- I'm a Jew in USA, and served in the military for more than a decade.
- I used to get annoyed by the Palestinian protests I'd see in the years before this, and generally sided with Israel, and the operations its military performed in counter-Shia-militia operations etc in the region, and was outraged at the Oct 7 attacks.
This is large-scale, continued, intentional CIVCAS.
This Haaretz article is very troubling. To the extent it's accurate, there's not much question that it reflects war crimes.
A few thoughts:
1. The article itself says there is an ongoing investigation into some of these accusations. I hope that, to whatever extent this is happening, it's not widespread, and anyone committing war crimes is very visibly and publicly tried in court.
2. There is clearly something broken with the GHF and the new aid delivery - dozens dead every day for weeks. We really need some answers on what's going on.
3. From Haaretz today:
> The U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Saturday urged Israel to investigate reports that soldiers opened fire towards unarmed Palestinians near aid distribution sites, detailed in a Haaretz expose, calling the allegations "too grave to ignore," while denying that any such incidents occurred within its facilities.
> GHF Interim Director John Acree stated, "There have been no incidents or fatalities at or in the immediate vicinity of any of our distribution sites."
Would you consider ethno-nationalists of other nations (far) left, based on (speculating) their economic/women's rights/LGBT/other social stances?
(Orthogonally, I can certainly empathize with being pro-something, but not pro-everything-that-something-does. There's certainly nothing intrinsic to a Jewish state that would require firing at unarmed crowds.)
If your implication is that I'm an ethno-nationalist, I don't think that characterizes Israel or my thoughts about it, however much "ethnostate" is a favorite slur of people to use against Israel.
In the 2022 census, only 76.5% of people in Ireland were ethnically Irish. Over 20% of the population are foreign-born, with the most common countries of foreign birth being Poland, the UK, India, Romania and Lithuania.
So Ireland is far less homogeneous than you perceive it to be.
But the real issue here isn’t how diverse the state’s population is in practice, it is how the state defines itself in its own founding documents (such as the constitution) - as a state for all its citizens, or as a state for a people (ethnos) which is only a subset of the state’s citizens? Israel is (2) but essentially all Western nations nowadays are (1).
Even though the French and German constitutions still express the idea of a “national people” for whom the state exists, they consider anyone who is naturalised as a citizen as joining that people (“ethnos”). By contrast, a non-Jew can immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen-but the state will still not consider them a member of the people for whom the state exists-only conversion to Judaism does that, and only if their conversion is accepted as valid by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate-non-Orthodox conversions will not be accepted, but they sometimes even reject conversions by overseas Orthodox Rabbis whom they don’t consider “rigorous” enough.
So Israel is actually unique in this regard - no Western nation makes becoming “not just a citizen of the state, but a member of the people for whom it exists” contingent on religious conversion. If you want a parallel, you’d have to look at the Islamic world, where non-Muslims are sometimes (not always) permitted citizenship, but are denied membership in the category of “nation for whose sake the state exists”