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Photos show scale of the destruction of Israel air attacks on Gaza
(www.aljazeera.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Can someone give me the straight talk on why western countries, who usually at least try to look like they have the moral high ground, are falling all over themselves in support of Israel?
What is the non-conspiracy nutter reason why the US feels the need to provide billions of dollars in support to Israel?
Clearly actions on both sides are reprehensible, some more-so than others. There's no goodies and baddies here. There's aggressors, innocents, and victims on all sides.
Hamas are terrorists and Western governments support combatting them. Hamas hides behind civilians who tragically are the victims of the war Hamas started this time
That's not really an answer though - obviously there's a question of degree.
If there were 20,000 terrorists with access to advanced weaponry then a few hundred civilian casualties is probably acceptable. If there's 100 terrorists with access to some home made rockets then a few thousand civilian casualties probably isn't acceptable.
Is the present campaign against Gaza with the mode of engagement by Israel really the surest path to peace with the least civilian casualties? Hard to believe given that there was a stale mate just a few weeks ago.
Besides which, you can't kill all the terrorists, that's not how extremism works.
Of course it's an answer.
Ok, well it doesn't address the question, at all.
Of course it does. Fighting terrorism gives the perception of moral high ground
Israel is creating a humanitarian crisis. If you're getting the perception of moral high ground I don't really know what to say to you.
Because Israel is ultimately a problem created by western nations like the UK and US, have more similar culture to the west and are their strategic partner for the area whereas the arab nations are traditionally backed by Russia. So they basically HAVE to give them unconditional support to Israel or lose their influence on the region.
I've done some reading and listening since I asked this question and I think that this is the correct answer.
They're the only non-muslim country in the middle-east, and therefore our closest ideological partner, and therefore our best strategic partner.
War is about resources. USA and Britain don't give a shit about giving the land (that they stole from Palestinians) to Jewish people. Israel and Saudi Arabia are their only ways to project power in the region to have leverage against countries with more oil.
You said it. Actions of one side are more reprehensible than of the other. In fact, much more reprehensible from what I see.
One side: "We understand you have terrorists, but it's not our responsibility to help you with it because we value lives of our people. We are going to help you with basic supplies like water, electricity, internet etc., and protect ourselves with the iron dome. It all costs a lot but lives are really what matters."
Another side: "Our objective will not be completed until your country and citizens stop existing. We were elected having this objective by our people. We will teach our children that this is also their objective. We will build rockets. We will launch them at you even if some of them may not reach your territory. We will launch them from civillian buildings because we know you care about lives of civillians. You will think twice before launching anything back, and when you do, you will be blamed by the world for killing innocents. We will kill as many of your civilians as we can, by our hands. We will brake their limbs and hold them hostages, even if they are the citizens of other countries. And when you retaliate, the world will blame you for what you have done. The world must understand that by killing your people we fight for our future, and give us everything we need. This will be glorious, and you will die, and we will prosper, and the world will forget we are the killers, and remember you as killers. We will throw every resource we have for that to happen, be it the money we got as a humanitarian aid for our citizens or ~~baby dolls that should be indistinguishable from dead children with some mosaic. Oops we forgot the mosaic.~~ You didnt see it. You are the killers."
Ignoring Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Gaza quite literally being a ghetto full of people forced off their land, the military checkpoints, the complete imbalance of deaths and suffering between the two sides.
As reprehensible as the violence is on both sides, Israel/Palestine is an apartheid state and Palestinians suffer far more than just from the effects of violence.
What exact violence? Israel provides Gaza with stuff they need. Including pipes for the water construction, that instead are used to build rockets.
Palestinians are doing terrorism, whether they understand it or not. Israel reacts to terrorism. Do you not agree that a country should react to acts of terrorism?
You're implying a false dichotomy, as though in response to a terrorist attack you either lie down and accept further attacks, or grind gaza into the dust.
No, I'm not. Grinding Giza to the dust is not what's being done. Hamas contribute more by firing uncontrollable missiles that also tend to fall in Gaza.
But you are implying a reality where every single sane person should ignore the existence and terrorism of hamas and Palestinians. Probably.
Hyperbole on my part, but not excessive given the post we're discussing this under.
Patently false. I'll refer you again to the pictures in this article.
This is the false dichotomy I referred to in my last comment. Perhaps you should look it up. We can acknowledge the existence of terrorism and respond appropriately without causing a humanitarian crisis.
This is classic American "fucked around and found out" diplomacy. Like a child with a hammer.
Yeah kindly explain how exactly maybe?
If hamas wouldn't use Palestinians as a shield there would be no crisis.
They absolutely should respond to acts of violent terrorism, and I didn't suggest they don't. However it's far from one sided.
The Gaza strip is an open air prison for over 2 million people, who can't even access, or travel for proper healthcare, where food and water are insecure or poorly available. Where you can't leave by either land or sea. Where even if you were one of the >1 million young people living there who managed to leave you'd be poor and uneducated.
But maybe you're not in Gaza. Maybe you're one of the Palestinians who live in the west bank can can barely travel without huge impediments, or may see your house demolished to make way for Israeli settlers, in what amounts to an apartheid system, widely condemned internationally by human rights organisations.
Hamas are absolutely disgusting, and the terrorist attack on Israel should be rightly condemned. But if you think Israel are the good guys here, and this is a black and white, good and evil situation you're not paying attention.
So they are responding, there is no problem with that.
Though I find it amusing that so much effort goes into outlining the hurdles of Palestinians only.
If you want to promote better lives for Palestinians, then maybe you should've started with themselves, to let them know they shouldn't have elected terrorists their leaders. Maybe Palestinians would understand that doing terrorism will not give them any good future?
Hmm... it seems like the disparity of "badness" you describe would've been true a few months ago, but no longer is?
Most of what you've said about Palestinians also describes israel now? Seems that way anyway.
If we were looking for the path to peace with the least casualties, this doesn't seem like it.
The
.deis showing.I'm from Australia.
Then you should be practical enough to realize that almost none of what was said about Palestinians in that statement describes Israel now.
Ok mate. Believe it or not, I'm not looking for an argument about who is most awful between Palestinians and Israelis.
My question is, why the world feels the need to take sides in this conflict rather than simply condemning the violence perpetrated by both sides.
The hatred violence, and wrongdoing does not need to be equal between all combatants in order for the hatred, violence, and wrongdoing to be condemned.
Well imagine that the native Australian population, the Aboriginals decoded they wanted their land back and started murdering all the white folk and they killed the equivalent of about 5,000 people (adjusted for Australia's population); mostly eldely and children. They restarted started a bombing campaign that threatened every inch of Australia. And they did this after ~60 years of similar actions on a smaller scale.
Would you and your countrymen submit to genocide for peace? Or would you fight back?
For you and I (USA), nations built on European Colonialism; it should be clear why that Colonialism was wrong but why it can't be undone. Trying to correct past atrocities with a modern genocide isn't acceptable and the last 20 years of Hamas's rule in Gaza has shown that Genocide is all it will accept.
That's just not analogous though.
I am loathe to defend hamas, but the UN stats just don't portray them as the aggressors.
If Australian aboriginals started terrorising the rest of us, of course we would use reasonable force to bring that to a stop. We would also be negotiating, and compromising. If we decided that peaceful solutions had been exhausted, I can assure you other countries wouldn't be sending us billions of dollars worth of hardware with which to exterminate them.
Mr Dog muffins, if the Aboriginals in Australia started a campaign of war against the white Austrailians, what makes you think the casualty numbers would be less skewed there?
Well congrats now you're doing the same thing Israel is doing. Peaceful solutions with Hamas have been exhausted.
How would you feel if we sent billions of dollars of Aid to the people trying to genocide you instead? What if we continued to commit billions in aid in the form of materials we knew were being used to create weapons to indiscriminately kill Australians. And then we condemned you for trying to stop that miltilitary aid?
The good news is, for countries like ours; we don't have to pretend to sit up on our high horse like the Europeans do. We have complicated, often evil histories with our colonized populations. But as much as we can and should call out that history as evil, as genocide; we should also know that you can't answer a genocide with genocide.
Those stats aren't from war-time - this isn't a spears vs guns situation. Sorry maye you're welcome to criticise me all you like for Australia's treatment of first nations people but your aboriginal metaphor is not analogous to the gaza conflict and isn't helping illustrate your point.
The core of our disagreement is the level of force used in response.
Forgive me, but I've come to expect a "fucked around and found out" mode of diplomacy from the US. As in, hamas threw the first punch so theres a moral imperative to grind gaza into the dust.
I don't see it that way. A few weeks ago there was a stale mate. Israel has adequate defences. Securing Israel with minimal loss of life ought to be the priority.
I'm happy to disagree in this regard, neither of us are going to change our positions.
For the first years of Australia's colonization, there was militant Aboriginal resistance - of course, given their technological disadvantages, it was not successful and the indigenous population were slaughtered at every turn.
The most well-known and feared of the early insurrectionists - a Bidjigal man named Pemulwuy - is today celebrated by white Australian culture - one of Sydney's suburbs is named for him. The British were somewhat less charitable in 1802, when he was finally captured, shot and beheaded after many years of fighting against their presence in early Sydney.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_frontier_wars
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/pemulwuy
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Yes colonists did some very bad things in Australia 200 years ago. Should we not strove to hold ourselves to a higher standard?
"Yes Israel is creating a humanitarian crisis, but we it's fine to support their endeavours because we did some very bad things 200 years ago".
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I didn't say anything like that - go easy on those quote marks ;) - I'm just talking about Australian history, not the current events. I am cautious discussing history in this contentious thread because I'm really just interested in the discussion about indigenous Australians, who did resist occupation, to the extent they could. The colonial response to that became "The Frontier Wars". Which was quasi-official genocide.
There are parallels in colonization throughout history, of course, which is presumably how this particular discussion came about, but today's situation is obviously a vastly different time and place to early Australia and I'm not informed enough to opine on what's happening now. I'm just here reading stuff on Lemmy.
Having said all this, indigenous Australians were living for thousands of years without any formalized state, political or military structure. No metal, wheels, writing or permanent dwellings. Had there been less difference in technology and logistical capabilities between aboriginal Australians and the British in the early 1800s, then Australia would probably look very different than it does today.
Sure. I actually don't know that much about Australia's colonisation other than what we were taught in school, which I can assure you doesn't focus on the genocide part.
I've always found the "terra nullius" aspect of international law to be fascinating. James Cook is generally credited with Australia's discovery, but the West Coast had been visited many times by the dutch, and my favorite description of Cook is that he was "just the guy that steered the boat for Joseph Banks". Although they declared that there were no permanent settlements of any note, in the most recent decades this has been found to be false, in courts of law, many times over.
I am perhaps naively hopeful that the education curriculum has evolved since you were at school, although quite likely not. The genocide part is not a palatable discussion to most people and probably a little heavy for high school.
The British knew full-well what they were doing. The legal maneuvering necessary to dispossess the indigenous population is not unique to Australia's colonial history - and the British had plenty of practice subjugating more aggressive native populations before they founded Sydney.
You're quite right - the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the French were already aware of the Australian continent and must have made some contact with Aboriginal people. There were also informal outposts of whalers and seal-hunters that were probably established to some extent several years before British occupation.
There were many aboriginal people living on the continent when Cook and Banks dropped anchor in Sydney. The earliest accounts usually mention seeing smoke from campfires all along the coast. Most of the initial deaths were from disease. The British took smallpox cultures to Sydney with the first fleet in 1788 - within a year of their arrival in Sydney, disease killed between 50 and 90 percent of the indigenous population. Whether the British deliberately introduced smallpox to the aboriginal population is still debated, although I don't know why else they would carry smallpox cultures on the first fleet - maybe they already knew how to vaccinate with it - but I would think you could get the cultures from an infected person were that the case. What other reason for carrying smallpox to Australia on the first fleet could there be, unless it was a biological weapon?
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/smallpox-epidemic
In Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) the resistance to the settlers moving in on aboriginal hunting grounds became so troublesome that the government set up a program to capture or exterminate all native people in 1830 - by which time the Aboriginal population had already been reduced by 90 percent since settlement - the remaining few thousand aboriginal people were extremely hostile to the encroaching settlements and they were raiding and burning houses, killing settlers.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/the-black-line
As in all conflicts, there are nuances and factors that we can't fully appreciate or empathize with from our current perspective, but what happened to the Aboriginal population during Australia's settlement should be a cause for national introspection - this makes the referendum result last week seem so disappointing to those who would like to see a more open acknowledgement of the darker history of Australia's founding - and greater efforts made to redress it.
Well, since Hamas doesn't represent all of Palestine, it doesn't make sense to decimate the whole of Palestine. Sure, send in special forces that track down Hamas and kill them. But don't carpet bomb civilian areas in the hopes you get the right people.
Also, you're saying Israel has been doing this on a smaller scale. I don't think that's entirely accurate. Yes, many years "just" a few hundred Palestinians were killed by Israel. But a few times Israel already committed atrocities much worse than what Hamas did on October 7th. And that's ignoring that Palestine already has half the population of Israel. And also ignoring all the other ways Israel has been oppressing them, like heavily regulating and limiting trade with other nations or preventing Palestine from having an army
Are you seriously trying to argue that Israel doing this to Palestine for the past half century should be ignored? Just because maybe the majority of years it was less deaths? Do you seriously not understand why Palestinians are fighting back? Or do you seriously believe that Palestinians are the aggressors here?
They're not decimating the whole of Palestine. They're attacking the parts that Hamas rules.
There are Israelis who pour concrete mix into the water in the West Bank.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-07-30/ty-article-opinion/.premium/we-even-destroy-their-water-wells/00000189-a31f-d00f-a7db-b39f5f280000
So why is it that civilians keep dying then? Attacking the parts they rule makes it okay that civilians die?
The West knows they messed up with the actual historical countries of the area. Too many milenia of trying to take over and cause havoc (like in 63 BC when the Romans left a few hundred people alive of the natives like the Samaritans, the Crusades, etc.). They saw what the Germans did to European Jews and saw an opportunity: "If we can't make friends in the traditional sense, we'll create one."
They shipped Jews from all over the world to Palestine. As their citizens of these Western countries are either Christian or come from Christian families, all this Israel nonsense sounds vaguely correct. These countries acted like dogs. It got to the point where France even pretended to allies to Arabic countries, only to reveal it was a lie/trap.
Then the media comes in and sneakily replaces Palestinians with Hamas when it benefits Israel's cause even though Hamas hasn't went through elections in nearly two decades and the average age of someone from Gaza is somewhere between 14 and 18.
Israel is just a western invention to give the West an ally in the region and it worked because it all sounds vaguely biblical correct to a world where Christianity just means "I hate gays and abortions and we don't actually need to act like Jesus who was kind of Jewish anyways."