#Netanyahu hamas and the idf suck

[twoelectrichearts]

Noah Schnapp is literally beyond evil. Like, spawn of satan level of evil. He only deserves to suffer for the rest of his existence. How dare he have empathy for innocent civilians in Israel and Palestine. First of all, there’s no such thing as innocent Israeli civilians. Second of all, you can't have empathy for both. Especially if he is a Zionist. All the Jewish people who identify as Zionists are evil. Israel has absolutely no right to exist and Jewish people have no right to exist in Israel. So many Jewish people who are Zionists claim that’s what Zionism means to them but they’re wrong. Zionism is pure evil. You can’t be Zionist and want peace and self determination for Palestinians. I’m not Jewish but I definitely know better than the Jewish Zionists who claim that. They’re all evil lying monsters. They want every Palestinian wiped off the face of the Earth. Hamas would never want such a thing. It’s not like they had a charter that said that about Jewish people. Even if they did, they supposedly recently changed it to Zionists instead so it’s all good now. Hamas is totally accepting of Jewish people now and would welcome them with open arms as long as they aren’t Zionist. Noah, if you’re a Zionist, don’t be anymore. You can change your evil ways. Hamas changed. Yeah, they may have killed civilians and taken hundreds hostage, they may have said October 7th was just the beginning and that it was going to happen over and over again, but they’re no longer antisemitic. They’re just anti Zionist so they’re good people now. You can change and be good too. You’re so young. There’s still hope for you. Stop lying and telling us how you want peace and self determination for Palestinians. We all know that’s not true. It can only be true if you aren’t Zionist.

You liking something like this makes absolutely no sense if you’re Zionist. I bet you don’t even agree with it and just liked it by accident or something. It’s crazy how I even managed to come across this months ago considering nobody talked about it or brought it to light. You liking that sketch of people in the LGBTQ+ community simping over Hamas got so much attention and caused so much outrage though. Funny how the internet works. Anyways, as a bisexual, I was so offended by that video. Hamas are well known LGBTQ+ allies. How could you like that video as someone who’s gay? It’s probably because you’re lying about being gay too. Shame on you.

Last thing I’m gonna say is fuck Israel and fuck Israelis. That country and all the people living there are evil. They’re all colonizers and occupiers. It needs to cease to exist and all the people currently living there need to go back to where they originally came from. All of them came from Europe, right? That’s what I’ve been hearing. They all need to return to Europe. Gosh, why’d they ever leave there in the first place? I know Jewish people say otherwise but they’re wrong. They’re either lying or in denial. They’re not indigenous to Israel. They’re indigenous to Europe. Us non Jewish people really need to educate them more about their own history, religion, ethnicity, etc. We need to teach them what antisemitism actually is. A lot of them don’t seem to understand what it is. We do that to every other minority group that we aren’t apart of, right?

[cantotallyeven]

OK look, I'm not reblogging that Trump Tirade of wild, frequently off-topic, entirely uncited claims. But I want to say that if you are interested in understanding a bit better why people like me feel the way they do about Israel - that is, that it's fair to label it an ethnostate and that is something that needs to change, NOT that it should cease to exist - you should look at the history of colonisation in Rhodesia or the USA. All of these arguments - "we want X group to have their own country too, on this land we've chosen for them", "actually we have people from X group who we've integrated", "they would do worse to us" - they've been run before.

I don't personally agree with the slogan "from the river to the sea, palestine [must/will] be free" because of how imprecise it is, the fact that it can be read as calling for a reverse ethnic cleansing (which would be just as bad as what is happening now). However, I know that a lot of people who do use it and agree with it envisage a South Africa style one-state solution. That's personally what I'd want to see as well.

I appreciate that if you're an Israeli Jew this is a very difficult time. I live in the UK and find it horrifying that my country is acting as a passive enabler of Netanyahu's agenda. If you wholeheartedly support a free Palestinian country, it must be awful seeing it reduced to rubble and feeling there's nothing you can personally do to stop it.

I'll just breeze past your opinion insult there. So you say I should look into the history of colonization in the US. But here's the thing. Israel is actually a decolonization project. it was literally the indigenous people going home. And those indigenous people didn't want to kick the current occupants out, they wanted to live there in peace with them. But those current occupants didn't like that. They refused to give the Jews equal rights. And when Britain and the UN left, they went and tried to ethnically cleanse all of the Jews. They failed. So what were the Jews to do? Simply say "no worries' and let all of the Palestinians back in?

You say you envision a one state solution South Africa style but how would that work? Cuz like, the population of Gaza + the West Bank is around 5 million. The population of Israel is 9 million. Isn't that equivalent to Israel just taking control of Palestine? Like, even if the 2 million Arabs form a voting block with the incoming Palestinians, it would still be the current Israeli government in control until all of the new citizens are integrated. And again, this assumes that Hamas would not have an issue living in peace with Jews, they've shown time and again that they don't want that. Like yes, in an ideal world that would happen, but I don't think it could in the real world.

And yes, seeing all of that death and destruction sucks. I guess where we differ is I feel Hamas is more to blame for that than the IDF.

[5thdivinebeast]

Alright I'm rant for a little bit.

Online pro-genocide zionists might actually be the most annoying terminally online fucks out there. I literally saw someone post something like "man it sucks that Israel bombed civilians" and the immediate response from someone was "WHY ARE YOU AN ANTISEMITE FREE THE HOSTAGES!!!!"

Like...

Are you absolutely incapable of holding any empathy for the civilians' lives we've lost? Have you just ignored how the Netanyahu administration has refused deals to return the hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire? Are you ignoring the fact that the IDF killed hostages that were being released?

And I am goddamn tired of people using the excuse of "well hamas is embedded in the civilian population" when the landmass in question is around the size of Rhode Island where the fuck are they supposed to go???

And of course hamas is a terrible organization, they are a literal terrorist organization

But when Israel launches a campaign of utter destruction after decades of a blockade, purposefully creating the conditions for a famine, targeting aid workers and journalists, and have members of their government denying even the existence of the Palestinian people, you have to take a moment and think "maybe... this isn't all one sides fault?"

And the level of anti-muslim/Arab sentiment I've seen dripping from these pro-israel comments are... kinda unbelievable

Like, I've fully seen people call all Palestinians terrorists and that they're a backwards baby-killing culture

And i hate feeling like I constantly have to defend my position here, no of course I'm not justifying the actions of hamas. Of course the Israeli people deserve peace as well. But we have to get to a point where we can call a spade a spade, a war crime a war crime, and a genocide a genocide.

[thatnewguy200]

What's with the whole Black and White view on the whole Gaza War?

I'm serious here. On one hand, we have people who support Palestine, but have said "All Jews should die" or "Down with all Jews" or something like that, and on the other hand, we have people who have supported Israel, but have said "All Muslims should die" or something of that nature. They focus on the horrible atrocities of both sides, but they have this extreme black and white rationalization that Jews/Muslims as a whole are evil genocidal warmongers, when they actually aren't. Instead of rightfully calling out both the Hamas AND the IDF (ESPECIALLY Netanyahu), they just blame all Jews or Muslims.

Not everything is Black and White. Not everything is a whole "Good VS. Evil" scenario. People need to see the grey area, as well as acknowledge that this is an "Everyone sucks here" scenario, rather than pin the blame on entire religions. I mean, I'm the sort of guy who'd want Palestine to be free from... well, a LOT of things, most notably the Hamas and Israel's poor treatment of them, but all this is taking things WAY too far.

I still don't know some things, but the atrocities both the IDF and the Hamas have committed, and the past (and present) actions of both do not justify any of the horrible things they both have done, both past AND present. I just don't want any more fighting, man.

[extracts-sheep]

Not getting sucked into the Syrian civil war has arguably been Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement (as of March 2018). If it wanted to, the Israel Defense Forces could have seized Damascus within a week, but what would Israel have gained from that? It would be even easier for the IDF to conquer Gaza and topple the Hamas regime, but Israel has repeatedly declined to do so. For all its military prowess and for all the hawkish rhetoric of Israeli politicians, Israel knows there is little to be won from war. Like the USA, China, Germany, Japan and Iran, Israel seems to understand that in the twenty-first century the most successful strategy is to sit on the fence and let others do the fighting for you.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century | Yuval Noah Harari

[centrally-unplanned]

While I wouldn't really care I can at least recognize some loose reasoning from whoever you are talking about - but that isn't me and isn't in my post. Like:

it is an insufficient casus belli

I don't say that nor do I necessarily think that. I think it is a dumb casus belli in this specific case and I will dig into that, but as I explicitly say in my post, if alternate-universe-Israel was doing the alternate-universe-thing banning UNRWA I discussed my response would be "dumb but whatever". Again, the entire point of my post.

Anyway:

[No one is saying] "Hamas is a spiritual contamination they are infected with due to contact with the government,"

That includes me, I also don't say that, so good talk I guess:

UNRWA is actively aiding Hamas's military aims against Israel by knowingly providing shelter, transport, and material support for Hamas fighters.

I think the strong version of this is blatantly not true and not only has Israel never made a good case for this, they don't even bother most of the time outside of incredibly small examples. You are smuggling their implications into an argument - their actual claims are the weaker "UNRWA has Hamas members working for them and they help out sometimes" and then they let that vibe into "and then obviously that means the whole org is leaking missile strikes details and programmatically smuggling weapons" when that is a batshit implication to make that they never back up. You can disagree, that is fine, but I don't think my one-off segue paragraph needs to dig into that.

The weaker version - "UNRWA and Hamas have ties", is true and exactly what I said! UNRWA obviously has members of hamas who collaborate with it, obviously has many employees who are broadly sympathetic to them, and obviously in the course of its work is going to have individual staffers who do favors for the people they know and all that stuff. Just like the aid organizations with the US in Afghanistan! Do you think food aid orgs didn't share intelligence with American forces fighting the Taliban? Of course they did, DIA alone had an entire team devoted to it, why wouldn't they? They worked for the US!

I get that the typical western mind unable to understand the zen duality of Biba Netanyahu as he held the twin spirits of Cursing Hamas as the Great Enemy and Funding Them to Fuck the PLO in synergistic abeyance for 20 years, but most of us lack his meditative grace. For the rest of us, if you embed in a place for decades doing deep humanitarian work involving tens of thousands of employees, you get complicit. And to the extent that Israel continues to believe that allowing any IDF soldier to remain on the ground Gaza for more than 2 seconds to face the consequences of their actions will give them cooties, any aid organization that follows the UNRWA will continue along that trend with whatever government emerges after the war.

Is that good? Idk, I mean hamas fucking sucks so it probably isn't. But it is life and also a direct consequence of Israeli's particular brand of hands-off management of the country it refuses to recognize exists, so I am broadly unsympathetic to their complaints. Which is why this is dumb btw. They are playing whack-a-mole with symptoms; and broadly irrelevant ones at that, as any "aid" UNRWA is providing to hamas is tiny on the scale of things and easily checked by the IDF's monopoly on force in the area.

But since those complaints weren't relevant, and since I opened the piece clearly explaining how removing an aid org doesn't have to be a big deal, I summarized it quickly with:

Government officials, working in both, par for the course.

and

I completely agree that UNRWA has many people who are sympathetic to Hamas in it

Which seems absolutely sufficient for my purposes, and only a willfully mischaritable read would take that to mean I think "the UNRWA is completely spotless" - zero organizations of such scale are after all.

The trick on the whole "Israel banning UNRWA" thing is that most militaries - like say the US in Afghanistan for example - directly provision aid. American soldiers would often be handing out food packages themselves, and even if they weren't the aid organizations would be directly contracting with the US government and the Department of Defense. You have a group in the military and the government that is like, okay, how do we feed people, let's hit those targets.

So if Congress decided to ban the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan in 2006 from operating in the country or whatever, that bill would say like "we hand over its mission to USAID, which has been allocated $2.1 billion dollars in FY-2005 to do X Y Z". It would probably be a dumb move that would create unnecessary friction and cost lives for political bullshit, but that is also life, people dying for political bullshit is a universal constant. It would probably be pretty small bore in the scale of things, like switching over contractors.

That isn't how Israel does things. I might be wrong about this, Israel is deliberately opaque about these things and I just gave this the ol' half hour of googling, I am open to being contradicted here. But my current understanding of net spending by the government of Israel itself on aid to Gaza is...$0. They do not provide aid. They permit aid from other organizations, funded by other countries, to be provided! But they don't take responsibility for the provision; meeting targets, outcomes, etc, none of that is their job. (I am sure it isn't literally zero btw, but I think you get my point)

It is really telling that when you look up pro-Israel statements by say AIPAC on aid, their headlines are:

Israel Facilitates Humanitarian Aid to Gaza as Hamas Continues to Attack

And they criticize the UN because the UN trucks aren't being delivered:

The United Nations and other international agencies are largely responsible for the existing delays in aid deliveries into Gaza. The U.N. has not been able to distribute aid at the rate that Israel is processing it, causing back-ups at the border crossings after Israeli inspections are completed. On March 3, the U.N. received 234 trucks in Gaza but only distributed 131 trucks of aid to civilians in the enclave.

If this was the US military, and the UN was getting aid trucks and failing to send them, we would send more of our own trucks? That we have? Because aid is part of the military operation. But Israel doesn't do that - because it doesn't have any trucks. Because aid isn't part of the military operation.

Which is why the bill banning UNRWA that is being passed does not mention aid provision to Gaza:

The international community has raised alarm over the legislation, which was passed without a plan in place for a humanitarian agency to replace UNRWA.

Again going off news sources here, link for the actual bill is currently down, if I am wrong will correct here, but I think it all tracks. So in the article above, you get statements from the government when people ask about aid, they reply, oh yeah these other aid organizations will fill the gap.

Then you ask the aid organizations themselves and they go, no, we won't fill the gap! We don't have the resources to do that! Which is logical when you realize Israel isn't funding those orgs. They don't know or care about their funding status. Hopefully someone else will figure that out - aid is someone else's problem. Those government remarks are just off the cuff, they aren't a plan.

Which I want to loop back around to the casus belli for the ban - UNRWA having ties to Hamas. That, to me, is one of those "uh duh, and?" thing is - Hamas is the government of Gaza. UNRWA runs schools there? And medical clinics? You think they do that...without contact with the government? This is just silly, the UN Mission in Afghanistan obviously had connections to the US Government! Government officials, working in both, par for the course.

But, and this is far more important, it is irrelevant. I completely agree that UNRWA has many people who are sympathetic to Hamas in it, because obviously they do. You want to ban it, dumb but okay. You propose a bill outlining the $2 billion dollars and the 5 partnered aid organizations and the 400 IDF trucks that will deliver aid to replace their work, sure. Whatever man, do your small bore politics bullshit.

That is not what they are doing.

Now, Israel has in fact allowed a bunch of aid in Gaza, I don't doubt that like USAID and the non-profit community and the governments of the UK and Japan and so on are gonna pivot funding to a bunch of organizations that will do herculean work stepping up operations and interfacing with the IDF checkpoint system and get aid in. Maybe they will do such a bang-up job that the cost in suffering won't be that high. Israel did give 3 months after all, they aren't the literal worst they could be.

But I do think at a certain point, the line between indifference and malice just ceases to matter. The UNRWA bill isn't some breaking point or big policy shift - it is just a highly revealing moment in the Israeli approach, why the war there has gone the way that it has. And it is, as the kids say, not a good look.

(h/t @loving-n0t-heyting as this was initially a reblog of their post, but they mentioned getting drama in the notes so I split it off; sorry to deny you the precious +1 internet point)