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locallost ◴[] No.39148816[source]
My views on the situation aside, the clearest I saw anyone communicate the issues from a global angle was the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin

Translated here: https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1718201487132885246

Viewed from the angle of the West, I think the message it needs to avoid isolating itself from the world is very unusual for Western media and important.

Quote:

"Westerners must open their eyes to the extent of the historical drama unfolding before us to find the right answers."

And

"This Palestinian question will not fade. And so we must address it and find an answer. This is where we need courage. The use of force is a dead end. The moral condemnation of what Hamas did - and there's no "but" in my words regarding the moral condemnation of this horror - must not prevent us from moving forward politically and diplomatically in an enlightened manner. The law of retaliation is a never-ending cycle."

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pgeorgi ◴[] No.39148909[source]
All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their campaign. And then?

Spend tons of money on iron dome to shoot down the rockets and hope that Hamas won't manage to conduct another massacre, even if "only" half the scope of October 7?

This mess features not one but two parties who currently reject the concept of a cease fire.

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ajross ◴[] No.39150129[source]
> All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their campaign. And then?

It remains a mess, but less of a mess? Look, it's all bad guys running the show in that hell hole of a desert. There are no trusted entities anywhere able to run a government that isn't somewhere between actively antagonistic and actively genocidal toward half the local population.

Nonetheless a status quo with less shooting and death is better than a status quo with more. Hamas killed fewer people than Israel did/is, so... yeah, I guess. An occasional October 7th is a better choice than levelling Gaza is. Incrementally. But none of this is going to get better, likely within our lifetimes.

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aurelien_gasser ◴[] No.39150769[source]
> Hamas killed fewer people than Israel did/is

That's an understatement, Hamas killed less than 1,000 civilians, Israel killed 20,000+

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ajross[dead post] ◴[] No.39150832[source]
[flagged]
albedoa ◴[] No.39151044[source]
I march with left-leaning American Jews. Exactly zero of them are called genocidal colonizers by anyone, let alone left-leaning American progressives.

Since you are asserting the existence of something here, are you able to provide an example?

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ajross ◴[] No.39157634[source]
Replying here in a flagged subthread because I really do think this is important:

So... those two accusations are so commonly made and debated that they both have their own wikipedia pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusatio...

I mean, sure, you can retreat to arguments about whether it's a personal accusation or just an abstract idea, or whether I can substantiate use of the combined pharse "genocidal colonizer" (which of course I can't). But we both know that's hairsplitting.

The point I was trying to make is that there is a large population of people[1] out there who AGREE with you on virtually every practical, relevant point of public policy or international relations.... but who will never make common cause with you if they perceive your goals as the invalidation of the nationality of nine million people. There's no solution here that doesn't involve Zionists, just as there's no solution that rejects Islam.[2]

[1] And in particular people with significant influence over the Israeli policy you want to see changed!

[2] Realistically there's just no solution, and it would do well for everyone involved to recognize that and resign ourselves to the policy of just reducing immediate harm as what amounts to a BATNA.

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1. tptacek ◴[] No.39158398[source]
Both those accusations are colorable and have non-inflammatory interpretations.

For example, sociologically speaking, Israel is a settler-colonialist state. What activists don't acknowledge is that the concept of "settler-colonialism" was invented to describe the distinction between extractive colonialism, of the King Leopold of Belgium type, and the long-term sustainable kind, of the New Zealand type. It was a way of working out why some human migration seems to "work" and others don't. Later --- I think probably in part due to the abuses of "settlers" within Israel, in the West Bank --- the term became an epithet. I suspect it's used largely by people who don't know the meaning.

Similarly, there's a colloquial meaning to the word "genocide" that doesn't intersect with the legal meaning. It's any campaign of mass violence directed at a race or creed. That meaning is dilutive of the original concept of genocide, which really did mean an effort to erase (through murder, sterilization, or kidnapping) an entire ethnicity. But it has meaning nonetheless.

However justified the military operation of Gaza might be, it would be difficult for a supporter of the IDF to argue that it doesn't consistute mass violence targeting Palestinians, even if it pretty clearly doesn't have either the intention or the potential to erase the Palestinian identity (I feel like if you asked an activist selected at random for a percentage of Palestinians killed in Gaza, you'd get a double-digit number from most of them, which of course not even close).

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2. ◴[] No.39158616[source]