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.
replies(16):
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.
Military intervention meaning invade a nuclear power?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.