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What exactly is Israel supposed to do? Not make a fuss about jihadist Muslims killing their citizens because it will mess up Trump's "peace deal" (read: humiliating capitulation virtually unparalleled in US history)?
If Trump wants to prostrate himself to the IRGC, he's free to do so, but when the Israelis said "Never again", it wasn't just an empty statement.
What's really funny is that Israel's enemies don't understand that it's America that protects them from Israel. The dissolution of the friendship between the US and Israel is not good news for Iran, Syria, etc.
Yeah, that's how peace deals work. Hezbollah has killed 4 Israeli civilians since the 2025 Gaza ceasefire. Israel has extracted more than enough Lebanese blood to get even.
Yes, I know that if Israel had their way they would turn the greater part of the Middle East into Gaza. The United States has an interest in preventing any more refugee crises. It would be good for Israelis to keep in mind that American foreign policy has many settings below "zero aid".
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It seems rather obvious that the Iran war was Israel's idea, and they managed to sell it to Trump.
There are ways they can respond to the odd missile which do not blow up the world economy. Blow up a few more pagers or whatever.
Come on. How many thousand Jews does Iran murder in their camps per day, again?
Sure, Oct 7 was bad, and Iran is partly to blame for arming the murderous thugs known as Hamas, but it was still just a terrorist attack, not a genocide. Personally, if I were arguing for Israel's side of things, I would stay the hell away from genocide rhetoric, because the party most likely to have crossed the line from ordinary war crimes to that is not Iran.
For example, they are demolishing villages in Lebanon. The aim is clearly to forcibly displace the native population. Arguably, that is already genocide.
Personally, I have very little sympathy for the objective of keeping Iran away from nukes. "A Middle-Eastern country run by bloodthirsty, slightly genocidal religious nutjobs has nukes" is something we have survived before. If we can get Iran not to develop nukes with some modest effort (e.g. Obama's deal), I am all for it. If we need to wreck the world economy to prevent it, it is simply not worth it.
We will just have to see, won't we? I am a bit skeptical that their current strategy of jeopardizing the opening of Hormuz will endear them to the autocrats of the gulf states. Israel does not have the manpower to occupy Iran. I think it is fair to say that cowing Iran through conventional air power has been tried extensively. Extending the bombing to civilian infrastructure will not help.
Perhaps they can nuke Iran, but at that point the gulf autocrats might feel obliged to do something about them for appearances sake, even if they secretly welcome them decimating a rival regional power. Their population does not get to vote, but Israel killing a few tens of millions of Muslims might still incite some anger.
Last year, Israel weathered the Iranian drone and missile attacks very well in part because the US and their regional allies were shooting them down. If the US decides that the crazies bombing each other in the ME does not concern them, things might turn out differently.
On a longer timeline, being cut off from US military tech will definitely hurt Israel. How many different weapon systems can a country of nine million citizens develop by themselves, really?
Well, you can survive a decent number of rounds of Russian roulette, too. Which isn't to say I'm an Iran hawk, but "very little sympathy" seems extreme.
Let me rephrase that. I think nuclear war -- even though probably not an x-risk -- is really bad and we should try to avoid things which make it more likely, including reducing the number of warheads, disincentivizing states from obtaining nukes and incentivizing nuclear disarmament.
Suitable tools to do that are diplomacy and sanctions. And first and foremost, international law. Sure, like all law, it is just make-believe, but in practice it works well enough. Denmark could afford a nuclear program, and if they felt that the Gemans were going to invade again sooner or later they would have one. Instead, they get to live in a pacified Europe where the marginal security offered by nukes is simply not worth it.
I feel that Trump and Bibi are just accomplishing the opposite. Now, I am fine with using Stuxnet to destroy Iranian centrifuges. Bombing their enrichment program is probably already an undue step of escalation (especially as it likely used intel learned from UN inspections), as is assassinating their nuclear engineers. Killing their head of state in a botched attempt at regime change sends a terrible message.
Any country in the world which has less cozy relations with Trump than the Saudis will notice that recently, one head of state got kidnapped and one got assassinated by him, and how it was basically impossible for these states to hurt the US militarily. They will also notice that North Korea was not targeted, and conclude that this likely has something to do with their nuclear weapons.
The Iran debacle showcases that in a world full of strongmen, you want nuclear deterrence. Any supporter of the Iranian regime who was on the fence wrt nukes will conclude as much -- Iran can't squeeze the balls of the world economy through Hormuz forever.
Netanyahu seems like a foolish hero of some Greek tragedy who wanted to thwart the prediction of some oracle and thereby causes it to be fulfilled. His and Trump's violent disregard for international law have made the world less safe everywhere.
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Not say this? For starters? Israel was actually doing pretty well with restraint and measured responses right up until Oct 7th when they (somewhat understandably but very foolishly) let Hamas provoke them into an orgy of violence that makes them look like just another band of murderous ethnic psychos.
Oct 7th definitely gave Israel a blank check... for Gaza. What the fuck did Lebanon do?!
I'm almost hoping that tweet by Israel's defense minister is misreported or... something. But it's all too believable regardless just from Israel's actions. Absolutely unhinged shit.
Yes it’s always lucky when a conveniently timed terrorist attack gives you an excuse to do exactly what you already wanted to do anyway. Russia, America, and William Randolph Hearst would approve.
It’s like someone who wants to blame Britain for WW2 since they were the first to declare war on the other party. But the fact that the bell only rang after the first punches were already thrown on the continent is irrelevant.
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Fail the foundational responsibility of a sovereign state, which is to maintain a monopoly on organized violence within their territory.
When your territory becomes the basis of extended artillery campaigns against your neighbor as part of another conflict, one of you is going to lose sovereign control as a result.
I repeat the quote by their defense minister
Even taking everything you said at face value, does that quote not seem completely insane? I'd expect some diplomatic concerns about pacifying a restive region, not bragging about committing a second genocide.
I note your quote of the defense minister does not address, or refute, what Lebanon did (or failed to do), which was the topic of your question and it's direct answer.
Even if I took that quote at face value, it is neither bragging nor is the situation in Lebanon a genocide unless you scope the term down to the level routinely noted as undeserving in other contexts- including the context of the previous Hezbollah artillery campaign from southern Lebanon that led to mass regional evacuations of jews from northern israel, i.e. technically genocide by ethnic cleansing definitions if you stretch it to a small enough area. I don't mind if you want to call the Israeli dislocations of border villages genocide, so long as you consistently apply the standard to the dislocation of Israeli border villages by the Hezbollah artillery campaign, but consistently applying the standard provides the answer to your earlier question.
Which returns to the point of what Lebanon- or at least the state of Lebanon- let its sovereign territory be used for.
It isn't actually, but if we took "all of Lebanon must burn" at "face value", it plainly would be. It's concerning, and in the modern world, unusual, for war rhetoric to aspire to the literal obliteration of the enemy nation - I think it's fair to describe such claims as genocidal aspirations even if the actual war strategy is less insane. (And yes, Hezbollah and Hamas plainly harbor genocidal aspirations with regards to Israel.)
It's unusual for Europeans but probably not as crazy in that part of the world. The problem, of course, is that the Israelis want to be seen as Europeans/Westerners not like the sort of demented terrorists who run around saying they'll obliterate Israel.
Also it’s really hard to base your PR strategy on sympathy about that one time you got horribly genocided when your government keeps unveiling flags inscribed with “YAY GENOCIDE!”
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Lebanon was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and couldn't and basically allowed them to continue as is. Post-Oct 7th they started shelling northern Israel and forced many people to evacuate.
Essentially, they declared a (limited) war in support of Hamas and refused to back down until the situation in Gaza was resolved. America invaded Afghanistan for similar reasons.
No, they did not attack Israel until Israel attacked them first. On October 8th they fired some volleys at Lebanese territory, in the Shebaa Farms area, which is definitively not Israeli territory. These were symbolic attacks, on their own territory, which did not even harm any of the invading Israelis who had built illegal outposts there. Israel responded by attacking Lebanon.
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They played a high risk strategy by convincing Trump to start the war in the first place (yes alongside long term Republican hawks) and telling him it would be quick and easy. There was never public support for this war, or any real attempt to build support. Now they've run into the obvious problem that the public doesn't want to pay any cost to support this war, so Trump has to back down before the mid terms to retain some popularity. All of this is the predictable bad case outcome of Israeli strategy to start the war in the first place and they can either take the L or double down on continuing the war and undermine their relationship with the Republican party after completely torching their relationship with the Democratic Party.
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I'm not sure why you wrote a serious response to OP assuming he was arguing in good faith; he explicitly called for Pro-Palestinians and anti-semites to help him feel less bad about Israel responding to rocket fire. I don't think he's interested in non-groyper perspectives.
People are allowed to post pro-Israel diatribes and they are allowed to post anti-Israel diatribes, so long as they follow the rules, though in my opinion, the OP was not really a diatribe so much as honestly asking for opinions.
Unlike you, @FiveHourMarathon does not have a history of bad faith posting. You do have a history of antagonistic call-outs and you've been told repeatedly to stop doing this. Banned for five days this time.
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I don't like calling out people who attack me, especially when I've been blocked, but if we let this kind of discursive spiral continue, we're going to end up instituting woke speech norms on a forum explicitly existing to avoid them.
For what it's worth, I read
as obviously tongue-in-cheek. After all, very few here self-describe as antisemites or shitlibs. The fact that you did not include a slur for the people taking the side of the Israeli government (genocide apologists?) does not mean that you did not want them to reply, and the banned poster was not arguing in good faith.
I'm glad someone saw the humor in picking four absurd descriptions, but not laughing at my jokes isn't a problem really. The problem is that there's this tendency on certain topics here to attack someone's character when they are brought up, it's not a problem with your argument it's a problem with you. To engage with this argument requires me to go on the defensive and show my philosemitic bona fides in order to talk about Israel without getting dismissed as antisemite. The woke purity spiral has shown us that this never stops at the first, but continues until debate is nothing but purity tests.
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Do they want to continue receiving, in Vance's estimation, two thirds of their defensive weapons from the United States?
That doesn’t really answer the question. Israel has no good strategic options and didn’t even before October 7th. Hope that eventually something happens in Iran and that Hezbollah doesn’t want to fight and that they can hold off every attack and Hamas never develops rockets that can breach the Iron Dome and that the Houthis don’t get more aggressive with missiles and that they continue to maintain a huge technological / military advantage.
A lot of hope, in other words. October 7th showed how weak Israel was and is to ground invasion, it’s a largely flat country with no strategic depth, surrounded by civilians who - regardless of what their leadership may or may not believe or say - want to kill and pillage its inhabitants and take their land. The only winning move was not to play, but that was decided a long time ago.
I'm amazed that Israel, which did a fantastic job of marketing itself for decades and has huge and obvious access in the media, has suddenly decided to ignore optics and surrender totally in the face of social media.
As you were posting what you were posting below on November 9, 2023, there were already groups decrying the Gaza genocide. Israel had no reason to worry about optics, as the optics were not at all under its control.
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What marketing campaign would you suggest?
I posted this November 9th, 2023
The Israeli Arab rapprochement isn’t the risk here. Ultimately the Arab world might destroy Israel, sure, but it’s not the primary threat. MBS still doesn’t care, the domestic population was pacified, there were actually surprisingly few violent pro-Palestinian protests in places like Egypt and Tunisia, the UAE obviously remains onside for Israel. The risk is that the Shiites (primarily in Lebanon but to some extent also Yemen and Iraq) and Hamas alone can make Israel unliveable by first world standards.
By the way, I don’t think the evidence has borne out your speculation on Hamas’ plan. Everything I’ve seen suggests they really did believe they’d storm through to the West Bank and ignite a popular uprising among Palestinians and possibly even Israeli Arabs, and at that point Hezbollah would probably have finally joined in with Iranian permission (which they probably didn’t initially have), and that would have been immediately existential for Israel, fighting on three fronts including internally, everyone throwing everything at them. It wasn’t a PR move.
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