Can someone living in Israel help me understand what is going on right now?
What does the political climate look like in Israel? Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this?
Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
I know that the media is all over the place and it's hard to figure out what is going on as an outsider.
Either way, I hope that this situation gets resolved. I don't think that it's good for anyone and is costing a lot of money and lives.
“Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
“About three-quarters of Israeli
Jews thought that Israel's military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.”
The banality of evil on full display. These very same people will claim in the future that they were misled or did not understand the gravity of crimes being committed in Gaza and the West Bank.
The settlers been at this for a long, long time. It was hard for me to understand their perspective as well, because surely they most be seeing what they do as something good, like everyone else. There is a BBC documentary that goes into more depth, but a short snippet of the documentary can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrdldVhfbaU which includes a short interview with Daniella Weiss, a Orthodox Zionist who founded a organization focusing on creating these civilian colonies for Israelis.
As far as I can tell, from talking with Israelis both living in Israel and outside, there really isn't one majority thinking a certain way, it seems to me that there is an equal amount of people cheering the settlers as there are people against what they're doing.
Except most polls, etc., show that you're wrong and that most Israelis are pro-colonization, and don't care about Palestinian lives, etc. Some things just aren't easy to say in casual conversation. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-d...
"‘If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you,’ the Israeli stand-up comedian Gil Kopatz posted. ‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’ According to a survey commissioned by Penn State, more than 80 per cent of Israeli Jews now support the expulsion of Gazans. Compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists. When Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, posted a tweet celebrating a recent prisoner exchange, he was denounced for seeming to equate the predicament of jailed Palestinians and Jewish hostages: ‘Your presence pollutes the Knesset,’ a colleague told him."
There is a real war going on between israel and hamas.
On all levels, including information war. Information war is the only one where hamas is currently winning.
That is why you are already heavily biased based on the tone of your questions. About 90%+ of what you see on mainstream media is either a straightforward lie or carefully designed, massaged and distorted truth (for example hamas counts as casualties everyone, including fully armed terrorists killed in action). Another example is fake news about “starvation” where they post standalone photos of children with generic disorders as a proof. Im just scratching the surface.
This information war is mainly sponsored by quatar and iran with 2 longterm goals in mind 1) destabilizing and undermining USA influence in middle east and worldwide 2) destroying israel and killing as many jews as possible (literally, they don’t hide it if you check anything besides bbc and english al-jazeera)
That is what really going on. That is the brutal truth. Unfortunately it’s not an exaggeration.
And unfortunately it is nothing new. Way before founding modern Israel there has been a long history of regular pogroms and massacres in that region. This doesn’t excuse current Israel from some mistakes and poor judgements, but it paints a very different picture that doesn’t fit sugarcoated antisemitic victim narrative that all main media sponsored by botomless pit of oil qatar money shoves up all naive western listeners.
Israeli here, can't directly answer your question since I've lived in the US for 99% of my adult life, but I consider myself pro-Israel and resent the way Israel is currently/always being portrayed. I see the key problem as people removing context: Context for why the current situation could easily be different if Hamas acted/acts differently, and context for why there is no "just stop fighting" option that leaves Israel with a high confidence that another Oct 7 won't happen in the next few years.
The problem here though is what will ever give Israel confidence that Oct 7 will never happen again? We know that going after terrorists for years and killing them just creates more terrorists (Iraq, Afghanistan). The young children who do not end up dying of starvation will be men in 20 years, still in Gaza with no options to leave and resent Israel who they will consider to be effectively their jailer. The situation is just untenable. I don't like to think that the result of Oct 7 is a more open Gaza but I don't really know what other options Israel has.
Hamas obviously started this but Israel won the war a long time ago. The world deserves an end. The longer it goes on the more Hamas will actually have achieved some kind of lasting positive image of Gaza which is rooted in their actions on Oct 7th and that would be an incredibly bad outcome for all.
>the way Israel is currently/always being portrayed
Israeli soldiers, politicians, and many civilians are portraying themselves this way. Soldiers post videos sniping a child in the head calling it a "legendary video", politicians say Palestinians should starve, civilians block aid trucks.
Do you resent the way they are portrayed or do you mean you resent what a lot of Israelis are doing?
> there is no "just stop fighting" option that leaves Israel with a high confidence that another Oct 7 won't happen in the next few years
How can the same country that prides itself in their intel/spying prowess, and has demonstrated sophisticated capabilities and attacks, claim it will be helpless if they don't absolutely disappear another group of people and take their territory?
I seriously doubt the Oct 7 attack caught Israel by surprise, given the scale of it and the level of compromise Israel had on Hamas. Given the disproportionate response Israel was prepared to employ, it was a perfect casus belli to appropriate even more land, as it is happening right now.
Oct 7 happened as a result of the Israeli occupation. If there’s occupation, there will be resistance.
Instead Israel could become a democratic state with equal rights for all citizens.
Which context has been stripped from the narrative in your opinion? Maybe you’ll say Israel is the original Jewish homeland and therefore the occupation is justified?
Maybe not locking people up in the world's largest open-air prison for an entire generation and constantly kicking their teeth in would help. Just a thought.
"Give me liberty or give me death" as you say in America, I believe. Or does that only apply to the white man?
I don't recall many people ever seriously asking for that, though I admit I'm not up-to-date on Israeli affairs. Don't the overwhelming majority of outsiders want a two-state solution, or failing that a more secular Israeli administration?
Through a lens of historical context and not just Oct 7th, it's hard for me to believe that Israelis don't know how to attain regional peace. We know exactly why Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are angry at the Israeli government, and there are simple ways to fix it if the willpower exists.
> I see the key problem as people removing context
this is also the main problem with your post; your context goes back to Oct 7, whereas it should go back to 1948 (or earlier).
You cannot drive people from their land into a barren reservation, oppress them for decades, and expect them to not resist or fight back. It's the same colonization tactics that were used on the Native Americans, who launched their Intifadas and occasionally also committed the type of horrible atrocities as Hamas did on Oct 7. You can't justify Oct 7, but the reality is human nature is such that unless you remove the conditions which caused Oct 7 in the first place -- then it will repeat, maybe not Hamas, maybe not in this generation, but the next generation, as we've already seen.
The Israeli government is trying to "solve" the Palestinian problem the same way that the US government "solved" the Native American problem -- kill enough of them, make deals and then break them (this is the Israeli settler problem), and move them far enough away from their original lands, for long enough, that you finally and completely break their spirit and ability to resist. And if that means bombing and starving tens of thousands of women and children, so be it. And the Israeli God-given "right" to the Palestinian land, because it's the "holy land" from 2000 years ago, is very much like the God-given "manifest destiny" that US colonizers invoked to "settle" the West. It was genocide then and it's genocide now.
settler attacks against West Bank Palestinians were not caused by Hamas, but by the settlers religious belief that the land is promised to them. That is a key part of the context as well. And in that vein, what options to Palestinians have to defend against violent settlers and displacement?
I am very much of the opinion that Hamas should not be allowed to continued to exist for Israel's benefit and for Palestine's, but there is a lot of space in between "just stop fighting" and "genocide", and Israel is way closer to one side of that than I would prefer.
Isn’t the greater context that most of these people (Palestinians) had their ancestral homes stolen by “settlers”? I would vote for a pretty extreme government if someone came and stole my house.
Also, the situation on the ground seems pretty clear cut. You can literally watch videos of brutal war crimes committed by Israel on Reddit. Everyone has direct proof.
Aside from a vocal minority, the impression I get around from conversations with and reading other Australians is that the Australian people largely agree with your position.
It's possible to be critical of both Hamas and Israel, while recognizing that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is evil and a war crime.
Just war principles are important to observe.
The Nazis were a thuggish and murderous regime with plenty of complicity from the German populace, but the firebombing of Dresden was evil, as were the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Targeting civilians is evil.
If we accept that these are evil, and we ought to, then we must accept that what Israel is doing is unacceptable. Bibi should be punished.
You can target Hamas, and you should, but just war does not allow for the means Israel has used.
What do you mean the political climate? The current government is based on a majority. Although some parties in the opposition are trying to undermine the government actions, they are mostly hold exact or very similar views on the issues. When the opposition were in charge with Bennett as the PM, there was no major change in the state/security issues, the main arguments are more on "internal" affairs. ?
After Oct 7, you'll find very little people interested on what is happening in Gaze. You can also see that the Palestinians in the West Bank are not interested in what's happening in Gaza. Almost zero disturbances or protests about it, even in cities like Ramahllah which enjoys a complete autonomy.
but thats the thing. it IS good for the settlers and it IS something that israel is actively promoting in its own self interest. this settler stuff isnt a mistake or an oversight
Yes, it's broadly supported. Besides widely publicised polls by universities and corporations outside of Israel you can look at IDI polls here, https://en.idi.org.il/tags-en/1465.
The why takes more explanation. I'd suggest you dig through https://xcancel.com/ireallyhateyou/, this person is an israeli with background in leftist activism that recently went into exile. They collect and translate a lot of material from israeli television and other media, and also translate and explain a lot of historical material, both more mainstream like background information on contemporary israeli politicians and the occasional look at punk and leftist activism in Israel during the nineties and -00s.
It's also a good idea to spend time going through the material collected by Younis Tirawi, https://xcancel.com/ytirawi. It shows what IDF personnel believes to be appropriate behaviour that will positively impress their civilian israeli peers, i.e. what they consider to be the political climate.
Diaspora jews are quite heterogenous and splintered. Many support Israel, and many don't. One 'poll' is the democratic mayor primary in New York, where Zohran Mamdani was quite popular among jewish constituents. Adding to this, many jewish institutions are in some sense captured or founded by zionists, and funded because they are loyal to the zionist cause. This includes many summer camps and similar activities for jewish youth. Since 2023 I expect more diaspora jews to have lost sympathy with the zionist movement than it has gained, but it's not something I have polling numbers to support. On the other hand, basically every recurring large protest against Israel has a jewish contingent.
At the moment we're past immediate resolution, because the entire population in the Gaza strip has been permanently, irrevocably harmed by starvation. It would also take a lot of violence to force the israeli society to back down and stop what it's doing to its neighbours, and then likely generations of enforced stabilisation and education to sow seeds of democracy, neither of which Israel's occidental backers are willing to consider. Then there's the questions of colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are illegal and must be dissolved, which in turn would require distinct amounts of force both to achieve and then to keep it from turning into a civil war within Israel when the so called settlers are relocated there.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, one should keep in mind that this is mainly a christian project, most adherents to zionism are christians.
I was born in Ukraine and moved to Israel (made "aliyah") in 1999. I moved to the Netherlands for work in 2021.
I'm not an Israeli by Israeli standards :) And will never be. But, of course, I'm a citizen, I can read and speak Hebrew well.
Politically, you can say, I came full circle. As many newcomers I was fed a very simplified and one-sided story of Israeli-Arab relationship. The first time I ever cast my vote in elections I voted Shinuj (they are farther right than Likud). In general, immigrants from the former Soviet Union tend to vote right and be pro-settlers.
For non-political reasons I ended up in military jail, where I met some "prisoners of consciousness" who, while didn't convince me to switch my political position entirely, exposed me to the leftist ideas delivered by the leftists. It's very important to see such ideas through the eyes of supporters because the other side virtually always misrepresents them to score points.
I didn't care about elections for a while, but, eventually, when I finally decided to vote, I voted Meretz.
I don't think I will vote in the next elections. Or, maybe, out of habit, I'll vote Democrats (former Labor and Meretz together)... but, really, I don't see a good candidate.
Anyways, what made me depart from the liberal camp is the European liberals. Pathologically bad decisions, or, even more often, the complete lack of any decisions. Gullible and zealous about issues they don't understand... I just don't want to associate myself with people like that. And I see how Israeli liberals parrot the European liberal's believing they know better.
* * *
So... to try to give some sort of a breakdown on who in Israel stands with settlers and why:
* Working class hates Arabs. It's plain and simple: working class often has to work in mixed environments. Construction, hospitality, agriculture. And there Arabs are just danger. You have to look over your shoulder all the time to make sure Mahmud isn't in a bad mood today and didn't bring a knife to work, and isn't going to cut you. I worked in a chain restaurant where a line cook brought a bomb one day to work and killed a bunch of people, himself included. Any Israeli who worked blue collar jobs probably has a story like that. These people don't care about the technicalities or long-term consequences of illegal settlements. Whoever harms Arabs, they are voting for that guy.
* Healthcare holds a special place in white collar jobs because there are a lot of Arabs working in it. But these are not the brutes who come to work with knives and bombs. Also, doctors Jewish doctors are exposed to Arab patients and the other way around... this creates a more friendly atmosphere. You will also find that doctors in Israel are probably the most leftist of any occupation.
* White collar jobs in general want to see Israel copying Europe. People in these jobs tend to want the rule of law, equality, secularism, inclusivity. They see settlers as either crazy or brutish and don't want to associate with them. Even if they may hold right-wing views, they want the implementation to be lawful and non-violent if possible.
* Black-kipah orthodox Jews only care about themselves. For better or for worse. They only wake up when politicians directly address their interests. If settlers go berserk on Arabs or Arabs eviscerate the settlers: they don't care.
* Knitted-kipah orthodox Jews are the settlers (not all of them, but probably a majority). They believe Israel should be restored in some sort of historical borders... as per usual, those borders aren't very certain, but they would quite certainly encompass a place called Judea and a city called Jerusalem. They believe they are doing a favor to the Jewish community by fighting "invaders" (Arabs).
* Israeli Arabs... are a mixed bag. You can find literal jihadists and those who hate other Arabs on the other side of the fence more than settlers do. It's very clanish and way too involved to try to parse it.
* The owners class, the rich people, they despise settlers. See them as an inconvenience / a bunch of lunatics. They don't care about Arabs either.
* Immigrants, especially fresh, tend to overwhelmingly support settlers because they misunderstand their status and genuinely believe the settlers are doing what the country isn't allowed to do due to some political scheming going on.
Basically nothing portrayed by the main stream media / international press on this issue is accurately represented. Most of it is either wildly ignorant or actively hostile (or both).
The Free Press, Call Me Back (podcast), and Breaking Israeli History (podcast) do a good job. Also we will dance again and October 8 (films). I'd also recommend Douglas Murray's On Democracies and Death Cults to get some perspective if you're curious, generally people don't bother on online discussion forums on this topic because it's not productive, but for earnestly curious friends I make the case below. From my perspective, Jews outside of Israel have become more united because the nature of a lot of the western response after 10/7 ironically shows why Jews need a state and an army to protect themselves.
I’m all for high minded debate, but a lot of the anti-Israel protesting isn’t that, the people celebrating or excusing 10/7 on 10/8 before Israel responded, the guy that recently executed two young people leaving a jewish event in DC and then screamed “Free Palestine”, the guy that murdered an old woman at a hostage march in boulder, the “death, death to the IDF” shouted from the stage in Glastonbury to a cheering crowd, the “river to the sea” and “intifada” chants/harassing of jews on college campuses, the repeated negative press narrowly focused on Israel from BBC, Guardian, NYT, the ‘genocide’ claims and other false blood libels, people marching waving islamic republic of Iran and Hezbollah flags in NYC, smashing up jewish owned businesses, etc. - these people are not motivated by some idea of nuanced democratic values or a ‘two state solution’, they’re motivated by old Jewish hatred under a new name. Islamism blended with lefty socialism united in their support of “anti-zionism” i.e. the destruction of Israel.
Many of these media orgs have been hollowed out by an activist ideology that doesn’t understand the history it’s swimming in and doesn’t pursue truth as much as push a political agenda. What ‘genocide’ provides aid to the people they’re supposedly trying to kill? Hamas is driven by a theologically motivated Jihad against the Jews with explicit genocidal intent, The Islamic Republic of Iran (distinct from its people) wants to destroy Israel and then the west and uses terrorism for this purpose and may have used a nuke if not for recent events. It is necessary to use lethal force to defend against this kind of threat. Anyone that cares about a positive future for Palestinians should recognize there is no possibility of such a future while Hamas remains in power.
Europe has largely been protected by the US providing its security and deterrence after WWII. Israel is on the front lines and can’t ignore the reality on the ground, their survival depends on it. You can fight this earlier or wait until the cost is higher to fight it later. Other Arab countries understand these problems, it’s why the UAE has banned the Muslim brotherhood and other extremist organizations, it’s why Saudi is leaning closer towards normalization with Israel and both are allied against Iran. They understand the risks of Islamic terror because they have to deal with it - it forces an accurate understanding. Something Europe (and anti-Israel protestors in the west) don’t grasp, but given Europe’s poor policy on this issue they likely will continue to experience more of first hand.
What Hamas did is joyfully murder, rape, and torture a bunch of lefty kibbutzniks (the kind bringing gaza kids to Israeli hospitals) and music festival kids, took hostages that they’re still holding, while filming it, laughing about it and celebrating it. They have an explicitly genocidal charter interested in killing all the Jews. There is no compatibility between the west and those interested in Islamic Jihad. Every third house in gaza has weapons in it (often hidden in kids rooms), Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian areas to try to maximize civilian casualties despite Israel’s effort to minimize them. They also kill civilians that go against them and have been launching rockets into Israel for years.
That action requires a military response to achieve political goals: return the hostages and destroy hamas / remove them from power. That is unavoidable without civilian deaths (always a tragedy in war), but the fault for this lies squarely with Hamas for starting the war. Few wars have moral grounding as clear as the war started because of 10/7. On October 8th people in the west were celebrating the invasion and killing carried about by Hamas, some mixture of ignorance and useful idiots (primarily on the political left) along with explicitly pro-hamas support. This was popular in American universities and across Europe before Israel had even responded chanting things like “globalize the intifada”. This is, at best, total moral confusion.
Also notice the attention placed on this conflict, but conspicuously absent from others. Why aren’t students protesting Bashar al-Assad? Or the civilian deaths in the conflict in Yemen? Or in Sudan? Why only the one Jewish state that was brutally attacked by a terrorist group that’s still holding its citizens hostage? This isn’t just an issue with Hamas either, it’s more complicated - many Palestinian civilians participated in the kidnapping, looting, and violence on 10/7. They helped harbor hostages. They would have lynched the hostages being returned if Hamas wasn’t preventing that and they of course elected Hamas to power in the first place. The population itself is radicalized with a deep hatred of Jews.
Enormous amounts of foreign aid (hundreds of millions) has flowed into gaza of the last couple of decades. Enough to make the Hamas leaders billionaires whose families can live large in Qatar while supporting their investment of tunnels to support their terrorism. A lot of it is backed by Iran, but a lot of this aid is from western nations to organizations that worked directly with and supported Hamas (UNRWA). This money could have been used to build something after Israel’s "land for peace" withdrawal in 2005, instead it was used for terror. It’s more instructive to look at what motivates the groups today rather than litigate divergent historical narratives (i.e. Nakba was five Arab states attacking Israel and the ‘catastrophe’ was that they lost, the security checkpoints exist because of suicide bombing during the intifadas, etc.). If Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages it would end the fighting they started. If Israel laid down their weapons they’d all be killed. Palestinians have no interest in two states which they’ve repeatedly rejected, they’re interested in killing all the Jews, the destruction of Israel, and more broadly the destruction of the west (as Iran’s proxy). Meanwhile in Israel, Arabs and Jews live together peacefully as Israeli citizens.
Ideally it’d be possible to engage in war with perfect individual targeting and no civilian casualties. Israel does this as much as possible (Hezbollah pager attack was very narrowly targeted, targeted strikes on individuals in specific apartments, other civilian warning strategies), but it’s not perfect and civilian deaths are unavoidable, especially in dense urban conflict zones. The IDF has a better record on this than any other modern western army (including US when we took Mosul against ISIS). I see war as a means to achieve a specific political result when diplomacy is not possible (or after you’ve been attacked). In this case: remove Hamas from power and return the hostages. In the broader conflict: remove the threat from Hezbollah and Iran. I think it’s necessary to achieve these goals in order to achieve any lasting peace.
Some ideologies and enemies require total military defeat. If western civilization is not willing to do this despite its real costs, then power is ceded to enemies that don’t have the same moral concerns, or in this case, explicitly want to maximize civilian death and terror as they did on 10/7 and it'll just happen again. My view is Israel would like to live in peace with its neighbors if that’s a real option (and historically has tried many times), but it’s not. Israel's neighbors (driven by a particular theological view of Islam from the Muslim Brotherhood) are not interested in peaceful coexistence. Israel should not make concessions to an enemy still plotting to destroy them.
If we’re lucky an outcome of this conflict could be normalization with KSA / an extension of the Abraham accords and deeper partnership with other Arab countries in the region - maybe even a shift in some of the public’s ideology if people recognize that trying to destroy Israel/kill Jews leads to ruin (though this is hard with radicalization in the culture/schools, etc.) - it’s a generational project that will take time, but it’s not impossible. Currently, because the goals have not been achieved (Hamas still holds hostages, still wants to remain in power, still will not surrender) the war continues and sadly civilians continue to pay some of the cost. The allies (mostly US) fully administered Japan after WWII for 7 years, Japan lost their sovereignty during that time. An outcome of starting a war and losing it is you may lose your sovereignty and land. It’s possible to defeat evil ideologies, it happened in WWII with both Japan and Germany.
I think it’s very challenging to know what’s true given all the bad actors (UN, Hamas, Pallywood - they film fake videos to (effectively) manipulate western sentiment) and their repeated lying. I think that the GHF has weakened Hamas by removing their control over the aid which has threatened them, and lastly I’m personally not sure what responsibility there is to provide aid at all while hostages remain held in Gaza (this is a more controversial view) - that said, Israel has provided and continues to provide enormous amounts of civilian aid and works to move civilians outside of the areas of fighting despite this being a thankless task. War can be a moral act, the west exercising its power to defend its values against an evil ideology is an important and necessary thing.
We would consider someone fucking uneducated if in 2025 they tried to justify the Iraq/Afghanistan war. The same will be true for everything you wrote as time goes on.
I think a lot of this is hard for an external observer to discern. Are the Palestinians really thar bad? Is IDF really bombing indiscriminately? Ultimately a lot of this is down to information external observers don't have, and people's convictions are at risk of aligning with their sympathies. It is definitely true of me. I don't know if Israel really needs to destroy Hamas to be safe, and what is sufficient to do that.
However, there are two aspects of this conflict where Israel is IMO monumentally and unarguably in the wrong.
One is the settler program. It is wholly inconsistent with a desire to live peacefully alongside even savage enemies. If they are so bad, put up fences and put guns on them - as Israel is doing. But the settlement program, with displacements of Palestinian civilians, bulldozing of Palestinian villages, rendering arable land inhospitable, unchecked settler violence, is clearly just a land grab, and against any semblance of desiring a peaceful coexistence. It often gets dismissed as a fringe movement, but election after election, democratic Israeli governments show varying, but always positive amounts of support.
The other is use of famine against civilians. There is no conceivable military goal in sight other than indiscriminate death and misery onto truly random people, half of them below the median age of 19 not even being politically active. It is not an accident either, Ben Gvir and/or Smotrich talk about it openly.
To be clear, Hamas and co are also guilty of horrendous crimes. Thing is, vast majority of reasonable people accept that and point it out. Israel clearly accepts that too, but perceives the mere whiff of criticism as rabid discrimination.
And the two don't cancel out. It's not about restraint, or higher standard, or any uneven field. Any instance of terrorism and genocide is horrendous, unnecessary and unacceptable. They don't serve military or diplomatic deals. They are there to hurt just because you can, and somehow it pleases some basic human instinct.
Anti-Israeli crime is awful and I condemn it. I don't support Hamas, heckling of Jews around the world, the 7th Oct attacks were awful. I mean it. And Israel's actions are also awful and inhumane.
> Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this?
If you are asking specifically about the Hilltop Youth, I believe most people understand them to be somewhere between extremists and jewish terrorists and do not support their actions. The government (well, Ben-Gvir) can continue to support them (within limits of plausible deniability) as long as they are in power and elections aren't until late next year.
If you are asking about Israeli Jews and the ongoing war, I'd remind you that the IDF is the people's army and conscription is mandatory. Everyone (in the mainstream) has either served in the IDF or has family there and so they know first-hand that claims that the IDF is participating in a genocide are absurd. If you're telling me my (in this case fictional) cousing Omri is participating in a genocide, I can very easily ignore that because I know he is a good kid that wouldn't do that, and I can call him up and ask him. Or maybe I'll ask my (fictional) coworker Daniel, the poor guy has been called into reserve duty for over 300 days since the war started.
They've also probably seen at least one of the many lies going around about the war. The documentary that the BBC tried to fake. The UN lying about the amount of aid going into Gaza (at the time when the american temporary pier plan was ongoing, the UN published numbers of trucks that they personally supervised going into Gaza. Conveniently, they had no one present to supervise in one of three checkpoints and "missed" about 1/3rd of the aid going in). UNWRA personnel participating in the OCT-7 attack. UNIFIL providing cover for Hezbollah to fire rockets on Israeli homes (including some Druze children which really shocked people around the country). Some blatant foreign media nonesense I've seen is showing footage of Israeli soccer fans being beaten and recontextualising it as if they are the ones doing the beating. Footage of an Israeli survivor of a terrorist attack (speaking Hebrew, in Israeli media!) being subtitled to describe her as a Palestinian survivor of an Israeli terror attack. Footage of Assad slaughtering his Syrian population broadcast as if it is a slaughter by the IDF, etc. Foreign media has proven itself to Israelis as liars, so they have no reason to listen to them.
They also see it as the #1 priority to return the hostages and see any call to stop the war before they are returned as ridiculous and evil (Though I do believe a majority support a deal of "everyone for everyone and a stop to the war").
In this light, even though many people believe the war could have already ended (with an aforementioned "everyone for everyone" deal) and Netanyahu is cruelly extending the war for his own personal interests, they also understand that any civilian casualties are part of the horrors of war and are purely the fault of Hamas, both for starting the conflict, and for their use of civilians as human shields, their use of civilian infrastructure (schools, mosques, hospitals) as war resources and use of their children as soldiers. They may also be familiar with the data, which last time both sides published semi-reliable information (or equally unreliable information), showed that when compared to other historical conflicts, civilian casualties were actually a smaller part of overall casualties. And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war as the IDF is already doing their duty to fight as ethically as is reasonably possible.
While we're there, we also frequently see news of Israelis and Jews being attacked around the world with no one really giving a shit about it. If the UK shows me that they don't give a shit about the lives of Jews/Israelis in the UK, I'm definitely not going to care what the UK government thinks about the ongoing war.
> Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
If you are in Israel and know of Jews residing elsewhere, they are probably former Israelis, which don't neccesarily represent non-Israeli Jews in those countries. Those I've spoken to have spoken about a sharp rise in antisemitism. Some fear for their lives. From the news and other media I know some Jews feel like Israel is going too far, but they get their opinions from e.g. the BBC, so you can't really take them as well-informed opinions.
- Incidentally, one former UN employee I know has spoken about ingrained and casual antisemitism in the UN much earlier than OCT-7 (of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" kind), so I'd consider any opinion or intervention by the UN as deceitful and unwelcome.
>any civilian casualties are part of the horrors of war and are purely the fault of Hamas
They started the war, but Israel should be expected to behave at a higher standard than terrorists. They are causing the starvation and death that is not needed to protect Israel's interests. The deaths are now on them.
>And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war
I don't believe that one minute.
Your own defense ministers have said there is no military value in continuing the war, and there is no getting the hostages back without a deal with Hamas. This war continues because of far-right bloodlust from the Israeli government, and Bibi's desire to stay in power and out of jail.
Aid could get in, and the starvation could stop, if it was the will of the Israeli government. Hamas is militarily FUBAR, and Oct7 only happened because of the decisions made by Bibi to move IDF to the West Bank and ignore warnings from intelligence. Oct7 will not happen again, even if the fighting stopped this instant.
Instead, they want to see Palestine starve so they can take over Gaza.
> I'd remind you that the IDF is the people's army and conscription is mandatory.
That's pretty irrelevant when they don't put you in front of a firing squad for draft dodging, isn't it? If it is possible to refuse - either by draft dodging or by complying poorly enough that it basically becomes sabotage - the fact that you chose not to do so means you are complicit.
To bring this argument to the extreme: would you murder your own father if there was a $10 fine on not doing so? It's the law, after all! You're just following the law, so you cannot possibly be held accountable for your actions, right?
We have numerous first-hand reports from doctors of young children showing up at Gazan hospitals with gun shot injuries to the head. We have seen well-marked aid convoys blown up. Grutesque living skeleton children haunt our social media feeds. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch declared a genocide over a year and a half ago. A reply to OP's question that doesn't engage with these realities is, at best, deeply unserious.
Yeah, that's right. That's why there are no rapists, because our (fictional) cousins would tell us about everyone they raped, but they haven't, so rape does not exist. Everything is fine. BBC is lying. No journalists are allowed in Gaza, because they would only use the opportunity to lie more. Everyone is against us.
...
It makes no sense. Yes, antisemitism exists. Two wrongs don't make a right.
people here don't understand and don't care about difference between 700k settlers, 500 hilltop youth idiots and where from they came.
trying to explain it, will get you downvoted and flagged. because people find it inconvenient when facts don't correlate with carefully cultivated media picture that they been consuming
This has been happening regularly over the course of decades on the West Bank but no-one is willing to call it "Terrorism" and therefore respond appropriately.
Israeli jewish settlers murdered, on average, one Palestinian civilian per day in the west bank, for the entire year leading up to oct 11. The attacks on Palestinian civilians in the west bank have only accelerated, since then.
The word “terrorist” is strictly a political designation, one that allows for dehumanizing and condemning one’s enemies. Israel’s pager attack on Lebanon has all of the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, but the west won’t call it as it is because it’s inconvenient. It was inconvenient to acknowledge that Israel is conducting a full on genocide, so not until very recently did major western news orgs start using the dreaded G word.
It's even worse than that. Israel's minister of the security services is ideologically aligned with the terrorists, and has openly supported their causes all his life. A quite unprecedented situation, I think!
No, it's been the norm for Israel since its inception. To mention just a couple of examples, ben-Gurion was a founder of Haganah, of which Rabin, infamous for his "break-their-bones" policy, was a member.
we're precedenting it in the united states. our government is deeply ideologically aligned with the people committing the vast majority of domestic terrorism in this country.
The perpetrator, Yinon Levy, has sanctions put on him by a few countries. The current regime in the White House lifted the US sanction a while ago.
Arguably it's worse than what is usually meant by terrorism, i.e. civilians or paramilitaries attacking a state by actions against civilians, since it's a state exterminating stateless civilians.
If you want to see someone refer to acts of the Hilltop Youth as Jewish Terrorism and condemn it, you need only switch to channel 12 (Israeli channel, that is).
It's important to note that a big part of Israeli society opposes the JahuNatan government, the illegal settlers and war crimes in Gaza. Even after the Hamas attack on Kibbutzim near Gaza in '23.
Quite important not to become part of the problem when you discuss this case. And the problem is that such a heated subject is prone to make people ideologically possessed and tribal. To a point where they become emotionally blinded and are unable to listen to people that don't share/fully support their beliefs.
Given Israeli education, support for settlers, the immigration policy which allows anyone with Jewish heritage to claim land there (regardless of any connection to the area, and of any outstanding arrest warrants) and Israelis using their kids to stop aid trucks and so on, there's a lot needed to show the majority what is actually humane and acceptable.
It's interesting to contrast comments like this in this thread, with the amount of hatred and abuse heaped upon Russians on the day of Russia's invasion - not just the Russian state, but a big chunk of comments that made it clear that they held all Russians responsible for it and would like to see their lives destroyed. And had relatively little pushback against them.
I agree with the sentiment of your second paragraph, but I wish that thought applied in general, and not just to some special case countries. Especially considering the widely differing levels of democratic power people have in these different countries.
Netanyahu is the longest serving Israeli prime minister in history serving a combined 17 years. And he is tipped to win again next election. He very much embodies the will of the Israeli public.
If you listen to their “liberal opposition” leaders like the likes of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz they sound just as unhinged as Netanyahu himself [1]
Every poll conducted on Israeli public opinion on the conflict would make have made Nazi officials blush. Majority of Israelis support ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza [2].
Seeing the facts as they are is not being “emotionally blinded”. When genocidal psychopaths scream at the top of their lungs they want to commit genocide and actively work towards that goal, with the results right in front of our eyes, we compelled to believe them.
I'm glad this is being discussed on HN instead of getting flagged. If we're intellectually curious, then we need to be curious about phenomena that defy explanation and events that may define the future course of our civiliazation. I think what's happening in Gaza/Palestine/Israel counts as both. It certainly defies explanation in my mind.
To me, simply labeling somone as "evil" not feels like a premature termination of the chain of causality, but also circular reasoning (Why does X do evil things? Because X is evil. Why is X evil? Because X does evil things). There has to be more to it than that.
The film could not find a U.S. distributor after being picked up for distribution in 24 countries and winning the Oscar, a situation that has been compared to soft censorship.
Bunch of racist Israeli hooligans that were thrown into the Amsterdam Canals got more outrage from the international media and diplomats than a livestreamed cold blooded murder by a terrorist.
This is everything you need to know about the world we live in. Palestinian lives simply do not matter.
While we should absolutely be covering on-going civil wars and genocides across the world -- I personally listen to French news sources in order to understand what's going on across Africa -- the fact is that the US has provided Israel with over $300 billion since it's founding. For Sudan, that number is somewhere around $5 billion. So many of us here in the US are rightfully watching and questioning why our taxes are funding a genocide.
And yet far less attention than those in Ukraine got even at a time when the destruction and killing there was less than 1% of what Palestine has gone through. Within one week of the first attack, Ukraine got more mainstream support, on-air time, and geopolitical response, than Palestine got over a year of suffering through civilian murders and other clear war crimes.
Speaking out about this issue in any way that smells "pro-Palestinian" has cost people their jobs, and sometimes even their residency and "freedom" in western countries, and is accompanied by smears and accusations of anti-Semitism against people who clearly are not.
I've lost friends of 15 years for remarking on my horror about bombings and civilian deaths. Nothing more.
I can't even begin to understand a mentality which cannot see the absolute asymmetry of power at work here.
The daily protests happen because they're necessary. And they're clearly not enough.
> Today, Jews residing in Muslim countries have been reduced to a small fraction of their former sizes, with Iran and Turkey being home to the largest remaining Jewish populations, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Algeria, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq. This was due to Zionist recruitment, religious beliefs, economic reasons, widespread persecution, antisemitism, political instability and curbing of human rights in Muslim-majority countries.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim," they say. Where then, should the Jews be allowed to live? Only in Brooklyn?
> Until the 1960s, approximately one million Jews lived in Iran and other Arab countries having arrived in the region more than 2,000 years before. Nowadays, it is estimated that only around 15,000 remain, as the majority of the Jewish population in Muslim lands were forced to flee their homes
> The introduction of nationalist ideologies (including Zionism and Arab nationalism), the impact of colonial policies, and the establishment of modern nation-states altered the status and dynamics of Jewish communities in Muslim-majority countries.
From your source.
It's important to note that in a place like Algeria the French colonists granted Jewish populations citizenship to France, yet denied it to the Arab and Berber populations. [1] This fractured relations between the Sephardic population and the rest of the local population, which is exactly what the French wanted.
I'm not going to say relations were perfect before, or deny that Jewish populations weren't second class citizens, but there was a long history of being neighbors and having cities like Constantine be a place of refuge after the Spanish expulsion of Jews from Andalusia. I mean, in places like Mogador in Morocco, Jewish populations were explicitly invited by the king to settle and set up trading businesses [2].
The founding of Israel completely changed this and fractured relations that went back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. [3]
Judging by the British Raj, choosing to inhabit a former British colony probably wasn't a super informed decision. If you attended history class, you know what happened the moment Britian left.
Violence begets violence, if Israeli settlers want to fight to displace other people then they will die in that process. Thankfully for Jews, there are other states they can choose to inhabit that are both secular and respect international law. These are, statistically, safer places for Jewish individuals to live than a state that instructs their army on how to commit fratricide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Readit News
What does the political climate look like in Israel? Do majority of people support what is happening, if so why? if not, how is the government executing this?
Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
I know that the media is all over the place and it's hard to figure out what is going on as an outsider.
Either way, I hope that this situation gets resolved. I don't think that it's good for anyone and is costing a lot of money and lives.
“Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
“About three-quarters of Israeli Jews thought that Israel's military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-d...
As far as I can tell, from talking with Israelis both living in Israel and outside, there really isn't one majority thinking a certain way, it seems to me that there is an equal amount of people cheering the settlers as there are people against what they're doing.
Speaking out of my ass here. But I’d guess most people don’t care. A minority cheers. A minority protests. Most go on with their lives.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n13/adam-shatz/the-world...
https://archive.ph/2025.07.19-181407/https://www.lrb.co.uk/t...
"‘If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you,’ the Israeli stand-up comedian Gil Kopatz posted. ‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’ According to a survey commissioned by Penn State, more than 80 per cent of Israeli Jews now support the expulsion of Gazans. Compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists. When Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, posted a tweet celebrating a recent prisoner exchange, he was denounced for seeming to equate the predicament of jailed Palestinians and Jewish hostages: ‘Your presence pollutes the Knesset,’ a colleague told him."
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On all levels, including information war. Information war is the only one where hamas is currently winning.
That is why you are already heavily biased based on the tone of your questions. About 90%+ of what you see on mainstream media is either a straightforward lie or carefully designed, massaged and distorted truth (for example hamas counts as casualties everyone, including fully armed terrorists killed in action). Another example is fake news about “starvation” where they post standalone photos of children with generic disorders as a proof. Im just scratching the surface.
This information war is mainly sponsored by quatar and iran with 2 longterm goals in mind 1) destabilizing and undermining USA influence in middle east and worldwide 2) destroying israel and killing as many jews as possible (literally, they don’t hide it if you check anything besides bbc and english al-jazeera)
That is what really going on. That is the brutal truth. Unfortunately it’s not an exaggeration.
Hamas obviously started this but Israel won the war a long time ago. The world deserves an end. The longer it goes on the more Hamas will actually have achieved some kind of lasting positive image of Gaza which is rooted in their actions on Oct 7th and that would be an incredibly bad outcome for all.
Israeli soldiers, politicians, and many civilians are portraying themselves this way. Soldiers post videos sniping a child in the head calling it a "legendary video", politicians say Palestinians should starve, civilians block aid trucks.
Do you resent the way they are portrayed or do you mean you resent what a lot of Israelis are doing?
How can the same country that prides itself in their intel/spying prowess, and has demonstrated sophisticated capabilities and attacks, claim it will be helpless if they don't absolutely disappear another group of people and take their territory?
I seriously doubt the Oct 7 attack caught Israel by surprise, given the scale of it and the level of compromise Israel had on Hamas. Given the disproportionate response Israel was prepared to employ, it was a perfect casus belli to appropriate even more land, as it is happening right now.
Instead Israel could become a democratic state with equal rights for all citizens.
Which context has been stripped from the narrative in your opinion? Maybe you’ll say Israel is the original Jewish homeland and therefore the occupation is justified?
"Give me liberty or give me death" as you say in America, I believe. Or does that only apply to the white man?
ok when is it contextually ok to starve children?
I don't recall many people ever seriously asking for that, though I admit I'm not up-to-date on Israeli affairs. Don't the overwhelming majority of outsiders want a two-state solution, or failing that a more secular Israeli administration?
Through a lens of historical context and not just Oct 7th, it's hard for me to believe that Israelis don't know how to attain regional peace. We know exactly why Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are angry at the Israeli government, and there are simple ways to fix it if the willpower exists.
this is also the main problem with your post; your context goes back to Oct 7, whereas it should go back to 1948 (or earlier).
You cannot drive people from their land into a barren reservation, oppress them for decades, and expect them to not resist or fight back. It's the same colonization tactics that were used on the Native Americans, who launched their Intifadas and occasionally also committed the type of horrible atrocities as Hamas did on Oct 7. You can't justify Oct 7, but the reality is human nature is such that unless you remove the conditions which caused Oct 7 in the first place -- then it will repeat, maybe not Hamas, maybe not in this generation, but the next generation, as we've already seen.
The Israeli government is trying to "solve" the Palestinian problem the same way that the US government "solved" the Native American problem -- kill enough of them, make deals and then break them (this is the Israeli settler problem), and move them far enough away from their original lands, for long enough, that you finally and completely break their spirit and ability to resist. And if that means bombing and starving tens of thousands of women and children, so be it. And the Israeli God-given "right" to the Palestinian land, because it's the "holy land" from 2000 years ago, is very much like the God-given "manifest destiny" that US colonizers invoked to "settle" the West. It was genocide then and it's genocide now.
Also, the situation on the ground seems pretty clear cut. You can literally watch videos of brutal war crimes committed by Israel on Reddit. Everyone has direct proof.
This grants power while losing agency. And it is more, and more common, e.g. in the United States with its "Deep State" myth of the Q-Anon sect.
Now unless you ascribe to that religion or believe that your tribe can do no wrong it all seems simple.
Aside from a vocal minority, the impression I get around from conversations with and reading other Australians is that the Australian people largely agree with your position.
Just war principles are important to observe.
The Nazis were a thuggish and murderous regime with plenty of complicity from the German populace, but the firebombing of Dresden was evil, as were the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Targeting civilians is evil.
If we accept that these are evil, and we ought to, then we must accept that what Israel is doing is unacceptable. Bibi should be punished.
You can target Hamas, and you should, but just war does not allow for the means Israel has used.
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The why takes more explanation. I'd suggest you dig through https://xcancel.com/ireallyhateyou/, this person is an israeli with background in leftist activism that recently went into exile. They collect and translate a lot of material from israeli television and other media, and also translate and explain a lot of historical material, both more mainstream like background information on contemporary israeli politicians and the occasional look at punk and leftist activism in Israel during the nineties and -00s.
It's also a good idea to spend time going through the material collected by Younis Tirawi, https://xcancel.com/ytirawi. It shows what IDF personnel believes to be appropriate behaviour that will positively impress their civilian israeli peers, i.e. what they consider to be the political climate.
Diaspora jews are quite heterogenous and splintered. Many support Israel, and many don't. One 'poll' is the democratic mayor primary in New York, where Zohran Mamdani was quite popular among jewish constituents. Adding to this, many jewish institutions are in some sense captured or founded by zionists, and funded because they are loyal to the zionist cause. This includes many summer camps and similar activities for jewish youth. Since 2023 I expect more diaspora jews to have lost sympathy with the zionist movement than it has gained, but it's not something I have polling numbers to support. On the other hand, basically every recurring large protest against Israel has a jewish contingent.
At the moment we're past immediate resolution, because the entire population in the Gaza strip has been permanently, irrevocably harmed by starvation. It would also take a lot of violence to force the israeli society to back down and stop what it's doing to its neighbours, and then likely generations of enforced stabilisation and education to sow seeds of democracy, neither of which Israel's occidental backers are willing to consider. Then there's the questions of colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are illegal and must be dissolved, which in turn would require distinct amounts of force both to achieve and then to keep it from turning into a civil war within Israel when the so called settlers are relocated there.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, one should keep in mind that this is mainly a christian project, most adherents to zionism are christians.
I'm not an Israeli by Israeli standards :) And will never be. But, of course, I'm a citizen, I can read and speak Hebrew well.
Politically, you can say, I came full circle. As many newcomers I was fed a very simplified and one-sided story of Israeli-Arab relationship. The first time I ever cast my vote in elections I voted Shinuj (they are farther right than Likud). In general, immigrants from the former Soviet Union tend to vote right and be pro-settlers.
For non-political reasons I ended up in military jail, where I met some "prisoners of consciousness" who, while didn't convince me to switch my political position entirely, exposed me to the leftist ideas delivered by the leftists. It's very important to see such ideas through the eyes of supporters because the other side virtually always misrepresents them to score points.
I didn't care about elections for a while, but, eventually, when I finally decided to vote, I voted Meretz.
I don't think I will vote in the next elections. Or, maybe, out of habit, I'll vote Democrats (former Labor and Meretz together)... but, really, I don't see a good candidate.
Anyways, what made me depart from the liberal camp is the European liberals. Pathologically bad decisions, or, even more often, the complete lack of any decisions. Gullible and zealous about issues they don't understand... I just don't want to associate myself with people like that. And I see how Israeli liberals parrot the European liberal's believing they know better.
* * *
So... to try to give some sort of a breakdown on who in Israel stands with settlers and why:
* Working class hates Arabs. It's plain and simple: working class often has to work in mixed environments. Construction, hospitality, agriculture. And there Arabs are just danger. You have to look over your shoulder all the time to make sure Mahmud isn't in a bad mood today and didn't bring a knife to work, and isn't going to cut you. I worked in a chain restaurant where a line cook brought a bomb one day to work and killed a bunch of people, himself included. Any Israeli who worked blue collar jobs probably has a story like that. These people don't care about the technicalities or long-term consequences of illegal settlements. Whoever harms Arabs, they are voting for that guy.
* Healthcare holds a special place in white collar jobs because there are a lot of Arabs working in it. But these are not the brutes who come to work with knives and bombs. Also, doctors Jewish doctors are exposed to Arab patients and the other way around... this creates a more friendly atmosphere. You will also find that doctors in Israel are probably the most leftist of any occupation.
* White collar jobs in general want to see Israel copying Europe. People in these jobs tend to want the rule of law, equality, secularism, inclusivity. They see settlers as either crazy or brutish and don't want to associate with them. Even if they may hold right-wing views, they want the implementation to be lawful and non-violent if possible.
* Black-kipah orthodox Jews only care about themselves. For better or for worse. They only wake up when politicians directly address their interests. If settlers go berserk on Arabs or Arabs eviscerate the settlers: they don't care.
* Knitted-kipah orthodox Jews are the settlers (not all of them, but probably a majority). They believe Israel should be restored in some sort of historical borders... as per usual, those borders aren't very certain, but they would quite certainly encompass a place called Judea and a city called Jerusalem. They believe they are doing a favor to the Jewish community by fighting "invaders" (Arabs).
* Israeli Arabs... are a mixed bag. You can find literal jihadists and those who hate other Arabs on the other side of the fence more than settlers do. It's very clanish and way too involved to try to parse it.
* The owners class, the rich people, they despise settlers. See them as an inconvenience / a bunch of lunatics. They don't care about Arabs either.
* Immigrants, especially fresh, tend to overwhelmingly support settlers because they misunderstand their status and genuinely believe the settlers are doing what the country isn't allowed to do due to some political scheming going on.
The Free Press, Call Me Back (podcast), and Breaking Israeli History (podcast) do a good job. Also we will dance again and October 8 (films). I'd also recommend Douglas Murray's On Democracies and Death Cults to get some perspective if you're curious, generally people don't bother on online discussion forums on this topic because it's not productive, but for earnestly curious friends I make the case below. From my perspective, Jews outside of Israel have become more united because the nature of a lot of the western response after 10/7 ironically shows why Jews need a state and an army to protect themselves.
I’m all for high minded debate, but a lot of the anti-Israel protesting isn’t that, the people celebrating or excusing 10/7 on 10/8 before Israel responded, the guy that recently executed two young people leaving a jewish event in DC and then screamed “Free Palestine”, the guy that murdered an old woman at a hostage march in boulder, the “death, death to the IDF” shouted from the stage in Glastonbury to a cheering crowd, the “river to the sea” and “intifada” chants/harassing of jews on college campuses, the repeated negative press narrowly focused on Israel from BBC, Guardian, NYT, the ‘genocide’ claims and other false blood libels, people marching waving islamic republic of Iran and Hezbollah flags in NYC, smashing up jewish owned businesses, etc. - these people are not motivated by some idea of nuanced democratic values or a ‘two state solution’, they’re motivated by old Jewish hatred under a new name. Islamism blended with lefty socialism united in their support of “anti-zionism” i.e. the destruction of Israel.
Many of these media orgs have been hollowed out by an activist ideology that doesn’t understand the history it’s swimming in and doesn’t pursue truth as much as push a political agenda. What ‘genocide’ provides aid to the people they’re supposedly trying to kill? Hamas is driven by a theologically motivated Jihad against the Jews with explicit genocidal intent, The Islamic Republic of Iran (distinct from its people) wants to destroy Israel and then the west and uses terrorism for this purpose and may have used a nuke if not for recent events. It is necessary to use lethal force to defend against this kind of threat. Anyone that cares about a positive future for Palestinians should recognize there is no possibility of such a future while Hamas remains in power.
Europe has largely been protected by the US providing its security and deterrence after WWII. Israel is on the front lines and can’t ignore the reality on the ground, their survival depends on it. You can fight this earlier or wait until the cost is higher to fight it later. Other Arab countries understand these problems, it’s why the UAE has banned the Muslim brotherhood and other extremist organizations, it’s why Saudi is leaning closer towards normalization with Israel and both are allied against Iran. They understand the risks of Islamic terror because they have to deal with it - it forces an accurate understanding. Something Europe (and anti-Israel protestors in the west) don’t grasp, but given Europe’s poor policy on this issue they likely will continue to experience more of first hand.
What Hamas did is joyfully murder, rape, and torture a bunch of lefty kibbutzniks (the kind bringing gaza kids to Israeli hospitals) and music festival kids, took hostages that they’re still holding, while filming it, laughing about it and celebrating it. They have an explicitly genocidal charter interested in killing all the Jews. There is no compatibility between the west and those interested in Islamic Jihad. Every third house in gaza has weapons in it (often hidden in kids rooms), Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian areas to try to maximize civilian casualties despite Israel’s effort to minimize them. They also kill civilians that go against them and have been launching rockets into Israel for years.
That action requires a military response to achieve political goals: return the hostages and destroy hamas / remove them from power. That is unavoidable without civilian deaths (always a tragedy in war), but the fault for this lies squarely with Hamas for starting the war. Few wars have moral grounding as clear as the war started because of 10/7. On October 8th people in the west were celebrating the invasion and killing carried about by Hamas, some mixture of ignorance and useful idiots (primarily on the political left) along with explicitly pro-hamas support. This was popular in American universities and across Europe before Israel had even responded chanting things like “globalize the intifada”. This is, at best, total moral confusion.
Also notice the attention placed on this conflict, but conspicuously absent from others. Why aren’t students protesting Bashar al-Assad? Or the civilian deaths in the conflict in Yemen? Or in Sudan? Why only the one Jewish state that was brutally attacked by a terrorist group that’s still holding its citizens hostage? This isn’t just an issue with Hamas either, it’s more complicated - many Palestinian civilians participated in the kidnapping, looting, and violence on 10/7. They helped harbor hostages. They would have lynched the hostages being returned if Hamas wasn’t preventing that and they of course elected Hamas to power in the first place. The population itself is radicalized with a deep hatred of Jews.
Enormous amounts of foreign aid (hundreds of millions) has flowed into gaza of the last couple of decades. Enough to make the Hamas leaders billionaires whose families can live large in Qatar while supporting their investment of tunnels to support their terrorism. A lot of it is backed by Iran, but a lot of this aid is from western nations to organizations that worked directly with and supported Hamas (UNRWA). This money could have been used to build something after Israel’s "land for peace" withdrawal in 2005, instead it was used for terror. It’s more instructive to look at what motivates the groups today rather than litigate divergent historical narratives (i.e. Nakba was five Arab states attacking Israel and the ‘catastrophe’ was that they lost, the security checkpoints exist because of suicide bombing during the intifadas, etc.). If Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages it would end the fighting they started. If Israel laid down their weapons they’d all be killed. Palestinians have no interest in two states which they’ve repeatedly rejected, they’re interested in killing all the Jews, the destruction of Israel, and more broadly the destruction of the west (as Iran’s proxy). Meanwhile in Israel, Arabs and Jews live together peacefully as Israeli citizens.
Ideally it’d be possible to engage in war with perfect individual targeting and no civilian casualties. Israel does this as much as possible (Hezbollah pager attack was very narrowly targeted, targeted strikes on individuals in specific apartments, other civilian warning strategies), but it’s not perfect and civilian deaths are unavoidable, especially in dense urban conflict zones. The IDF has a better record on this than any other modern western army (including US when we took Mosul against ISIS). I see war as a means to achieve a specific political result when diplomacy is not possible (or after you’ve been attacked). In this case: remove Hamas from power and return the hostages. In the broader conflict: remove the threat from Hezbollah and Iran. I think it’s necessary to achieve these goals in order to achieve any lasting peace.
Some ideologies and enemies require total military defeat. If western civilization is not willing to do this despite its real costs, then power is ceded to enemies that don’t have the same moral concerns, or in this case, explicitly want to maximize civilian death and terror as they did on 10/7 and it'll just happen again. My view is Israel would like to live in peace with its neighbors if that’s a real option (and historically has tried many times), but it’s not. Israel's neighbors (driven by a particular theological view of Islam from the Muslim Brotherhood) are not interested in peaceful coexistence. Israel should not make concessions to an enemy still plotting to destroy them.
If we’re lucky an outcome of this conflict could be normalization with KSA / an extension of the Abraham accords and deeper partnership with other Arab countries in the region - maybe even a shift in some of the public’s ideology if people recognize that trying to destroy Israel/kill Jews leads to ruin (though this is hard with radicalization in the culture/schools, etc.) - it’s a generational project that will take time, but it’s not impossible. Currently, because the goals have not been achieved (Hamas still holds hostages, still wants to remain in power, still will not surrender) the war continues and sadly civilians continue to pay some of the cost. The allies (mostly US) fully administered Japan after WWII for 7 years, Japan lost their sovereignty during that time. An outcome of starting a war and losing it is you may lose your sovereignty and land. It’s possible to defeat evil ideologies, it happened in WWII with both Japan and Germany.
I think it’s very challenging to know what’s true given all the bad actors (UN, Hamas, Pallywood - they film fake videos to (effectively) manipulate western sentiment) and their repeated lying. I think that the GHF has weakened Hamas by removing their control over the aid which has threatened them, and lastly I’m personally not sure what responsibility there is to provide aid at all while hostages remain held in Gaza (this is a more controversial view) - that said, Israel has provided and continues to provide enormous amounts of civilian aid and works to move civilians outside of the areas of fighting despite this being a thankless task. War can be a moral act, the west exercising its power to defend its values against an evil ideology is an important and necessary thing.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-destruction...
We would consider someone fucking uneducated if in 2025 they tried to justify the Iraq/Afghanistan war. The same will be true for everything you wrote as time goes on.
However, there are two aspects of this conflict where Israel is IMO monumentally and unarguably in the wrong.
One is the settler program. It is wholly inconsistent with a desire to live peacefully alongside even savage enemies. If they are so bad, put up fences and put guns on them - as Israel is doing. But the settlement program, with displacements of Palestinian civilians, bulldozing of Palestinian villages, rendering arable land inhospitable, unchecked settler violence, is clearly just a land grab, and against any semblance of desiring a peaceful coexistence. It often gets dismissed as a fringe movement, but election after election, democratic Israeli governments show varying, but always positive amounts of support.
The other is use of famine against civilians. There is no conceivable military goal in sight other than indiscriminate death and misery onto truly random people, half of them below the median age of 19 not even being politically active. It is not an accident either, Ben Gvir and/or Smotrich talk about it openly.
To be clear, Hamas and co are also guilty of horrendous crimes. Thing is, vast majority of reasonable people accept that and point it out. Israel clearly accepts that too, but perceives the mere whiff of criticism as rabid discrimination.
And the two don't cancel out. It's not about restraint, or higher standard, or any uneven field. Any instance of terrorism and genocide is horrendous, unnecessary and unacceptable. They don't serve military or diplomatic deals. They are there to hurt just because you can, and somehow it pleases some basic human instinct.
Anti-Israeli crime is awful and I condemn it. I don't support Hamas, heckling of Jews around the world, the 7th Oct attacks were awful. I mean it. And Israel's actions are also awful and inhumane.
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If you are asking specifically about the Hilltop Youth, I believe most people understand them to be somewhere between extremists and jewish terrorists and do not support their actions. The government (well, Ben-Gvir) can continue to support them (within limits of plausible deniability) as long as they are in power and elections aren't until late next year.
If you are asking about Israeli Jews and the ongoing war, I'd remind you that the IDF is the people's army and conscription is mandatory. Everyone (in the mainstream) has either served in the IDF or has family there and so they know first-hand that claims that the IDF is participating in a genocide are absurd. If you're telling me my (in this case fictional) cousing Omri is participating in a genocide, I can very easily ignore that because I know he is a good kid that wouldn't do that, and I can call him up and ask him. Or maybe I'll ask my (fictional) coworker Daniel, the poor guy has been called into reserve duty for over 300 days since the war started.
They've also probably seen at least one of the many lies going around about the war. The documentary that the BBC tried to fake. The UN lying about the amount of aid going into Gaza (at the time when the american temporary pier plan was ongoing, the UN published numbers of trucks that they personally supervised going into Gaza. Conveniently, they had no one present to supervise in one of three checkpoints and "missed" about 1/3rd of the aid going in). UNWRA personnel participating in the OCT-7 attack. UNIFIL providing cover for Hezbollah to fire rockets on Israeli homes (including some Druze children which really shocked people around the country). Some blatant foreign media nonesense I've seen is showing footage of Israeli soccer fans being beaten and recontextualising it as if they are the ones doing the beating. Footage of an Israeli survivor of a terrorist attack (speaking Hebrew, in Israeli media!) being subtitled to describe her as a Palestinian survivor of an Israeli terror attack. Footage of Assad slaughtering his Syrian population broadcast as if it is a slaughter by the IDF, etc. Foreign media has proven itself to Israelis as liars, so they have no reason to listen to them.
They also see it as the #1 priority to return the hostages and see any call to stop the war before they are returned as ridiculous and evil (Though I do believe a majority support a deal of "everyone for everyone and a stop to the war").
In this light, even though many people believe the war could have already ended (with an aforementioned "everyone for everyone" deal) and Netanyahu is cruelly extending the war for his own personal interests, they also understand that any civilian casualties are part of the horrors of war and are purely the fault of Hamas, both for starting the conflict, and for their use of civilians as human shields, their use of civilian infrastructure (schools, mosques, hospitals) as war resources and use of their children as soldiers. They may also be familiar with the data, which last time both sides published semi-reliable information (or equally unreliable information), showed that when compared to other historical conflicts, civilian casualties were actually a smaller part of overall casualties. And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war as the IDF is already doing their duty to fight as ethically as is reasonably possible.
While we're there, we also frequently see news of Israelis and Jews being attacked around the world with no one really giving a shit about it. If the UK shows me that they don't give a shit about the lives of Jews/Israelis in the UK, I'm definitely not going to care what the UK government thinks about the ongoing war.
> Further, has this had any impact on the overall relationship between Jewish people worldwide and those residing in Israel? if so, how?
If you are in Israel and know of Jews residing elsewhere, they are probably former Israelis, which don't neccesarily represent non-Israeli Jews in those countries. Those I've spoken to have spoken about a sharp rise in antisemitism. Some fear for their lives. From the news and other media I know some Jews feel like Israel is going too far, but they get their opinions from e.g. the BBC, so you can't really take them as well-informed opinions.
- Incidentally, one former UN employee I know has spoken about ingrained and casual antisemitism in the UN much earlier than OCT-7 (of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" kind), so I'd consider any opinion or intervention by the UN as deceitful and unwelcome.They started the war, but Israel should be expected to behave at a higher standard than terrorists. They are causing the starvation and death that is not needed to protect Israel's interests. The deaths are now on them.
>And so until the hostages return, there's not much reason to stop the war
I don't believe that one minute.
Your own defense ministers have said there is no military value in continuing the war, and there is no getting the hostages back without a deal with Hamas. This war continues because of far-right bloodlust from the Israeli government, and Bibi's desire to stay in power and out of jail.
Aid could get in, and the starvation could stop, if it was the will of the Israeli government. Hamas is militarily FUBAR, and Oct7 only happened because of the decisions made by Bibi to move IDF to the West Bank and ignore warnings from intelligence. Oct7 will not happen again, even if the fighting stopped this instant.
Instead, they want to see Palestine starve so they can take over Gaza.
Great summary of recent status: https://crooked.com/podcast/tbd-2/
That's pretty irrelevant when they don't put you in front of a firing squad for draft dodging, isn't it? If it is possible to refuse - either by draft dodging or by complying poorly enough that it basically becomes sabotage - the fact that you chose not to do so means you are complicit.
To bring this argument to the extreme: would you murder your own father if there was a $10 fine on not doing so? It's the law, after all! You're just following the law, so you cannot possibly be held accountable for your actions, right?
...
It makes no sense. Yes, antisemitism exists. Two wrongs don't make a right.
trying to explain it, will get you downvoted and flagged. because people find it inconvenient when facts don't correlate with carefully cultivated media picture that they been consuming
edit: just in case somebody cares
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
https://www.jns.org/over-6300-terror-attacks-against-jews-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Price_tag_attack_...
[1] https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/dossiers-pays/israel-terri...
Israel is a terrorist organization, not a state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break-their-bones_policy
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Arguably it's worse than what is usually meant by terrorism, i.e. civilians or paramilitaries attacking a state by actions against civilians, since it's a state exterminating stateless civilians.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/letter-sanctio...
Quite important not to become part of the problem when you discuss this case. And the problem is that such a heated subject is prone to make people ideologically possessed and tribal. To a point where they become emotionally blinded and are unable to listen to people that don't share/fully support their beliefs.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support...
Given Israeli education, support for settlers, the immigration policy which allows anyone with Jewish heritage to claim land there (regardless of any connection to the area, and of any outstanding arrest warrants) and Israelis using their kids to stop aid trucks and so on, there's a lot needed to show the majority what is actually humane and acceptable.
I agree with the sentiment of your second paragraph, but I wish that thought applied in general, and not just to some special case countries. Especially considering the widely differing levels of democratic power people have in these different countries.
If you listen to their “liberal opposition” leaders like the likes of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz they sound just as unhinged as Netanyahu himself [1]
Every poll conducted on Israeli public opinion on the conflict would make have made Nazi officials blush. Majority of Israelis support ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza [2].
Seeing the facts as they are is not being “emotionally blinded”. When genocidal psychopaths scream at the top of their lungs they want to commit genocide and actively work towards that goal, with the results right in front of our eyes, we compelled to believe them.
[1] https://x.com/ghostofbph/status/1948720978378309847?s=46
[2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-03/ty-article/.p...
> Eurasia Poll: 82% of Israelis want to expel Palestinians from Gaza; 47% want to kill every man, woman, child
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/05/30/poll-israelis-exp...
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To me, simply labeling somone as "evil" not feels like a premature termination of the chain of causality, but also circular reasoning (Why does X do evil things? Because X is evil. Why is X evil? Because X does evil things). There has to be more to it than that.
What is happening is definitely "evil" in its purest form, but there are many contributing explanations that don't rely on circular reasoning.
- long-term geopolitical goals of "the West" in the middle east
- a culture defined by a noxious combination of victim complex + ethnoreligious superiority
- a society pampered by foreign financial and military aid (not having to stand on its own)
- a long history of regional violence
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This is everything you need to know about the world we live in. Palestinian lives simply do not matter.
Lives in Palestine get far more attention than Burma, West Africa, Ethiopia and Sudan [1].
The basic truth is lives far removed from us tend to be forgettable.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_confli...
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I've lost friends of 15 years for remarking on my horror about bombings and civilian deaths. Nothing more.
I can't even begin to understand a mentality which cannot see the absolute asymmetry of power at work here.
The daily protests happen because they're necessary. And they're clearly not enough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Mu...
> Today, Jews residing in Muslim countries have been reduced to a small fraction of their former sizes, with Iran and Turkey being home to the largest remaining Jewish populations, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Algeria, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq. This was due to Zionist recruitment, religious beliefs, economic reasons, widespread persecution, antisemitism, political instability and curbing of human rights in Muslim-majority countries.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim," they say. Where then, should the Jews be allowed to live? Only in Brooklyn?
> Until the 1960s, approximately one million Jews lived in Iran and other Arab countries having arrived in the region more than 2,000 years before. Nowadays, it is estimated that only around 15,000 remain, as the majority of the Jewish population in Muslim lands were forced to flee their homes
https://sephardicu.com/history/jewish-population-in-10-islam...
Hamas could surrender at any time. They're to blame for everything.
From your source.
It's important to note that in a place like Algeria the French colonists granted Jewish populations citizenship to France, yet denied it to the Arab and Berber populations. [1] This fractured relations between the Sephardic population and the rest of the local population, which is exactly what the French wanted.
I'm not going to say relations were perfect before, or deny that Jewish populations weren't second class citizens, but there was a long history of being neighbors and having cities like Constantine be a place of refuge after the Spanish expulsion of Jews from Andalusia. I mean, in places like Mogador in Morocco, Jewish populations were explicitly invited by the king to settle and set up trading businesses [2].
The founding of Israel completely changed this and fractured relations that went back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9mieux_Decree
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essaouira#Jewish_presence
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maghrebi_Jews
Violence begets violence, if Israeli settlers want to fight to displace other people then they will die in that process. Thankfully for Jews, there are other states they can choose to inhabit that are both secular and respect international law. These are, statistically, safer places for Jewish individuals to live than a state that instructs their army on how to commit fratricide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive