Raze

Israel isn’t under existential threat from Hamas either, they are completely blockaded in Gaza and just fire rockets that are easily intercepted. Oct 7 was a fluke from incompetence and even that wasn’t an existential threat. This isn’t just common war crimes happening in war, the former Israeli PM literally just wrote an op Ed admitting they are committing illegal war crimes as an act of policy, not accidentally. The comparison with the US is not a good one. Nothing in the US war on terror was remotely as bad as what israel is doing, more may have died but it was far more combatants to civilians and a lot was indirectly because of incompetence leaving power vacuums. Have you read the amnesty international or human rights watch reports charging genocide? Or the ICC / ICJ cases? These aren’t being made lightly. The last conflict that had this rapid a rate of child deaths was Rwanda. The US public didn’t get wrapped up in a genocidal furor like Israel. A poll just came out finding nearly half of Israelis believe every single Gazan should be killed.

If you look at combatant to civilian ratios, Israel was worse than Hamas before Hamas existed, and off the scale since. Your analysis is based on assumptions that technological development equates to moral development equates to morality of actions. That makes no sense. We can look at what international law and human rights groups say about Israel and Hamas, they charge Hamas with crimes, but Israel with far worse crimes. Saying “Palestinians would do worse if they could” is irrelevant. So would israel. The finance minister admitted that he would like to starve all 2 million Palestinians but the international blowback would be too much. Not at all true, even Israeli historian Avi Shlaim acknowledges Hamas followed ceasefires much closer than Israel did. Historically israel provoked every war, the three times they didn’t were 73, 06 Lebanon, and oct 7, which they all did the worst in initially. Egypt was an Islamist country and hasn’t broke the peace treaty since they signed it. It was already reported Hamas agreed to give up power to the PA and Israel publicly rejected this. Historically terrorist organizations are usually beaten when they become political parties and agree to cease armed resistance. A terror group being destroyed by military action is rare because they regroup or another group forms.

Hamas doesn’t represent Palestinian society anymore than far right Israelis. What about the PA? They control the West Bank and they don’t even defend themselves let alone target civilians. Are they more developed than Israel now? That doesn’t compute since West Bank Palestinians largely live in squalor surrounded by check points and heavily armed settlers. Just saying Hamas would do worse if they could is irrelevant when you can make the exact same argument about Israel. Israel would do worse if it wasn’t for international pressure. They wanted to block all food and water after oct 7, only after the US demanded it did they allow it. I am not dodging it. My point is that development isn’t a determinist straight line, not all societies are more or less developed in even ways across all spectrums, and it absolutely doesn’t directly reflect in their actions every time. I gave multiple examples of this very conflict where a “less developed” state did less immoral actions than the “developed state”.

No, I’m disputing the notion Israelis are morally “superior”, by any relevant metric their actions are worse. The idea that having more economic and technological development by default means they must by default not be as bad in the crimes they commit is absurd when they’ve committed settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide. You can be more “developed” but commit morally worse actions and worse crimes than less developed populations. The ANC killed civilians and committed terrorism, but they weren’t “morally worse” than the apartheid government. I’ll even grant Palestinian militants are worse than the ANC because historically they targeted civilians more, but Israel is far worse than South Africa’s apartheid government, even former anti apartheid activists who lived through it said this. As an israel supporter you are no different, you’ve justified and defended monstrous atrocities far worse than anything Hamas has done multiple times. You’ve basically reverted into gross nationalism like on the other thread ranting about how this is all justified on religious grounds. The irony of accusing others of being childish when you proudly say you analyze the conflict from the perspective of being a nationalist Jew who thinks the religious claims of land ownership is relevant.

- pre-Israel Zionists had organized terror militias, Palestinians didn’t even have an army, it was Zionist’s that introduced tactics like hiding bombs in shops. They were more “developed” technology and tactically than Palestinians but they were arguably less civilized as they were far more violent than Palestinians who lived relatively peacefully with their minorities prior to Zionism. - during the 48 war, the Arab states did far less massacres of civilians in their captured territory than Zionists. When Arab states ethnically cleansed their Jews they killed a fraction of the civilians compared to Israel among the Palestinians it expelled. Yet the Arab states at time were far less “developed” than the European Zionist colonialists, their armies still used camels and they had low rates of literacy. - Israel does not “mostly” avoid civilian casualties. Look up siege of Beirut, a new idf soldier refused his orders saying they’d kill too many civilians and they stripped him of his rank and did it anyway, or the goldstone report which found they purposefully targeted civilians. Soldiers literally bragged to the media about how many civilians they could shoot during the great march of return. - for the current war NYT reported Israel was ok with killing hundreds of civilians in strikes if they suspected a Hamas commander would be hit. By this standard the suicide bombing aren’t terrorism because they can argue they may have hit a soldier off duty. A Us Gov whistleblower told 60 minutes Israel killed 70 civilians to bomb a tunnel that they didn’t even believe had a combatant in it. If a Palestinian militant killed 70 civilians to destroy some military structure that no one was inside you’d call them an undeveloped terrorist. But when Israel does it somehow it’s not as bad because they self declare to be civilized. - what makes you think Palestinian militants never worried about civilian casualties? Suicide bombings only showed up in the 80s after decades of brutal occupation, the first by Hamas was only approved after idf made the Hamas founder listen to audio of them torturing his son. They stopped doing suicide bombings for over a decade (aside from recent attempts) because of the heat they got for hitting civilians. Meanwhile Israel let settlers kill more and more Palestinian civilians. - that’s like saying if you had a kid you’d rather they be born in nazi Germany than the Warsaw ghetto or they be born white in apartheid South Africa than black. Having better living standards at the expense of others does not make you the lesser of two evils. You keep defaulting to the assumption that development automatically is reflected in actions and morality, that is not true, you can be more developed on paper and commit morally worse crimes than a lesser developed grip. You can be more developed and still be a greater evil compared to a lesser developed group if you are committing worse crimes.

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-army-human-shields-80f358dd2c87a1123f26ffada159701c

So coddling their victim narrative would just make the problem worse. The only reason they think that is an absolute refusal to confront how their refusal to see humanity of Palestinians lead to that attack. It also assumes it’s their honest feelings. A lot of it is just a tactic to distract and delay pushback to buy Israel time to finish exterminating the Palestinian people. An example of this was how the ADL was saying accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing was antisemitic, then when Netanyahu announced he wanted to expel Gazans they turned around and supported it.

This misunderstands the colonial mindset. In South Africa they used the excuse apartheid was necessary for safety, but the second it began hurting them economically and they were losing public support in the western countries they liked, they dismantled it. In apartheid South Africa whites were only 10% of the population. In historic Palestine Jews are 50% and have an even larger power gap, yet they refuse to give Palestinian equal rights or even remove the illegal settlements and give them a state despite all Arab states offering normalization for it. That’s because they feel the losses they take are worth having a racial supremacist state. As soon as the costs of subjugating Palestinians is higher than the benefits, you’ll see them flip and say they were against it the entire time.

Unfortunately this is largely nonsense, early zionists wanted to turn Judaism into a nationalist war like ideology, they only adopted the holocaust as part of the national narrative after they realized it helps get support from western guilt. In Israel holocaust survivors were mocked as “soap people” and to this day a large amount live in poverty and suffer from loneliness. https://www.timesofisrael.com/1-in-3-holocaust-survivors-cant-afford-all-the-groceries-they-need-poll/ They know another holocaust won’t happen, if it does it’s as a reaction to Israel’s behavior such as a major war that leads to the Samson option, in fact currently Israeli Jews are leaving Israel for the western countries that were responsible for the holocaust, in record numbers. They don’t care about having a safe space for Jews, they want Israel to persist even if it’s unsafe. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/17/israelis-moving-live-europe-rejuvenating-jewish-communities The reason is three fold, - they’ve adopted a victim narrative and refuse to acknowledge other groups of people are equally deserving of human rights. example, nytimes interviewed an israeli woman who discussed why their was so much anger at childrens entertainer ms Rachel for sharing information about injured Palestinian children: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/arts/television/ms-rachel-gaza-israel.html - they are extremely racist towards Palestinians and view them as subhumans polls find the majority of Israelis believe Jews deserve special privileges and have racist beliefs about Palestinians such as not wanting to live in the same building as them: https://www.timesofisrael.com/plurality-of-jewish-israelis-want-to-expel-arabs-study-shows/ - a radical religious group believes god is telling them they need to remove Palestinians and recreate greater Israel to bring the messiah back. They have outsized control of the government because the mainstream right uses them to maintain power and the mainstream left refuses to work with Palestinian parties partially due to racial supremacist beliefs, leading to them being a minority.

- western governments are funding and arming Israel, so citizens of those countries are implicated - more people died in Syria, but Syria has 10x the population as Gaza, In Syria 80% of casualties were male, in Gaza its 40%

That doesn’t mean their actions or positions are automatically worse morally. An adult has higher moral development than a child, but if the adult rapes someone, their action was morally worse. Even the major terrorism examples like suicide bombings or plane hijacking’s only showed up after they had already been occupied for decades btw. Your mistake is assuming that’s always an outgrowth of moral development as opposed to strategic positioning and desperation. If I took a highly morally developed ethics professor and locked him in a prison with no food and he starts cannibalizing the inmates would we say I guess he is less developed than the average joes outside the prison who don’t engage in that behavior? I don’t think so.

This would mean accepting three assumptions that aren’t necessarily true - greater technological and economic development means greater moral development, not necessarily, there are practical and strategic reasons beyond development that cause this. The moral development of the far right Israelis is probably not far off from Hamas, they just have much of economic support and a tactically advantageous position far above them. It’s actually happened many times where a colonial power lifts up one minority economically and technologically to use them to help subjugate other minorities, something like that happened in Rwanda, usually they had similar development but one ended up in a far more advantageous position politically and economically. - the lower developed civilization will always be morally worse than the higher developed civilization. Not true, a group with higher development can have a worse or equal moral position depending on their actions. Nazi Germany would have much higher development than say some African tribes that co-exist with each other with some tensions, yet Nazi Germanys positions and actions were morally worse. The Middle East had less development than Europe during the 19th and 20th century, but prior to Zionism they treated the Jewish minority much more morally than they were treated in Europe. - Baseline development dictates victory. It doesn’t, there are many different factors. You can argue the Afrikaaners had higher development than black south Africans, yet apartheid ended. The French had higher development than the Algerians, yet French Algeria collapsed. Strategically Israel’s position of dominance over Palestinians depends on various things such as international economic support, military dominance, and social cohesion. These can all be damaged and lead to the failure of Zionism even if it has higher development as a society compared to native Palestinians simply because of long term strategic issues. Yes the average Hamas soldier is probably less developed than the average IDF soldier, Hamas soldiers are orphans raised in a ghetto and IDF soldiers can be from Europe or America and travel to first world countries. But if they both kill a civilian by choice, their actions would be equally morally wrong and illegal under any fair interpretation of international law.

Killing civilians is not proof it was pre-planned. For example if their orders were to go and kidnap idf but they recklessly endanger civilians and some soldiers massacre civilians, it wasn’t pre planned in the case even when they killed civilians. There was video of one Hamas commander telling his soldiers something about not killing civilians. Of course they very well ended up killing many, but that would indicate it wasn’t the original plan. Most of the areas they attacked were military bases. Feel free to show me evidence they went in planning on massacring civilians as the purpose of the attack. The examples of idf massacres I linked were when there wasn’t a reasonable military target, indicating it was a pre-planned massacre of civilians. If we are counting any attack that also had civilians massacred, I could link 50 of those from Israel. But those can’t be assumed to be pre-planned as they can argue only the military purpose was planned and the rest was collateral.

The Qibya example linked there was clearly pre-planned retribution. I already linked you a incident in 82 where they let a militia into a refugee camp to kill civilians on purpose. The dahiya doctrine is an operational procedure targeting civilian structures. I haven’t even seen proof oct 7 was a pre-planned massacre of civilians, as far as we know they werent aware the festival was happening, so far it’s unclear how many of the civilians were killed by Hamas as opposed to other groups or the Hannibal directive. I don’t see how that’s morally any different than the documented reports of Israel bombing civilian structures in Gaza or shooting unarmed civilians carrying white flags, which was before this current war. The current war is so beyond any of this it’s ridiculous to even draw a comparison btw. Even if you disagree about the past examples I linked it is insane you are still under the delusion that the current war is avoiding civilian casualties in any shape or form. I don’t know what more possible evidence can be given this is not the case if the overwhelming amount of current evidence, literally to the point where every major human rights organization and international law organization is saying this.

The main reason why countries like Israel can get away with it is because of these kinds of double standards.

this isn’t true. They’ve went on rampages slaughtering civilians by choice multiple times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibya_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafr_Qasim_massacre they even have a military doctrine called the dahiya doctrine specifically designed to destroy civilian structures on purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine Plus there are countless videos of individual instances of idf shooting civilians. And who knows how many not captured on video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqzE4hkuee4 https://x.com/btselem/status/1717554938337701929 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/19/israeli-troops-gaza-shootings-civilians https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/10/video-appears-show-cheers-israeli-sniper-shoots-palestinian They are literally starving 2 million people at this point by blocking all food and medicine. How is that avoiding civilian casualties? Israel arrests civilian Palestinians constantly, the majority of Palestinian men have spent time in prison. They’ve called their prisoners “bargaining chips” in the past. In fact most of the Palestinian prisoners israel has released so far weren’t charged with any crime, and many were women or minors.

Destroying Zionism isn’t the same as wanting to ethnically cleanse israel. A Islamist could want to destroy Israel but be fine with Jews living there as long as they got to have their Islamist government.

So why didn’t they ethnically cleanse the Jews and Christians living their prior to Zionism? Jihadists would want to install some version of Islamic law, that doesn’t call for ethnic cleansing by default.

Hamas hasn’t engaged in ethnic cleansing. You could say that’s because they’re not capable of it, but irregardless it isn’t their action. Terrorism yes, but so did the ANC and Algerian rebels, and it wasn’t assumed they wanted ethnic cleansing.

Right, but that’s also rhetoric. So we should look at the proposals they themselves offered.

So why isn’t the offer to demolish the illegal settlements in the west bank and move them there while Gaza is rebuilt then let them return? Why isn’t the offer to move the civilians into the Israeli lands where they were from before israel ethnically cleansed them? Why is the offer permanent expulsion of the ethnic group? Or why do they support blocking aid and Israel destroying 90% of buildings making their lives more miserable? Because, they want their home to be unlivable to remove them as a population, as it is ethnic cleansing.

So we can’t trust their own founders words or their own charters? What exactly is the source that they want to ethnically cleanse israel then? Then why did they offer compromises? Saying they’ll do a 10 year ceasefire in exchange for a state is a compromise, saying they’ll disarm in exchange for a state is a compromise, saying they’ll cede power to the PA is a compromise.

No it wasn’t, their original charter called for a Palestinian state between the river and the sea, and some rhetoric about expelling Jewish immigrants from Europe, but not all Jews. Btw, that charter was written by like 12 people under siege while Israel was literally massacring 1000 civilians during the first intifada. This is from their 2017 charter: This is far closer to the international legal consensus than Israel’s position, from Likud’s charter: The PA doesn’t call for ethnic cleansing, yet prior to oct 7 they were actually undergoing more ethnic cleansing from Israel as they built settlements in the West Bank and demolished Palestinian homes. And again, what a group would hypothetically want to do is not the same as what another group actually did and is doing. Israel did the nakba and is trying to do it again, actually doing ethnic cleansing is worse than a group that would hypothetically want to do it if they could. If I ethnically cleanse your family and occupy them, and you say you’d like to ethnically cleanse me if you could after I did that, then I start trying to ethnically cleanse your family again, it would absurd to put me and you on the same level. And even more absurd to absolve others for supporting me while I do that while denouncing you for wanting to do it.

- these are quotes from the founder of Hamas - in the end you are responsible for what you do, not what you would hypothetically want to do. International law as a position of two states on 1967 Borders, Hamas said in the past they would accept a long term ceasefire in exchange for it, more recently they’ve said they’d disarm for it or give up power to the PA. Israel says their will not be a Palestinian state and it wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza. - western countries are enabling Israel to do this, they are not enabling Hamas to do this, therefore they are complicit in acts as bad as what they claim Hamas wants.

Polls find the majority of Israelis support full ethnic cleansing of Gaza and blocking all aid. It isn’t just the deep right wing.