About 100,000 turn out in London for pro-Palestine rally

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to World News@lemmy.world – 658 points –
About 100,000 turn out in London for pro-Palestine rally
theguardian.com
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The battle lines are being drawn in the court of public opinion. Now the question becomes how steadfast is the public support behind demanding a peaceful yet forceful resolution to this conflict and finally ending this apartheid regime.

Public perception outside Israel has affected a total of 0 policy decisions in the country

I just want my country to stop knob slobbing these fucking fascists.

Because they keep getting money from the US. The US tap has to be turned off.

Um, actually.... it currently IS turned off until the house gets it's act together. Of course, the sink is filled to the brim with soap and plates, so it will be a while before the water runs out - but it will make the genocidal plate scrubbing of Gaza a bit harder without the tap turned on.

Israel is too important for the USA's goals and stature in the area for public perception is the US to change the flow of money.

And in practise, Israel is not getting money but weapons systems, which is quite lucrative for the US

How successful the court of public opinion has been in influencing the outcome of Israel conflict before?

Very. Israel has been on several benders that were curtailed due to international opinion. Unfortunately it's never outrightly solved the issue.

It was successful against South African Apartheid. There's a reason conservatives are trying to literally outlaw the BDS Israel movement. (Boycott, Divest, Sanction)

Pretty effective. It's backlash to Israel that has stopped Netanyahu from wiping palestine off the map.

Israel is a small country that relies on the implicit assumption that Western countries will defend it if a large invasion ever comes to be. If they didn't need some considerable international support, they would have ethnically cleansed the whole of Palestine already.

Imagine how angry and disappointed our ancestors would be knowing that the supposed chosen children of God literally got given their land after WW2, gave them sympathy, gave them diamonds and global support to promote love, peace and prosperity, then watched them literally turn and slaughter their brothers and sisters next door, make millions selling spyware tools and then carpet bomb hospitals because anyone can be a terrorist. Meanwhile Sweden has had literal gunmen attack youth campus.

Now imagine that you're actually a hardcore supporter of a Jewish homeland, or Zionism so to speak, and then imagine that this is the hell your government has created and nobody in power could be bothered building a road or a school but depends on a million dollar empire in a faraway land to provide them billions of dollars of weaponry, guns, tanks etc while they claim the country is under 24-7 threat. When you really think about it it's almost like if it was imaginary or true it wouldn't matter, because dogma and paranoia overrides any sense of logic with these people, meanwhile they're literally unironically spreading their little paranoia and fear by knowingly selling spyware to dictatorships to target "dissidents"

You could have been born yesterday, or be a hundred years old, and you would still have known where energy and LOVE has been squandered

the supposed chosen children of God literally got given their land after WW2, gave them sympathy, gave them diamonds and global support to promote love, peace and prosperity, then watched them literally turn and slaughter their brothers and sisters next door

Ignoring the borderline antisemitism there, in reality the people of the region were essentially abandoned by the West to fight it out. The Arab League didn't like the results of the UN vote, and so riots broke out and the violence escalated into a war in which the Zionists were victorious against 7 Arab nations. To be clear, I'm not saying it was moral or ethical for the Zionists to settle land that was already inhabited by Arabs in the first place (it wasn't), but that ship had long since sailed by 1948. My point is there was a very serious war over the land and no one was "given" anything. After the war, the Western powers agreed to enforce the 1949 armistice borders, and began supporting Israel materially because they were seen as a counterpoint to Soviet-Arab relations.

It follows that the point of support for Israel has never been "love, peace and prosperity", but a geopolitical calculation, and one that has been wildly successful in maintaining Western hegemony in a region of the world that has never been particularly receptive to Western liberalism. Because of its geopolitical positioning, Israel is under constant threat, as evidenced by the Six Day War, two Intifadas, the bus & cafe bombings of the 90s & 00s, and the frequent rocket attacks of more recent times. Yes, they are under attack because they are unwelcome in the region due to their history of violence against native Arabs, but that doesn't make the fear of Israelis irrational or paranoid - just hypocritical. It doesn't justify the violence, but it does perpetuate it.

And so the clearest route to peace was through the normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab/Islamic neighbors, leading to a gradual detente and eventually a regional consensus. This latest flare-up of the conflict is a major setback in that effort, though, and speculatively, that aspect of it may be intentional on the part of Iran, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.

And if support for Israel stops Palestine and countries like Iran will kill everyone they can in Israel and the country will be replaced by another extremist country lead by terrorists.

Peaceful yet forceful?

They probably mean forceful as in strong, not nonviolent. Like the world needs to band up and tell Israel to cut their shit out like they did to South Africa.

I can’t remember what happened in South Africa. I was young and doing a lot of drugs then. Is it possible for this to end similarly?

I mean probably yes. What ended the Apartheid was immense pressure from the international community up to and including sanctions. That's what the BSD movement aims to do, but it doesn't have much steam right now.

What people seem to forget is that the international sanctions started AFTER violent actions are done by anti apartheid activists in South Africa. Such violent actions happened after what? Ding ding ding, the non violent protesting which ends in the deaths of the protesters. Fun fact, did you know Nelson Mandela is designated as a terrorist until 2008? And he got elected as South Africa president in 1994. There's 14 years after he got democratically elected as a president that he's still designated as a terrorist.

I condemn what Hamas did on October 7th, even if you read about Islam, there are actually rules of engagement in Islamic teachings. But after what happened during Great March of Return which is a peaceful protest done by Palestinians that resulted in IDF snipers killing peaceful Palestinians. What the fuck do you expect is going to happen after decades of occupation and humiliation? Do you want Palestinians to be a perfect victim? To just roll over and die? Just to let the apartheid state murder them and reduce their population to be so small that you feel bad about them because they can do nothing? Like what the US or Canada did to their indigenous population?

Look, if something like this happened to you, what are you going to do? Just roll over and let some dude from Brooklyn take your home?

My family's home country is a country that got colonized by a lot of European countries, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Brits, even the Japanese got their turn colonizing my home country. And did you know what happened after we proclaimed our independence? Our colonizers came back and invaded us saying what we did is "illegal" and forced us to a bloody war of 4 years that cost more than 100,000 lives. If that kind of thing happened today, I bet you a billion dollars that the people who fought for their independence will be labeled as a terrorist.

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And I remember that Mandela died until one day I flicked on the telly and found out apparently not

Israel is not an apartheid regime. That is silly.

Israel has full political and military control of Palestinian land. They control every aspect of their lives. Remember when Jewish people where placed into ghettos and they each had different insignia that would indicate where they were from and were they could travel and what freedoms they had? Israel does the same thing with palestinians.

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