What does the political climate look like in Israel? Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this?
Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
I know that the media is all over the place and it's hard to figure out what is going on as an outsider.
Either way, I hope that this situation gets resolved. I don't think that it's good for anyone and is costing a lot of money and lives.
“Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
“About three-quarters of Israeli Jews thought that Israel's military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-d...
As far as I can tell, from talking with Israelis both living in Israel and outside, there really isn't one majority thinking a certain way, it seems to me that there is an equal amount of people cheering the settlers as there are people against what they're doing.
Speaking out of my ass here. But I’d guess most people don’t care. A minority cheers. A minority protests. Most go on with their lives.
"‘If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you,’ the Israeli stand-up comedian Gil Kopatz posted. ‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’ According to a survey commissioned by Penn State, more than 80 per cent of Israeli Jews now support the expulsion of Gazans. Compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists. When Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, posted a tweet celebrating a recent prisoner exchange, he was denounced for seeming to equate the predicament of jailed Palestinians and Jewish hostages: ‘Your presence pollutes the Knesset,’ a colleague told him."
On all levels, including information war. Information war is the only one where hamas is currently winning.
That is why you are already heavily biased based on the tone of your questions. About 90%+ of what you see on mainstream media is either a straightforward lie or carefully designed, massaged and distorted truth (for example hamas counts as casualties everyone, including fully armed terrorists killed in action). Another example is fake news about “starvation” where they post standalone photos of children with generic disorders as a proof. Im just scratching the surface.
This information war is mainly sponsored by quatar and iran with 2 longterm goals in mind 1) destabilizing and undermining USA influence in middle east and worldwide 2) destroying israel and killing as many jews as possible (literally, they don’t hide it if you check anything besides bbc and english al-jazeera)
That is what really going on. That is the brutal truth. Unfortunately it’s not an exaggeration.
Hamas obviously started this but Israel won the war a long time ago. The world deserves an end. The longer it goes on the more Hamas will actually have achieved some kind of lasting positive image of Gaza which is rooted in their actions on Oct 7th and that would be an incredibly bad outcome for all.
Israeli soldiers, politicians, and many civilians are portraying themselves this way. Soldiers post videos sniping a child in the head calling it a "legendary video", politicians say Palestinians should starve, civilians block aid trucks.
Do you resent the way they are portrayed or do you mean you resent what a lot of Israelis are doing?
How can the same country that prides itself in their intel/spying prowess, and has demonstrated sophisticated capabilities and attacks, claim it will be helpless if they don't absolutely disappear another group of people and take their territory?
I seriously doubt the Oct 7 attack caught Israel by surprise, given the scale of it and the level of compromise Israel had on Hamas. Given the disproportionate response Israel was prepared to employ, it was a perfect casus belli to appropriate even more land, as it is happening right now.
Instead Israel could become a democratic state with equal rights for all citizens.
Which context has been stripped from the narrative in your opinion? Maybe you’ll say Israel is the original Jewish homeland and therefore the occupation is justified?
"Give me liberty or give me death" as you say in America, I believe. Or does that only apply to the white man?
ok when is it contextually ok to starve children?
I don't recall many people ever seriously asking for that, though I admit I'm not up-to-date on Israeli affairs. Don't the overwhelming majority of outsiders want a two-state solution, or failing that a more secular Israeli administration?
Through a lens of historical context and not just Oct 7th, it's hard for me to believe that Israelis don't know how to attain regional peace. We know exactly why Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are angry at the Israeli government, and there are simple ways to fix it if the willpower exists.
this is also the main problem with your post; your context goes back to Oct 7, whereas it should go back to 1948 (or earlier).
You cannot drive people from their land into a barren reservation, oppress them for decades, and expect them to not resist or fight back. It's the same colonization tactics that were used on the Native Americans, who launched their Intifadas and occasionally also committed the type of horrible atrocities as Hamas did on Oct 7. You can't justify Oct 7, but the reality is human nature is such that unless you remove the conditions which caused Oct 7 in the first place -- then it will repeat, maybe not Hamas, maybe not in this generation, but the next generation, as we've already seen.
The Israeli government is trying to "solve" the Palestinian problem the same way that the US government "solved" the Native American problem -- kill enough of them, make deals and then break them (this is the Israeli settler problem), and move them far enough away from their original lands, for long enough, that you finally and completely break their spirit and ability to resist. And if that means bombing and starving tens of thousands of women and children, so be it. And the Israeli God-given "right" to the Palestinian land, because it's the "holy land" from 2000 years ago, is very much like the God-given "manifest destiny" that US colonizers invoked to "settle" the West. It was genocide then and it's genocide now.
Also, the situation on the ground seems pretty clear cut. You can literally watch videos of brutal war crimes committed by Israel on Reddit. Everyone has direct proof.
This grants power while losing agency. And it is more, and more common, e.g. in the United States with its "Deep State" myth of the Q-Anon sect.
Now unless you ascribe to that religion or believe that your tribe can do no wrong it all seems simple.
Aside from a vocal minority, the impression I get around from conversations with and reading other Australians is that the Australian people largely agree with your position.
Just war principles are important to observe.
The Nazis were a thuggish and murderous regime with plenty of complicity from the German populace, but the firebombing of Dresden was evil, as were the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Targeting civilians is evil.
If we accept that these are evil, and we ought to, then we must accept that what Israel is doing is unacceptable. Bibi should be punished.
You can target Hamas, and you should, but just war does not allow for the means Israel has used.
The why takes more explanation. I'd suggest you dig through https://xcancel.com/ireallyhateyou/, this person is an israeli with background in leftist activism that recently went into exile. They collect and translate a lot of material from israeli television and other media, and also translate and explain a lot of historical material, both more mainstream like background information on contemporary israeli politicians and the occasional look at punk and leftist activism in Israel during the nineties and -00s.
It's also a good idea to spend time going through the material collected by Younis Tirawi, https://xcancel.com/ytirawi. It shows what IDF personnel believes to be appropriate behaviour that will positively impress their civilian israeli peers, i.e. what they consider to be the political climate.
Diaspora jews are quite heterogenous and splintered. Many support Israel, and many don't. One 'poll' is the democratic mayor primary in New York, where Zohran Mamdani was quite popular among jewish constituents. Adding to this, many jewish institutions are in some sense captured or founded by zionists, and funded because they are loyal to the zionist cause. This includes many summer camps and similar activities for jewish youth. Since 2023 I expect more diaspora jews to have lost sympathy with the zionist movement than it has gained, but it's not something I have polling numbers to support. On the other hand, basically every recurring large protest against Israel has a jewish contingent.
At the moment we're past immediate resolution, because the entire population in the Gaza strip has been permanently, irrevocably harmed by starvation. It would also take a lot of violence to force the israeli society to back down and stop what it's doing to its neighbours, and then likely generations of enforced stabilisation and education to sow seeds of democracy, neither of which Israel's occidental backers are willing to consider. Then there's the questions of colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are illegal and must be dissolved, which in turn would require distinct amounts of force both to achieve and then to keep it from turning into a civil war within Israel when the so called settlers are relocated there.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, one should keep in mind that this is mainly a christian project, most adherents to zionism are christians.
I'm not an Israeli by Israeli standards :) And will never be. But, of course, I'm a citizen, I can read and speak Hebrew well.
Politically, you can say, I came full circle. As many newcomers I was fed a very simplified and one-sided story of Israeli-Arab relationship. The first time I ever cast my vote in elections I voted Shinuj (they are farther right than Likud). In general, immigrants from the former Soviet Union tend to vote right and be pro-settlers.
For non-political reasons I ended up in military jail, where I met some "prisoners of consciousness" who, while didn't convince me to switch my political position entirely, exposed me to the leftist ideas delivered by the leftists. It's very important to see such ideas through the eyes of supporters because the other side virtually always misrepresents them to score points.
I didn't care about elections for a while, but, eventually, when I finally decided to vote, I voted Meretz.
I don't think I will vote in the next elections. Or, maybe, out of habit, I'll vote Democrats (former Labor and Meretz together)... but, really, I don't see a good candidate.
Anyways, what made me depart from the liberal camp is the European liberals. Pathologically bad decisions, or, even more often, the complete lack of any decisions. Gullible and zealous about issues they don't understand... I just don't want to associate myself with people like that. And I see how Israeli liberals parrot the European liberal's believing they know better.
* * *
So... to try to give some sort of a breakdown on who in Israel stands with settlers and why:
* Working class hates Arabs. It's plain and simple: working class often has to work in mixed environments. Construction, hospitality, agriculture. And there Arabs are just danger. You have to look over your shoulder all the time to make sure Mahmud isn't in a bad mood today and didn't bring a knife to work, and isn't going to cut you. I worked in a chain restaurant where a line cook brought a bomb one day to work and killed a bunch of people, himself included. Any Israeli who worked blue collar jobs probably has a story like that. These people don't care about the technicalities or long-term consequences of illegal settlements. Whoever harms Arabs, they are voting for that guy.
* Healthcare holds a special place in white collar jobs because there are a lot of Arabs working in it. But these are not the brutes who come to work with knives and bombs. Also, doctors Jewish doctors are exposed to Arab patients and the other way around... this creates a more friendly atmosphere. You will also find that doctors in Israel are probably the most leftist of any occupation.
* White collar jobs in general want to see Israel copying Europe. People in these jobs tend to want the rule of law, equality, secularism, inclusivity. They see settlers as either crazy or brutish and don't want to associate with them. Even if they may hold right-wing views, they want the implementation to be lawful and non-violent if possible.
* Black-kipah orthodox Jews only care about themselves. For better or for worse. They only wake up when politicians directly address their interests. If settlers go berserk on Arabs or Arabs eviscerate the settlers: they don't care.
* Knitted-kipah orthodox Jews are the settlers (not all of them, but probably a majority). They believe Israel should be restored in some sort of historical borders... as per usual, those borders aren't very certain, but they would quite certainly encompass a place called Judea and a city called Jerusalem. They believe they are doing a favor to the Jewish community by fighting "invaders" (Arabs).
* Israeli Arabs... are a mixed bag. You can find literal jihadists and those who hate other Arabs on the other side of the fence more than settlers do. It's very clanish and way too involved to try to parse it.
* The owners class, the rich people, they despise settlers. See them as an inconvenience / a bunch of lunatics. They don't care about Arabs either.
* Immigrants, especially fresh, tend to overwhelmingly support settlers because they misunderstand their status and genuinely believe the settlers are doing what the country isn't allowed to do due to some political scheming going on.
The Free Press, Call Me Back (podcast), and Breaking Israeli History (podcast) do a good job. Also we will dance again and October 8 (films). I'd also recommend Douglas Murray's On Democracies and Death Cults to get some perspective if you're curious, generally people don't bother on online discussion forums on this topic because it's not productive, but for earnestly curious friends I make the case below. From my perspective, Jews outside of Israel have become more united because the nature of a lot of the western response after 10/7 ironically shows why Jews need a state and an army to protect themselves.
I’m all for high minded debate, but a lot of the anti-Israel protesting isn’t that, the people celebrating or excusing 10/7 on 10/8 before Israel responded, the guy that recently executed two young people leaving a jewish event in DC and then screamed “Free Palestine”, the guy that murdered an old woman at a hostage march in boulder, the “death, death to the IDF” shouted from the stage in Glastonbury to a cheering crowd, the “river to the sea” and “intifada” chants/harassing of jews on college campuses, the repeated negative press narrowly focused on Israel from BBC, Guardian, NYT, the ‘genocide’ claims and other false blood libels, people marching waving islamic republic of Iran and Hezbollah flags in NYC, smashing up jewish owned businesses, etc. - these people are not motivated by some idea of nuanced democratic values or a ‘two state solution’, they’re motivated by old Jewish hatred under a new name. Islamism blended with lefty socialism united in their support of “anti-zionism” i.e. the destruction of Israel.
Many of these media orgs have been hollowed out by an activist ideology that doesn’t understand the history it’s swimming in and doesn’t pursue truth as much as push a political agenda. What ‘genocide’ provides aid to the people they’re supposedly trying to kill? Hamas is driven by a theologically motivated Jihad against the Jews with explicit genocidal intent, The Islamic Republic of Iran (distinct from its people) wants to destroy Israel and then the west and uses terrorism for this purpose and may have used a nuke if not for recent events. It is necessary to use lethal force to defend against this kind of threat. Anyone that cares about a positive future for Palestinians should recognize there is no possibility of such a future while Hamas remains in power.
Europe has largely been protected by the US providing its security and deterrence after WWII. Israel is on the front lines and can’t ignore the reality on the ground, their survival depends on it. You can fight this earlier or wait until the cost is higher to fight it later. Other Arab countries understand these problems, it’s why the UAE has banned the Muslim brotherhood and other extremist organizations, it’s why Saudi is leaning closer towards normalization with Israel and both are allied against Iran. They understand the risks of Islamic terror because they have to deal with it - it forces an accurate understanding. Something Europe (and anti-Israel protestors in the west) don’t grasp, but given Europe’s poor policy on this issue they likely will continue to experience more of first hand.
What Hamas did is joyfully murder, rape, and torture a bunch of lefty kibbutzniks (the kind bringing gaza kids to Israeli hospitals) and music festival kids, took hostages that they’re still holding, while filming it, laughing about it and celebrating it. They have an explicitly genocidal charter interested in killing all the Jews. There is no compatibility between the west and those interested in Islamic Jihad. Every third house in gaza has weapons in it (often hidden in kids rooms), Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian areas to try to maximize civilian casualties despite Israel’s effort to minimize them. They also kill civilians that go against them and have been launching rockets into Israel for years.
That action requires a military response to achieve political goals: return the hostages and destroy hamas / remove them from power. That is unavoidable without civilian deaths (always a tragedy in war), but the fault for this lies squarely with Hamas for starting the war. Few wars have moral grounding as clear as the war started because of 10/7. On October 8th people in the west were celebrating the invasion and killing carried about by Hamas, some mixture of ignorance and useful idiots (primarily on the political left) along with explicitly pro-hamas support. This was popular in American universities and across Europe before Israel had even responded chanting things like “globalize the intifada”. This is, at best, total moral confusion.
Also notice the attention placed on this conflict, but conspicuously absent from others. Why aren’t students protesting Bashar al-Assad? Or the civilian deaths in the conflict in Yemen? Or in Sudan? Why only the one Jewish state that was brutally attacked by a terrorist group that’s still holding its citizens hostage? This isn’t just an issue with Hamas either, it’s more complicated - many Palestinian civilians participated in the kidnapping, looting, and violence on 10/7. They helped harbor hostages. They would have lynched the hostages being returned if Hamas wasn’t preventing that and they of course elected Hamas to power in the first place. The population itself is radicalized with a deep hatred of Jews.
Enormous amounts of foreign aid (hundreds of millions) has flowed into gaza of the last couple of decades. Enough to make the Hamas leaders billionaires whose families can live large in Qatar while supporting their investment of tunnels to support their terrorism. A lot of it is backed by Iran, but a lot of this aid is from western nations to organizations that worked directly with and supported Hamas (UNRWA). This money could have been used to build something after Israel’s "land for peace" withdrawal in 2005, instead it was used for terror. It’s more instructive to look at what motivates the groups today rather than litigate divergent historical narratives (i.e. Nakba was five Arab states attacking Israel and the ‘catastrophe’ was that they lost, the security checkpoints exist because of suicide bombing during the intifadas, etc.). If Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages it would end the fighting they started. If Israel laid down their weapons they’d all be killed. Palestinians have no interest in two states which they’ve repeatedly rejected, they’re interested in killing all the Jews, the destruction of Israel, and more broadly the destruction of the west (as Iran’s proxy). Meanwhile in Israel, Arabs and Jews live together peacefully as Israeli citizens.
Ideally it’d be possible to engage in war with perfect individual targeting and no civilian casualties. Israel does this as much as possible (Hezbollah pager attack was very narrowly targeted, targeted strikes on individuals in specific apartments, other civilian warning strategies), but it’s not perfect and civilian deaths are unavoidable, especially in dense urban conflict zones. The IDF has a better record on this than any other modern western army (including US when we took Mosul against ISIS). I see war as a means to achieve a specific political result when diplomacy is not possible (or after you’ve been attacked). In this case: remove Hamas from power and return the hostages. In the broader conflict: remove the threat from Hezbollah and Iran. I think it’s necessary to achieve these goals in order to achieve any lasting peace.
Some ideologies and enemies require total military defeat. If western civilization is not willing to do this despite its real costs, then power is ceded to enemies that don’t have the same moral concerns, or in this case, explicitly want to maximize civilian death and terror as they did on 10/7 and it'll just happen again. My view is Israel would like to live in peace with its neighbors if that’s a real option (and historically has tried many times), but it’s not. Israel's neighbors (driven by a particular theological view of Islam from the Muslim Brotherhood) are not interested in peaceful coexistence. Israel should not make concessions to an enemy still plotting to destroy them.
If we’re lucky an outcome of this conflict could be normalization with KSA / an extension of the Abraham accords and deeper partnership with other Arab countries in the region - maybe even a shift in some of the public’s ideology if people recognize that trying to destroy Israel/kill Jews leads to ruin (though this is hard with radicalization in the culture/schools, etc.) - it’s a generational project that will take time, but it’s not impossible. Currently, because the goals have not been achieved (Hamas still holds hostages, still wants to remain in power, still will not surrender) the war continues and sadly civilians continue to pay some of the cost. The allies (mostly US) fully administered Japan after WWII for 7 years, Japan lost their sovereignty during that time. An outcome of starting a war and losing it is you may lose your sovereignty and land. It’s possible to defeat evil ideologies, it happened in WWII with both Japan and Germany.
I think it’s very challenging to know what’s true given all the bad actors (UN, Hamas, Pallywood - they film fake videos to (effectively) manipulate western sentiment) and their repeated lying. I think that the GHF has weakened Hamas by removing their control over the aid which has threatened them, and lastly I’m personally not sure what responsibility there is to provide aid at all while hostages remain held in Gaza (this is a more controversial view) - that said, Israel has provided and continues to provide enormous amounts of civilian aid and works to move civilians outside of the areas of fighting despite this being a thankless task. War can be a moral act, the west exercising its power to defend its values against an evil ideology is an important and necessary thing.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-destruction...
We would consider someone fucking uneducated if in 2025 they tried to justify the Iraq/Afghanistan war. The same will be true for everything you wrote as time goes on.
However, there are two aspects of this conflict where Israel is IMO monumentally and unarguably in the wrong.
One is the settler program. It is wholly inconsistent with a desire to live peacefully alongside even savage enemies. If they are so bad, put up fences and put guns on them - as Israel is doing. But the settlement program, with displacements of Palestinian civilians, bulldozing of Palestinian villages, rendering arable land inhospitable, unchecked settler violence, is clearly just a land grab, and against any semblance of desiring a peaceful coexistence. It often gets dismissed as a fringe movement, but election after election, democratic Israeli governments show varying, but always positive amounts of support.
The other is use of famine against civilians. There is no conceivable military goal in sight other than indiscriminate death and misery onto truly random people, half of them below the median age of 19 not even being politically active. It is not an accident either, Ben Gvir and/or Smotrich talk about it openly.
To be clear, Hamas and co are also guilty of horrendous crimes. Thing is, vast majority of reasonable people accept that and point it out. Israel clearly accepts that too, but perceives the mere whiff of criticism as rabid discrimination.
And the two don't cancel out. It's not about restraint, or higher standard, or any uneven field. Any instance of terrorism and genocide is horrendous, unnecessary and unacceptable. They don't serve military or diplomatic deals. They are there to hurt just because you can, and somehow it pleases some basic human instinct.
Anti-Israeli crime is awful and I condemn it. I don't support Hamas, heckling of Jews around the world, the 7th Oct attacks were awful. I mean it. And Israel's actions are also awful and inhumane.
If you are asking specifically about the Hilltop Youth, I believe most people understand them to be somewhere between extremists and jewish terrorists and do not support their actions. The government (well, Ben-Gvir) can continue to support them (within limits of plausible deniability) as long as they are in power and elections aren't until late next year.
If you are asking about Israeli Jews and the ongoing war, I'd remind you that the IDF is the people's army and conscription is mandatory. Everyone (in the mainstream) has either served in the IDF or has family there and so they know first-hand that claims that the IDF is participating in a genocide are absurd. If you're telling me my (in this case fictional) cousing Omri is participating in a genocide, I can very easily ignore that because I know he is a good kid that wouldn't do that, and I can call him up and ask him. Or maybe I'll ask my (fictional) coworker Daniel, the poor guy has been called into reserve duty for over 300 days since the war started.
They've also probably seen at least one of the many lies going around about the war. The documentary that the BBC tried to fake. The UN lying about the amount of aid going into Gaza (at the time when the american temporary pier plan was ongoing, the UN published numbers of trucks that they personally supervised going into Gaza. Conveniently, they had no one present to supervise in one of three checkpoints and "missed" about 1/3rd of the aid going in). UNWRA personnel participating in the OCT-7 attack. UNIFIL providing cover for Hezbollah to fire rockets on Israeli homes (including some Druze children which really shocked people around the country). Some blatant foreign media nonesense I've seen is showing footage of Israeli soccer fans being beaten and recontextualising it as if they are the ones doing the beating. Footage of an Israeli survivor of a terrorist attack (speaking Hebrew, in Israeli media!) being subtitled to describe her as a Palestinian survivor of an Israeli terror attack. Footage of Assad slaughtering his Syrian population broadcast as if it is a slaughter by the IDF, etc. Foreign media has proven itself to Israelis as liars, so they have no reason to listen to them.
They also see it as the #1 priority to return the hostages and see any call to stop the war before they are returned as ridiculous and evil (Though I do believe a majority support a deal of "everyone for everyone and a stop to the war").
In this light, even though many people believe the war could have already ended (with an aforementioned "everyone for everyone" deal) and Netanyahu is cruelly extending the war for his own personal interests, they also understand that any civilian casualties are part of the horrors of war and are purely the fault of Hamas, both for starting the conflict, and for their use of civilians as human shields, their use of civilian infrastructure (schools, mosques, hospitals) as war resources and use of their children as soldiers. They may also be familiar with the data, which last time both sides published semi-reliable information (or equally unreliable information), showed that when compared to other historical conflicts, civilian casualties were actually a smaller part of overall casualties. And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war as the IDF is already doing their duty to fight as ethically as is reasonably possible.
While we're there, we also frequently see news of Israelis and Jews being attacked around the world with no one really giving a shit about it. If the UK shows me that they don't give a shit about the lives of Jews/Israelis in the UK, I'm definitely not going to care what the UK government thinks about the ongoing war.
> Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
If you are in Israel and know of Jews residing elsewhere, they are probably former Israelis, which don't neccesarily represent non-Israeli Jews in those countries. Those I've spoken to have spoken about a sharp rise in antisemitism. Some fear for their lives. From the news and other media I know some Jews feel like Israel is going too far, but they get their opinions from e.g. the BBC, so you can't really take them as well-informed opinions.
- Incidentally, one former UN employee I know has spoken about ingrained and casual antisemitism in the UN much earlier than OCT-7 (of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" kind), so I'd consider any opinion or intervention by the UN as deceitful and unwelcome.
They started the war, but Israel should be expected to behave at a higher standard than terrorists. They are causing the starvation and death that is not needed to protect Israel's interests. The deaths are now on them.
>And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war
I don't believe that one minute.
Your own defense ministers have said there is no military value in continuing the war, and there is no getting the hostages back without a deal with Hamas. This war continues because of far-right bloodlust from the Israeli government, and Bibi's desire to stay in power and out of jail.
Aid could get in, and the starvation could stop, if it was the will of the Israeli government. Hamas is militarily FUBAR, and Oct7 only happened because of the decisions made by Bibi to move IDF to the West Bank and ignore warnings from intelligence. Oct7 will not happen again, even if the fighting stopped this instant.
Instead, they want to see Palestine starve so they can take over Gaza.
Great summary of recent status: https://crooked.com/podcast/tbd-2/
That's pretty irrelevant when they don't put you in front of a firing squad for draft dodging, isn't it? If it is possible to refuse - either by draft dodging or by complying poorly enough that it basically becomes sabotage - the fact that you chose not to do so means you are complicit.
To bring this argument to the extreme: would you murder your own father if there was a $10 fine on not doing so? It's the law, after all! You're just following the law, so you cannot possibly be held accountable for your actions, right?
...
It makes no sense. Yes, antisemitism exists. Two wrongs don't make a right.
trying to explain it, will get you downvoted and flagged. because people find it inconvenient when facts don't correlate with carefully cultivated media picture that they been consuming
edit: just in case somebody cares
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
https://www.jns.org/over-6300-terror-attacks-against-jews-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Price_tag_attack_...
[1] https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/dossiers-pays/israel-terri...
Israel is a terrorist organization, not a state.
Arguably it's worse than what is usually meant by terrorism, i.e. civilians or paramilitaries attacking a state by actions against civilians, since it's a state exterminating stateless civilians.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/letter-sanctio...
Quite important not to become part of the problem when you discuss this case. And the problem is that such a heated subject is prone to make people ideologically possessed and tribal. To a point where they become emotionally blinded and are unable to listen to people that don't share/fully support their beliefs.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support...
Given Israeli education, support for settlers, the immigration policy which allows anyone with Jewish heritage to claim land there (regardless of any connection to the area, and of any outstanding arrest warrants) and Israelis using their kids to stop aid trucks and so on, there's a lot needed to show the majority what is actually humane and acceptable.
I agree with the sentiment of your second paragraph, but I wish that thought applied in general, and not just to some special case countries. Especially considering the widely differing levels of democratic power people have in these different countries.
If you listen to their “liberal opposition” leaders like the likes of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz they sound just as unhinged as Netanyahu himself [1]
Every poll conducted on Israeli public opinion on the conflict would make have made Nazi officials blush. Majority of Israelis support ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza [2].
Seeing the facts as they are is not being “emotionally blinded”. When genocidal psychopaths scream at the top of their lungs they want to commit genocide and actively work towards that goal, with the results right in front of our eyes, we compelled to believe them.
[1] https://x.com/ghostofbph/status/1948720978378309847?s=46
[2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-03/ty-article/.p...
> Eurasia Poll: 82% of Israelis want to expel Palestinians from Gaza; 47% want to kill every man, woman, child
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/05/30/poll-israelis-exp...
To me, simply labeling somone as "evil" not feels like a premature termination of the chain of causality, but also circular reasoning (Why does X do evil things? Because X is evil. Why is X evil? Because X does evil things). There has to be more to it than that.
What is happening is definitely "evil" in its purest form, but there are many contributing explanations that don't rely on circular reasoning.
- long-term geopolitical goals of "the West" in the middle east
- a culture defined by a noxious combination of victim complex + ethnoreligious superiority
- a society pampered by foreign financial and military aid (not having to stand on its own)
- a long history of regional violence
The film could not find a U.S. distributor after being picked up for distribution in 24 countries and winning the Oscar, a situation that has been compared to soft censorship.
This is everything you need to know about the world we live in. Palestinian lives simply do not matter.
Lives in Palestine get far more attention than Burma, West Africa, Ethiopia and Sudan [1].
The basic truth is lives far removed from us tend to be forgettable.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_confli...
I've lost friends of 15 years for remarking on my horror about bombings and civilian deaths. Nothing more.
I can't even begin to understand a mentality which cannot see the absolute asymmetry of power at work here.
The daily protests happen because they're necessary. And they're clearly not enough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Mu...
> Today, Jews residing in Muslim countries have been reduced to a small fraction of their former sizes, with Iran and Turkey being home to the largest remaining Jewish populations, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Algeria, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq. This was due to Zionist recruitment, religious beliefs, economic reasons, widespread persecution, antisemitism, political instability and curbing of human rights in Muslim-majority countries.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim," they say. Where then, should the Jews be allowed to live? Only in Brooklyn?
> Until the 1960s, approximately one million Jews lived in Iran and other Arab countries having arrived in the region more than 2,000 years before. Nowadays, it is estimated that only around 15,000 remain, as the majority of the Jewish population in Muslim lands were forced to flee their homes
https://sephardicu.com/history/jewish-population-in-10-islam...
Hamas could surrender at any time. They're to blame for everything.
From your source.
It's important to note that in a place like Algeria the French colonists granted Jewish populations citizenship to France, yet denied it to the Arab and Berber populations. [1] This fractured relations between the Sephardic population and the rest of the local population, which is exactly what the French wanted.
I'm not going to say relations were perfect before, or deny that Jewish populations weren't second class citizens, but there was a long history of being neighbors and having cities like Constantine be a place of refuge after the Spanish expulsion of Jews from Andalusia. I mean, in places like Mogador in Morocco, Jewish populations were explicitly invited by the king to settle and set up trading businesses [2].
The founding of Israel completely changed this and fractured relations that went back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9mieux_Decree
Violence begets violence, if Israeli settlers want to fight to displace other people then they will die in that process. Thankfully for Jews, there are other states they can choose to inhabit that are both secular and respect international law. These are, statistically, safer places for Jewish individuals to live than a state that instructs their army on how to commit fratricide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Israel very much depends on being the dominant power in the region. If they lose US support, things could get ugly indeed. And they are losing support rapidly now.
If anything, currently it looks like Israel's relations with its nearby neighbours (excluding Palestine. Syria is bit unclear also) are improving while its relationship with the broader world is sinking like a stone.
Or more accurately, the world would let the US let it happen. And the US would probably fund it.
And the world would feel so, so sorry as they paved over the mass graves and built AI data centers and luxury hotels in what used to be Gaza.
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/29/headlines/palestinian...
> Odeh Muhammad Hadalin’s name was sometimes spelt as Awdah Muhammad Hathaleen.
You could also say that "two-state solution" has been tried in 1948, but (for whatever reasons) didn't work out. So support for 2-state is just a form of delaying the inevitable.
I am now firm believer in one-state solution as the most fair one. Peter Beinart has some good arguments in its favor.
And I think it would be a poetic justice for all the racist settlers (or islamists) to have the people they hate as their neighbors.
The Arab world overwhelmingly rejected the UN Partition Plan in principle, which led directly to the 1948 Palestine war and the first Arab-Israeli war. Likewise, the signing of the Oslo Accords (and the rejection of those accords by Hamas, PIJ and other factions within the PLO) led directly to the Second Intifada. Most of the Arab world has now conceded that Israel isn't going anywhere and huge steps have been made in normalising Arab-Israeli relations, but Palestinian politics is still dominated by a fundamentally futile anti-Zionist absolutism.
A credible option of full statehood and international recognition has been on the table for nearly eighty years, but Palestinians have consistently failed to establish a workable consensus on taking up that option. The PLO's intransigence has alienated most of their allies in the region, primarily because they instigated civil wars in both Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1975).
A one-state solution is no solution at all while there remain extremists on both sides who are simply unwilling to coexist; unless Israel can reign in the religious right and the Palestinians can establish a political consensus in favour of coexistence, it's a straightforward path to war. There's no "poetic justice" in making people who hate each other live together, just an inevitable perpetuation of bloodshed.
The political debates about land rights are intractably complex, but the fundamental realpolitik question is about how much the Palestinians are willing to suffer for the principle of "from the river to the sea". Israel is militarily dominant and is likely to remain so regardless of how much international pressure is brought to bear. In simple practical terms, the ball is in the Palestinian court and it is for them to decide whether to seriously engage in a two (or three) state solution with international support, or whether to continue pursuing an unwinnable conflict. A post-Netanyahu Israel is highly likely to support a serious two-state solution, but simply isn't going to accept a one-state solution; even if you believe a one-state solution to be the only just outcome, it isn't a workable outcome.
More than a one-state solution.
Would it be nice if people could get along and not require militarised borders to keep them from killing each other? Sure. This was essentially the colonial assumption when the Middle East (and Africa’s) modern borders were drawn—that local preferences could be overcome by force of will.
In reality, where you draw borders on a map matters less than the people on the ground’s identities and guns.
This is a problem for the neighbouring countries, isn't it? They don't want to deal with a bunch of new people any more than any other country does.
> let Israel annexate Gaza
This is just admitting that might makes right
> and then imposing strict border controls... severly sanctioned
You would need people to actually believe this
Even so, this plan does not address the fact that both parties really really want to live on the same land. You might as well ask the Israelis why they aren't content to resettle some other place, they wouldn't accept it anymore than the Palestinians would.
To the extent there is consensus among today’s superpower and regional powers, it’s that international peacekeepers don’t work. At best they delay while incubating a conflict.
What’s the solution then? We keep wringing our hands and saying it’s impossible?
Truth is no one wants to fight overseas anymore.
This is a bit misleading.
Israel proposed that it maintain absolute and total military control of Gaza, but that a "peacekeeping force" from three Arab nations, bizarrely to be controlled by the US, would "secure food distribution".
Israel has absolutely zero intention of handing over control of Gaza, and has gone to extraordinary lengths to vilify and delegitimize every international organization at every turn.
An actual peacekeeping force as described above would be about keeping Israel in check as much as ensuring Hamas doesn't re-appear.
Given the history of Israel with the UNIFIL...
If the answer is "None" then Israel did not in fact propose peacekeeping forces.
The original European Jews who founded Israel were even opposed to the German Nazis transferring thousands of Jewish children to other countries to save their lives.
These Zionist Jews thought it would be better for their state building project if these children were all murdered than if the children were sent anywhere except to Palestine.
But, some of the collaboration wasn't really the Zionist Jews' entire fault. E.g., the machine tools the Zionist Jews used to create weaponry to murder Palestinian civilians and ethnically cleans Palestine were all German made, and purchased from the Nazi regime, but this was because the Nazis only allowed the rich jews to leave with German made products, not with cash. So, when the minority of Jews fled to Israel/Palestine instead of to the United States (vast majority went to the US), they were instructed to purchase machine tools from the Germans to bring with them.
But I'm sure they wouldn't have done the same to Gaza if they would've just done the right thing by kicking off Hamas, and stopping any armed resistance !
I mean they didn't literally kill every single arab in Gaza yet so they are very progressive. They'd rather just slowly settle your land and kill you if you resist, as opposed to Hamas who would've done the same but faster. Let's not forget that they have killed tens of thousands of Muslims, but at least they could've killed even more!
https://www.kqed.org/news/12043918/feds-detain-2-palestinian...
The last update was
June 13: A previous version of this story named the two Palestinian men who were sent back home. Their names were removed after concerns were raised for their safety.
The Isreali man really should not have been there, but I have to recognise a couple of things.
1) I don't know what anyone is saying except, ironically, plea's of someone near the camera man asking the Israeli man to "Shoot me".
2) I do not know what lead up to this confrontation
3) I have been in a circumstance before where a large group of people are acting frantic and in a threatening way and it's genuinely terrifying, so much so that you will act irrationally - this might be something others on this platform might not be familiar with.
The circumstance could have been avoided by Israel not having any settlers in the west bank, for sure, and it's a tragic situation.
However, I'm sitting here, in Sweden, behind a computer on a site about entrepreneurialism and technology.
I can't possibly say anything on the subject that's meaningful, none of us can. Why is it here?
If anything being armed in that situation is incredibly stupid, because you'll still panic and now you're acting irrationally with a deadly weapon. The weapon can be used (as this example) or taken off you.
I speak from experience, I got mobbed upon by a local gang, thought it would be smart to arm myself with a prop sword in order to stop them advancing.
It didn't stop them, and in fact the sword was taken off me (because it was a prop, and I wouldn't have used it even if it wasn't to be honest) - and they proceeded to smash it over my head sending me to hospital.
All of this is only obvious with a clear head, and in hindsight. Being in that situation as a human being is just.. awful. I don't recommend it.
EDIT: I'm getting flagged a lot from emotional people; I think this is part of why I really dislike this topic, we know nothing except how we feel and refuse to look at things objectively - and we're not even qualified to do that anyway. So everything becomes pornography to confirm our biases and to drown out anyone who doesn't immediately call for the end of Israel.
If a Russian soldier in Ukrainian territory shot some civilian in the face, I guess you'd also have put yourself in their shoes and given them the benefit of the doubt? I mean, they were terrified!
- About tech
- About a current event
- About censorship
Genocide by itself, that's just not good enough apparently. That's very weird because there's tons of serious discussion on HN about history. This place cares a lot about history. Whatever is happening right now is just real-time history.
This western favoritism is new, probably vicariously living Israels dirty work which they would like to do themselves. But the israeli supremacist mindset is nothing new for the chosen ones.
He was arrested by Israeli police for questioning, but was later released on house arrest while an investigation continued.
About a dozen Israeli soldiers raided the mourning tent, pushing those attending out while keeping a thumb on the pin of a stun grenade. Soldiers declared the area a closed military zone and said only residents of the village could be present. They arrested two activists and threw stun grenades at journalists who were too slow to leave.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/palestinian-aw...
The documentary "Checkpoint" is more than 20 years old by now, the treatment of West Bank's Palestinians has been fucked up for even longer than that, and Netanyahu's government only made it worse.
I wish to see in my lifetime Israel having to reckon with the fact they've become the monster, justifying their actions after the immense suffering their ancestors went through during the Holocaust is impossible...
Edit: according to Yuval Abraham[0], the killer instructed soldiers to arrest the other 4 family members of Awdah Hathaleen which are still in jail, while the murderer was released under house arrest, fucking insane.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/10/video-appears-...
When it does happen, how often does well-intended foreign intervention actually "fix" things - vs. turning into a yet another "park our troops there 'till we finally run out of patience" occupation?
My read is that the many powerful factions which favor (overtly or not) the ongoing violent mess in/around Israel have (generally) very good understandings of the situation and its dynamics. And the benefits & costs - for them - of encouraging it to continue indefinitely. Vs. the opposing side is dominated by sincere but all-too-simple "make horrible things stop happening!!!" emotions.
:(
1. Hamas doesn't accept a two-state solution.
2. Israel is therefore forced into implementing a one-state solution.
* - 2-state means 2 co-equal states, with equal people, and equal rights (including the equal right to be safe from the other)
lWe're both from the country where most of the planned un-living of the First Holocaust were performed. We recently discussed how in a street poll, half of Polish population couldn't solve a simple math task, a simple language task and one more simple task, placing Poland in the second last position from all the countries taking place. (For comparison, in Norway and Holland only 9%). And how it was likely a consequence of genetic holocaust performed on Poles by both German and Russian nazis during the 2WW. That systematic destruction of elites can behead a country for years to come.
I tried to calm her down, show her that it's just her Instagram bubble that makes her think so. That such things like planned un-living don't happen anymore in the civilized world where we are living, that last time something like that was about to happen, there was a UN action in the Balkans. Or that through the common effort we've managed to halt Russia's advance when they once again attempted to conquer Europe.
But now in the morning the next day I have my own doubts. That people have to use special language to talk about the Holy Land situation to avoid censorship on Youtube or other websites. That this thread got pulled down 30 minutes after posting (even though I was positively surprised when it was reinstated another 30 min later). That just like during the First Holocaust, even though the nations of civilized world are being informed about what's happening, people are ignoring the subject and not beliving that it actually happen.
If we look backwards in time, we come from a very violent history, but politics and technology has continuously reshaped how it happens. For example wars post industrialism were much more murderous than ever before.
The long arch view(?) seems to be that the post-WWII era has ended and something new is coming around the corner. It looks like an era of bigger empires but without the single superpower.
Objecting to the Holocaust because it eugenicized the wrong way is a thing I guess.
You may explain her that this is a different face of the same world where a state has been targeted by hatred and terrorism for 80 years, and everybody insisted on them being patient and just live with it.
What's happening is sad, but it is not sadder than what preceded it.