Meanwhile on the International front....

My problem with that is that in all the years since 1948 or 1967, there have to have been deals that were not that shitty offered. Add that Israel has made deliberate choices of their own that have inflamed the situation and actively made things worse. I'll grant your position that percentage wise the Israelis have been the victim more often, but you can't run a cycle of hate and reprisal with only one actor involved.

 

I don't think anybody here is saying Israel is completely innocent in all this, but you have to keep in mind that they correctly believe that they are fighting for their right to exist. Hamas doesn't want peace. It wants to wipe Israel out.

 

The British left a lot of problems on the ground behind them as they jettisoned their empire after World War 2.

 

Go back and look at the events of the partition of India and Pakistan. Not a great deal of difference except that there were soon borders that allowed the two parties to each have a nation of their own. The Palestinians never did, and Israel suffers now because they never allowed a Palestinian homeland. Plenty of blame for that to both sides. I understand that the number or terrorist acts against the Israelis are far more numerous, but I won't pretend that those committed by Israelis don't exist, either. Hamas and their ilk are reprehensible, no problem with killing them or the PLO or AQ or whatever terror group is the current plague.

That said, Israel is openly using terror tactics too. Two huge bombings of a refugee camp. They are making the point that they'll go after Hamas if they hide among the civilians, and they probably hope that if nothing else it leads the locals to rat them out individually so that such bombings don't happen to them - but they are absolutely using terror tactics to make the point.

A kid who is decapitated is dead, same as a kid blown up by an aerial bomb. I find it difficult to see either one as morally superior.

Sigh. The way they are going after the tunnels with robots and drones backed by soldiers is the hard way to dig the bastards out, costly of IDF lives. It works but it's war at it's ugliest. Except maybe for deliberately bombing civilian populations.

 

This should help, if it's allowed to happen.

 

Israel has posted a photo and video archive of the Hamas atrocities documented on Oct. 7. A number of them come from Hamas fighters themselves, since they wore Go Pro cameras and took trophy photos of what they did.
I know a lot of people will say "I don't want to see that" — and the stuff in this archive is certainly not pleasant to look at — but I'm sharing this here because I think it's important to get past that and look at these to remind ourselves of what this whole thing is about.

https://www.hamas-massacre.net/

 

I'm gonna nope on out of that.

Might need to read that Vin Scully bit again.

 

Worth a read.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/a-dangerous-conflation/

We are Jewish writers, artists, and activists who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. Israel and its defenders have long used this rhetorical tactic to shield Israel from accountability, dignify the US’s multibillion-dollar investment in Israel’s military, obscure the deadly reality of occupation, and deny Palestinian sovereignty. Now, this insidious gagging of free speech is being used to justify Israel’s ongoing military bombardment of Gaza and to silence criticism from the international community.

 

How does one say "strawman" in Hebrew?

 

Feels fairly routine the last 20 years or so to conflate reasonable political criticism of the conduct of the State of Israel with antisemitism.

 

Nice, but do you doubt they people do label criticism of Israel as anti-Judaism?