This happened in the occupied West Bank. What would you like Hamas to do differently there?
But with nukes it for sure is because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
EDIT: There are a couple of axes that helped me get a broader perspective:
1. Whether one supports Israel's continued existence 2. Whether one believes Israel's continued existence is guaranteed
Having started about midway between yes and no on 1, and at yes on 2, it was extremely enlightening to reinterpret my observations from the point of view of yes on 1 and no on 2. All Israeli behaviour that I had previously found incomprehensible finally made sense.
During a surprise attack.
The conflict that was started by Oct 7, according to Wikipedia, has seen 81,526+ dead on the Palestinian and associated side*, vs. 2,053 on the Israeli side.
That said, from the point of view of your edit: the ratio is irrelevant when someone's convinced they're facing an existential threat. Given Oct 7 was proportionally worse for Israel than 9/11 was for the USA, and the USA didn't seem to stop justifying everything through that lens for about a decade afterwards… it's going to suck for everyone that Israel thinks is so much as looking at them funny. (That isn't a joke even if it sounds like one: the people who see Israel as their home and their safe-space are collectively likely to be hyper-vigilant, to their own cost, in this kind of way, for a long time).
* With the footnote that '"Indirect" deaths may be multiple times higher' and 'In addition to direct deaths, armed conflicts result in indirect deaths "attributable to the conflict". Mortality due to indirect deaths could be due to a variety of causes, such as infectious diseases.[27] Indirect deaths range from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths in recent conflicts.[28] In Gaza, estimated 51,000 natural deaths, natural death rate has gone up from 3.5/1000 to 22/1000 (late June 2024)[29]'
Yes indeed, I'm talking about the surprise attack phase. (Israel has experienced a surprise attack before that has put its continued existence in question: the Yom Kippur war.) And in fact, looking at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks
it seems as though the ratio was closer to 3:2.
In any case, Israel is surrounded by a hostile population of hundreds of millions (yes, still hostile despite the cold peace treaty it has with Egypt and the lukewarm one it has with Jordan), and it itself numbers about 10 million. So it is outnumbered by double figures to one.
I certainly don't see Israel's continued existence as guaranteed despite "nukes" and despite "American support" and despite having the "nth most powerful army in the world". And that point of view has helped me to understand the conflict like no other explanation.
I think the USA is unlikely to shift for as long as it's one single democratic nation, owing to internal political demographics. Same reasons it hasn't shifted on Cuba. But the USA keeps surprising me by failing to implode despite what all the politicians have been saying about each other, and by the anti-government language often used to justify gun ownership, so if I was in a position to influence Israel, I would be suggesting a diversification of international support.
But many times in history governments have done dumb thnings that backfired.
It's exceedingly subtle the way ethno-nationalism gets smuggled into the phrase "as a sovereign Jewish state," but it is no less terrible and ugly than the ethno-nationalism in other parts of the world and eras in history.
Edit: To elaborate, because there was another comment comparing this to Assad in Syria:
I think the difference is that Assad already belonged to the "enemy" is of the West (rightly so) and was immediately hit with sanctions.
What is special about Israel is that the government and, as it seems, large parts of the population, are displaying the same mentality - but unlike with Assad, no one is putting on the brakes here or threatening sanctions. On the contrary, our governments are protecting and enabling Israel in its behavior.
I think the aggression specifically towards Israel stems from the feeling of being on the wrong side this time.
Israel is modern invention by educated people who themselves have a long history of displacement and oppression. The bottom line is people expect them to "do better" compared to Syria, Myanmar, or China for that matter.
In that sense you could say it's actually racism towards all those other countries because the world just expects them to be violent, genocidal, and uncivilized anyway.
Conflating the Jews with Israel as a whole also makes every single Jew in the world worse off and in danger. I would not advise vomiting out Bibi's propaganda unless you want to see how terrible the consequences can really get
Not sure how the colonization of America justifies other colonization's.
Unless you think everyone is owed a 1 free genocide pass?
Not sure i'd be happy to live next to a neighbor illegally occupying my former house.
If you’re not happy, that’s on you. Time moves on, you need to accept the existence of the Israeli state.
Fair enough, but what happens when the US (inevitably) decide that they're not going to support Israel anymore. Bibi has basically turned support of Israel into a culture war argument, and without consistent US support, I'm not sure Israel will survive in it's current form.
Mind you, climate change could make the whole Middle East uninhabitable before then, so it's possible that the Israeli state will last until then.
And lets be clear, I don't think most people have an issue with the existence of an Israeli state, but what's been happening in Judea and Samaria for the past twenty or so years and Gaza currently is deeply, deeply wrong and reminds me of my favourite phrase, "the only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns from history". One would think that the Jewish people would have learned better lessons from their persecution, but apparently they learnt different lessons than I expected.
Its great that most people don’t have problem with our existence, but our neighbors do. That’s why we have wars.
And comparing it to the holocaust is quite different, in the entire Jewish history we never seeked to destroy anyone, we were always targeted because of antisemitism. The Palestinians? They are taught in schools that we are the devil.
Mmmm, maybe you should read the Bible? Lots of violence committed by the Israelis there.
> comparing it to the holocaust is quite different
Sorry, it's mostly the same (and incredibly similar to Irish history between Catholics and Protestants). Both sides dehumanise each other, and that leads to violence and suffering. How often does Israeli media cover the bombing of Gaza? Like, a lot of the footage didn't appear on most Western media until 12months + into the conflict.
One could also make the argument that what's happening in the West bank/Gaza is basically ghettoization, which was something that happened to the Jews a lot in Western Europe. It's profoundly depressing that all the Jewish people have learned is to inflict this kind of suffering on other people.
And the current plans to basically force all of the Gazans out is again, incredibly similar to historical pogroms and treatment meted out to the Jewish people.
Not sure how the colonization of America justifies other colonization's.
Unless you think everyone is owed a 1 free genocide pass?"
Most of them died from disease. Far more of them died from disease than died from say, hand to hand combat or warfare on the plains.
The American Indians were toast as soon as the first coughing European stepped ashore. The native Americans had no immunity to the stew of diseases that had been brewing in Europe and Asia for centuries, so the Indians simply died. Once an Indian had a disease (s)he could spread it to other indians (s)he met. The flame front of infection raged ahead of the white man across the continent. The "mountain men" encountered regions where entire societies were struck down: bodies everywhere, tools, lodging, structures left intact but virtually no one was around (and many the infected likely fled to more remote lands, worsening the spread).
One estimate is that 61 million people lived in the Americas prior to European contact. Between 1492 and 1600 about 50 million native Americans died of disease.
"Killed?" Yes but rarely intentionally. "Genocide?" No.
And note this was perpetrated by The United States, not the "American colonists". This was happening in the 1800s, a good 300 years after the initial disease front came through.
If the United States had respected the native populations the American West would look very different today. Compare with current Central and South America for example (which were certainly still victims of both disease and genocide, but it was less thorough due to differences in colonizers and geography).
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Unit...
So really these people have no reason to be elevated among similarly displaced people who did have a sovereign nation within much more recent timelines, and they aren’t without safe harbor or communities in safer nations that guarantee their rights.
So if the state of Israel does not exist for the safety of Jewish people as logic has plainly laid out, why does it exist? Easy. Military foothold. This is a modern day crusader state. A beachhead. An airbase. A missile platform. A hidden nuclear arsenal. A prolific defense industry with very little red tape binding it. These are the true foundations of Israel today. Everything else is a fig leaf poorly hiding this when you apply rational logic to the emotional justifications that people use. And everything Israel does makes perfect rational sense in light of its true purpose.
But even when it does become sovereign, I'm finding it hard to imagine that Scotland would annex Northumberland - which used to be Scotland in the distant past - and rape, murder, and starve the English people living there.
There is no excuse for the kind of barbarisms that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. Not ethnonationalism, not history, not the holocaust, not October 7.
And from an obvious common sense point of view, living in an embattled fortress territory is an eccentric definition of "safe."
It's an outbreak of collective psychopathy and deserves to be labelled as such. The people in charge are basically insane. Extremist ethnonationalism always is, whatever the nationality or background.
That's a really easy question: no.
Plenty of people don't have sovereign countries for themselves. Some of them persecuted, some of them integrated by force into other countries. Countries are not owed. They simply are. Tibet is being wholly integrated and controlled by China. Catalonia is somewhat asking for it, native americans are being relegated as second class citizens, and aboriginals in Australia are being left to die. Romanis do not have a country based around their culture.
Jews should absolutely be protected, in whichever country they are. That does not make the world owe them a country. Countries are not owed, they just are. As it stands, Israel is, but as a result of what they have done, not because it was owed to them.
No one is questioning the existence of Bulgaria as a separate entity from turkey, when they declared independence after the Russo Turkish war.
We would be if they were actively exterminating Turks living in their territory simply because they aren't Bulgarians.
Jews have and had the right to seek refuge from oppression. No one has the right to perpetuate oppression.
And no, I don't believe ethnonationalism is a panacea for anyone. The world would not be a better place if we could only subdivide into a multitude of homogenous little nations. I am grateful for the cultural diversity of my country. Countries like Japan that strive to protect their racial homogeneity will pay a steep cost.
And regarding some history on the establishment of Israel, after the UN partition resolution the Arabs started a civil war, where Arabs fled from Jewish territories, and Jews fled from Arab territories (Bethlehem and Hebron for example). So you could say that 2 ethno states were established.
So you do not condemn the behavior of the illegal settlements?