Israel/Palestine thread

If you follow this issue long enough you learn that "good will" means the inclination of the U.S. to supply Israel with weapons and other forms of support. And "moral authority" means keeping atrocities contained to a level which don't readily reveal the actual dynamic of the conflict, that of an occupier torturing it's occupied population, to the extent that American newspapers can credibly misrepresent the conflict as some kind of "tit for tat" or Tom and Jerry scenario.

While political support for Israel is declining and active opposition is increasing, it's not going to lose its "good will" anytime soon as U.S. politicians are loyal to their donors and the security state first, their other constituencies a distant second. Biden is probably going to lose this election, but Trump will carry on the same Israel policy. But Israel's actions do help increase the deficit between American's preferences and the policy they get, increasing demand for an alternative party. But that's a medium to long term concern, not immediate.

As the mainstream media strains itself to avoid depicting the truth about Israel it loses credibility and, with it, the ability to wield influence across the board. It gets harder to portray Israel as the "good guy" when the fact that it is deliberately starving hundreds of thousands of children is widely known. It is riskier to call Israel a democracy when the scale of the massacres it is committing have a way of inducing more people to learn about the occupation and realize Israel is not democratic.

So "good will" and "moral authority" are propaganda terms for U.S. support and the facade of its moral justification in the U.S. - it's all about the U.S. relationship. Very few people outside of heavily propagandized populations have any actual "good will" towards Israel or thinks it is righteous in its central project, that of ethnic cleansing. And while the real measures, which might be translated into tangible values like an aid package amount or the number of votes pro Israel politicians receive considering their Israel stance as a factor, are waning, there is likely little consequence due to the scale of waning and other factors that buttress the measures such as election contributions made by AIPAC or zionist ownership of U.S. media outlets.

Israel is a democracy in the same way the Us is a democracy

I should have foreseen that x% would die from drowning after the "aid" is dropped into the sea.

12 people yesterday or today.

So it's an oligarchy then.

just bombed Paramedics in Lebanon. not Gaza. Lebanon. 7 or 10 dead.

I can’t believe you teach this stuff to our kids

I teach math

But my students have a better understanding of democracy than you have apparently

But if you want to make this thread about attacking me personally, i can return to ignoring you

Not a great start pw

But I'll give it one more chance

There should be a number regardless .
Even if there was 1 million Hamas killed with 1k Palestinian innocent killed over 1k Israeli , it’s an overwhelming reaction at a genocide level .

At what now ? 30-1 ratio today ?
It’s already pass any reasonable respond by far for
« defensive measures ».

Is there any cite for this at all of are you just guessing? Like if Israel doesn't have the resources to check aid trucks coming in and that's a bottleneck, you would think they'd publicly ask for help as it would help their image a bit. I'm not sure that or their request to for help to set up new camps prior to a rafah invasion is happening but maybe I just haven't seen it.

Israel is intentionally blocking aid trucks. its not a matter of resources. have you seen the civilian blockade? every day civilians show up and block the trucks. ofc the military could stop them but they dont. bc most people are genocidal maniacs.

I could provide a ton of links from many sources and I already have so I wont right now bc if you are still wondering why aid isnt getting in then you proly havent read about anything yet and wont believe it.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-pla...

They've wanted this for a while but need international buyin. Doesn't look like they will get it before election

On one level it doesn't make a ton of sense to engage with people who deny trivial matching of terms to events because, if we can't agree water is wet, then what's the point? But it's kinda nice to see the desperation of the opponents of humanity so I tend to encourage it. As you are forced into more and more ridiculous denials of the reality everyone sees it only accelerates your condemnation.

At no point did I say or imply that Israel's crimes preclude it being a democracy. In fact I seem to be one of the few people who don't passively cluster in democracy (or free markets) with everything good about a society. Israel is not a democracy because it controls the major parameters of life for millions of people who have no say over that control. It's that simple. The Palestinians in the territories are disenfranchised yet live totally under Israeli rule and so Israel is decidedly undemocratic, illiberal, authoritarian...all those labels.

You can say what you want designating the territories this or that but it doesn't matter to the simple definitions. If you control the public affairs and material destiny of a population and deny them the right to vote then, by definition, you are not a democracy.

"Citing Egyptian officials, the WSJ report said that Israel expects the camps, which would include medical facilities, to be funded by the US and Arab partners."
How does Israel think that everyone else needs to pay for their population displacement of their invasion?

Of course I know about the fundamentalists blocking a crossing. Just asking if Mets has any cites showing that Israel doesn't have the resources to security check all the trucks waiting in line or if they're just being dicks.

Set up a lemonade stand and do shiit

I was referring to our material and diplomatic support for the genocide, our extreme favoritism towards Israel. We need to treat Israel in accordance with international law, meaning, among other things, under the principle that each nation is equal under the law. We need to stop the killing and ethnic cleansing through an international force. And there are larger considerations from this. When we continually allow Israel to flaunt the law it degrades confidence in international law and encourages unilateral actions like, for example, Russia's expansion of the Ukraine conflict.

Go cater the event.

The plan is as awful as it is stupid. You’re talking about a forced displacement and internment on a scale that hasn’t been seen since WW2.

There was and still only is only one play: reconstruction for demilitarization while fighting for every PR win possible to counter the collateral damage of your military operations.

Israel WILL pay, in treasures to win hearts and minds or in lives and treasure to defend against the flywheel of hatred it seems only too happy to accelerate.

Feed the Gazans with food and aid that’s got Israeli flags stamped all over them.

This whole idea IDF doesn’t have the manpower to inspect trucks is absolutely ridiculous. Thousands of trucks of goods are inspected in the English Channel crossing with a tiny fraction of the manpower IDF has. If the IDF wanted to, it could literally open every truck, slap Israeli flags on every box, and distribute the aid itself.

You could assign 50k (probably way fewer) soldiers to strictly food/aid distribution and get this done easily. It’s sheer insanity fueled by hatred and Bibi’s political expediency to not feed the Gazans.

If nothing else, feeding them and getting intel from them is your best chance of finding all the tunnels. Stick ****ing air tags into every box of aid and track them if you want.

Hamas MUST die as a military force. To bring that about, Israel must do everything in its power to minimize civilian casualties.

Lol the UK was a democracy even when it had a zillion actually colonies, so even if it was true that Israel "controlled the majort parameters of life for millions of people", which is obviously false, that would still not be a denial of Israelian democracy.

If you oppress foreigners in any amount, in any way, you can still be a democracy, as long as your own citizens can vote periodically, candidates are allowed to run and so on.

And btw all democracies deny the right to vote to non citizens afaik, at least in national elections. And palestinians are denied the right to vote in their own elections by hamas , not by Israel.

Oh and to end, a lot of countries were democracies even when women couldn't vote. Universalism of the franchise isn't required to be a democracy.

One of the fundamental problems with democracies is mob rule.

Your argument is essentially a tautology that simply denies the existence of the problem by definition but doesn't actually address how an existing democracy, as you defined it, are systematically different from or could be prevented from becoming, a "not democracy democracy" where the people collectively decided to do terrible things to another people.

What populists (Bibi and his gang in Israel, Trumpers in the US) would argue is democracies mean the will of the citizenry. That inevitably means when the collective consciousness is wrong (groupthink or some other reason), we're gonna **** up. Sometimes that's gonna be terrible atrocities committed in our name.

Democracies mean political power to a certain extent is subject to the vote.

You can have other rules to limit that power, that's orthogonal to having a democracy (and btw in theory you could have those rules without a democracy as well). You can give power to other state entities to veto actions by the elected body, like with constitutional courts being able to veto the president and congress.

You can care about foreigners a lot, a little, or none at all and still be a democracy.

You could have a constitutional democracy that has in it's constitution the genocide of all other people on the planet, it would still be a constitutional democracy. Or you can have a constitutional democracy that gives the same identical rights to all people on the planet. Or anything in between.

But in all these cases it would STILL be the will of the citizenry. The constitution will be written according to rules set and voted upon by the citizenry at some point in time, and amended by the citizenry.

It's absolutly not populist to claim that the actual power to determine all extents of the constitution (and of national rules in general) resides with the citizens, in actual democracies. That's actually something most constitutions *explicitly tell you*.

What you need to have a democracy is the vote to some significant (5-10%+) portions of the population, periodical; the ability for people to present themselves up for elections without being harassed if they do so. Actual fair voting procedures. *that's about it*.

Everything else can modify your democracy even by a lot, but isn't a requirement to be a democracy.

You can have an illiberal democracy for example (hello, Singapore).

You can have a democracy where there is no power of constitutional veto for actions of parliament (hello, The Netherlands).

You can have a democracy where there isn't actual freedom of religion (hello, India).

You can have a democracy where there isn't actual freedom of the press (hello, Italy). Or freedom of speech in general (hello, hate speech laws everywhere).

You can have a democracy with slaves (hello, USA for a century). Where women can't vote (hello, all democracies until recently).

You can have a democracy without habeas corpus (hello, El Salvador and most others during "emergencies").

And so on and on. 90-95% of what people mean with "democracy" has nothing to do with the democratic system of deciding who gets political power, but it's rather a wishlist of the actual constitutional rights they would like to see protected and so on.

I hope that students being actively taught lessons know more about the subject matter than someone who hasn’t been in high school for 20+ years.

You teach racism

Please block me. You’re an idiot and a liar and a racist. These aren’t exclusively attacks, these are the behaviors I have seen you take

I reported you for racism. What happened? I thought the mods were cracking down on racists?