As I write these words, I am sitting at home in Tel Aviv, trying to figure out how to protect my family in a house with no shelter or safe room, following with growing panic the reports and rumors of horrible events taking place in the Israeli towns near Gaza which are under attack. I see people, some of them my friends, calling on social media to attack Gaza more fiercely than ever before. Some Israelis are saying that now is the time to eradicate Gaza entirely — essentially calling for genocide. Through all the explosions, the dread and the bloodshed, speaking about peaceful solutions seems like madness to them.
Yet I remember that everything that I am feeling now, which every Israeli must be sharing, has been the life experience of millions of Palestinians for far too long. The only solution, as it has always been, is to bring an end of apartheid, occupation, and siege, and promote a future based on justice and equality for all of us. It is not in spite of the horror that we have to change course — it is exactly because of it.
I wish more people could adhere to this. The entire world seems to be heading in a bad direction.
Almost a century ago, our forefathers had fought against a rising tide of tyranny, marching almost relentlessly across the world.
I suppose it’s may soon be our turn to fight again…
By making the Palestinians pay the price for Europe’s crimes?
I really don’t think that’s what they were saying.
True
But that is exactly what is happening.
To be more clear: I’m pretty sure the person you responded to was lamenting the general rise in authoritarianism everywhere
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Judging from other commentary, I’m sure there are terrified Israelis, but as a whole they seem more angry than terrified.
The comments in this thread are mind blowing. Simply put, people are cheering for pure terrorists who also want to kill all Jews, while condemning the side who has offered peace treaties multiple times, and always been either flat out rejected, or betrayed.
And somehow just because you hit back with a bigger stick after your children have been blown to bits, you’re the bad guy.
There’s a “both bad” crowd here, totally rejecting reality, and then a surprisingly large pro-terrorism crowd.
What the fuck.
Oh and don’t forget OP speaking about writing this from Tel Aviv as he would be living in Israel. He’s in UK.
I mean, both sides are bad, killing civilians in retaliation for a terror attack is still killing civilians. But to pretend that the terrorism is somehow justified is just wrong.
The sentiment, when I wrote my comment, was largely “Hamas good, Israeli bad”, which was just baffling.
Both sides have done horrible things, but only one 100% extremist and wants to rid the world of certain group of people. Remind you of a particular regime from the 40s?
Of course the whole situation is more nuanced, but that’s the brass tacs, and I just can’t wrap my head around how anyone can be pro Hamas.
You should have uncritical support of Palestinian resistance.
Its okay to have critical support of organisations like hamas.
We’re also left in a situation where Hamas is the most powerful group in the fight for Palestine because Israel funded them in the 80s to take power away from the more sane leftist PLO.
Nothing deserves uncritical support imho.
Always uncritical support for oppressed peoples resistance against oppression
Israel’s government supported and enabled Hamas because it was expedient. And to weaken credible self determination movements like PLO.
Israel created this situation.
Germany supported and enabled Hitler because it seemed convenient. Yet, we don’t blame the enabler or bystander for the actions of criminals and terrorists. Hamas is responsible for what Hamas does.
Irrelevant to today’s leadership challenges. You cannot undo what happened 30 years ago
Israel created the situation, which is not irrelevant.
It’s neither that simple nor relevant to the current situation.
There’s a “both bad” crowd here, totally rejecting reality, and then a surprisingly large pro-terrorism crow
While I am extremely sympathetic to Palestinians who are totally fucked by Israel as well as Israeli citizens who are caught in a crossfire and victims of terrorist attacks, both sides are very much bad here, in terms of leadership.
That the Israeli government has effectively no plan for long-term de-escalation and encourages far-right hardliners is unacceptable. That Palestinians are increasingly clinging to Hamas and calling for Israel’s destruction is unacceptable.
Regardless of the history (and I am very aware of the repeated and at times extremely generous peace plans put forth), what matters is competency and leadership today, and the leadership of both sides here has unflinchingly chosen escalation
As a result, there is no option for Israel after this attack except an overwhelming show of force, which is both tragic and as clear and example as you can get that recent leadership has utterly failed to provide genuine safety.
You do know what quotes are, right? The things OP wrote are direct excerpts from the article, which you’d know, had you bothered to read it before commenting. Instead you chose to waste your time, going through OPs posts smh…
There’s a “both bad” crowd here, totally rejecting reality
but this isn’t a black and white situation. This is literally the case right now. Both sides are absolute shit.
You don’t always have to take a side. You’re allowed to say a Conflict is too complex to take a clear side in it.
Yes, only the one side commits acts of terrorism. Because the Israelis are a government sanctioned by the UN what they do isn’t terrorism. Oh wait, they’re still a bunch of land stealing baby killers. So yeah, hope they all kill each other and the west stops pissing money away on supporting Israel.
This reads like one of those “I have some black friends, here’s why they’re inferior” type of rants. Lol
Absolute horseshit.
Your entire comment history makes it clear you live in the UK.
You’re taking advantage of this horrific attack on Israel to do some sick false flag attack, that’s basically: “I’m an Israeli and we deserve this!”
What gave you away was that ignorant"apartheid" bullshit. Anyone living in Tel Aviv knows full well that Muslims and Arabs have full citizenship rights in Israel, including leadership roles in government.
What an asshole.
Real Israelis are dying because their genocidal neighbors who have been trying to kill them for decades have just made another attempt, and you’re here lying so that your can both-sides this issue?
Disgusting.
I didn’t use the word apartheid but it absolutely is. And individual Israelis don’t deserve this any more than the Palestinians deserve it. But your country is in the grip of absolute fanatics who absolutely will not settle for peace.
Israel has the 4th or 5th largest military in the world. The Palestinians have home-made rockets and stones. Don’t you dare play the victim.
Because if they didn’t have one of the largest and powerful militaries, they would’ve been genocided again.
You have to be pretty stupid to think that whoever has the better weapon is the bad guy.
Israel is the only party with the power to end this.
Quite the contrary.
They offered the most generous peace deal in history, and Palestinians turned them down.
Palestinians want the right of return, which would allow Palestinians to claim Israeli citizens in such numbers that they would be able to vote to turn Israel into an anti-Jewish theocracy. It would be the end of democracy in the region, and the end of all the Jews in short order.
That’s been the Palestinian sticking-point.
Israel can’t end that.
If I came in to your house and started claiming rooms, and kept saying I’ll stop if you agree that we split the house, I have a feeling you wouldn’t want to agree or say it’s a generous deal.
Oh well, if one guy disagrees, the historical record must be wrong!
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So, what’s it’s like to be a Jew Nazi? Like how do you justify being a member of an oppressive regime trying to control and subjugate an ethnic group into a large ghetto? All your countries problems are clearly their fault. You better kill them all. Makes total sense.
I hope the world remembers this the next time they want to start calling Israel apartheid for building security fences on their borders.
For their entire existence they’ve lived with genocidal neighbors who would, in a heartbeat, murder all Jewish children and wipe them from the map.
Palestinian terrorists have been raining rockets down at Israeli civilians constantly for years.
But if Israel does a targeted, surgical strike of terrorist infrastructure, CALLING the buildings ahead of time to people evacuate, and even dropping a warning shot first… There is no end to people calling Israel the villain.
Hell, people lose their shit if Israel bulldozes a house that Palestinians were using as a terrorist base.
Glad to see at long last that the world is remembering who the actual terrorists are, and finally backing Israel.
There are so many things I could say to this, but I’ll just leave these here instead:
As some gamers would say: Git gud
That just shows that Israel has the better military. Everyone already knows that.
It has nothing to do with who is justified in the conflict.
If 10,000 people wielding rocks tried to take over the Whitehouse, I’m pretty sure we’d see 10,000 dead people with rocks in their hands. Does that make them the good guys?
Palestinians have been TARGETING Israeli children for death. Israel had been targeting military targets, and with a better record of minimizing civilian casualties than even the United States.
… Let’s it put it this way: if Palestinians put down their weapons, this conflict would be over in a matter of months.
If Israel out down their weapons, Palestinians would murder them all. It’s in their elected leaders’ charter, for fucks sake.
🙉🙈🙊
You just look up Israeli snipers and killing children if you want to talk about targeting children.
I mean you had plenty of people try to take over the white house on Jan 6 and not a lot of them were shot.
Also by your rock example, are you telling me you think all of the 31,000 Palestinians killed by IDF or settlers in 2018 were active combatants?
So thought crimes are worse than killing people. That is some just top tier justification there. It’s almost like mass murder gets people to hate you.
Read the fucking room. Or better still, the article. Israel is the aggressor and has left the Palestinians nothing to lose.
I’m sorry but that’s not true, there are going to be consequences for this. Israel cannot back down now because it sets an absolute precedent that you can do shit like this to get your way. I do not agree with Israel’s policies in the region or the atrocities that they certainly have committed but this… this has the power to turn public opinion. The repercussions are going to be horrifying and hamas knows it, and they don’t care.
This is the absolute truth. People on here are nuts cheering on Hamas. Keep defending terrorists. This will be devastating to everyone living in Gaza. The Israelis are going to want to level Gaza. There are 2 million people in Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Hamas’ actions today have signed the death of possibly tens of thousands of people.
I don’t like the Israeli government. I don’t like Hamas. Both sides are bad and do very bad things. But there are millions of people living in this region and the escalation today was done by Hamas and it puts these millions of people at risk. They went to a concert and kidnapped young adults, basically children. Slaughtered civilians at bus stops and in their homes and these are the pictures the world will see. The world powers have made it clear that Israel has their full support. Like it or not. Israel has no choice but to wipe out Hamas. Politically, Netanyahu needs to show strength, his life depends on this victory. This is his chance to unite Israel under him when mere weeks ago there were protests in the streets of Jerusalem. It’s an opportunity for him to sieze power and protect himself from the punishment for his crimes.
This will end horribly for the Palestinian people more than anyone else. Israel will lose much less people, but they’re all still people. All people dying. But make no mistake, Israel will hit back way harder, and they will win.
This shitty world was better yesterday before this happened.
Yes, they should just lay down and take it. Maybe we should give them all some of those super loud rape whistles and they can just all blow them constantly. That will surely make the Israelis stop.
I did read the room. Caught you in a pathetic lie.
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ADL money probably
That ain’t it, chief. Israel is a violent colonizer. Individual Jews are often persecuted for being Jewish. Those are separate and unrelated statements.
If you want to know who the lying shill is, look elsewhere in the thread. I called him out, and you can see his comment history for yourself.
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I believe it is not possible,
not for me,
not for you,
to have a complete and balance view of the whole situation. Trying to do so would drive me mad with anger and desperation.
