Yes. The minimum rules we all must agree on have to be the basic human rights. And that means we can’t take all the civilians in Gaza hostage for Hamas. These are humans with hopes and dreams and friends and family, like you and like Israelis.
That Israel in particular would so easily forget about this is horrible.
> Why is that? What are we misunderstanding about their perspective that causes the expectation to be off?
There's a perfect explanation for this in Ten Steps of Genocide, which is taught by many Holocaust museums.
Instead of recognizing Palestinian humanity, Israelites (not all, but enough to gain control of their government) have allowed themselves to discriminate, dehumanize, and persecute them.
Granted, not doing so in a situation as fraught with hostility & danger as Israel's would have taken tremendous levels of moral courage, but if there's one ethnic group that we expected to be aware of the slippery slope of genocide, it's the jews.
There are ~2m Palestinians in Israel, making up about 21% percent of the population of Israel and Palestinians in Israel have had the right to vote since 1949.
According to my research, there are 10 Palestinians in the Knesset.
> According to my research, there are 10 Palestinians in the Knesset.
That's great, but it doesn't contradict my claim. After all, I didn't say "all Israelis". I said "enough Israelis to gain control of their government".
I said: "Instead of recognizing Palestinian humanity, Israelites (not all, but enough to gain control of their government) have allowed themselves to discriminate, dehumanize, and persecute them."
"Israelites dehumanize Palestinians" is an over-simplification of my statement.
So now when the targeted population is actually increasing, we can still call it a "genocide". And when there is no actual concentration camp we can say there is a "moral concentration camp". Stop getting your news from Al Jazeera, FFS.
> So now when the targeted population is actually increasing, we can still call it a "genocide".
Please show me where the targeted population is "increasing" over the last two years? is it because people from other areas are being forced to relocate and you guys call that a population increase?
Where should i get my news from? last I checked, 100+ journalists came out with a written statement about how higher ups at the BBC were preventing news critical of Israel from being broadcast on air. The concentration camp thing has been corroborated by several news sources including some from within Israel itself. Even CNN nowadays is starting to be critical of the genocide.
Do you have any standards at all for what the word genocide means? You want to get into the muck about whether the population has increased or decreased by some fractional or single digit percentages? All this demonstrates is that you want to twist the meaning of words to support whatever interpretation of events is in vogue with your tribe.
but I mean, you guys also call amnesty international, the ICC, the BBC and reality itself antisemetic so believe whatever you want. the only "tribe" I'm in is the one where indiscriminate killing of innocent people is wrong.
Where do you think these data are coming from? You think the UN and Amnesty International have census takers going tunnel to tunnel in Gaza?
Why don't you reveal your standard for what a "genocide" is without discrediting the actual ongoing genocides in other places? Israel has got to be the most incompetent prosecutor of genocide in history.
I imagined that, if nothing else, they'd have an interest in the next generation of Gazans not growing up with even more hatred towards Israel than the previous one. Which is kind of hard given the cruelty they are currently subjected to.
That is unless the plan is that there won't be a next generation of Gazans.
Yes, I'd expect that from compassionate human beings. Such beings can hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time: the hostages situation is incredibly tragic, and the suffering inflicted unto innocent people who had nothing to do with the hostage taking is also immensely tragic and inhuman.
Using the hostages as justification for collective punishment is exactly what Netanyahu's government want, it becomes easy to justify the abhorrent treatment of millions of people, repeating this is just ceding power to the worst elements of his government (Ben Gvir, etc.).
The hostages should be returned by Hamas, that shouldn't cost millions of people their families, homes, lives, it's collective punishment, it's genocide.
