The bare minimum expected of a leader of the American left, and a democratic socialist, should be a willingness to say “I endorse the conclusion of mainstream human rights organizations.” Why wouldn’t Sanders be willing to do that? He says that it doesn’t really matter “what you call it,” because it’s horrific. But clearly it does matter to Sanders, because he is making a choice not to use the same language as the human rights organizations. Why is he making that choice? He has not explained.
Sanders is right that the more important debate is about actions rather than language. But genocide is also the supreme crime against humanity, and it is so unanimously reviled that it makes a difference whether we use the term. For instance: there might be a debate over whether we should cut off weapons to a state that has “engaged in war crimes.” (How many? Are they aberrations or policy?) The Allied powers in World War II engaged in war crimes, and many Americans think war crimes can be justified in the service of a noble end. But there can be no debate over whether we should ever arm a state that has engaged in genocide. Genocide has no justification, no mitigation. If a state is committing it, all ties should be cut with that state.
Actually, we can see the difference in Bernie Sanders’ own policy response to Israel’s crimes. He told CNN that “your taxpayer dollars” should not go to support a “horror.” This is true. Sanders, to his credit, has repeatedly proposed a bill that would cut off a certain amount of weapons sales to Israel. Democratic opinion has so soured on Israel that Sanders’ bill attracted a record amount of Democratic support (27 senators, more than half the caucus.) But notably, Sanders’ bill only cuts off “offensive” weapons to Israel, leaving “defensive” weapons sales intact.
We might think that it’s perfectly fine to sell “defensive” weapons. Israel’s “Iron Dome” system, which U.S. taxpayers help pay for, protects the country against incoming missiles, and protection against incoming missiles is surely a good and noble thing. But notably, we have not bought Hamas its own “iron dome.” Or Iran. Or Russia. This is because we do not support the causes for which they fight. We understand in these cases that to help the “defense” is to help the “offense.” If Russia is protected from Ukrainian missiles, it will fight Ukraine more effectively. Likewise, if Israel is protected from Hamas rocket fire, but Gaza is not protected from Israeli missiles, the balance of arms is tilted toward Israel, and they can pulverize Gaza without Hamas being able to inflict similar damage in response.
But Hamas exclusively fires inaccurate unguided missiles into Israel. If the West funded a similar system for Russia, it would be used to defend the military and industrial targets that Ukraine is attempting to strike, not just civilians. In addition, the bulk of funding for Iron Dome was given at a time when, while Israel was justifiably criticised for breaches of international law, it was not committing a genocide, and it could be said that it was the better party to support. The other party, Hamas, has always been explicitly genocidal.
There is a lot of inertia here: it will take time (and would, even in the absence of AIPAC) for the atrocities to change minds.
Like Israel's Iron Dome does when Yemen or Iran attack?
How in the hell is the party committing ethnic cleansing, Apartheid and deliberately starving children the "better party to support"? And in the first place, who the hell said anything about supporting Hamas? There's a myriad of options other than supporting Hamas that don't entail supporting an Apartheid Nazi state.
Iran and Yemen aren't Palestine, so the problems we have with Israel's war against Palestine and Palestinians don't apply there. Unless, that is, you aren't on the side of Palestinians at all, but instead just want to see Israel defeated. But I chipped in to explain how it made sense for the US to fund Iron Dome, so we have to start from a point of view that makes at least some sense with respect to how the US saw the world then and wanting to destroy Israel is not that.
The situation in 2011 (when Iron Dome's development started) was not this one, so start there.
I would agree with the OP that funding Iron Dome now, for a genocidal state, would be a huge error.
They do. Israeli aggression is most intense in Palestine, but it's not exactly a saint with its other neighbors.
I do want to see Israel defeated because they keep fucking up everything for everyone else, especially but not only Palestinians, and because Apartheid states shouldn't exist. Your point?
It was. Israel has been deliberately keeping Gaza under chronic malnutrition and on the brink of economic collapse for two decades, and settlements constitute ethnic cleansing. The Gaza genocide is the worst single crime Israel has committed in its history, but it's far from the only one.
Israeli aggression towards Palestine is by far the most egregious because they have been performing a slow-motion annexation of it, and all the problems that come with that. Palestine had little ability to retaliate (though it did) so Israel's actions were grossly disproportionate. But this is not nearly so true with other states in the region, which have historically had a military and foreign policy posture of wanting Israel's complete destruction, and made strikes, wars and statements to that effect.
As far as our own geopolitical attitudes in the West are concerned, support for Israeli attacks on Iran has historically been an easy calculation to make because of how disastrous it would be for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. You can see this in the rhetoric now where even those who condemn Israel for attacking Iran recently, and condemn Trump for dismantling the one thing that seemed likely to keep Iran nuke-free, say that it nevertheless has to remain the goal.
My point is that you (and other people in this thread) seem motivated more out of a desire to see the destruction of the state of Israel than out of a desire for justice and a world free of ethnic cleansing.
I won't disagree that Israel has been breaking international law for decades and other countries should have been more forceful about that. That doesn't mean that helping to protect Israeli civilians from rocket attacks was the wrong thing to do.
Setting aside that that's not at all true, what's wrong with opposing a state committing and built on Apartheid and ethnic cleansing? Do you think the appropriate response to these actions is to do nothing?
How the fuck does that lead to supporting Israel against Iran when Iran has been nothing if not cooperative with the international community on the subject? Nobody, literally nobody other than Netanyahu himself thinks Iran is trying to build nukes. Also why would Iran having nukes be more disastrous than Israel having them?
Because?
And do you not see how that "protection" directly supports Israel's subjugation of Palestinians?
This is blatantly false - most Western assessment seem to have been that (after Trump unilaterally ended the deal) Iran was enriching way beyond what is necessary for civilian use.
Israel, despite its faults, is a democracy. Its genocidal ambitions have been restricted to Palestine - unlike Iran's. Israel also already has nukes (probably) - this question is not one of the lesser evil.
Because they state outright they want to see Israel destroyed.
"Directly" is wrong. It indirectly helps Israel's illegal actions against Palestinians - and that difference between direct and indirect help is the key to understanding this.
Haven't Yemen and Iran effectively debunked this claim? The missile shield is good at knocking down the odd munition from Lebanon or Syria, but it collapses in the face of a coordinated, continuous salvo by a sophisticated attacker.
What effectively curtailed the Israel-Iran ten day war was the consistency with which Iran's bombs penetrated Israel's defenses. As soon as the Israelis realized Iran could keep hitting back, they signed a ceasefire.
The Nakba of 1947 was a genocide by definition.
Subsequent military campaigns to brutalize Palestinians in the West Bank - via incremental land grabs and assassinations of political opposition - and in Gaza - via strategic assassinations along with restricting the import of durable goods and to impose a "calorie count" intended to shrink the population - were de facto genocides played out over decades.
What the current Israeli government has done is so nakedly and categorically genocidal, even to the point of Israeli politicians explicitly advocating for genocide in open debate, has removed the ability of Western supports to equivocate and hedge.
But the modern Palestinian State has existed under a policy of intentional ethnic cleansing for decades.
The only inertia is Zionism. And you're not going to cause Zionists to change their minds now. Not when they have been working towards this moment for sixty years.
Either the Israeli State is dismantled or the killing will continue unabated. The notion that this war will end once rational minds prevail is the same naive optimism that kept the US in Iraq for 13 years and Afghanistan for 23.
The decisions around whom to support in 2011 are not based on what was going on in 1948.
Your reply takes such a one-sided view that I'm not sure there's much point in having an extended discussion. I don't support Israel's genocide against Palestinians, but I also refuse to view the history of the conflict starting in 1948 and ignoring Arabs' role in it, and do not support the dismantling of Israel as a state, which would itself be ethnic cleansing on a greater scale than anything we have yet seen there.
Opposing the genocide of Palestinians by supporting a fresh ethic cleansing of Jews is abhorrent.
You sound normal, you should avoid touching grass for a bit. Extreme viewpoints and black and white thinking are the spice of life!
Being extremely against apartheid isn't being extreme.
I didn't see any comments about that
The Palestinian key is the Palestinian symbol of homes lost in the 1948 Nakba, when more than half of the population of Mandatory Palestine were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias as part of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, and were subsequently denied the right to return
It is a symbol that shows up at every Palestine Protest. It was at the heart of The Great March of Return in 2018, a peaceful protest march out of Gaza that ended with Israelis slaughtering hundreds of protesters. The Nakba was been - until Oct 7th, 2023 - as central to the Palestinian understanding of their history as the Holocaust was for the Jews.
Might as well start waving the flag of the Russian Federation and Imperial Japan, while you're at it.
STOP LYING. israel is a supremacist colonial project from the start. If you don’t know stuff, just open wikipedia, search for Lehi. Then come back here and tell me what it says.
That is not a reasonable characterisation of Israel, and in any case, is not the same as a genocide, so your reply isn't even relevant.
If you want to point to the creation of Israel as problematic, then by all means do so, but the available options boiled down to:
3 was already not working. 2 was attempted but nobody could agree on how to do it. In the end what we got was a bit of all three, but calling that "supremacist colonial" as if that is the original sin from which all other problems followed implies that there was some other option that could have been taken which would have worked out well. In which case, spell it out.
Otherwise, you are saying that the choice of one bad option among only bad options means that the result is unsupportable for ever more, which is ludicrous.
Not a reasonable characterisation? Why don’t you post about the Lehi, so everyone can judge by themselves? Allow me:
I have highlighted the ““problematic”” parts of the genocidal colonial project.
You are a pathetic coward ignorant who uses dead children to bend history with your disgusting lies.
Now reply my questions liar: who put a family in an oven after the end of WWII in 1948?
Zionist are the scum of the earth
I give them 3 solutions: either leave Palestine, make living together work or die.
Pasting large bits of a wikipedia article about how a terrorist organisation is a terrorist organisation is not useful. It should be obvious to you from what I've written - if you're actually reading it - that I don't think the creation of the state of Israel was some kind of clean and just process.
What I commented about was that people are applying bad lenses to the situation in 2011. Bringing in atrocities from 60 years before is just showing that you are continuing to do that. If you are using 60-year-old history to decide everything, think about how that would affect how we dealt with all the axis powers from WW2.
For decades, living together was mostly working. But during this time, it's not like the only violations and provocations were on the Israeli side. So it sounds to me like you're saying that Israel, during this time, should have "made living together work" while under rocket attack, while being attacked in the Yom Kippur war, while being the subject of random terror attacks, and most recently after being subject to a massive attack that killed over a thousand and took dozens of hostages. We hear the refrain almost daily about Israel's "right to defend itself" so it's easy to forget what it's about.
If you think that the onus is solely on Israel to "make it work" under these conditions - and it looks like you do because you only criticise Israel - then you don't actually have three solutions. You have two: "leave or die". That is advocating the ethnic cleansing of Jews.
We should not ignore or forget the atrocities committed by Jews in the creation of Israel, nor the continued illegal building of settlements that inevitably provokes violence from Palestinians but if you only place criticism, blame and conditions on Israel and Jews then you are not fighting for a better world at all, just ethnic cleansing of a flavour that, apparently but horrifyingly, is acceptable to you. Whether that's because of antisemitism or some other reason that causes you to feel more keenly the plight of Palestinians doesn't matter: it's disgusting that anyone who moralises as much as you have can simultaneously hold such a position.
I don’t care about your opinions, you proved yourself as a liar and you are keep lying and distorting reality.
If someone is reading this, this above is called HASBARA (aka israeli propaganda) and mr. FishFace is practicing it perfectly. Please learn to spot it, they just want to waste your time.
More about Hasbara
I'll take that as a mark of honour given why you got banned.
It's the one who made the mess to find the solution nobody forced israel to occupy gaza and the west bank in 67 than created illegal settlements to make a two state solution imposible
Who made the mess? Israel? Egypt? The UK and France? The UN? The Ottoman Empire? By now certainly Hamas itself has contributed to "the mess".
Assinging responsibility to one party is failing to engage with a complex problem.
Not everything about it is complex: it's simple to see that Israel has been committing war crimes for a long time, and we can now see clearly they are committing a genocide, and should be called out as such. That doesn't mean it is in any way legitimate to lose sight of the complexities of the situation. It does not give you or anyone the right to say "well, we should just erase Israel". That makes a mockery of the supposed morals you want to uphold for the Palestinian people.
Nothing complex israel is the occupier, palestine the occupied. Israel made the mess. Nobody forced zionists imigrants to force a state on local populations. Nobody forced them to occupy gaza and the west bank in 67 and expand illegal settlements to make a two state solution hard to accomplish. Hamas wouldn't exists without israel occupation.
You don't see people still talk about nana sahib in india being responsible for the occupation after he did a similar retaliation to 7 of october against british civilians for the hate he get towards british people for occupation. You don't see people blaming Nate Turner for slavery to continue after he killed kids during his revolt.
Fucking hell.
Hamas target military bases by calculating the projectile trajectory.
Ah yes, very calculated
Hamas' rockets generally can't even hit a town-sized target. Many fall within Gaza or on farmland.
What happened to these L nerds?
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b12gtgugr
Are you using an incident in which four people were killed in an attack which also hit a kibbutz and "a building near an outpost" to argue that Hamas' rocket attacks are, overall, accurate?
Literally nobody, including Hamas, thinks that Hamas is able to launch accurate strikes. Then Hamas leader Khalid Mishal implicitly agreeing that, in 2014, Hamas did not have this capability.
Israel should not build their houses near military bases then. Human shields.
Hamas rockets are more accurate than Israeli F35s
I asked a pretty easy question. The fact that you don't want to answer it says it all: you know as well as everyone else that Hamas' attacks are indiscriminate, but whether because of the recent ethnic cleansing by Israel, or because of longer-standing views on the conflict, you are only willing to condemn one party.
Maybe you can use this perspective to help realise why your political leaders are also only willing to properly condemn one party.
You did not ask a question you pivoted because you got caught out.
Hamas rockets make far less civilian casualties than Israeli F35 jets. That is a fact. Are you denying it?
I'll give you a straight answer after you give me one :) Here's the question again so you don't have to go digging:
Rockets is general has high failure rate