this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
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It's actually upsetting to read some people defend an illegal war of aggression in this thread. Just practice the golden rule for a change and imagine yourself being in the same situation. What if it was your country being invaded? Would you take up arms to defend your family, your friends, your neighbors? The bombs are dropping everywhere, and you have to hide in basements to prevent their terror attacks from taking away all that you hold dear.
Of course a country being invaded has the right to defend themselves and the right to fight back. The aggressors could end this war immediately but they wont because their leader is an insular autocrat. Isolating himself and giving orders without considering the best for the rest of the world. Devaluing human life from on top of a pedestal. This is the danger what happens when one single individual gains too much power and the rest of the world needs to be unanimously against it regardless of blind idealism.
How would you define a "legal war"?
A war can be considered legal if it meets the criteria and conditions set forth by international law. On the other hand, an "illegal war" typically refers to armed conflicts that do not meet the requirements outlined in international law.
Practically every war throughout history violates that standard. Are there people out there who are truly this naive?
Straight up. Israel and Ukraine are under constant attack these days and absolutely not be criticized for defending themselves even if they don't always go about it exactly the right way.
Are you seriously comparing an apartheid state to a country that's a victim of an invasion? Is Israel "defending itself" when it slaughters Palestinian children?
Have you ever been there? Do you know what apartheid actually means? Every single Palestinian without citizenship doesn't have it only because they refused. And furthermore, in 2005 Israel actually forced its own citizens out of the Gaza strip, whole family is dislocated at gunpoint by their own government. And when the Palestinians moved in, the terrorists among them tore down the infrastructure and somehow convinced their brethren that the Israelis were to blame. Israel is not the one who's incriminately shooting rockets from hospitals and schoolyards. Israel is not the one encouraging citizens to enter houses of worship and go on killing sprees. Israel is not the one who is encouraging and applauding suicide bombers attacking bus stops and pizza shops. Israel is the one who is sending out texts and dropping leaflets warning people to get out of buildings that they suspect their housing military equipment used to attack them before bombing said buildings. It is easily within Israel's capability set to kill every last Palestinian and I imagine just about any other country put through what Israel's been put through would be a lot more aggressive. They aren't always in the right. There are things they have done wrong. But an apartheid state they are not.
Forgot to mention, the terrorists in charge of the Gaza strip also diverted equipment meant to be used for construction and instead chose to use it to dig tunnels to get through to Israel to carry out attacks and kidnappings.
I'm sorry, how do you think YOU would behave if your homeland were colonized? You'd just politely ask the colonizers to leave until they felt bad enough for you to listen? Not everything Palestinians do to fight back is good or justified, but they're clearly the victims in this scenario.
Half of children in Gaza are suicidal. HALF. 60% self-harm, and 80% are depressed. Are you cool with that? Because that is directly Israel's doing.
To be clear, Israel is not a unique evil. The US and China are at least as bad. But Israel is not magically exempt from criticism, nor is it remotely comparable to Ukraine.
Israel are not colonizers though. Israel is one of the indigenous people finally returning to their homeland. You can say they should share and I agree but the immediate attempt at their annihilation right when they were established definitely indicated that many of their neighbors were not keen on sharing nicely. It's awful that the children in Gaza are suffering but the blame for that lies with the terrorists who use those children as human shields, tore down the infrastructure, and diverted construction materials meant for humanitarian aid to be used to enable further terrorist attacks, not the country that forced it's own citizens out and left a fully functioning set of infrastructure for the new inhabitants.
Edit- I was hoping to get away from Reddit culture of disagree=downvote and was looking forward to productive respectful discussions here. So far it seems not to be working out but maybe we can still turn it around
If white Americans today went back to Europe and forcibly displaced the people living there, they would be colonizers. It doesn't matter that they can trace their lineage back to that location. The idea that blood links you to land is nonsense.
Jesus Christ, how much Israeli propaganda have you been drinking? I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but even assuming that's all true, whose fault is it that people there needed humanitarian aid in the first place? Try reading sources on Palestinians that don't have a pro-Israel agenda sometime.
My instance disables downvotes, so I can neither downvote you nor see your negative score, but good. I'm glad you're getting downvoted. That's exactly what uncritically regurgitated propaganda deserves.
How much Palestinian propaganda have you been reading? Americans weren't forcibly expelled to begin with and even if they were they haven't been actively demonstrably yearning and attempting to return ever since so the analogy fails on two counts. A third count as well actually because Americans haven't had bigotry, prosecution, and murder sprees and mobs and pogroms constantly plaguing them everywhere they've been since they left europe.
Regarding the downvotes- good to know although ironically you are the person who would uld be least wrong to downvote me. You're at least articulating what you disagree with than giving a cowardly anonymous thumbs down like those who have been downvoting.
Why does any of that matter? Why does any of that make it okay to displace the people who currently live in a place? It's their homeland, too. They have at least as much a right to it as Israelis.
Shit, I'm for landback for indigenous Americans, and even I don't think non-indigenous people should be kicked off the land they currently live on and relocated. And Native Americans have a much more recent claim to American land than Israelis do to Palestine.
Why does the fact that Jews have not been safe in any society on the planet in the past 2000 years matter? Why does it matter that they were forced off the land? Why does it matter that this bothered us and we've been demonstrably hoping and trying to return for the past two millenia? Because if any of those weren't true I might cede that in some capacity we gave lost our claim to it. However the fact remains that we were forcibly dispossessed of our land and have a right to go back. Of course not at the expense of entirely uprooting those who moved in after us but enough that they and we really should share the land nicely.
If I could ask my own question in return I'd ask why recency of claim matters more than any of the factors I mentioned above. And for the record I agree that native Americans should have far more land rights than they do today. But at the very least they can dwell in a portion of their homeland without the leaders of the rest of those who reside who openly calling for their complete removal and/or extermination and that's more than can be said for today's Jews in Israel.
And none of that matters even one single iota to a Palestinian child who's just been shot in the chest. Go ahead, go up to a grieving Palestinian family and tell them, "Well, I'm oppressed too." So what? So fucking what? Having been displaced and oppressed doesn't magically make it okay for you to turn around and do the same thing to others.
I don't have a problem with Jews living in Palestine if they don't displace the Palestinians. But that's exactly what they're doing. Jews, like anyone else, should be free to live absolutely anywhere on Earth without fear. But they have no right to inflict terror on others. No amount of oppression could possibly justify that.
As for why recency of claim matters, I don't think it's necessarily that important, but I was making a point. However, you could make the argument in the case of Native Americans that they're still quite tied to the lands they live(d) on and often care for those lands in a way colonizers don't, and therefore their presence is important for environmental reasons. You can't really make the same argument for Jews and Israel.
Hahaha, what? Native Americans don't have anyone calling for their extermination? They're literally still subject to a genocide, like many racial minorities in the US. They were involuntarily sterilized up until the 1970s, and they're still treated brutally by the government (and especially police).
:::spoiler child sexual abuse I literally heard a speech in person from a Native man who was taken to a residential school and repeatedly sexual assaulted until he was suicidal while his age was still in single digits. There are people alive today who have experienced this stuff.
Nor do any of those points matter to innocents stabbed to death in a synagogue or blown up trying to buy some pizza. The issue is that Israel tried just existing but literally the day it was established it was attacked in an extermination attempts by literally every country surrounding it. Being oppressed doesn't make it ok to turn around and oppress others but being under a constant state of siege does make it ok to take actions to ensure your safety as well as that of your citizens. Would you say that literal thousands of rocket attacks, hundreds of suicide bombings, bouts of stabbings, bouts of shootings, and more in addition to at least 3 military actions jointly taken by surrounding nations doesn't count as a state of siege? If not what does?
regarding recency, we absolutely can make the argument of environmental importance to the land. See what twain wrote of it in our absence. Even now there is a literal green line separating land under our control vs under palestinian control. And I can tell you the green is definitely not on the palestinian side.
And I never said nobody is calling for native americans to be exterminated (although I do believe that it is true that there is nobody around today so bold as to outright say their continued existence here is intolerable in the literal sense that they should be rounded up and killed if they don't leave and the dissolution of reservations is an absolute condition of their policy that they refuse to revise in any way despite the government of the gaza strip saying just that about israel) I said america's leaders are not calling for their complete removal or extermination which is currently has been so for a while (~20 years) albeit not nearly as long as it should have been(~200 yrs).
I already said that not everything Palestinians do to fight back is good or justified. I believe attacks on the Israeli government and military are at least potentially justified, but no, random Israeli citizens should not be killed. But even unjust violence on the part of the Palestinians does not change the position of victim and aggressor here, any more than the brutality that some Native American tribes exhibited against European colonists did. And what do the actions of surrounding nations have to do with Palestinians? Besides, I'd say the oppression of Palestinians goes far beyond what anyone could possibly consider reasonable safety measures. Frankly, you sound like an American conservative talking about the "invasion" at the southern border.
Genuine question, because I literally don't know this: Is the green in Israeli-occupied territory natural green that comes from good tending, or is it artificial green like all the grass in Las Vegas? Should it be there or is it a massive waste of water turning a desert into an unnatural and unsustainable oasis? And if it's the former, could the lack of green on Palestinian soil be because of the bombings and destruction of infrastructure/social frameworks that could support greenery?
I disagree. When the migrants are refugees you definitely become the aggressor when you start campaigns that explicitly call for their extermination.
because the palestinians supported these military campaigns
I disagree. What would you do when the enemy is indiscriminately firing rockets into civilian centers and fields of crops from hospitals, schoolyards, and apartment buildings? Let them keep at it and just call the occasional wildfire or dead civilian the cost of doing the right thing or bomb the launch site? If you bomb it do you do so without warning or give a 2-3 minute heads up that you're going to do so? When people are constantly climbing the fence to commit terroristic acts on civilians do you just shrug or build a wall? That wall by the way has cut such events by over 80% and been lauded by analysts as a highly effective security measure.
except that there have not been multiple terrorist campaigns endorsed by the mexican government encouraging terrorism on US soil with the explicit goal of the extermination or eviction of every single american from the land. If that were the case I'd agree with them about what we should do.
the former
the former
it's possible although then I would blame the terrorists who destroy infrastructure and revel in their brethren's suffering as they exploit it to demonize Israel rather than Israel themselves who, as I stated, actually left all of the infrastructure for the gaza strip intact when they pulled out.
Nevermind, double commented
Downvoted for being off topic and thread derailing.
Fair enough. I appreciate the critique.
I would flee from the front line and I recommend everybody else do the same. Why get involved when states fight over their sphere of influence? Ukraine isn't a state worth giving your life for. US imperial hegemony (a major reason for this conflict) should not be supported. They will abuse any support given to further their own goals and throw you (or anyone) under the bus when convenient.
What's even more upsetting are the people who can write comments like yours, without irony. Why is it anybody who points out the causes of the conflict, gets decried as a Russian asset? Nobody here has explicitly said what Russia did wasn't illegal or immoral, because it is. But what people like you don't understand, is that events like this don't happen in isolation. These moves are highly interactive and very dangerous. You can't ignorantly just point to one in a vacuum and say, "'that's' imperialism!"
Were people like you making similar protestations when the west backed the Maidan coup, which overthrew the democratically elected President (Yanukovych) in Ukraine? Were you criticizing the US for encouraging Ukraine to ignore and break its peace treaty that was agreed to with Russia, under the Minsk Accords? Were you criticizing the west for it's media blackout of the continued shelling and massacring of Russian speaking citizens in eastern Ukraine (i.e. Donbass and Luhansk), while they were crying for Russia's help? Of course you weren't. You have no idea what I'm even talking about. Because you for, this conflict began with Russia moving into Ukraine. You only know what the MSM propaganda in the west tells you you're supposed to believe. I fully understand Putin when he called the US "The Empire of Lies." And people like you ignorantly fall for the bait. Every single time. Without fail. You're a successful product of the American ideological and propaganda system. You haven't seen past the dense fog of propaganda that's deployed to keep you ignorant. It's why the hidden is deliberately and intentionally hidden from you and they don't want you finding out about it.
Why does hating western hypocrisy on the home front make me a Putin shill? Why is politics a 'team sport' that I'm betraying, because I call out the warmongering of my own team?
You bring up a lot of things I never typed that aren't relevant to what I actually typed. It shows how deluded you are. For all the "western propaganda" where is all the evidence you speak of that that Russia invading Ukraine is somehow justified? Truth is not propaganda. Instead of attacking your imaginary fairy-tale "western" beast, try facing the reality that you are actually wrong. Take a mental journey and imagine yourself in the same position of the victims of war, then how wrong it is to somehow try to justify any of it.
Did you even read what I wrote?:
Apparently not.
I have. Have you? Did Putin not make peaceful overtures to Ukraine? Did he not want to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement? Did Ukraine not 'agree' to the Minsk Accords?