Oddbean

@4a737d46 sure, words matter. But, in all honesty, how would you label a State whose goal is to completely wipe out a piece of land on an ethnic basis and doesn't seem to care of any of the civilians who live there - and its representatives are also very clear about their intentions? Forcefully removing people out of their homes to replace them with people of a different ethnic group is called ethnic cleansing. Confining people in geographical cages with little possibility of movement or integrating into the larger society is called apartheid. The indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population on an ethnic basis, and the cutting off their supplies of food, water and electricity, is called a genocide. And preaching the formation of a State with a single homogenous ethnic and religious group is called theocratic fascism. Words matter, so we should probably start using the right ones.

@4a737d46 my label is a response to what I often hear from representatives and sympathizers of this government - including the ambassador in this interview. "We need all of that land because the Holocaust <put-victimist-excuse-here>". It's almost like the evil that they went through allows them to perpetrate the same evil against others. It's almost as if they were allowed to respond with a reaction of the same intensity. How would you call this kind of behaviour and reaction?

@7d199f28 Look, what you are calling for (fight, sanction) and your emotional language (evil, hate), plus your willingness to condemn all of Israel and make pseudo-psychological explanations for the behaviour of Israelis... All this makes you no better than any of them, as you do not even have the excuse of being involved in the conflict, and are rather an armchair instigator of war. I am sorry you speak like this.

@4a737d46 "Evil" and "hate" are exactly the words the Israeli ambassador used when talking about Gaza in this clip. He slowly repeats "we have to destroy Gaza" three times, with his eyes fill up with hate. How is denouncing hate and putting the right labels onto it a form of hate itself? Also note that I'm always careful not to condemn all of Israel. I've repeatedly talked about "Israeli State" as "the current Israeli government", not of Israel as a whole. I know that not all the folks over there support Likud and its far-right partners. I know that many of them have taken to the streets when Netanyahu repeatedly tried to neutralize the judicial power in the past few months. I know that many of them are in favour of opening a line of dialogue at least with the exiled PLO/PA and oppose this war. Not everybody in Israel is a fascist illiberal colonist who wants to wipe out a whole ethnic group and create a theocratic State, but everybody who politically represents Israel right now falls under that category. Just like not all Palestinians are terrorists who believe in violence as a legitimate mean of getting back all of their lands, but everybody in Hamas falls under that category. And I'm also not instigating war. I believe that the '67 UN resolution was the best possible deal, and that the Oslo accords actually came quite close to a durable peace. I believe in a two-State solution. Those who instigate war are those who have spent the past 30 years opposing that peace process - and that applies to both the sides of the conflict. And I'm definitely not saying that a war against Israel is justified. I'm saying that we should make sure not to give a single helmet or bullet, let alone a US air carrier in the Mediterranean, to a country that has decided to respond to an overall moderate-impact attack by basically wiping out a whole region and displacing millions who will soon knock on Europe's doors. And, on top of that, sanctions against Israel would make perfectly sense if we were really ideologically honest - if we put sanctions on Russia for engaging in a colonial campaign, then why aren't we doing the same with Israel?

@Alexia Gaudeul you work for the EU, so probably you would learn a lot by hearing from Arabic people directly, as EU media is acting as.a lawyer of Israel. If you hear learning people speaking or see their media (Al Jazeera and others) you would see the propaganda and Double morale EU is doing on this topic

@Alexia Gaudeul Albert Einstein himself said some Israeli parties are applying Nazi methods against their own people, and on Arabs and British. Those parties later formed the likud, the party of Ariel Sharon and now Neytaniahu, who is now doing the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Here's the original article from Einstein, published on the New York Times in 1948, reporting a massacre of 200 people made by Israeli parties and how some Israeli celebrated it. https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948/page/n2/mode/1up

@7d199f28 @4a737d46 Dror Eydar holds no office since 2022, and his entire political career was a 3-year assignment as Ambassador to Italy. Suggesting he’s communicating the goals of the Israeli government is a stretch to fit a narrative. I’m no fan, but Netanyahu held a press conference yesterday where he was very clear about Israel’s goals of the war: Return the hostages and eliminate Hamas.

@5c8e0a6d @4a737d46 I simply can't trust Netanyahu. While his official position is to eliminate Hamas and liberate the hostages, I simply can't trust someone who has openly promised to do anything in his power to delay the implementation of the Oslo accords - and has managed to do so for two decades so far. And he's in a coalition with Shas (Ovadia Yosef repeatedly cursed the Palestinians and call for the wrath of god against them), Tkuma (which opposes any territorial concessions to the Palestinians), and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose has made it a political mission to harass anybody who isn't Jew - from provoking Muslims praying in mosques, to defending spitting at Christians as an "ancient Jewish tradition". I mean, I don't have to see a Roman salute to recognize a fascist. I know that positions like those of Dror Eydar's aren't uncommon among those who currently hold power in Israel. I know that Netanyahu has to walk a thin line - on one side he has Western partners that can be easily alienated if he causes a humanitarian crisis on the doorstep of Europe, and on the other side he has internal pressures from his partners to cause exactly that type of crisis. Of course he'll say that he only wants to liberate the hostages and neutralize Hamas. But it's not hard to imagine what he says when he talks to his partner - his off-the-record comments on the Oslo accords are a good example of that.