Israel live-tweets assault on Gaza
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
What better way to create more terrorists than by laughing in their faces, publishing military operations on Twitter as if they were trivial events, showing military kill strikes on YouTube and using game like graphics stating their leaders have been "eliminated".
Do you want to enrage your enemy into more violence or do you want to win?
Do your military operations - kill terrorists or don't - protect your borders or don't - I don't frankly give a damn.
But don't give the enemy more emotional ammunition than necessary, especially since you know they will use this as perfect fodder to indoctrinate even more people to their cause - especially children. This is the stuff they'll show kids, stating "Look, do you see how they mock us! - This is why you must fight and die!". You're just setting up the next wave of violence.
This is why the US military didn't release anything to do with Osama's assassination, and buried him at sea - nothing to worship, nothing to point to, nothing to show the people you want to brainwash - and say "Look how they mock us!".
You don't poke a cornered enemy unnecessarily. The expected value of that is negative.
It's not a fucking game.
Large organisations are still figuring out how to use social media, but in principle publishing an operation on twitter is no different than putting our a press release or sending someone for an interview at a major TV channel.
Same goes for making videos available on YouTube, I don't see anything wrong with that. In fact, since I don't watch TV I would have never seen this video if it wasn't made available online.
A dry press release, no image data, and a dry political report from the relevant spokesperson is perfect for this - there's nothing to latch onto - if you just list the facts, and get it over with.
It's what Obama did after Osama was assassinated, and it worked well - there was nothing offensive to latch on to, nothing to point to, and say "Look, that's what you are fighting for!".
Gaza strip borders Egypt on the southwest (11 km) and Israel on the east and north (51 km (32 mi))[1]. Israel can only "blockade" it's borders. The border to Egypt is open, and that where the rockets come from. The strip was occupied too long, true (38 years), but once Israel pulled you would expect something better than a fundamentalist militant Islamic regim that is focused on terror rather then encouraging better life after the occupation. One can hardly call "free from occupation" the Palestinians who live under this Islamic brutal oppression.
The objective requires an enemy.
I distinctly remember footage, on al-Jazeera of all networks, of Americans outside the White House singing "na na na na hey hey hey goodbye". OK, nothing official, but it's there. But oddly, no reprisals.
Regardless of how the Palestinians react to it, it does just seem a very dehumanized way of approaching a conflict where actual real people are dying.
> Over 50 rockets fired from #Gaza hit Israel since yesterday -- more than 800 rockets in 2012 alone. RT this. #Hamas
> 1 million citizens in #Israel slept in bomb shelters tonight, barraged by dozens of rockets from #Gaza. pic.twitter.com/LqPfjaTj
Seems like they are explaining things in simple terms so more humans can understand what's happening. I don't get how communicating so more humans will understand is dehumanizing.
I'm not saying they're not justified in doing what they're doing (that's a whole other 70+ year conversation) but this is the same as any other propaganda to 'other' the enemy.
if a Danish cartoon in a newspaper can set off riots
in countries where it is not published it does just seem a very dehumanized way of approaching a conflict
where actual real people are dyingI didn't mean to compare the two in terms of which was ok, I was just pointing out that saying " Most Palestinians probably don't read english anyways." doesn't mean they won't be aware of it regardless of whether or not they are the "intended" audience
No, this account is aimed at Americans. It shares short, simple, true messages: Hamas is a terrorist organization, Hamas launches hundreds of rockets into Israel, Israel is defending itself, and Israel is rather good at defending itself. The messages are designed to be shared with friends, in order to combat anti-Israeli attitudes. If you look at the IDF's blog (http://www.idfblog.com/), they've even added some game mechanics to the mix with their 'IDF Ranks'.
Personally, I think it's brilliant.
That's probably the least appropriate analogy ever.
> who believe that driving people out of their homes is god's work
Israel is actually a surprisingly secular country. If you don't know the most basic things about a country, maybe you shouldn't go around calling them nazis and barbarians. There's a word for those kind of attitudes.
But I do admit here that I've turned this not-understanding into choosing that it must be plain evil. Maybe it's something different. I'll not delete my original post to keep the thread understandable.
EDIT: I'm editing this comment because HN won't allow me to respond to blvr's post. blvr, thanks for elaborating. I don't mean to sound hateful, and I'm willing to accept that I have it all wrong. But still, can you explain the colonization thing? Why do they do it? Note, this is not criticism: I'd really like to understand it better. It's been pointed out by many in this thread by now that I've been assuming things.
I don't know what you mean by 'the colonisation thing'. What are you talking about specifically?
Aie, damn. Lost in translation. I meant the settlements. But people have been elaborating about those in other comments by now. And I've come to stand corrected that even if the settlements are horrible, they're less horrible than suicide bombings and the likes.
Zionism is the idea that Jews need a Jewish nation to take Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. History has basically proved that to be true.
What it's not:
1. The idea that Jews are in any way superior. All races have equal rights under Israeli law (although secular Jews have some obligations that other groups don't, i.e. mandatory military service) and Israel has a significant Arab population.
2. Religion-based. Early Zionists were all secular socialists. Religious Jews got on board later when they started to see Israel as a sign from God but the traditional position (and the reason why many Ultra-Orthodox Jews still don't support Israel) is that Jews weren't allowed a nation until the Messiah comes.
Israel isn't perfect (obviously) but your comments are completely disproportionate. You need to tone down the hate.
Makes perfect sense. If you settle a persecuted set of people on a totally unoccupied land, which would be totally harmless. What I don't understand is the need to persecute one already existing set of people to accommodate another set of people who just got persecuted.
If a persecuted tribe in Africa decides to settle down in Antarctica people wouldn't have a problem. But will it be OK, if they invade California drive out the existing set of people there and settle down.
If you think that's analogous to what happened in Palestine you need a history lesson.
Will it be ok, If they drive out existing residents of California?
This narrative about driving people out is an oversimplification at best, though, just as much for Israel as for California.
I don't see Hispanics flying around in F-16's bombing white American colonies. If they do, I will be the first to speak out. What you seem to be talking about is natural change in demographics, where a group of people grow in population and the other group doesn't grow much. And then there is natural movement(like immigration in case of Hispanics).
Also if its oversimplification, please explain us the right thing.
As a result you call my response intellectually dishonest, and ask me to go over to Reddit and talk to other fanatics.
Sorry, but no more replies from me. Also If have I hurt you by any means on this thread, accept my sincere apologies.
How on earth is the former causally linked to the latter?
But they weren't persecuted - they were paid off.
In 1917, at the end of WW1, Britain was given the mandate of administering Palestine - at the time a chunk of the recently-defeated-and-defunct Ottoman Empire. Part of this mandate was the Balfour Declaration, which basically said that Britain would work to build 'a national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine ("it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine").
They worked with the "Jewish Agency for Palestine" (these days the Jewish Agency for Israel), who had been buying the land in the area from the previous owners - mostly Arab clans and local sheiks and so on. Nothing was seized, nobody was driven out or persecuted.
In practice the people in the area operated as 'millets' - micronations unified by religious belief, governing themselves according to religious law. When the British took over administration of the region in 1917, they didn't try to change this.
So for the most part, the landowners that the Jewish Agency was buying from were the governance. The trade wasn't like one citizen of a nation selling to another citizen of the nation; it was like one country selling land to another country (and so moving its borders).
The message is clear and simple: Don't mess with us, we will fk you over. Whether it is nice or not is a different matter.
I do not think that what Israel is doing is better or worse than what other countries have done or are currently doing and should not be treated any better or worse because of it. But it would be disingenuous to spin it as anything but what it is. To me, the strategy is to occupy and take over territory over time. It works. See the history of the United States versus native people, Australians versus aborigines, Chinese versus Tibetans. Might makes right. For Americans, we still benefit greatly from what happened in the past. Its not to say that the Palestinians are blameless, just that Israel has the 'bigger gun' in this fight.
Say what you will about history, but how people are treated right now is telling.
Why don't you do research on the early Zionists, if you're actually curious about the subject and not just trying to score points in an internet debate? Probably most of the early Zionists were very secularist.
I don't especially like the settlements, actually, and neither do a lot of Palestinians. I'd be happier if the lot of them were either removed or simply abandoned to the jurisdiction of Palestinian authorities.
Sharon actually closed a lot of them awhile ago, but just like any democracy, it's hard to get away with alienating any constituency. You'll notice that even though Sharon pulled all the settlements out of the Gaza Strip, it didn't seem to improve matters there any. Also, the settlements provide a lot of jobs and economic benefits to Palestinians. It's a complicated issue, much more complicated than this bullshit of yours about "the Israelis are Nazis" (which itself is pretty fucking racist, BTW).
As for the bulldozers, do you have any good sources on that? As far as I can readily find, most demolitions are either carried out because structures were constructed (often in Israel itself) without proper building permits (though this is allegedly enforced unfairly), or because there are terrorists actively holed up inside them. Interestingly, Israel also demolishes a lot of the settlements.
This is probably a good time to point out one of my simple ground rules about this issue: I think any criticism of any party, or any policy, is reasonable, as long as one accepts that both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist as independent states.
As a sidenote, I agree that the Nazi reference was over the top and I regret using it. I do not agree, however, that it was "fucking racist", since I called a government something, not a race or a nation's people.
There are also Palestinian factions which are unreasonable, including Hamas. I think it's doubly unfortunate that both Hamas and Likud have managed to win various elections.
We should care about your opinion why?
Flagged.
But that's not what people are usually talking about when this argument comes up - instead, they're criticizing Israel's right to exist or Israel's right to defend itself (which amounts to the same thing). When they're not being so explicit, they want Israel to embark on a policy which would lead to the end of Israel (accepting indefensible borders, the 'right of return', etc.)
In short, they're making the 'anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism' argument. Personally, I think anti-Zionism is just the first type of antisemitism to try and simultaneously deny it's antisemitic. Let me try to explain with an analogy.
Let's say I was anti-France - that I believed French national identity was somehow illegitimate, and that therefore France shouldn't be a country. Since France shouldn't exist, France also isn't entitled to defend itself from external attack. However, I have no problem with French people! Great wine, great cheese - they just shouldn't be able to have a country. If a French person objects, I'll just patiently remind him that I'm not anti-French, I'm merely anti-France. Perhaps I'll criticize him a bit for inappropriately throwing out the anti-French card.
Sound ridiculous? Well, that's exactly how it sounds to me when someone argues that my people can't establish a state (in the same imperfect way most states are established) and then can't defend our state from attack. Everyone else's national self-determination is fine, but ours is somehow not.
So yes, when people make this sort of argument against Israel - a type of argument they would never make against Sweden or France or Mexico - in that case I do believe they're being more than a little biased against my people in particular, and therefore antisemitic.
You cannot deny, however, that Israel has been less than kind to the Palestinian people in many instances. Is pointing that out antisemitic? No. What about if it's pointed out in an absolutely tasteless way, for instance by using a Nazi reference? Still not. It's tasteless, and I apologize, but it's not denying Israel's right to exist or defend itself. I'm not convinced that maintaining a situation that essentially boils down to having first-class and second-class citizens is the only way to guarantee the continued existence of Israel.
And, it's important that we're allowed to discuss this. If any criticism of Israel's actions is called antisemitism, we're effectively censoring the entire debate. Now I'll be the first to admit that arguing on the internet has little direct value, but I daresay that the "antisemitism!!" gut reaction is at least as harmful as people like me rudely denouncing the people running a government in situation as complex as Israel's as "a bunch of Nazis".
you're now making factual assertions, which are false, and which you have never researched, you've only heard them from biased unscholarly sources like CNN. and you just believed them, without adequate questioning of them.
is it a coincidence that you believe false factual statements condemning israel, but not ones condemning france? or what?
and that you're so damn sure israel is guilty that you insist no one could even dispute it, even though you're highly ignorant on the topic and do not provide any factual arguments documenting any atrocities. (there are many purported documentations of such things. i've seen them before. they are not exactly high quality or persuasive. they only convince biased people or people who don't look too closely.)
For example, you obviously don't like being called an antisemite, and you don't want to think of yourself as an antisemite. I hope that pointing out your very real bigotry will bother you enough that you'll spend some time exploring the underlying facts and thinking more about why the Jewish state is held to a standard no other nation is, and whether its actions are actually 'atrocities' or whether this belief comes from other antisemitic propaganda and lies.
Best of luck.
the excuse that "i am only criticizing israel (which just happens to be the jewish state, what a coincidence), not jews" is an extremely common statement of anti-semites. using it without further elaboration only makes you look more anti-semitic.
Nevertheless, I have a hard time understanding what you hope to gain by your approach here. While you may be quite right that stating "i am only criticizing israel, not jews" is common among people who hate Jews, did you ever consider that this does not imply the inverse? It does not mean that everyone criticizing Israel hates Jews. As a programmer, you must understand this.
IMHO, the fastest way Israel support organisations can lose popular support in countries outside Israel is by calling people who criticize them (no matter how tastelessly) antisemites. I never understood why commenters like you and pro-Israel organisations appear to be so trigger happy with the term. It moves the entire discussion from the sphere of fact and opinion to the sphere of taboos.
I'll happily discuss fact and opinion with you. So whether or not Israel did right or wrong things - that's an HN-worthy discussion. But playing the antisemite card on a criticism of a government, even if this criticism is exceptionally harsh and inappropriate, that just doesn't work. I called a bunch of politicians something horrible. You called me something comparably horrible.
- criticizes israel in public, in ways anti-semites like to criticize israel - is not anti-semitic - does not include any clarifications in his criticism to differentiate himself from anti-semites
I think all good people know such clarifications are needed when you sound like you might be an anti-semite but actually aren't. If you leave them out, you're giving aid and comfort to anti-semitism and misleading people about your character, at best.
Note that any old clarifications won't work. Many anti-semites try to clarify how they aren't anti-semitic. A decent person would have to figure out how to say something that objectively differentiates himself. And he would care to do it if he wanted to publicly agree with the anti-semitic position on some specific point.
It's a testament to the overall excellence of the HN community that the comment sparked a discussion, not a flamewar.
If Israel is looking for more support from people like me, the question I'd like to see them answer is: how do they justify the West Bank settlements? I can't even begin to understand how Israel can claim to want peace with Palestinians while unilaterally moving into the land where 2/3 of them live. Where do they think the Palestinian state should be?
I can't even say I'm disagreeing with Israel's stance on this issue, because I honestly don't understand what theory Israel uses to justify this. Every time I read any news on this issue, there is a conspicuous lack of comment from Israeli leadership about why this is ok. It's like they don't believe it needs explaining. It's very strange to me.
Hamas is awful, but what space are Israel's policies leaving for more moderate Palestinian leadership?
Palestine will have moderate leadership sometime after the majority of Palestinians are decent people who will vote for decent leaders. Blaming Israel for the hatred of its extremist enemies is nasty.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01...
Your mistake is no random accident. You should go learn positive things about Israel until you wouldn't make such a mistake again.
You also implied they are not decent because of their voting preferences, completely ignoring the complex factors that may have led each to make that decision. There are so many ways you could have gotten the point across that the Palestinion public needs to make better choices in their elected officials, yet you decided to just call those people indecent.
> Your mistake is no random accident. You should go learn positive things about Israel until you wouldn't make such a mistake again.
Is your attitude regarding the people of Palestine no random accident? Should I advise you to learn more about individual Palestinions with the assumption that would change your mind?
But we will not get anywhere in this discussion: if someone's mind is closed, it is hard to deal with that.
Paraphrased, their position is: we won the 1967 war, and because there was no formal country in the West Bank prior to that, we can keep the land that we won in that war legally. Since we own it, we see no reason to keep Israelis from moving there if they want to.
It still seems hard to justify, saying on one hand that the "right of return" would threaten Israel's identity as a Jewish state (I agree; this is an unrealistic demand), but simultaneously arguing that Israelis are free to continue moving to the West Bank if they so choose, as if that doesn't threaten the identity of a future Palestinian state.
the issue with millions of hostile persons becoming israel voters is not paralleled by any similar issue with some settlements in palestine. first, isn't the population figures of the settlements more in line with the amount of arabs already in israel than with trying to take over? second, the israel settlers are not, as a whole, hostile/violent/dangerous to have in your country, so there's no reason to mind them. palestinians, while some individuals are decent folk, as a group they are dangerous, like it or not it's simply a fact: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01...
That said, the construction of new settlements seems like a totally unnecessary provocation that undermines the prospect of a future Palestinian state. It very much gives me the impression that Israel is not serious about a two-state solution (in contrast with the withdrawal from Gaza, which very strongly had given me the opposite impression). I don't think it's appropriate to say what Palestinians should or should not "mind" having around; a major element of (future) sovereignty is a people being able to make their own decisions about immigration, as Israel does now. And while Israeli settlers may not be violent "as a whole," there is certainly a noticeable incidence of Israeli settler violence that targets Palestinians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settler_violence
I agree that empirically, a lot of violence is waged on Israelis by Palestinians. However I think it's wrong to frame them as an inherently violent people. You might have said the same thing about Jordanians in 1967, but now Israel and Jordan are allies. Likewise the PLO, which called for the destruction of Israel in its founding charter, has since recognized Israel's right to exist and rejected violence and terrorism. I'm not denying current Palestinian violence, which is awful.
If Israel is serious about holding the West Bank as a future homeland for Palestinians, they should be more restrictive about building new settlements and gently push for closing existing settlements. It's hard to do that when the settlers are your own people and they vote, though.
The problem is that while Arafat officially recognized Israel in 1993, Israel never reciprocated. Would it still be war if Israel recognized the right for a Palestinian State to exist, and how this Palestinian demand for a right to have a state can be denied by people who asked for the exact same thing and obtained it (leading to the existence of Israel) a few decades before ?
Why would Palestinian Authorities accept any borders except the ones from 1967, which is already very generous ?
As for accepting borders - there are many reasons, but first and foremost pragmatism. Some Israeli cities in the West Bank will never be moved, and insisting on their evacuation is just an excuse to not make peace. These large inhabited areas are practically suburbs of large Israeli cities which are not in the West Bank, and wouldn't inhibit Palestinian life in any way. A land swap is the reasonable thing to do.
For comparison, up until the 40s the Israeli government (to be) accepted pretty much any proposal that would just let them get on with it and build a state (Peel Comission 1930s, UN Partition Plan 1940s). They too had endless justifications for why they should get more than they were offered, and how unjust it would be to settle for less, but ultimately they chose the future over the past.
Palestinians can cling to their version of a just solution for another hundred years and go nowhere, or accept the perfectly reasonable framework that was already put on the table by Clinton in 2000 and accepted by Israel:
* Over 95% of 1967 territory, with the rest made up for in land swaps * Full control over East Jerusalem * Billions of dollars in aid to resettle all refugees in Palestine
Many countries have defensible grievances over which pieces of territory should or should not be under their control, but still get on with their lives and live peacefully with their neighbours. Palestinians don't, and we should ask ourselves why.
The trophy eliminated graphic and youtube video.. it's almost like they aren't even serious about killing people and using military force. It has a reckless feeling to it and it doesn't sit well with me.
Its not even a game actually. I mean you are comparing two forces of totally unequal magnitude. Israel probably has several hundreds of times a more military power, air power and naval power than the Palestinians. The Palestinians do not even have a remote chance of even touching Israel.
>>it's almost like they aren't even serious about killing people and using military force.
Your opponents have a fleet of most advanced air power backed by the biggest, most powerful and technically sophisticated army owned by a super power in the whole world. Coupled with this unmatched ground power. What you have is a gun, crude weapons and rockets.
Is this even a competition? Think of it more like practice sessions.
Tell that to all the Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorism.
Let's look at it simply, Israel has the land, settlements in Palestinian territory, denying right of return and controlling East Jerusalem. All of which are Palestinian rights according to the UN. Give them back and whine all you want about terrorism to the world, until you do, any attacks on you are legitimate. And your retaliation is nothing other than trying to subject a free people to surrender their rights, which they never will.
You really do the Palestinian position no favours by claiming absurdities.
Funny how the word 'antisemitic' gets thrown around; Arabs are Semites too.
nope, nothing at all. but somehow everyone knows that seal team six is BADASS.
pointing to the US, of all countries, as a counter example is a cognitive dissonance of such magnitude, it is baffling.
greetings from Europe.
The White House pictures showed no glee and did not trivialise the situation - they were serious and released appropriately. No photos of Osama or his assassination were released.
The pictures of the aftermath were from Pakistan.
Books/Movies/References occur with any high impact event - you cannot stop them.
Greetings from "get off your high horse", the real world is messy - hence you deal with the situations as best you can as they arise - but obviously Europe is doing just fine - so we should all probably listen to you.
Oh wait - no you aren't.
@USArmy, @USFOR_A + @ISAF_RC_South + @ISAFmedia, @DeptofDefense, @StateDept, @NATO, http://www.pentagonchannel.mil/ ... all exist and post war content directly.
the IDF is doing the same.
The only way thing the muslim murders fear is humiliation. A quick martyrdom followed by a dignified burial at sea is not going to deter anybody. And they have all the reason they need to hate the US so long as there are soldiers on 'muslim' land. Just as they have plenty of things to hate Israel for, no matter what they are posting on twitter.
What Obama did with Osama was a fucking scandal
and should have cost him the presidency. The only way thing the muslim murders fear is humiliation. A quick martyrdom followed by a dignified burial at sea
is not going to deter anybody.Look, I understand frustration and feelings, but we can talk rationally here.
I guess Israel feels they need to be more in control of the news that will be send out, sending the news out themselves from the moment it happens is one way of achieving this.
I see the need for this. Here in Europe many countries, organisations (like the EU) and media outlets seem to be more politically aligned with Arab nations compared to Israel. I believe this to be because the Arab nations are much more worth as trade partner to Europe compared to Israel and in the end money makes the world go round. Perhaps by sending these tweets Israel can gain more support from the (European) citizens.
Provoke your enemies to launch small time worthless rocket(Without much firepower or guidance system to cause organized damage) attacks at you. Use those attacks, now as a reason- Call it terrorism and then bomb them left right and center with F-16s and call it defending yourself.
I am not supporting anybody here. But this is a valid defense strategy in a war.
You can do anything in a war so as long you can justify it.
Yes, in a "go on, make my day" kind of way, to justify even more future military action, since Israel is likely to win any future conflict.
> This is why the US military didn't release anything
US military's goal was not the same as Israel's goal.
> or do you want to win?
They want to win, but not as you think.
Their definition of "win" is to ethnically clean Palestinians from biblical Israel, so yes, engaging them in more and more and more violence is the way to go.
> You're just setting up the next wave of violence.
And the next wave of violence will lead to the next way of Israel wins, and the next way of Israel wins will lead to the next way of settlements and land expropriation. Mission accomplished. The Israeli far right loves it when a plan comes together.
> It's not a fucking game.
Your problem is that you dont even for a second consider the possibility that Israel is the bad guy in this game, i.e. the Nazis, so youre all the time "wrong move, wrong move, WTF are they doing?!?!". From a bully's point of view, Israels tactics fully make sense. You start a conflict and then you win and you take your victims toys and chase him from the playground.
This is what I understand: historically you don't defeat and dominate your enemy and after some generations all is good. Historically you killed everyone to ensure no new generations would come back to fight back.
This means that historically all children were murdered too. Total eradication of entire civilizations.
The modern western warfare now respects children and woman. This is a HUGE change, and the consequences are still being discovered.
Now everything is a public relations issue. I don't agree or disagree with what's happening, I simply watch in fascination as an external unrelated entity.
Lets be frank, this was a targeted assassination by a nation state that consistently tries to paint itself as a beacon of democracy in the region.
Say all you want about Ahmed Jabari but his modus operandi was a direct result of a life of occupation and subjugation. You don't go into prison at the age of 22 and come out 13 years later a happy individual. I mean it was only 6 years ago that Hamas was democratically elected in a process considered fair and transparant, only for the elections to be found null and void by those (US/Israel et al) outside of Gaza!
Edit: On a side note, I wonder whether many people know that Likud, the Netanyahus political party, does not recognise Palestines right to exist!
On individual cases, you can't blame Israel for defending against hand-made rockets flying over the Gaza strip border. Similarly, you can't blame your average Palestinian for joining the resistance after an Isreali army bulldozered his village to make place for Israeli houses and theatres.
Both sides, in many ways, are equally bad. The main difference is that Israel can choose to stop colonizing, can choose to give Palestinians basic human rights to allow some sort of economy to develop. The only thing Palestinians can choose to do is to stop fighting. There's a difference here.
I don't see how all of that has anything to do with Israel being a Jewish state, except of course that declaring a single-religion state, in general, is asking for trouble.
EDIT: In a different set of comments here, it was pointed out to me that Isreal is in fact a "surprisingly secular state". I tend to believe that. So in that case, you can scratch my last line. In exchange, we all stop calling Israel a Jewish state.
Israel isn't a state for Judaism, it's simply a state for Jewish people. The set of Jewish people is not equal to the set of people who practice Judaism.
First, the settlers aren't settling in Gaza, they're settling in the West Bank. This makes the idea of rockets-as-retribution a bit strange, since relations with the West Bank are decent and they obviously undergo a lot more daily molestation than Gazans do since Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_statistics_for_Israe...
Also, Israel is in no sense a single religion state. There is complete freedom of religion in Israel. There is an "official" orthodox Judaism there which sadly has the authority to determine if you get a real Jewish wedding among other things, but there are Muslim and Christian Israelis among everything else, and the stripe of ones Judaism is not relevant to immigration.
Who's holding the gate closed to this giant prison camp? Nobody, as it turns out, except Gaza itself. Look at questions 14 and 15 on this poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion:
http://www.pcpo.ps/polls/poll171.htm
80% of Palestinians won't give up on right of return, and they won't accept a cash buyout either. The former is as likely as America peacably returning the land to the Native Americans. The latter is an actual possibility, but what's the point if they don't want it. The Palestinian Authority doesn't want a large migration rate out, because it hurts their appeal for statehood and the argument for right of return. Hamas is responsible for turning Gaza into a prison camp, not Israel. Compare to the situation in the West Bank, where you could legitimately say there is too much Israeli interference, yet there is peace. If Gaza wants peace, they should show Hamas the door and elect Fatah. It worked for one half.
Israel has a fundamental responsibility to its citizens to guarantee their safety, and that responsibility has precedence over protecting the lives of innocent bystanders living in an enemy territory surrounded by agents who are actively attacking them. As far as this particular Gaza expedition goes, their hands are clean. This one's on Gaza.
Is there anyone in Israel running for office on the platform of "let's not assassinate terrorists"? Are these people under the illusion that they would vote for such a person, or abstain from voting if no such candidate presented themselves?
Once you vote for an assassin in your country, you lose the moral authority to denounce another country's assassinations. Romney or not.
You should try asking them how they feel about this instead of claiming hypocrisy.
this is war.
Attempts to whitewash Israels treatment of the Palestinians falls short the minute facts enter the argument.
Why does Israel ban confectionary into Gaza?
I don't, because Hamas is a terrorist organization with the express goal of destroying Israel. And it's not for lack of candy, either.
> Is it the same side that straps children to the front of armoured troop carriers?
Um, do you have any kind of evidence of that ever happening, or is this just another blood libel? Google literally brings up your comment as the only relevant result.
Thing is, I can't pinpoint why, exactly, it feels so strange. Just... militant combatants pledging mutual annihilation, living right alongside a photo of your aunt's cat peering out of a shoebox. The dissonance is off the charts.
These tweets just re-enforce people's existing opinion.
Also, 'ELIMINATED' is a distasteful way of saying 'DEAD' or 'KILLED'.
sk5t's comment was: "My perception is that Zionists are a very powerful special interest group." Which strikes me as a calm, rational opinion. (Whether or not you or I agree with it is another matter...)
The American right tends to be supportive of Israel. The American left is slightly more split, but since American Jews tend to be left-wing they exert enough of an influence on the rest. This doesn't tend to be as true in Europe, where anti-semitism never went fully out of fashion.
(This, of course, assumes that by antisemitism you mean actual hatred of Jews, and not "being critical of the something the Israeli government does or did")
Well, for example, there's being critical of something the Israeli government does or did, and then there's literally calling them Nazis.
There's also that charming little incident in your country where football supporters, specifically of Ajax, took on a "Jewish" identity for some reason, which was cute until rival supporters chanted "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas". Oddly enough, this kind of racist abuse doesn't seem to happen in the United States. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9404E7DB153FF...
Fair point though about the football supporters. Their behaviour show the worst in any people. That said, if Ajax had happened to be associated with Catholics instead of Jews, the rival supporters would've come up with something horribly offensive to Catholics. So I'm not sure that this was real decent antisemitism: more like a very inappropriate form of anti-Ajaxism.
In fact, the way I understand that incident, it's much like using the term "Nazi" to criticize the Israeli governmen. I don't see how that's antisemitic, but it's still ridiculously offensive. When I wrote that, I lowered myself to the standards of mindless hooligans.
-- Anti-semitism is rampant: In the UK, France, and Germany, etc. Its quite possibly, even trendy. [1,2,3]
____________________________
[1] How my hate-filled family spawned Merah the monster
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/how-my-hatefi...
[M. Merah murdered seven people, including three Jewish <children>, in a series of scooter-borne attacks in the Toulouse area in March 2012.]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/how-my-hatefi...
[2] 'One in six' east Germans think like neo-Nazis
Published: 12 Nov 12 15:51 CET
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20121112-46121.html
[3] Anti-Israel culture war of British liberal elites is not a grassroots movement Too many of our leading British academic and cultural institutions are in the thrall of left-wing activists, but anti-Semitism is far from rife at the British grassroots
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1381/anti_israel_cultu...
[4] "There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary." - 2010. Y. Rabim, Nobel Laureate.
See http://www.patrobertson.com/Speeches/IsraelLauder.asp for their own words, and http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/north7.html for an non-evangelical viewpoint.
So I find myself internally at a conflicted point. Why was it 'bad' for Egypt to do? Why wouldn't it be 'bad' for Twitter to do? (remember this is me asking myself if I can deduce through introspection why I'm conflicted) I'm not on either 'side' of the Palestinian conflict, but I am interested in trying to reason about morality and the Internet's impact on it.
You make some interesting points, and they could have led to some useful discussion.
I'll try (and I'll avoid the traditional flame-war aspects of the discussion.)
I think the difference may be the perceived power balances: in one situation there is an oppressive regime censoring communications to hinder rebels who are protesting against that oppressive regime. In the other situation there is a network who would be asking some account holders not to make posts on their network. Their servers, their rules.
We might dislike twitter for taking a stance, but it's not censorship.
I think you are correct about the power balances. People revolting in Egypt don't have a 'voice' but the government does, similarly Israel has its own 'voice' in the form of television media, etc and doesn't "need" the amplification that Twitter provides.
Its an interesting dichotomy that I'll have to think more about. Meanwhile this whole thread has been modded into oblivion :-)
This could be extrapolated to "if Israel doesn't do this sort of thing, then it will be a sign of weakness to the Palestinians, Iran, and others", however I don't think that is true. There is a line between an aggressive posture and just downright being awful, and they crossed it.
Also assassination is wrong no matter who it is done to. Geneva convention or not, life is sacred and even those that have committed the utmost atrocities deserve only to be separated from everyone else so they can do no more harm and perhaps learn from their mistakes and repent. I know that I would be just as angry as the Israelis or Palestinians if I had to experience what they have, though.
Israel defends themselves -- not enough (if some Israeli innocents still get murdered and Israel still attacked in the future, how can that be enough defense?) -- and you call it "awful"? Explain yourself!
Good thing is they killed a well known military leader and a terrorist . Just to send a message , I mean striking terror in the heart of enemy is the single most accurate technique that has worked since the origin of war. I think those who volunteer for Hamas now will think twice about it.
Frankly enforcing religion in military used to work when people fought with knives and swords . Here most wars are won with discipline and intelligence . No religion led military will ever win , they are just a bunch of monkeys jumping here and there and are too emotional to think with their heads .
I wonder how many people who have followed IDF since this attack are terrorists.
IDF Twitter status: Following @terrorist... with my laser! LMAO
They might as well setup a FourSquare account also. IDF is now mayor of license plate xxxxx.