You may be surprised but Israel policy is not a major issue for UK voters generally, unlike in the USA. The present regime of genocide and apartheid might be changing opinions, but generally not in favour of the Israeli side, from what limited polling I have seen.

Jamiet99uk wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 29, 2024 7:05 pm

I am a member of the Green Party and I would love it to win an election.

In this year's UK general election we achieved our best ever results.

I suspect you actually wouldn't. Getting four seats amidst a wave of disdain for both major parties requires very little compromise.

You've got the crowd on your side with wealth taxes and renewables. But there are key pillars where you lose about half of voters if you take a hard line - on nuclear weapons, nuclear power, Israel, etc. Voters might agree with an ambition like net-zero by 2040 in the abstract, but it will not be a winning policy position once you specify the sacrifices this would entail. Something would have to give.

I am a member of the Green Party and I would love it to win an election.

In this year's UK general election we achieved our best ever results.

The Canadian left has this same squabble constantly, I guess it's just human nature.

Utopians, socialists, and hardcore anti-Zionists would rather their parties never win an election. It's more important (and comfortable) to be ideologically pure than to actually gain power and make positive change. And it's never their fault they can't craft a convincing political narrative to bring others onboard— it's just that those goddamn conservatives and, even worse, moderates and centre left people, are too dense to see the light.

He also parachuted a self-proclaimed right-wing "Zionist Shitlord", who is basically an agent of the Israeli State, into my constituency to become my new MP (against the wishes of local Labour Party members, some of whom resigned), as a reward to the little bastard for helping hound real socialists out of the Labour Party in his massive witch-hunt last year.

He may fuck right off.

Keir Starmer is also in favour of Israeli genocide because he is allowing the continued supply of UK-manufactured weapons to Israel, instead of imposing a complete embargo which would be the civilised option.

Starmer is not left wing, he is a centrist, which is why he appeals to you, Oct.

Jamiet99uk wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 28, 2024 11:25 pm

Joe Biden is a fucking weakling.
Keir Starmer is a fucking weakling.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the current ruler of Earth and he has the power of a God.

Democracy is over.
Democracy does not exist.
Might makes right.

It's been so long since the last one I'd forgotten how depressed British left wingers can get when we elect a left wing government

Starmer hasn't been too bad, truth be told. His enthusiasm for meeting Donald Trump and Giorgia Maloney shows a political maturity rather than a continuation of the "far right" bashing favoured by activists. His attempts to replace the Rwanda policy with an Albania policy regarding immigration seems wasteful, but at least he hasn't abandoned the concept. There's been no crazy talk about abandoning trident and a genuine enthusiasm for reforming the NHS in a way that the Tories would never have been allowed to get away with. They seem to be mostly keeping control of spending too. I find myself quite comfortable with current progress.

What's striking to me about this discussion is that there are brutal wars all the time that are found to be hardly worth a mention in the international media or by world leaders. The current civil war in Sudan has displaced something like 10 million people and has probably killed more than 100,000 people. Both sides have international support (from Iran, Russia, and the UAE primarily). Both sides have committed ethnic cleansing and horrific atrocities. I don't know if Biden has ever been asked a question about the war.

For the past few years, civil war in Ethiopia has killed more than half a million civilians, involved considerable ethnic cleansing, and displaced millions of people. Iran, Russia, China, and the UAE have all been involved, as has Eritrea. In that case, the US did put sanctions on the Ethiopian government, but again, very little media coverage and very little accountability on anyone.

The US, UK, France, and many other countries have been carrying out airstrikes against ISIS for years that are alleged to have killed 10s of thousands of civilians. Minimal media coverage, minimal controversy.

So, I think as lovely as it would be to live in a world where conflicts were resolved by international agreements rather than by war, that's very rarely what happens anywhere. The countries with a direct interest in a conflict get involved, and other countries don't do anything. From this perspective, the US, UK and Europe having a minimal reaction to Israel attacking a nonstate proxy army/terrorist group that's been shooting missiles at them for a year is very par for the course. Netanyahu is a corrupt, illiberal leader of a flawed democracy that, like most countries, has been largely left on its own to fight dirty regional wars.

Joe Biden is a fucking weakling.
Keir Starmer is a fucking weakling.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the current ruler of Earth and he has the power of a God.

Democracy is over.
Democracy does not exist.
Might makes right.

There's no such thing as international law.

The United Nations should be disbanded.

We should just start World War 3 now and be done with it. Let's just kill everyone. Peace is for weaklings. Apparently.

Fuck every world leader. What a bunch of stupid cunts. The human race is doomed.

kingofthepirates wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 28, 2024 3:00 pm

On the one hand, thank goodness it’s over. On the other, when does international law start doing its thing :[

There's a first time for everything, I guess...

But yeah, it's a shame international law is so weak. If UN Resolution 1701 had been enforced this recent batch of unpleasantness would have been entirely unnecessary

On the one hand, thank goodness it’s over. On the other, when does international law start doing its thing :[

As far as I can work out Israel finally lost patience with Hamas firing Iranian missiles at them and, after sowing chaos and panic with the pager attacks have managed to blow up the leadership.

It's all rather impressive, truth be told. If it was us and the Yanks doing this we would have required an invasion force of at least 100,000 and a decade long occupation to achieve the same results. A magnificent display of intelligence lead military operations.

what happened this time (I've been out of the loop overall for quite a while, the pager thing made super big news so I heard that but haven't gotten much else)?

Israel is deliberately escalating it.

Nobody is willing or able to stop them.

They can murder as many civilians as they like with complete impunity.

It's very sad to see that the conflict is rapidly escalating as we speak. Truly terrifying.

Jamiet99uk wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 23, 2024 8:04 pm

Fair question.

Israel could support the legitimate Lebanese government and help them to establish a stable state with a military that is more competent and powerful than Hezbollah, I'd be strongly in favour of that.

In the meantime if Israel can target individual Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, it's curious that their first strategy in Gaza is to blow up hospitals and bomb refugee camps where they know civilians are going to die.

If these are the options, I can see why Israel might resort to clandestine attacks on Hezbollah.

Lebanon is a failed state with a large Sunni population that hates Israel. Regardless of whether these facts are partly Israel's own fault, it is extremely unlikely that Israel could play a productive role in Lebanon in 2024. It's probably worth noting that this type of cooperation would also be violently opposed by Iran and, even if it weren't, reviving a failed state is extraordinarily unlikely to work.

If I lived next door to a failed state that launched rockets at me, I would view it as unfair for the international community to say "suffer these rocket attacks until you somehow fix the economy and governance of a mostly-hostile neighboring country".

And Hezbollah and Hamas are quite different as military targets targets. Lebanon tolerates Hezbollah, but they did not allow them to build 500km of tunnels under civilian infrastructure in Beirut. I don't mean to excuse the obvious excesses of the current Gaza conflict, I'm just saying it's not really meaningful to compare the two.

Fair question.

Israel could support the legitimate Lebanese government and help them to establish a stable state with a military that is more competent and powerful than Hezbollah, I'd be strongly in favour of that.

In the meantime if Israel can target individual Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, it's curious that their first strategy in Gaza is to blow up hospitals and bomb refugee camps where they know civilians are going to die.

CaptainFritz28 wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 22, 2024 2:11 am

I guess the question really should be not what I brought up, but more how to go about honorable warfare with a dishonorable enemy.

I generally agree with Jamie when he expresses outrage about Israel's war crimes. However, it seems one-sided to criticize Israel for its pager attack on Hezbollah—an act that, while illegal under international law, was highly targeted—without first acknowledging that Hezbollah is a genocidal organization that indiscriminately fires rockets into Israel. The pager attacks strikes me as being very different from Israel's many war crimes in Gaza, which I am much more comfortable condemning in the strongest terms.

I can see why some Israelis feel put upon when folks appear to indulge a double standard that basically asks them to suffer terror attacks indefinitely. It's worth asking, if the pager attack was unconscionable, what legitimate self defense could Israel pursue against Hezbollah? I suspect many of Israel's critics would take issue with basically any conceivable retaliation, which to me is identical to arguing in favour of dismantling Israel (and, de facto, expelling Jews from the middle east).

And yet I would not want to view the conflict as some race-to-the-bottom where morally reprehensible actions by one side excuse outrageous behaviour from the other. I think fairness requires that this principle be applied in both directions: Israel's many historic crimes (and the particularly counter-productive and toxic policies of the Bibi government) don't justify Hamas- and Hezbollah-style terrorism, and terror attacks against Israel do not excuse its war crimes.