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HAPPENING NOW: ISRAEL LAUNCHES MASSIVE ATTACK AGAINST IRANESE NUCLEAR FACILITIES—AIR RAID SIRENS HEARD ALL ACROSS ISRAEL—MASSIVE AIR ACTIVITY OVER IRAQ-SYRIA BORDER—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS CONFIRMED IN TEHRAN INCLUDING COLLAPSED BUILDING—IRANIAN FIGHTER JETS SEEN TAKING OFF FROM AIRSTRIPS NEAR TEHRAN—BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES REPORTED IN IRAN—REPORTS OF EXPLOSIONS AT US BASES IN IRAQ—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HEARD NEAR IRAN’S NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY—VIDEO FOOTAGE SHOWING NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY BURNING—UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT THE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE IRANIAN MILITARY HAS BEEN KILLED IN A TARGETED STRIKE
—Inb4 source
—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops
Regarding culture war aspects of this: I predict more Israel Bad posts everywhere. I have already seen some on reddit saying they'd rather that Iran have nukes than Israel because Israel has been the main aggressor in the region since its existence and Iran having nukes would help reign them in. I doubt we'll get huge rallies of people shouting "Free Iran!", though.
"Don't paint the devil on the wall"
For a while now, the Left has made a past time out of calling Israel every bad name under the sun. In contrast to those accusations, Israel has behaved honorably in victory. Over the last century, Israeli moderates have proposed many 2 state solutions despite overwhelming victories in wars that were started against it. They've withdrawn from territories they've won and prisoners of war were treated in line with the western standard. Despite every war being started by the Arabs, the left labels Israel as the evil ones.
More recently, (Sharon) acted with generosity by withdrawing from Gaza in 05. In return they got rewarded with Hamas. Through the Arab spring, Muslim nations performed the worst acts of violence on each other, as the western left cheered on the revolutionaries. During this period, Israel remained a peaceful place for its resident Arabs. Yet, 2 newly empowered enemies emerged with self-professed genocidal intent (Houthis and Hezbollah). They're armed by Iran, who through proxy, attests to the same genocidal intent. Once Iran starts developing nukes, the west once more, tried to extend an olive branch. JCPoA (Iran Nuclear deal) was signed. And once again, this generosity was rewarded by resumed development of nukes. Yet, in the eyes of the western left, Israel remained the evil one.
This is where the the first domino fell. Netanyahu solidified his power because the Israeli left was left with no political space to maneuver in. Israelis hadn't changed, but the clearly rising antisemitism among the western left and its Islamic neighborhood pushed Israelis to vote for the one cynical hawk in town : Bibi. While politics shifted right, the average Israeli remained a normal person. 2012-2023, Israel greatly expanded labor permits so Gazans could work on the Israeli side. (~200k daily cross border workers). At home, things were stable.
Then you got, Oct 23. Frankly, the reaction to the tragedy was despicable. I was shocked by the complete lack of empathy from elite western institutions and a "they had it coming" undertone. I think this broke the average Israeli for good. Imagine if your daughter got raped and murdered. Then your friend says "she had it coming". I know I'd see red. A century of accusations being called the devil. If you're going to be called evil either way, might as well go scorched earth and solve the problem once and for all.
Think about it:
this is quite tendentious.
Israelis have changed, and will change more. Demographically, politically, culturally. Israel today is not some offshoot of Western Civilization but a higher-IQ Middle Eastern nation, with all that follows. This narrative is getting very stale.
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October 23? what happened 16 days after the terror attack?
I meant October 2023.
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I think that's "Oct. '23."
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Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
He did that because he concluded it wasn't demographically practical to settle, demolish Palestinian houses and do the standard divide-and-conquer tactics in Gaza. Sharon was not a generous man in any reasonable sense. His military career included war crimes, he founded Unit 101 and is responsible for the Qibya Massacre amongst other things.
Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that "Qibya was to be an example for everyone," and that he ordered "maximal killing and damage to property". Post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
It really isn't this simple. The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back, along with unarmed protestors. There's a lot of bad blood on both sides. The Arabs are not nice people either. Wars are unpleasant, borders are formed by bloodshed. However, it is inappropriate and ahistorical to valorize Israel as though they're pure good facing pure evil.
Where is the outrage over all the Palestinians who get sodomized or tortured in Israeli prisons? Israeli parliamentarians have said, on camera, 'oh they had it coming, they're Hamas, we can do anything we like!' The Muslim world are the ones who get upset about this, along with people who read various UN or Human rights reports on the subject. The 'free palestine' leftists are doing the same thing as you, seeing both real and imagined evils of one party, siding with the other and then ignoring their own flaws. This kind of skewed perspective eventually creates support for unsound policies, rousing excessive passions about other people's wars.
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
I once again ask that literally anyone provides me with evidence of this. Not bootstrapped citation farming and not faked x-rays. Specific, unambiguous footage of Palestinian civilians being murdered.
https://x.com/search?q=palestinian%20civilian%20shot&src=typed_query&f=media -- you won't find it here. I've looked in darker places and found nothing there, either, but I could have missed it.
What's so galling about this claim is with the volume of media coming from Palestine and the alleged frequency of the outright murder of civilians, there should be at least one glaring example. One I would have heard by specific reference as it made the rounds among judenkritikal lefties and righties alike. Instead it's always the generic, "They're shooting kids," not "They shot this specific child, here's his body, you'll notice the distinct lack of a head."
I don't give a shit about Israel, I don't want a penny going to them if we don't get a dime back and I don't want one single American dying for that flag. I just want the truth, and being told something exists when I would have seen if it did, and when I then look for it and still can't find it, makes me quite certain the videos don't exist, because the deeds they would show haven't happened, because Israel does not indiscriminately murder civilians. They do murder civilians, many civilians, as is the nature of war in casualty of their real targets. It's just that you can't allow your enemy in war to dictate how you fight. If they use human shields thinking it will save them, you shoot the hostage then the soldier, you blow up the apartment building or hospital. If those shields know with certainty they will be killed by Israel, then it's on them to put down the ones who hold them hostage, and if they don't, they get what they deserve.
It's that old chestnut, where the white supremacy of yesteryear emerges in intersectional politics that can't help but treat whites and especially white men as the only beings on this earth with full agency. The Palestinians either have agency or they don't. If they can't see that there is truly no win condition and behave accordingly, Israel should rule them.
No such Word in any German dialect I know.
I didn't want to slur all criticism as antisemitism, thus my poor attempt at a novel term.
German is very permissive with compount neologisms, but the constituent parts must be valid. "Kritikal" is not. Maybe for nuclear physicists, but I don't really think so. Try "judenkritisch".
But also, please explain yourself. Why German in the first place?
Policy debate, or that's how I got to it, anyway. If you're not familiar or only passingly familiar, critical theory is sometimes (well, sometimes when I was in, probably dominant now) employed in the type of argument called "kritik," or Ks. Capitalism K, Securitization K, Biopower K.
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The instance I'm referencing is this one where he even got acquitted: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
But if you want you can do just about any internet search and find similar, albeit less egregious cases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/05/three-year-old-palestinian-boy-shot-by-israeli-soldiers-dies-in-hospital
Neither are what I requested, and neither are what are cited in the modern discussion of Israel and Palestine. The modern discussion says specifically there are immediate and frequent examples of Israeli soldiers outright murdering Palestinian civilians. A single example from 20 years ago that resulted in a full investigation and trial is none of these.
As for the other example:
A man who had every reason to lie said there had been no other gunfire. Had there been, it absolves the IDF. They would still be wrong to shoot the car, but they shot it because they were under fire and understandably assumed the worst. It's a casualty of war, it happens, it's not wanton murder. And to not make you think I take the IDF at their word, I never do, but they at least check. That article mentions the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, where the IDF admitted one of their soldiers fired at her. How many times has any Palestinian organization admitted a group they first claimed as civilians murdered by the IDF were in fact militants killed fairly? Has it happened a single time ever? If it hasn't, it's not because they've never lied about it.
That's the problem with articles, journalists wrote them. The writer of the second article is a person who is specifically motivated to defend Palestine and criticize Israel. I can't believe them, categorically, and again by the way, same for Haaretz or whatever Israel-favoring publications, I presume every sentence as untrue. This is why I ask for video.
What I am asking for is clear video evidence from the current Gaza War of a civilian being murdered. That they are objectively a civilian, so objectively civilian circumstances (Ideally, anyway, right now can't be held as a standard in Palestine) so a woman who could not possibly be concealing explosives or else couldn't be considered as in a place where that's a reasonable fear, or a child who can on-sight be determined as not carrying explosives--as this discussion can't be held faithfully without acknowledging one side employs women and children as suicide bombers--and that they are then clearly singularly targeted and shot. Ian Carroll, who I've liked clips by him, talks about it, Darryl Cooper, same, talks about it, IDF snipers wantonly dropping civilians, and it is those videos I have never seen, those videos I have looked again and again to find, and all I can ever get is people talking about the supposed incidents, not actually showing them. I don't want to watch them, but I need to know the truth more than I need to avoid the heartsickness from seeing the horror I already know is so much in this world.
What about the protests prior to the Gaza war where they gunned down a bunch of protestors from the other side of a fence?
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition
That should be a higher margin of 'israelis bad' since there was no major conflict going on at that time. I appreciate that civilians die in wartime. But we are approaching Tiananmen square level territory, just without the tanks or 'occupying a key area right outside of govt building' bit. And nobody outside the pro-Palestine people in the West seem to have ever heard of this, it allows a strange narrative of 'oh the Palestinians just woke up one day and decided to zerg-rush israel in the october 7 attacks' to emerge. If you shoot the protestors, it's going to weaken the 'peace' element. People are going to get grievances and be hateful when you shoot them.
It goes on and on and on... The Israeli military is, understandably, quite cruel and hateful of the Palestinians.
The event mentioned here is the 20-month long Great March of Return.
"Protestors" accepts framing and implies them as the righteous party. Week after week these groups showed up to "demonstrate" and week after week people there got shot and killed. At a certain point it's no longer "protesting," if it ever was, it's about optics, and if it's about optics, well -- TPOASIWID and the purpose of the Friday "protests" was to produce dead Palestinians.
"Gunned down" evokes imagery of incidents of massed concentrated fire at civilians, and that isn't right either. Across those 20 months, Israeli soldiers, I think almost all snipers did fire on Palestinians, totaling 9,204 injured and 223 killed. 46 are listed as "children" but the citation is "minors under the age of 18."
The one claimed definite child was this:
But even if this had been true, that a baby had died from tear gas inhalation, it wouldn't have been the IDF's fault someone brought a baby.
You will also find this recurrent. Any Palestinian aged 17 years, 364 days or younger is counted as a child. Children can use guns and toss Molotovs. 16-year-olds are not children and if one throws a Molotov at a soldier, whatever they get is what they deserve.
6,106 opportunities for video, or above, 9,204 total. Where the fuck is it? The absence is deafening. I am told to accept that thousands were unjustly shot and there isn't one single video? Not one single person over 20 months of "protest" thought "I should record this." Why would I accept this? I bet there is video, only it captures what I describe. A Palestinian tossing a Molotov or trying to breach the fence and getting their leg shot off or hit in the gut or groin or chest on a pass-through tumble from a kneecap.
As for that kneecapping, here's an interestingly candid article from Haaretz:
The sniper shot 42 people in one day, his partner 28. They're boasting or all but about shooting 70 people. I looked for video of this and found one: https://x.com/vic2pal/status/981095851010469888
Gunshot, he instantly falls, couple frames of the wound but it's not graphic. I think you'd have to know it's a gunshot wound to even make sense of it. (And of course you can't actually tell what's going on around him.)
This team in one day produced themselves 70 opportunities for video. Again, boasting or all but, "Yeah sometimes we hit people behind our targets. Bummer." Where's the video? We do know this happened, since both sides say it did. 70 opportunities from one team in one day for video of a bad shot.
Nothing.
From 2015, if something has supposedly happened more than 10,000 times and there isn't video of it, the simplest and only rational explanation is that it didn't happen. The excessively compassionate, I understand how their brains turn off, they just aren't the sort of people who can think past suffering, and that's often good. The inadequately cynical, who talk about how "you think you hate journalists enough but you don't," how much lefties lie, how the crusades were justified and Islam is shit and how much Muslims rape and marry their own cousins, how much human rights organizations are just masks for USAID State Department globohomo/lefty sinecures/looting public coffers, and how the UN is one giant fraud at best or Bilderberg NWO fronting at worst, to have their brains turn off on all of those things they loudly hate because of the word "Jew" is just fucking funny.
But, not an argument, and I'm not saying you're either of these. I'm only saying you should consider if you reached your position from pure reason as applied to evidence, or if you reached it because you read words that aligned with how you already saw things. That you felt convinced by those words when really you were flattered, and you think I might also be convinced. Words won't convince me, I am adequately cynical, I know both sides are nothing but liars, and that's why I want video.
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I think your demand is hard to meet simply because gore videos like this are not easily searchable. But that fact seems rather irrelevant to the question of whether or not these killings are happening. Unless the position is that these mainstream media outlets and human rights groups are lying about these deaths and the videos they allege to have of the events.
It's fair to argue they may not be easily searchable, they shouldn't be, but I'm not only saying I can't find them, I'm also saying I've never seen them in the wild, and I have every reason to think I would have. Darryl Cooper has specifically claimed, on X or Rogan or Tucker, that he has seen multiple videos of Palestinians being shot by snipers. He's former military, he knows people, it could be he's long had access to special channels, but that's not a satisfactory answer as it requires explaining why none have ever "breached containment."
Video is absolutely relevant. You understand this, a graphic video of a civilian murdered, such as a child being shot, would be an unparalleled optics victory for Palestine. I could believe most Palestinians would refuse to use so terrible a death even with what they would gain, but there are Palestinians who wouldn't refuse. Not even cynically, the virtuous who believe the world should know the truth and they show it in hope of preventing future deaths. It would mean convincing me and anyone else who would find video conclusive where words aren't.
My position is simple. Israelis are liars, Palestinians are liars, human rights organizations are liars, journalists are liars. There is total incentive to lie about everything by everyone involved. Israel to cover their ass, Palestine to maintain their existentially-required image of being the victim, orgs to justify their continued work or because they're aligned with Palestine, and journalists because they're journalists.
Palestine, actually, is waging effective fifth-generation warfare, their action is the optics of victimhood. Every civilian death is an attack, every civilian massacre is a major maneuver. This is the case regardless of the truth of their claims, as in if everything they claim is true and they aren't trying to do optics they just get them from their being attacked, it's the case as an emergent property. It's how they have to fight, it's all they have against an actual military. But because it's how they fight, it's exactly how they would lie.
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As if Trump needed lobbying to pull out of his predecessor's deal or the Republicans hadn't spent the previous year tarnishing it... (Yes, Iran sponsors terrorists and a reduction in sanctions would have made them more able to do so; no, that doesn't mean that the deal was a net negative, unless you have high confidence the nuclear provisions would have been ineffective. However, Trump may have genuinely thought that, in addition to the other political motivations.)
It's possible Iran has strategically maintained all-but-last-n-steps capability, so as to be next-best-thing to a nuclear threat, without the political problems (not just external - their theocracy is opposed) outright nuclear capability would bring.
Oh no, Iran sponsors terrorists? How awful, I'm sure the US didn't literally hand out ground to ground anti-tank missiles to "the good kind of terrorists" in Syria. Terrorism? Really? Is anyone left in 2025 who gives any weight these words?
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I've seen this claim made dozens of times in the past few months, and never with a source.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution#1043
Ctrl-f torture.
Thank you.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/05/palestinian-prisoners-describe-widespread-abuse-in-israels-jails
Was very easy to find.
Considering that Israel has denied the Red Cross visitation to their prisons post Oct 7 it shouldn't be a surprise that there are some sordid things going on.
Thank you.
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This is, at the very least, debatable. Egypt massed troops on the border and was making threats (and closed the Straits of Tiran after Israel said they would consider this an act of war). Whether Nasser was just saber-rattling for appearances, or really meant to attack Israel we may never know, but if you mass troops on the border of a hostile neighbor and talk about how you're going to finish the job you failed to do last war, you should not be surprised if your neighbor decides to take you seriously.
The guerilla tactics used in Israel's early days were not nice. Nor is the ongoing occupation. Israelis and Arabs are certainly both guilty of war crimes. That said, you seem like most dedicated Israel-haters to take every Hamas PR release at face value while playing down Palestinian atrocities. Israel might not have a lot of charity left for Palestinians, but they'd still take even a disadvantageous deal if they actually believed it would lead to peace. (Obviously, the likelihood of this now is very close to zero.)
Israel isn't pure good facing pure evil. Israel has as much blood on their hands as every other country, and more than most, but they're facing people who are even worse. Sorry, that's the truth, and I have sympathy for Palestinians, but both their government (what there is of it) and, frankly, their culture, is terrible. Even other Arabs hate Palestinians and couldn't care less about dead Palestinian children except as props to make Israel look bad.
Maybe we should just abandon Israel and let them sink or swim on their own. I'd actually be okay with that, as long as there are no crocodile tears when Israel says "Fine, we'll show you what a genocide actually looks like."
Foreign intervention on behalf of local proxies seems weighted towards Israel only because Israel seems to have the best ROI for stability generation. Supporting Iran lead to its revolution, supporting Iraq lead to the Gulf War, etc etc etc. Despite that, CENTCOM still has to swing its dick to shower 'regional support' jizz to thirsty Saudis and the Gulf States because without that the whole region goes even further to hell. Its a shit pot with shitty players that will blow up the casino if they aren't bankrolled by a big daddy somewhere, and US/West either plays big daddy or China gets more notches in its Belt (and road). Israel just happens to be the least shit player in a table full of self destructive retards (including Israel). Besides, foreign intervention restrains more than enables. Were it not for foreign intervention Israel would have had parades through Cairo and Damascus in 73, if not 67, and effective control of the Suez in 50whatever. Israel actually produces shit that makes sanctioning it ineffective, just like how Russia and even Iran sanctions don't even matter. If Israel truly had a free hand, they'd force all the Gazans to be Egyptian citizens and West Bank to be Jordanians, like the Palestinians Territories were before the Egyptians and Jordanians got sick of their shit. Forced displacement is nothing foreign to the middle east, and the last great Palestinian exodus was the Kuwaitis kicking out 400k Palestinians. Its well known that no one gives a single shit about 130k Jews expelled from Iraq back in the 1950s, and we can see no one gives a shit about Arabs kicking out other Arabs. Any foreign intervention on behalf of Jews is conducted out of necessity to keep a tenuous balance beyond the Middle East in place, not out of love for the Jews.
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Some people think "self-defense" can only begin once you already got punched, or stabbed, or shot. If somebody takes out a gun, aims at you, shouts "I'm going to kill you, motherfucker!", and tries to press the trigger, but you're quicker on the draw and shoot first - you're the "aggressor". Or at least they pretend to think so when Israel is concerned. Of course, there are also plain old antisemites for which Israel is bad in any case, and they are just need to find the reason why.
You have a very appropriate username for that. Having Han shoot first or second was a deliberate choice that Lucas famously went back on.
If a little child tells you, "When I grow up, I will kill you", when are you allowed to kill him in self-defense? When he says that? When he starts learning about guns and toxins and explosives? When he makes his first unexpected attempt on your life? When he reaches the age of criminal responsibility?
There are a lot of caselaw considering the question of imminent danger.
The case here though is more like the kid grew up, tried to kill you many times, with guns, toxins and explosives, and this time showed up at your door with some friends, all wielding firearms and shouting "we will finish the job this time!".
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Are we still talking about Palestine?
Yes. Palestinian children, to be precise.
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Actually what’s worse is that because of this constant Israel = Bad rhetoric, there’s actually less incentive to not go for broke. Gaza was “genocide” on Day 1. Exactly what does Israel get for not doing exactly that — other than more attacks? Why not simply raze everything and put up Israeli 7-11s where Gaza and the West Bank are now, rather than waiting for the next one? Why not settle Judea? Why not go crazy if you’re crazy anyway.
If everything is Genocide, nothing is Genocide. The cooler heads currently in power in Egypt and Jordan are the ones imploring Israel to not go forth with the mass exodus, because Egypt and Jordan are even less ready to deal with an eternally hostile population than the Israelis are. Egypt just kicked out several hundred 'peace activists' that wanted to go show their support for Gaza by marching into Rafah, and the entire world was just reminded that Egypts border wall with Gaza is even more intense than Israels. The neat new trick is that these border walls are there for Palestines benefit because 'if they were allowed to leave then the Palestinian cause would be extinguished', and I for one REALLY hope this logic takes full root everywhere because then every single asylum seeker will be denied on compassionate grounds. No, little Aylan, you must stay in shitholestan to keep the dream of the PKK alive.
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Somewhere here is a good observation about the importance of escalation dominance in the domain of information warfare.
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Because they're a tiny, weak country pretending to be a major power. 10 million people, 7 million of them Jews, cannot sustain significant long-term military capacity against even low-medium strength foes if they lose the support of the US. Israel's Gaza campaign is dependent upon US munitions and US support. They aren't even able to raze Gaza without US munitions 'forward-based' in Israel, de facto there for them to use.
US sanctions? They're done. Israel's high-tech economy goes straight to zero and the country disintegrates. How do you sanction-proof with such a small country? F-35s probably wouldn't last 6 months without the gigantic global supply chain of parts.
Much of this comment smacks of US centrism rather than contempt of Israel, though Israel certainly is consistently sneered at by everyone. Theres this weird fiction that the USA is God, that the USA simply flexes and all submit before its might, and that flexing is the only reason Israel is able to exist. It ignores the USA flexing on behalf of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and UAE and literally any asshole anywhere in the world that has positional relevance against US strategic threats.
Israel is, unfortunately, not merely a puppeteer that will be helpless once the glorious USA has cut off its strings and unshackled itself to this meddlesome burden of irrelevance. Sanctions don't work if someone has useful shit in the first place, as we see with Iran and USA still able to import all manner of European technologies never mind random Asian crap. Israel has a domestic tech base and production capacity that can be spun up irritatingly quickly, and the entirely of Gaza is within dumb artillery range, a capability that Israel can restart with little effort given that they actually manufacture their small arms themselves and are a net exporter of smart arms.
There is this worldview that the great act and the weak suffer as they must, and the defiance of the weak is merely due to the restraint of the great. Russia conducts itself in this way, as if their dominance is assured and their stumbling in Ukraine is an act of deliberately considered mercy on their part. And as Russia acts, so too does this current iteration of USA in its trade wars, where the first order logic is 'US trade is critical for all other economies, so they will all rush to surrender to our threats'. Its a nice comforting logic that means the weak inferiors are about to collapse immediately and all that must be done is to wake up and simply flick the switch to manifest reality. Flicking the switch to turn off Israel will see that country drowned in its own iniquities, but the bright light from Israel is less likely to be its burning and more the activation of its own backups.
No, they don't. China has a domestic tech base and production capacity. Russia has production capacity. Israel just produces a few high-end pieces in a giant web of European and American IP and supply chains. Intel has a fab in Israel, running on Dutch lithography equipment, itself made from German lenses...
Does Israel produce all of the umpteen million parts needed for aircraft and guided missiles? No. They import. They're heavily reliant on imported steel! There's no guns or shells or machine tools without steel. They have zero oil production, only natural gas. They're heavily reliant on imported energy. They're surely heavily reliant on all kinds of key industrial infrastructure (transformers, large turbines, construction vehicles).
If Western sanctions fall on Israel, the country disintegrates immediately since it's just impossible to sustain an advanced, high-tech economy at their low level of scale. America first is an entirely separate issue. Russia and America can afford to scorn the world to a certain extent, they're actually big countries. Size matters a lot. The US can't bully China or Russia or Europe with assured success but it can wipe the floor with Israel economically.
Iran isn't a specialized high-tech economy, they're sanctions-proofed and have a much sounder, more developed foundation in their industrial base. Iran actually is energy-secure and a net energy exporter. Iran is the 10th biggest steel producer, Israel isn't even on the list.
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Strong Abbas Araghchi vibes here.
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Given that most of their neighbors want them dead and gone, and not due to generic geopolitical tensions, that just sounds like withdrawing US support will put them in a position where their only hope for survival is to establish regional supremacy as quickly and forcefully as possible, since they really can't sustain a long-term war against a coalition. Very unstable, certainly, but better than slowly and inevitably being ground into the ocean.
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They even stole their nukes from us. They're the definition of a parasite.
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Probably because the liberal Democrat west still generally supports Israel, at least in most countries, and if they went full genocidal they’d lose the ability to ever play the holocaust/anti semitism card ever again (which still holds some cache, at least among the old guard in western institutions)
Rather, the people in the west are generally negative to Israel. Even Americans are net negative to Israel. Western politicians go against the will of the people and cuck endlessly to Israel regardless of what Israel does because of Israel's extreme influence. This becomes a problem when the voters are not onboard, yet they have to officially worship Likud.
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If I be a dog, beware my fangs.
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Well, I'd peg Iran as a good case of "bad guys who are in the right". I don't have much love left for the Islamic theocracy they are running and think there are many ways in which they deny human flourishing for no good reason at all, but also it seems clear to me that they have more of a popular mandate to run the country than anyone else does, and in particular they came to power as a sort of last-resort response to all sorts of alternative attempts of running Iran were tried and turned out to be more unjust.
As for Israel Bad, let me present an abbreviated case that Israel is in fact Bad. Really, in my estimation and value system, it is hard to think of a state entity that is more unambiguously evil: they stole land to build a murderous ethnostate (the last part already being bad in itself, if you subscribe to a certain brand of humanism); take, take and take from even their so-called friends while repaying the friendship with perfidy and treason, and use their extensive influence network to gaslight the friends into not even being able to coherently respond to said perfidy; and, worst of all, they come to be among the worst purveyors of hypocrisy and double standards anywhere to cover up for their actions, which I see as an attack on the idea of standards and rules, and civilisation built upon it, itself. If an Arab kills one random Israeli, they tell us, this is an atrocity of the highest order, retroactively justifying every abuse that not only this Arab but the grandfather of his cousin thrice removed was subjected to; if an Israeli kills a hundred random Arabs, this is maybe a little excessive and you really wish they would exercise restraint but of course their right to defend themselves should not be questioned? Those hundred probably included a lot of people who felt vaguely positively about the Arab who killed one Israeli before? Even their very founding myth does this - their target demographic suffered the great injustice of being murdered and expelled for the sake of someone else's ethnostate, so they will gloriously murder and expel an entirely unrelated people to get their ethnostate. The median Israeli, furthermore, seems about as complicit in this as any citizen can be complicit in the actions of their country - few other countries are as affluent, polyglot and well-connected, and I figure any Israeli who wanted to leave would be welcomed with open arms in most of the Western world. Certainly, if I were Israeli, I hope I would have the integrity to either leave or else accept any retribution that comes my way with the serenity of a repentant murderer on death row.
I think having the worst version of their standards applied to themselves is the most appropriate punishment for purveyors of double standards. Israel contends that 55k dead Palestinians (80% civilians) is a just response to 1.2k dead Israelis (68% civilians) (Wikipedia figures). If against all odds Iran came through and successfully applied the same ratio to them, I would not think the world became a better* place, but it would be hard to shake the feeling that it became a more just one, in the ruat caelum way.
*I do not reject the argument that net suffering even for Arabs in Israel (let alone net disutility for its Imperial Citizens) is lower than net suffering for Arabs in self-governed countries, but find it irrelevant. I wish for people to have the right to be governed by their own choice and consent, including the right to be governed badly.
Firstly I will say I don't have a camel in this race because I don't care much what two strangers do to each other. I don't think Israel is Good but its tough to convince me they're Bad:
It seems to boil down to: (1) they're bad allies to the US; (2) they treat their enemies as enemies. Now I will grant you (1), since you're probably right and I don't care either way. But I'd like to push back on (2).
So Israel is Bad for valuing one citizen over a hundred Arabs. Does Gaza value the life of a Jew equally to one of its citizens? Does Iran? I haven't researched what Gazans and Iranians think of Jews, or read anything their governments say about various attacks and grievances. I have however seen some Gazan propaganda television teaching their kids to hate Jews, so I know where I'd put my money.
Finally, I agree with you that Iran and Palestine are entitled to take their revenge on Israel. It seems Israel already thinks their enemies want that anyways. So, I also don't begrudge Israel turning their neighbors into glass. Actually I'm quite impressed with their restraint.
Israelis liquidated entire vilages, women children and all during the Nakba. They would deserve everything that's coming to them, were this universe even slightly just.
The Nakba resulted from a war the Arabs started, and it was a tea party compared to the displacement and massacres accompanying the partition of India and Pakistan. Somehow we manage not to deplore those states for it, seven decades on.
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One data point is Shalit, for whom Nethanyahu paid with 1027 Arabs in 2011. Of course, this was a terrible decision on Israel's part: releasing 280 terrorists serving life sentences will have expected costs much higher than a single Israeli life. But likely Netanyahu needed a cheap political win at the time or something.
With all the hostages taken on Oct-7, the market value of Israelis has really crumbled to the point where 200 Arabs are exchanged for for four female IDF soldiers.
(Arguably, the most valuable contribution an IDF soldier could ever hope to make to Israel's wars is to suicide when captured. Most soldiers can never hope to personally neutralize 100 enemies, but a captured soldier can prevent 100 enemies from being un-neutralized.)
This is precisely the rationale behind the so-called Hannibal Directive
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Palestinians appear to value a dead Israeli more than the lives of multiple Palestinians.
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I would care significantly less what they did if I weren't forced to be complicit in it, by way of taxes if nothing else (which also forces me to in fact be okay with some amount of being blown up by Arab terrorists in revenge, because per my own morality I do deserve it); but yes, I do in fact think that a 1:100 valuation, especially from a capable state, is an unacceptable defection against peaceful modernity as I envision it. In my ideal world, every state brazenly implementing such a value function in favour of its own citizens ought to be ganged up on by everyone else, until only countries that assign reasonable value even to foreigners remain. ((1) I'm not sure what sort of ratio I'm okay with; (2) I'm happy if all of Israel's enemies are next, should they prove that they still have such a preference function after Israel has been obliterated. Israel at least has provided circumstantial evidence that their relative valuation is not confined to a handful of countries.) Think of Russia/Ukraine as the usual comparison case - in the case of those two countries, neither actually dares to "treat their enemies as enemies" in the Israeli fashion, because they know full well that being the first to do so would invite massive Western retribution (if Russia does it) or at least a nearly as fatal downturn in Western support (if Ukraine does).
As for (1), it's not just the US. (I'm not American! The USS Liberty episode was just the starkest display of cuckoldry I could think of, and probably more compelling to our American majority.)
Is whats good for the goose good for the gander? The Arab states CONSISTENTLY display and act on their desire to destroy their proximate enemies, be it the neighbor or village or country or cousin. Israel isn't even the most devastating conflict each of their antagonists engaged in, with Egypt intervening in Yemen to lose more troops than the Yom Kippur War and Syria losing.... well, literally everything. Even their domestic conduct and respect for foreigners leaves much to be desired, as anyone who has ever set foot in any of those countries can attest. Try going for Haj if you're not of superior Arab or acceptable White blood, see how they treat you. If you put your value function as 'fuck these constantly defecting assholes', we have EXISTING proof of such actions being conducted ad nauseum. I maintain that the best path for the Israelis is to just buy out Carnival Cruises and go on a nationwide 4 year booze cruise, and let the region implode upon itself.
In general yes, and with the Saudis in particular I actually think they are long overdue for a drubbing on very similar grounds to Israel. (Since Saudi Arabia is not even remotely democratic, though, I think the moral case that its civilians deserve it is far weaker!) That being said, I think of the obligation to be a "good citizen" among the nations to only really come into full force after a certain threshold of national capability is surpassed - tasers and rubber bullets are appropriate for antisocial adults running wild, not antisocial children throwing a temper tantrum, with the latter being more appropriately subjected to gentler and more patronising modes of reeducation. If some random minnow on the order of Syria is impotently mouthing off against its neighbours, what they need is a stern talking-to and maybe a review if at some point it looks like they might be acquiring the capacity to making good on those threats.
Libya was run by a clown moron that looked like a parody of what a dictator should be. He was also sponsoring terrorist attacks that managed to actually kill a sizable number of people, in addition to just enriching many terrorists groups that were not competent enough to achieve their goals. The reality is that terrorism has a fairly low capability bar to clear, and maintaining the discipline of agents until a target of opportunity arises is the largest problem. Even after Gadafi died Libya still hosted terrorist training camps that resulted in the manchester bombing, killing dozens of actual children - prepubescent little girls not 17 year old bearded boys - to no response from the UK authorities. Perhaps the irritating Syrian minnow should not be brushed off as irrelevant just because you wish to focus energies on preferred aggressors. Thats not very aladeen of you if you only aladeen the aladeen aladeen.
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Probably, if you consider absolute value. They'd definitely accept more than one Gazan killed in exchange for killing a Jew.
The "You also value my property more than your life" meme but its Israel aiming a missile reading "You also value my citizens more than your own"
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It's probably not something I should make a habit of, but I feel compelled to give some support to Israel here. Israel didn't steal any land any more than anyone else won or lost land before and after World War II, but the difference is the reaction to them has been way crazier because they planted themselves in the middle of a sea of extremists based around a nucleus of religious sites (geez, how many holy sites are Muslims entitled to? The Jews just have a few right there, right?). Much blood has been spilled because there was no postwar liberal consensus in the Middle East as there was in Europe. The postwar liberal consensus had to be created by Israel basically all by itself, with limited success, as the situation in Gaza shows. Israel was making some serious progress on a two-state thing, but that whole deal was killed by rampant terrorist attacks, and due to these sustained attacks, the Palestinians have never been farther from their own state. That's never what they wanted, anyway; they want everything, river to the sea.
Israelis are considered more valued by both sides. You can see this based on the prisoner exchanges between Hamas and Israel. Always, Israel releases hundreds or thousands of militants in exchange for a handful of their own soldiers or civilian hostages. Hamas is glad to accept these deals that bear the implication that one Israeli is worth thousands of Gazans, so I can't blame anyone for believing it's true. But disproportionate casualties have always been acceptable in war, which is what this is. Those civilian to militant casualty ratios are not even out of the ordinary for war. Massive assaults on civilians have also always been a decent cause for war, especially ones committed by the literal government of a territory.
If Israel is an ethnostate (it probably is), it's not a very good one. Do you think that Nazi Germany would accept having a populace composed of 20% Jews?
Normally, I find the idea of actual genocide to be pretty terrible. Ethnic groups and DNA and culture are fascinating to me, and to see something like that die entirely is a huge bummer. Gaza tests this value of mine. Never has a people been more problematic than them and never has a people been more determined to reject their lot in life. Basically their entire purpose nowadays is to take back every square inch of Israel, no matter how impossible that is, no matter how many people on their own side and on the enemy side are killed. Before the 20th century, they absolutely would never have been tolerated. They would have been, at the very least, brutally slapped around until a huge percentage of the population was dead and the rest was too weak and scared to retaliate. If this is not done, this conflict will likely never end. Even forcibly moving every Gazan out of the area probably would not fix the problem, because they are extremely intent on getting their territory back, and distance does not stop the likes of the Houthis and the Iranians either.
I am a little fascinated by the right wingers who do not like Israel. For them, it's generally a much more obvious case of antisemitism than it is for left wingers. My father introduced me to the fact that antisemitism is really, really old in Europe. For Christians, it makes a lot of sense; they were a very radically different group that lived in close proximity to them, considered sinners, forced into a universally disliked profession as bankers, and there is some basis for the idea that they killed Christ and called down a blood curse upon themselves. This, plus random grievances accumulated throughout the centuries just from tallying up every negative incident they could find. For the non-religious, I do not know why they would dislike Jews in particular. My best guess is conspiracy reasons related to Hollywood or perhaps certain Holocaust deniers. If anyone here is agnostic or atheist or otherwise not a Christian, and really doesn't like Jews, please let me know your reasons. I'm interested, scientifically. My father really liked Jews before his, uh, awakening, and he hated Muslims. Now he basically loves Gazans and hates Jews, while still mostly hating Muslims in Europe.
Jews are politically minorities in a way that does not exactly endear them to the far right.
Why so many secular far right wingers(and in middle eastern conflicts, when forced to have an opinion, I simply support whatever side is better for local Christians. Ethnoreligious prejudices are how the locals make their decisions, after all) hate Israel I can't say- it is after all Jews being somewhere else.
Are you Arab? If not, how is supporting your perceived interests of Arab Christians comparable to "ethnoreligious prejudices?"
Can you be more specific about which "secular far right wingers" you think want "Jews being somewhere else?" Does supporting the goals of the "Jewish Lobby" result in American Jews emigrating or reduce the number of foreign Jews immigrating?
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The difference is that WWII land loss mostly affected belligerents, who had legitimate beefs going back centuries. Israel was built at the expense of Arab villagers who didn't really do anything to anybody. If you get injured in a mass brawl, you can't just go on to maul a random bystander and excuse yourself by saying that everyone in the mass brawl you just came out of suffered injuries.
I mean, they are clearly working on it. South Africa, generally recognised as pretty evil, always was minority-European.
Would it fix the problem on the Israeli side? They have already also grabbed parts of Lebanon (more, recently); how do we figure there would be a real limit to their quest for Lebensraum?
South Africa never was ethnonationalist project. Vast demographic stratum of not-coethnics is incompatible (with ethnonationalist ethnostate). Apartheid era South Africa was an attempt at ethnosupremacist caste society. Some similarities with multicultural empires (but without the position, resources and stature of empire) or American South. Agreed it was pretty evil, though, but accusations should be kept correct and precise. The post-apartheid "Kill the Boer" South Africa may be catching up on the relative evil.
It's also not super clear Israelis are "working on it", no matter is "it" ethnostate or South Africa. Israel seems content with 20% Israeli Arab population with civil rights. That attitude may change if the demographic balance ever tips the other way (not unlike how demographics became so contentious topic in Lebanon that no official demographic surveys are conducted), but orthodox Israelis seem to be working on keeping the favorable balance with the 6.6 fertility rate, so perhaps they can keep kicking that can forward until end of time.
Putting my realist glasses on: it's the same as for any other country: none, nobody can figure it out, there is no such limit other than established by tradition of peace. I don't think it as any special perfidiousness of Israel: no country in a habit of making war has had such limit, either, until perhaps they are clearly losing. If you are winning, there will be no shortage of warmongers who want to win some more. Britain never had any limit in enlarging the British empire. Success at defensive war may encourage starting offensive war: Revolutionary France wanted keep the Revolution, then they wanted natural borders at Rhein, and then Napoleon was at the gates of Moscow. In broad strokes, there are only two stable states: mission creep until eventual failure, or no war at all.
I like to bring up Denmark and Sweden: they had a tradition of trying to conquer/reconquer each other for centuries. Then, after Napoleon the military and political landscape changed, they stopped waging war due to circumstances, the circumstances became a habit, and after two centuries today nobody (up to lizardsman's constant) in either country seriously considers ownership of previously contested areas a just casus belli. Unfortunately it is never permanent, the mentality can changed with a concerted propaganda effort in one generation. So, nobody can guarantee limits to war aims, in general and not in this particular case.
Back to topic of Palestine. Until recently, the Palestinians and their supporters have had equal or upper hand at rejecting opportunities to begin the tradition of peace. Predictably, after few decades of that, cycle of war feeding itself and warmonger politicians with maximalist claims, they got what they wanted: there is few Israeli powers-that-be willing to entertain peaceful solutions like two-state. As long as neither side seriously considers peace, I view Israel equally just in waging the war as the opposing side.
Now do I like Israel and their policy of war? Less and less more brutal they become, but it is an untrue claim Israel has always been "unambiguously evil": at every window of opportunity for co-existence that doesn't feed the evil, Palestine and their backers have never took opportunity other than to make opportunity more remote; find more evil ways of fighting war and hurt "random bystanders", and never shown willingness to back away from plan to drive the Israel back to sea.
Not really related to main point, but I think this is bit selective. Israel has existed today longer (77 years since 1947) than "Germany" had existed as a country in 1939. If you count back to Confederation of the Rhine, you get a "beef" beyond 130 years, but you could count Israel starting from Zionist migration to Ottoman Palestine, and that started late 19th century. By standards of beefs going back to centuries, Israel/Palestine has been around long enough.
...yes, and Germany has basically only lost territory nonconsensually since its creation. In terms of lands it controls that were not German in even semi-recent history, at most you could make an argument about a narrow strip it took from Denmark in the very north, and there there was a corresponding longer history of mutual wronging between Denmark and various particular states that were later absorbed into the German fold.
Israel and Palestine are still around, and basically every piece of real estate Israel owns was stolen from ancestors of modern-day Palestinians. In this particular case, it is really hard to buy into the "it was out of their hand for so long, they should get over it already" argument - especially since Israel still continues expropriating and settling more Palestinian land, in brazen defiance of admonitions even from its "friends".
With some civil rights. I have actually been to Israel, and it's impossible to ignore how obviously the Palestinian population is being treated differently - there are villages fenced in by Berlin-style prefab concrete walls everywhere across the countryside, random checkpoints with separate, overflowing queues for them, parts of cities randomly locked off on the basis of some or another Jewish festivity with police filtration points that keep them out completely, etc.; I searched a bit and Amnesty has a much longer list including things that I would not have noticed during my fairly short stay.
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So history won’t change. I’m just like waiting for anyone to take a fair honest look at the ME. Israel isn’t perfect, but I think most people are hopelessly naive about just how warlike the Arab world can be. It’s just a bunch of war and honor cultures that are hopelessly aggressive against Jews existing in the region. Iran isn’t France, and Palestinians are not Hopi. Jihad is a major part of the current theological understanding of Islam, and not the internal kind of jihad.
Jordan was just helping defend Israel against Iranian drones. Saudis are doing jack shit to fight Israel and made it illegal to criticise prince Bonesaw in that regard. Arabs are mostly Quislings, actually.
Quisling because they made the devils bargain with the clerics following the grand mosque seizure. The Hashemites should have won over the house of saud, but they overrepresented their position to the colonial powers and could not capitalize on the fall of the ottomans. There is ONE polity that functions exceptionally well in the region on its own merits, and literally everyone ignores them for reasons that baffle me.
All Arab leaders wish to vacation in the West and fund such travels with their receipts from home. Their domestic political situations make reconciliation with the hardliners impossible because islamists rush to fill any political void and their ability to destroy what little influence the Arab nations have is quite astonishing. Left to their own devices, eternal repression and poverty is the only way the leader can keep his neck off a noose, and so they must beg and abase themselves to anyone willing to lend them some technical experts to keep their rigs flowing and the secret police happy.
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I had to Google the bonesaw reference. The Khashoggi(?) guy, right? Didn't that blow up just because he was a WaPo writer and because he
crossed state linesgot chopped up in an embassy? That was one of my earliest noticings about "current thing" programming. Suddenly 10,000,000 reddit threads about some literal who nobody cared about the day before.Obligatory I don't advocate "fingers first" bonesawings for anyone, but Khashoggi was an Islamist and his political complaints were there not being enough and the correct kind of Islamic rule. And then Americans lamenting this poor "journalist" as though he wasn't an advocate for something completely incompatible with our way of life.
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MBS annoys the purple blob for the same reason Trump drives them mad. They flat out refuse to obey the rules people weaker than them have imposed. It is wrong to kill a columnist, but if you really have to, please do it with discrete assassinations. It is so impolite otherwise. Their brains totally lack the capacity to understand how someone could grant women the right to drive and throw the activists that pushed for that in prison. You are enlightened and yet you have no trouble starving yemen to death. That makes you something even worse than a Trump, it makes you Kissinger. I know some people that have worked for him - and what they say - when things go good - they are really good, but if things go bad on a project - they go really bad really fast. I am quite interested if he will be able to pull off a modernized saudi arabia.
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"Mr. Bonesaw" is the Prime Minister and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia; he's not a literal nobody. The Washington Post may not have noticed him until he chopped up a journalist, but he was already Crown Prince at the time.
I think he was referring to Kashoggi
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Calling an Iranian an 'Arab' is the fastest way to make him hate you.
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This state of affairs reminds me of Kyle Rittenhouse a bit. One guy shooting three other guys? He has to be in the wrong, right? He's so violent. Well, actually, he's only violent because everyone around him is forcing him to be, and they're actually the unreasonable ones. But a lot of people disagree, some of them partly because they don't see the unreasonable ones as so unreasonable.
Who is playing the convicted child molesters in this analogy?
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I mean famously the Iranians aren't Arabs. An under appreciated aspect of the whole dynamic is precisely the struggle between the Persian/Shia side and the Arab/Sunni side. Iran has been remarkably resilient to civil conflict in comparison to the rest of the region.
And less famously, not all Iranians are Persians. A good ~30% of Iranians are of Kurdish or Turkic stock, for instance.
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I'm not sure it'll make a big difference. Months of civilians getting starved, displaced and blown up is quite different from a short, narrowly focused military operation targetting high-ranking members of a regime plus military/nuclear hardware. Israel's actions against Hezbollah didn't elicit much of a negative reaction.
The perception of Israel across the world has been in steady decline for the past 1.5 years. More Israeli warmongering and bombing just makes people dislike them more.
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Trump as well is speed running losing long term support. He's alienated the more libertarian voters by attacking Rand Paul and Massie, while having a really bloated pork filled spending bill. He's alienated the isolationists by continuing to provide intel to Ukraine, basically doing the same good cop bad cop routine he just did with Iran to claim neutrality while all the evidence points to continued support. He alienated the moderates and boomers with his poorly planned tariffs, even managed to alienate the pro tariff people by waffling too much on them. If he does the amnesty he was talking about yesterday his base is going to shrivel up. I've never seen this much hate before for Trump on right wing twitter.
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