Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month.
Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men. According to a translation of the coverage, they were not identified in the reporting.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow, said: “This is among the worst footage I’ve seen. Not only were these boys clearly unarmed and present no threat whatsoever, but they were struck multiple times even after stumbling/crawling away. There is no way they could have been considered combatants. This is unreal.”
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Because it’s wildly unpopular here. The attacks on 10/7 have convinced more people who would normally be supporters if Gaza/Hamas to not be. And the persistent polling that shows supermajority support amongst Palestinians, plus the continued ransom (and likely perpetual rape) of hostages, combine with the consistent pledge of “we love it and we’ll do it again”, and the fact that Americans are still being held hostage; Palestinians should be glad the US hasn’t entered the conflict ourselves.
Is it really so unpopular among actual people? It’s politically not popular, but people in the US are beginning to see the IDF and Israeli government for what they are. I have been seeing Palestinian flags and other shows of support all over since October, and Western media makes little attempt to justify the atrocities by the IDF in their reporting.
Oh absolutely. Israel’s popularity has taken a hit in the US (Down to 58%, source but the Palestinian Authority’s support is down to 18% (same source).
And when you look at specifically questions around Israel & Hamas’ handling and justification for conflict it’s no-contest (source. Nobody thinks Hamas’ actions were justifiable. That pew poll is pretty nuanced and lays it out pretty well. Most of Palestinians support is primarily focused on the human cost of the war; which the US is seen to be mitigating with it’s air drops and the port we’re building.
It’s not really surprising either. The older you are the more you’ve experienced Hamas/PA tactics and PR and the less susceptible you are to it. And Hamas is getting fairly good coverage here. There’s rarely a news article pointing out that US citizens are still being held hostage, for example.
Possible unpopular take, but suddenly cutting off support for Israel may be evaluated as the path that results in far more blood. Because of Bibi’s absolute shit response, there’s a good possibility that many groups in the region (Hezbolah, Iran, etc.) are standing quite ready to exterminate Israel and all of its roughly 9.3 million residents (2021 numbers). While the US cutting off support may be a short term solution that a lot of people could agree with, Bibi has made clear that he is willing to play chicken with the entire population of Israel, and so if the aid stops and the possible invasion from the regional players starts up, then the US has to decide whether to let a “former” ally get exterminated, or get involved at that point when many more actors could be involved in the conflict.
Israel is a nuclear nation, they’ll be fine. What will happen is they’ll ally with Russia and sell off access to the tech we’ve been dumb enough to give them.
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There are plenty of American Jews that don’t support what Israel is doing.
Does it matter? Support or oppose people are being killed by missiles from drones not unkind words tossed from across the ocean.
In the context of the conversation we’re currently having? Yeah it does matter, because the person I was replying to suggested that all Jews support what Israel is doing.
And some of the strongest critics of Israel I’ve seen throughout all this have been Jewish. Wild to cast their protest to the side and generalize them.
Right? Some absolutely braindead takes in here.
It matters insomuch as they are protesting/committing acts of civil disobedience or hounding politicians or not donating to AIPAC or whatever else they can do from across the ocean.
Piss off “the Jews”? Can we please condemn Israels violence without antisemitism?
They are Jewish…
I don’t worry about pissing off white people in America by pointing out the shitty things they collectively were responsible for in the pre civil war era even though not every white person in the 1800s owned slaves or supported slavery.
How are we almost six months into this genocide and people are still conflating Jewishness with Zionism?
Most Zionists are not Jews, and many Jews are not Zionists, in fact some Jews are fervently anti-Zionist.
I’ll tell you the nasty truth. You’re right, but if a politician ran a campaign to strip Israel of all their benefits of American Exceptionalism they will be crushed in the polls. They won’t just lose they will be decimated.
Why?
Because despite what you say, many of those Jews you are referring to are actually Zionists once cutting off the hand that feeds their homeland is threatened.
Non-Jews need to understand that unlike Christianity there is a level of identity politics steeped in nationalism, religion and culture are all so heavily intertwined it’s hard to break through. I’m speaking from experience. 3 of my kids are Jewish.
I feel sorry for those sane Israelis that are powerless as their insanely right wing government kills any hope they have for a safe future thanks to destroying an already tenuous relationship with all their neighbours in the ME.
offtopic: “Decimated” means “reduced by 10%”, that is, multiplied by 0.9, that is, in the ancient Rome it meant “every 10th executed”. Seems closer to “just lose” than to “crushed in the polls”. While correcting people writing in their native language which isn’t mine is stupid, in this case the term is Roman, so.
I will accept the pedantic response lol. I was not aware.
Other meaning: “kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of.”
The word has more than just one meaning of “reduction by 1/10”, even if that’s originally where the expression comes from. But im sure a smart guy as yourself already knew that.
In general how a word is used is what it means in the language, prescriptivism is cancer. I just felt that its original meaning is worth preserving too, and there are many ways to say “badly hurt”.
The only cancer is you going around trying to “correct” people when there’s nothing to correct.
They used the word “decimated” accurately.
You’re not preserving the original meaning. You’re just being an ass.
How does it feel to be such a moron that you can’t be bothered to look up the word “prescriptivism”, don’t know it, thus don’t get what you are answering and still decide to throw insults?
What’s certain is that I don’t seek for evaluations of my actions and statements from apes who guess the meaning of words while having Internet access.
EDIT: and guess the exact opposite at that
Many who have actual ties to the occupying state, or who still consider it a “homeland” despite what they’re seeing before their eyes, probably.
That Religio-nationalism isn’t alien to us. Look at American Christian nationalism. Second Thought: The Growing Threat Of Christian Nationalism
Settler-colonialism isn’t foreign to us either: we created it. The Jewish state is a settler-colony created by and still supported by & deeply dependent on Global North colonizers. America itself is a settler-colony: we genocided the indigenous peoples and settled here.
Point being it’s an extremely nuanced situation right now and it’s disgusting but there’s no easy fix.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The Growing Threat Of Christian Nationalism
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
https://www.jpr.org.uk/reports/conflict-israel-and-gaza-what-do-jews-uk-think
https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-have-widely-differing-views-on-israel/
The majority of US/UK jews are both pro-Israel and not against what is going on in Gaza
I couldn’t find a worldwide survey but it doesn’t seem altogether unfair to conflate the jewish religion with the worldwide bastion of that religion any more than it would be wrong to conflate Catholics and the pope. This does NOT mean its ok to harm people based on what they believe. Adding to the sum total of harm does nothing to alleviate the suffering in Gaza.
This analogy doesn’t work. You’re conflating the Jewish people with the Jewish religion. Catholicism is not an ethnicity, and many Jews aren’t religious, in fact quite a few are atheists.
The fact that Judaism is both an ethnicity and a religion is confusing. Nobody should be condemned for the ethnicity they were born with. Religions are voluntary associations.
Indeed. And the Jewish faith isn’t monolithically Zionist either, not even in Palestine itself: Edah HaChareidis
JPost, 2017: Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York protest IDF draft law Anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic group joins Israeli Orthodox in campaign against Orthodox conscription into the IDF.
Daily Mail, Oct. 2023: Thousands of pro-Palestine protestors shut down Brooklyn Bridge after flooding NYC streets alongside orthodox Jewish members to condemn Israel’s war in Gaza - as businesses are plastered with ‘Zionism is Terrorism’ stickers
JPost, Mar. 2024: Ultra-Orthodox Jews block Israeli highway in protest of IDF draft
Israel isn’t any kind of bastion, Judaism doesn’t have a central authority like the Pope and those smaller ones it has are not in Israel.
Where did you get this from? It sounds wrong to me. The early Zionist terrorist groups (Haganah, Lehi etc.) were singularly Jewish groups, with mass immigration of Jews to Palestine being one of their top priorities (getting the British and Palestinians out being another).
To vote in the World Zionist Congress you have to be Jewish.
Or maybe this is a question of definition- how do you define Zionists in this case?
As Genocide Joe has been saying for decades, you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. You just have to believe in the project of Atlanticist Jews settler-colonizing the Palestinian people’s land.
.
Another reason the imperialist US government is Zionist is that Israel is its unsinkable aircraft carrier in oil-rich Western Asia. As Biden has been saying for decades, “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
Ok, now I see what you mean. Thanks.
Edit: holy shit, yea.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Genocide Joe has been saying for decades
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sure.
Who cares about them, really?
They’re not more important than anyone else on this planet.
Im starting to think that what a lot of people learned from the holocaust wasn’t ‘never let this happen again’, but ‘never let this happen to the jews again’. The people of gaza are being wiped out because we, the west, can’t hold a Jewish state accountable for their actions, because that might make us nazis in the eyes of morons and their propagandists.
You mean the Israeli state?
That always happens when you try to teach a crowd a moral lesson.
But, to be frank, there were institutional things learned too, culminating in the UN being created. Too bad it wasn’t reformed significantly after decolonization happened, and for the Cold War, and as a result by now it’s completely irrelevant. Its rules are being used to justify things opposite to stated when those rules were written.
The many faces of totalitarianism; we need to discuss this better, or have representatives who can at very least acknowledge that. By the way, none of these people seem to have at hearth the peace of the region. Until than, our hands are tied.
Idk if you have participated in the us political system much but like there’s a lot of Jews
Going against them and potentially being branded anti-Semitic is political suicide
I think we can move past this while fighting actual antisemitism, which may be on the rise for all I know.
Acnshually, jews
Calm down, Kanye.
He’s got a point. AIPAC i one of the strongest lobby organization in the US. They make and break politicians all the time.
And they’ve been very successful in convincing everyone that Israel = Jews; so that any criticism of Israel is defacto antisemitic (nevermind that Palestinians are a Semitic people).
We should be clear that Netanyahu and the far-right fundamentalist Likud party in Israel is the problem.
Putting the star of David on their flag was
propaganda.
If you think AIPAC represents all Jews, you are absolutely an antisemite. No surprise you think Kanye “I like Hitler” West has “got a point”.
Criticising the Israel lobby is fine, but maybe don’t blame Jews for everything Israel does…
Eight-in-ten U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is an important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel/pf_05-11-21_jewish-americans-07-2/
“Caring about Israel” is a very generic metric, and I bet things have changed a lot since 2021. I know plenty of people who support Israel’s right to exist, but also want Bibi imprisoned for life for what he’s doing to Palestinians.
Jews are not a monolithic group. If you can’t criticize a government without condemning an entire ethnic group, that’s your failure.
Odd phrasing in that first bit 💀