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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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At this point it feels like Netanyahu has a checklist with 6 million boxes, and is checking them off as fast as possible so they can finally get even with Germany or something.
Do we ever, really? Over the sum of all war-related humanitarian disasters, the West responds to very few of them, and only when it's economically or geopolitically useful. The Palestinian crisis is no different; it's not exceptional in any way. There's an ongoing nightmare in DRC that's orders of magnitude worse than what's happening in Gaza and... no one cares. Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of disengaging from Ukraine.
The thing is, it doesn't even matter if we "condemn this behavior." We could do that all we want and it wouldn't make much difference. And no one wants to be interventionist - there's too much awful history around it, and it smacks of colonialism, and it means taking resources away from "domestic issues" that always seem to matter more.
We've got to move away from the notion that the situation in Gaza is somehow unique. It allows us to conveniently ignore the root causes of the problem, which is much more universal, and stems from the ongoing sense of cultural superiority on the part of Europe and the U.S.
The US only cares about human rights and war crimes when they can be exploited to take over a nation's resources.
Afghanistan had few resources, so that's not necessarily true. But I do agree that the US only intervenes when it aligns with selfish interests.
But then, the same is true of every nation on the planet. The US isn't unique in that, it just gets all of the attention.
The reason Afganistan has had so much trouble with superpowers during the last few centuries is that they are an extremely important geographic location which would provide great strategic advantage to the power controlling them. That's why American media has been trying to push the public to be sympathetic to a re-invasion until recently. Fortunately for Afganistan, they are very difficult to conquer for very long.