Professor Dave goes off on Destiny and Israel 🇮🇱

[Karmadhi]

3 hours ago, Nivsch said:

@Karmadhi Russia is 750 times bigger than Israel. Israel has no strategic depth and is under much greater pressure to be powerful in order to survive.

I did some reading and appearently Russia has created a Jewish state where they gave a piece of land to be goverened autonomously

If Israel had been created on a piece of Russian land, all this bullshit would have been avoided as Russia willingly gave it to them

Most Ashkanazi Jews come from Russia technically so it makes sense somewhat

Missed opportunity imo

Much calmer alternative than the heart of the Middle East

Edited 11 hours ago by Karmadhi

[Raze]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Russia-Ukraine are not comparable.

Russia straight up invaded a nation and seeks to eat the whole territory if allowed. Even Israel is not so bold.

They have been doing that with settlements for the past 50 years.

In Russias case they are making Ukrainians Russian, in Israel’s case they trying to make Palestinians not exist.

When did Russia do this?

Quote

Israeli settlers storm Palestinian village, seizing home with owner inside

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/middleeast/israeli-settler-violence-qusra-palestinian-intl

Edited 10 hours ago by Raze

[Karmadhi]

9 minutes ago, Raze said:

They have been doing that with settlements for the past 50 years.

In Russias case they are making Ukrainians Russian, in Israel’s case they trying to make Palestinians not exist.

What Russia is doing to Ukraine to me seems a strong example of "cultural genocide"

Basically they want to change the software of the population from Ukranian to Russian. 

They view Ukranians as deluded Russians who need to be educated back into their senses and once it happens, they get treated the same as other Russians.

If Ukraniansdo not obey, they get killed by Russia.

Israel seems to want to ethnically cleanse Palestine

They view Palestinians as inherently bad and there is no desire to change or educate them. They must be removed as they are beyond help.

If Palestinians do not obey, they get killed by Israel

If i had to oversimpify the whole thing

Edited 10 hours ago by Karmadhi

[Willy Phallicus]

The Palestines aren't good - the Israelis aren't evil - they're both just stupid and aggressive.  There is an evil at work over there and it's the same evil that's playing both sides against each other as well as against themselves - and yeah , the whole thing is a tragedy but since when has life anywhere not been?

Maybe its time to get over the drama.

[Thought Art]

8 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Palestine is a terrorism and radical Islam issue. Ukraine is a classical war issue.

Are you sure? When I look are the Israel and Palestinian conflict it seems like this didn’t start due to radical Islam. 

[coca]

@Thought Art Quite the contrary, going back in history it seems like Zionism was the main catalyst of the conflict, with radical Islam adding fuel to the fire. 

4 hours ago, Willy Phallicus said:

The Palestines aren't good - the Israelis aren't evil - they're both just stupid and aggressive.  There is an evil at work over there and it's the same evil that's playing both sides against each other as well as against themselves - and yeah , the whole thing is a tragedy but since when has life anywhere not been?

Maybe it’s time to get over the drama.

@Willy Phallicus Palestine is prohibited from having a military due to Israeli policies, why put HAMAS and Palestine in the same boat?

@Raze @Karmadhi Those are also important distinctions, ethnic cleansing is definitely more severe than the loss of a cultural identity 

Edited 5 hours ago by coca

[Knn]

On 9/3/2026 at 0:30 AM, Leo Gura said:

@Raze Hamas provoked the bear. You see the result in Gaza's ruins.

You need to understand when you a dealing with a force way bigger than you. It is like you are fighting a tsunami.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why Hamas did what it did, and specifically about what its political motivation might have been.

I also want to be clear about something from the beginning: what I saw in many of those videos was horrifying, brutal, and at times barbaric. Some of the acts shown were disgusting and indefensible. I am not trying to sanitize that reality or pretend that the violence was somehow humane.

Hamas is jihadist, terrorist, and radically Islamist. Yes. But its members are also human beings, and Hamas is not only a militant organization; it is also a political actor. Terrorism itself can be used as a form of political violence.

Imagine that I attacked and harassed you and your family for years. I harmed you repeatedly, restricted your life, and gradually destroyed your hope of building any kind of future. You went to the police for help—or, if you were in the United States, even to the FBI—but the authorities either sided with me or did nothing meaningful to stop me and the people acting with me.

What would you eventually do?

My point is not to justify the killing of civilians, nor to excuse the brutality visible in those videos. It is to ask a different question: what political logic, however brutal or morally unacceptable, may have existed behind the attack?

They had been living beside the bear for years. And the bear had already been behaving like a bear: controlling their lives, confining them, and forcing them to live under conditions that many describe as apartheid.

For roughly twenty years, that violence, humiliation, restriction, and domination had been spread out over time. What happened next was, in a sense, the horror of those years compressed into a much shorter period and made suddenly visible to the entire world.

The bear had already been doing what bears do. But when twenty years of brutality are compressed into two years—or even into a few days—the images become impossible to ignore.

That does not make those images less horrific. It does not excuse atrocities. But it may help explain why the violence looked so extreme when it finally erupted into full view.

They forced the world to look at the bear—to see what it had been doing for years, and to see what those living beside it had become capable of doing in response.

[coca]

@Knna splendid read!

[Nivsch]

@Knn Ok so then what in your opinion is the logic behind the behaviour of the bear?

Edited 4 hours ago by Nivsch

[coca]

@Nivsch If you ask me, Leo was spot on with the original bear analogy, the bear simply does not care about your moral system.

[Knn]

@Nivsch

I honestly don’t know what the deeper logic of the bear is. I can only give you my limited interpretation.

There is a Jewish people who have suffered enormously throughout history, culminating in the Holocaust, and they eventually established a state in a land to which they had historical and religious connections. Some also believe that this land was promised to them by God. To me, that is not a rational political argument, but I am not interested in mocking people for their religious beliefs.

I am not even against Israel having the land it needs to exist securely. Personally, if Palestinians voluntarily wanted to move elsewhere and Arab countries were willing to integrate them, I would not see that as some unimaginable solution. What I object to is forcing people out.

But I think the bear massively overreacted. It handled this catastrophically.

Whatever security justification Israel had after October 7, what followed was something the entire world watched in real time: enormous destruction, mass civilian death, displacement, starvation, and scenes that many people, institutions, and legal scholars have described as genocidal.

And I think this will have consequences for trust.

I think governments around the world will now be much more cautious about the Israeli state, Israeli intelligence, lobbying networks, and people with unusually close connections to those structures. The Epstein affair, whatever conclusions one draws from it, also contributes to a broader public suspicion about how powerful networks, intelligence services, money, and political influence can intersect.

But I am talking about states, institutions, networks, and powerful individuals here—not about an ordinary Jewish person simply because they are Jewish.

The “chosen people” idea is also strange and interesting to me. As folklore or theology, fine. Every religion has ideas that look irrational from the outside. But when the belief that God chose your people becomes a serious political conviction that gives you greater rights over land or over other human beings, then it stops being harmless theology.

I actually support Israel’s right to exist and to have territory.

What I cannot understand is how a people whose history contains such extreme persecution could allow their state to respond in a way that produced this level of suffering.

So perhaps that is my answer about the bear: I can understand its fear, historical trauma, insecurity, nationalism, and religious mythology.

But I think the bear reacted far beyond what was necessary, managed the situation terribly, and damaged itself morally and politically in the process.

[Ajay0]

Both the Palestinian and Ukrainian conflicts have their origin in the legacy of the second world war, imho.

The religious and racial persecution of the Jews in europe for many centuries eventually led to the genocide in the second world war which killed over 6 million jews, and thus leading to the events creating a separate state for the remaining Jews in the Middle east surrounded by hostile arab states.

Similarly heavy destruction of life was caused by the Axis military alliance of European Nazis in the second world war in the USSR, leading to the deaths of over 25 million Slavs as part of racial genocide. 

This is one of the reasons, along with Napoleon's earlier invasion of Russia, that the russians are heavy paranoid of hostile military alliances on their borders, leading to both diplomatic moves in the begining to prevent such a scenario and now followed by conflict.

The two world wars which originated in europe killing over a hundred million people came about on the basis of military alliances.

Hence disbanding of military alliances is key to prevent more such disastrous world wars from coming up in europe again .
 

[coca]

@Knn Do you really think modern Israelis still bear a grudge that deep based on historical events that they weren’t alive for tho? It’s surely one factor in the equation but I believe Leo is correct to boil it down to simply not caring about others moral system.

 

[coca]

@Ajay0 The root of these conflicts can be traced back to the founding of the countries! From the Ukrainian war of independence to “Zionism was the main force behind the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and remains the country's dominant ideology today.”(Wikipedia). 

[Raze]

1 hour ago, Knn said:

@Nivsch

I honestly don’t know what the deeper logic of the bear is. I can only give you my limited interpretation.

There is a Jewish people who have suffered enormously throughout history, culminating in the Holocaust, and they eventually established a state in a land to which they had historical and religious connections. Some also believe that this land was promised to them by God. To me, that is not a rational political argument, but I am not interested in mocking people for their religious beliefs.

I am not even against Israel having the land it needs to exist securely. Personally, if Palestinians voluntarily wanted to move elsewhere and Arab countries were willing to integrate them, I would not see that as some unimaginable solution. What I object to is forcing people out.

But I think the bear massively overreacted. It handled this catastrophically.

Whatever security justification Israel had after October 7, what followed was something the entire world watched in real time: enormous destruction, mass civilian death, displacement, starvation, and scenes that many people, institutions, and legal scholars have described as genocidal.

And I think this will have consequences for trust.

I think governments around the world will now be much more cautious about the Israeli state, Israeli intelligence, lobbying networks, and people with unusually close connections to those structures. The Epstein affair, whatever conclusions one draws from it, also contributes to a broader public suspicion about how powerful networks, intelligence services, money, and political influence can intersect.

But I am talking about states, institutions, networks, and powerful individuals here—not about an ordinary Jewish person simply because they are Jewish.

The “chosen people” idea is also strange and interesting to me. As folklore or theology, fine. Every religion has ideas that look irrational from the outside. But when the belief that God chose your people becomes a serious political conviction that gives you greater rights over land or over other human beings, then it stops being harmless theology.

I actually support Israel’s right to exist and to have territory.

What I cannot understand is how a people whose history contains such extreme persecution could allow their state to respond in a way that produced this level of suffering.

So perhaps that is my answer about the bear: I can understand its fear, historical trauma, insecurity, nationalism, and religious mythology.

But I think the bear reacted far beyond what was necessary, managed the situation terribly, and damaged itself morally and politically in the process.

- you ignored the biggest factor for Hamas’s motivation, the Abraham accords trying to lock Palestinians out of a future

- Israel is managing itself just fine if you understand their goals, which is to destroy the Palestinians, it’s goal isn’t security or popularity, it uses those for the primary goal of destroying Palestinians. 

 

 

[Ajay0]

24 minutes ago, coca said:

@Ajay0 The root of these conflicts can be traced back to the founding of the countries! From the Ukrainian war of independence to “Zionism was the main force behind the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and remains the country's dominant ideology today.”(Wikipedia). 

Whether Ukraine was independent or part of USSR, it was still targetted by the European Nazis for total annihilation and who considered the Slavs as racially inferior. 

Many millions of Ukrainian Slavs and Jews were methodically eliminated by the Nazis in Ukraine as well in tune with its policy of creating Lebensraum or living space for future occupation by europeans considered racially superior .

If it weren't for the stunning Russian counter-attack starting from Stalingrad that ended the Nazi war machine permanently, the Jews and Ukrainian Slavs would have ended as extinct as the dodos.