The battle lines are being drawn in the court of public opinion. Now the question becomes how steadfast is the public support behind demanding a peaceful yet forceful resolution to this conflict and finally ending this apartheid regime.
Public perception outside Israel has affected a total of 0 policy decisions in the country
Because they keep getting money from the US. The US tap has to be turned off.
Um, actually… it currently IS turned off until the house gets it’s act together. Of course, the sink is filled to the brim with soap and plates, so it will be a while before the water runs out - but it will make the genocidal plate scrubbing of Gaza a bit harder without the tap turned on.
How successful the court of public opinion has been in influencing the outcome of Israel conflict before?
Israel is a small country that relies on the implicit assumption that Western countries will defend it if a large invasion ever comes to be. If they didn’t need some considerable international support, they would have ethnically cleansed the whole of Palestine already.
Imagine how angry and disappointed our ancestors would be knowing that the supposed chosen children of God literally got given their land after WW2, gave them sympathy, gave them diamonds and global support to promote love, peace and prosperity, then watched them literally turn and slaughter their brothers and sisters next door, make millions selling spyware tools and then carpet bomb hospitals because anyone can be a terrorist. Meanwhile Sweden has had literal gunmen attack youth campus.
Now imagine that you’re actually a hardcore supporter of a Jewish homeland, or Zionism so to speak, and then imagine that this is the hell your government has created and nobody in power could be bothered building a road or a school but depends on a million dollar empire in a faraway land to provide them billions of dollars of weaponry, guns, tanks etc while they claim the country is under 24-7 threat. When you really think about it it’s almost like if it was imaginary or true it wouldn’t matter, because dogma and paranoia overrides any sense of logic with these people, meanwhile they’re literally unironically spreading their little paranoia and fear by knowingly selling spyware to dictatorships to target “dissidents”
You could have been born yesterday, or be a hundred years old, and you would still have known where energy and LOVE has been squandered
They probably mean forceful as in strong, not nonviolent. Like the world needs to band up and tell Israel to cut their shit out like they did to South Africa.
I can’t remember what happened in South Africa. I was young and doing a lot of drugs then. Is it possible for this to end similarly?
Israel has full political and military control of Palestinian land. They control every aspect of their lives. Remember when Jewish people where placed into ghettos and they each had different insignia that would indicate where they were from and were they could travel and what freedoms they had? Israel does the same thing with palestinians.
According to Amnesty International, the world’s leading human rights organisation: “Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control.” According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: “The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls an apartheid regime.”
What exactly does it mean to be an apartheid state?
Apartheid was explicitly racialized discrimination. White citizens and black citizens had vastly different rights under the law. Black South African citizens, for example, couldn’t vote for parliamentary representatives by 1959.
Israel is different, in that most legal discrimination is on the basis of citizenship. Arab-Israeli citizens face a lot of private racism, but their legal rights are completely different vs Arabs in Palestine without Israeli citizenship.
The difference between Arab Israelis and people in Gaza isn’t racial, it’s whether they lived in Gaza or in what was partitioned into Israel, and if they fled during the 1948 war or not.
Israel’s regime is deeply problematic in many ways. Whether it’s aparthied or not seems mostly in how you generalize your definition of apartheid. If apartheid must be explicitly racialized discrimination against citizens, Israel is obviously not an apartheid state. If discriminating against non-citizens counts, Israel is an apartheid state.
If you don’t want apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, then you want to rape festival-goers. Those are the only two choices!
Palestinians asking for a homeland. They are at home and have been invaded for over 70 years
I don’t think any right-thinking person has any sympathy for Hamas, and rightly so.
However, Palestinians are not automatically members of Hamas. This would be like saying you’re “done with” Americans and we should bomb every major American city because of the actions of the Proud Boys and other right-wing militias.
The support for hamas is 57% in palestine, Islamic Jihad has 71% support, people with Palestinian background are celebrating the executions, the rapes, and the murder of children on the streets in the western world even.
A more reasonable comparison would be to feel completely done with USA because of the republicans or democrats, but not even that compares since the support of both parties actually are lower than that of Hamas or Islamic Jihad in Palestine
Just a few things thats come up in Sweden in “support of palestine” after the 7th october attack.
Big number of cars driving up and down the streets honking and waving flags hours after the terrorist attack. In the comments people are discussing how big this demonstration was, and how several streets were completely shut off, aswell as some Danish commenters explaining how it was the same in Copenhagen.
Lost any sympathy with Palestinians
In other words… your sympathies always lay with the white supremacist settler-colonialist project and not their victims.
How is Israel a white supremacist settler-colonist? Do you know anything about Israel?
Last drop in the bucket was how they dug up the water pipes that europe paid for, to make rockets out of them.
Palestinians haven’t been the victims here? The ones being evicted and shot by illegal “settlers” for decades?
I mean, didn’t this all start from a war where Israel was attacked by 3 countries and beat all of them so bad they actually gained ground?
Exactly this. People are oversimplify the whole story. In my opinion there’s 2 camps of people who currently supports Palestine.
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They just don’t know the historical background and don’t know specifically -what- Hamas did the 7th, nor the huge support Hamas has in Palestine. (to clarify, A TERROR GROUP that has SUMMER CAMPS where they train kids to become terrorists).
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They support them because they enjoy jews getting killed.
Concidering how the rich arab countries has reacted during their neighbour’s times of need earlier: closing borders and not caring, group number 2 seems likely.
Just picture that the Palestinians actually celebrate Hamas terrorist attack, they feel joy over the actions many of us now have seen on videos and they celebrate it even in the streets in Western countries.
Imagine that 57% of Palestinians supports Hamas and 50% are against the idea of peace, 71% supports PIJ (Islamic Jihad), all while Biden won his election with 51%, Obama won with 53%, George Bush won in 1989 by 53%, last time any president got more votes than the support Hamas has in Palestine was in 1984, 39 years ago! Source about Palestinians support.
That’s how enormous the support of Hamas is, and some of ya’ll are defending them. You need to watch the videos released of the atrocities Hamas committed, see the actions that you’re defending, but I bet you don’t even have the stomachs for it.
What about the group that’s aware that Palestinians were forced out of their homes and have been forced to live in impoverished conditions for decades?
What about the group that recognizes the actions of both sides as being wrong and that neither side is “right”?
Imagine that 57% of Palestinians supports Hamas
It’s cute when someone posts claims contradicted by their own source. The link actually says that “57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas”.
Consider that while Hamas is a terrorist organisation it also runs social programs, exactly to effectively buy this kind of support. For some poor family in Gaza struggling to survive it’s unsurprising that if given handouts by Hamas that some will express that kind of muted positive views even for a dictatorial regime that 70% of Gazans wants removed from power per the same link (see below).
To try to twist that into “supports” is victim-blaming of the worst sort.
Should we meanwhile talk about Israel, where there actually are regular elections and majorities keep voting in regimes that perpetuate an apartheid regime and commits gross crimes against humanity? Or is it only people in Gaza who are responsible for their governments actions, despite the fact that the majority of those of voting age in Gaza were not old enough to be part of the electorate that brought Hamas to power (in an election where they got a minority of votes).
some of ya’ll are defending them
Just like some are defending the mass murderous apartheid regime of Israel or try to implicate Palestinian civilians for actions they had no party in.
Meanwhile most of us think Hamas are terrorists but also recognise that Israel is an oppressive apartheid state and the only party with the power to actually end this, and yet is doubling down on crimes against humanity.
To focus on Hamas is deflection.
And plenty of Americans (probably around 50% given recent election results) would rejoice over any innocent civilian we killed in “the war on terror” and would defend war criminals in the US military. Would that make it okay to starve and bomb the entire population of the US? Is everyone in this country a war criminal?
The last time any election was held in Gaza most of the people weren’t even old enough to vote. And despite your efforts to smear the people as bloodthirsty your own link says the majority did not want to break the cease fire.
If you think hating Palestinians is justified because of support for Hamas while they do terrible things, do you also think it is justified to hate Israel for the inhumanity the Israeli government (which has the support of the Israeli people) has perpetuated since Israel was brought into the region?
It’s simple, don’t steal their houses, encroach on their land, fracture their community into an archipelago divided by walls, and put checkpoints every two miles, and restrict trade. Don’t do any of that, especially don’t do it while preaching about genocide and the holocaust and then asking for hand outs. Then I wouldn’t care, and might even support israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba?wprov=sfla1
This why Palestinians hate Israel, Israel literally destroyed their country.
Also pretty fucking rich to dig elections from 17 years ago where Israel supported Hamas to delegitimize other groups so people like you would be fooled.
You forgot another important point: the absolute majority of Muslims will defend Palestine, no matter what they do. You risk being reprimanded in your Muslim community if you aren’t 100 % pro Palestine and often also when you aren’t pro Hamas. It has become part of their identity.
I’m from Bristol. Haven’t seen a single Israeli flag or show of support for Israel in this conflict, but I have seen loads of Palestinian flags waved around, and even witnessed a march last week.
I think public opinion has drastically changed in favour of Palestine.
Israel has the support of powerful governments the world over, it doesn’t need the support of a hundred thousand marchers. This is why they get away with what they’ve done for decades.
I’d say we’re looking at a generalized propaganda failure here all across Europe and most of the world - ten years ago you were banned off any sizable English-language forum for calling Israel genocidal… that’s simply not the case any longer.
I’d say that’s a big factor to it, yes. And it’s not just in regards to Israel - the people at the top had the information tap perfectly in hand until the internet came around to spoil all that. That’s why you see so many attempts to clamp down on the internet - everything from AI surveillance to Phony Stark taking a $44 billion hit to “fix” sites like Twitter.
I think a large part of the issue is that the settlements themselves are actually a reflection of Israel failing to develop vertically. Even without picking a side, even if we ignore the ridiculous hypocrisy of Israel for selling literal spyware tools like Pegasus for the Saudis and other dictators to use on their own citizens and commit murder, the reality is that Israel’s current problem with terrorism is entirely of their own making, because they’ve funded settlements and wasted time and money when they’ve had more than 20 years since the Nakba, Fatah and had millions of dollars of US funding and done fuck all. Mate, you could be a hardcore Zionist and supporter of the state of Israel, and still think that they’ve done a shit job.
My experience is the opposite.
I have a lot of Jewish friends and live in a place with a lot of Jewish people, and I see plenty who support Israel and have no problem being loud about their unequivocal support for Israels response. While the comments from my Jewish friends who don’t support the response have been much more muted. Except for one girl who is pretty pissed that her suffering from the attacks is being used to justify what she calls is atrocities against the civilians of Gaza. My neighbor even told me over drinks this weekend that he keeps his mouth shut about it because he fears the retaliation (primarily social) from his Jewish community about the fact that he strongly disagrees with Israel’s response.
That’s not the reason.
The reason is because Israel decided to squander any good-will they had by launching a massively disproportionate attack. Public sympathy was with them for while.
You are getting downvoted but you are objectively correct. It only took a few days for Israel to squander any goodwill they had after the attack. And they’ve been squandering good will for decades. I grew up in a Jewish community and it’s amazing to see how fast they destroy sympathy for their cause, if I didn’t know any better I would think it’s self sabotage.
Fact that it’s even that close when there’s a lot of Western bias towards Israel and with how Muslims are often painted as terrorists by the media is a testament to how badly Israel fucked up.
Bristol has a very left wing lean, I’ve seen the graffiti around. It’s a vocal minority. Public opinion is mainly indifference but condemnation of both sides, maybe a bit on Israel’s side right now. The way Hamas has conducted themselves I would argue has seriously damaged the perception of the Palestinian cause.
Genuine question: How many, in term of proportion, if you can estimate, of the protesters are non-Muslim, or simply say white people/Chinese etc? I am saying this because they’re a lot of Muslims living near cities, especially London, Manchester and Birmingham. Having many muslims protesting for the Palestinians is no brainer, as they share the same values. It’s much more impactful if the protesters are consisted of many different religious demographics.
Nice job Londoners.
Removed. I’ll try to make this as simple to understand as possible… You can’t advocate against the genocide of a people by promoting the genocide of another people. I don’t care if the argument is “Palestinians need to die so Israel can exist.” Or “Israel needs to die so Palestinians can exist.” Neither view is acceptable.
So how, exact, do you see the process of making Israel not exist proceeding? Genuinely, I’m curious. Do you really see absolutely no way for a state of Israel to exist in some fashion without the genocide of Palestinians? If not, then what exactly are you proposing?
Edit: keep upvoting the comment that literally is calling for the end of Israel as they “don’t have the right to exist” using some shit strawman with Palestinian genocide as a fulcrum as if that’s what Israel is. The is gov does not define the people just like Hamas doesn’t define Palestine. Are you fucking kidding me?
Israel doesn’t have the right to exist? What kind of brain dead shit are you talking about??
Israel absolutely deserves to exist, they were placed there after they themselves were genocided. THAT is the problem, they were placed there and it’s fucked everything.
Israel absolutely deserves to exist just like Palestine.
If Israel’s very existance is dependent on the genocide of Palestinians, and it is, then it doesn’t deserve to exist. Rights are for people, not countries so kindly stop saying that “Israel has a right to exist”. It doesn’t, Palestinians have a right to exist without being killed and ethnically cleansed from their native lands.
Jesus fucking Christ, how are you this fucking stupid? Israel’s existence is not dependent on the genocide of Palestinians, that’s just a bullshit strawman you just pulled out of your ass so you could knock it down. Rights are indeed for people but guess what, when people say Israel deserves to exist they’re talking about the Israeli people. Those people deserve to not be killed or ethnically purged from their homes as well, the difference is the Israel never should have been placed there. But guess what they were. So what do the Israeli citizens do? If we ask you, I guess your stance is go fuck themselves because of what the Israeli gov has done over the many years. Do you not see how reductive and fucked that is?
Personally, I have always been a free Palestine supporter and a strong hater of Israeli gov but the mindless emotional backlash like the one in your comment only enables more hate and bullshit. Israel deserves to exist they just don’t deserve to exist on other people’s lands. That’s a big fucking difference to the emotional bullshit you vomited out. When you say “it (Israel) doesn’t (have the right to exist)”, it sounds quite similar to the Hamas goal of the extermination of Israel. Hamas doesn’t represent the Palestinian people, yet here you are with this bullshit. No, I’m not saying if you don’t suck netanyahoo’s dick you’re an antisemite, I’m saying if you seriously can’t see that there are an insane number of innocents on each side of this conflict, then you are lost and unreasonable.
Israel absolutely deserves to exist just like Palestine. Jesus fucking Christ
Israel, the Jewish state, doesn’t have the right to exist. That doesn’t mean the Jews should be pushed into the sea or whatever, but there’s absolutely no reason a country that goes “We’re the Jewish homeland. Everyone else can eat shit” needs to exist. This is the 21st century, we should oppose the creation of explicit ethnostates.
I think the point is that we saw just two weeks ago the methods that Hamas would use to un-exist Israel, so it’s not that hard to read between the lines of what people mean when they say that Israel should not exist.
We’re the Jewish homeland. Everyone else can eat shit" needs to exist.
This isn’t really an accurate description of Israel though. Israel isn’t the multi-ethnic paradise it should be, but Israeli Arabs have full legal rights and are pretty well-integrated. An Israeli Arab medic was actually murdered at the music festival when he approached Hamas members in an attempt to negotiate with them.
I would agree that Israel should not make full legal rights dependent on being a Jew, but it doesn’t do that, even though there are some actions it’s taken, particularly under Netanyahu, to tie Israeli identity more strictly to Judaism. That stuff pisses off quite a lot of secular Israelis as well.
And philosophical quibbling about the role of nation states aside, the fact of the matter is that Israel does exist and it’s people are not going to go anywhere. Given that Hamas’ explicit aim is to murder them all, Israel is going to do anything and everything to resist them. Palestinian statehood cannot and will never proceed if it’s dependent on the violent eradication of Israel. Fortunately, it does not need to depend on that, though Israel must do more to facilitate an actual peaceful conclusion, such as dismantling settlements. But regardless, violence is simply not a productive option for the Palestinian cause, and it never will be. It must be abandoned.
Aha and why does Israel deserve to exist exactly? I couldn’t care less if every single country in the world disappeared tomorrow. Again, rights are for people, not countries and if your statehood relies on genocide and ethnic cleansing, it needs to go. Call me sympathetic to Hamas talking points all you want. I certainly don’t support their ideology but at the end of the day, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter and armed struggle against an occupying force is legal under international law. Hamas isn’t even recognized as a terrorist organization by the UN. Hamas could be flowerpower hippies and they’d still be called “terrorists” by Israel and its allies. Really shows how meaningless that word has become.
