Seoul is 11 km from the North Korean border. People just assume things won't go wrong until they do.

Israel is TINY. EVERYTHING is near a border with one of their hostile neighbors.

Man, if I could upvote this comment more than once I would.

Expresses my sentiments exactly.

I visited Israel years ago - shortly after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin - and remember coming across a class (girls, around 7-8 years old) out on a school trip … and they had 3 guys carrying assault rifles to protect them. And I remember thinking: “whatever it is you’re fighting for … isn’t worth it if you have to live like this”

And sadly I think it’s only got worse since that time.

Yesterday on TV over here, they showed a satellite picture of an area of Hamas' incursion across the border were you can see both sides of the border line and the border itself.

And the commentator said: "Here you can see the destruction caused by the attack"

And it's only after a few seconds of looking at the area that looks like a junkyard and a mess and thinking "yes indeed, it's all trashed" that you notice that actually the black smoke is all on the opposite side of the border, the one with lots of space and nature, with little villages, which would look idyllic if not for the smoke.

The overpopulated slum on the left side that looks like a junkyard on a satellite picture is the Gaza side and just a wall away on the right side is this idyllic area with lots of space and nature, a place were the people from the left side will never be allowed to live or even just visit.

How could anybody ever imagine that it would be safe to live in spacious homes and comparative luxury, right next an area were people are forced to, since the day they were born, live in what's basically an overcrowded slum?

I was under the impression that the border was extremely well guarded and secure. At least at some point it must have been. It seems like the government recently moved troops to the west bank in order to protect settlers instead. https://lemmy.world/post/6616736

Why it should happen to us, exactly? People build up tolerance to accept this kind of gambling-as-a-routine, especially if the rules are obfuscated and conditioned by other things. Consider now how suicidal is a process of driving a car to work – but you can't avoid it this morning and there are many safeguards at place to make it less risky. They just go with it, they rationalize it before they stop giving a fuck. And it is layered, as many parties approved such a thing to be.

Politicians push to approve construction there and guarantee it's safe because their career depends on it, like one of safety-promising Benj. Companies buy a plot and develop this place into housing because high risk => high reward and FOMO. Young people and re-pats buys them because they need a house, it's their best affordable option and two other parties said it won't get them killed. Such a snowball, growing bigger at each turn, and each next party has less agency there. And it could be stopped at any of them, I guess?

I've seen that with Crimea: occupiers waving a hand to their rich oligarch friends in the biz, companies taking random bits of land to develop, building apartments in the middle of nowhere, people buying property there. I knew some of the latter. They had a fascinating list of reasons why to buy it and none of them thought that there's any chance of water and energy limiting, escalation and, for sure, Ukrainian advancement. But at the time they've settled there, these phantom risk were outweighted by Crimea's good climate and them not getting any housing otherwise for that price.

Frugal person pays twice, as our saing goes.

It really does seem like an inevitable outcome of the status quo. I think it's silly to pretend otherwise.

“None of it is justified by any side ...“

Strong disagree. Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend itself.

The Palestinians didn’t do anything. Hamas, the chosen enemy actively propped up by Netanyahu, did something terrible.