Posted by supercopter 10 hours ago
The only thing saving Israel is the US protection and the nukes. US protection can change. Nukes are harder.
South Africa successfully utilized "strategic ambiguity". They never explicitly acknowledged they had the weapons, while making sure world leaders knew they were a credible threat.
during South Africa's border wars (specifically against the Cubans in Angola), there were internal discussions about deploying tactical nuclear weapons. Because world leaders viewed that threat as entirely credible, it gave South Africa massive leverage.
Feels like world leaders view modern Israeli threats through the exact same lens and i'd agree given recent covert operations like the beeper bombings hence this UN posture.
Could we replicate the SA situation? probably not but maybe partially?
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, South Africa’s strategic leverage evaporated overnight. The US and UK no longer had a reason to shield them from crippling global economic sanctions.
Feels like we are watching this in real time with Israel post Iran war. If the US entirely removed its diplomatic shield and allowed full global economic isolation to set in, the economic cost of maintaining a pariah state might eventually outweigh the perceived security benefit of the weapons. ('might' doing a lot of heavy lifting there)
Also SA was also motivated by fear of the nukes getting in the hands of the incoming leftist government, Israel does not have that fear.
Then there various secular narratives around the Jewish homeland, the rebirth (and Germany's redemption) after the Holocaust etc.
For western politicians, it seems far easier to chime in to the dehumanization of Palestinians and either paint the daily suffering there as "tragic but necessary", make fun of it or dismiss it completely - than to object to those stories.
This seems to work on a different layer than geopolitics, so I have doubts that a shift in geopolitics alone would change this. (I may be wrong)
Though maybe the changed perception of Israel after the Gaza war might change it.
Before 1939 there were large Jewish communities across Europe and the Middle East. There were many schools for rabbis and philosophy. But Antisemitism and the Holocaust destroyed the European communities and antizionism forced the Jews from Arab countries to Israel in the 1950s. These communities have never been rebuilt. The hate was real, powerful and successful. Most of what was left of the Jews went to Israel.
Israel is now the centre of Jewish life and religious life. It is also where Jews are most protected. For example, most rabbis are trained in Israel and many Jews have moved there. So many modern Jews have a spiritual, historical and familial connection to Israel.
Jews see a different side of the conflict. Most want peace but believe their Arab enemies do not.
Israel is without a doubt, the most dangerous place for Jews in the world. Not only is the entire country built on ethnically cleansed land (and thus Zionists have the indigenous population correctly trying to get them off the land), Israel has also attacked almost every country in the region and regularly receives missile attacks.
That makes sense as a "subjective experience" (if there is something like the subjective experience of a people), but it fails the reality check for me.
Yes, Israel is the center of Jewish life today (New York coming next apparently), but I can't really believe that it genuinely is the safest place for Jews in the world today - not after the last years. Jews in the US or Europe were not at risk of being murdered by Hamas, hit by a missile from Iran or get conscripted in a war. Jews in Israel were.
> Most want peace but believe their Arab enemies do not.
Well, everyone wants peace in the "I won" sense. I don't see that most Israeli Jews want peace in the sense of living together peacefully with their neighbors.
(Neither do their neighbors, true - which is why I fault Israelis less here than the western allies who should apply force to both sides to deescalate and reconcile if they really wanted to end the conflict, but who instead only apply pressure to one side and unquestionably support the other side)
Their neighbours don't really have an option though. Stopping all resistance will not stop the settlers from harassing and chasing away the natives, and it will not force Israel to respect any border (which they took care of not even declaring). If anything, Palestinian resistance is functional to the progress of the occupation, so, if things get too quiet, a couple of killings or demolished homes keep the situation dynamic enough.
Unless you're counting on the moral authority of the Western nations that stayed silent or even financed and armed Israel while it was starving a population under blockade and bombings, murdering tens of thousands of civilians, killing hundreds of journalists, bombing hospitals and universities. Maybe they would say something if Israel killed and conquered a population that absolutely refuses to react. What do you think?
This blinkered view will reasonably leave you baffled and with a distorted world model, and a perception that people are stupid when they are actually seeing the bigger picture.
They are not family and often not even the same race. It’s a religious thing, but you only find two of the three religious alignments irrational, when these are more likely just reacting in response to the other.
What is the lowest entity that can apply leverage? Regardless of what US or UN does or doesn't, you can start boycotting today.
When Hamas started the Gaza war, the IDF barely defended against Hamas. They feared they were about to face land incursions straight through UN lines from Lebanon. That, despite the direct UN mission to use weapons to prevent it from just about everyone, the UNSC, the UNGA, UN resolutions, Lebanon's government, Hezbollah built up an army right under the noses of these soldiers.
The IDF was 100% correct in their assessment.
So now what do we do? Nobody sane will pretend that hamas or hezbollah's stated reasons for fighting against Israel are even remotely true. And Iran? Iran still quite literally screams on state television they will massacre Israel and then the US (they have "hardliners" making speeches, which are really more like screaming)
So another attack will come again, that's for sure. How do we prevent the same outcome we had now? Nobody, not even Iran, wants this (although for Iran I'd bet the Palestinian casualties aren't anywhere near high enough). But they won't change. So ...
What now?
Pretty sure he died well before Oct 7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...
Note the islamic emblem and the fact that the "muslim pope" (mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian) visited extermination camps while recruiting SS soldiers. There are rumors about what he said when he was there. Should I repeat them?
There is no unanimous consensus on this issue at all.
Now after WW2, consensus is that the League of Nations may have outright caused WW2, and certainly contributed more than any other individual factor. The League of Nations was the embodiment of the treaty of Versailles. As if that wasn't bad enough, the League of Nations was also the league of nations that stopped most reactions against Hitler immediately before the war.
I'm not even going to bother drawing the obvious parallel with how the UN is treating nuclear powers, and people defending themselves against attacks by a nuclear (or trying-to-be-nuclear) power.
Apply the Apartheid South Africa treatament. Gather the larger number possible of complying members, and apply a coordinated boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to put pressure in the party engaged in genocide, ethnic cleansing or other abhorrent actions.
I think the emergence of nation states with democratic institutions and a strong system of law is actually a hopeful precedent here. Somehow we got from a world of fiefdoms and lords that literally stood above the law to states with checks and balances. (Yes, we're sliding back towards the "fiefdoms" situation right now, but we're still far better than things used to be)
So I'm gonna be a starry-eyed idealist and keep the hope up that we might archive the same on a global level at some point.
If recent history is any indicator, UN isn't that structure; probably EU / G7 / BRICS & other such blocs are:
... we construct a new dataset covering all 43 very large mass atrocities perpetrated by governments or non-state actors since 1945 with at least 50,000 civilian fatalities.
This article introduces and summarizes these data, including an inductively generated typology of three major ending types: those in which (i) violence is carried out to its intended conclusion (37%); (ii) the perpetrator is driven out of power militarily (26%); or (iii) the perpetrator shifts to a different strategy no longer involving mass atrocities against civilians (37%).
We find that international actors play a range of important roles in endings, often involving encouragement and support for policy changes that reduce mass killings. Endings could be attributed principally to armed foreign interventions in only four cases, three of which involved regime change. Within the cases we study, no ending was attributable to a neutral peacekeeping mission.
And this veto nonsense needs to go away.
1: The new nuclear powers should be included, I guess including N Korea, India, and Pakistan. And possibly Israel, if they admit to having them.
2: Rethink the whole thing. Are nukes really as important as everybody thought they were after WWII? If not, what should we look at to decide who to include?
That's not actually true, the 5 permanent seats on the UNSC were granted in 1945, well before any country aside from the US managed to develop nuclear weapons.
Those 5 countries did all eventually develop nuclear weapons and became nuclear weapon states under the NPT but that happened quite a bit later.
in theory its better if you don't give veto power to great powers because they'll abuse it. in practice it's what keeps the fragile system that prevents WW3 from total collapse, as happened with the league of nations.
And, of course, the problem is people don't agree. Turkey refuses to accept many of it's actions as genocidal (because that's how Turkey was created: when the last islamic state ("the Ottoman empire") got destroyed by Turks (who at that point were the ottoman army), they massacred a LOT of population groups, famously the Armenians but academics name more than a dozen separate genocides: Greeks, Kurds, Azeri, Jews, ...)
Oh and of course they kept doing it. Technically what Turkey did in Cyprus is also a genocide, and they have an active policy of replacing Kurd population groups but that's, if that's even possible, an even worse sore point.
The sad fact is that these genocides happened to gain territory. And, most of that territory, go look at Google Maps. This was mostly deep inland Turkey. And ... Turks obviously don't want it. There's no big cities there, and the more east you go, the less little towns, the less people, the less everything (except on the border). After the genocides what was a European landscape, a village every 5km or so is now empty. Hundreds of kilometers of nothing. Names on a map , with nothing or ruins below them. You don't really need a line to find the Armenian or Georgian border: where the farms begin, the rectangular fields, the villages, you've crossed the Turkish border. In other words: what repopulation the Turks did ... is a failure. And what little remains, mostly near the black sea, is losing young people at an astonishing rate. This is huge empty space, mostly ecologically destroyed land, not productive farmland. Not nature preserves. Nothing.
Also the reverse also doesn't apply. The UN may have trouble with Israeli actions, but where the UN took control to resolve the situation, where the UN took action, most famously southern Lebanon, it has not just failed but it systematically kept getting worse for 50+ years now. Whereas at least for Israel you can say: look at Tel Aviv. Look at Jerusalem. Look at Haifa. They really built something. Where the UN "helped" ... there's nothing.
Maybe the UN should try to avoid releasing obviously biased reports.[0]
Keep in mind the UN has already effectively thrown away all credibility when it comes to anything related to Israel already due to well documented extreme anti-Israel bias.[1]
[0] https://unwatch.org/un-watch-legal-rebuttal-disproving-the-p...
[1] https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...
I don't actually live in Russia, if I did, it would be even worse.
We need more of that.
https://blog.xero.com/news-events/our-position-on-ukraine-an...
But they didn't do anything for Israel. Actually, at the height of the genocide, they decided to invest in an Israeli company.
slow claps
It is even more sickening and outrageous if you view it through that lens.
The proposed reforms led by the likes of Brazil, Germany and India are not getting a lot of traction. Maybe if they included everyone else they'd have a better chance.
Needing so many years to get the courage to say the world genocide, where everybody had seen for years Israel turning little children into little flesh chunks, slowly unfurl in horrid technicolor in world TV, is just another part of the problem. UN is useless.
The circumstances of little Hind Rajab's death plays on my mind every single day, and haunts me. The fact something as brazen and blatant as that could happen, and the world did nothing.
Truly a stain on our generation.
The premie babies at Al-Nasr hospital.
Over a hundred bombed hospitals.
The Irish president's sister kidnapped and abused.
Assassinating negotiation teams and scientists.
Murders of whole families who dared to speak out to the world.
Running over a teenager with their hands zip-tied behind their backs with Caterpillars®.
The paramedic massacre in Rafah.
The hundreds of journalists. The tens of thousands of children. The doctors raped to death.
The people who never get mentioned in these lists of atrocities, buried in mass graves with their children, hands tied.
The people dying from n-order effects, slowly, painfully, barely noticed or counted.
...
And little/no sanctions from our civilized Western democracies. (Except on the people calling it out, who can't use a credit card or bank any more, or even receive donations.)
We are far worse than useless. The stain is set for all time.
A reminder for any Americans reading this: 98.15% of 2024 voters chose a Presidential candidate that supported the above.
Because that which war criminals bring to their victims, they will also - ALWAYS - bring back to their own state.
Prosecute your war criminals. Now!
But I never came to better conclusion about West Bank annexation that that it is pure imperialism. Basically what russians are trying in Ukraine. I'm still not quite sure what is the purpose, there is really not enough land or it's all just bs?
I wonder if this ends up Flagged.
Not sure it's the same thing. Russians want political and territorial control in Ukraine, not expelling Ukrainians to resettle the place with "ethnic Russians". Israel wants to conquer the whole of Palestine (West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem) to replace the native population with its own. There is no possible equal integration of Palestinians or their descendants into a Jewish state, not in a thousand years, and by design.
But I wouldn't be sure about your claim regarding Israel. Even now there are millions of Palestinians with Israel citizenship. I understand the deeply rooted animosity with hamas but I do not understand the whole point of this type of colonisation of west bank. I suppose it have something to do with their extreme religious part of goverment?
You've had a point. Maybe it's more like Native Americans and colonizer type of situation.
Besides the obvious religious/ ideological motivation, there's also a simple matter of territory: Israel is a small country and the West Bank and Gaza have a lot of value, both for the country as a whole (more space for more people, more natural resources, nobody to share with) as well as commercial value- think developments, real estate, industrial and agricultural areas, seafront properties, etc. Very hard to keep your hands off this bounty, for decades, when the rest of the world basically allows you everything.
The similarity might be stronger than you suspect. Russia abducts and transports Ukrainian children to controlled territories [0], and actively encourages its own citizens to relocate to captured Ukrainian areas through economic incentives, subsidized housing, and aggressive long-term repopulation strategies.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7g5xnvl2eo
[1] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russias...
[[ Edit - added references in response to flagging ]]
I really don't want to descend into countless counterexamples, but that's how virtually every military or militia wages war, including the IDF. I assume your confusion on this issue may be due to a lack of familiarity with the subject.
Usually never ever has anything to do with malevolence (eg. in an attempt to use the counter strike as a propaganda story). More often, it's just a matter of convenience, logistics, and the realities of operating in populated areas.
If there's one thing that CIA manuals on training militias stressed on, or any military history book in that regard, it's that soldiers need to be fed and supported. Or they'll find ways to meet those needs without you.
Even roofs of civilians apartments, let alone reinforced structures such as hospitals, town halls, schools, etc if they can't use alternatives.
Even antique frontal wars used terrain to their advantage. That's why we wrote rules of engagement, but if the bigger powers themselves abuse them, how can you expect militias that have to carry guerrilla or urban tactics to stand by them?
BTW, The response came after texting the residents, distributing leaflets and annoncening in every way possible that the place is going to be bombed.
BTW (2), For years Israel avoided bombing dense residential areas, despite knowing the origin of those rockets.
Regardless, my original point stands that Hamas do not have the means and resources both to build public shelters for everyone and to continue its military efforts.
Interesting part about your commentary is, that you completely ignored the West bank I mentioned. Place when Israel forces killed hundreds of children with sole reason or colonisation of land belonging to someone else. Or at least I never found any other explanation for behavior at the West Bank.
May, 2024: At least 21 killed in Israeli attacks on tent camp near Gaza’s Rafah [4]
September, 2024: An Israeli strike on humanitarian tent camp for displaced Gazans killed at least 19 people [5]
December 2024: Seven attacks on tent encampments in the past two weeks kill 34 Palestinians including 10 children [2]
April 2025, Israeli strikes kill Palestinians in tented area for displaced in Gaza [3]
January, 2026: Israeli airstrikes targeted tents belonging to displaced people [1]
[1] https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/israeli-airstrikes-targe...
[2] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-opt-press-release-...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yrl891j23o
[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/5/28/at-least-21-kil...
[5] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/an-israeli-strike-on-huma...
Israelis have bomb shelters because have ample warning and an enemy that is barely able to hit anything.
This blaming the victims of your own bombings for not taking shelter- actually accusing them to be responsible for their own deaths and those of their relatives, parents, wives, children, is some of the most revolting and shameless Israeli propaganda.
Literally the first paragraph of the article we're commenting.
Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions. Use any legal means to stop funding this genocide and make Israel's leadership accountable. We all love our comfy white collar jobs and would rather not rock the boat, but not doing the little we can do (e.g. stop using Israeli suppliers and services) makes us supporters.