This. And a justification for one population to dehumanize another population.
(I’m also generalizing religion, throughout time it’s a mechanism for labeling the “other/lesser”. It’s a great concept, the execution sucks and it’s readily co-opted and corrupted.).
So tribal yes, but with additional brainwashing capacity that allows for heinious actions.
Not a justification, a stated rationalization. If it weren’t religious differences, it’d be something else.
That’s incredibly bad analysis. This is the culmination of Bib’s entire career… an opportunity for a final solution to the Palestinian question.
How anyone can not see that these attacks are amazing news for the Israeli right is mind blowing to me. That journalist has my lawnmower circling a different star.
Sorry man religious nutjobs are a major accelerant to the situation. Religion the concept for sure owns a full share of the responsibility for what is happening.
It’s not even just Jews and Muslims it’s also American evangelical nutjobs trying to bring on revelations through unifying Israel.
And justifications matter when it comes to being able to commit atrocities. Really hard to exclude religion from blame when all three flavors of people of the book are involved aggressively in a place nicknamed ‘the holy land’.
I don’t find what you’re writing here to be incompatible with the article. Like, I think the author talking about Bibi’s incredible arrogance and overconfidence in thinking he could manage Hamas is true regardless of whether the Israeli public holds him to account for his failure or rallies around him to do more war crimes.
I think Bibi got exactly what he wanted. I think the analysis that he was incorrect about his control level is wrong because the only reading you could have of the last 5 years would be Israel cranking every burner to max and then spraying the stove with gasoline.
Senior employee wanted to put a statement on our socials in support of Israel and condemning the attacks. I said that nobody is looking for or needs our company’s thoughts on current events, but that I’d be comfortable with a general statement mourning the impact on everyone there. Ended up in a short and civil conversation where at some point I mentioned innocent lives lost on both sides, and he said that he wasn’t sure there were any innocent lives in Gaza. I pointed out that there are plenty of people who say the same about Israel, and that I don’t agree with them or him.
Anyway, no statement.
Hundreds of the Israeli Right were just massacred in a modern day pogrom. This included the children, parents, and grandparents of the Israeli right.
I don’t have a kind response to this in me. I’m sure you’re feeling some kind of way today for perfectly good reasons. I clearly am also feeling pretty bad about what is happening.
I think there’s a very strong chance we’re about to witness the end of Palestine and have a very large humanitarian crisis with a six figure body count nearly all of whom in the final accounting will be Palestinians.
But yeah the people who have been for war my whole life didn’t win because there were some civilian casualties on their side.
How do you imagine do we get to six figures?
I think you’re really conflating different issues. Unless your going for the viewpoint that Israeli government intentionally allowed their people to be killed to progress an agenda then it’s pretty clearly a massive failure of governance to allow this attack to have happened.
But nothing like God to tell you that it’s OK.
I think this conflict goes on a while. I really really really want to be wrong. I think Bibi tries to close this out right here right now where he’s got near global support. He’s got the excuse he needs to do what he wants to do and I think he’s got some pretty extreme plans.
I don’t think they intentionally let the attacks happen or anything, but I think they raised the pressure on the situation until something happened. It happened to be this and it happened to be now. I don’t think exactly when and exactly where it happened is the important part from the perspective of the people making the decisions.
The above is just a fancier way of making the following circular argument:
“Hamas only attacked because Israel kept squeezing them. It doesn’t really matter what the trigger was, since the attack is proof of them feeling squeezed.”
Think BS’s overall point is that the center-left in Israel is wishcasting just like the US center-left did about, as one somewhat similar example, GWB dragging us into Iraq. By November 2004 it was clear that the Iraq War was a mistake yet 2.8% more people voted for GWB in 2004 than in 2000.
The story that wins out in Israel in the medium term isn’t going to be Bibi’s incompetence, etc. in allowing/causing this to happen, it’s going to be that Bibi “was right about the Palestinians all along” and the atrocities that flow from that thinking.
In other words, it’s not “The NY Times of Israel” reader that is going to determine Bibi’s fate and what happens next, it’s the median Israeli voter, I.e. the ones who elected this nutjob government in the first place.
They didn’t just feel squeezed. There’s an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. I’m not minimizing the scale of these attacks, they are quite large… but let’s not pretend that there was no justification for violence.
The day before this happened it was when not if. That doesn’t make a massacre at a music festival ok, in fact that act was so terrible for Israeli public opinion I don’t even know what to make of it besides the fact that Hamas isn’t even trying to win. Barbaric and horribly counteractive. The only possible reason to hit that music festival was that it was there, security was lax, and they thought they could kill a bunch of Israeli civilians.
Woulda coulda shoulda I think when it’s all over the target selection by Hamas is going to make military theory textbooks as an example of what not to do next to our bombing campaigns since WW2. As time goes on and terrorism gets tried I think humanity is starting to realize that it doesn’t actually work. You bomb people and they do get scared… they also get insanely pissed. If our bombing campaign in Vietnam didn’t destroy the populations morale these attacks on Israel are in no danger of working.
Yeah I dunno this seems like it’s blowing up in Bibi’s face, esp if it’s true that they ignored warnings from Egypt. Not that it matters, he seems to stay in power regardless.
