this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Ah see you've fallen into one of their many thought traps - because the calculation is made impossible by them repeatedly claiming 'there are no civilians in Gaza'. 12 year old boy playing soccer? Hamas terrorist. 8 year old girl in line outside a store? Hamas terrorist. Newborn baby? Somehow also Hamas terrorist.
The Israeli admin won't stop the genocide. Not until they have some massive political upheaval, remove existing power brokers and prosecute all the war criminals. That will take decades, if there's even an appetite for it at all amongst the Israeli populace.
I don't know many israelis, but the ones I do know are on the streets protesting all the time now. Accounts differ, but there are many signs that Netanyahu is not particularly popular even at home these days.
What is pretty unique about Israel's genocide is that it is strangely democratic in nature. Sure, Israeli democracy is hardly a democracy at all, but it plays by democratic rules for the part of the population who are considered full citizen. And within this democratic system Netanyahu and his crooks have painted themselves into a corner, where they need to appease the most extremist extreme right terrorists they have chosen as coalition partners. Because the second they stop the government will fall and they will almost certainly be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
So the combination of the existence of these crimes and the democracy-like institutions in Israel are actually forcing Netanyahu to double down on genocide. It's pretty crazy.
In the third Reich, the first thing the NSDAP did was to abolish democratic institutions. Israel's genocide is very different - dynamics of democratic government are actively fueling the fire of their holocaust. It's the first ever democratic genocide. When the dust settles, I think this is going to give us a lot to think about.
The US did a genocide on the Native Americans, even after being a democracy.
Yes, it's not that genocide has never happened in democracies. But in the US, democratic institutions were not the driving factors behind the genocide: you did not have actors locked in to their genocidal actions due to the democratic institutions. Democracy and genocide in America were two largely separate things.
My idea here is that while the genocides on Native Americans were genocides in a democracy, Israel's genocide can be categorized as a genocide by democracy. It is made possible, or at the very least worse, by democratic institutions (however flawed).
It's just a shower thought really, I might obviously be wrong. But I have a fairly good overview of the history of genocide and I am fairly certain this one is unique in this regard.
Yeah I think you're wrong. Many politicians in the US won their votes on the idea of being tougher on the native population. (I think of Andrew Jackson in particular.) Similarly to how many politicians in the South won on upholding slavery before the civil war and Jim Crow laws after it.
Conservatism itself is basically the belief that there should be, is by nature, or exists a certain hierarchy in society and that it can be reinforced with violence if necessary in order to "protect it" from egalitarianism.
But in the US the genocide was largely carried out by random people shooting folks for fun from their train wagons, in Israel it's carried out by the professionally organized army of an allegedly democratic nation. Very different.
Even when the US army was directly involved (no small degree, especially if you don't accept Native American warriors as military targets), its actions were not driven by Democratic institutions. Sure, people voted for leaders who supported genocide, but the genocide was not the direct result of democratic institutions malfunctioning. In Israel it is.
Natives were excluded from the political system, just like they are in Israel.
Natives were seen as savage threats to colonists. In Israel, Palestinians are seen as terroristic threats to settlers.
They're very similar and the main differences are eras, technology, and geography.
America is a lot larger and at the time the surveillance and military technology didn't exist to round every native up and put them in an open air prison. Where there were large communities of native Americans living in organized settlements, the government ran largely the same playbook Israel does today: move them from preferred areas to areas nobody wanted, put them in camps when camps existed, go to war with them directly, etc.