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therobots927 ◴[] No.45266704[source]
I for one will be holding my representatives responsible who continue to vote for the US to enable a genocide. The videos coming out of Gaza have turned me and many others into single issue voters.
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beloch ◴[] No.45267542[source]
Flipping the U.S. really is the key to ending this conflict. The U.S. reliably uses its security council veto to nix any meaningful UN response and the U.S. remains, by far, the biggest supplier of arms to the IDF. If the US were to stop veto'ing everything and cut off the IDF's supply of, at least, some types of weapons, the new ground assault would likely end quickly.

Unfortunately, that isn't likely to happen. Netanyahu has, to date, handled Trump deftly and Rubio's current presence in Israel seems to be aimed at offering support to the ground offensive, not opposition. I honestly have no idea what kind of backlash it would take to shake U.S. support for this genocide.

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dlubarov ◴[] No.45268075[source]
Why would we expect any desirable outcome in this hypothetical though? So the US flips, Israel is pressured into withdrawing, Hamas regains control of the strip and resumes rocket attacks, Israel is forced to respond eventually. It doesn't seem like a path toward a real solution.
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sporkxrocket ◴[] No.45270471[source]
The US and all other nations sanction Israel. If that doesn't work, military intervention. Israel will fall, it's just a matter of time.
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dlubarov ◴[] No.45271241[source]
What would you demand Israel do to be released from these hypothetical sanctions?

Military intervention meaning invade a nuclear power?

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DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.45273283[source]
Either withdraw from all the territory that doesn't legally belong to it (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, plus the parts of Syria and Lebanon it occupies), or keep the territory and make all the inhabitants equal citizens.
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lelanthran ◴[] No.45279735[source]
> plus the parts of Syria and Lebanon it occupies)

Well, if Syria and Lebanon didn't want to lose territories, maybe they should not have started wars to ethnically cleans Jews from the place?

I mean, when you start a war with your neighbour with the goal of extermination, you don't get to complain when you lose.

In fact, you should be happy that even though you tried to exterminate them, they didn't try to exterminate you when they won.

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1. DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.45280590[source]
Syria lost the Golan Heights in a war that Israel initiated (Israel claimed it was preemptive self-defense, but that's highly questionable). And then in the last year, Israel has taken a bunch more territory in Syria, just because it can. Syria didn't do anything to Israel.

The whole thing about ethnic cleansing is really turning history on its head. The reason why Israel is hated by its neighbors is because Israel was founded by European settlers who conquered and ethnically cleansed the land.

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2. themaninthedark ◴[] No.45283692[source]
Nah, history doesn't fully back you up there....Israel decided to face off with Egypt after Egypt decided to stop allowing ships in. Syria then decided to try and get in on this action all on their own.

In May–June 1967, in preparation for conflict, the Israeli government planned to confine the confrontation to the Egyptian front, whilst taking into account the possibility of some fighting on the Syrian front. Syrian front 5–8 June

Syria largely stayed out of the conflict for the first four days.

False Egyptian reports of a crushing victory against the Israeli army and forecasts that Egyptian forces would soon be attacking Tel Aviv influenced Syria's decision to enter the war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War#Golan_Heights

Two thirds of the area was depopulated and occupied by Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War and then effectively annexed in 1981

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

In the months prior to the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, tensions again became dangerously heightened: Israel reiterated its post-1956 position that another Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping would be a definite casus belli. In May 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would again be closed to Israeli vessels. He subsequently mobilized the Egyptian military into defensive lines along the border with Israel and ordered the immediate withdrawal of all UNEF personnel.

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities in what is known as Operation Focus. Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt's military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy. Simultaneously, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. After some initial resistance, Nasser ordered an evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula; by the sixth day of the conflict, Israel had occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula. Jordan, which had entered into a defense pact with Egypt just a week before the war began, did not take on an all-out offensive role against Israel, but launched attacks against Israeli forces to slow Israel's advance. On the fifth day, Syria joined the war by shelling Israeli positions in the north.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War

3. dlubarov ◴[] No.45283771[source]
In the six-day war, Syria attacked Israel before the opposite, so it's pretty misleading to say "in a war that Israel initiated".

Sure, Israel struck Egypt first, but Syria is not Egypt. And calling it a preemptive strike should be pretty uncontroversial considering Egypt's naval blockade, expulsion of peacekeepers, deployment of ~100k troops near Israel's border, and Nasser being pretty explicit about his intentions.

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4. DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.45285864[source]
Syria and Egypt had a mutual defense treaty.

> And calling it a preemptive strike should be pretty uncontroversial

It's actually highly controversial, given that:

1. Egypt had no intention of attacking Israel (as we now know for certain).

2. The Israeli leadership was extremely confident in its own military dominance over Egypt, and that it would win any war quickly.

3. The Israeli leadership of the time had ambitions of territorial expansion.

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5. dlubarov ◴[] No.45286390{3}[source]
> 1. Egypt had no intention of attacking Israel (as we now know for certain).

Where are you getting this idea from? A leader with no intention of attacking Israel would not have made statements like

"We will not accept any possibility of co-existence with Israel. [...] The war with Israel is in effect since 1948." (Nasser, May 28, 1967)

and then proceeded to amass ~100k troops near the border, or in Nasser's words: "The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel ..."

As far as preemptive strikes go, it really doesn't get any clearer than this.

Not to mention the naval blockade which was in itself an act of war, making the question of who started the war rather moot.

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6. DiogenesKynikos ◴[] No.45286893{4}[source]
The internal deliberations of the Egyptian government at the time are all publicly known now. The Egyptian leadership feared that Israel was planning an attack on Syria, which is why they mobilized their own army. They had no intention of attacking Israel.

The Israelis had been planning their own attack on Egypt for years. Ben Gurion had aggressive, expansionist foreign policy views, which the crisis with Egypt allowed him to implement.

The Israeli public was afraid of Egypt, but the leadership was extremely confident that Israel had massive military superiority over the Egyptians and would rapidly win any war. That's also what American intelligence thought, and what they told the Israelis.

As for Egyptian public statements about Israel, remember the political context: Israel had been founded 19 years earlier through the mass theft of Palestinian land and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israel had carried out terrorist bombings in Cairo in the early 1950s in order to try to politically destabilize the country, and had invaded Egypt in 1956, as part of a conspiracy with Britain and France to take over the Suez Canal. The Egyptians had good reasons to view the Israelis as enemies and loudly complain, but we now know they had no intention of attacking.

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7. dlubarov ◴[] No.45290970{5}[source]
Your position boils down to an unverifiable claim about Nasser's mental state. Egypt had a plan (Operation Dawn) to invade Israel. Nasser had not approved it yet, but that doesn't mean he wasn't going to.

Even if Nasser planned to wait and induce Israel to fire the first shot, how would Israel know when Egypt's actions, as well as many of their statements, were perfectly consistent with a military preparing to immanently invade?

Taking this to the extreme, if Russia launched a silo of ICBMs targeting DC, and it turned out that they were all convincing decoys with no payload, would you say the US "initiated the war" for responding with real munitions?

Realistically, pre-emptive strikes don't get any clearer than this. If one objects to this pre-emptive, one would pretty much have reject the notion of pre-emptive strikes categorically. There can be a legal argument that pre-emptive strikes never technically fall under then narrow language of Article 51, but that's more of a strict textualist argument and not a pragmatist one.