I’m not sure the Israeli government (and to be perfectly clear, this is very obviously coming from the Israeli government) is able to wrap their head around how much they’re absolutely shattering any goodwill they had from most rational people these days. And that’s not even going in to the irreparable damage they’re doing to their geopolitical relationships and alliances.
Bibi doesn’t understand that his power play… didn’t.
Israel is one USA's major allies. America helped in the creation of the Israeli state. He believes the Jews have the right to their own homeland. These are three likely reasons.
The US didn’t have much to do with the founding of Israel, the UK was the primary colonial sponsor at the time. It wasn’t until a few decades later when the US decided that it was going to need a permanent military presence in the Middle East to ensure the oil flowed that the US became the primary colonial sponsor.
For those who are unaware, the soldier who killed Castleman is a member of the Hilltop youth, which is a known extremist pro-settler group who want to get rid of all Palestinians in West Bank. The soldier had actually been interviewed prior to this and stated that he was really excited to "check that box", ie kill a Palestinian for the first time.
Israel and the US are a danger to a rule based international order and morally and legally corrupting the west.
They are destroying the institutions that were established with a lot of effort to not repeat the horrors of the second world war and in particular the horrors of the Holocaust.
Now that they are held to the standards that they demanded from other countries, they attack the institutions that are our best bet to protect the world from another world war and unprecedented age of genocide.
Israel and the US are rogue terrorist states. It is no surprise that they are in league with Russia in having declared to never ratify the ICC accords. It was a grave mistake of the other western countries to continue ally with them and throughout this period. If the EU, Canada, Australia and NZ are not taking a stance now and protect the UN and in particular the ICC and ICJ any resemblance of a rule based international order will fall apart and we will fast track to WW3
pointing out that Iranian leaders have called for Israel’s destruction and that Iran gives strong backing to Hamas and other Gaza terror groups that carried out the October 7 atrocities.
IMO, they think their defense case was damaged by all the comments senior Israelis have made calling for the genocide of the Palestinians, so now they're trying to defuse that argument.
Hate on Biden all you want, but please vote for him. Trump is worse. Trump was behind moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Trump instituted a ban on travel to the USA from some (note some) Muslim majority countries. If Trump gets elected, expect Project 2025 to come to fruition.
im guessing you aren’t functional. you are probably misrepresenting the premise on purpose, because i don’t think anyone is actually this stupid. you have some weird anti-social thing going on. i don’t care that much about american politics, but i probably wouldn’t like you as a person.
the premise is “A is shit but B is far worse”. it’s everywhere in the thread. it’s in your examples here. it’s a really common thing to say.
this premise is not in conflict with “A is still shit 4 years later”. this premise is not in conflict with “B is apocalyptically bad”. this premise is not equivalent to “A gets better if you vote A”.
Funny, that’s exactly what I was told in 2020 when I asked about 2024, and yet here we are once again, once again being yelled at about how we have no choice but to vote for the right wing war criminal.
I’m not sure what you’re alluding to. One party probably won’t win every election until the end of days, nor should it. However, votes are one way that we have a voice in government, and your government represents you less when your voice isn’t heard.
democracy is just going to end sooner or later anyway
This is speculative, and a bad reason to not vote on purpose. The US has a flawed democracy, and it can get better. Voting won’t “fix” our government alone, but not voting is a guaranteed way to let others choose and vote for you.
You should probably get some outside opinions that aren’t on Lemmy. Lemmy seems to have a very specific crowd that tends to be an echo chamber for certain beliefs and opinions. There are better things to do with your vote than not vote at all.
Edit: The fact that this was down-voted is proof of Lemmy’s echo chamber tendencies, ha.
It shows where the US stands compared to other countries in a democracy index. But it sounds like you aren’t interested, so I’m sorry to have bothered you.
It shows where a bunch of British conservatives think the US stands on a ‘democracy index’ they made up themselves. Oh what a shock, they think their allies are democratic and their enemies aren’t. Why should I care
Did you think the ‘democracy index’ was handed down by God on a gold tablet?
Trump is a Zionist too. He officially recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel. Anybody who thinks they will fix the Israel problem by not voting for Biden is sorely mistaken.
because it doesn’t want them speaking publicly about what they endured on Oct. 7
Which is why they released women for the other 7 days. Love how this article contradicts itself in the first sentence.
More likely Hamas wasn’t satisfied or no longer needed a reason to continue the truce, so they kept the hostages for another time. Which makes sense considering the original truce started at 3 days, and Hamas probably extended it as much as they saw fit for easier rearmament.
Not to mention Israel has been double dipping pretty heavily anyway, so no point in giving up hostage leverage for no gain. They’ll probably try to negotiate a new deal later down the line.
God I hate news reporting on military related conflicts because it almost always completely ignores how factions function. IDF nor Hamas are incompetent in warfare. They both have goals and know what they are trying to accomplish. Both groups barely care about the hostages beyond their use as leverage.
Which is why they released women for the other 7 days. Love how this article contradicts itself in the first sentence.
Here’s the entire sentence:
Israeli official says Hamas doesn’t want to release remaining women because it doesn’t want them speaking publicly about what they endured on Oct. 7 and in their time in captivity
which clearly implies that Hamas was fine releasing female hostages that were treated okay, but is refusing to release the remaining female hostages that have possibly been abused, raped, sexually mistreated.
You obviously don’t have to agree with that analysis, but where exactly do you see the contradiction?
No, it fucking isn’t. They weren’t there for treatment.
What I expect from hostage takers is brutality, murder, and the intentional targeting of civilians, which is what they did. If Hamas wants to be taken seriously as a government, and not what they are - a terrorist organization that is as bad, if not worse, for Palestinians as the oppression from Israel - then I expect something else: NOT TAKING HOSTAGES.
Lol, nobody’s saying they’re a proper government. Everyone agrees they’re terrorists. All I’m saying is that a hospital treating hostages doesn’t make it part of a terrorist entreprise.
One of the hostages is visibly wounded in his arm and is brought on a hospital bed, while the second is forcefully dragged into the hospital
And
In an evening press conference, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari says the two wounded hostages were later taken by Hamas to hideouts, and that the Red Cross was unable to visit them. He says their locations are currently unknown.
So, you’re wrong about both assertions. The IDF themselves say they were both wounded, and that after treatment they were moved to a different location. The source also doesn’t indicate they’re both dead now, you’re just making shit up.
OK, I’ll take my lumps. You’re right, I missed that when I skimmed the article. I was wrong.
That said, this is still a situation in which Hamas injured two civilians, abducted them, forcibly dragged one of them into a hospital that is now clearly known to have been at least partially a Hamas front, and is still holding them against their will (assuming they are still alive). The fact that they aren’t known to have committed the final atrocity - yet - to these two hostages does not magically make them the good guys in this.
Hamas are not the good guys. That doesn’t make the hospital the bad guys, and it doesn’t make everyone in Gaza complicit. Your inability to separate different actors in this scenario is limiting your perspective and objectivity.
Nobody’s calling Hamas the good guys. We’re pushing back on the narrative that the hospital itself is somehow involved and thus exempt from the normal protections in war.
Hospitals will treat anyone that comes in by default, and in the case of a Gazan hospital, what choice would they even have anyway? You can’t call the authorities if Hamas are the (de facto) authorities. You treat the hostage and get them to GTFO as fast as possible before you get bombed.
You are falling for the IDF narrative that says all Palestinians are Hamas, as if they have any kind of choice in the matter.
I some mob enforcer shot some guy “to teach him a lesson” and then brough him to a Hospital so that he wouldn’t die, would that make the Hospital a “Mob HQ” and justify a military attack on it that killed innocents being treated and working there?!
There is no such thing as Guilt By Association except in the “they’re all the same” of racist-logic, so one wonders how exactly anybody who is not a racist could ever go from “IDF video of Hamas bringing hostages for treatment in a Hospital” to “This justifies the IDF’s military attack on that hospital and associated civilian deaths”.
Oh, for fuck’s sake… Stop reading stuff into my comments that isn’t there. I didn’t justify Israel’s attack on the hospital. I said it’s known that the hospital is at least partially a front for Hamas, which should surprise zero people, since Hamas is a terrorist organization that uses civilian Palestinians as human shields.
The whole situation is fucked up because there are no right answers when an organization is willing to do that. It’s an effective - if psychotic - tactic, since only other psychotics would attack a building that is, yes, also a functional hospital.
And the accusation of racism - for pointing out that nothing Hamas does with hostages other than letting them go (or better yet, never injuring and taking them hostage in the first place) is good, and that we don’t know if the hostages in the video are even still alive, let alone actually treated there - is ridiculous.
Hamas is not Palestine, and Palestine is not Hamas. Palestinians are victimized by Hamas as much, if not more, than the Israeli civilians they murdered, because Palestinians have lived under their brutal rules for decades, and speaking out has long been a great way to get murdered along with one’s entire family.
I’m not taking Israel’s side, here. Yes, they were attacked first, and horrifically. But their response has also been horrific, and their oppression of Gaza has given Hamas oxygen it wouldn’t otherwise have had in the first place.
There are no easy answers now. Anyone who tells you they know who the good guys and bad guys are and how to solve this is a lying scumbag. And it doesn’t help when we don’t look honestly at Hamas and recognize its terrorist tactics for what they are.
Only it’s not “known that the hospital is at least partially a front for Hamas” and as you yourself ended up admitting, that can’t be concluded tfrom this video.
The only source for that idea that the hospital is a front for Hamas comes from the IDF in the form of unverified self-serving statements and videos just like this, which cannot be trusted unless corroborated by an independent source and sometimes end up being publicly shown as complete fabrications (such as the “weapons in the hospital” video were it ended up being spotted by none other than CNN that the weapons had been put there by the IDF as some weren’t there in a video the IDF made before allowing the external Press in for filming).
You can’t really use uncorroborated pieces of “information” from those who kill people to justify their killings, and in this war this applies just as much to the IDF as it does to Hamas.
You might want to ask yourself why you implictly trust uncorroborated self-serving “information” coming from one set of people killing innocents - believing in both would be naivety, believing a very specific one is something else altogether, especially when the one side you implicitly choose to believe are the guys openly bombing UN schools and with a 10x bigger body count: it takes quite an internal emotional link to a very specific group of people to keep on trusting them implicitly after they’ve killed over 10k civilians and bombed several UN schools.
By this point anybody who is not driven by an irrational love for one of those groups neither trusts the IDF nor Hamas.
POWs are SOLDIERS. Jesus fucking Christ, how the hell do you sleep at night? These hostages? They’re civilians. They’re you. They’re me. They’re just people, and Hamas stole them out of their country and is forcing them to stay with them.
Defending that is sick.
Israel is not the good guys here, either. The oppression they’ve inflicted on Gaza is terrible. But that can be true at the same time as it’s true that abducting civilians - after murdering a whole bunch of them - is also terrible.
You do know that means half of them aren’t, right?
Jesus Christ, stop with the apologetics for kidnapping and murdering civilians! You can criticize Israel’s response without trying to make what Hamas did - and is still doing - acceptable.
No one has been making that claim. So the only person who could lay it to rest is you. Since you’re the one claiming that. Everyone knows Hamas has been using civilian shields. We’re just upset about Israel committing genocide and using that as an excuse.
Isn’t it weird how nobody ever says that Hamas is committing genocide when they don’t give a fuck about where their rockets explode in Gaza, when they’re murdering Palestinians who are trying to evacuate, when they’re using Palestinian civilians as human shields, when they’re firing rockets from civilian Palestinian infrastructure, deliberately making it a military target?
Does it just not count when Hamas murders Palestinians, or how does that work?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Criticizing Israeli actions is not implicit approval of Hamas actions.
The challenge here is that Hamas are generally considered to be the bad guys. You expect the bad guys to do evil shit.
Israel is supposed to be the good guys in this scenario. Being the good guys means you are not expected to do evil shit, and are supposed to do the right thing even if it is harder. Except right now they are doing orders more magnitude evil shit than the bad guys. I don’t think it is unfair to call them out on that.
They’re an Appartheid state (with explicit legislation that creates special citizenship classes by religion, with the Jewish Iraeli Citizenship having more rights than the Arab Israeli Citizenship) governed by an extreme rightwing government displaying most of the traits of Fascism - Militarism, Ultra-nationalism, reckless use if violence, even rabid racism against an etnic group they describe as “animals” - and the worst kind of Fascism at that, the could calculating hate-filled Germanic shit, not the “mild” version of places like Italy.
If Israel were ever the good guys (maybe at some point after the architects of Nakba left power and before they murdered Yitzhak Rabin) they haven’t been it for a long time.
Buy yeah, if you unskeptically consume the propaganda about Israel from the last couple of decades that portrays them as a western-like white people with humanitarian values, it’s natural you think it’s a country of “good guys”.
Genocide is a focused/targeted slaying of specific groups. Hamas is murderous careless and wanton. It’s not genocide. It’s not good. But it’s not genocide. Israel however, is largely targeting and slaughtering large portions of innocent Palestinians who’ve done nothing to them. Simply because Israel wants the land and wants to clear the people. Who’ve lived there off of it. And are simply using the terrorist attack as an excuse That’s genocide.
I mean everyone hates Mondays. Let’s be real here. But Monday isn’t a terrorist neither is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday or Saturday.
I get it. I’m the Pope. It ain’t easy. But you should know kiddo. Two wrongs don’t make a right. My buddy J.C. even says so. And I was unaware one could not be Zionist in the US. Solid logic there.
What hamas did was horrible. What Israel has done since makes that pale in comparison. Well that’s not really fair. What Israel did before still made it pale in comparison. If you don’t like people calling you a Zionist stop carying their water. There are no good guys involved in this conflict. Unfortunately just collateral of innocent citizens. Both Israeli and mostly Palestinian. Israel however, is the one with the power to change all this.
You can call me whatever. It literally means nothing to me lol.
Civilian deaths fucking suck but when the group you’re fighting uses them as shields, the numbers are gonna be high.
Edit: just looked up the term
a political movement that was originally begun in order to establish an independent state for Jewish people, and now supports the development and protection of the state of Israel
It’s great and all how you can never actually address what was said. Civilian deaths could be much less while still addressing the Hamas problem. But I’m glad that you have accepted the definition as a genocidal ethno nationalist. That’s what zionists are these days bubbala. And with how hard you are defending their genocidal extermination. Honestly I got to say it’s very believable on you. So you should really do yourself a mitzvah and read up on things a little better.
I literally posted the definition that I’m identifying with but I guess you’re welcome to read into it. It won’t be representative of reality but I can’t stop you.
Your comments are a little hard to read though so I’m tiring of this particular thread.
Words and their meanings change over time. Composition of groups change over time as well. I have no problem with Israelis having a place in the Middle East. What I have a problem with is the far right Israeli government committing genocide. You don’t have a problem with that and I understand that. But you saying that you choose to identify with the old definition. Doesn’t mean much. The Nazis tried to claim they were socialist. The Chinese in the North Koreans tried to claim that they’re democratic. No one believes that. Everyone understands what they are and that they’re just saying that. Because what you say doesn’t dictate who you are. What you do, dictates who you are. And you are defending one of the most bloodthirsty genocidal groups involved in this conflict. And I will say again fuck hamas. They are murderous deceptive and outright horrible people. But the Israeli government bears a lot of blame for bringing them to this point. Again, that does not justify Hamas or defend Hamas. It just says fuck the right wing likud government of Israel harder. For manipulating people to bring about this genocide.
And yeah I get that you don’t want to continue this conversation. You have no response to any of this. Your only goal is to defend Israel. And it doesn’t matter to you how bad you look because of it. You have nothing to say to change that fact. So why continue to try right?
Don’t forget finance minister Bezalel Smotich. He gets less attention than Ben-Gvir, but he is arguably to Ben-Gvir’s right, as insane as that concept sounds.
Smotich has even acknowledged (in a joking manner) that he’s a fascist.
The website you link being timesofisrael is a bit ironic. Great app nonetheless! If they’re writing about it then it’s working and is among the most probable reasons of the tiktok ban
Tik tok is not a journalism app. China does not have free speech, nor do they export it, and if what they are telling you is true, than let’s talk about the genocide of the Uyghurs.
Damn, so it’s been discussed for years but nothing happened. Israel commit atrocities (like always ) but unlike it’s other domestic media, the US government and some of its billionaires can’t censor, lie and push their narrative anymore, so the youth finally see the truth about the genocidal apartheid, ethno-state that is Israel. Now, they ban tiktok.
This is just another perspective you haven’t thought about, or don’t want to think about because of it’s morbid implications about your country (if you’re from USA)
I don’t think they mean that tiktok is being banned over this app specifically: I just interpreted their comment to mean that tiktok has been an ongoing nuisance to the American mainstream political establishment.
I find the Times of Israel to be a decent source. They’re obviously biased in favor of Israel, but it’s not behind a paywall and they’re far more informative than The NY Post, for instance. I think they seem less biased then the WSJ, frankly.
Overall, a useful insight into mainstream discourse in Israel with fairly accurate reporting.
Okey, but let’s put it in another context. would you trust a British colonizer owned newspaper with its news articles exclusively being written by other white colonizers during the 80s Apartheid era south Africa ? Would you consider it to be a decent source of what’s happening in South Africa and what’s happening to the black population ? Heck, apartheid era south Africa wasn’t even an ethno-state and wasn’t doing a grand scale genocide. It’s more akin to a nazi Germany newspaper.
Obviously not. But that’s true to some degree for all news sources. I don’t blindly trust any newspaper. I read Times of Israel through a lens of context, just like I do for the NY Times, The Guardian, The Intercept, etc.
I think it’s incredibly useful to see what a country reads about itself. Not only is that true even for countries engaged atrocities: it’s especially true for countries engaged in atrocities.
timesofisrael.com
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