It's not "peace" when the Iranian regime sends tens of thousands of projectiles to Hezbollah specifically for attacking Israel. It's not "offensive" to respond to decades of bombardment.
If we want peace, regime change in Iran is the only option, otherwise the best case is a return to somewhat slower paced proxy warfare.
>Israel apologized the same day of the incident. They also paid $13m in reparations (much more if we adjust for inflation).
That's the "public" view yes. Many survivors disagree of course.
The entity who committed theft was Israel not Mordechai, however I reread it and it looks like it was a secret collaboration with South Africa not theft. But the main point is, why should you listen to whining about Iran having nukes from a country that blatantly lies about its own nukes and refuses to let its nukes be inspected? Iran is a much more responsible party clearly when it comes to the nuclear department.
It's also very well known that Israel secretly sold western defence tech secrets to China.
For example, BBC tweeted "Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say", which turned out to be disinformation from Hamas (although they did attribute the claim, but still).
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".
>"jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces"
But isn't this a fair editorial change? "Jihad" just means "fighting for a noble cause", and most Palestinians don't like to refer to the proper name "Israel" since they feel it validates the existence of that country. Thus, they tend to refer to "Israelis" by the ethnic designation that they came to be known as during the colonial era - "the Jews".
If the editor hadn't made that correction, Jewish people living in London or New York City might believe that Palestinian resistance groups intend to fight them, while the correction makes the true context much more clear?
If I didn't like to refer to the US by name because of my personal hatred for it, so I called it the Great Satan instead, would it be fair game to edit that back to "the US" in subtitles?
Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud". There's the widely used Arabized transliteration of Israel, or "occupation forces", "enemy forces", etc. When someone says "Yahud", it's because they're referring to Jews, not because some limitation in their language forced them to say it.
But even if (hypothetically) language limitations plausibly forced a certain "unintended" choice of words, it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say. If they were worried that a literal translation would led to confusion, they could have just omitted the quote.
It's apples and oranges to compare an externally-imposed nickname like "The Great Satan" with an ethnic designation that was the group's primary identity within the lifetimes of still-living people. There were no Israelis during the colonization of Palestine, recall. There were "the Jews", however, which is when the term entered the region's popular lexicon.
FWIW though, if there was some other group called "The Great Satan" that wasn't the US, and you were a journalist reporting on what someone had said about the US while terming then "The Great Satan", yes, you would still want to clarify that, I think?
>Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud".
Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.? And wasn't that what most Palestinians, including Jewish ones, called the Jewish colonial population of Palestine prior to Israel's formation in 1948?
>it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say.
But it isn't fundamentally different, when understood in the likely intended context. Jihad just means "fighting for a noble cause", and "the Jews" to anyone in the region clearly refers to Israelis, so there's no change in meaning, just the opposite - the chance of a drastic misunderstanding is reduced by the translation.
Israel has existed for 78 years now, and it didn't take long for us to update language, like replacing "Jewish militias" with "Israeli forces" to reflect the present reality. Such updates happened universally, across nations and languages (Arabic included).
Even political leaders who don't recognize Israel as a state still mostly refer to it by name. The few holdouts who refuse to say "Israel" are doing so out of hatred, not because 78 years wasn't enough time to work out the proper linguistic updates.
> you would still want to clarify that
Yes, but not by changing the statement and sanitizing its meaning. The usual method is to add bracketed context, like "The Great Satan [reference to the US]".
> Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.?
Both are in fact references to the Jews, not to Israel. The latter is just a weird metaphorical statement.
Thanks for taking the time to share your views! I don't know that we'll be able to reach much more consensus, but I appreciate hearing your perspective. Cheers!
I would love to know which Iranian proxy Israel "directly created". You might be confusing Hamas with Ahmed Yassin's previous charity, which ran schools, mosques and clubs. Even that charity was not "directly created" by Israel, Israel merely allowed them to operate.
Even if Israeli Jews whose ancestors once lived in Poland were interested in immigrating to Poland, where 90% of Jews were murdered, Poland has not offered them citizenship. Would you like them to disappear?
Do you apply the same logic to all the immigrants from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, etc.? Do you categorically oppose all immigration, or only when it's Jewish families?
This is a common talking point, but if we look at the underlying facts of what Israel did to "support" or "set up" Hamas, they... allowed Qatar to provide aid to Gaza to fund some infrastructure and civil servants' salaries. Would you have preferred that they block the aid and Gaza's governance collapse?
You claimed that "It's Israel that set up Hamas". Now you're talking about Israel supporting a charity that ran schools and mosques before Hamas existed. That doesn't support your claim.
Doesn't change the other side of the equation either: it is also not controversial that the KGB and the Soviets are financially behind the PLO (now PA), that Yasser Arafat ("the wise Egyptian") was a Soviet agent.
First time hearing about it, so cannot comment without reading further.
KGB and CIA had their noses in the affairs of every country, more so in the mid east, so cannot be ruled out.
Historical interest aside, that was not the point I made on this thread.
The point was justifying war on Iran upon the reason that they funded Hamas. So did Israel, they pretty much helped birth it. KGB may or may not be funding PLA, but that doesn't change who set up Hamas in the first place.
If reminding Arafat's Egyptian origin is to caste a shade, many in the Israeli government have European (often Polish) origin and surnames that they changed to fit their political career. Netanyahu included. So that cuts bothway.
A belief that Jews were given lands millennia ago does not imply a justification, let alone an obligation, to violently reconquer those lands today.
Consider that we haven't had a Sanhedrin (supreme Jewish council) for a while, which makes a bunch of Jewish law unenforceable. While there's some fringe interest in reinstituting the classical system, there's no scripture that would clearly obligate Jews to do so. Most just accept that times have changed.
Similarly while there's some fringe interest in recapturing all historic Jewish lands, there's no scripture that would clearly obligate Jews to do so. Most just accept that times have changed.
You can find a few weird individuals anywhere if you look hard enough, but portraying "religious Jews" broadly as aspiring to conquer the whole Middle East is way off base.
You don't judge a person by what they say, but what they ultimately do - Netanyahu is a right-wing religious fundamentalist as is evident by the kind of right-wing identity politics he practice, his support for the assassination of Israeli (and Palestinian) leaders who didn't support his political ideology and sought peace (Israel PM Netanyahu denies incitement before murder of Rabin - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-pm-netanyahu-denie... , Will Israel ever have another leader who truly wants peace? - https://forward.com/opinion/780946/yitzhak-rabin-assassinati... ), his attempts to usurp democracy in Israel and become a dictator (If Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition have their way, my country could deteriorate into a dictatorship. - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/israel-ben... ), his calls for the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, and the military sanction for the actual ongoing genocide in Gaza (and now in West Bank). The Likud party he leads emerged from a terrorist organisation that conducted Hamas like massacres of the Palestinains. ( The Terrorist Forefathers of Israel: The Irgun and Lehi - https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/03/the-terrorist-forefathers... ).
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and does what a duck does, it is a duck.
Netanyahu is not religious. He is, as the parent says, secular. If my cat quacked he's still not a duck.
There is "religion" in the broader sense which can be any set of beliefs but Netanyahu is as secular and logical as can be. He may be overly logical in the sense of advancing his personal agenda (avoiding standing trial) over the interests of his country but he's still very different than the religious crazies in Tehran where logic plays no role and g-d is everything.
I agree that one must be quite illogical and committed to some grander creed to issue a prohibition on nuclear weapons while Israel and USA are doing everything in their very much nuclear power to destroy you.
It's definitely illogical to enrich materials to nuclear grade and invest immense amounts in bunkers with centrifuges while saying you don't mean to have nuclear weapons.
No, those are both rational actions in this case. Iran getting nukes is less dangerous than only Israels current nukes. If both Iran and Israel had nukes, the region might have a chance at peace.
The Iranian regime would absolutely use nukes as soon as they have two or more weapons ready. Just as they have launched countless attacks against civilian areas in many of their neighbor states in the past 2 weeks, including several nations that have prohibited any use of US military installations or their in their country or their airspace as part of this campaign.
If Iran's regime had nukes, I guarantee you'll see UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and several others go all in on their own nuclear programs immediately. They'd be fools not to.
Israel's nukes are troubling, but the weird "nuclear ambiguity" doctrine has already stood for so long and managed to avoid nuclear flare-ups so far. I'd still like them to not have nukes, but they won't be launching any nuclear first strikes for sure - since we've seen them not do that even while fighting many major wars and suffering losses without taking that step...
If Iran had nukes it would nuke Israel without any consideration for Israel's nuclear retaliation because in their thinking becoming a martyr in the course of killing the infidels is a good outcome.
The region will have chance at peace once the regime of Iran is removed.
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