One of the project architects behind a solar power system in a southern Lebanese village tells pv magazine that the 200-panel array – which pumps water from an underground well for roughly 400 families – was allegedly destroyed earlier this month by Israeli forces. The community needs help rebuilding it, he says.
Bullshit.
Israel has attacked it’s own institutions to protect their Prime Minister from prosecution. Including charges of voter suppression and going after political rivals. That’s not a democracy.
Israel was already committing acts of war against Gaza with the blockade and countless military adventures into Gaza for decades. To include preventing the democratically elected party from forming a government in both territories. This war started in 2006.
This not the 1970’s. There is no existential threat to Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah do not have the power to get rid of them. Syria is paralyzed. Jordan and Egypt are trading partners. Iran would get a NATO bombing campaign inside of 24 hours as a prelude to a ground invasion started from Iraq and they know it. This is not the cold war.
The existence of greater war crimes does not make Israel’s any less galling.
And finally, we can develop tech anywhere. Israel getting frozen out would hurt but it’s not anything the west would actually worry about tech wise.
There is still no evidence the hospitals were home to more than a few security guards.
A flawed or imperfect democracy is still a democracy.
Their calls for genocide should not be overlooked simply because they presently lack the means. If Israel loses this war, (although it is incredibly unlikely,) they have nowhere to retreat to. They will not exist as a country, so existential is the right word. Compare that to Russia, whose people will simply return to Russia should they lose in Ukraine.
Israel claims to have valid military targets and the high civilian death count is due to collateral damage. If true, this makes their military actions legal, not war crimes.
No we cannot simply move tech anywhere, production requires infrastructure, which takes a lot of time and money to build, and development requires an educated population with a culture of technological entrepreneurialism and investors. Israel has all the nessicary components. They are one of the few places outside East Asia that produces advanced chips.
By that definition Russia is still a Democracy. Putin is voted back into office regularly. You cannot have it both ways.
Likewise you cannot justify previous military adventures with an attack that happened after them. But I do get why you would want to do that. Otherwise it gets kind of hard to (checks notes) defend shooting unarmed protestors and their medics.
If you want to talk about homeland I’m sure the Palestinians would love to tell you about how they lived there for thousands of years. Using the word homeland to describe settlers and colonists is just ridiculous. Being there for 500 years didn’t entitle Europeans to Asia, the Americas, or Africa. Why would 50 years entitle them to Israel?
If the hospitals were legitimate targets we’d have seen more than a maintenance tunnel hatch, 5 AKs, and 2 cans of oil spray.
As for how necessary they are, we just built another chip plant in Arizona, with plans for more in the US.
Finally, and in an edit because I fat fingered my phone, private calls for genocide in no way justify an actual ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign. Hamas as an organization has publicly stated many times they will settle for the 1969 borders and/or the destruction of the Israeli state. They very clearly avoid calling for killing all Jews.
Clearly Israel is more democratic than Russia, which is a de facto autocracy. Do I really need to elaborate on this?
As far as I’m aware every war Israel has ever fought has been in defense of its homeland, and therefore by definition not Military Adventurism.
It’s not really their homeland? Well, Israel disagrees and there’s been a lot of people living and dying there who now have a legitimate claim that it is, especially since they are currently in possession of said land and Palestine has no way of contesting their territorial claims. Regardless of how you feel about the term, “homeland,” it applies here:
Yes you do since Netanyahu is doing the same political stuff Putin is doing. He’s literally passed a law preventing the courts from holding him accountable for anything he does to maintain power. Which absolutely includes using the police to intimidate voters.
So please, elaborate.
Israel has been in a state of war continuously since the mid 2000’s. The election of Hamas was not a declaration of war against Israel. No matter how much you want to pretend. You don’t even need to go into cold war era to disprove the myth of them only defending themselves. To boot, many of their military adventures are justified by having settler militias attack Palestinians so the IDF can look clean when it clears the Palestinians out of a village. It’s a pattern repeated over and over again in Colonial history.
“We conquered this so it’s ours” went away at the end of World War 2. Not even the Soviet Union could make it stick anymore. The Israelis do not get some special dispensation to kill the locals and take their land. They can take the same deal settlers got in Africa. Become citizens of the unified successor state with democracy everyone gets to participate in
He’s simply not. Russia fakes elections in a way that lets us know they are faking elections and don’t give a shit:
Bibi is trying to neuter the Justice system, which would be a power grab, and he is trying to intimidate voters, but he doesn’t outright fake elections. He’s not an autocrat, (not yet anyway.) He is still beholden to popular vote in a way that Putin never will be. And because of this democracy he’s likely to be removed from power soon.
Putin just straight up murders and throws his political opponents in prison, en masse. He will be removed from power when he dies, and any claims of Russian democracy by the Federation are made in bad faith, to support comparisons like this one.
That would have been nice. Jews started out by legally buying the land until a xenophobic Arab nationalist movement was whipped up and started a cycle of massacres, making a 1-state solution impossible, and the hostilities never stopped. Most of that land was taken as a result of failed wars waged against Israel.
One doesn’t need a special dispensation for self-defense. Letting an enemy who outnumbers them and wants to drive them into the sea elect their leadership sounds like a terrible idea, that isn’t remotely viable today.
Right. I’m guessing you haven’t cracked a history book in the last decade or so.
Israeli settlers were the ones who pushed the British out and then started burning out Palestinians. We have the British Army reports on it. At the end of the day Israel is nothing but a modern colonialist state. Winning the war doesn’t give you moral authority.
And Bibi has already neutered the justice system. That law got passed.
Edit - and repeating myself. Hamas doesn’t want to kill all Jews. That’s Israeli propaganda. Their charter lays out their specific demands. A return to the 1969 borders or the dissolution of the state of Israel. So a two state solution or a one state solution. Not a permanent occupation and Apartheid.