Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Razgovory]

Only Israel can make peace.  Hamas is not a real government, and even if it was, it can't do shit unless Israel allows it.

Wait, Hamas couldn't stop itself from launching the October 6th attack?  It can't stop itself from shooting rockets at Israel?

[Sheilbh]

On Egypt:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/egypt-building-walled-enclosure-in-sinai-for-rafah-refugees-videos-suggest

[viper37]

Only Israel can make peace.  Hamas is not a real government, and even if it was, it can't do shit unless Israel allows it.

Wait, Hamas couldn't stop itself from launching the October 6th attack?  It can't stop itself from shooting rockets at Israel?

Did Israel wait Oct 6th before invading the West Bank?

[Razgovory]

Answer the question viper.

[viper37]

Answer the question viper.

Hamas could stop lauching rockets.  Some other organization could still launch rockets or perform attacks.  Or not.  Israel would not still not relinquish any territory or stop expelling Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.

Bibi said its goal was the destruction of Hamas.  If you want to destroy an ant nest, you want to kill all the ants and the queen.  Not just the queen, but all the workers too.  Not just the workers, but the queen too.  And then you want turn the ground to destroy the nest extending over many kilometers.

The problem with ants, is that they are very hard to number precisely.  Same with Hamas and their associates.  How many fighters are there? 10 000?  12 000?  14 053?  Will Israel stop at 14 010?  There will always be one more to pick up a rifle and fight the invader.  "Hamas" or whatever the name of the name of enemy, it will never cease to exist.  It will always be there.  When will Hamas be destroyed?  What is Hamas? Does it include the other groups waging war with Israel or only the card-carrying Hamas members?

That's why I'm saying Hamas can't stop the war and only Israel can.  Israel has set the goals to officially stop the war.  I know it's bullshit.  You know it.  We all know it.  You just refuse to speak of it publicly or are willifully blinding yourself.  They don't want any kind of Palestinian organization to exists, any kind of meaningful Palestinian population to exist on their borders, or even in their State.  That's always been the goal, and they don't even shy anymore from saying it publicly.

I had a revelation yesterday night, while listening to Aanal Nathraak's Endarkment.  Good song, very relaxing.
You should read this book, very enlightening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,13 and 14 are there in Israel's society and you approve of it, defend of it.  Happily.

Only 12 is missing.  For now. Sort of.  But we've seen that women's opinion are dismissed.  We just don't know if it was because they were women.

You're slipping.  You're become what you're suppose to hate.  Will you vote for the Orange clown too when the time comes?  Just to be on the side on the strong too? Or will you let yourself be culled by your strong pro-Bibi MAGA friends?

[Razgovory]

If Israel relinquished territory the attacks would still happen.  The Hamas charter says so.  In fact the Palestinians would have much, much more territory if they simply didn't try to genocide the Jews in the first place. And then keep trying it for 80 years. But that's racial hatred for you.  Maybe one day they will realize that shooting rockets at people on results in getting their shit wrecked.


When I want to kill ants I used to pour gasoline on the nest.  Seemed to work.  Other people use poison.  Some enterprising people pour liquid aluminum down the next.  There are plenty of ways to kill ants.

[Josquius]

Or you could just... Not get your kicks killing ants?

And how's that one go. The sins of the father are visited upon the children? An eye for an eye makes the world blind? Isn't there one about group punishment as well? - most of those Palestinians being victimised have nothing to do with the militants.

So the Palestinians deserve everything coming to them because they attacked Israel way back when is a pretty terrible world outlook (didn't Israel start it anyway?).
By that same train of thought aren't the anti semites right to hate Jews what with the JC killing? I mean. Exactly the same "logic".

Seriously raz. I don't know why but on Israel-Palestine you truly have an amazingly blinkered black and white view.
Both sides have their shit heads and you can't blame their existence purely on the others past misdeeds.

[Razgovory]

Or you could just... Not get your kicks killing ants?

And how's that one go. The sins of the father are visited upon the children? An eye for an eye makes the world blind? Isn't there one about group punishment as well? - most of those Palestinians being victimised have nothing to do with the militants.

So the Palestinians deserve everything coming to them because they attacked Israel way back when is a pretty terrible world outlook (didn't Israel start it anyway?).
By that same train of thought aren't the anti semites right to hate Jews what with the JC killing? I mean. Exactly the same "logic".

Seriously raz. I don't know why but on Israel-Palestine you truly have an amazingly blinkered black and white view.
Both sides have their shit heads and you can't blame their existence purely on the others past misdeeds.

We all live with the borders based on the actions of our ancestors.  The Germans live with truncated borders because of shit they started in the 1930's.  They've come to terms with it.  The Palestinians are going to have do the same.

Sorry, Jos.  Genocidal Antisemites rub me the wrong way.

[grumbler]

If Israel relinquished territory the attacks would still happen.  The Hamas charter says so.  In fact the Palestinians would have much, much more territory if they simply didn't try to genocide the Jews in the first place. And then keep trying it for 80 years. But that's racial hatred for you.  Maybe one day they will realize that shooting rockets at people on results in getting their shit wrecked.

The Hamas charter also says that Jews are to be perfectly safe and content in an Islamic Palestine.  You should go back to your history books if you think that the Palestinians were the ones who "tried] to genocide the Jews in the first place."  Adolph Hitler was not Palestinians nor were the death camps run by Palestinians.  You'll find out, with very little research, that it was Nazis that tried to "genocide the Jews."  And no one has been trying to "genocide the Jews" for "80 years."

You cannot learn from history if the history you cite is just one made up by yourself on the fly. 

Hamas is a criminal organization that should be wiped from the face of the earth... but not at any cost.

[Josquius]

The issue here isn't annexing Israeli land back to Palestine.
It's Israel denying Palestine freedom within its own borders and eroding what land is Palestinian ever more.

It's as if the Germans had their east taken but then had to spend the next 80 years with the Polish army enforcing whatever laws they wanted, denying Germany the ability to be anything like an independent country and Polish fascists regularly seizing German farms to build new towns for Poles.

Hamas and Co suck.
But it's perfectly understandable why they're so appealing to many angry young men. Israels hands are far from clean.

[Razgovory]

If Israel relinquished territory the attacks would still happen.  The Hamas charter says so.  In fact the Palestinians would have much, much more territory if they simply didn't try to genocide the Jews in the first place. And then keep trying it for 80 years. But that's racial hatred for you.  Maybe one day they will realize that shooting rockets at people on results in getting their shit wrecked.

The Hamas charter also says that Jews are to be perfectly safe and content in an Islamic Palestine.  You should go back to your history books if you think that the Palestinians were the ones who "tried] to genocide the Jews in the first place."  Adolph Hitler was not Palestinians nor were the death camps run by Palestinians.  You'll find out, with very little research, that it was Nazis that tried to "genocide the Jews."  And no one has been trying to "genocide the Jews" for "80 years."

You cannot learn from history if the history you cite is just one made up by yourself on the fly. 

Hamas is a criminal organization that should be wiped from the face of the earth... but not at any cost.

The Arabs were pretty clear that they wanted to drive the Jews into the sea.

[Razgovory]

The issue here isn't annexing Israeli land back to Palestine.
It's Israel denying Palestine freedom within its own borders and eroding what land is Palestinian ever more.

It's as if the Germans had their east taken but then had to spend the next 80 years with the Polish army enforcing whatever laws they wanted, denying Germany the ability to be anything like an independent country and Polish fascists regularly seizing German farms to build new towns for Poles.

Hamas and Co suck.
But it's perfectly understandable why they're so appealing to many angry young men. Israels hands are far from clean.

Yeah, the Palestinians want the whole enchilada.  Polls are pretty clear on that.  The River to the Sea.  Hamas and Co represent the mainstream of Palestinian politics.

[Razgovory]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/

By now, december's congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university's policies only "depending on the context," is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.

The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn't want free speech, or that they didn't want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn't want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations' buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings' windows. They didn't want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn't want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn't want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn't want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.

I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I'd been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay's anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it. I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews. As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they'd experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences.

In Congress, all three university presidents offered some version of the platitudes that "Hatred comes from ignorance" and "Education is the answer." But if hatred comes from ignorance, why were America's best universities full of this very specific ignorance? And why were so many people trying to justify it, explain it away, or even deny it? Our era's 10-second news cycle is no match for these questions, because the answers are deep and ancient, buried beneath the oldest of assumptions about what we think we know.

The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn't indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.

In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg's argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider "Judaism." This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries' worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies' ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider "Jewish," this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society's ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. "Anti-Judaism" thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.

This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist. Around 38 C.E., after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a "debate" before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship. Apion believed that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo's rebuttal for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor. Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 C.E. for 50,000 more of them to be slaughtered.

In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into disputations with Christian priests that placed Jewish texts and traditions on public trial, resulting in Jewish books being burned and Jewish disputants exiled. Later legal trials expanded on this concept, requiring Jews to defend themselves against the absurd charge known as the blood libel, in which Jews are accused of murdering and consuming non-Jewish children—a claim that has echoes in current lies about Israelis harvesting Palestinians' organs.

The absurdity of these charges is less remarkable than the high intellectual profiles of those making them: people like Apion, a scholar of Homer and Egyptian history, as well as Christian and Muslim scholars who were among the best-read people of their time. Similarly absurd claims of Jewish perfidy were later endorsed by civilizational luminaries such as Martin Luther and Voltaire. "Anti-Judaism," Nirenberg argues, "should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed."

I've been thinking about Nirenberg's thesis in the months since the October 7 massacre in Israel, during which Hamas, an openly genocidal organization whose stated goal is the murder of Jews, lived up to its mission statement by torturing, raping, and murdering more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and taking more than 200 captives, including babies, children, and the elderly. Shortly after the attacks, a Cornell professor publicly proclaimed the barbarity "exhilarating" and "energizing," while a Columbia professor called it "awesome" and an "achievement." Comparable praise percolated through America's top universities, coming from students and faculty alike. On campuses around the country, students began gathering regularly to chant "There is only one solution: intifada revolution!"—a reference to a suicide-bombing campaign in Israel a generation ago that maimed and murdered well over 1,000 Jews. (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.)

Students took these rallies inside libraries and other campus buildings. They vandalized university property with such slogans as "Zionism = Genocide," "New Intifada," and "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"—referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the state of Israel, where half the world's Jews live. (At Harvard, some students opted for chanting an Arabic version: "From water to water, Palestine is Arab.") On some campuses, the exhilaration escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students. When a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti-Israel protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag, protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student's nose.


It wasn't just universities. Crowds cheering for "intifada" gathered in cities around the country, shutting down and disrupting train stations and airport access roads. Lest their support for Hamas be mistaken for support for Palestinians in general, or for peace, U.S. rally organizers named their efforts "floods" ("Flood Seattle for Palestine," "Flood Manhattan for Gaza") after "Operation Al Aqsa Flood," Hamas's name for its October 7 butchery. The enthusiasm was hard to contain. Some people tore down or vandalized posters of Israeli hostages. Others targeted synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, spray-painting them with swastikas and slogans like "Israel's only religion is capitalism." In New York City, a Jewish teacher's online photo holding a sign that said i stand with israel was enough to prompt a schoolwide protest that devolved into a riot during which students destroyed school property; the teacher had to be moved to another part of the building to avoid the teenage mob screaming "Free Palestine!" In Los Angeles, a man invaded a Jewish family's home before dawn with a knife, breaking into the parents' bedroom while their four children slept, screaming "Kill Jewish people." When police arrested him, he shouted, "Free Palestine!"

Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own demonization, in "debates" with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea. The many legitimate concerns about Israel's policies toward Palestinians, and the many legitimate concerns about Israel's current war in Gaza, cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews. The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first emerged not in response to Israel's war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace.


But there are nuances to sadistic barbarity against Jews, we are told, and sometimes gang-raping Jewish women is actually a movement for human rights. It hardly seems fair to call people anti-Semitic if they want only half of the world's Jews to die. The phrase "Globalize the Intifada," currently chanted at universities across America, perhaps widens the net a tiny bit—but really, who can say? Even the phrase "Gas the Jews," chanted at a rally organized by NYU students and faculty, is so very ambiguous. How dare those whiny Jews presume to know what's in other people's hearts?

Besides, American Jews had nothing to whine about: Had any of them actually died in the United States from all this exhilaration? That question was answered in November, when a Jewish man died in California after an anti-Israel protester allegedly clubbed him over the head with a bullhorn, the kind used to chant entirely non-anti-Semitic slogans—and of course that question had already been answered repeatedly with other anti-Semitic murders in recent years, some more publicized than others. (One murder even happened on campus: In 2022, an expelled University of Arizona student who repeatedly ranted about Jews and Zionists shot and killed his professor—who wasn't Jewish, though the student thought he was.) But now the goalposts move again: Those actual murders, along with many other physical attacks against American Jews, are all just one-offs, lone wolves, mental-illness cases, entirely unrelated to the anti-Semitic rhetoric swirling through American life.

It remains unclear why anti-Semitism should matter only when it is lethal, or if so, how many unambiguously anti-Semitic murders would be necessary for anti-Semitism to be happening outside whiny Jews' heads. A realistic estimate might be 6 million. Even then, Jews have had to spend the past 80 years collecting documentation to prove it.

One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world's oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.

DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn't primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.

This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews' bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don't experience bigotry because they are "white," itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don't experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are "rich," an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups' statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.

The sordid history of the concept of anti-Zionism vividly illustrates this dynamic—and is particularly relevant for its success in scrambling the radar of well-meaning people. Jewish civilization has been centered for thousands of years, in ways large and small, on its homeland in Israel, where Jews have had a continuous presence since ancient times. The modern political idea of Zionism as Jewish self-determination in this homeland emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amid many other anticolonial movements around the world, as global power dynamics shifted from empires (Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, British, French, Japanese) toward nation-states. The large and often violent population upheavals following Israel's creation, including the displacement of most Arabs from what became Israel and the displacement of nearly all Jews from what became Arab states, paralleled similar population upheavals around the world as new states emerged from receding empires. In this, Zionism was typical.

But anti-Zionism as an explicit political concept has a history quite independent of the actions of Jews. In 1918, 30 years before the establishment of the state of Israel, Bolsheviks established Jewish sections of the Communist Party, which they insisted be anti-Zionist. The problem, Bolsheviks argued, was that Jewish particularism (in this case, Zionism) was the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under communism—just as Christians once saw Jewish particularism as the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under Christ. The righteousness of this mission was, as usual, the key: The claim that "anti-Zionism" was unrelated to anti-Semitism, repeated ad nauseam in Soviet propaganda for decades, was essential to the Communist Party's self-branding as humanity's liberators. It was also a bald-faced lie.

Bolsheviks quickly demonstrated their supposed lack of anti-Semitism by shutting down every "Zionist" institution under their control, a category that ranged from synagogues to sports clubs; appropriating their assets; taking over their buildings, sometimes physically destroying offices; and arresting and ultimately "purging" Jewish leaders, including those who had endorsed the party line and persecuted their fellow Jews for their "Zionism." Thousands of Jews were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.

Later, the U.S.S.R. exported this messaging to its client states in the developing world and ultimately to social-justice-minded circles in the United States. A thick paper trail shows how the KGB adapted its propaganda by explicitly rebranding Zionism as "racism" and "colonialism," beginning half a century ago, when those terms gained currency as potent smears—even though Jews are racially diverse and Zionism is one of the world's premier examples of an indigenous people reclaiming independence. Facts were irrelevant: Soviets labeled Jews as racist colonialist oppressors, just as Nazis had labeled Jews as both capitalist and Communist oppressors, and just as Christians and Muslims had labeled Jews as God-killers and Prophet-defilers. Jews were whatever a given society regarded as evil. To borrow the language of DEI, the big lie is systemic.

Even naming it—that is, calling out bigotry against Jews—can be classed as yet another sign of assumed evil intent, of Jews attacking beloved principles of justice for all. In an April 2023 lecture, David Nirenberg, the historian, presented the example of an activist with a large following whose boundary-pushing rhetoric met with accusations of anti-Semitism. The activist pointed out, as Nirenberg put it, that anti-Semitism "was merely an accusation that Jews used to silence criticism and squash free speech." He brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of anti-Semitism, and won them. It is unfortunate for those making this argument today that this activist was named Adolf Hitler.

Two weeks after the October 7 massacre, I wrote an op-ed for a national newspaper about the intergenerational fears many Jews were feeling, describing a few choice moments from several thousand years of anti-Semitic attacks. A friendly fact-checker followed up, asking me to prove that the Russian Civil War pogroms of 1918–21 involved gang rapes, and appending a judicious reportedly in front of a detail I'd included from the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 about attackers taking Jewish women's severed breasts as trophies. I dutifully provided additional sources, combing through sickening testimonies about mutilated Jewish girls in 1919 and 1941, while simultaneously avoiding videos of mutilated Jewish girls in 2023.

As I piled up evidence to prove that these things happened, I remembered an oral-history interview my sister once did with our grandfather to share with our family at his 97th-birthday party, in which he described his own grandparents' decision to leave their town in Ukraine after an aunt was attacked during a pogrom. "They raided her, et cetera, et cetera," my sister's notes from the interview say. Et cetera, et cetera, I thought over and over, as I hunted down sources on gang rapes of Jewish women to submit to the fact-checker, my vision going blurry. At the time, I hadn't wondered what those sanitized et ceteras meant.

The same week I spent emailing documentation to the fact-checker of pogroms long past, the newspaper, like many other news outlets, published a banner headline about Israelis bombing a hospital in Gaza and killing 500 people inside. This was quickly proven to be a lie told by Hamas—a lie similar to the medieval blood libel, about Jews deliberately targeting and murdering innocent non-Jewish babies—and a transparent psychological projection of the crimes that Hamas had actually committed in Israel, where Hamas terrorists had deliberately targeted and murdered hundreds of adults, children, and babies, and also repeatedly fired rockets at a hospital. Israel's military has indeed killed many innocent people in Gaza during its war to destroy Hamas, and deserves the same scrutiny as any country for its conduct in war. But scrutiny is impossible when lies are substituted for facts. The newspaper later issued a regretful editorial note acknowledging its error. Unfortunately, Hamas's lie had already inspired mass demonstrations around the world; rioters in Tunisia were so incensed by it that they burned a historic synagogue to the ground. I had been rightfully asked to prove that the Iraqi and Ukrainian pogroms happened. But the spokespeople for Hamas were taken at their word.

Shortly after the op-ed was published, I was invited to watch video footage of the October 7 attacks that the Israeli army had compiled from security cameras, online videos, and Hamas terrorists' GoPro cameras. This grim footage was assembled specifically for the purpose of fighting back against denial. But even this horrifying and humiliating evidence, documented largely by the perpetrators themselves, apparently isn't enough to prove that Jewish experiences are real. At a screening of the footage in Los Angeles, someone in the audience shouted, "Show the rapes!"

The attackers themselves provided footage of a woman's naked, mutilated corpse and of a teenager with blood-soaked pants being dragged by her hair out of a truck. Since then, it has become clear that Hamas used rape and sexual torture systematically against Israeli women. Israeli first responders and forensic scientists have found corpses of women and girls with vaginal bleeding and broken pelvises. Teenage sisters were found murdered in their bedroom, one shot in the head with her pants pulled down, covered in semen; one woman was found with nails and other objects in her genitalia, while others were found to have been shot through their vaginas. Eyewitness testimony has included details about a woman who was passed among many men, murdered while one of them was still raping her; at one point, her severed breast was tossed in the air. It's a detail familiar from the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, just as slicing a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman's body is a tactic Hamas unknowingly replicated from the Khmelnytskyi pogroms of 1648 Ukraine. Et cetera, et cetera. But who would believe it? "Show the rapes!"

[Josquius]

The issue here isn't annexing Israeli land back to Palestine.
It's Israel denying Palestine freedom within its own borders and eroding what land is Palestinian ever more.

It's as if the Germans had their east taken but then had to spend the next 80 years with the Polish army enforcing whatever laws they wanted, denying Germany the ability to be anything like an independent country and Polish fascists regularly seizing German farms to build new towns for Poles.

Hamas and Co suck.
But it's perfectly understandable why they're so appealing to many angry young men. Israels hands are far from clean.

Yeah, the Palestinians want the whole enchilada.  Polls are pretty clear on that.  The River to the Sea.  Hamas and Co represent the mainstream of Palestinian politics.

Germany only renounced it's claims to its east in 1990.

Do we think they'd have come to that if the complete analogous situation I'd outlined with Poland was in effect?

And that's not even considering Germany lost a much smaller percentage of its land than the Palestinians and had a hell of a lot left.

[Razgovory]

If Germany pressed it's claims on the east it would have gotten the shit kicked out of it.  There is a reason why they made peace.  You situation isn't analogous.  For it to be analogous Germany wouldn't have ever made peace they would have just continued fighting after 1945.  And yeah, in that situation they would have lost more territory.  And frankly the Soviets would probably have exterminated them.  Or at least the Germans in their sector.  Some times you need to throw in the towel.