Remember, no amount of brown suffering can make up for any amount of white suffering.
I know this isn’t necessarily about race, but it is another example of whites getting their way while browns get in the way. Just gonna add another tally.
The idea that indigenous peoples should be subjugated and forcefully integrated by settlers is an inherently racial problem. This was just as true in Canada and the US as it was true in South America as it is in Palestine today.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the indigenous people of North America should be free.
And that’s part of the reason the Israel-Palestine conflict is so contentious. Both peoples are indigenous to the region, having strong ancestral ties to the Canaanite peoples that inhabited the area over many periods of external rule and migrations.
That the Jewish people were once forced from the area but retained their identity in new lands doesn’t diminish their right to live in their ancestral home. Nor does it give them the right to treat their distant cousins (who also have ancestral claim) the Palestinians the way the state of Israel has.
I don’t know what the solution is, but many Palestinians and Israelis just want peace, contrary to the rhetoric of their governments.
I’m starting to lean towards a one state solution myself. Especially the more I’ve learned about the fact that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all used to get along in the area before the colonization of European and Western Jewish people into the area and displacement of the locals.
Give them democracy with a strong Constitution where everyone is equal, remove all traces of ethno nationalism or theocracy from the government (except for some public holidays). Integrate the security forces, courts, and other agencies of power together, enforce human rights, try to learn from South Africa, the Troubles in England, and I heard what they did in New Zealand to integrate with the indigenous worked, too. Mix up the schools so the next generation learns to grow up without the hate for the “other” their elders have.
Last time I checked over half of Israel’s population is at least partly of Mizrahi descent. Ie. they have Middle-Eastern, Asian, or North African ancestry.
They’re not homogenously white which is blindingly obvious if you look at a picture of ordinary Israelis. That’s also ignoring the fact that ‘European’ Ashkenazi Jews were historically never considered white either.
Applying simplistic quasi-binary American notions of race, and simplistic understandings of colonialism, to a complex conflict is ignorant and stupid, and anyone who upvoted your comment is ignorant for doing so.
It’s about as dumb as when Americans go on about the US being incredibly ethnically diverse, because they’re too ignorant and racist to realise a country like Uganda is super diverse even if ‘they all look the same’ to an uneducated American eye. Applying simplistic American notions of race to humanity’s birthplace, oblivious to the genetic diversity this entails, and to the fact that countries divided by colonial powers without any respect for existing linguistic, ethnic, national, or cultural borders are likely to be super diverse too.
Last time I checked over half of Israel’s population is at least partly of Mizrahi descent. Ie. they have Middle-Eastern, Asian, or North African ancestry.
What is passing complexion? What is colorismo?
I assume those are American concepts, part of American racial politics that primarily focuses on skin colour. But those genuinely aren’t as relevant to countries half way around the globe.
America is not the world. Foreign countries are genuinely foreign. No, really. Allow me to illustrate:
Example 1: imagine you just heard someone complaining about racism against white people.
In an American context, you’d likely (often correctly) assume they were a right wing lunatic or a racist.
But here in Europe, the Sámi and Irish travellers would likely seem ‘whiter than white’ from an American racial politics perspective. IRC there are some theories that suggest Irish Travellers are the descendants of people who lived in Ireland before the celts arrived. We’re talking millenia. And yet they face plenty of outright and often pretty nasty racism to this day.
Example 2: Israel.
My understanding is that Mizrahi Jews (sometimes known as ‘Arab Jews’ although that’s considered a pejorative by some) historically and still do face plenty of racism in Israel from ‘white’ Jews…
And yet they also vote for Netenyahu and Likud en masse. The far right Itamar Ben-Gvir is (still?) the current Minister of Security. Iraqi and Kurdish heritage. Not ‘white’ by American standards. And yet here’s an excerpt from his wikipedia article:
Itamar Ben-Gvir … is an Israeli lawyer and far-right politician who serves as the Minister of National Security. … His father was born in Jerusalem to Iraqi Jewish immigrants. … His mother was a Kurdish Jewish immigrant … Ben-Gvir, a settler in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has faced charges of hate speech against Arabs and was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. … He was also previously convicted of supporting a terrorist group known as Kach, which espoused Kahanism, an extremist religious Zionist ideology. … Under his leadership, the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a party which espouses Kahanism and anti-Arabism, won six seats in the 2022 Israeli legislative election … He has called for the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel who are not loyal to Israel. Ben Gvir is “widely known for his openly racist, anti-Arab views and activities” … led several visits to the Temple Mount as activist and member of Knesset, contentious marches through Jerusalem’s Old City Muslim Quarter, and set up an office in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood which witnessed several evictions of Palestinians. On 3 January 2023, he visited the Temple Mount where the al-Aqsa Mosque is located, spurring an international wave of criticism that labelled his visit purposely provocative. As a lawyer, he is known for defending Jewish radicals and terrorists on trial in Israel. … Prior to entering politics, he defended Jews spitting at Christians as a “an ancient Jewish custom”. … Ben-Gvir is married to Ayala Nimrodi… The couple has five children, and they live in the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba/Hebron, which is deemed illegal under international law, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
TLDR: more complicated than ‘brown people/white people’
And when you consider that approx 47% of the population is (was) under 18, they really showed those ~5k kids!!
If they didn’t want to get bombed, then they shouldn’t have been born brown/Arab. /s
I attended American public school, just tell me how many 9/11’s that is so I can be appropriately outraged.
According to Wikipedia, the population of the entire Gaza Strip is about 2.3 million. 11k people is about 0.5% of the population. The 9/11 attacks killed about 3,000 people out of a population of approx. 300 million, i.e. 0.001%. If my math is correct, that would this death toll equal to about 500 9/11s.
But you need to think like this: Terrorist attack in 9/11: 3000 deaths Terrorist attack hamas: 1300 deaths
Antiterrorist attack 9/11: ~180.000 deaths Antiterrorist attack Israel: 11.000 deaths
So its still 5% of the deaths of 9/11 dont play down the human rights violations of the US because of 9/11…
But Israel claimed that the Hamas attacks were equal to 9/11 or even Pearl Habor in scale measured by the country’s population. Biden even claimed that it was equal to fifteen 9/11s. So I think it’s totally fair and appropriate to apply the same rules and scale the death toll of the invasion by the population of the Gaza Strip.
Like I said before, I have an American public school education, so that’s more math than I can do, so I appreciate it. I also have no emotional intelligence, and the news isn’t telling me to be mad about this, so all I can say is that this is the type of bad emotion that makes your eyes wet.
Don’t forget, if you disapprove of this, you are antisemitic and therefore a Nazi.
These are the numbers being reported by the Health Ministry right? Honest question, are they actually controlled by Hamas like reports have indicated? If so, can we actually believe the numbers that a terrorist organization is reporting?
That being said, ANY civilian deaths are unacceptable whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.
UN seems to believe they’re not made up, don’t know how they’re verifying it
It is definitely true that the numbers are unlikely to be exact. That is both for the reasons others have noted, propaganda is definitely at play on both sides of any conflict. A second reason for the likely imprecise number though, is that many casualties are probably uncountable currently as numerous buildings have collapsed under bombardment. Fully surveying those sites for bodies is difficult with continuing combat in the area. We know the buildings are destroyed due to surveillance and other intelligence sources, but can’t yet know how many people were killed and injured during the destruction.
There are also reasons that the UN and other international organisations take the figures seriously. This is primarily because of historical accuracy, this is not the first occasion of strikes in the area and surveys in the aftermath of previous incidents have generally shown reasonable reporting accuracy from the Gazan health authority. Additionally there are other international organisations on the ground and reporting corroborating evidence of mass collateral casualties. UNICEF has supported the reporting on the 3700 children killed so far, inclusive of civilians on both sides. Recently Doctors Without Borders here in Canada issued a plea to our government, based on their presence in Gaza, calling for ceasefire directly because of the unreasonably high number of collateral casualties.
At this juncture it doesn’t seem likely that the numbers are precise, but even a much more conservative estimate would be quite shocking and aligns with action in the Syrian civil war (for example) much more than with action in western invasions or Ukraine. That suggests that, at the very least, insufficient effort is being put toward limitation of collateral casualties. It’s also important to remember that while the three-to-one rule of casualties in war is very loose, we are likely looking at much higher numbers of wounded than killed. That is badly complicated by the blockades, lack of power and water, as well as current military operations against the remaining hospitals in the area.
Just my thoughts, not an expert.
Deci-mating is 1 out of every 10 people, so a bit more before Gaza is decimated.
