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I can't speak to sentiments in Europe post 9/11, but I think this:
is wrong. The people celebrating had a problem with very specifically with Israel, and it was absolutely personal. Israel had been bleeding reputation for a while, and 10/7 was a momentary shot in the arm, precisely because you had a very visible group of people openly celebrating it in a way that seemed to validate Zionist critiques of anti-Zionism. They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards (not helped by Netanyahu being an extraordinarily repellent figure to all but the far right), which is when their reputation really started to tank.
This really cant be true IMO. Unless something like 99.9% of people who have allegedly "soured" on Israel post 10/7 are just too stupid to understand what the response was always going to be. You can't have a neighbor that launches hundred + man raiding bands into your territory where 1000+ of your people are killed, 200+ are taken hostage, and thousands of others injured, maimed, raped, not to mention the property damage. The only reasonable response to that is the maximum response.
If a Mexican cartel did that with the support (even tacit) support of the Mexican government and a hostile foriegn nation there would be no more Mexico. Everyone involved would obviously be killed, the government deposed, a gigantic DMZ imposed on their norther border, the country would be divided up into a bunch of territories administered by our local generals at first, later we'd let some local puppet have some semblance of authority. And the country would simply be broken up as well. Baja would be one protectorate, for maximum humiliation we'd call 3 of the new territories we create, "South New Mexico", "South Arizona", and "South Texas". No amount of civilian casualties would set us off of carrying out our goals, and no amount of dissent to our administration would be tolerated, up to and possibly including forcing them all to switch to English as an official language.
And if you asked any American President or Speaker of the House 1865-2000, "well isn't this proposal by some anon anti_dan a little extreme?" They'd first laugh at you, then tell you the US has a rich history of pseudonymous political writers, then tell you I'm a moderate, and a few would say something like, "thats a good idea, do we have to wait for the Mexicans to attack?"
This is demonstrably not true. We know because it has happened. The punitive expedition in Mexico did not involve any such tactics, and the US invasion of Afghanistan was not a brutal scorched earth campaign in the slightest.
I'm sure some would agree with you, but most of them would call you an absolute barbarian.
The problem in the US, and Israel, and indeed basically every country, is that there is a significant subset of the population with incorrigibly brutal instincts. It is incumbent on the rest of us not to indulge them, however much they try to promise that their methods are the key to success. Their instincts are terrible, and will constantly lead you to doing appalling things that will make your situation worse in most cases.
The problem is not incorrigibly brutal instincts, but the opposite: Tolerating crybullies who utilize their own citizens as human shields.
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I think this sentiment gives the lie to the idea that there was much goodwill among people on the left and center to begin with (which is the group that dominates traditional media). The messaging from these people basically seems to have been "Yes 10/7 was a terrible thing, but Israel shouldn't actually have done anything about it". The whole MSM/NGO machine was primed from the outset to hyper-focus on every negative outcome the war had on Gazans and portray them as a particular consequence of Israel's uniquely evil conduct, conveniently forgetting that war always negatively affects civilians, particularly those whose leaders try to maximise their own suffering for PR purposes (using human shields, firing from hospitals, stealing aid etc.)
chadyes.jpg
Or, to elaborate and contradict myself: Israel should have done something about it, but not what they did. Israeli leadership wants this conflict to have the moral logic of a war for survival rather than a policing action; they simultaneously want to deny the sovereignty of Palestine and deny any responsibility for Palestinian welfare. The problem is that these positions are incoherent and unjustifiable. Israel occupies a position of near-total superiority over Hamas and other Palestinian militants. Even in the worst case, it does not face anything even remotely approach an existential threat from these groups.
It's been two and a half years of high intensity conflict in an extremely confined geographical space; the victims of 10/7 have been avenged seventyfold, and yet Israel's position is, basically, that they are going to keep bombing Gaza so long as there is evil in the hearts of men (or the President pardons Netanyahu). If they are conducting this war in a good faith effort to end Palestinian militancy (which I question), they should contemplate whether there is some flaw in their strategy.
Was it, though?
There's a lot wrong with this post, but to keep things focussed:
Gaza has had complete sovereignty since the mid 2000s. So I don't see any contradiction in Israel treating the conflict as a war.
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I think this is just a straight up lie. I honestly can't recall anyone expressing even the slightest amount of sympathy for Israel in the immediate wake of October 7th. The idea that everyone in the West was on their side until they retaliated just seems flatly untrue to me. Even to this day I still encounter pro-Palestine types claiming that October 7th was a false flag, or that Hamas only attacked military targets (and the hundreds of hours of footage of their squaddies murdering civilians at a music festival were created with AI). Even pointing out that Hamas raped women and abducted people is widely seen as tantamount to endorsing Israel's "genocide" (massive enormous scare quotes).
From this comment I feel like you most be an incredible bubble. The MSM media from Fox to MSNBC was incredibly supportive of Israel after the October 7th attacks. The boomercons and boomerlibs started out 100% in lockstep support of Israel along with the entire US political establishment. Except maybe the squad which is 4 out of 435 representatives. Young leftists and groypers were very loud, especially online. And the young leftist were loud in deep blue urban cores and on elite university campuses but were pretty clearly a minority.
Now as the war dragged and increasingly turned into a slaughter with no real military objectives a lot of people turned on Israel. Which is why now the pro-Palestine position is the highest it's ever been. Israel had plenty of goodwill in America but they burned it up by gradually showing their opponents right. And I include myself in this I was very supportive of Israel in their initial fight against Hamas but gradually turned against them over the course of the war. And I know several people in the same boat. I could be in a bubble as well but polling seems to show that there was a real shift in opinion during the war in Gaza.
It's called "Europe", and specifically Ireland.
Ireland being aggressively in the tank for Palestine is not exactly new, but it is also an outlier. It certainly does not reflect American sentiment.
Back when the PLO was uncomplicatedly a terrorist organisation, the IRA, ETA and PLO saw each other as ideological allies and almost certainly cooperated operationally.
The dominant strain of Irish nationalism is anti-British first and foremost, and therefore anti-Western Civ by implication, which is why it is so hard to organise a right-populist party in Ireland, despite the obvious unmet demand for anti-immigration politics.
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That's quite the bubble, yes.
For what it's worth, post October 7th, I recall a massive amount of support for Isreal from a large number of right-wing coded spaces, though perhaps that's my bubble in action.
...conversely, I'm also seeing a number of that same space react negatively to getting dragged into a war with Iran, while the other half has simply devolved into Holden Bloodfeast.
In Australia it felt like the whole Gaza plight/anti-Israeli thing didn't really spin up till after a couple months of the October 7 attacks
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I meant it was not personal in the sense that it was not about the individuals who died. Of course it was indeed about Israel, just like the reaction about 9/11 was about the USA.
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