Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Pattern-chaser]

Sy Borg - Please share your source of your definition of genocide. According to the definition via the United Nations, Israel is guilty of genocide. But no matter what you call it, it's a program aimed at exterminating over a million Palestinians. There is no justification. Hamas didn't start the war on Oct 7, it was a conflict in a war that's been going on for decades.

Or millennia?

[Pattern-chaser]

The UN has been captured...

By whom?

[Sy Borg]

The UN has been captured...

By whom? 🤔

You know their voting record. If you need to ask this question, you don't know enough about the situation to validly comment.

[Pattern-chaser]

The UN has been captured...

By whom?

You know their voting record. If you need to ask this question, you don't know enough about the situation to validly comment.

I'm generally aware of UN votes, but can find no evidence of any form of "capture". Some nations have greater influence than others, but that's nothing new. Could your view be influenced by UN votes with which you disagree personally?

[Lagayascienza]

The UN is captured by the five nations who are permanent members of the UN Security Council and who have veto powers. This is undemocratic and the main cause of inaction on war crimes and crimes against humanity. It effectively prevents UN action against the five permanent members of the Security Council and their allies. This allows the US, for example, to veto any measure against Israel. This has enabled Israel to occupy more and more Palestinian territory with impunity. And the illegal occupation of territory, and illegal Israeli settlements on that occupied territory, has made Palestinians refugees in their own land and it is this which is the root cause of the troubles in the Middle East. Israel gets a free hand in Palestine while the Palestinians are herded into the ghetto which is Gaza. Some expect the Palestinians to just roll over and be exterminated. I don't. I think the Palestinians have a right to fight for their land against the illegal occupiers. Israel should have been content with what was illegally taken from the Palestinians after the 1948 partition. But no, that wasn't enough and it has been death by a thousand cuts for the Palestinians ever since. It is unjust and it is shameful.

[amorphos_ii]

I would add that making peoples communications devices explode, IS an act of terrorism.

[Sy Borg]

Lagaya, the capture is by Arab nations. It is completely bonkers that well over half of all UN resolutions have been directed at Israel. If the UN was not captured, they would not assess Israel's humans rights record as being worse than those of the US, China, Russia, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Congo, Myanmar, Serbia, Rwanda, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso - combined!

[Gertie]

The UN is captured by the five nations who are permanent members of the UN Security Council and who have veto powers. This is undemocratic and the main cause of inaction on war crimes and crimes against humanity. It effectively prevents UN action against the five permanent members of the Security Council and their allies. This allows the US, for example, to veto any measure against Israel. This has enabled Israel to occupy more and more Palestinian territory with impunity. And the illegal occupation of territory, and illegal Israeli settlements on that occupied territory, has made Palestinians refugees in their own land...

Exactly.

[Gertie]

There is no excuse, no justification for snipers shooting children.

Correct.

Nor is there any excuse of using children as soldiers or human shields.

Also correct.

Both of these things are part of what is wrong. But what about the other side of the coin? What is it that is right? The seemingly endless cycle of death is wrong; we all agree on that. So where do we go from here? What is the right direction to move in?

Israel is a small, vulnerable state which relies on its allies to help to practically and politically get away with genocide. America specifically. Stop funding them and arming them.. If that doesn't work, apply escalating sanctions. If that doesn't work use blockades, rather than bombing the Yeminis currently doing so. The Israeli population would likely turn against their Far Right government when it started to affect them. A last resort would be to send in UN peace-keepers.

This current humanitarian crisis isn't an impossible situation to resolve, it just lacks political will by America, for its own internal political reasons. Or when it comes to Trump, self-centred whim. And Trump appointing an Evangelical Christian Zionist as his Israeli ambassador looks disastrous. AP News -

''Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be ambassador to Israel, has long rejected a Palestinian state in territory previously seized by Israel and has repeatedly signaled his staunch support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Huckabee, a former TV host and Baptist preacher, frequently visits Israel and once said he wanted to buy a holiday home there. He has maintained throughout the years that the West Bank belongs to Israel, and recently said “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.”''


Eventual peace would be much more difficult, escaping the cycle of violence and grievance after so much suffering, especially now, will require superhuman forebearance, recognition of common humanity and shared interests, great leadership, lots of pressure and restitutive justice.

It's been done elsewhere, there's nothing inherently different about Jews and Muslims which make it impossible. The UN has the power to put such a road to peace in place and apply carrots and sticks.

[Sy Borg]

Odd that the state that's apparently under genocide's population has been increasing faster than the west's. Usually, populations under threat of genocide diminish rather than rapidly increase. The west needs that kind of genocide to boost its stocks, given that its birth rates have fallen below replacement level, unlike Palestine's.

[Mo_reese]

Sy Borg Please supply your source of your definition of genocide. The UN's definition states, ".....acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group:" Note: "in whole or in part".

[Sy Borg]

Genocide is exactly that - the death of genes, the removal of people from a gene pool - you know, like Iran's proxies have aimed to do for longer than I've been alive (which is quite a long time).

In the meantime, Hamas is 100% responsible for the deaths. They could have returned the hundreds of hostages (aka torture objects) a year ago, and most of this would not have happened. It is a deliberate choice by Hamas to turn the world against Israel, and they have gathered support from millions of naive and idealistic western "useful idiots", who close their eyes to Hamas's culpability and extremism to maintain the Marxist Oppressor/Oppressed dynamic foisted onto us by biased media and universities.

[Mo_reese]

Breaking - Israel agrees to a temporary cease fire as a thank you gift to war criminal Joe Biden for the $40,000,000,000 dollars. But Israel didn't agree to end the apartheid and their colonial expansion into the West Bank, the very reasons for the Hamas attack. Israel also didn't agree to end the rape and torture of the Palestinian hostages they continue to hold.
I doubt that this cease fire will last long as the killing is the only thing keeping Netanyahu from being tried for his crimes.