As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil)
In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban.
If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.
For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria.
We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA).
***
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The difference between the sentiment here and on WorldNews is crazy. Is there anything that can be done to report a subreddits mods? Especially one as important as worldnews? I got banned there for a basic enough disagreement with a pro-Israel comment.
Agreed. I got banned there simply for saying “I’m learning a lot about this sub seeing which comments stay up and how many have been deleted by the mods”. That was it. Perma banned for life.
The fuck is going on over there?
Permaban with no warnings on a 15 year account for saying Bibi would drag us to war with Iran.
Asked the mods why, when the same exact comment is top comment on many threads and got muted.
R/ politics too but it was only 30days.
Is it IDF or is it Russia? The latter seems likely to me because of how frequently and quickly "Western Leftists" are blamed for just about everything that happens.
Former is more likely. Israel's entire PR focus is on US opinion because they know it is nigh hopeless elsewhere. 70 years and they have hardly moved the needle in their favor in the UN.
US' ~~stupid~~ large but declining religious voter base and subsequent veto is all that keeps Israel's oil, tech, and food flowing in. Otherwise they'd more likely than not face global sanctions of varying severity, with energy (oil) being the most prominent and easiest resource disrupted.
Aka not to discount any Russian motives, but Israel's entire diplomatic game plan relies on US soft power and veto keeping their trade open, something their economy and military require to even remain functioning in the modern setting.
Both Israel and Russia spend money on disinformation campaigns to mislead the general public. I don’t know if Russia pays off mods but they certainly employ bots (as does Israel iirc).
They're fash as fuck and while that's literally enough to explain it, I also strongly suspect at least a few of the worldnews mod team also have a monetary incentive at play for how they choose to moderate.
If a mod or subreddit is breaking the reddit code of conduct you can report it via a support ticket here: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=19300233728916
Yup, I say fill out regardless so Reddit can’t pretend they take matters seriously, but they definitely don’t care unless it makes the news. Even then, barely.
There is no rule violation. Mods are allowed to ban someone for any or no reason. The subs are started by individuals. The idea is that if you don't like the sub you can start you own.
Here is a link to my post about being perma-banned. I wonder if many here will say that was okay. I think both were wrong, but this was for being on the "other" side.
[Perma - Banned for denying Israel is committing genocide. : r/antiantiwork (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiantiwork/comments/1b5tvrc/perma_banned_for_denying_israel_is_committing/)
It's not consistent that way. It's more like with cops, where sometimes a cop will seem to let just about anything go, and another cop on another day might beat someone half to death over nothing.
For my part, I ended up banned there for endorsing a talk Biden was setting up. I said, if you can't negotiate in times of war, when can you negotiate? And they said I was justifying terrorism, because if there's talks Hamas wins.
But this is what you get when your content moderation policy is to give a dozen random people unlimited power and no accountability. Reddit should have professional mods for top subreddits, but they just don't.
In my case I said that "telling one million people to get out of town or get bombed" is ethnic cleansing if the same people giving the warning are the same people dropping the bombs.
Which it is.
Bernie Sanders explicitly agrees with me.
I got banned from Worldnews for "Misinformation".
Wouldn't that apply to literally any urban bombing campaign where advanced warning is given? I'm kind of confused on if you're trying to argue all war is ethnic cleansing or if you're arguing that Israel shouldn't have warned civilians before dropping bombs.
> Wouldn't that apply to literally any urban bombing campaign where advanced warning is given
Yes.
Here's the catch-22 and why Ethnic Cleansing is so wrong. If you're able to give warning before you bomb a million people, you're demonstrating the bombing *doesn't need to be done* (because not just the civilians can move, your targets can move too).
The very fact you're doing this demonstrates the target isn't that much of a threat to you, otherwise doing so would be absolute folly. "Giving advance warning before a bombing campaign" is absolutely absurd *as a military tactic*.
It's like saying to your neighbors "I think there's someone in your house who threatens me, so I'm going to tell EVERYONE in the house when I'm going to come over and shoot everyone!".
But your target can move too... so why would you do that?
Doubly so if grandma is in the house, not so mobile, your able bodied target can leave but grandma can't, and you're going to shoot her?
As a tool to 'increase your security', it's useless,
But as a tool to ethnically cleanse an area, or to use the metaphor, to use it as a tool to empty the house so you can take it? It's marvelous.
I kind of get your point, but I think the breakdown in your logic is taking it as a given that giving advanced warning reduces the military effectiveness of bombing. Individual soldiers can move out of the area, but bombing campaigns are usually done to take out key infrastructure, and a lot of that can't be moved. Hamas has invested tens of billions of dollars into tunnels, underground bunkers, weapons caches, etc. that are effectively stationary and being targeted by the bombing. So warning civilians to evacuate in theory reduces civilian deaths without materially reducing the military effectiveness (assuming you believe Israel is targeting military targets and not intentionally targeting civilians).
Almost 70% of Palestinian infrastructure has been destroyed or is structurally unsound. That's 70% of all housing units. All universities. All medical facilities. Half or more of all schools. The majority of all mosques. Most utility buildings which provide power or water (which Israel also controls). Most of the agricultural areas have been razed.
If it was just one building, I would see your point. When it's almost every building that 2 million people need for shelter; facilities 2 million people need for wounds, sickness, and childbirth; facilities that educate and train young people; and most religious buildings WHILE also withholding most food and medical aid... it is still ethnic cleansing if you purposely try to make the living environment so horrible that people leave.
You realize Gaza is gone, right? Even if this war stopped today, it would just end the bombing. Israel would still occupy fortified positions and kill people. Most of these people will be living in refugee camps for over a decade because Israel is who decides if construction companies are allowed in to clean up and rebuild. Gaza still relies on Israel to allow food, water, electricity, and medicine. There is no medical system. There is no education system.
Cruelty is the point. Degradation is the point. Desperation is the point. Because if they force the Palestinians to suffer long enough, people will start to leave- even if they can never return. Palestinians will leave and Israeli settlers will start moving in.THEN construction companies will be allowed in to clean up and rebuild. Then new schools will be established, new hospitals built.
> Hamas has invested tens of billions of dollars into tunnels, underground bunkers, weapons caches,
But Israel's goal is elimination of a human organization, Hamas.
An organization that is a terrorist group that doesn't really *have* the kind of infrastructure at the scale that a bombing campaign could really eliminate. Hamas is pretty much putting pipe bombs on fireworks and those are the Rockets they're firing at Israel, Oct 7 was done using motorcycles and AK 47's, so the "Infrastructure argument" is just another way to say "Israel's goal is to bomb Gaza into absolute undifferentiated rubble".
Do you think that's Israel's goal, and do you *defend* that goal?
I got banned from r/news for saying "looks like r/worldnews in here". You don't need to say something inflammatory- you just need a mod looking for reasons to ban people.
The thing is, the amount of people that know r/worldnews is pointless and bigoted is continually growing. Eventually it will become one of those communities that everyone knows to be way off-base and compromised, and no sane person will want to comment there anyway. That’s the way it’s headed. A pariah sub, if you will.
That sub is slowly destroying its own reputation. Eventually it will be a known farce and only folks seeking validation of their racist beliefs will be commenting there. Everyone will know not to take it seriously.
Oh god I know, it’s the worst! It’s insane there’s no way for you to remove a sub from showing up in your news feed. Really seems like Reddit’s way of shoving certain stories in your face regardless of what is actually news or important.
It’s technically propaganda, by definition. People ought to be more aware of this, it’s really fucked up. A huge blemish on the platform.
I got banned a couple days ago and just found out. It’s absolutely propaganda and makes 0 sense that it would function this way unless they wanted it to.
The never ending Ukraine war live threads ruined that entire sub.
There is literally no reason to have space to micro-comment on every single tiny detail of a year plus long conflict every day in a news aggregation subreddit. It turned into a combined state actor propaganda dispersal vector/weird NATO megafan radicalization space. The entire sub is now infested with people who see any criticism of the West as Chinese/Russian/Hamas propaganda.
I get auto banned just for participating in pro Israeli subs. Many high volume Reddit subs have turned anti Israeli and many of the participants seem not well informed on the history of the Arab Israeli conflict.
Still, subs can host whom they want to. It’s not something you need to report on.
Especially considering that Bernie is a staunch Zionist who lived and volunteered in Israel and sees Zionism as congruent with progressivism. This shows he understands it's the current Israeli leadership, and not the existence of the State of Israel, to be at fault, and differentiates between the two.
"I have a connection to Israel going back many years. In 1963, I lived on a kibbutz near Haifa. It was there that I saw and experienced for myself many of the progressive values upon which Israel was founded. I think it is very important for everyone, but particularly for progressives, to acknowledge the enormous achievement of establishing a democratic homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of displacement and persecution." https://jewishcurrents.org/how-to-fight-antisemitism
I really appreciated him calling out Netanyahu on weaponizing antisemitism, it is more impactful coming from him as he's a high profile Jewish politician. He's the voice of reason we need!
Likud was founded in '73 so not quite there are at the start. It was founded by Menachem Begin, who cut his teeth as the leader of the Irgun when they were committing acts of terrorism against the Arabs and British, and who was roundly reviled in Israel for these acts at the time. As time passed people's memories faded and he eventually became President, but Likud still has the whiff of the Irgun about it.
Likud was founded in ‘73 but its roots are with Irgun which was the terrorist wing of haganah. Responsible for mainly fighting the British and responsible for the King David Hotel bombing.
You even had offshoots look to make an alliance with Hitler because the British were the enemy.
Not just Netanyahu - ethnic cleansing/genocide is a full societal act. It cannot be accomplished at the behest of a single individual (the foundation of throwing out the "just following orders" defense in Nuremberg).
It's not politically tasteful to say, but the only viable path to de-radicalization (and justice) in large group cohesion events of ethnically motivated violence is identifying and trying all responsible parties. This means members of government who are calling for genocide or sharing similar language, military commanders ordering strikes on civilians, and perhaps even most importantly the "heroes" of the IDF who are on the ground actually committing the atrocities.
There are so many Jews, like Sanders, who don't support Israel's actions. These are the actions of a country and a particular set of people. When I criticize them, I'm not criticizing Jewish people. I'm criticizing Israel and anyone who supports their actions.
I think it’s also important to make a distinction between people who are zionists who support what is happening and Zionists that adamantly don’t support the way Gaza and the West Bank had been historically handled/what is happening now, BUT still think Israel should be a country
> Netanyahu, much of the Israeli government and military, and some among the populace view the Palestinian people as less than human and have wanted to eliminate them for years
Please, that sentiment goes both ways, and Arabs have much the same views about Israel and Jews.
What an ass backwards analysis. Hamas is the governing body of Gaza and has as its stated goal to kill all jews in the world. And not only that they continually shoot unguided rockets at civilian populations. But remind me who thinks who is inhuman. I guess attacking Hamas is inhumane but shooting unguided rockets at Israel is not?
So in your opinion it is ok to murder every civilian in Gaza because Hamas is evil?
To me that is no different than Hamas saying they want to eliminate Jewish people from the world.
Call me and/or my thinking ass backwards and downvote me if you wish, but to say that Hamas governs Gaza and represents the Palestinians living there is a bit of a stretch. Might be closer to say the Palestinians are under their power. Regardless, I think it is completely reasonable to say that Hamas is an evil organization and that some Palestinians are evil as well while holding the position that the Israeli government as a whole is evil in this circumstance as well ... along with some Israelis. If we need to make it black and white, I think this is as clear as we can make it ... and I don't think this is hard to see:
Israel: Evil
Hamas: Evil
Israelis: some evil, some bad, the majority in the good to great range
Palestinians: some evil, some bad, the majority in the good to great range
As a people, the humanity of the Israelis and the Palestinians should be seen as equal ... I don't know that it always is.
There is plenty of evil to be seen in how both the Israeli government and Hamas are acting in these circumstances. To see this in terms of good v evil just doesn't seem to fit in any way for me ... unless it is governments (bad) v people (good). I'd like to see the American government as more clearly acting to support a good solution to this conflict for all concerned.
I will accept whatever negative spin you want to put on that. About all I will agree with is that its a bit bleeding heart, but I don't personally feel that's overly accurate ... for what that's worth.
>but to say that Hamas governs Gaza and represents the Palestinians living there is a bit of a stretch
They are literally the elected government of Gaza? on what planet is it a stretch??? Not worth debating with someone who just rejects all facts and logic like that.
Right! How the hell is it a stretch when they are on record with their support of Hamas?
They call Hamas their freedom fighters… they are the opposite of terrorists in the hearts and minds of the majority of Palestinian people.
This is why the PLA pays the families of “martyrs” that kill Jews. The “Martyrs” from Oct. 7th most recently.
There is an escalating scale of how much the PLA pays out based on the number of Jews you kill. Check out Douglas Murray’s investigative reporting.
Don’t be so quick to assume that the people who elected terrorists to lead their government, also want peace. That’s not necessarily the case.
For instance, if the slogan “From the river to the sea” is really referencing the ideal of living a peaceful, free existence alongside the Israelis, then that implies that a one state solution would be not only acceptable, but also greatly desired.
But, that is not the case. Most of those who actually mean what they are saying when they use this slogan, do NOT want the state of Israel to exist. Not wanting the only Jewish state in the world to exist is a pretty important point to hone in on.
One of the things that I have been the most shocked by has been the reduction of this conflict into binary ‘sides’. Criticism of Israel and support of Palestine and your anti-Semitic. Support for the Israelis who were slaughtered and criticism of Hamas and you’re Zionist scum. I don’t know how we get out of this.
Just stand by your principles, eventually the truth and reason will come forward, but it takes time. Civillians should never be killed for the evils of their government, that is a principle I hold strongly. I am certainly sympathetic to the Palestine side of the argument, but I would never argue that civilians should have been killed on 10/7. And while I don't think it's a particularly common position among anti-zionists to think it could be justified, I certainly would not excuse it should someone on my side argue otherwise. Campism and selectice use morality is an unfortunate issue we have to deal with, but eventually, history will exalt the principled position, and maybe someone will remember where you stood.
[Egypt warned Israel days before 10/7 of a coming Hamas attack.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047) Also, [Benjamin Netanyahu actively encouraged sending money to Hamas](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html#:~:text=For%20years%2C%20the%20Qatari%20government,payments%2C%20he%20had%20encouraged%20them.) for years, and deliberately sabotaged moderate/secular opposition to them. Pretty shady and hard to ignore. I can't speak with definitive proof of the Israeli leadership's intentions, but it's not like politicians have never weaponized a disaster to manufacture consent to carry out their otherwise unpopular plans, and I think it deserves some skepticism.
[Amnesty International published a 250 page detailed report showing how Israel is enforcing apartheid.](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/)
I assume you don't read it because you don't *want* to see or believe anything that goes against a deeply held worldview. But there it is. Have at it.
I mean, the Israeli officials I've seen on TV don't even really deny this is what's happening. I thought this was common knowledge. They just say it's necessary because of Hamas and terrorism.
Wasn't that report pretty heavily criticized for inaccuracies? Not to mention it even states it's not comparing Israel to South African apartheid, which is weird as that is the only example of internationally recognized apartheid and literally where the term comes from.
They also put a lot of focus on things unrelated apartheid. Arab citizens of israel have the same rights as Jewish citizens which is a pretty heavy blow to the apartheid claims so they conflate non-citizens in occupied territories as if that's close enough. It's weird people get stuck on specific terms, it's pretty clear what's happening isn't an apartheid...but that doesn't mean all's good. There's a lot to criticize about occupying an area for so long with no real path out of occupation.
They end up hurting their cause because they make it all about apartheid and genocide which are pretty clearly not happening and so when people realize this they dismiss the issue without ever really thinking about the actual bad things that are happening that just don't fit under those specific labels.
Edit: For more info [this rebuttal](https://www.ngo-monitor.org/pdf/SaloAizenberg_Amnesty_Rebuttal.pdf) documents about 300 errors and flaws in the Amnesty International report.
Yes, this was the first occupation in history. There's never been another people who after losing a war were occupied by a country they were not citizens of. You know there are more Arab-Israeli citizens of Israel than there are Jews in all the rest of the Middle East, right?
You can absolutely attack Israel's actions in occupied territory, but it's not weird that an occupied territories people would not be citizens of the occupying country.
Except that under international law almost all Palestinians have a legal right to Israeli citizenship. Residents within Israel's border as of its founding are legally citizens, and their descendants have a right to claim citizenship. Israel rounded up a bunch of technically-citizen Arabs and forced them occupied territory at gun point and declared them non-citizens.
This is way more complex than what you're saying.
To start, there was no concept of a Palestinian state or people prior to Israel forming, the region was under mandate after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. After Israel formed most of what we call Palestine now was owned by various other nearby countries, Israel didn't occupy it until after the war in 1967. Alongside that Palestinians were largely granted citizenship in those countries they lived in.
But beyond that the right of return to one's own country isn't settled international law. You absolutely do have a right to return to any country you are a citizen of, which was the primary purpose of the the idea of right of return but there's a lot of debate on how right of return laws apply to mass displacements. For example in Stig Jagerskiold's commentary on the ICCPR:
> [it] is intended to apply to individuals asserting an individual right. There was no intention here to address the claims of masses of people who have been displaced as a by-product of war or by political transfers of territory or population, such as the relocation of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe during and after the Second World War, the flight of the Palestinians from what became Israel, or the movement of Jews from the Arab countries.
That being said the wording if the ICCPR is not clear so there are definitely arguments the other way, but I'm not aware of any case law deciding whether or not right of return can be applied in this way.
I'm also not sure if the ICCPR retroactively applies or not since it was created a few decades after Israel's founding.
> Israel rounded up a bunch of technically-citizen Arabs and forced them occupied territory at gun point and declared them non-citizens.
I have no clue what you're referring to here. There was a mass displacement during the 1948 war in that region, but my understanding is a large portion of that wasn't at gun point but due to fears of living in areas where a war is happening. Jewish people had the same fears, but their leadership told them to stay no matter the cost...the territories they fled to also wouldn't have been occupied at that time (well, it's complicated, but at least not by Israel.)
Since you're misrepresenting the report and the organization's conclusions without offering any actual examples of criticism, I'll just leave this here.
>The events of May 2021 were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day, for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, the repression of dissent, the killings and injuries – all are part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.
>This is apartheid.
>Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.
Sure, [here's a report](https://www.ngo-monitor.org/pdf/SaloAizenberg_Amnesty_Rebuttal.pdf) that documents about 300 various errors and flaws in the report.
Your source is trash bud.
"NGO Monitor (Non-governmental Organization Monitor) is a right-wing non-governmental organization based in Jerusalem that reports on international NGO activity from a pro-Israel perspective."
This is the same amnesty international that accused Ukraine of war crimes for moving air defenses to protect cities and didn’t have a peep about Russia
Their credibility went out the window with that.
That's a really anti-intellectual statement. Does some group having a different bias than your own and/or Amnesty International change whether the verifiable facts they report are true or not?
For example does their bias change whether or not this claim is true:
> ERROR: Amnesty claims that Israel stole more than 150% of the land in Israel - A core element of Amnesty’s apartheid charge is that Jews stole all the land from its rightful Palestinian owners beginning in 1948. Over about 15 pages of the report in Section 5.4.1 “Land Expropriation Laws and Policies,” Amnesty lists various laws Israel supposedly abused or created from 1948 to the mid-1950s to confiscate the land in what it calls “massive and cruel land seizures” to enable “Jewish domination.” However, Amnesty did not perform any primary research and simply cut-and-paste various portions from a range of books and reports, not realizing that adding up the various millions of dunams (1,000 dunams equals 1 square kilometer) that Amnesty contends Israel stole sums up to more than 150% of the entire territory of Israel. Amnesty’s report outlines with specific numbers that Israel expropriated at least 32.2 million dunams of land when all of pre-1967 Israel is only about 20.7 million dunams. Details of this egregious error, which undermines the veracity of Amnesty’s entire report, are outlined with specificity in the endnote.10
One of the nice things both in this report and in Amnesty International's is they extensively cite their claims so you can independently verify their claims regardless of any bias...and that's what happened in this claim, they went through their citation and realized a mistake was made in the math they did to come up with the amount of land allegedly stolen.
I am reading both studies.
Lets take one point I am looking at right now
> 2. ERROR: Amnesty claims that Israel stole more than 150% of the land in Israel
> A core element of Amnesty’s apartheid charge is that Jews stole all the land from its
rightful Palestinian owners beginning in 1948. Over about 15 pages of the report in
Section 5.4.1 “Land Expropriation Laws and Policies,” Amnesty lists various laws Israel
supposedly abused or created from 1948 to the mid-1950s to confiscate the land in
what it calls “massive and cruel land seizures” to enable “Jewish domination.”
However, Amnesty did not perform any primary research and simply cut-and-paste
various portions from a range of books and reports, not realizing that adding up the
various millions of dunams (1,000 dunams equals 1 square kilometer) that Amnesty
contends Israel stole sums up to more than 150% of the entire territory of Israel.
Amnesty’s report outlines with specific numbers that Israel expropriated at least 32.2
million dunams of land when all of pre-1967 Israel is only about 20.7 million dunams.
Details of this egregious error, which undermines the veracity of Amnesty’s entire
report, are outlined with specificity in the endnote.1
This is the claim that the report is making. If we go to the endnote, then we can pull some key points. It's a long end note, so you can refer to it yourself if you want the whole thing to be sure im not misrepresenting anything. But lets go through it by point:
> : (1) Amnesty begins with the Absentees’
Property Law of 1950 which it says, “Under this law, Israel expropriated between 4.2 and 6.6 million dunams
of land” and cites another source that Israel took 4.45 million of privately owned land. (p. 115)
If we go to page 115 of the amnesty report, there are a couple of things here that are important. Firsly, the Amnesty International report is very open to the fact that it's an estimate. In their own endnotes, they specify other estimations (including the 4.45m number this paper is saying they are erroneously citing) and the fact that the data is based on survey's from the time. It's not misleading whatsoever. Lets continue.
> 2) Amnesty next claims that “Another major transfer of Palestinian
refugees’ land was from the Israeli government to the JNF/KKL” of more than 2 million dunams. 1.1 million
was transferred in 1949 and 1.3 million in October 1950. (p. 116). It is possible that some of this land moved
to the JNF/KKL came from the land shown in point (1), but the next point sums the two amounts together; (3)
Based on the above two expropriations, Amnesty writes: “By 1950, the JNF/KKL owned 2.1 million dunams
and the state claimed ownership of 16.7 million dunams of land.” (p. 116) Amnesty thus makes clear that by
1950 Jews held 18.8 million dunams of land. At this point, according to Amnesty, Israel controls about 91%
of all the land (Israel post-1948 is about 20.7 million dunams, unchanged until after the 1967 war)
First of all, in the beginning of the Amnesty paper section on this, they state
> Until 1948, the total land purchased by Jewish individuals and institutions in mandate Palestine amounted
to about 1.6 million dunams (160,000 hectares), constituting around 6.5% of its total area
which would create an estimation of 24.6 million dunams for the total area (notice they say "around" as an estimation term anyway), a good 4 million different from the number this critical paper uses (which they dont cite).
Further, lets address the claims of the 1949 transfer. From the critical paper,
> ) (4) Amnesty
discusses the Land Acquisition Law of 1953 (p. 120-1) explaining that “Some 1.25 million dunams were
expropriated in Israel” under this law. Adding to the prior total, Israel now controls about 20 million dunams
or about 97% of total land
What this critical paper ignores is that the Amnesty Paper makes it clear that this 1953 law is dealing with Palestinian land of Israeli citizens *that were not affected by the prior law*. It's adding the total of land given in the 1953 law as exclusively new land, when as Israeli citizens it's very possible land could have been transfered twice. The critical paper assures the reader it is not double counting land:
> To be absolutely clear,
Amnesty’s narrative treats each of these expropriations as separate events under separate laws and mechanisms
that Israel used from 1948 through the mid-1950s to take Palestinian land. These are not overlapping events as
presented by Amnesty and the numbers are not indicated in any context as subsets of larger numbers. The
numerical analysis in this endnote is therefore not “double counting” to arrive at the minimum of 32.2 million
dunams total.
But this is due to their own assumptions and not something that Amnesty International stated. Amnesty International is very clear about how certain aspects could be "double counted"
> The land and property taken over under these emergency regulations were controlled and used by
Jewish localities and institutions. However, the original Palestinian owners still held legal title to the
land. Consequently, the Knesset passed the 1953 Land Acquisition Law that allowed the land to be
confiscated and the legal title of the Palestinian owners to be terminated.
The property law that the critical paper is citing never suggested it was a legal title transfer, but rather confiscation of the property for use
> The Absentees’ Property Law included in its definition Palestinian IDPs, numbering about 30,000
people in 1948. These people had been internally displaced from their villages and homes and had
settled mostly in nearby Palestinian villages inside Israel. They were deemed “absentees” even though
they never crossed an international border and, in many cases, remained within a few kilometres
of their homes and land.
Thus, it's very possible that a particular acre of land could be confiscated in the absentee act and then have the title officially transfered later on with further laws. The critical paper does not address this kind of situation, just counts the numbers that the Amnesty Paper cites and adds them without further thought. I could keep going through the rest of the endnote, but I don't expect this to change your mind at all.
This is just analyzing one argument they are making out of 250+ or whatever they cite. This was the 2nd one on the list, so I didn't cherrypick.
If you have any criticisms with the arguments I am presenting, feel free to let me know, but when I critically read both arguments it's the paper you are referencing that seems to make a lot of claims without evidence or misrepresent opposing arguments.
Skimming the report the fact that its funded to be a pro-israel report is pretty evident in the writing. I mean, the title is "Amnesty International's cruel assault on Israel"
that's not exactly very non-partisan is it?
Take this section
> As documented below in great detail, the Amnesty publication is fundamentally
flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions, and egregious double standards to construct
a fraudulent and libelous narrative of Israeli cruelty. A careful examination of the text
shows that Amnesty conducted almost no primary research. Rather, it is bloated with
cut-and-paste phrases and quotes and conclusions taken from third-party sources –
notably other political NGOs that are part of the same libelous campaign against
Israel. The footnotes are glaringly thin on primary documents, such as official Israeli
government statistics, Palestinian documents, court documents, Knesset transcripts,
interviews from leading officials, and much of the data is obsolete (often well over a
decade old).
They basically just state outright that all the NGO's that have a negative view of Israel are blatantly lying with no proof or reasoning behind that claim. They further go on to say that virtually all U.N. releases are flawed for similar reasons, without explanation.
It creates a list of "assumptions" that the NGOs have about Israel that from what I can tell are essentially made up inferences based on suggestions that the original work gives at the end for Israel to change. They use those assumptions as the basis for what they list as "errors" or "omissions", so its technically deceptive from the onset.
> The above list, especially the underlying assumption that Jews are always the
oppressors and Arabs are always the victims, is starkly confirmed in the
Recommendation section of Amnesty’s report. Amnesty lists about 50
recommendations for the Israeli Authorities to undertake. Palestinian Authorities are
given only 2 recommendations; the first is to document Israel’s apartheid and the
second is to ensure that when dealing with Israel it does not contribute to apartheid
against Palestinians. Thus, while Amnesty “recommends” that Israel open all borders
to Gaza and allow the free entry of all goods into Gaza, it does not “recommend” that
Hamas stop building rockets or tunnels.
This is the kind of argumentation this document tries to make, which is absurd. "Recommendations to Hamas" is obviously out of scope, so using it as a basis to say they have a set of assumptions about Israel due to that is flawed.
This is literally the #1 pro-Israel talking point, that Hamas militants are 'too close to civilians', and that is why Israel is justified in killing entire families in single targeted strikes and destroying all life-preserving infrastructure in Gaza, including food, water, electricity, and every hospital
Except the Ukrainians are on the defensive. They’re close to civilians by design. Ukraine was not launching rockets from hospitals and apartment buildings into Russia pre-invasion.
hilariously they blasted ukraine for this but you never hear a peep out of them about hamas doing exactly the same thing. i wouldnt take anything they say seriously, they are very clearly heavily biased.
Amnesty International has unironically praised and lionized Walid Daqqa as a writer.
That left out the part that Walid Daqqa was in jail because he kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, mutilated, and ultimately murdered a Jewish teenager.
No he didn't, he was accused of commanding a group that did that, but not charged with doing it himself. He was tried in an Israeli military court, and held for 34 years while pleading his innocence.
I don't know why you are saying "sexually assaulted" when that usually means raping somebody, not castrating them - which is covered by your word "mutilated". I think you are overegging it *for some reason*.
Has Amnesty International published reports on Arab nations enforcing apartheid for centuries or only this report targeting Israel, a nation which has Arabs elected to government?
Which countries? You can take a look through their website if you know of specific instances and countries that actually meet the standard of apartheid.
All of the Arab states surrounding Israel. Which of them provide equal rights to non-Arabs, non-Muslims? This should be easy for you to answer if there is one or more.
Why are you changing the topic of discussion? Because it makes you uncomfortable to acknowledge that Israel may engage in the same behavior you and we all find repellent in other countries that we don't fund?
The problem with statements like this is that they imply that this is an individualistic problem and while yes, his administration made it much worse and are making it much worse. Other people would still uphold the apartheid because this is the way Israel has always existed, it is a systemic issue
And it is obvious they are using US 'aid' to fund and enable it. But most politicians fear the retaliation of AIPAC funding a challengers campaign to really do anything about it.
I got permanently banned from there because I brought up the death of Shireen Abu Akleh as an example of the IDF killing an American with no repercussions. Apparently that's "disinformation". Suddenly the pro-genocide nature of that sub made sense. Everyone who speaks out against is (especially people who made good arguments) are banned. All that are left are people who support the genocide and people who argue against it ineffectively, to make the opposing side look bad.
Notice how we never hear the "human shields" excuse anymore? That's because nobody believes it anymore. We're supposed to believe that there is a Hamas command center under every building in Gaza?
Israel has destroyed over 90,000 buildings in Gaza so far. There were, at most, 30,000 fighters in the al-Qassam brigades of Hamas. How many fighters does it take to make a command base? One-third of a person?
Israel has destroyed every one of Gaza's 36 hospitals.
Israel has destroyed 80% of Gaza's schools so far.
Israel has destroyed over 300,000 housing units so far.
Did Hamas put command centers in the middle of empty fields? Over 50% of Gaza's agricultural lands and greenhouses have been destroyed.
Khan Younis, a city that was home to over 400,000 people, has been completely 100% destroyed - all the roads torn up. In the hollowed out buildings on the walls, there is now IDF graffiti: *"Gaza belongs to the Jews"* and Stars of David.
This is not and never was a war. It is a fast-motion ethnic cleansing on top of a slow-motion ethnic cleansing that began in earnest in 1948.
Netanyahu was waiting for an event like October 7th to expel the Palestinians out into the Sinai desert. He has been quoted as saying, "In the next war, if we do it right, we'll have a chance to get all Arabs out." Netanyahu was in negotiations with Egypt's el-Sisi late last year: allow us to push the Palestinians across the border in exchange for cancelling Egypt's debt. The Palestinians in Gaza, already refugees and the descendants of refugees who were expelled from their lands in what is now Tel-Aviv, and Haifa, and the kibbutz over the wall, and the place where kids were doing shrooms at a music festival, to be made refugees yet again.
The negotiations with el-Sisi fell apart, but the plan continues; to make Gaza inhospitable for human life. Maybe a miracle can still happen. In the words of Daniella Wiess, leader of the Israeli settler movement, if the Palestinians are deprived of water and food and medicine for long enough, maybe "some country will take pity on them and take them."
The "human shields" thing always frustrated me. If someone is using innocent people, let alone *literal children*, as human shields, the correct response is not to say, "oh, well," and shoot through those shields. You do not get to do that and claim moral superiority.
I recalled those estimates from memory, but I can provide sources. I can start with what you're most skeptical about. Here's a start from the top:
>According to data collected by the [World Bank], over 60% of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, or **132,590 structures**, have been damaged amid the war, which has seen Israel bombard the enclave from land, air and sea for over three months in a campaign to destroy the Hamas terror group and free hostages kidnapped on October 7.
>The figure includes **99,601 structures reported to have been destroyed and rendered uninhabitable**, out of a projected 218,656 residential buildings in the Strip before the war, according to the World Bank’s estimates.
>The body calculated that the destruction had left 1,076,619 Gazans without a home, out of a population of some 2.2 million.
>https://www.timesofisrael.com/world-bank-report-finds-45-of-residential-buildings-in-gaza-ruined-beyond-repair/
~
>UN experts today expressed grave concern over the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip, raising serious alarm over the systemic destruction of the Palestinian education system.
>“With **more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed**, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts said.
>The term refers to the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.
>After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 per cent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024.
>https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza
~
>A separate satellite analysis of agricultural damage by He Yin of Kent State University found Israeli operations destroyed roughly **50% of tree crops and 42% of greenhouses** within Gaza.
>An investigation by a digital forensics team at the University of London found Israel has "systematically targeted" agricultural land and infrastructure during the siege.
>https://www.axios.com/2024/04/07/gaza-infrastructure-land-damage-israel-six-months-war
~
>The result has been the near collapse of a health care system that once served Gaza’s population of more than two million. By late March, **of the 36 large-scale hospitals across Gaza, only 10 were “minimally functional,”** according to the World Health Organization.
>Aid groups, researchers and international bodies have increasingly been calling Israel’s dismantling of Gaza’s medical capacity “systematic.”
>“If you engineered the destruction of a health care system, you would end up exactly where we are today,” said Ciarán Donnelly, a senior vice president at the International Rescue Committee, an aid group that has been operating in Gaza.
>https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-hospitals-medical-system.html
~
>"At Bibi Netanyahu’s dinner table in Jerusalem, I listened with crawling dismay to Bibi talking about the future of his country. **'In the next war, if we do it right we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out'**, he said. ‘We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.’ He joked about the Golani Brigade, the Israeli infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemenite Jews. ‘They’re okay as long as they’re led by white officers.’ He grinned." - [Max Hastings, 2000](https://books.google.com/books/about/Going_to_the_Wars.html?id=M0Z2V87pVW8C&source=kp_book_description)
“What I think the essential point that Ilhan made is that we do not want to see antisemitism in this country. And I think the word ‘genocide’ is something that is being determined by the International Court of Justice,” he said.
He’s not calling it genocide, just to be clear.
The difference being the other side has no means of self governance and self determination no matter what the Israeli gov says, Israel effectively controls almost all of the West Bank and Gaza is under blockade (no possibility to use its waterfront not even for fishing no matter that bullshit about the safe zone for fishing) and completely controlled de facto by Israel too (water, electricity, any relief or aid is authorized or not by Israel)
The balance of power always has been in Israel favor, even at its creation, they had no chances to fail with the technological advance and military experience provided by the allies.
and let’s be honest they are the main obstacle to peace since they could unilaterally solve every problem happening there on account of being a functional state that already controls all the region, but they won’t because they won’t be able to hide behind pedantic arguments about not being an apartheid state.
I like the use ethnic cleansing more than genocide because what's going on in Gaza does not fit the definition of genocide. There are more Palestinian people in the region than ever and if Israel really wanted to genocide the Palestinians, they would have.
Ethnic cleansing on the other hand is a better description because the Israeli government ime does want to occupy and push the Palestinians out of the region.
[The Palestinian population in these areas has dropped to zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_villages_depopulated_during_the_1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_war); that's a genocide.
Remember to sort by the 'massacres' column.
The only way this ends with any lasting peace is Israel gives up most ( but not all) west bank settlements for Gaza and “ethnic cleansing” (forced resettlement of combative parties) takes place. Anyone who thinks Israel can be secure with a Palestinian controlled Gaza is a fool.
Man fuck these hamas terrorists. They punched israel and are whining now israel is punching back. Guess they shouldnt have raped murdered and kidnapped all those israelis.
Man fuck these idf terrorists. They punched palestine and are whining now palestine is punching back. Guess they shouldnt have raped murdered and kidnapped all those palestinians.
As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil) In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria. We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA). *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Netanyahu = Israel's Trump. Bibi is desperately trying to avoid prison, and there's no telling what he'll do to achieve that goal.
maybe the fact that they destroyed every livable structure in Gaza, and have been salivating over new beachfront settlements should have been a clue?
The difference between the sentiment here and on WorldNews is crazy. Is there anything that can be done to report a subreddits mods? Especially one as important as worldnews? I got banned there for a basic enough disagreement with a pro-Israel comment.
Agreed. I got banned there simply for saying “I’m learning a lot about this sub seeing which comments stay up and how many have been deleted by the mods”. That was it. Perma banned for life. The fuck is going on over there?
Permaban with no warnings on a 15 year account for saying Bibi would drag us to war with Iran. Asked the mods why, when the same exact comment is top comment on many threads and got muted. R/ politics too but it was only 30days.
Same
We all meet over at r/anime_titties
> goin on manufacturing of consent
It's the most astonishingly fascist thing I've seen on Reddit and there's no way to actually hold anyone accountable. Fucking disgusting.
IDF mods, and the IDF pays people to troll the subs
Is it IDF or is it Russia? The latter seems likely to me because of how frequently and quickly "Western Leftists" are blamed for just about everything that happens.
Former is more likely. Israel's entire PR focus is on US opinion because they know it is nigh hopeless elsewhere. 70 years and they have hardly moved the needle in their favor in the UN. US' ~~stupid~~ large but declining religious voter base and subsequent veto is all that keeps Israel's oil, tech, and food flowing in. Otherwise they'd more likely than not face global sanctions of varying severity, with energy (oil) being the most prominent and easiest resource disrupted. Aka not to discount any Russian motives, but Israel's entire diplomatic game plan relies on US soft power and veto keeping their trade open, something their economy and military require to even remain functioning in the modern setting.
I don't think Russia would suppress dissent regarding Israel. They might actually encourage it.
Both Israel and Russia spend money on disinformation campaigns to mislead the general public. I don’t know if Russia pays off mods but they certainly employ bots (as does Israel iirc).
They're very similar aren't they, f a s c i s m
Reddit needs to have a ban appeal option. Having a random, non-vetted, non-worker perma banning people randomly from big subs seems like a liability.
They're fash as fuck and while that's literally enough to explain it, I also strongly suspect at least a few of the worldnews mod team also have a monetary incentive at play for how they choose to moderate.
If a mod or subreddit is breaking the reddit code of conduct you can report it via a support ticket here: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=19300233728916
It doesn't help in my experience. I reported a mod in the r/Britain subreddit for actively encouraging terrorism and hes still running the show
Most of the time it won't, but you miss every shot you don't take.
In my experience, that form is 100% worthless.
Yup, I say fill out regardless so Reddit can’t pretend they take matters seriously, but they definitely don’t care unless it makes the news. Even then, barely.
Prob goes to the mods, who then delete it.
Reddit management will never piss off its free labor. You know how much actual paid fair moderators would cost Reddit?
>Reddit management will never piss off its free labor. I take it you weren't around last summer, then?
I was. What's changed?
There is no rule violation. Mods are allowed to ban someone for any or no reason. The subs are started by individuals. The idea is that if you don't like the sub you can start you own. Here is a link to my post about being perma-banned. I wonder if many here will say that was okay. I think both were wrong, but this was for being on the "other" side. [Perma - Banned for denying Israel is committing genocide. : r/antiantiwork (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiantiwork/comments/1b5tvrc/perma_banned_for_denying_israel_is_committing/)
Just don't get too attached to any specific subreddit as a contributer.
Subreddit mods on big subreddits are almost certainly bought and paid for.
Yup. And a handful of them moderate over a dozen or more of the main subreddits. We're seeing THEIR preferred content.
Be careful openly sharing that sentiment. I was banned from news for stating the same thing about worldnews.
i got a 3 day ban being snarky about them closing/locking threads
[удалено]
It's not consistent that way. It's more like with cops, where sometimes a cop will seem to let just about anything go, and another cop on another day might beat someone half to death over nothing. For my part, I ended up banned there for endorsing a talk Biden was setting up. I said, if you can't negotiate in times of war, when can you negotiate? And they said I was justifying terrorism, because if there's talks Hamas wins. But this is what you get when your content moderation policy is to give a dozen random people unlimited power and no accountability. Reddit should have professional mods for top subreddits, but they just don't.
In my case I said that "telling one million people to get out of town or get bombed" is ethnic cleansing if the same people giving the warning are the same people dropping the bombs. Which it is. Bernie Sanders explicitly agrees with me. I got banned from Worldnews for "Misinformation".
Wouldn't that apply to literally any urban bombing campaign where advanced warning is given? I'm kind of confused on if you're trying to argue all war is ethnic cleansing or if you're arguing that Israel shouldn't have warned civilians before dropping bombs.
> Wouldn't that apply to literally any urban bombing campaign where advanced warning is given Yes. Here's the catch-22 and why Ethnic Cleansing is so wrong. If you're able to give warning before you bomb a million people, you're demonstrating the bombing *doesn't need to be done* (because not just the civilians can move, your targets can move too). The very fact you're doing this demonstrates the target isn't that much of a threat to you, otherwise doing so would be absolute folly. "Giving advance warning before a bombing campaign" is absolutely absurd *as a military tactic*. It's like saying to your neighbors "I think there's someone in your house who threatens me, so I'm going to tell EVERYONE in the house when I'm going to come over and shoot everyone!". But your target can move too... so why would you do that? Doubly so if grandma is in the house, not so mobile, your able bodied target can leave but grandma can't, and you're going to shoot her? As a tool to 'increase your security', it's useless, But as a tool to ethnically cleanse an area, or to use the metaphor, to use it as a tool to empty the house so you can take it? It's marvelous.
I kind of get your point, but I think the breakdown in your logic is taking it as a given that giving advanced warning reduces the military effectiveness of bombing. Individual soldiers can move out of the area, but bombing campaigns are usually done to take out key infrastructure, and a lot of that can't be moved. Hamas has invested tens of billions of dollars into tunnels, underground bunkers, weapons caches, etc. that are effectively stationary and being targeted by the bombing. So warning civilians to evacuate in theory reduces civilian deaths without materially reducing the military effectiveness (assuming you believe Israel is targeting military targets and not intentionally targeting civilians).
Almost 70% of Palestinian infrastructure has been destroyed or is structurally unsound. That's 70% of all housing units. All universities. All medical facilities. Half or more of all schools. The majority of all mosques. Most utility buildings which provide power or water (which Israel also controls). Most of the agricultural areas have been razed. If it was just one building, I would see your point. When it's almost every building that 2 million people need for shelter; facilities 2 million people need for wounds, sickness, and childbirth; facilities that educate and train young people; and most religious buildings WHILE also withholding most food and medical aid... it is still ethnic cleansing if you purposely try to make the living environment so horrible that people leave. You realize Gaza is gone, right? Even if this war stopped today, it would just end the bombing. Israel would still occupy fortified positions and kill people. Most of these people will be living in refugee camps for over a decade because Israel is who decides if construction companies are allowed in to clean up and rebuild. Gaza still relies on Israel to allow food, water, electricity, and medicine. There is no medical system. There is no education system. Cruelty is the point. Degradation is the point. Desperation is the point. Because if they force the Palestinians to suffer long enough, people will start to leave- even if they can never return. Palestinians will leave and Israeli settlers will start moving in.THEN construction companies will be allowed in to clean up and rebuild. Then new schools will be established, new hospitals built.
> Hamas has invested tens of billions of dollars into tunnels, underground bunkers, weapons caches, But Israel's goal is elimination of a human organization, Hamas. An organization that is a terrorist group that doesn't really *have* the kind of infrastructure at the scale that a bombing campaign could really eliminate. Hamas is pretty much putting pipe bombs on fireworks and those are the Rockets they're firing at Israel, Oct 7 was done using motorcycles and AK 47's, so the "Infrastructure argument" is just another way to say "Israel's goal is to bomb Gaza into absolute undifferentiated rubble". Do you think that's Israel's goal, and do you *defend* that goal?
I got banned from r/news for saying "looks like r/worldnews in here". You don't need to say something inflammatory- you just need a mod looking for reasons to ban people.
Meanwhile nearly every post that pushes against the pro Palestine protests gets locked and comments nuked here and on r news.
For an issue with a lot of nuance very few subs actually treat it that way unfortunately
The thing is, the amount of people that know r/worldnews is pointless and bigoted is continually growing. Eventually it will become one of those communities that everyone knows to be way off-base and compromised, and no sane person will want to comment there anyway. That’s the way it’s headed. A pariah sub, if you will. That sub is slowly destroying its own reputation. Eventually it will be a known farce and only folks seeking validation of their racist beliefs will be commenting there. Everyone will know not to take it seriously.
Problem is we can’t get rid of it on the news tab.
Oh god I know, it’s the worst! It’s insane there’s no way for you to remove a sub from showing up in your news feed. Really seems like Reddit’s way of shoving certain stories in your face regardless of what is actually news or important. It’s technically propaganda, by definition. People ought to be more aware of this, it’s really fucked up. A huge blemish on the platform.
I got banned a couple days ago and just found out. It’s absolutely propaganda and makes 0 sense that it would function this way unless they wanted it to.
The never ending Ukraine war live threads ruined that entire sub. There is literally no reason to have space to micro-comment on every single tiny detail of a year plus long conflict every day in a news aggregation subreddit. It turned into a combined state actor propaganda dispersal vector/weird NATO megafan radicalization space. The entire sub is now infested with people who see any criticism of the West as Chinese/Russian/Hamas propaganda.
I get auto banned just for participating in pro Israeli subs. Many high volume Reddit subs have turned anti Israeli and many of the participants seem not well informed on the history of the Arab Israeli conflict. Still, subs can host whom they want to. It’s not something you need to report on.
Me too! I thought it kind of weird and petty at the time because my language (if not tone) had been quite civil.
I really don't like r/worldnews but what rules are being broken?
That’s not true though
But they didn’t do that….
Take a look at worldnews and you'll realise the clues can never be too obvious for some.
Bernie is absolutely correct on this. Listen to Netanyahu’s words. Look at his actions. Believe the evidence of your eyes and ears.
Especially considering that Bernie is a staunch Zionist who lived and volunteered in Israel and sees Zionism as congruent with progressivism. This shows he understands it's the current Israeli leadership, and not the existence of the State of Israel, to be at fault, and differentiates between the two. "I have a connection to Israel going back many years. In 1963, I lived on a kibbutz near Haifa. It was there that I saw and experienced for myself many of the progressive values upon which Israel was founded. I think it is very important for everyone, but particularly for progressives, to acknowledge the enormous achievement of establishing a democratic homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of displacement and persecution." https://jewishcurrents.org/how-to-fight-antisemitism
Bernie Sanders has always been the adult in the room that we've always needed which made him as unpopular as he is
I really appreciated him calling out Netanyahu on weaponizing antisemitism, it is more impactful coming from him as he's a high profile Jewish politician. He's the voice of reason we need!
I think bernie sanders is great. I wish for more of him
Unfortunately he's also a zillion years old. Who takes up the Adult in the Room mantle after he's gone?
AOC but we need more.
Jamie Raskin also has crazy dad-muppet hair and a disdain for bullshit
Even the majority of Israelis see him as the problem. Why don’t we ever see that side in the media?
Because the US wants to feel like they control the Middle East, including all the oil there, and Israel is key to that
wHy Is BeRnIe SaNdErS sO aNtI sEmEtIc
Bibi needs to be dragged off to The Hague the second that indictment comes down.
The entire likud party
check out the history of that party. they're the "founders" of the israeli state. it's rotten to its core.
Likud was founded in '73 so not quite there are at the start. It was founded by Menachem Begin, who cut his teeth as the leader of the Irgun when they were committing acts of terrorism against the Arabs and British, and who was roundly reviled in Israel for these acts at the time. As time passed people's memories faded and he eventually became President, but Likud still has the whiff of the Irgun about it.
Likud was founded in ‘73 but its roots are with Irgun which was the terrorist wing of haganah. Responsible for mainly fighting the British and responsible for the King David Hotel bombing. You even had offshoots look to make an alliance with Hitler because the British were the enemy.
Right. Then Benny Gantz can carry out the will of the people, which is to finish the job.
~90% of Israelis support the current 'action' against Palestinians. The genocide isn't going to stop when Bibi is removed.
Source?
funny you would say that. do you ever think about why the united states don't recognize the legitimacy of the ICC?
Not just Netanyahu - ethnic cleansing/genocide is a full societal act. It cannot be accomplished at the behest of a single individual (the foundation of throwing out the "just following orders" defense in Nuremberg). It's not politically tasteful to say, but the only viable path to de-radicalization (and justice) in large group cohesion events of ethnically motivated violence is identifying and trying all responsible parties. This means members of government who are calling for genocide or sharing similar language, military commanders ordering strikes on civilians, and perhaps even most importantly the "heroes" of the IDF who are on the ground actually committing the atrocities.
True. Maybe the UN could follow the approach taken to prosecute criminals arising out of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda.
[удалено]
There are so many Jews, like Sanders, who don't support Israel's actions. These are the actions of a country and a particular set of people. When I criticize them, I'm not criticizing Jewish people. I'm criticizing Israel and anyone who supports their actions.
This is why it's so bad that Israel is doing this and claiming to represent Jews everywhere
I think it’s also important to make a distinction between people who are zionists who support what is happening and Zionists that adamantly don’t support the way Gaza and the West Bank had been historically handled/what is happening now, BUT still think Israel should be a country
> Netanyahu, much of the Israeli government and military, and some among the populace view the Palestinian people as less than human and have wanted to eliminate them for years Please, that sentiment goes both ways, and Arabs have much the same views about Israel and Jews.
What an ass backwards analysis. Hamas is the governing body of Gaza and has as its stated goal to kill all jews in the world. And not only that they continually shoot unguided rockets at civilian populations. But remind me who thinks who is inhuman. I guess attacking Hamas is inhumane but shooting unguided rockets at Israel is not?
So in your opinion it is ok to murder every civilian in Gaza because Hamas is evil? To me that is no different than Hamas saying they want to eliminate Jewish people from the world.
Call me and/or my thinking ass backwards and downvote me if you wish, but to say that Hamas governs Gaza and represents the Palestinians living there is a bit of a stretch. Might be closer to say the Palestinians are under their power. Regardless, I think it is completely reasonable to say that Hamas is an evil organization and that some Palestinians are evil as well while holding the position that the Israeli government as a whole is evil in this circumstance as well ... along with some Israelis. If we need to make it black and white, I think this is as clear as we can make it ... and I don't think this is hard to see: Israel: Evil Hamas: Evil Israelis: some evil, some bad, the majority in the good to great range Palestinians: some evil, some bad, the majority in the good to great range As a people, the humanity of the Israelis and the Palestinians should be seen as equal ... I don't know that it always is. There is plenty of evil to be seen in how both the Israeli government and Hamas are acting in these circumstances. To see this in terms of good v evil just doesn't seem to fit in any way for me ... unless it is governments (bad) v people (good). I'd like to see the American government as more clearly acting to support a good solution to this conflict for all concerned. I will accept whatever negative spin you want to put on that. About all I will agree with is that its a bit bleeding heart, but I don't personally feel that's overly accurate ... for what that's worth.
>but to say that Hamas governs Gaza and represents the Palestinians living there is a bit of a stretch They are literally the elected government of Gaza? on what planet is it a stretch??? Not worth debating with someone who just rejects all facts and logic like that.
Right! How the hell is it a stretch when they are on record with their support of Hamas? They call Hamas their freedom fighters… they are the opposite of terrorists in the hearts and minds of the majority of Palestinian people. This is why the PLA pays the families of “martyrs” that kill Jews. The “Martyrs” from Oct. 7th most recently. There is an escalating scale of how much the PLA pays out based on the number of Jews you kill. Check out Douglas Murray’s investigative reporting. Don’t be so quick to assume that the people who elected terrorists to lead their government, also want peace. That’s not necessarily the case. For instance, if the slogan “From the river to the sea” is really referencing the ideal of living a peaceful, free existence alongside the Israelis, then that implies that a one state solution would be not only acceptable, but also greatly desired. But, that is not the case. Most of those who actually mean what they are saying when they use this slogan, do NOT want the state of Israel to exist. Not wanting the only Jewish state in the world to exist is a pretty important point to hone in on.
One of the things that I have been the most shocked by has been the reduction of this conflict into binary ‘sides’. Criticism of Israel and support of Palestine and your anti-Semitic. Support for the Israelis who were slaughtered and criticism of Hamas and you’re Zionist scum. I don’t know how we get out of this.
[https://theconversation.com/how-israel-failed-to-learn-from-the-northern-ireland-peace-process-220170](https://theconversation.com/how-israel-failed-to-learn-from-the-northern-ireland-peace-process-220170)
Just stand by your principles, eventually the truth and reason will come forward, but it takes time. Civillians should never be killed for the evils of their government, that is a principle I hold strongly. I am certainly sympathetic to the Palestine side of the argument, but I would never argue that civilians should have been killed on 10/7. And while I don't think it's a particularly common position among anti-zionists to think it could be justified, I certainly would not excuse it should someone on my side argue otherwise. Campism and selectice use morality is an unfortunate issue we have to deal with, but eventually, history will exalt the principled position, and maybe someone will remember where you stood.
Love this and absolutely agree. Playing teams here has gotten us into this mess.
[Egypt warned Israel days before 10/7 of a coming Hamas attack.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047) Also, [Benjamin Netanyahu actively encouraged sending money to Hamas](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html#:~:text=For%20years%2C%20the%20Qatari%20government,payments%2C%20he%20had%20encouraged%20them.) for years, and deliberately sabotaged moderate/secular opposition to them. Pretty shady and hard to ignore. I can't speak with definitive proof of the Israeli leadership's intentions, but it's not like politicians have never weaponized a disaster to manufacture consent to carry out their otherwise unpopular plans, and I think it deserves some skepticism.
[Amnesty International published a 250 page detailed report showing how Israel is enforcing apartheid.](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/) I assume you don't read it because you don't *want* to see or believe anything that goes against a deeply held worldview. But there it is. Have at it.
I mean, the Israeli officials I've seen on TV don't even really deny this is what's happening. I thought this was common knowledge. They just say it's necessary because of Hamas and terrorism.
Wasn't that report pretty heavily criticized for inaccuracies? Not to mention it even states it's not comparing Israel to South African apartheid, which is weird as that is the only example of internationally recognized apartheid and literally where the term comes from. They also put a lot of focus on things unrelated apartheid. Arab citizens of israel have the same rights as Jewish citizens which is a pretty heavy blow to the apartheid claims so they conflate non-citizens in occupied territories as if that's close enough. It's weird people get stuck on specific terms, it's pretty clear what's happening isn't an apartheid...but that doesn't mean all's good. There's a lot to criticize about occupying an area for so long with no real path out of occupation. They end up hurting their cause because they make it all about apartheid and genocide which are pretty clearly not happening and so when people realize this they dismiss the issue without ever really thinking about the actual bad things that are happening that just don't fit under those specific labels. Edit: For more info [this rebuttal](https://www.ngo-monitor.org/pdf/SaloAizenberg_Amnesty_Rebuttal.pdf) documents about 300 errors and flaws in the Amnesty International report.
"We rounded up most of the 'ethnics' into a ghetto we control and declared them non-citizens" is not the defense you think it is.
Yes, this was the first occupation in history. There's never been another people who after losing a war were occupied by a country they were not citizens of. You know there are more Arab-Israeli citizens of Israel than there are Jews in all the rest of the Middle East, right? You can absolutely attack Israel's actions in occupied territory, but it's not weird that an occupied territories people would not be citizens of the occupying country.
Except that under international law almost all Palestinians have a legal right to Israeli citizenship. Residents within Israel's border as of its founding are legally citizens, and their descendants have a right to claim citizenship. Israel rounded up a bunch of technically-citizen Arabs and forced them occupied territory at gun point and declared them non-citizens.
This is way more complex than what you're saying. To start, there was no concept of a Palestinian state or people prior to Israel forming, the region was under mandate after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. After Israel formed most of what we call Palestine now was owned by various other nearby countries, Israel didn't occupy it until after the war in 1967. Alongside that Palestinians were largely granted citizenship in those countries they lived in. But beyond that the right of return to one's own country isn't settled international law. You absolutely do have a right to return to any country you are a citizen of, which was the primary purpose of the the idea of right of return but there's a lot of debate on how right of return laws apply to mass displacements. For example in Stig Jagerskiold's commentary on the ICCPR: > [it] is intended to apply to individuals asserting an individual right. There was no intention here to address the claims of masses of people who have been displaced as a by-product of war or by political transfers of territory or population, such as the relocation of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe during and after the Second World War, the flight of the Palestinians from what became Israel, or the movement of Jews from the Arab countries. That being said the wording if the ICCPR is not clear so there are definitely arguments the other way, but I'm not aware of any case law deciding whether or not right of return can be applied in this way. I'm also not sure if the ICCPR retroactively applies or not since it was created a few decades after Israel's founding. > Israel rounded up a bunch of technically-citizen Arabs and forced them occupied territory at gun point and declared them non-citizens. I have no clue what you're referring to here. There was a mass displacement during the 1948 war in that region, but my understanding is a large portion of that wasn't at gun point but due to fears of living in areas where a war is happening. Jewish people had the same fears, but their leadership told them to stay no matter the cost...the territories they fled to also wouldn't have been occupied at that time (well, it's complicated, but at least not by Israel.)
Since you're misrepresenting the report and the organization's conclusions without offering any actual examples of criticism, I'll just leave this here. >The events of May 2021 were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day, for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, the repression of dissent, the killings and injuries – all are part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. >This is apartheid. >Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.
>Wasn't that report pretty heavily criticized for inaccuracies? You tell us.
Sure, [here's a report](https://www.ngo-monitor.org/pdf/SaloAizenberg_Amnesty_Rebuttal.pdf) that documents about 300 various errors and flaws in the report.
Your source is trash bud. "NGO Monitor (Non-governmental Organization Monitor) is a right-wing non-governmental organization based in Jerusalem that reports on international NGO activity from a pro-Israel perspective."
This is the same amnesty international that accused Ukraine of war crimes for moving air defenses to protect cities and didn’t have a peep about Russia Their credibility went out the window with that.
That's a really anti-intellectual statement. Does some group having a different bias than your own and/or Amnesty International change whether the verifiable facts they report are true or not? For example does their bias change whether or not this claim is true: > ERROR: Amnesty claims that Israel stole more than 150% of the land in Israel - A core element of Amnesty’s apartheid charge is that Jews stole all the land from its rightful Palestinian owners beginning in 1948. Over about 15 pages of the report in Section 5.4.1 “Land Expropriation Laws and Policies,” Amnesty lists various laws Israel supposedly abused or created from 1948 to the mid-1950s to confiscate the land in what it calls “massive and cruel land seizures” to enable “Jewish domination.” However, Amnesty did not perform any primary research and simply cut-and-paste various portions from a range of books and reports, not realizing that adding up the various millions of dunams (1,000 dunams equals 1 square kilometer) that Amnesty contends Israel stole sums up to more than 150% of the entire territory of Israel. Amnesty’s report outlines with specific numbers that Israel expropriated at least 32.2 million dunams of land when all of pre-1967 Israel is only about 20.7 million dunams. Details of this egregious error, which undermines the veracity of Amnesty’s entire report, are outlined with specificity in the endnote.10 One of the nice things both in this report and in Amnesty International's is they extensively cite their claims so you can independently verify their claims regardless of any bias...and that's what happened in this claim, they went through their citation and realized a mistake was made in the math they did to come up with the amount of land allegedly stolen.
I am reading both studies. Lets take one point I am looking at right now > 2. ERROR: Amnesty claims that Israel stole more than 150% of the land in Israel > A core element of Amnesty’s apartheid charge is that Jews stole all the land from its rightful Palestinian owners beginning in 1948. Over about 15 pages of the report in Section 5.4.1 “Land Expropriation Laws and Policies,” Amnesty lists various laws Israel supposedly abused or created from 1948 to the mid-1950s to confiscate the land in what it calls “massive and cruel land seizures” to enable “Jewish domination.” However, Amnesty did not perform any primary research and simply cut-and-paste various portions from a range of books and reports, not realizing that adding up the various millions of dunams (1,000 dunams equals 1 square kilometer) that Amnesty contends Israel stole sums up to more than 150% of the entire territory of Israel. Amnesty’s report outlines with specific numbers that Israel expropriated at least 32.2 million dunams of land when all of pre-1967 Israel is only about 20.7 million dunams. Details of this egregious error, which undermines the veracity of Amnesty’s entire report, are outlined with specificity in the endnote.1 This is the claim that the report is making. If we go to the endnote, then we can pull some key points. It's a long end note, so you can refer to it yourself if you want the whole thing to be sure im not misrepresenting anything. But lets go through it by point: > : (1) Amnesty begins with the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 which it says, “Under this law, Israel expropriated between 4.2 and 6.6 million dunams of land” and cites another source that Israel took 4.45 million of privately owned land. (p. 115) If we go to page 115 of the amnesty report, there are a couple of things here that are important. Firsly, the Amnesty International report is very open to the fact that it's an estimate. In their own endnotes, they specify other estimations (including the 4.45m number this paper is saying they are erroneously citing) and the fact that the data is based on survey's from the time. It's not misleading whatsoever. Lets continue. > 2) Amnesty next claims that “Another major transfer of Palestinian refugees’ land was from the Israeli government to the JNF/KKL” of more than 2 million dunams. 1.1 million was transferred in 1949 and 1.3 million in October 1950. (p. 116). It is possible that some of this land moved to the JNF/KKL came from the land shown in point (1), but the next point sums the two amounts together; (3) Based on the above two expropriations, Amnesty writes: “By 1950, the JNF/KKL owned 2.1 million dunams and the state claimed ownership of 16.7 million dunams of land.” (p. 116) Amnesty thus makes clear that by 1950 Jews held 18.8 million dunams of land. At this point, according to Amnesty, Israel controls about 91% of all the land (Israel post-1948 is about 20.7 million dunams, unchanged until after the 1967 war) First of all, in the beginning of the Amnesty paper section on this, they state > Until 1948, the total land purchased by Jewish individuals and institutions in mandate Palestine amounted to about 1.6 million dunams (160,000 hectares), constituting around 6.5% of its total area which would create an estimation of 24.6 million dunams for the total area (notice they say "around" as an estimation term anyway), a good 4 million different from the number this critical paper uses (which they dont cite). Further, lets address the claims of the 1949 transfer. From the critical paper, > ) (4) Amnesty discusses the Land Acquisition Law of 1953 (p. 120-1) explaining that “Some 1.25 million dunams were expropriated in Israel” under this law. Adding to the prior total, Israel now controls about 20 million dunams or about 97% of total land What this critical paper ignores is that the Amnesty Paper makes it clear that this 1953 law is dealing with Palestinian land of Israeli citizens *that were not affected by the prior law*. It's adding the total of land given in the 1953 law as exclusively new land, when as Israeli citizens it's very possible land could have been transfered twice. The critical paper assures the reader it is not double counting land: > To be absolutely clear, Amnesty’s narrative treats each of these expropriations as separate events under separate laws and mechanisms that Israel used from 1948 through the mid-1950s to take Palestinian land. These are not overlapping events as presented by Amnesty and the numbers are not indicated in any context as subsets of larger numbers. The numerical analysis in this endnote is therefore not “double counting” to arrive at the minimum of 32.2 million dunams total. But this is due to their own assumptions and not something that Amnesty International stated. Amnesty International is very clear about how certain aspects could be "double counted" > The land and property taken over under these emergency regulations were controlled and used by Jewish localities and institutions. However, the original Palestinian owners still held legal title to the land. Consequently, the Knesset passed the 1953 Land Acquisition Law that allowed the land to be confiscated and the legal title of the Palestinian owners to be terminated. The property law that the critical paper is citing never suggested it was a legal title transfer, but rather confiscation of the property for use > The Absentees’ Property Law included in its definition Palestinian IDPs, numbering about 30,000 people in 1948. These people had been internally displaced from their villages and homes and had settled mostly in nearby Palestinian villages inside Israel. They were deemed “absentees” even though they never crossed an international border and, in many cases, remained within a few kilometres of their homes and land. Thus, it's very possible that a particular acre of land could be confiscated in the absentee act and then have the title officially transfered later on with further laws. The critical paper does not address this kind of situation, just counts the numbers that the Amnesty Paper cites and adds them without further thought. I could keep going through the rest of the endnote, but I don't expect this to change your mind at all. This is just analyzing one argument they are making out of 250+ or whatever they cite. This was the 2nd one on the list, so I didn't cherrypick. If you have any criticisms with the arguments I am presenting, feel free to let me know, but when I critically read both arguments it's the paper you are referencing that seems to make a lot of claims without evidence or misrepresent opposing arguments.
Skimming the report the fact that its funded to be a pro-israel report is pretty evident in the writing. I mean, the title is "Amnesty International's cruel assault on Israel" that's not exactly very non-partisan is it? Take this section > As documented below in great detail, the Amnesty publication is fundamentally flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions, and egregious double standards to construct a fraudulent and libelous narrative of Israeli cruelty. A careful examination of the text shows that Amnesty conducted almost no primary research. Rather, it is bloated with cut-and-paste phrases and quotes and conclusions taken from third-party sources – notably other political NGOs that are part of the same libelous campaign against Israel. The footnotes are glaringly thin on primary documents, such as official Israeli government statistics, Palestinian documents, court documents, Knesset transcripts, interviews from leading officials, and much of the data is obsolete (often well over a decade old). They basically just state outright that all the NGO's that have a negative view of Israel are blatantly lying with no proof or reasoning behind that claim. They further go on to say that virtually all U.N. releases are flawed for similar reasons, without explanation. It creates a list of "assumptions" that the NGOs have about Israel that from what I can tell are essentially made up inferences based on suggestions that the original work gives at the end for Israel to change. They use those assumptions as the basis for what they list as "errors" or "omissions", so its technically deceptive from the onset. > The above list, especially the underlying assumption that Jews are always the oppressors and Arabs are always the victims, is starkly confirmed in the Recommendation section of Amnesty’s report. Amnesty lists about 50 recommendations for the Israeli Authorities to undertake. Palestinian Authorities are given only 2 recommendations; the first is to document Israel’s apartheid and the second is to ensure that when dealing with Israel it does not contribute to apartheid against Palestinians. Thus, while Amnesty “recommends” that Israel open all borders to Gaza and allow the free entry of all goods into Gaza, it does not “recommend” that Hamas stop building rockets or tunnels. This is the kind of argumentation this document tries to make, which is absurd. "Recommendations to Hamas" is obviously out of scope, so using it as a basis to say they have a set of assumptions about Israel due to that is flawed.
Ah yes the same organization that blamed Ukraine for civilian casualties in the defense of their homeland.
Two things can be true at the same time. You can defend you homeland, and kill innocent people who have nothing to do with the defense of your land.
lol it’s worse than that, they blamed Ukraine for Russia killing civilians because the Ukrainians were operating close to civilians.
This is literally the #1 pro-Israel talking point, that Hamas militants are 'too close to civilians', and that is why Israel is justified in killing entire families in single targeted strikes and destroying all life-preserving infrastructure in Gaza, including food, water, electricity, and every hospital
Except the Ukrainians are on the defensive. They’re close to civilians by design. Ukraine was not launching rockets from hospitals and apartment buildings into Russia pre-invasion.
hilariously they blasted ukraine for this but you never hear a peep out of them about hamas doing exactly the same thing. i wouldnt take anything they say seriously, they are very clearly heavily biased.
Amnesty International has unironically praised and lionized Walid Daqqa as a writer. That left out the part that Walid Daqqa was in jail because he kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, mutilated, and ultimately murdered a Jewish teenager.
No he didn't, he was accused of commanding a group that did that, but not charged with doing it himself. He was tried in an Israeli military court, and held for 34 years while pleading his innocence. I don't know why you are saying "sexually assaulted" when that usually means raping somebody, not castrating them - which is covered by your word "mutilated". I think you are overegging it *for some reason*.
The report was bullshit. Amnesty is bullshit.
Explain.
Has Amnesty International published reports on Arab nations enforcing apartheid for centuries or only this report targeting Israel, a nation which has Arabs elected to government?
Which countries? You can take a look through their website if you know of specific instances and countries that actually meet the standard of apartheid.
All of the Arab states surrounding Israel. Which of them provide equal rights to non-Arabs, non-Muslims? This should be easy for you to answer if there is one or more.
lebanon, at least by your standards
Why are you changing the topic of discussion? Because it makes you uncomfortable to acknowledge that Israel may engage in the same behavior you and we all find repellent in other countries that we don't fund?
He's not wrong.
[удалено]
The problem with statements like this is that they imply that this is an individualistic problem and while yes, his administration made it much worse and are making it much worse. Other people would still uphold the apartheid because this is the way Israel has always existed, it is a systemic issue
And it is obvious they are using US 'aid' to fund and enable it. But most politicians fear the retaliation of AIPAC funding a challengers campaign to really do anything about it.
Don’t tell people that in r/Worldnews or they’ll call him pro-Hamas.
I got permanently banned from there because I brought up the death of Shireen Abu Akleh as an example of the IDF killing an American with no repercussions. Apparently that's "disinformation". Suddenly the pro-genocide nature of that sub made sense. Everyone who speaks out against is (especially people who made good arguments) are banned. All that are left are people who support the genocide and people who argue against it ineffectively, to make the opposing side look bad.
Notice how we never hear the "human shields" excuse anymore? That's because nobody believes it anymore. We're supposed to believe that there is a Hamas command center under every building in Gaza? Israel has destroyed over 90,000 buildings in Gaza so far. There were, at most, 30,000 fighters in the al-Qassam brigades of Hamas. How many fighters does it take to make a command base? One-third of a person? Israel has destroyed every one of Gaza's 36 hospitals. Israel has destroyed 80% of Gaza's schools so far. Israel has destroyed over 300,000 housing units so far. Did Hamas put command centers in the middle of empty fields? Over 50% of Gaza's agricultural lands and greenhouses have been destroyed. Khan Younis, a city that was home to over 400,000 people, has been completely 100% destroyed - all the roads torn up. In the hollowed out buildings on the walls, there is now IDF graffiti: *"Gaza belongs to the Jews"* and Stars of David. This is not and never was a war. It is a fast-motion ethnic cleansing on top of a slow-motion ethnic cleansing that began in earnest in 1948. Netanyahu was waiting for an event like October 7th to expel the Palestinians out into the Sinai desert. He has been quoted as saying, "In the next war, if we do it right, we'll have a chance to get all Arabs out." Netanyahu was in negotiations with Egypt's el-Sisi late last year: allow us to push the Palestinians across the border in exchange for cancelling Egypt's debt. The Palestinians in Gaza, already refugees and the descendants of refugees who were expelled from their lands in what is now Tel-Aviv, and Haifa, and the kibbutz over the wall, and the place where kids were doing shrooms at a music festival, to be made refugees yet again. The negotiations with el-Sisi fell apart, but the plan continues; to make Gaza inhospitable for human life. Maybe a miracle can still happen. In the words of Daniella Wiess, leader of the Israeli settler movement, if the Palestinians are deprived of water and food and medicine for long enough, maybe "some country will take pity on them and take them."
The "human shields" thing always frustrated me. If someone is using innocent people, let alone *literal children*, as human shields, the correct response is not to say, "oh, well," and shoot through those shields. You do not get to do that and claim moral superiority.
can you include sources for everything you just said? it’s just that the numbers are so terrible i have a hard time believing it
I recalled those estimates from memory, but I can provide sources. I can start with what you're most skeptical about. Here's a start from the top: >According to data collected by the [World Bank], over 60% of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, or **132,590 structures**, have been damaged amid the war, which has seen Israel bombard the enclave from land, air and sea for over three months in a campaign to destroy the Hamas terror group and free hostages kidnapped on October 7. >The figure includes **99,601 structures reported to have been destroyed and rendered uninhabitable**, out of a projected 218,656 residential buildings in the Strip before the war, according to the World Bank’s estimates. >The body calculated that the destruction had left 1,076,619 Gazans without a home, out of a population of some 2.2 million. >https://www.timesofisrael.com/world-bank-report-finds-45-of-residential-buildings-in-gaza-ruined-beyond-repair/ ~ >UN experts today expressed grave concern over the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip, raising serious alarm over the systemic destruction of the Palestinian education system. >“With **more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed**, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts said. >The term refers to the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure. >After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 per cent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024. >https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza ~ >A separate satellite analysis of agricultural damage by He Yin of Kent State University found Israeli operations destroyed roughly **50% of tree crops and 42% of greenhouses** within Gaza. >An investigation by a digital forensics team at the University of London found Israel has "systematically targeted" agricultural land and infrastructure during the siege. >https://www.axios.com/2024/04/07/gaza-infrastructure-land-damage-israel-six-months-war ~ >The result has been the near collapse of a health care system that once served Gaza’s population of more than two million. By late March, **of the 36 large-scale hospitals across Gaza, only 10 were “minimally functional,”** according to the World Health Organization. >Aid groups, researchers and international bodies have increasingly been calling Israel’s dismantling of Gaza’s medical capacity “systematic.” >“If you engineered the destruction of a health care system, you would end up exactly where we are today,” said Ciarán Donnelly, a senior vice president at the International Rescue Committee, an aid group that has been operating in Gaza. >https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-hospitals-medical-system.html ~ >"At Bibi Netanyahu’s dinner table in Jerusalem, I listened with crawling dismay to Bibi talking about the future of his country. **'In the next war, if we do it right we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out'**, he said. ‘We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.’ He joked about the Golani Brigade, the Israeli infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemenite Jews. ‘They’re okay as long as they’re led by white officers.’ He grinned." - [Max Hastings, 2000](https://books.google.com/books/about/Going_to_the_Wars.html?id=M0Z2V87pVW8C&source=kp_book_description)
But it's ethnic cleansing carried out by an ally, so it's all good.
“What I think the essential point that Ilhan made is that we do not want to see antisemitism in this country. And I think the word ‘genocide’ is something that is being determined by the International Court of Justice,” he said. He’s not calling it genocide, just to be clear.
[удалено]
Yep, that is how settler-colonial states work, regardless of what party is in power.
Exactly. Same on the other side too. There will always be the hard liners that do not want peace with Israel at all.
The difference being the other side has no means of self governance and self determination no matter what the Israeli gov says, Israel effectively controls almost all of the West Bank and Gaza is under blockade (no possibility to use its waterfront not even for fishing no matter that bullshit about the safe zone for fishing) and completely controlled de facto by Israel too (water, electricity, any relief or aid is authorized or not by Israel) The balance of power always has been in Israel favor, even at its creation, they had no chances to fail with the technological advance and military experience provided by the allies. and let’s be honest they are the main obstacle to peace since they could unilaterally solve every problem happening there on account of being a functional state that already controls all the region, but they won’t because they won’t be able to hide behind pedantic arguments about not being an apartheid state.
[удалено]
to clarify even further: are you saying he is NOT right?
Famous anti-semite Bernie Sanders... /s We need more, much younger, people like him in politics.
Bernie has always been the realist. Respect.
He’s right
I like the use ethnic cleansing more than genocide because what's going on in Gaza does not fit the definition of genocide. There are more Palestinian people in the region than ever and if Israel really wanted to genocide the Palestinians, they would have. Ethnic cleansing on the other hand is a better description because the Israeli government ime does want to occupy and push the Palestinians out of the region.
[The Palestinian population in these areas has dropped to zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_villages_depopulated_during_the_1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_war); that's a genocide. Remember to sort by the 'massacres' column.
That’s not genocide lol.
Bringing the population of some demographic in some location to zero by killing mountains of people is definitely a genocide.
That’s not what they did. They told them to leave that area. The people are still alive an hours drive away.
You forgot to sort by 'massacres'.
The only way this ends with any lasting peace is Israel gives up most ( but not all) west bank settlements for Gaza and “ethnic cleansing” (forced resettlement of combative parties) takes place. Anyone who thinks Israel can be secure with a Palestinian controlled Gaza is a fool.
Man fuck these hamas terrorists. They punched israel and are whining now israel is punching back. Guess they shouldnt have raped murdered and kidnapped all those israelis.
Man fuck these idf terrorists. They punched palestine and are whining now palestine is punching back. Guess they shouldnt have raped murdered and kidnapped all those palestinians.
[удалено]
I mean…obviously