Meanwhile on the International front....

Palestinians prefer. Hamas. Perhaps an end is in sight. \s

Palestinian poll shows Hamas widely supported in Gaza, West Bank - analysis

 

Wow.

Imagine thinking, feeling and polling this way, about Hamas activists who won't even so much as show their faces, even after all these months of terrible war/invasion and devastation. I mean, they started it, so they must have wanted it, but still...it's incredible.

And any young person who participated in a U.S. college protest on behalf of Palestinians because of a seemingly over-aggressive Jewish response, with or without western help, ought to know about it.

 

Ragu is absolutely right here but the Gordian knot here is that just about all of the accusations leveled here can be played in reverse. Let me try, for the sake of the thought experiment:

Almost everyone in Israel seems to want to run Netanyahu out and yet the ongoing and persistent support for Likud demonstrates that a blocking minority, if not an outright majority, of the Israeli electorate believes Netanyahu and/or his allies are the only people who can defend Israel from an existential Palestinian threat and that they are tacitly willing to cede authority to them to act in their name, no matter what they do. Since Netanyahu first won an election in 1996, he's been in charge for 16 1/2 years (out of 28) and Ariel Sharon had another five, and the only thing that dislodged Sharon was a debilitating stroke. The Israeli left of Ben-Gurion, Meir and Rabin hasn't even been a thing, much less a legitimate electoral option, in more than a generation. Other than Ehud Olmert, who was brought down by his own corruption, any attempt to elect "Not Likud" in the last 25 years has been futile or a farce. In modern Israeli usage, "leftist" is a slur and a byword for a fifth column who would disarm Israel unilaterally.

None of that necessarily justifies the heinousness of the Oct. 7 attacks, and you can easily argue that the Jews are a persecuted class both in the micro locally and in the macro globally. But if totally unquestioned support for Israel were not a third rail in American politics for at least 50 years and hatred or suspicion of Muslims not ingrained into American culture since Sept. 11, we'd at least honestly to be able to recognize that thousands, probably tens of thousands, or people are being killed across all walks of life by the direct actions of the Israel Defense Force, most of them who have no connection to Hamas other than that they're figuratively being used as human shields. The definition of that last sentence is still genocide, and being the victims of a previous genocide does not grant any army, state or ethnic group the right to return genocide with genocide.

This is a place where nearly every able-bodied adult has served in the military and trained to defend Israel against threats that all seem to come from Muslims. In their schools, they are taught that Palestinians are at best interlopers trespassing on a territory given to them by G-d directly in scripture and at worst a daily threat to blow up their city bus and rape their little sister, and after Oct. 7, they have material proof that Hamas' dedication to Israel's destruction isn't just a position statement. The typical Israeli in Tel Aviv isn't massacring the Arab they see on the sidewalk but they sure as hell aren't horrified enough by it in Gaza to do anything about it.

---

OK, back to reality. Or maybe we never left. My actual position? I don't know. I went out to get coffee halfway through my shift on Saturday and some pro-Palestinian protesters, about a dozen, either mostly or entirely unkempt white kids, walked right past the office toward me. I hustled to the door, opened it and made sure it locked behind me. Some of those people have camped out in front of City Hall protesting in direct violation of city code but the cops won't touch them because they don't want to be seen manhandling a peaceful protest.

I don't like taking the position of terrorists, which is why I played the "thought experiment" game above. But Israel seems to be taking the very neo-con position that you can kill terrorism, but killing terrorism and killing terrorists are two different things. I don't think anyone in power in Israel really cares how many Gazans they kill, or if they do, they view it as justifiable collateral damage.

 

Great post. But I think you mean settlements in Gaza (uprooted in 2005) and the West Bank? Israel annexed the Golan in 1980 after capturing it from Syria during the Six-Day War (following two decades of Syria using its high ground to launch attacks on Israeli villages in the Upper Galilee). The Syrian Arabs who lived there mostly fled. Today it's mostly Druze and Jewish. There are no "settlements" within the meaning of what there are in the West Bank or what there were in Gaza and -- before the Camp David Accords -- the Sinai (living proof of Israel's willingness to swap land for peace for decades now). And there was never anyone in the Golan who identified as "Palestinian" (which is largely a concept that emerged in the 1960s anyway).

 

It’s not goddamn 1947 any more and genocide in the name of the Abrahamic deity is still exactly that. How many more dead Palestinians would make you happy?

 

Reasonable explainer here.

‘The grey zone’: how IDF views some journalists in Gaza as legitimate targets

 

also, this:

https://wapo.st/3VE2PZp

TEL AVIV — Israel’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students must be conscripted into the Israeli military and are no longer eligible for substantial government benefits, which could result in the collapse of the government’s ruling coalition.

 

It's about time. The Haredim have been a privileged minority in Israel, and a militant one at that. They're leading the push to colonize the West Bank, and not reluctant to intimidate Arabs living there. But their religious status has made them exempt from military service and qualified them for government subsidies.
Judging from prior behavior, it wouldn't surprise me if they responded violently to this development.

 

Show us that you don't know what you are talking about without admitting it.