The countries actions are deplorable.
The minorities driving these actions didnât garner votes in the Countries elections.
They are in the position of power because the despotic self indulgent Prime Minister is only interested in saving his own skin whilst continuing to feather his nest no doubt through the interests of arms manufacturers.
Maybe Iâm wrong but you have to believe there in good in people or else weâre all fucked.
Thatâs the most reasoned and logical post youâve ever had on here. Thereâs lots of things we can agree on
The awful shame about Israel is that in the 70s it was a beacon of progressive society and what it should look like. Dissent and many views were par for course. Had a vibrant centre left society.
Since the building of settlements and the vermin who moved into them arrived, mostly from America and Russia , the place has slowly gone to pot
Some total headcases come over from America to settle
Why would you go from America to Israel?
Religion
Pure zealots.
It would be like if they gave that Joe Rogan lad a few square miles of desert and let him set up his own country there. Youâd have every crackpot and headbanger moving there
Itâs called America
If we could seal the cunts in it wouldnât be the worst idea
Thatâs actually a great idea. Pen the headbangers into their new country and build a wall around them so they never come out and bother normal people again.
If I could Iâd build a wall
Around old Donegal
Military aged men, wonât get within
By God weâd build it tall
Vaccines and great replacements,
Oh weâll prevent them all
No noooo sheeple
In the hills of Donegal
What a tool demanding Sky News sack her for a valid comparison.
Israel has consistently lied through its teeth about exactly what happened on October 7th in order to create pretext for genocide. This reality is not widely known in the world because news organisations are petrified to call it out. Owen Jones was one of the few to do so and roundly smeared as a rape apologist by by the Nazi-like Israeli propaganda machine merely because he had the temerity to say that the Israeli propaganda tape he viewed in its entirety did not back up their breathless claims.
Good article by Peter Beinart here.
My view is the liberal hawks are so blinded and cowed by the moral blackmail of the Holocaust that theyâve suckered themselves into genuinely believing Israel can simply do no wrong, that any depravity Israel commits can be justified because the Holocaust existed.
On the other side you have eejits who claim to be âanti-imperialistâ through their support for or denial of Russian and Chinese imperial genocide. Even South Africa, who have brought this genocide case against Israel to the ICJ, and are justified in doing so, are themselves morally bankrupt through their support of âanti-imperialâ imperial genocide by Russia and China.
Itâs really frustrating the way public debate is controlled by people who are basically compromised by one geopolitical camp or the other, while universal human rights, the upholding of human rights, which should be everybodyâs position, is simply bulldozed, and reasonable people like me who actually believe in a universal human rights position have basically nobody to properly represent us.
On 7 January, Anne Applebaum, a historian and a staff writer at the Atlantic, retweeted a video of Russian missiles striking a Ukrainian hospital. Three days later, former US ambassador Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor and contributing columnist at the Washington Post, approvingly tweeted a sign demanding that Vladimir Putin be sent to the Hague. On 15 January, Post columnist Max Boot reminded readers that, according to the United Nations, Russia has killed more than 10,000 civilians in Ukraine.
These expressions of outrage were entirely justified. What makes them odd is that more than three months into the war in Gaza, Applebaum has still not acknowledged on X (formerly known as Twitter), where she comments frequently, that Israel has attacked hospitals there. She has not done so despite a Washington Post investigation in December that found that Israel has âconducted repeated and widespread airstrikes in proximity to hospitalsâ, thus contributing to a public health catastrophe in which, according to the World Health Organization, only 15 of Gazaâs 36 hospitals remain even partly functional.
Nor would a reader know from following McFaul on X that Israel is currently on trial at the Hague, accused by South Africa of committing genocide in Gaza. Boot has addressed Israelâs war more forthrightly: He largely defends it. One of the conflictâs lessons, he argued on 20 December, âis the need for a robust defense-industrial capacity, because high-intensity conflicts always consume vast quantities of ammunitionâ.
Applebaum, McFaul and Boot are liberal hawks. They claim to support a foreign policy devoted to defending democracy and human rights whenever possible, sometimes even at the point of a gun. (The line between liberal hawks and neoconservatives can grow fuzzy, but liberal hawks are more sympathetic to diplomacy and international institutions, and generally favor Democrats, not Republicans.) Not long ago, liberal hawks were considered a casualty of Americaâs military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, wars advertised as bringing freedom to long-suffering populations, which brought chaos and destruction instead. (I myself identified as a liberal hawk until those wars forced me to alter my worldview.)
But in recent years, liberal hawks have regained much of their respectability and power. Their resurgence has been fueled by Washingtonâs turn away from the âwar on terrorâ, which for many Americans ended when the US withdrew troops from Afghanistan in 2021, and its focus on a new cold war. Because dictatorships rule Russia and China, and because Moscow and Beijing menace vulnerable democracies on their border, liberal hawks argue that preserving freedom requires deterring Americaâs great power adversaries.
Their argument has gained particular force since Russiaâs 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which they see as a test case for the global struggle to come. âLiberals who once protested the Iraq War now urge Washington to dispatch more rocket launchers to defeat Russian imperialism,â the Atlantic declared in a September 2022 essay entitled, The Rise of the Liberal Hawks. Last February, Britainâs The Critic argued that the âRussian invasion of Ukraine has sealed liberal hawk ascendancy.â
Liberal hawks often profess their commitment to human rights. Yet they havenât called to end a war killing more people per day than any conflict this century
Liberal hawks enjoy particular influence in Washington because their worldview closely aligns with the Biden administrationâs. Itâs no surprise that both Applebaum and McFaul have been invited to private, off-the-record, discussions with the president. Biden and his top foreign policy advisers share Applebaumâs belief that todayâs great power contest pits the âdemocratic worldâ against the âautocratic worldâ. As Biden put it in a 2022 speech about Ukraine, the United States and its allies must âput the strength of democracies into action to thwart the designs of autocracyâ.
This worldview contains important truths. Russia and China are far more authoritarian than the United States and many of its key European and Asian allies. Theyâre also far more authoritarian than Ukraine and Taiwan, imperiled democracies that deserve to chart their own path free from imperialistic aggression. Whether or not one agrees with the policies that Applebaum, Boot and McFaul advocate in Eastern Europe and East Asia, theyâre aimed at defending liberal democracy â a commitment that extends to the United States, where all three writers staunchly oppose Donald Trump.
But liberal hawks have a problem: the borderlands of Russia and China are not the entire world. In the global south, especially, the geopolitical boundaries between the US and its adversaries donât map easily onto the moral boundaries between freedom and tyranny. When discussing countries outside of Europe or East Asia, liberal hawks often strain to shoehorn them into a worldview that associates America and its allies with democracyâs cause.
In March 2022, for instance, when Applebaum delivered Senate testimony about what she called âthe new autocratic allianceâ, she included in its ranks China, Russia, Belarus, Venezuela and Cuba, all US adversaries, along with Turkey, an American frenemy. She never mentioned Saudi Arabia, a critical US ally that â awkwardly â scores lower in Freedom Houseâs most recent freedom rankings than all of the autocracies she denounced except Belarus, with whom it ties.
Never have these ideological contortions been as conspicuous as during Israelâs war in Gaza. Liberal hawks often profess their commitment to human rights. Yet they havenât called for ending a war that is killing more people per day than any conflict this century. They havenât done so because, like their allies in the Biden administration, they are wedded to a narrative about the moral superiority of American power that this war defies.
Liberal hawks want to preserve American primacy, which they associate with human progress. But Israel-Palestine reveals a harsher truth: that in much of the world, for many decades, the US has used its power not to defend freedom but to deny it. Thatâs why liberal hawks canât face the true horror of this war. Doing so would require them to reconsider their deepest assumptions about Americaâs role in the world.
Since 7 October, liberal hawks have labored to analogize Israelâs war in Gaza to Ukraineâs defense against Russian invasion â a template that renders Israel an innocent victim of external aggression and places America on the side of human rights and international law. In his 19 October speech from the Oval Office, President Biden declared that âHamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common. They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.â
Liberal hawks in the media have offered similar comparisons. In a column on 9 October, Applebaum suggested that âThe Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamasâs surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejectionsâ of a ârules-based world orderâ. On 3 November, McFaul described Hamas and Russia as part of an âIlliberal Internationalâ â which also includes Iran, Hezbollah and sometimes China â that âhas come together again to attack democratic Israel.â Boot added on 20 December that âThe wars in both Gaza and Ukraine should remind complacent western leaders that our adversaries do not share our liberal values.â
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty say Israel practices apartheid and has for more than 15 years held millions of Palestinians in Gaza in what both organizations call an âopen-air prisonâ
When Applebaum, McFaul and Boot call Hamas an illiberal movement that does not respect international law, they are correct. Its Islamist ideology is incompatible with individual freedom and equality under the law, and it blatantly violated the rules of war when it murdered civilians on 7 October. But to depict Israelâs war as another battle between a democratic, rules-abiding west and a lawless, illiberal axis that runs from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran to Gaza City, liberal hawks must ignore elementary facts about the Jewish state.
When detailing Russiaâs crimes, Applebaum and Boot are fond of citing Human Rights Watch; McFaul boosts the work of Amnesty International. When it comes to Israel, however, the findings of the worldâs leading human rights organizations become irrelevant. Israel is âdemocraticâ, respects the ârules-based world orderâ and embodies âliberal valuesâ â even though Human Rights Watch and Amnesty say it practices apartheid and has for more than 15 years held millions of Palestinians in Gaza in what both organizations call an âopen-air prisonâ.
When discussing Americaâs adversaries, liberal hawks often warn Americans not to let their ideological preconceptions blind them to the harsh realities on the ground. But when it comes to Israel, they do exactly that. In recent years, Applebaum has written eloquently about the struggle between liberal democrats and populist authoritarians in Poland, Hungary and the United States. After traveling to Israel last summer, she projected a similar dynamic onto the Jewish state. Benjamin Netanyahuâs attempted judicial overhaul, she declared, risks creating an âundemocratic Israel, a de facto autocracyâ. But this storyline only works if you ignore Palestinians. For more than 70% of the Palestinians under Israelâs control â those in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, who live or die based on the actions of a government for whom they cannot vote â Israel is an autocracy right now.
Among Applebaum, McFaul and Bootâs favorite epithets for Americans who disagree with them about Russia is ânaiveâ. But when describing Israel, they conjure a fantasyland in which Palestinians either donât exist or would soon have their own state if only they behaved themselves. On 4 November, McFaul suggested that if Hamas gave up power and released Israeli hostages it would âgive new momentum to Palestinian sovereigntyâ. But Israel hasnât elected a prime minister who supports Palestinian sovereignty in 15 years. And even Netanyahuâs leading centrist opponent**,** Benny Gantz, is careful to say that while he supports a Palestinian âentityâ in the West Bank, it wonât enjoy the powers of a state.
On 17 October, Boot instructed Palestinians that âthe most effective resistance against liberal democracies is the most nonviolentâ. In so doing, he evidently forgot that the Palestinian Authority has been collaborating with Israel to prevent unarmed resistance in the West Bank since 2005, that Israeli sharpshooters and drone operators injured roughly 36,000 protesters in Gaza during the largely unarmed Great March of Return in 2018, and that Palestinians launched a nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in 2005 â a movement Boot derided because it targets Israel, not China.
As the war in Gaza has ground on, depicting Israel as the embodiment of a rules-abiding, liberal democratic west has grown harder. But despite some initial warnings, Applebaum and McFaul have largely averted their eyes. On 13 October, Applebaum quoted her Atlantic colleague George Packer, who urged Israelis not to âassume that the worldâs support will last a day longer if news emerges of mass civilian deaths in Gaza.â On 29 October, she tweeted a New Yorker essay about life in the Strip. But in the months since, as news has emerged of civilian deaths on a terrifying scale, Applebaum has said little. On 29 December and again on 7 January, she retweeted news that Moscow had struck civilian targets in Ukraine. Her feed contains no acknowledgement that Israel has done the same in Gaza.
Four days into the war, McFaul implored Israel to âabide by international law and minimize civilian casualties and civilian suffering.â In early November, he declared that the Biden administration was âright to pressure Netanyahu to take much greater measures to reduce civilian deathsâ and even suggested that âfuture US aid to Israel should have conditions.â But since then, as civilian casualties have exceeded 20,000 and human rights groups have repeatedly accused Israel of violating international law, McFaul has used his X feed to neither endorse a ceasefire nor to endorse the actual legislation to condition aid voted on by the Senate.
Like Applebaum, McFaul has said barely anything. On 4 December, he applauded Senator Jim Risch for decrying âRussiaâs brutality and continued war crimes against the Ukrainian peopleâ. From McFaulâs online posts, however, youâd never know that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even Israelâs own leading human rights organization, BâTselem, have accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza.
As the war in Gaza has ground on, depicting Israel as the embodiment of a rules-abiding, liberal democratic west has grown harder
Boot has been more upfront. He hasnât ignored the destruction of Gaza; heâs justified it. While acknowledging that âthis is a great tragedy for the people of Gazaâ, Boot alleged on 15 January that âprimary blame must lie with Hamas, because it launched an unprovoked attack on Israel and uses civilians as human shieldsâ.
Depicting Hamasâs massacre as âunprovokedâ â and thus akin to Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine â requires ignoring that Israel has been occupying Gaza since 1967 and blockading it (with assistance from Egypt) since 2007. Justifying Israelâs destruction because Hamas embeds itself among civilians would justify the mass killing of civilians in most wars against a guerilla foe because, as Mao Zedong famously declared, âThe guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.â Indeed, the United States in the 1960s and 1970s used Bootâs argument about âhuman shieldsâ to justify bombing villages that sheltered the Vietcong and Russia has employed it repeatedly to justify murdering civilians in Ukraine.
Boot also dismisses South Africaâs charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza because, he argues, civilian deaths there âconstitute less than 1% of the territoryâs populationâ. He contrasts this allegedly baseless charge with the US governmentâs claim that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, which he cites with approval.
But when the State Department in 2021 accused China of genocide, it didnât allege that Beijing had killed any particular percentage of the Uyghur population. It didnât discuss mass slaughter at all but rather âforced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority groupâ through forced sterilization and abortion, forced marriage to non-Uyghurs, separation of children from their parents, denial of freedom of speech, travel and worship and mass imprisonment and torture in labor camps. By Bootâs standard, these horrors â which some scholars have called âcultural genocideâ â wouldnât constitute genocide either. In accusing South Africa of a âdouble standardâ, Boot inadvertently reveals his own: one definition of genocide for Americaâs foes, another for its friends.
Why do commentators who write so passionately about the human rights abuses committed by Russia and other US adversaries find it so hard to oppose a war that, according to the United Nations, is putting half a million Palestinians at risk of starvation? Itâs not that Applebaum, McFaul and Boot believe America can do no wrong. To the contrary, they warn that under Donald Trump, the US could go over to the dark side and join the autocratic world.
But they tell a particular story about America, and about the last century, which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turns on its head. The story is that Americaâs rise to global pre-eminence ushered in a freer and more law-abiding world. Applebaum has applauded the âPax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order.â Boot argues that after winning the second world war, the US avoided âpursuing our narrow self-interestâ and instead created âlasting institutions such as Nato and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (forerunner of the World Trade Organization) to promote prosperity and security for allâ. McFaul insists that âthe US has not for many decades engaged in annexation or colonization, does not attack democracies, and does not use terrorism deliberately as a method of warâ.
But there are many places, especially in the global south, that do not fit this story of American power producing moral progress. The story doesnât account for the 62 times, according to the political scientist Dov Levin, that the United States intervened in foreign elections between 1946 and 1989, nor the fact that, according to Lindsey OâRourkeâs book Covert Regime Change, many of the leftist parties the US sabotaged had ârepeatedly committed themselves to working within a democratic framework, and, in some cases, US policymakers even acknowledged this factâ.
The story doesnât account for US complicity in Indonesiaâs killing of roughly 1 million alleged leftists in the mid-1960s or the CIAâs role in helping apartheid South Africa arrest Nelson Mandela. It canât be reconciled with the Nixon administrationâs decision to keep arming Pakistanâs war in what became Bangladesh when Americaâs own chief diplomat on the ground told them that the Pakistanis were committing genocide or the Reagan administrationâs insistence.) on supplying weapons to President EfraĂn RĂos Montt, who a Guatemalan court later convicted of genocide for his effort to wipe out his countryâs Maya Ixil Indians.
Israel-Palestine is part of a darker history about the era of American primacy that liberal hawks celebrate and wish to preserve
The story doesnât explain the George HW Bush and Clinton administrationâs sanctions against Iraq, which the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in that country warned were âdestroying an entire societyâ or the Obama administrationâs participation in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emiratesâ blockade and indiscriminate bombing of Yemen, which left 18 million of the countryâs 28 million people without reliable access to food.
Israel-Palestine is part of a darker history about the era of American primacy that liberal hawks celebrate and wish to preserve. For decades, the United States has used its unparalleled military might and diplomatic muscle to ensure that Israel can deny millions of Palestinians the most basic rights â citizenship, due process, freedom of movement, the right to vote â with impunity.
In 2020, the United States froze the assets of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, partly in retaliation for her decision to launch an investigation into Israeli war crimes. At the United Nations General Assembly, the entire world â including virtually all the democracies on earth â regularly vote to condemn Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The tally last November was 145-7. But the US renders this global human rights consensus impotent by again and again employing its veto at the security council. Many US states bar individuals or organizations that support boycotting Israel â or even merely boycotting Israeli settlements â from conducting business with state government.
These are not the actions merely of Maga authoritarians. This intensive effort to protect Israeli apartheid has been broadly bipartisan and spanned many presidencies. It includes many of the politicians that Applebaum, McFaul and Boot believe embody the best of America â those dedicated to supporting Ukraine and keeping Donald Trump from re-entering the White House â chief among them Joe Biden. And since 7 October, these decades of near-unconditional US support have culminated in Biden rushing weapons to Israel even as, according to Oxfam, Israel kills more than five times as many people per day as Russia is killing in Ukraine. All this gravely undermines the moral dichotomy that structures liberal hawksâ view of the world. The more honestly one faces the horror in Gaza, the harder it becomes to draw a bright line between the way America wields its power and the way its adversaries do.
In 2021, Applebaum bemoaned the fact that âa part of the American left has abandoned the idea that âdemocracyâ belongs at the heart of US foreign policyâ. She speculated that the leftâs emphasis on Americaâs sins â its alleged belief that âthe history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much elseâ â had convinced many progressives that the US lacks the moral authority to aid people suffering âprofound injusticeâ overseas.
But because Applebaum focuses on the oppression committed by Americaâs adversaries, she ignored the possibility that American progressives might rise up in solidarity with people oppressed by Americaâs friends, and that they might draw inspiration not from a celebration of Americaâs past virtue but from those in prior generations who struggled against American genocide, slavery and exploitation.
In her 2021 essay, Applebaum criticized progressives for not producing âsomething comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980sâ. They now have. If a new generation of Americans eventually turns US policy against apartheid in Israel-Palestine, as their forebearers turned US policy against apartheid in South Africa, it wonât be because they extolled American power. It will be because they confronted the âprofound injusticesâ, committed under Americaâs auspices, which liberal hawks so often obfuscate or ignore.
Read that a while ago. A good piece. You were quoting Anne applebaum a while back I recall. Sheâs been torn a new one there. She seems a bit of a dope.
I donât think that adequately explains it myself. I think Americans have warped enough views at the best of times. I think itâs more that they canât/wonât criticise allies or admit when theyâre wrong.
Sheâs far from a dope and is entirely correct about Russia. Itâs quite frustrating to see people who are highly intelligent provide such cogent analysis of one situation and then wilfully delude themselves about another.
It probably doesnât but itâs one major element. The insane situation in Germany right now is one example of how this mindset functions at a nation state level and grips an entire polity in delusion, hypocrisy and hysteria.
Ego is probably another. The unwillingness to admit being wrong about anything and the drive to double down on wrong analysis because of bruised ego. Cynical interests are another but focussing entirely on cynical interests and ignoring universal values is the surest way of destroying your own cynical interests in the long run.
Fear is another. Israel drives an utterly chilling climate of censorship worldwide and they will stop at nothing to silence even the most tepid of their critics. Theyâll get Gary Lineker yet you know, theyâre desperate to.
I dunno. I recall she had a really stupid article about Russia anyway. But even if sheâs spot on about one thing, then being completely deluded or at best highly inconsistent on another would suggest sheâs a dope. Even Russiaâs statements are correct on occasion.
Itâs probably different things in different places. The power of Israelâs lobbying incredible though. What theyâve advanced as definitions of antisemitism for example.
Unrelated point, Oliver Sears the founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland has had a few poorly judged (to my mind) articles.
With Russia, itâs as simple as a former empire which has returned to fascism and dreams of empire demanding the right to control a democratic former colony and if it canât, it will attempt to destroy that democratic former colony, its people and its allies by any means it can muster.
Israelâs lobbying works because the Holocaust is the ultimate moral blackmail. That the Holocaust happened is used to justify any depravity, and anybody who objects can expect to be destroyed.
It takes exceptional knowledge of the issues, exceptional knowledge of history, exceptional knowledge of linguistic frameworks, exceptional debating skills. exceptional belief in universal human rights and exceptional bravery to even attempt to go up against that, and even then you will be a target for forcible silencing.
Plenty of people who support the Russia/China/Iran/Assad geopolitical axis will go after Israel, but they go after Israel while shamelessly defending genocide and the destruction of human rights elsewhere. Theyâve chosen the âdeplorableâ path. These people are easy to dismiss and in reality mainly benefit Israel in propaganda terms.
Israel itself has chosen the deplorable path, and is dragging the west down with it.
