I was just reading about how a current Israeli war minister’s son died in combat and it made me wonder that if Israeli’s politicians who make these decisions know their family will be affected by it personally and directly, does that lend towards the suggestion that it is more likely they are making genuinely ethically and morally correct decisions to engage in war stuff given their personal skin i the game?

It would seem totally different from American politicians like Cheney who create bullshit geopolitical conflicts knowing full well their progeny will never be touched by it…

Edit: I’m assuming they actually care/give a shit about their offspring and family, even if only just for appearences

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.worldOP
    105·
    11 months ago

    That’s what I was referencing. Not that I want to say Israel is blameless or the West Bank expansion shit isn’t straight up evil colonialism shit, but its harder to write them off if they’re putting their own children in harms way in the furtherance of what I would otherwise dismiss as plain geopolitical thieving.

    • YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH@infosec.pub
      162·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, I mean just because they have something staked on the outcome doesn’t mean that the state of Israel isn’t an apartheid state. I don’t think any state is good, but separating citizens based on race or religion seems pretty fucking evil. And it is worse when you take an indigenous peoples land. As an American, I feel this deeply since we followed this same path dispossessing indigenous people while enslaving Africans. Not great… and I hope we start to rectify those evils sometime soon.

      But jews lived next to non Jewish Arabs in Palestine for generations peacefully. And Jewish Arabs lived peacefully all over the Middle East. But the nekba changed those dynamics. Arab Jews are discriminated against in Israel and a lot have been ejected from their old Arab countries. The whole thing of boiling a person down to their ethnicity or religion just is not a great thing.

      There needs to be a political settlement soon. Palestinians deserve better and Israelis deserve peace.

      • cheese_greater@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        11 months ago

        How do most Israelis feel about the West Bank or are they aware of it?

        Is the West Bank the foundational issue/disagreement?

        • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
          44·
          11 months ago

          Every Israeli is aware of the West Bank (it’s a huge chunk of land right at the center of the country, kinda hard not to be aware of it).

          Almost nobody in Israel seriously considers “returning” the jewish parts of the WB, the are de-facto annexed.

          I’d say Israelis are more concerned about Gaza than the WB.

            • caesar_salad83@lemmy.world
              42·
              11 months ago

              Gaza was controlled and settled by Isrealis. In 2005 Israel, by mean of law and force, disengaged from the gaza strip unilaterally. In the process, relocated all the settlers. I don’t think there’s any will, national or political, to annex gaza, not realistically.

              • yaaaaayPancakes@lemmy.world
                21·
                11 months ago

                I will admit that I am not totally aware of the value of the land of the West Bank vs Gaza. But from what I’ve been reading and watching these few months on the history of the conflict, it seems that at some point the PLO stopped being violent after the second Infatada and Hamas took over Gaza and pushed them out to the West Bank. And ever since then the West Bank has been slowly carved up more and more by Jewish settlements, effectively making the Palestinian land in the WB never able to be contiguous, and thus making it impossible for there to be a Palestinian state to be formed there.

                So if the WB land is valuable to the Israelis, I cannot see how Gaza wouldn’t be even more valuable. As Gaza has access to the sea, and there’s all the recently found offshore gas fields that would fall into Gaza’s EEZ if it ever were to be recognized as the Palestinian state.

                So I don’t get why they’d disengage and leave Gaza alone when it’s valuable land, but they will also for obvious reasons never stop the blockade of Gaza. As an outsider that leans to the left, it seems like Gaza is purposefully put into the state that it’s in, to keep a threat around, so the conservatives running Israel can stay in power.

            • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
              32·
              11 months ago

              Israel just wants peace, and will settle for stability.

              Gaza is a pain point on both fronts.

      • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
        58·
        11 months ago

        Jews are indigenous to Israel too (backed by genetics and history). Also why are you so sure all Palestinians are indigenous to Israel? Studies have shown that there is a very good possibility that there has also been a large migration of Arabs into Palestine from the surrounding regions, as a consequence of conditions rapidly improving there.

        Israel doesn’t separate people based on race and religion, there are Muslim Arab judges, cops, doctors, programmers, etc. A few years ago a bunch of programmers from Gaza got permission to work in Israel due to shortages - these guys are literally Arab, Muslim and come from enemy territory.

        Arab Jews are discriminated against in Israel? You mean Mizrahi Jews which are the largest Jewish group in Israel and have the exact same rights as other people in Israel?

        Or did you mean Arab Israelis who have the pleasure of living in (relative) freedom, when compared to Arabs elsewhere in the middle east (and as I stated before, also aren’t discriminated against)?

        Israelis deserve peace, and Palestinians definitely deserve better - but it is their responsibility as a people to make their situation better. Israeli leadership currently sucks but the Israeli population in general has gone above and beyond in filling the void the government left. The same can be done by the Palestinians if they really wanted to, but it seems many of them really just want us dead at all costs.