I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I’m an idiot.
It isn’t absurd, it is the fundamental truth of how these places operate. They are militarized and on stolen land, populated by ex-IDF soldiers. A handful may participate in charities, but few do any real work to liberate Palestine, they believe in the basics of their ethnosupremacist project.
I have actually met such people. I know very well that you have not, armchair critic.
There was nothing to it. It was a vague unjustified generalization. It’s difficult to even know what you really meant. You’re really just talking to yourself with these things, moving away from the concrete - such as material causes - to whatever it is you thought you were communicating.
Yes. Israel itself is very weak. It is only its sponsor that is strong and that props it up.
Yes, a campaign that targets masses of civilians for death from afar with bombs dropped by fighter jets is indeed exactly what a weak group does. It is telling that in actual ground combat, they wilt. They do not have any real staying power outside of this. Just like the Nazis, they crumble when their sense of invincibility is undermined. Israel’s economy is currently in shambles, is scrambling to import displaced Palestinian labor, and they are lashing out trying to provoke a wider war that will draw in more direct participation from Western countries. They have made very little progress in Lebanon, again relying more on civilian bombing campaigns than any actual fighting, as they consistently lose against guerillas. The axis of resistance is larger than it has been in decades and has made gains that were inconceivable before. The US and Israel cannot even contain Yemen’s solidarity against genocide-complicit shipping.
I am not so wrapped up in a particular leader, that is a liberal false understanding of how political power works and usually comes in the form of thinking Netanyahu is somehow uniquely evil, when he is fairly average for an Israeli.
Notice how you have changed the topic from Israel’s (alleged lack of) weakness to the destruction of Gaza, implicitly conflating the two. You can, apparently, only measure a liberation fight by the numbers of dead, or perhaps, like a Nazi or Boer or imperialist American soldier, by a death ratio, though your thoughts are so muddled you cannot just directly state them. And yet, all of them were defeated. Knowing nothing about the strategic basis of armed resistance against a genocidal occupier, you fail to see what the path to victory must look like. And you certainly don’t help with it, instead tut-tutting in favor of a relative passivity and a clean victimhood.
You imagine yourself aware of the strategizing despite knowing nothing about it, lmao. Please understand, again, that your imagination and reactionary idealism is not the same as understanding or fact.
For Israelis? Yes. They can’t do anything without complete air dominance. Do you know literally anything at all about war?
They will lose if they attempt a ground assault (bullets) and their cheap drones must be sourced from groups that would prevent their import. They also require an apparatus that is functional rather than one that has seen the workers that can operate and maintain them abandon the place in waves.
I am not your teacher, unless you want to pay me. This idea that you are simply owed hand-picked sources that you clearly have zero curiosity about and will not read is stupid and there is no rule that I must provide them for you. You can be a big ol’ adult and become curious and humble on your own, I cannot do it for you.
Mandela was imprisoned by the ANC was not crushed. The ANC continued its guerilla campaign and grew, becoming a powerful electoral party as well.
Incidentally, liberals such as yourself were tut-tutting Mandela as a terrorist during this time. If you actually read history out of curiosity rather than making things up and Googling for the first thing that sort-of confirms your bias, you might become an actually helpful person instead of feeding into this reactionary bigotry against armed resistance movements.
Again you are simply making things up counter to the basic facts of the major and sustained direct action campaigns carried out by South Africans. You do not know anything about this topic. Please stop lying about it.
It is not that complicated, but you do have to actually take the time to learn about something before pretending you can have an opinion about it. That is the “complexity” that liberals hide behind, it is just a laziness and a desire to prop up their preconceived notions that were fed to them as propaganda, often as children. You must be willing to sit down and read or shut that mouth and stop typing on that keyboard, otherwise you will be correctly recognized as someone that plays with fairy tales and seems to even believe them!
I’ve already addressed this. You can respond to what I said or quietly disengage, having nothing to say in response.
As I said, Vietnamese fighting is the primary “why”, as is obvious to anyone that studies this topic in any way. And I didn’t say only the VC, did I? It is a typical ignorant Western confusion to think that the Viet Cong were the only Vietnamese national liberation fighters.
You don’t look at the causes at all. You simply repeat the standard milquetoast propaganda line and make things up when convenient. And those milquetoast lines, as I mentioned, are implicitly racist. They are a chauvinistic view premised on not actually trying to learn anything about imperialist and racist aggression and saying, “well they stopped because they wanted to” and not because they were forced by circumstances imposed by the national liberation fighters and their constellation of movements taking direct action. I am certain you don’t even know about what direct actions were taken, despite this false pretense of looking for “all causes”, as you only ever look at one cause: whatever excuse was made by the imperialists themselves for their loss, which makes them feel like the victors and good fighters in their own way rather than the same people that would have supported the oppression, tacitly, tut-tutting the resistance fighters. Like, say, yourself.
You would have to demonstrate some level of curiosity and humility rather than using this request as a rhetorical cudgel to excuse your own ignorance and fibbing.
You seem to like your “truths”, but that just speaks to your deep and abiding faith. That’s religious talk. I prefer hard evidence, and I don’t trust internet anecdotes. The borders around Gaza have been set for decades, it isn’t the West Bank. These aren’t fresh settlements of right wing settlers that just moved in. There was no evidence of any sort of successful widescale resistance to the Oct 7th attack, which would not have been the case had the border kibbutz been camps of armed jailors, as you attempt to portray.
No more generalized than your sweeping assertion of material causes. Not everything is concrete, ultimately, humans do very stupid shit sometimes. Like I said, fundamentally illogical. Our decisions are based on the firing of neurons in our brains, which are not limited to solely material causes. If you weren’t faith-blinded, you could see this. It’s common sense, and very much an everyday occurrence.
The IDF is 400k strong by last estimate, who knows what it’s up to now. This is more of your faith speaking, a blind trust that without advanced weaponry, Israel somehow falls apart. It makes no sense in the cold light of day. 400k soldiers is a lot. You can man a border and enforce a famine with that many.
Wow. I think Israel’s early wars, where the entire Arab coalition was crushed without the aid of air power, speak to their history of infantry combat. Using advanced tools is a helpful, a convenience. Not a requirement.
Fine, allow me to clarify my question. Does Netanyahu’s government look like it is failing in its current objectives?
Huh, so you’re saying the destruction of Gaza was all part of the plan? An indication of weakness? That’s a pretty twisted path to victory, you’re just going to get them all killed. Unfortunately, far more genocides have succeeded through history than liberation battles. That’s the sad reality of the world we live in, it’s what we have to work with.
That’s cute, but again, your path to victory is a farce. Israel is not losing, except in your fantasies. It’s objectives move steadily closer and closer to success, hamas’ do not.
No, air power is not necessary to man a border or keep checkpoints closed, that’s silly. Okay, so what about the ground assaults the IDF has conducted into Gaza? Quite a large amount of footage came out from both hamas and IDF sources showing ground fighting. The IDF continued to advance. Israel has domestic manufacturing too, by the way, they produce their own tanks and small arms, drones are not difficult.
The ANC was driven underground, its leadership fled or arrested. That’s crushed. Yes, it persisted underground, and eventually entered peaceful negotiations, this is true, but alone it would have never accomplished these goals. Mandela’s imprisonment was a big deal in the west, despite governments labeling him as a terrorist, his story galvanized significant international support.
Cute that you accuse me of fairy tales while you’re the one spouting all the messaging about a clearly losing party that could only win if only the air planes went away. I’m afraid complexity is real, though. Humans are a mess, and do things for all manner of reasons, despite our faiths trying to oversimplify everything into some imaginary god or single philosophy of materialism.
You may have addressed it, but you’re simply nonsensical. All you have is “I’m offended, VC won, end story.” That’s cute, but a little simple.
Nitpicking pointless details. Fine, all fighters for the North Vietnamese were not the sole cause for victory. It takes two sides to end a war, a side has to accept its defeat. The US only accepted its defeat due to domestic factors, there were plenty of war hawks keen to keep going.
No, I am not the one looking at a sole cause. I acknowledged the efficacy of the guerilla campaign. The one looking at sole causes is you, pointing to that guerilla campaign. I am saying it alone is not enough, more factors were necessary.
Uh huh, shift all the blame to cover for yourself, very convenient. It’s pretty clear to see a political agenda instead of an honest intellectual conversation though. Your whole thrust is in defense of hamas. Mine is not in support of Israel’s genocide, though, just in an accurate understanding of what’s going on, no matter who it reflects poorly upon. The real propagandist here is pretty clearly you, you are attempting to positively participate in an ongoing military conflict, and help one of the two sides. I understand, but don’t throw stones when the real agent is yourself.
Oh, you mean a primary operative of the ANC that pushed hard to start their guerilla efforts? lmao
I haven’t said that, actually. You have confused yourself again.
Complexity is real, but this topic is not. You are just incurious and, like other liberals, decide to whitewash that ignorance as a recognition of (unstated, unidentifiable) complexity. A cop-out, basically. Notice that you have basically nothing to say about the alleged complexity. Nothing that actually challenges anything I’ve said.
Okay bro just one more toke bro. You are so confused, I don’t even know where to begin. When did we begin discussing materialism or philosophy? Buddy, we are stuck at the basics of things like not lying and remembering what we are talking about and how you should read before sharing opinions.
I don’t know what you’re referring to and I don’t care to try to figure out out. Be clearer in your thoughts and words or use the quote feature.
I didn’t say anything like that either lmao. You seem to have no idea what is happening most of the time, it’s like you don’t even read what I said.
I’ve already addressed this. I will wait for you to respond to what I said instead of endlessly repeating yourself.
Same as before, I don’t know what you’re referring to and don’t care to go and figure it out. Use the quote feature or organize your thoughts.
I am having a very honest conversation, but it is in no way intellectual. We are, as I said, stuck at very basic things like, “is it okay to lie?” and, “do I need to actually go and try to learn things before having and sharing my half-baked opinions?” and, “maybe what will help is a series of confused generalizations about faith and god and philosophy of materialism with no relation to what anyone else is talking about”. We could only ever have an intellectual conversation if you were in any way interested in an intellectual topic. To be perfectly frank, this topic does not require much in the way of an intellectual discussion, it is mostly about establishing basic facts of which you are entirely ignorant and obstinately refuse to engage with our educate yourself about, but you do seem to think that I am at fault for not accepting your nonsense fabrications you offer as substitute.
I’m not certain that I’ve even mentioned Hamas in this conversation. I certainly wouldn’t reduce the Palestinian resistance to only Hamas. I think you are just projecting your own lightweight understanding of the topic onto me.
But you have no understanding of what is going on. Nearly everything is clearly a revelation to you. There is rarely anything concrete or specific in what you say and when there is it is usually wrong or misleading. When I provide concrete specifics you just make things up to be contrarian and rescue your prior fibbing. You are acting in the exact opposite way that you are currently claiming.
Agent? What? I of course stand with the Palestinian resistance, this is obvious and I in no way hide it. And propaganda is just an attempt to convince others of political positions through argument and presentation. We all engage in it. But mine is accurate, informed, and just.
Unfortunately you have decided that the important thing here is your ego and not, say, the Palestinians themselves. God forbid you learn anything about them.
Those are your words, not mine. You’re just telling yourself stories and believing them again.
You clearly do not, you are not interested in investigating this topic whatsoever. You prefer to use requests for evidence to have other people fetch things for you and then use them purely rhetorically.
Decades is not a very long time, per this topic. Refugees in Gaza exist who were kicked from their homes in the nearby area in living memory. If you actually stated your point, though, it might be easier to address it.
So many qualifiers. The Kibbutzim did fire back, it is one of the reasons many were killed in the first place, per first hand accounts. Several articles have been written about Kibbutz Be’eri, presumably to provide the most favorable of narratives, and in dire need of a skeptical lens, but of course these articles tend to mention that the Kibbutz has an armory of M16 rifles that the settlers almost immediately ran to. This is standard in such locations, they are little walled, armed communities. You would know this if you were ever in any way curious about the topic instead of approaching what I say with ignorant contrarianism.
Hardly. My claims re: material basis is about actual settler-colonial bases, both current and historical, and this is an inarguable fact of settler-colonialism: it requires that the settlers feel reasonably safe and secure on their stolen lands. Israeli society makes much of this, they talk about their iron dome often and the necessity, but also success, of their high level of militarization against Palestinians. And when you look to polling, and the politics of Israel, you will find that they are outraged over a loss of status, of an inability to return the hostages, of being forced from the area around Gaza and from Northern Israel, and that in return they want military escalation and death. When the government launches new campaigns, when they bomb residential neighborhoods, their ratings go up.
If you deigned to read and engage with what I had said about this material basis, you would not be saying such silly things.
This sounds like the “deep” thoughts of an high mediocre college freshman. Who knows what your point is. Apparently you think your appeal to your belief in “illogic” is somehow comparable to the decades of settler colonialism and the psychology basis of settlers, long studied and described by the oppressed who wage resistance against them. You seem to think your imaginary vague idea of people “being illogical” is far more reliable analysis than, say, settlers needing to feel secure in their occupation, arming themselves, building up a series of racist oppressions to do so, etc. You have no real response to this, which is why you can barely string these thoughts together.
Again these are your words and then you say it is “more of my faith”, lmao. You are deeply confused.
PS the IDF is mostly teenagers and young 20-somethings with inflated titles that fall apart in any real fight. The Zionist press is absolutely chock full of articles about how “the troops” lack capacity due to attrition (casualties and psychologically) and cannot fight in Lebanon.
I actually already mentioned some specific examples of why their doctrine falls apart without constant supplies from the US. If only you had the courage of your convictions to directly address what I had said. Instead you play little games.
These forces can’t even push much more than a hair into Lebanon and that is with massive air support.
Israel has never won a war without air power and full support of a major imperialist sponsor, whether it was the British or US. You are simply making things up again.
It occurs to me that you don’t know how to use the quote feature of Lemmy. Perhaps you are too proud to ask? It is not always clear what you are responding to.
This question is too vague. An entire government has many objectives addressing different topics. Do you want me to list objectives for you? Or do you have some in mind to make your question more clear?
Every resistance fighter in Palestine knows that the Zionists will respond with incredible cruelty and a massively outsized response. The ratios of killed or wounded are typically 10:1 or more. These decisions are made with full eyes about what it means to provoke and escalate, but it is the same logic as those of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is people who see a slow genocide and displacement as guaranteed from the status quo and from all other realistic paths provided. And they set out a plan to disrupt the Zionist entity, to agitate, which will, knowingly, create a disproportionate response, in order to forward their goals of resistance, to undermine Zionist security, to test their own capacity for war, to bleed their enemy through the tactics I have already mentioned.
If you actually cared to learn anything about this topic, you would already know this. They have repeatedly made public statements about this. There is a reason they call their fallen compatriots martyrs. There is a reason they place emphasis on mourning via righteousness and solidarity and not simply despair.
Israel is now well-known to be a genocidal ethnostate, a rogue state. The world stands against them. Again, something you would know if you weren’t locked in a box of propaganda. Along with regional allies, Israel is in turmoil and on the brink of falling apart, with its credit ratings tanking every few months. It is a country dependent on finance capitalism, with related industries like tech, and those workers have largely fled. It is attempting to lash out and provoke further war, and it is succeeding only at, yet again, mass killing of civilians without actually addressing the fundamental collapse within.
If you cared about this topic you would already know these things.
It is when you are a 19-year-old Israeli brigadier-general whose CO just got sniped in front of them. They can barely operate without overhwelming air support. This is their war doctrine, it is identical to the Americans’. You would already know this if you cared about this topic.
They only occur after massive civilian bombing campaigns and they routinely lose to guerillas. They declare an area cleared and then resistance fighters pop back up a few days later. Their allegedly new strategy in North Gaza is to begin more thoroughly razing it via bombings because they simply cannot win against the guerillas with their soldiers.
You would already know this if you cared about this topic. One wonders if you will someday acquire shame at this poor behavior.
All of this occurred under conditions of full air support and bombing campaigns. Did you forget what we were talking about? I think so.
Nowhere near enough. They are dependent on US weapons and materials and logistical support.
The ANC, as well as the rest of the tripartite group, was underground for 3 decades during which it made nearly all of its major advances. “Crushed”, lmao. Who do you think the apartheid government negotiated with? You know nothing about this topic.
Nobody ever said the ANC was alone. It had quite a substantial amount of support from the Soviets, for example, as well as the Cubans and the Palestinian resistance. You are simply ignorant of the history.
You yourself mentioned “fundamental truths”, not me. It’s not lies to call you out on it.
You don’t know why I ask for them, you’ve failed to provide a single one. This is likely due to you knowing they’re political in nature.
You know my point. Seeing the border kibbutz as armed jailors (and thus combatants) is ludicrous. While arms were certainly present, and local security forces certainly returned fire, a heavily armed, fortified camp would have provided heavy resistance. Instead, the attack swept through them quickly, killing many in their shelters. There is significant video evidence of this.
There you go again with “inarguable fact”. No fact is inarguable, that’s not how facts work. Proper intellectual rigor allows the challenging of even the most deeply-held belief, otherwise Einsteinian gravity would have never overtaken Newtonian gravity. In your case, you even misapply it, taking a very natural human reaction against security threats to an illogical conclusion that if those security threats escalate to a certain severity, then the Israelis will lose somehow. This makes no sense.
More cute deflections out of you. But no, again, your materialist philosophy does not actually provide for a concrete path to victory. Your long studies on the psychology of settlers is missing a whole bunch of psychology if all you can focus on is material security. Hate, for instance, is an emotion that can be taught generation to generation, and can motivate independently of material conditions.
Do you think 20somethings cannot be trained to be good soldiers? Do you think the IDF is smaller than 400k? Be clear. And no, you did not mentioned specific examples, except to repeat this claim that they “fall apart” in ground combat. That is not a specific example.
Has there been a widespread invasion into Lebanon that faltered? Or are you arguing they are too scared and weak to even try?
In the 1948 war, Israel had no air force. The Arab countries did. They still lost.
Quoting wastes space. I can recall our previous discussion, if you can’t it’s not hard to scroll back a little. Their goal of ethnic cleansing.
There’s still no path to victory described here. Israel does not have the world against them, because genocide just isn’t that big a deal across the world. You know India still trades with Israel, and has its navy active in the Red Sea area? Israel’s credit rating is still in the A range, it’s not being knocked down “every few months”. I don’t think you should be accusing me of being locked in a box of propaganda when your statements are this exaggerated and untrue.
So, you think Major Generals can frequently be found at checkpoints then…?
Routinely lose to the guerillas where? Using bombardment to prepare for an assault is nothing new, that’s pretty standard going back centuries. Losing the ground assault is notable though. Guerillas popping back up is just guerillas fighting a guerilla campaign, I assume you understand how that’s supposed to operate, and how it isn’t reflecting the IDF being defeated in a pitched battle.
More nitpicking details. Being crushed does not have to mean no longer present. The point remains that the ANC would have never accomplished their goals without international pressure. Had the international community not cared about Apartheid, it would have continued despite ANC resistance, into the foreseeable future.
Actually you did, right here:
otherwise you will be correctly recognized as someone that plays with fairy tales and seems to even believe them!
You could have easily checked this, but I guess you’re not putting much effort in.
You brought up materialism several paragraphs up, around 3 posts ago. You seem to want to give credit for expanding freedom movements solely to violent combatants, while saying nonviolent methods are ineffective. This is simplistic. You are ignoring other factors present.
I see, you cannot remember well. Sorry, but if I quote everything too, for your convenience since you are reluctant to reread I suppose, then these replies will simply get longer and longer as yours have. You’re now up to two full size comments, all because you are wasting space quoting me when I can fully remember what I said. You don’t have to. I won’t start.
We were discussing whether American nonviolent protest was a significant factor in ending the war. I said yes, you said no.
Most of the rest of that looks like trolling and more nitpicking pointless details like me saying “hamas” instead of “Palestinian resistance”. I suppose your rigid mind might actually lack the flexibility to bridge the two, though. You also seem to blame me for confusion when you cannot remember or reread and thus need me to provide quotes for your convenience.
No, not everyone engages in propaganda. It is possible to analyze factual events without applying value judgements, which are a necessary component of propaganda. We are engaged in a propagandistic discussion, certainly, that’s unavoidable I think, but it is not some unavoidable thing.
At this point you are basically uncomprehensible because you aren’t using the quote feature and your thoughts are disorganized, providing insufficient context for what point you are trying to make. Plus, I am getting very repetitive because the fundamental problem here is an intransigent combination of arrogance and ignorance - your defensiveness despite clearly knowing virtually nothing abiyt this topic and relying on deflection and invention to resist correction. A curious person would at least go read a bit to see if the things I’m referring to have grounding and develop their own education this way. Unfortunately you are against your own education on this topic and that is not something I can fix on your behalf. The lack of self-reflection to even make yourself comprehensible is an example of this, it has escalated to the point of communication itself being nearly impossible.
If you are at some point interested in a good faith discussion where you acknowledge what you do and do not know and what you will spend time learning, let me know.
Very convenient when you’re the one making strong claims with no evidence or sourcing. I suppose I don’t really expect you to do anything asides blame someone else for all your problems though. That’s much easier.