Israel’s foreign minister has said that an arms embargo on his country would lead to the elimination of the Israeli state and “a second Holocaust”.

Gideon Saar was speaking on Tuesday at an international conference on antisemitism in Jerusalem.

  • MetalMachine@feddit.nl
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    3 days ago

    “Does israel have a right to exist?”

    The answer to this is: did nazi Germany have a right to exist?

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      I wonder if we can find a new way of describing the notion of “Israel existing.” It seems opponents believe we mean killing the occupants of Israel or (somehow removing the area entirely) rather than reforging the state itself. It’s not like we don’t want the geographical region to continue existing.

        • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          Generally I’m not interested in what Israel as the right to become. I would rather “Israel doesn’t have the right to not be Palestine” (phrased better, perhaps?)

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            2 days ago

            Israel has to become something. It can’t stay the way it is.

            Allowing it to become Palestine again is just the compromise position.

            • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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              2 days ago

              Good point. Still, “not having the right to exist” sounds to me – and more importantly, to those undecided on the issue – like it’s encouraging the destruction of the things that are in Israel, not the entity of Israel itself. Which is obviously not a take that’s likely to attract support.

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                2 days ago

                That’s why I say it has a right to become Palestine. It will still exist, sort of, but in a revolutionary new form.

                And Israelis can become Palestinians.

                Assuming they aren’t just settlers that moved there recently to steal land, of course.

                • vfreire85@lemmy.ml
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                  2 days ago

                  if the world was fair, that tract of land in the middle east would become palestine, jewish immigrants would be allowed to live there and have full citizenship and rights, but a nice chunk of territory would be carved out of central or eastern europe to make “settlerania”.

                • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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                  2 days ago

                  What Israel has a right to do is not relevant. America has the right to become part of Canada. Israel remaining as it is is the problem – and more to the point, the problem is that people don’t see that as the problem.

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                    2 days ago

                    America has the right to become part of Canada.

                    Except Canadians don’t seem to want that.

                    What do you think “river to the sea” means? It means Israel will become Palestine again.

              • IttihadChe@lemmy.ml
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                1 day ago

                It doesn’t sound like that to me at all? What about that phrase signals anything about the destruction of anything except the entity of Israel? Outside of the way it’s propagandized against which would happen to any phrase.

                • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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                  1 day ago

                  You are probably very steeped in theory, and such words have a precise meaning to you. That’s awesome btw that you read and think about this a lot, but the people we need to advertise to don’t.

                  “destroy israel,” “israel doesn’t have the right to exist” and so on just sound to me like a call to evict israelis from the land. I have seen people on lemmy make this exact inference. A common response is “but what you want is also genocide,” indicating that people think those phrases really mean physically destructive action.

                  • IttihadChe@lemmy.ml
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                    20 hours ago

                    What is the alternative which wouldn’t be warped by Zionist propaganda? They literally frame everything as a call for their destruction, the OP is them framing calls to stop directly arming their genocide as such.

                    “BLM” was met with “white lives don’t matter?”

                    “Defund the police” was met with “so you want crime to run rampant?”

                    “Abolish ice” is met with “so you want open borders?”

                    “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is met with “so you want to genocide the Jews”.

                    You don’t combat this by simply switching language as your new choice will also be attacked in the same vein. Conceding on these fronts only serves to legitimize the framing Of the original message as extreme.

                    If we constantly shift to avoid their criticism, we will inevitably end at “all lives matter” and something like “Israel has a right to defend itself…but so does Palestine” (and even this would be ruthlessly attacked by Zionist propaganda).

                    Our goal is to transform/counter the narrative pushed from authority towards the masses (that Israel has the right to defend itself and what we are seeing is them enacting that right, the might just be going a little too far), towards what we believe (that settler colonial regimes have no such rights as they are inherently the aggressor and Palestinians deserve to live not under the boot of their oppression) not to fit inside of it.

                    We are to be “the vanguard”, leading the masses towards a future of our making, not “the rearguard” focussed on following the masses towards wherever they march as led by borgious propaganda.

                    We do this by standing firm in our principles and making access to our way of understanding readily available to any who question from a position of good faith.

                    TLDR: They will attack and warp anything we say. We don’t avoid this by constantly switching to something less radical, we fight against it via educating those willing to listen.