"There is no way they could have been considered combatants," said one writer and analyst. "This is unreal."
Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month.
Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men. According to a translation of the coverage, they were not identified in the reporting.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka's U.S. policy fellow, said: "This is among the worst footage I've seen. Not only were these boys clearly unarmed and present no threat whatsoever, but they were struck multiple times even after stumbling/crawling away. There is no way they could have been considered combatants. This is unreal."
Because it's wildly unpopular here. The attacks on 10/7 have convinced more people who would normally be supporters if Gaza/Hamas to not be. And the persistent polling that shows supermajority support amongst Palestinians, plus the continued ransom (and likely perpetual rape) of hostages, combine with the consistent pledge of "we love it and we'll do it again", and the fact that Americans are still being held hostage; Palestinians should be glad the US hasn't entered the conflict ourselves.
Is it really so unpopular among actual people? It's politically not popular, but people in the US are beginning to see the IDF and Israeli government for what they are. I have been seeing Palestinian flags and other shows of support all over since October, and Western media makes little attempt to justify the atrocities by the IDF in their reporting.
Oh absolutely. Israel's popularity has taken a hit in the US (Down to 58%, source but the Palestinian Authority's support is down to 18% (same source).
And when you look at specifically questions around Israel & Hamas' handling and justification for conflict it's no-contest (source. Nobody thinks Hamas' actions were justifiable. That pew poll is pretty nuanced and lays it out pretty well. Most of Palestinians support is primarily focused on the human cost of the war; which the US is seen to be mitigating with it's air drops and the port we're building.
It's not really surprising either. The older you are the more you've experienced Hamas/PA tactics and PR and the less susceptible you are to it. And Hamas is getting fairly good coverage here. There's rarely a news article pointing out that US citizens are still being held hostage, for example.
Possible unpopular take, but suddenly cutting off support for Israel may be evaluated as the path that results in far more blood. Because of Bibi's absolute shit response, there's a good possibility that many groups in the region (Hezbolah, Iran, etc.) are standing quite ready to exterminate Israel and all of its roughly 9.3 million residents (2021 numbers). While the US cutting off support may be a short term solution that a lot of people could agree with, Bibi has made clear that he is willing to play chicken with the entire population of Israel, and so if the aid stops and the possible invasion from the regional players starts up, then the US has to decide whether to let a "former" ally get exterminated, or get involved at that point when many more actors could be involved in the conflict.
Israel is a nuclear nation, they'll be fine. What will happen is they'll ally with Russia and sell off access to the tech we've been dumb enough to give them.
In the context of the conversation we're currently having? Yeah it does matter, because the person I was replying to suggested that all Jews support what Israel is doing.
And some of the strongest critics of Israel I’ve seen throughout all this have been Jewish. Wild to cast their protest to the side and generalize them.
I don't worry about pissing off white people in America by pointing out the shitty things they collectively were responsible for in the pre civil war era even though not every white person in the 1800s owned slaves or supported slavery.
I'll tell you the nasty truth. You're right, but if a politician ran a campaign to strip Israel of all their benefits of American Exceptionalism they will be crushed in the polls. They won't just lose they will be decimated.
Why?
Because despite what you say, many of those Jews you are referring to are actually Zionists once cutting off the hand that feeds their homeland is threatened.
Non-Jews need to understand that unlike Christianity there is a level of identity politics steeped in nationalism, religion and culture are all so heavily intertwined it's hard to break through. I'm speaking from experience. 3 of my kids are Jewish.
I feel sorry for those sane Israelis that are powerless as their insanely right wing government kills any hope they have for a safe future thanks to destroying an already tenuous relationship with all their neighbours in the ME.
offtopic: "Decimated" means "reduced by 10%", that is, multiplied by 0.9, that is, in the ancient Rome it meant "every 10th executed". Seems closer to "just lose" than to "crushed in the polls". While correcting people writing in their native language which isn't mine is stupid, in this case the term is Roman, so.
Other meaning: "kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of."
The word has more than just one meaning of "reduction by 1/10", even if that's originally where the expression comes from. But im sure a smart guy as yourself already knew that.
In general how a word is used is what it means in the language, prescriptivism is cancer. I just felt that its original meaning is worth preserving too, and there are many ways to say "badly hurt".
The only cancer is you going around trying to “correct” people when there’s nothing to correct.
How does it feel to be such a moron that you can't be bothered to look up the word "prescriptivism", don't know it, thus don't get what you are answering and still decide to throw insults?
You’re not preserving the original meaning. You’re just being an ass.
What's certain is that I don't seek for evaluations of my actions and statements from apes who guess the meaning of words while having Internet access.
Because despite what you say, many of those Jews you are referring to are actually Zionists once cutting off the hand that feeds their homeland is threatened.
Many who have actual ties to the occupying state, or who still consider it a “homeland” despite what they’re seeing before their eyes, probably.
Non-Jews need to understand that unlike Christianity there is a level of identity politics steeped in nationalism, religion and culture are all so heavily intertwined it’s hard to break through.
Settler-colonialism isn’t foreign to us either: we created it. The Jewish state is a settler-colony created by and still supported by & deeply dependent on Global North colonizers. America itself is a settler-colony: we genocided the indigenous peoples and settled here.
The majority of US/UK jews are both pro-Israel and not against what is going on in Gaza
I couldn't find a worldwide survey but it doesn't seem altogether unfair to conflate the jewish religion with the worldwide bastion of that religion any more than it would be wrong to conflate Catholics and the pope. This does NOT mean its ok to harm people based on what they believe. Adding to the sum total of harm does nothing to alleviate the suffering in Gaza.
I couldn’t find a worldwide survey but it doesn’t seem altogether unfair to conflate the jewish religion with the worldwide bastion of that religion any more than it would be wrong to conflate Catholics and the pope.
This analogy doesn’t work. You’re conflating the Jewish people with the Jewish religion. Catholicism is not an ethnicity, and many Jews aren’t religious, in fact quite a few are atheists.
The fact that Judaism is both an ethnicity and a religion is confusing. Nobody should be condemned for the ethnicity they were born with. Religions are voluntary associations.
Where did you get this from? It sounds wrong to me. The early Zionist terrorist groups (Haganah, Lehi etc.) were singularly Jewish groups, with mass immigration of Jews to Palestine being one of their top priorities (getting the British and Palestinians out being another).
As early as mid-1895, Herzl described his expectation that in supporting the emigration of Jews, "anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies".[2]
The Israeli government's alleged collaboration with antisemitic politicians abroad has been criticized as a manifestation of Zionist antisemitism, in that it seeks to highlight Jew-hatred in order to provide further incentive for Jewish immigration to Israel. In this context, anti-Zionists have criticized the Zionist movement's alleged complicity with or capitulation to antisemitism since it gained traction in the 19th century, and some anti-Zionists have also categorized Zionism as a form of antisemitism. The Austrian-Jewish anti-Zionist writer Karl Kraus regarded antisemitism as the "essence" of the Zionist movement and used the label "Jewish antisemites" to describe Jews who identified as Zionists.[3]
Im starting to think that what a lot of people learned from the holocaust wasn't 'never let this happen again', but 'never let this happen to the jews again'. The people of gaza are being wiped out because we, the west, can't hold a Jewish state accountable for their actions, because that might make us nazis in the eyes of morons and their propagandists.
The many faces of totalitarianism; we need to discuss this better, or have representatives who can at very least acknowledge that. By the way, none of these people seem to have at hearth the peace of the region. Until than, our hands are tied.
Im starting to think that what a lot of people learned from the holocaust
That always happens when you try to teach a crowd a moral lesson.
But, to be frank, there were institutional things learned too, culminating in the UN being created. Too bad it wasn't reformed significantly after decolonization happened, and for the Cold War, and as a result by now it's completely irrelevant. Its rules are being used to justify things opposite to stated when those rules were written.
And they've been very successful in convincing everyone that Israel = Jews; so that any criticism of Israel is defacto antisemitic (nevermind that Palestinians are a Semitic people).
We should be clear that Netanyahu and the far-right fundamentalist Likud party in Israel is the problem.
"Caring about Israel" is a very generic metric, and I bet things have changed a lot since 2021. I know plenty of people who support Israel's right to exist, but also want Bibi imprisoned for life for what he's doing to Palestinians.
Jews are not a monolithic group. If you can't criticize a government without condemning an entire ethnic group, that's your failure.
I can condemn a group of people who are voluntarily a member of a religion (not the ethnic group) while understanding that individuals should be judged as individuals.
Then point the finger at a group that deserves it like Zionists, rather than broadly pointing the finger at Jews. Most Jews, especially in America, are secular.