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Even saying "very unsafe" is an example of exactly the kind of thing I'm complaining about. In an actuarial table of how Israelis met their ends since the founding of the state, would "being intentionally killed by the IDF to prevent them from being taken hostage by groups hostile to Israel" even crack the top hundred most common causes of death? The top five hundred? The top thousand? No, obviously not. And yet critics of Israel have this obsessive fixation on the Hannibal directive as evidence of how uniquely barbarous the nation is - when in reality, a counterfactual world in which the Hannibal directive didn't exist would only mean a tiny handful of Israelis would still be alive.
Let me put this in terms that you might find more agreeable: being shot dead by a police officer is a live possibility for black Americans in a way it isn't for black Britons, or indeed black citizens of just about any European country. But if you were investigating the causes of the reduced life expectancy among black Americans relative to other ethnic groups, "risk of being shot dead by police officers" shouldn't even enter into the equation. It's evidence of a mindset warped by political partisanship.
This is nonsense in the same way that people argue terrorism kills less westerners than sharks or lightning strikes and therefore caring about terrorism exposes some bias or ignorance. With your same logic, one can show that traffic accidents or obesity is much more dangerous to average Israeli than any hostile action as well. What are you arguing about then? Let’s get cutting the IDF budget for healthy eating campaigns.
But of course this is all atrocious nonsense. Just like how you should of course care many orders of magnitude more about a sentient adversary trying to kill you compared to random accidents, your own state security forces murdering you knowingly to avoid an awkward situation for the politicians is something again many orders of magnitude worse and more troublesome.
Sure, it's more troublesome. But as I've gone to great lengths to argue and contrary to your and the OP's framing, Israelis are not "very unsafe" because of the existence of the Hannibal directive. Ostensibly, this thread isn't about how "troublesome" the Israeli government is, but how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations.
Is the Hannibal directive a troublesome policy for which the Israeli government ought to face criticism? Of course, I've never suggested otherwise. Should it factor into any honest, disinterested discussion of how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations? No, obviously not. Surely no one would dispute that a random Israeli civilian is orders of magnitude less likely to die violently than a randomly selected civilian of any other Middle Eastern country - and none of those countries, to my knowledge, have any official policy analogous to the Hannibal directive. I'd even go so far to say that, given the rate of civil war, ethnic cleansing and political repression, a randomly selected civilian in any other Middle Eastern country is vastly more likely to die at the hands of that country's security forces than a randomly selected Israeli civilian is.
Israel is not supposed to be “a Middle Eastern country”. It’s supposed to be a European colony situated by historical coincidence in Middle East, offering safety to a minority religious group of Europeans who deemed themselves too vulnerable in Europe. If the best you can say in favour of this country that it offers its citizens better survival rates than the civil war Iraq or Syria, then it’s quite a failed project. This is of course not a fringe remark, there is a reason why vastly more Ashkenazim live in the US than in Israel and Israel is turning into a madhouse of the most lunatic religious Ashkenazim and low human capital Mizrahi Jews.
Actually, I can do better. It has the 20th highest life expectancy in the world, ranking above numerous European nations including many in Western Europe. Its intentional homicide rate is marginally higher than most of Western Europe, but given that these murders are overwhelmingly concentrated among the Arab citizenry, the country seems to be doing a pretty good job at its stated mission of serving as a safe haven for Jews in particular.
Great news! Now that we established Israelis live long enough and we shouldn’t care about them dying of causes which aren’t statistically important, we can finally stop sending them massive amounts of direct and indirect aid. Imagine how many Africans can be saved from aids in exchange for stopping a single ballistic missile hitting Tel Aviv.
Aren't you Turkish?
Yes I am. Turkey is an ally and military/economic partner to Israel and has always been, regardless of what politicians on both sides like to say in public.
Also I live and pay taxes in a country that does send the direct/indirect aid.
You know better than me, but that's... not the impression I've gotten. Hosting members of Hamas doesn't look like what a military partner to Israel would do. I've also seen reports suggesting Turkey is involved in financing Hamas activities (they're Israeli sources, though I don't know what they'd stand to gain by lying about it).
You live in the US? I'm not aware of any other country that sends aid to Israel.
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I'd have no objection to that, personally.
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