This is criticism given from most of the region when the topic of lifting sanctions comes up. Nothing I said is novel or extreme.
In fact, we have direct evidence of what happens when those sanctions are lifted from when it was done under the Biden administration. They expanded their nuclear program and expanded funding to their regional proxies to carry out terror campaigns. The Houthis attacked global shipping lines and October 7th happened. That's not theoretical.
Btw, I'm of Iranian descent.
True we only sanction them because it's funny.
I don't really care what descent you are, anyone can have a bad opinion of American foreign policy. There are tons of people right now in America who are Iranian that are screaming for a crazy monarch to take power.
Sanctions against Iran are imposed by the United Nations (also the US, UK and EU). That means that UN member states think that sanctions against Iran are politically palatable. It's definitionally mainstream opinion that Iran should be sanctioned.
Your statement was just blatantly false and slightly defamatory.
This is a weird thing to say to me. You're saying that keeping sanctions on Iran is important to prevent another October 7 because Iran was funding Hamas? Okay, but then wouldn't it be better to put sanctions on Israel, since they're the aggressive, colonizing, occupying force?
However when your survival is at stake (and the survival of your own kind and culture) people often stop giving a damn about who was right and who was wrong and they just try to defend themselves.
Many people understand this when the people defending themselves are Palestinians, and somehow are able to forgive senseless violence that they do, all because "they are in the right".
But somehow they cannot imagine that Israeli Jews are living for a long time in a genuine existential threat. Many people just think that all those Jews who live in Israel should just go back where they came from. That's obviously impossible since many fled countries where they didn't feel safe.
It's hard to understand the determination to fight for having just a normal life. We can't understand this because most people in the world have a "nation" a "fatherland" a place where they don't get butchered just because they belong to a given race or speak with an accent or have a long nose.
The situation is not symmetrical at all. Arabs can live in Israel. Arab citizens are not discriminated, there are Arab doctors, Arab justices, Arab members of the parlament. 20% of the Israeli citizens are Arab Muslims.
Israel is the multicultural democratic state that everybody claims to want Palestine to be. Jews need Israel to exist because they need a state that will protect them and not be at the whims of whatever populist government will turn their neighbors against (as it happened many times in many places, not only in Germany)
And yes, Israel did do many crimes directly and indirectly and has mistreated Palestinians in many cases.
But you have to put things in context. Arabs never accepted the Palestinian state and fought with several wars. Which they lost.
These kind of stuff happened many times in history, even recent history. Many borders were redrawen even in Europe and people were displaced. None of that is a good thing for people who suffered it
But Arabs did something that nobody else did for quite a long time: they engaged in a holy war, using suicide bombings and having an utter disregard for their own lives and the lives of their own children, all in the name of martyrdom. This ideology is very hard to fight. Japanese lost and surrendered, Germans lost and surrendered. Palestinian lost and kept blowing up people and making their own women and children dangerous. This increased the tension and created the condition for security checks and a kind of apartheid.
But this can be solved, if only Arabs stopped demanding the destruction of Israel. Of course, Israel cannot accept laying down their arms and letting them be butchered.
There is truth in the quote: if Palestinians laid down their arms there will be peace, if Israelis laid down their arms there would be genocide.
This seems like a crazy statement but this happens every single time Israel lowers their guard.
The only reason Israeli Jews are not dead is because they are efficient at defending themselves.
They are constantly bombed but they blow the rockets out of the air. They have shelters.
That's why there are so few dead Jews. Not for lack of trying on the Arab side.
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So what is the right thing to do in this case?
Saying "Israel shouldn't have been created in 48 so they are and they always been colonizers so now they just have to go away"?
How can this be reasonable solution? We're talking about millions of people who are born there for a few generations now.
3. Consider that Israel is also interested in wiping most of its neighbors off the map (and has, in the past 2 years, already attacked 5 of its neighbors, often with disproportionate force and brutality), and unlike Iran has far more military might and international support to do so? If we want to reduce violence in the middle east, let's look at the nation most prone to dishing it out, and most able to defend itself from it.
4. When did I look at anything through a black and white lens? I didn't say one or the other, I said my method would be more fruitful (and just)