This might just sound like the same old shit others voice with the recent gaza genocide, but ive hated israel for far longer. In high school i read a book called the olive grove, its based on a true story of a Palestinian family that lost every thing to the zionist movement. It follows 3 generation of the family from the first world war till after the second. It tells of the horrors they faced by the us backed terrorists taking their home and land turning away from the atrocities being committed. Its heart breaking, and when i read it in 2009 i didnt fully understand but seeing all the shit done now, i just think this cycle of hate started and can not be stopped.
Idk what else to say, i mean i could go on and on but i dont have the mental capacity to do so while drinking. I recommend others to read the book, it was a very good read when i was a high schooler and i plan to start it again as soon as i can find my copy.
Here is a link to the book if anyone is interested in reading it https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2327988.The_Olive_Grove
Since we’re talking about hot takes, here’s mine. The Nazis are the most reviled because Hitler did the “unthinkable”: he tried to colonize the colonizers by claiming to be whiter than the whites. So, the atrocities committed by nazis are somehow way more inexcusable than the ones committed by the British over “brown people”. They ran concentration camps too, but since the victims were black, people doesn’t seem too bothered by it.
And don’t get me started about slavery, where people were grabbed and treated like animals, packed in ships as packages, and forced to work in their own concentration camps for the white guys.
What the Nazis did was horrible, but let’s not pretend they’re the only evil ones. Israel is just as bad, the difference being they’re doing it over brown people which makes it somehow more acceptable on the eyes of the world.
Im not going to defend the british empire. But these atrocities are off by a significant factor compared to the holocaust.
There were over 40,000 jewish ghettos and concentration camps.
In the ghettos, jews (and romani, and others) were rationed on 250cal per day, lived 7 to a room. Warsaw ghetto had a peek population of 460,000. At least 300,000 were shot, and a further 92,000 died of starvation and disease. Despite thousands (if not 10s of thousands) of people being forced into the ghetto, the population never increased.
Auschwitz had the highest survival rate of the concentration camps, where 1.1 million died of the 1.3 million that went “through” that camp.
Yes, the british empire has done horrendous things. But nowhere on the scale and ferocity of the holocaust.
I think the early 1900s were very dark, and a lot of people did horrendous things. Actually, probably doing a lot of horrendous things in the 1800s as well.
Id like to think humanity has learned since then
There is also another aspect:
While many European empires colonized and oppressed the local populations brutally, eradication was never the point. The point was always extraction of wealth.
With the Nazis there was not even a pretense of working towards any goal other than complete annihilation. The Nazis engineered death according to modern, industrial principles. They did not just dehumanize their victims by declaring their lives worthless. They calculated a value of exactly what it was worth to extinguish a jewish/handicapped/lgbtq/communist/sinti/roma/non-white life and then went about spending that money as efficiently as possible.
In other genocides you will see wanton bombings, mobs raging through the streets, sieges denying food and resources to areas. But you will not see reports from bureaucrats complaining that shipping of this load of victims to that camp was inefficient and they should have been sent to a different camp to save costs instead.
Israel is not the Nazis. Still bad though.
Israel is restrained by modern morality. We didn’t see Hitler coming, and we didn’t care back then. We do care now. If Israel went ahead with cattle cars and gas chambers and ovens they’d get curb stomped by the world. Israel has to tread carefully, portraying this as a war on terror instead of what it really is: mass extermination. Plus they literally cannot just mow down the whole populace, again because the world hasn’t forgotten Hitler and would shut them down. They have to boil the pot more slowly… because scrutiny has increased as have standards of human rights.
Without all those restraints…
They have proof of concept from that massacre yesterday.
Yeh, absolutely.
But it isnt fair to say they are worse than nazis.
Modern nazis? Maybe.
Id also say that the optics are that they arent attacking because of things people cant change.
They specifically targetting hamas’s members children, they arent specifically targetting people that used to be hamas. Theoretically if hamas disbanded, the war would stop.
At least, thats the way the optics seem.
Whether that is what is actually happening (or would happen) is a different matter.
Are they going about it the correct way? Doesnt seem like it.
The nazis persecuted jewish people, their children, anybody associating with them and so on.
There were nazi supporters in many countries before WW2, who also blamed the jewish for many issues.
Theoretically. Targeting anyone’s children is far out of bounds, and at 30,000 dead including people stampeding for food, it’s not just Hamas or Hamas kids they’re going after. Nor is it only Hamas that they’re starving to death en masse. It is, however, the bullshit they’re spoon feeding an uncritical world.
Funny how you treat the Holocaust like a numbers game. So in your mind it cat be a Holocaust until huge numbers of ppl die?
Palestine looks a lot like the beginning of a Holocaust…
That all was done on a short term time frame. But how does the israel crimes of 70 years compare?
Thats a new take i never thought of. Interesting.
Most Israelis are now ‘brown’ people of Arab or North African descent. They’re also the group that is most likely to support (far-) right parties.
I’d like some source on that because the rise of the far right on the EU and USA says otherwise.
No problem.
On most Israelis being of Middle-Eastern or North African descent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel
Bit of a tangent, but this is partly why Israel’s security services are/were so feared in the middle-east. They simply employed ‘Arab’/Mizrahi Jews, who were indistinguishable from other Arabs and often knew the culture.
On Mizrahi Jews being more likely to support (far-) right parties:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-why-right-wing-mizrahi-vote-misunderstood
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-05-19/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/in-some-respects-mizrahi-identity-in-israel-is-dominant-and-ashkenazim-face-inequality/00000188-2f95-d914-af8c-afb5a0fb0000
If you want you can look up (recent) Israeli cabinet ministers on wikipedia, you’ll often find they have Middle-Eastern or North African ancestry. Often these are some of the most right-wing politicians. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Golan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
Wow, TIL. Thank you very much for the sources.