> One would think that if people don't want to lose land, they should not set out to make war.
What a perverse, meaningless justification. This statement reflects your own insecurity - you would never let someone say this if it was Israeli territory being contested. You would never have to say this if Israel didn't possess illegally claim, genocide and then colonize annexed territory in violation of international law.
Exactly. Unlike the US, there are no large oceans or seas surrounding Israel and keeping our enemies away. Our enemies are right on our borders, we are extremely insecure.
What deterrent do we have? Attack us, loose land. That's it. That's our only deterrent.
As long as you continue to call your immediate neighbours "enemies" you will always feel insecure and threatened by them.
Perhaps Israel could take a radically different path and aim to call their neighbours "friends" instead, or at minimum a healthy but neutral relationship?
Only a small number of bordering countries worldwide are sworn enemies and the world would be a better place for everyone if this fell to zero.
This is one of the most disingenuous posts I've read in this entire thread. Are you suggesting that Israel's neighbors are not the ones who consider themselves enemies of Israel? Did not upon the founding of Israel seven of our neighbors, including all four nations who border us, invade us? Have they not done this on numerous other occasions as well? Did Gaza not invade Israel at the beginning of the current conflict two years ago?
You might also be interested in this excerpt from our declaration of independence:
> WE EXTEND our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.
your words betray black and white thinking that demonstrates obvious externalization of responsibility. look up "splitting". it's a psychological defense mechanism.
if you were on the spiritual and moral ground you represent yourself as being on, no one else's actions or stance would change your opinion on whether they deserve love and a psychologically/relationally secure response from you. when someone is psychologically insecure, they overreact, hold double standards, externalize responsibility, and project their own insecurity as a moral flaw onto others. the term "narcissistic defenses" appears in literature. this is why it's so hard to talk to you. you are perpetuating the conflict by using the "logic" you are using. in reality you are displaying entitlement and grandiosity. and that prevents you from admitting it.
an eye for an eye makes the world blind, big man.
realistically, it's your own people and your own children and parts of yourselves that you are attempting to destroy and alienate. You're being used and you're using people.
Just for some agenda that you don't even understand but are all too willing to deploy propaganda to argue for. You remind me of a cult member or someone my grandparents fought against in WW2. Those "Arabs" are just taking your living room, aren't they?
> Those "Arabs" are just taking your living room, aren't they?
Those Arabs were actually in the living rooms of my friends and co-workers two years ago, yes in fact. Two women I know had their babies burned to death. My daughter's classmate was murdered along with both his siblings and both his parents in their living room. My son's camp counselor was dragged off to Gaza and murdered - pulled out of his bedroom. I could go on and on and on, these are just examples of people whom the Arabs were in their living rooms recently. In fact, one man that I would occasionally have breakfast with, though he wasn't a close friend, is still in Gaza today. He was dragged out of his own living room or bedroom, yes.
You have become worse than them.
Until you admit this, you will not be better. And I know that you don't care about being better anymore.
You're just a racist looking to wipe out an ethnic group, not even an ideology. It's in your words.
Shame on you. If and when history confirms that your self-entitlement was the cause of the attacks you would deny it for a long time, just as you are now.
By the way, you're talking to someone whose family is from there as well. You're not the only one who has lost people.
What you are doing is attempting to justify the perpetuation of an asymmetric response because you cannot admit your own falsehood, ignorance, and lack of relational depth.
If you really are the stronger and more justified party, you can chill out and allow justice to take its course. Instead, you have lost the support of your allies because you have become the murderers you decried.
This conflict will stop when you can admit that.
The obvious solution that you are proposing is the elimination of a group of people, not an ideology. And that is why you can go straight to hell.
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines call on us to more thoughtful and substantive, not less, when a topic is divisive. This is clearly inflammatory, and not the right way to discuss difficult topics here.
None of that is unique to Israel. You need less generalizeable logic, if Syria started bulldozing the Golan Heights colonies then Netenyahu would go ballistic.
Correct, it's not unique to Israel. This is the way most nations in the Middle East treat each other, but the Americans and the Europeans don't seem to know this. They have no recollection of what constant threat from one's neighbors was like. Even though it's been less than a century since the Europeans had been in a similar situation.
Now go look at how every other Middle Eastern nation has dealt with the situation. Do I need to talk about Syrian brutality and gassing people in their own capital? Do I need to talk about Iraqi brutality and their gassing of the Kurds? Saudi Arabia, chopping people to bits in their embassies? Iran, Qatar, Egypt?
When one looks at Israel's neighbors, there is no way to not conclude that Israel has been the gentlest of the Middle Eastern Nations. But now we've taken the gloves off, after the 7th of October 2023. Welcome to the new Middle East.
Nothing excuses the slaughter of thousands of civilians - but if you really believed that like I do then you would direct your anger at Hamas and UNRWA, not Israel. Hamas and Gazan civilians poured over the border and slaughtered people. Burned babies to death, beheaded adults, left fetuses with knives in their heads. Phoned home to brag to parents "I just killed ten Jews with my bare hands". It's all recorded - by Hamas themselves!
Not to mention how many Gazans killed by IEDs and failed rocket attacks in the Gaza strip, and how Hamas stoots at people fleeing buildings and areas that the IDF warned they are targeting. Or shooting at people collecting humanitarian aid from distribution centres instead of paying Hamas for it in markets. Or their human shields. Every one of those dead is counted against Israel because in Muslim culture, a martyr dies for a cause no matter which side's hand killed them. And even with those deaths incorrectly attributed to Israel, the civilian:combatant death toll in the Gaza strip is lower than any conflict that NATO or UN forces have ever fought in - by NATO and UN numbers themselves.
> in a tiny strip of land that poses NO fucking existential threat at all to the overall security of Israel?
That tiny step of land was educated by UNRWA to believe that the highest honour in their society is to kill Jews. There is ample video evidence of children stating this as their life goal, and parents stating they want this for their children. That does not justify killing them, but it demonstrates that when they do start killing us there is no easy tactic to calm the situation. They used to infiltrate our communities, we built a wall. We tried moving out of the strip and living further away, they start shooting rockets at us. We build defensive interceptor rockets at extreme cost, they put over the border en mass to put babies in ovens, rape wowen and even in one case I know of an man, enter medical facilities and execute the entire staff and patients. All documented by Hamas themselves.
You need to decide if you feel as strongly about protecting civilians as you do about destroying Israel. Because if you really feel that your ambition is to protect civilians (or at least to defend their cause online) then you need to reevaluate your position on the current conflict. Not because Israel is perfect, but because Israel is fighting to save human life and the Gazans are fighting to destroy it.
I have yet to even mention the hostages, dozens of whom are still in Gaza including people I know personally, which itself is justification for contributing the war no matter the cost to the aggressors. And when the aggressors decide that the civilians of the Gaza strip have suffered too much - the civilians they as the governing body are charged to protect - they can release the hostages and the war will be over.
> I have yet to even mention the hostages .... which itself is justification for contributing the war no matter the cost to the aggressors.
I'm sorry, but from the outside events would suggest that Bibi has little interest in the return, indeed welfare, of all the hostages. `Indeed he seems to have actively sabotaged efforts that would have returned them, in order to continue the war and the wider aims.
Many ex-hostages and families of hostages seem to agree.
> If you sincerely believe the grotesquely distorted nonsense you've written above, you're as much a deluded, fanatical lunatic
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. The guidelines call on us us to make our points without using abusive terms like this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I actually fail to see how the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank violates international law (not that international law means anything), aside from the obvious fact that they weren’t outright annexed after 1967, when Israel was on rock-solid legal ground to just annex the entire place (nothing in the international law prohibits a country from annexing territory won in a _defensive_ war).
Where in the world have you found any indication that any international law makes any distinction between defensive and offensive war in terms of annexation of land?
That rule was brought about by the UN Security Council Resolution 242.
And funnily enough, nobody objected when Egypt annexed Gaza, and Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1948.
As far as the international law is concerned, Israel was completely in the clear to annex the entire place until 22nd of November, 1967. After that it gets a bit murky.
That still doesn't change the fact that the entire idea of an independent Palestinian state happened because Israel just didn't annex it all in 1967.
But going back to the UNSC Resolution 242.
> Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force
There are still no recognized boundaries of Palestine, and there sure as hell weren't in 1967. The original UN Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted, but the problem with its adoption is the fact that it was a General Assembly resolution, and the problem with General Assembly resolutions is that they are notoriously non-binding, and thus not worth the paper they are printed on.
Which brings me back to my initial point that the international law just doesn't matter, because technically speaking, the original Partition Plan was settled international law. Worked out great in practice.
> And funnily enough, nobody objected when Egypt annexed Gaza, and Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1948.
What many people don't realize is that, though no nation objected to the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, no nation acknowledged it either. The Jordanian annexation of the West Bank was accepted by one nation in the entire planet: Iraq. Note worthy that Iraq's king and Jordan's king were brothers.
Noteworthy as well, that while the West Bank was in the hands of Arabs, there were no calls for establishing an independent Palestinian state there. Same in the Gaza strip.
And while I'm on this soapbox, I might as well mention that Jordan was part of the Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate for Palestine divided the land into two entities: Mandatory Palestine which was decided by the British to be the 23% of Palestine designated for the Jews, and Jordan which was the 77% of Palestine designated for the Arabs - the same idea of partition that the UN came up with 27 years later. Only difference being that the UN plan partitioned the 23% designated for the Jews further. And yet in both cases the Jews accepted and the Arabs violently ethnically cleansed the lands of Jews. And before anybody mentions the racist idea "it's Arab land" (is Great Britian white man's land?) it should be clear that Jerusalem was Jewish majority for a century before that time.
Nobody called for a Palestinian state in the West Bank during 1948 to 1967 because everyone in power at the time was aware that there already was a Palestinian state in the Land of Palestine: The Kingdom of Jordan.
