take a word with a well understood and emotionally charged meaning and apply it to something very different with the hopes of getting some of the stink of the word on the new thing.
Of course it also cheapens the word if you’re successful.
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. After all, there’s hunger, and there’s release-the-hostages hunger. Their famine seems to be somewhere between the two.
I agree with all you wrote very eloquently but I think the one problem which facilitates the cheapening of the term is the fact that the holocaust is getting so farther and farther back in history such that many young people simply are disconnected to it ( a recurring theme in this aging forum is that historical events once so present in our psyche are but wisps of memory for young people. Pearl Harbor seems to be forgotten and the impact of 9/11 will be in another generation.matter of time that movies like Schindler’s list or the pianist describing world war 2 will not be made anymore)
Be that as it may, your description of the use of the word genocide is right on target. What a fucked up world. Just reading the descriptions by the flotilla detainees led by Greta of their 48 imprisonment being nazi like, is enough to make you shake your head and think how are people so incredibly stupid.
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Watching the 2 year remembrance vigils of the murderous incursion into Israel, one thing seems certain, that the Palestinian Hamas (& other) terrorists got more in return than they expected.
Having slaughtered 1200 Israelis and kidnapped another 240, I guess Hamas were prepared for Israel to go into Gaza gung-ho, within days, and fairly unprepared for the defensive tunnels and tactics they could provide.
Looking back with two years of hindsight, the long 3 weeks of attrition by Israeli aerial bombardment, a pause which must have allowed for considered & substantial planning, made the eventual Israeli response quite effective... except in finding and extracting the hostages.
I maintain that Israel has had every right to respond the way it has; respond to the Palestinian Hamas written & spoken genocidal intentions and its prolonged genocidal actions against Israeli citizens.
Kill the Palestinian terrorists by any & every means possible, in Gaza and wherever they may hide in our world.What else can an elected democratic state do to protect its citizens and respond to such hatred.
What remains surprising to me is the lack of real response from Arab neighbours (Lebanese terrorists notwithstanding), some maintaining a faux neutrality, others like Qatar spreading propaganda and appealing to western human rights which of course the Palestinian terrorists do not share in any way.
And the Egyptian border with Gaza closed and still so.Does anyone know what has happened to the Gazan tunnel network?
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@jon-nyc said in Hamas attacks Israel:
Honestly it’s like calling a glance at a black woman’s hair ‘white supremacy’.
You take a word with a well understood and emotionally charged meaning and apply it to something very different with the hopes of getting some of the stink of the word on the new thing.
Of course it also cheapens the word if you’re successful.
This tweet pithily demonstrates that since most of us still assign to the word the original horror it was meant to convey, but there’s a palpable absurdity in its use given Hamas is taking days to decide whether it wants it to end and will probably not quite get there. After all, there’s hunger, and there’s release-the-hostages hunger. Their famine seems to be somewhere between the two.
I agree with all you wrote very eloquently but I think the one problem which facilitates the cheapening of the term is the fact that the holocaust is getting so farther and farther back in history such that many young people simply are disconnected to it ( a recurring theme in this aging forum is that historical events once so present in our psyche are but wisps of memory for young people. Pearl Harbor seems to be forgotten and the impact of 9/11 will be in another generation.matter of time that movies like Schindler’s list or the pianist describing world war 2 will not be made anymore)
Be that as it may, your description of the use of the word genocide is right on target. What a fucked up world. Just reading the descriptions by the flotilla detainees led by Greta of their 48 imprisonment being nazi like, is enough to make you shake your head and think how are people so incredibly stupid.
@bachophile said in Hamas attacks Israel:
the one problem which facilitates the cheapening of the term is the fact that the holocaust is getting so farther and farther back in history such that many young people simply are disconnected to it ( a recurring theme in this aging forum is that historical events once so present in our psyche are but wisps of memory for young people. Pearl Harbor seems to be forgotten and the impact of 9/11 will be in another generation. Matter of time that movies like Schindler’s list or the pianist describing world war 2 will not be made anymore)There is truth in what you say. The passage of time may have dulled humanity’s memory of atrocity. Events that once burned themselves into the collective consciousness — the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, even 9/11 — are receding into abstraction. A generation is growing up for whom Schindler’s List or The Pianist are historical curiosities rather than moral imperatives.
In my own community, the Holocaust was not an abstraction. One of the Chicago suburbs near where I live had, at one time, more survivors than anywhere outside Israel. For decades, I read a great deal of Holocaust literature — more than fifty books on the subject. I wanted to understand how such barbarism could happen on such a scale, how ordinary prejudice could metastasize into organized cruelty, and what any of us might have done, faced with a society bent on such a moral collapse.
For many years, I accepted Israel’s founding narrative without much question.
As for the current wave of young people who support the Palestinian cause, ignorance of the Holocaust may play a part, but it is hardly the whole story. Much more decisive is the unfiltered content that social media delivers.
Bari Weiss and Sam Harris insist that these young people are “misinformed.” That, in itself, betrays a failure to grasp what the students have seen.They have watched Holocaust survivors — and the children of survivors — denounce Israeli actions using that most charged of words: genocide. They have seen the President of the United States assure the world that he had seen photographs of forty murdered infants — a claim later revealed to be false. They have watched official Israeli accounts twist and mutate until no one could take them seriously – e.g. the massacre of the Palestinian ambulance teams but many others.
They have seen, as I have, a video of an Israeli soldier boasting of killing nine infants and several videos of IDF troops saying that the killing of Palestinians is no more than killing an animal. They have seen medics and family members gunned down as they tried to reach the wounded. They have seen Israeli school children openly discuss killing Palestinians, soldiers desecrating churches, and men and children spitting on priests in the streets of Jerusalem. There are videos of settlers stealing homes, destroying crops, killing innocents.
These images do not vanish with official denials. They are imprinted.
I am merely a messenger of what is shown on a particular platform. The totality of all of this — testimony from doctors, journalists, and humanitarian workers — is not inconsequential. Israeli television itself has broadcast politicians speaking in openly eliminationist terms. Perhaps such language is understandable in the aftermath of the October 7th horror, but in the court of world opinion, it works against the narrative that Israel has sought before the world stage.
And then comes the repression — the silencing of voices that report from Gaza, the spectacle of a U.S. President flanked by an Israeli flag, the untouchable billions in aid while other programs are slashed. The influence of AIPAC is not speculation; it is essential for political survival – as admitted by politicians and former Presidents.
Meanwhile, the other “emotionally charged” word, "antisemitism", is flung about so casually that it risks losing much of its meaning, importance and power. That this accusation is now often leveled by Jews against other Jews — writers, historians, and humanists who refuse to grant Israel moral immunity — only underscores some of the intellectual bankruptcy of the tactic.
I remain a supporter of Israel. I admire its people though I think some of the IDF have gone Mai Lai - some in the Israeli government could hold their own with some figures from the 1930s, and settlers in the West Bank, with their biblical pretensions, have become Israel’s worst ambassadors. They do not represent the spirit of a people who once built a refuge from persecution; they represent the betrayal of that very ideal.
Israel will survive and likely thrive again. But it has suffered a moral injury that will take a couple of generations to heal. Those who equate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism — Weiss, Harris, etc. — do not enhance Israel’s moral standing; they erode it. In trying to silence its critics, they feed the very resentment they wish to extinguish.
Finally, I admire that many within the Jewish/Israeli community do speak out – and criticize, condemn and protest what they see – and note that a heritage of persecution does not exempt a people from self-examination and critique.
