Israel says it will ban UN staff after secretary general’s comments

pleasemakesense@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 307 points –
Israel says it will ban UN staff after secretary general’s comments
theguardian.com
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Protip: If your thought process begins to sound like "either you're with me, or you're against me", you may be in the middle of the process of turning into a tv villain.

I 100% condemn Hamas and their terrorism, but I have been thinking of this skit a lot lately, wondering how many Isrealis are experiencing this revelation and asking "Are we the badies?"

Sometimes people forget the lesser evil is still evil. And Benjamin "lets-prop-up-hamas-to-weaken-the-PLO" Netanyahu definitely fits the bill.

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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this skit

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

This whole conflict is nothing but villains and victims. There's no moral high ground and no good guys.

Totally agree. I don't support Hamas and their terrorism, nor do I support Isreal's genocide and ethnic cleansing.

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Or a movie villain.

Obi Wan: Anakin, my allegiance is to the Republic, to Democracy!

Anakin Skywalker: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!

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It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation

This is the statement they're doing this over? It seems pretty tame. What the fuck Israel?
Is it because Gaza was blockaded but not occupied at the time of the attack?

Erdan has already demanded Guterres’ resignation and described his remarks as blood libel.

That's not what blood libel means.

Pointing out that Palestinians have been treated like dirt for half a century is the same thing as claiming Jews drink kids’ blood, don’t be thick.

That they have the audacity to say this shows how powerful a hold Zionists have in the West.

1-month ago:

"Jews controls the world sheeple!"

Fucking fruitcake...

Today:

You get fired for saying anything remotely fair about Palestine. Look at the backlash in the fields of law, banking and entertainment.

Israel is seriously losing the plot. And possibly it’s grasp on reality.

Don’t they have a super right-wing government right now? This kind of frothing at the mouth sure sounds like it.

So, summaries like this are never completely accurate because theres just too much going on to shorten it so much, but it's kind of like this:

  1. Very few Israel government terms have been established by moderates or peacekeepers, one of the most notable was PM Rabin who was assassinated in 1995.

  2. Netanyahu elected PM in 1996, then the youngest ever, and served until 1999 and then later again from 2009-2021. Bit of a frother, he is probably happy Hamas gave him a reason TBH.

  3. Netanyahu was in charge until he went to trial for corruption with various associated companies conflict of interests with the multiple offices of government that Netanyahu held.

  4. The government then had to decide who was in charge in his place, but couldn't so they formed a "Unity Government" where one sides' guy Bennett (Extreme Right Frother, worse than Netanyahu) ruled for 2 years then the other side, Yair Lapid, gets to rule for 2 years.

  5. Netanyahu had made changes to laws that made it impossible to hold him accountable for his crimes.

  6. From July to Dec 2022 Lapid was in power, and then Netanyahu established himself as leader once again.

So. Yeah, it's totally fucked.

Bonus Fact: Israel's Surveillance Technology has been sold worldwide and one of their biggest buyers are US Administrations who prioritize securing the Southern Border, example given: Donald Trump. Their relationship was so good that Trump's son in law, working as an advisor in the white house, supported a pro-Israel single state solution, which is to say the destruction of Palestine.

It's so weird because they've been pretty effective in the past at this. This time it just seems to be such low quality and low effort, yet it's coming at me on almost every platform I use. The stuff that's showing up on my YouTube where it's like "10 most fierce IDF women soldiers," and the thumb is a beautiful Jewish woman with a photoshopped scratch on her face.

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Look. Look. We don't want you to see the war crimes we are about to do, so you're banned.

Humanity would not prevail.

Their current stance of the Israeli government is that there is no such thing as a humanitarian crisis, the UN is presenting a false picture of the situation in Gaza and that the civilian casualty numbers are severely exaggerated.

Despite them restricting food, water, electricity and fuel and even blocking on purpose humanitarian aid to the enclave.

Despite their indiscriminate bombing, flattening out complete neighbourhoods.

Despite them hitting targets south of the line the IDF suggested civilians to go.

Refusing to admit your own mistakes or wrongdoings is the first step towards dictatorship even though some might argue that they are already one.

And let's not forget that the UN was the institution that ratified the creation of this whole country. Oh the turntables!

Ah yes, a totally normal thing that innocent, non-fascist governments do. Nothing to see here, UN. Certainly no war crimes or ethnic cleansing!

The UN has been sending their troops to countries for years to put a stop to genocides.

Places like Serbia must be kicking themselves right now, like they had no idea just saying "no" and carrying on killing was an option.

Israel will go down speed running through history as the reason why humanity can't have nice things

You're doing it to "teach them a lesson?" What's the lesson? That your government is running a genocidal apartheid state? I think they're aware already

I watched a good documentary recently called "roadmap to apartheid" that shows the comparison of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the ongoing Israeli apartheid. It touches on the relationship between the two countries during that era too. It is shocking how much worse the Israeli one is. It was hard to watch at times but it shows peace is possible. It is on youtube if anyone is interested.

At least when the US does it, they sprinkle in a liberation narrative.

"Obviously we're retaliating hard with maximum flex-

"BOOOOOO!"

"But! But! But! We'll liberate a bunch of people while we're there and be aware of civilians and their lives."

"Oh. Well that seems nice. You won't harm innocents?"

"We'll be aware of civilians and their lives. And the liberation."

"Well, okay then..."

No one to watch their crimes agaisnt humanity and document them allowed on the ground anymore, eh?

Ah, good ole fashioned collective punishment.

Israel loves this one simple trick.

Wow Israel is about as respectable as hamas. What a time to be alive. Terrorists all the way to the bottom.

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Likud party flailing to justify their existence. They've been in power for awhile but I think it's a mistake to confuse the Likud and further right wing parties as representative of all of Israel. I think there's a very good chance this attack will result in them losing the knesset because their failures were obviously responsible for the attacks success anyway.

t I think it's a mistake to confuse the Likud and further right wing parties as representative of all of Israel

Very true. The ruling coalition failed to gain a majority of votes, and only gained a majority in the knesset thanks to a recent rule change that disadvantaged smaller parties on the left. There were widespread protests when the far right government set about entrenching itself. People were worried about shit like this:

An article by former United States ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and former Jordanian United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid bin Ra'ad in Foreign Policy argued that the insistence of Israeli right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on curbing the powers of the Supreme Court, stems from a desire to "more easily enact his vision of an Israel that extends unimpeded from river to sea," as the court had previously impeded the legalization of Israeli settlements built on privately-owned Palestinian land.

When Hamas supporters chant From the River to the Sea, it's often argued to be supportive of genocide. Get rid of all the Jews, establish a Muslim Palestinian state. But the current finance minister has echoed exactly that rhetoric, but for a Jewish ethnostate. From what I've read, they're incredibly brazen about it, especially in Hebrew.

This far right government does not have popular support with ordinary Israelis. Especially now Netenyahu aka "Mr. Security" failed to prevent the attacks. I strongly recommend people read the English language version of Times of Israel or Hareetz to get an idea what part(!!!) of the population thinks about all this. For example, I found this article while reading Hareetz a few days after the attack:

These are dark times: the fear of a catastrophe waiting to unfold. Israelis still don’t know the fate of their loved ones, everyday Palestinians are trying to survive under an all-out Israeli attack, the Israeli government and Hamas, both corrupt and bloodthirsty

And to give people an idea of how genuinely far right some of the people in the current Israeli government are, a copy paste from wikipedia:

Itamar Ben-Gvir ... serves as the Minister of National Security ... Ben-Gvir, a settler in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has faced charges of hate speech against Arabs and was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. He removed the portrait after he entered politics. He was also previously convicted of supporting a terrorist group known as Kach, which espoused Kahanism, an extremist religious Zionist ideology ... He has called for the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel who are not loyal to Israel. Ben Gvir is "widely known for his openly racist, anti-Arab views and activities" ...

If you told me that some of these people, were likely secretly happy about the attacks because it gives them an excuse to go all out on their plans, I wouldn't be particularly surprised.

More than that, I'd say it's essentially guaranteed. Polling in the aftermath of the attacks showed something like 90% of Israelis holding Netanyahu accountable for it, and his approval rating has stayed buried in the ground.

The sole promise of Likud was that they were the ones that could keep Israelis safe. That narrative very obviously doesn't fly any more.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Israel says it is banning United Nations representatives from visiting the country “to teach them a lesson” after the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said the 7 October attacks by Hamas had to be seen in the context of decades of occupation of the Palestinian people.

Speaking at a UN general debate on the Middle East in New York, Guterres created fury when he said: “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.

Griffiths, a former British diplomat and special envoy on Yemen, has been forthright in warning that levels of UN aid into Gaza are woefully inadequate.

Last week the US vetoed a UN resolution tabled by Brazil calling for a humanitarian pause to allow aid into Gaza since it did not explicitly allow for Israel’s self-defence.

The US has requested a vote at the UN security council on Thursday afternoon on a draft resolution of its own that reaffirms Israel’s right to collective and individual self defence, but adds that the movement of people within Gaza must be voluntary.

Asked to expand on Blinken’s comments, national security council spokesperson John Kirby said: “We want to see that all measure of protection for civilians and pauses in operation is a tool and a tactic that can do that for temporary periods of time.”


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I guess by "the country" they also mean gaza and therefore continue to try to prevent their war crimes from being exposed, right?

UN Secretary General fails at basic diplomacy. His one job.

Guterres remaining as Sec Gen hurts the UN's ability to conduct diplomacy during a serious conflict. The tankies might like what he said but the UN's ability to do it's job should take precedence. If the dude cares about the UN he should resign so someone more interested in serious diplomacy rather than scoring internet points can take the job he's failed at.

Maintaining Peace at this point is no longer about convincing Israel so much as it is about stopping Israel before the surrounding nations take matters into their own hands.