Sweden and the US are “kinda cozy” (I would say at least, from an inside perspective on how Sweden seems to lean in to US interests including copyright enforcements and so forth).
However Sweden was the first country to recognise Palestine.
Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff, similar to the threats of pulling out of NATO and the actual pulling out of the Paris Accords.
I’m aware that there has still been some US interference in the middle-east, I’m just not sure I’m drawing the same connections as you.
Also, and I mean this in the best way I can: I don’t really trust anything coming out of Gaza’s health ministry. That doesn’t mean I side with Israel as they are also distorting facts very often.
If you don't believe Gaza's health ministry, how about Agence France-Presse?
The journalists' association of the French wire service Agence France-Presse (AFP) warned on Monday that staff working with the agency in Gaza are at risk of starvation and that "without intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die."
In the statement, the SDJ said that AFP's journalists in Gaza have warned that they no longer have strength to report, with one photographer, Bashar Taleb, saying in a post on Facebook: "My body is thin and I can no longer work."
"Since AFP was founded in August 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks, but none of us can recall seeing a colleague die of hunger," the SDJ said in a post on X.
Israel controls 80% of the territory in Gaza and all the aid posts. This is a complete fabrication by the media that has no correspondence to what people in the ground are saying.
And that has nothing to do with israel blocking aid agencies from bringing in food?
Nothing to do with israel destroying farms and crops?
Hamas bad. We can all agree hamas bad. But to blame starvation on hamas when israel is in control of the food supply… how do you mental gymnastics your way to that??
I wasn’t aware of that media outlet, just FYI (and to reinforce your point) it seems that while there is a significant left bias, generally AFP’s journalism is considered reliable and credible.
AFP is previously unknown to me, and yes I did because its actually reinforcing the parents point about being a reliable source.
Maybe read before commenting, or perhaps allow people to be ignorant and admit that openly; jumping down my throat because I don’t already know your favourite news outlet solves what exactly?
(also don’t think I don’t see the irony of your bio being: “I usually don't know what I'm talking about.”)
I wasn't trying to jump down your throat for not knowing AFP, I just thought it was a somewhat funny-absurdist situation to have a major news agency ranked for reliability by some website with a name that's basically a maga dogwhistle (not saying it is affiliated, as it predates maga). I can see that my phrasing was quite bad.
Oh, I don't doubt for a minute that the are starving people. The whole reason for Palestinian people to exist is to flip the script (hey it's tiny Israel against the whole giant Arab world) into it's evil Israel against Palestinian people who just want freedom. They are waging the CNN war after they lost, you know, the war war. If there are no starving people to produce for the France Presse cameras, they will create some.
Do you have a link to a recent picture of this Bashar Taleb? I've found the Gaza famine to be very different from any other famine I've ever looked into - people seem to go from healthy to "died from starvation" without ever getting thin.
If you google for "famine yemen", you see very thin children, with just skin on bone - all the fat and muscle is gone. If you google for "famine gaza", they just seem a lot healthier.
Have you ever watched the TV show Alone? It’s an outdoor survival competition reality show. In it people regularly end up medically evacuated due to starvation or malnutrition.
Sometimes you can tell by looking at someone’s face they’re starving - but usually you can’t. Usually it’s when they strip down for the periodic medical exam when you can actually tell how starved they are.
Do you want a recent photo of this man, or do you want him to strip naked for you to judge his weight loss?
Why is one man stripping naked for you something you need before you’ll believe the hundreds of different people saying that people are starving?
Like, seriously. What if he’s lying? He could be, of course - but would you then believe everyone is lying? Or what if he’s telling the truth about weight loss, and you see proof - will you then turn around and say well yeah but he’s probably just starving himself for attention?
You need proof one man is starving to believe hundreds?
> Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff
That would be great (?), except the stated reason for pulling out was "anti-Israel bias". It's about kowtowing to a foreign terror regime, not standing up for America.
>Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff, similar to the threats of pulling out of NATO and the actual pulling out of the Paris Accords.
Why would you give them the benefit of the doubt when they directly state that they're withdrawing over the decision to admit Palestine?
So far all independent verifications of the gaza health ministry’s numbers have found that they under-report the death toll.
And i’m not sure how your sweden example says anything about the US supporting israel’s genocide? Was there something you expected to happen when sweden recognized palestine?
It is hard/impossible to come up with an accurate death toll.
The Gaza Health Ministry systemically underreports the death toll by only counting bodies that they have directly observed.
Some third parties have tried to extrapolate from the reported numbers to get to the actual numbers; but that is a highly speculative endeavor under the best circumstances.
> by only counting bodies that they have directly observed
This was only true in an early phase of the conflict; they've long since been adding casualties reported by "reliable media sources" as well as a Google form.
The facts on the ground are extremely clear if you read what the aid agencies on the ground say instead of what gets passed off as news by American media.
In short: gazans are all issued ID numbers at birth. The ministry of health has published id numbers of the dead, which means you can do stats and tell if the data is fake. On top of that, so far (afaik since 2009 when hamas came to power) nobody has caught them in a lie. So they’ve a track record of telling the truth, and give us data that we can smell-test for fraud and it passes.
So yes, nobody else is on the ground to produce independent numbers, so the numbers can’t be fully verified. But using that doubt as an excuse for inaction in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is fucking disgusting.
> The ministry of health has published id numbers of the dead, which means you can do stats and tell if the data is fake. On top of that, so far (afaik since 2009 when hamas came to power) nobody has caught them in a lie. So they’ve a track record of telling the truth, and give us data that we can smell-test for fraud and it passes.
If you comment that they give us this data, surely you have a link to said data?
Surely you have the ability to google and find out for yourself. I don’t know if the data is available to the public, or just to journalists - but numerous reputable outlets have reported on this.
Yeah, we really need more verification that people are starving in Gaza. Why would people starve in Gaza? It's not like anybody has been bombing the city and blocking supply routes. Why would anybody starve there? We are going to need more proof than people saying that they don't have enough food.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I don't think he's saying to dismiss the Ministry's numbers, but more that the death toll is actually even higher than the Ministry's numbers, in opposition to Israeli claims that the Ministry is making up deaths.
It’s really not my fight, I’m Swedish - not American.
You’ll always be disappointed if you continue with this mindset though, the world will not bend to you because of your moral outrage, the best you can hope for is to open peoples eyes with understanding - not by calling everyone inhumane, disgusting or laying expectations at their feet.
I think mass murder is one area where we can safely feel moral outrage. It might not work, but it probably has a better chance of influencing the outcome than shrugging and saying "well, that's just how it is".
I felt moral outrage after October 7th, but my moral outrage only served to give Israel a bit more justification for actions which are increasingly and ultimately turning out in a way that provokes similar outrage. Outrage begets outrage, blood will have blood.
To be completely fair with you which mass murder should I be outraged at?
I was outraged with Uyghurs, I was outraged with Rwandans, I was outraged about the Tamils, Burma, the ISIL occupation, Boko Haram etc;etc;etc;
I’m old now, my outrage did nothing to prevent or assuage these conflicts and this conflict seems too muddy for me to get involved with, I can’t pick a side, both sides are killing each other and one is more successful than the other.
I don’t feel like beating people over the head with the conflict will actually stop anyone dying, even if we decided all of us together to bomb Israel off the map: that’s bad too. Nobody is coming to the table with anything even resembling a solution.
So, kindly, I will reserve my moral outrage to situations whereby I can make a difference, where I don’t have to watch both sides chanting death threats in schools about each other. I will not morally side with either.
Kids being murdered is just as awful in Palestine, as it is in Africa, Asia, the Americas or anywhere else in the world. But, at what point does the rest of the world get to run out of "fucks" to give about their conflicts.
I think the US should absolutely stop giving money to Israel, there seems to be no benefit at all and it supports their genocide. But I also see no reason to actually support Palestine. The current conflict can be traced back to the October attacks, but then those attacks can be traced back to some attacks Israel did and back and forth until you get to the Old Testament and probably before that.
It's a religious conflict that won't go away unless you remove religion from it. I don't expect that to happen during my lifetime so I'd rather we just pull the tax dollars out of the region.
This isn't some deep seated religious conflict. The few Jews and other people's lived largely in peace under the ottoman empire. Modern Israel is a joint US and European imperialist settler project where the founders of that movement outright said they intend to take over the area for their ethnostate.
Most of the problems in the middle east can be traced back to European and American meddling.
Like the other reply, this shit really isn't as black and white and people make it out to be. There is a ton of history and fighting. They both suck. Anyone taking a hard stance with either side only has a surface level view of the situation.
Pretty much all atrocities in the middle east can be traced back Europeans (mainly UK) carving up the area after ww1 and theirs and American imperialism since ww2. Israel is a project of this.
So you want Israel to cease to exist?
Germany did the Holocaust, nobody said Germany can't exist.
Russia attacks Ukraine in an emperialistic power move, no one suggest Russia shouldn't exist.
But Israel is a "project" that needs to end. More like a scape goat.
I'm israeli. This war is bad, my government is evil. But I deserve to have a nation to call home, so do the Palestinians.
If you disagree with me, think about it a bit and what it says about you.
> Russia attacks Ukraine in an emperialistic power move, no one suggest Russia shouldn't exist.
But people do suggest russia should give back the territory they’ve taken by force. That’s most (if not all depending on your take) of israel.
Historically - in my opinion in the wake of ww2 a jewish state should have been carved out of germany, rather than england giving away land that wasn’t theirs to give away. So in a sense Germany as we know it should have ceased to exist.
Just as now, i believe for there to be peace in the region israel as we know it must cease to exist. Either by radically changing and becoming a place where palestinians and jews live together in peace and shared governance, or by giving up a huge chunk of land they stole in ‘48 to create two states.
Alas hamas killed that one in The 90s when they decided to send suicide bombers to Israeli busses during the peace process that Israel initiated.
Also Israel accepted the two state solution in 1948, alas all Arab countries decided to attack the newly idndependent country.
Saying "we" stole the land is a bit odd. The arabs leaving in Israel didn't call themselves Palestinians until after 1948.
Israel is not in the Arab peninsula, arabs living here came from there, hence they are Arabs.
I still support their right to their national claim. But pretending it's some ancient construct that "we" stole from is not historical. Palestinian nationalism is a modern construct.
Who has the right to exist in that area? The people that already lived there and their offspring, who are now refugees in Gaza. People do have the right to form their own states, but on land they already own legally and ethically, not when you colonize land already occupied by others.
I did not call for the end of Israel as a project, I do disagree with it's creation, considering how it turned out, especially since it was more or less the intention of Zionism as stated by it's founders.
I don't know how to solve it. But I do know that Israels actions since it was founded has worked against any kind of solution that is not a takeover of the area and the creation of their ethnostate.
You domknownthat Palestinians are mostly Arabs and not native to the region.
The Israeli founders accepted the UN partition resolution. all Arab countries attacked Israel to destroy and create their pan Arabian fantasy.
In the 90s Israel initiated the peace process and gave self rule to the Palestinians with an end goal to create a Palestinian state. Hamas decided to send suicide bombers to bomb Israeli busses killing thousands.
This caused a massive shift right in israeli politics. And gave power to those saying we can't afford to give land. I don't agree with them.
Whos's native then? Only jews? What about the peoples that lived in that region before them? Or the people that moved through the area after leaving Africa? This is a nonsense argument, people lived there and others colonized the area and has operated like most European colonies. This is what happened in recent times, not 2000 years ago.
In private letters from the founders they write about their true intent of accepting the 48 deal just to get a foothold and then keep taking over the rest of the land, you can look it up yourself. And what a deal, Jews owned like 7% of the land and was handed 55%? Why would anyone be angry about that. By an organization that was basically three countries in a trenchcoat and without the support of most the people who lived there.
I know Hamas is bad, I can call them terrorist without a problem. Netanyahu however is also a fan of Hamas as he has stated its critical to prop them up as that allows them to divide and conquer the Palestinians and create more chaos that they can use. Exactly like how they are using Oct 7 in both Gaza and the West Bank now.
I understand that Israel is in the grips of far right zionist fanatics, but a large part of their population does support some kind of genocide.
If the only way that Israel can continue to exist is as an apartheid state where a large proportion of the population has to be forcibly kept in a status with no political rights, or else expelled or killed altogether, then yes, Israel doesn't deserve to exist.
Now, I don't know whether that is true. It seems to be the argument that the Israeli government and the right-wing majority of its population are making now - that if they give Palestinians actual freedom, Israel will just cease to be, so they have to starve people to death, bomb them etc. The more they do that, the stronger the argument that Israel should cease to exist.
If there is another option that allows Israel to continue to exist, that's great. But it's really up to Israel to come up with a viable option for that, because Israel is an alien entity that forcefully imposed itself on this territory to begin with.
Regarding Russia, I'm a Russian citizen, and the invasion of Ukraine did, in fact, made me reach the conclusion that Russia should not exist as a state. It's not that this particular war is especially damning; it's that Russia has a very long track record of imperialist wars, and, more importantly, it doesn't change - it keeps doing it. Arguably Russia as it exists today is inevitably imperialistic simply because it's a polity that is cobbled together and still largely held by force or threat of it - it never really fully de-colonized, and if it ever does, it'd be an order of magnitude smaller. So from that perspective it really cannot change - and if so, then yes, it should cease to exist.
If Israel is alien to the region, so are Arabs which is what Palestinians are.
That's nonsense.
The Jewish people have a long (2000years) of calling Israel territory as home. Does it mean I deny the Palestinians national claim, no. But it sure as hell mean Jews have a claim atleast as much as Arab immigrants and conquerers
The vast majority of Jews who settled in modern Israel didn't have a 2000-year history of Israel as their home. They have a 2000-year history of religious beliefs that center around Israel and date back to their very distant ancestors living in that place, but that's not at all the same thing. I mean, can you imagine what the world map would look like if we were to apply this criteria to other nations today?
Palestinians, on the other hand, have actually been physically living in that place for well over a millennium. Not only that, but dismissing them as "Arab invaders" is also rather misleading - while the language and the culture is Arabic, the Palestinian population is mostly descendants of the same people who lived in this area 2000 years ago (Canaanites etc), with Arabic culture imposed on them during the early Islamic conquests. And again, if you're willing to look back that far to establish a link that translates to right of possession, then should we go back another 1000 years and talk about Torah's vivid descriptions of the invasion of Canaan by Jewish tribes and genocide of the local population?
I think it's foolish to try to derive some kind of meaningful claim today from what happened 2000-3000 years ago, though. And looking at the more recent history, what is today Israel was explicitly a settler colonialist project. Here's Ze'ev Jabotinsky writing in 1923, not mincing words about Palestinians being the native population that he wants to displace:
"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. ... Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. ... Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach."
However Sweden was the first country to recognise Palestine.
Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff, similar to the threats of pulling out of NATO and the actual pulling out of the Paris Accords.
I’m aware that there has still been some US interference in the middle-east, I’m just not sure I’m drawing the same connections as you.
Also, and I mean this in the best way I can: I don’t really trust anything coming out of Gaza’s health ministry. That doesn’t mean I side with Israel as they are also distorting facts very often.