this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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The human shield lie is dead. The majority of structures in Gaza have been bombed and rendered uninhabitable. Israel is just destroying everything indiscriminately and killing anything that moves outside the designated camps.
Was Hamas using over half of all structures in Gaza as operating bases? Get real.
It's already known that Hamas uses tunnels, why would they even be in the buildings at this point? This is just a campaign of total destruction.
Don't spread genocide denial.
you realize operating bases are probably in the tunnels right. They certainly aren't above ground.
This also ignores stationing for the militants, and potential hideouts, for things like... Bombs.
They aren't bombing the tunnels, they're just blowing up hospitals and apartments and schools. The tunnels are unaffected.
any ideas as to why they aren't bombing the tunnels?
Well firstly, the point of the bombing campaign is to make Gaza uninhabitable. The tunnels are irrelevant to that.
But more importantly, the tunnels are too deep to bomb and they don't know where the tunnels even are. At best they can bomb tunnel entrances, the tunnels themselves require deep penetration to attack directly.
there we go. Also im pretty sure israel has some knowledge on the tunnel layouts and design, i believe they even captured early war plans from the initial october 7th attack. But i dont know fuck shit about that, intelligence teams are fucking crazy.
Don't forget they're constantly torturing Palestinians in the prisons to get them to reveal the locations of tunnels.
is this globally illegal? Russia has similar human rights violations, the US is one of very few places that has it culturally ingrained into law.
The middle east is also not generally known for having incredibly high tolerance for such things as human rights.
It's a violation of international law.
But also? US law forbids giving military aid to nations that commit crimes against humanity, of which torture is recognized under international law.
The law doesn't apply to Israel.
im not sure if it doesnt apply to israel, as much as it wouldnt apply to the US more broadly, since we've seen this stuff with proxy partners in the past, autralia during the iraq war i believe.
This seems to be a general theme in the US military going back through recent history with all the democracy spreading wars and what not.
Well, yeah, Israel is the 51st State. The law doesn't apply to Israel because it doesn't apply to the US. Even the US's own laws.
i mean, that's obviously not true. But this is a shitpost so that doesn't matter.
Admittance to the union though goes through congress (which also requires a majority vote), which has discretion over that event, so yknow, i'm not certain it would happen. Although if it did that would probably be beneficial because than israel would really have a good reason to stop committing war crimes.
What's not true? That Israel is an extension of the US empire? Or that the law doesn't apply to these war criminals?
They can torture and rape Palestinians in their dungeons for fun and there are no consequences, and it's because they are fundamentally part of the American project.
the statehood part, it's some form of extension of US power projection, but that's to be expected, every world power does this. Including russia and china. I believe russia runs a really large blood diamond ring, and china, well they do a few things. Natural resource extraction seems to be a big one right now though. The soviet union also did this.
that could be happening, but there is also a video of a wagner PMC guy having his head squished gently by a sledgehammer, so uh. Granted we don't directly provide aid, but we also do have Guantanamo bay still so.
Ugh, okay, obviously it's not legally a state. No shit. I call it a state to emphasize how integral it is to the US. It's not just power projection, like the Saudi allies or the Ukrainian allies, it's a fundamentally important component of the empire. The empire would be drastically different without Israel to act as a bulwark against African migration and unsinkable aircraft carrier to police oil and gas supplies and a laboratory of oppression for border technology and prison technology and surveillance technology.
The US values Israel higher than literally every other ally and vassal state put together. If the US somehow had to choose between sacrificing Israel or an actual state like Iowa, they'd happily nuke Iowa to keep Israel.
idk that they'd nuke iowa tbh. I think they'd probably nuke israel and then turn it into a US state, but that's just me. Exercising a little military effort is going to be vastly more popular than literally deleting iowa.
Israel's genocide isn't popular either but they're still doing it and they won't stop.
Israel is that important. Popularity comes second. What are people going to do anyway? Vote for the other guy? lol
and it's also not legally classified as being genocide? Which would probably be the biggest determining factor in this case. Also i'm not sure what you specifically mean by "popularity comes second" a very small minority of people on the left are die hard voters on this issue. The vast majority of people on the left would prefer it "stop" but that's a really complicated solution to a very long running and complex issue such as israel. For one thing we probably shouldn't just go and get rid of israel because, well, genocide.
the US historically doesn't abide by most formality when it comes to this stuff, like both Russia/China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions#Adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty
just two pretty pertinent examples here.
regardless of these facts, israel is definitely doing some amount of war crime, the settlements for example, likely to be highly illegal. Disallowing people from fleeing would be another significant one, but i dont know much about that one.
It's hard to actually find up-to-date polling (big surprise) but only 42 percent of the US public would favor using US troops to defend Israel if it were attached by Iran (56% oppose). While a slim majority of Republicans would favor US forces defending Israel in this scenario (53%), only four in 10 Independents (42%) and third of Democrats (34%) agree. Yet, we're already putting carriers with US troops in region to threaten Iran in case they retaliate. This suggests, to me, that popular support comes second.
These recent offenses are certainly more egregious than any violation that has come before, though. US policy on Israel is destroying international legitimacy of the US and its so-called "rules based international order" - and it's worth it to the US because Israel is more important than what any other country has to say.
yeah im not really surprised lol.
for one thing, this is iran directly, the US unilaterally does not like sending troops into overseas wars, this has been a thing since the vietnam war. The korean war was more admirable as it was a more supported war, since they were an existing territory. Things like taiwan and hong kong which want independence are also more popular as well. But even then sending troops would still be relatively unpopular. And when it does happen it's mostly border control reasons, not for actual combat. Similar to the US troops stationed in poland in the early ukraine war days.
this is also not the same as putting troops into war, we do this with basically every potential military conflict, it's strategic power projection if needed. They're not pulling up carriers to the beach and sending soldiers in, though they might send a few planes over, the likelihood of either iran or palestine taking them down is, low. They might also send over a few missiles, who knows. But a direct troop defense is extremely unlikely. And it's certainly even more unlikely that a draft would happen.
"The one instance presented to Americans where a majority (54%) would still favor using US troops is in a peacekeeping scenario if Israel and the Palestinians reached a peace agreement. Democrats (62%) are most willing of all the partisans to use US troops in a peacekeeping manner, consistent with previous polling. About half of Independents (51%) and Republicans (48%) agree."
this is also a fairly interesting stat here. So there is some level of popularity here.
i mean idk, the iraq war was pretty bad, we had the whole WMD thing as well. Again the vietnam war, those people literally considered us war criminals, rather than POW, but that might very well be bias on their part. We literally only joined ww2 when japan had decided to attack us. The US has historically had a policy of self preservation, as do most states. We're still the primary capital and defense force of the world, our navy is one of the strongest, if not the strongest in the world.
It might be true that this stuff negatively influences america, but i don't really think it matters on the grand scheme of things. This is certainly more admirable than a lot of stuff that russia does, and most certainly a lot of things that go on in china.
That's popularity for US troops enforcing a peace agreement, not attacking Israel's enemies in the region. Quite the difference!
Yes, and support for Israel is about self-preservation. That's why I called it the 51st state! Israel is incredibly important for power projection into the Middle East and North Africa, for controlling the movement of migrants out of Africa into Asia, for controlling a huge portion of the worlds oil and gas supplies, for controlling trade through the Red Sea and that region of the Mediterranean, and as a live-testing laboratory for border controls and prisons and policing and public surveillance systems. Protecting Israel is a matter of self preservation, and that matters more than the existence or lack-thereof of popular support. Israel matters more than whatever voters have to say.
It's not just that it negatively impacts the US, but rather, it has revealed that the so-called "rules based international order" doesn't actually exist. That has impacts on countries domestically, as voters think long and hard about whether they can trust the US, whether they really should sacrifice so much to oppose countries sanctioned by the US, and it even calls into question whether they should even follow international law at all. That's bad for the US because it relies on this international order for stability and legitimacy.
This is especially important with the decline of the US dollar hegemony and the rise of the BRICS as a parallel world economy. Suddenly there's options for countries like Iran or groups like the Taliban, whereas before they were totally locked out. One of the best control mechanisms for enforcing the "rules based order" is collapsing, and it's happening at the same time as the legitimacy of that "rules based order" is collapsing. These things will feed back into each other, I won't be surprised if we see other countries in the Middle East or North Africa change their alignments completely towards China and restart relations with Iran.