So recognising Palestine would remove this specious talking point.
Let’s do it.
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Indeed. It’s long past time for the Palestinians to have their own state. I’m really getting bored of all the people claiming that it’s too hard, and we can’t do it. It’s hard, yes, but we can do it and we should.
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Preferably one with water and access to the sea.
What do I mean preferably? Certainly.
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Then they’re not moral standards.
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I don’t know. I could see making a case that a government of an internationally recognized state should be held to a bit higher standard than a resistance group in occupied or blockaded territories.
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It is fundamentally wrong to hold Israel and Hamas to the same moral standards
… saying the quiet part out loud again 
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Hi. Comedian Josh Gondelman joins Katy and Cody to talk about the Biden administration finally threatening to condition its policy on aid to Israel on the safety of civilians. They also touch on Florida’s Supreme Court allowing a six-week abortion ban to take effect, and Amazon discontinuing its “Just Walk Out” program.
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Israel has killed allies’ citizens before, it has targeted aid workers, it has attacked hospitals, murdered journalists etc. so what is different this time?
Obviously I don’t know but the US and allies failing to impose their will on the world regarding Ukraine is a wake up call. Any soft power is utterly undermined by the hypocrisy shown towards the invasion by Israel which is far, far more focused on murdering civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure than Russia is. And then there is the famine. Israel’s behaviour is not comparable to Russia’s because Russia is fighting an army, not civilians. That Israel counts any man of the appropriate age they kill as a militant is in keeping with the white supremacists’ narrative in all our countries about men coming. Usually Muslim men. So it really doesn’t fool anyone in the global south.
That Ukraine is always out of bombs and facing a bigger enemy and Israel gets whatever it wants and faces a pitiful resistance is not unnoticed by everyone.
The upshot, it seems to me, is that Kissinger’s realpolitik seems to have run out of road. Israel and other corrupt client regimes in the Middle East were key to this. Perhaps it’s in part Israel’s understanding that America is too disunited to stand up to it. Unlike Reagan, Biden can’t simply ring up and tell them to stop. It won’t work. They have strong allies in the US. They are the same ones who are sanguine about Russian expansionism. And while they are hawkish about Chinese growth they don’t actually have an alternative to offer.
It really does feel like a balance is changing.
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Biden can stop supplying arms that Israel needs to keep fighting.
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Yeah. No. Russia’s ratio of civilian to army killings is nothing like, absolutely incomparable, to Israel’s.
It’s unacceptable to fudge them as equivalent.
Doing so is a huge part of why nobody trusts the West’s narrative.
He must. Reagan didn’t even need to do that, just tell them to stop. It’s very different.
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I’m not saying that they are equivalent. I am saying that Russia deliberately targets civilians. You seem to be suggesting that Russia’s conduct is acceptable or legitimate because it looks relatively mild compared to what Israel has been doing (and only in comparison to something worse).
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I would argue that’s not because they are not trying to do so, since they are very much targeting Ukrainian identity as independent from a Russian identity, in much the same way that the right wing in Israel seeks to obliterate Palestinian identity. They haven’t been able to do nearly as much damage because of the land masses involved, and more importantly, due to the closer equivalences of the forces involved in the fight. It’s not that Putin is any less genocidal than the Israeli far right, it’s just that the conditions are different. Meanwhile, Israel has the largest, most powerful, only nuclear armed military in the region, fighting against terrorist groups/militias funded in part by a far less powerful, well-resourced militaries (Iran, Syria, Lebanon).
maybe, but the differences stem primarily from capabilities, not necessarily from intent. If Ukraine were the size of Gaza and had been living under an intense Russian occupation for a while and Ukraine didn’t have a military, just militias, then it would have bee much more of a direct comparison.
We got to reject them both, I thin. Not that I’m saying your doing that, just that some do, under the mistaken impression that Russia actions are only a reaction to NATO/Western aggression and not a shared desire to keep both forms of imperialism going. It was the same in the cold war, but far too many were busy trying to pin the blame on one side or the other, they often excused imperial violence or proxy wars as an acceptable cost of doing business, to “stick it to the other guy”… I think about something like Angola, where money, arms, logistical support poured in from the US, South Africa, and other western powers on one hand, on the Soviet Union from the other, and even from Cuba. None of that actually fixed the problem, and instead kept that country in a state of war for decades. Yes, we should call out western imperial hypocrisy, but Russia should not get a pass either, for flexing their OWN imperial muscles. Wagner is ALL over the place in Africa, for example? But THAT isn’t also destructive. It’s just as harmful as the corporations seeking to fund militias to destabilize resource rich locales like the Congo.
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My point is that we in the west have shown our whole arses to the rest of the world with our condemnation of Russia and continued arms sale to Israel. Not so much as an economic sanction.
It doesn’t matter if you get that, it’s absolutely obvious to the vast majority of people in the world. That this is so needs to be driven home repeatedly.
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