US says Netanyahu has to rein in ‘extremist’ settlers in West Bank
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
thehill.com
The United States is warning Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rein in “extremist” settlers in the West Bank in the wake of reports of violence against Palestinians. “We…
There shouldn't be settlements in the West Bank.
The right to self defense does not extend to Palestinians illegally forced off their own lands by Israel.
If they had the same rights then Israel would never have been able to be formed. I can't imagine why Palestinians might be a bit upset.
I'm confused, I thought the rules based international order that the United States and the EU lectures others about would apply here.
There shouldn't ba an Israel
US: “Yeah, if you could land grab and displace people without making a massive fuss and killings, that would be super cool…”
All settlers are extremist and the fact they're called settlers instead of occupiers stealing land is ridiculous
Right? The normalization of occupation and stealing land in this day and age… it’s downright insanity.
And then people wonder why organizations like Hamas exist…
Any other context, they'd be call Colonizers.
This is a just a show by the United States.
It vetoes UN resolutions about settlements in the West Bank.
I'm glad this is being said. There are problems all around and fervor seems to be creating large envelopes of "allowed activity" for those who are willing.
This is a complex situation, but some things are clear. This is one.
Yea most Israelis agree it's fucked too.
Cops are bastards and let it happen, local troops help.
One silver lining is the Israeli Left is having a resurgence and there might be a government trying to roll it back and clean up it's act after this.
Isrealis have repeatedly voted for governments that openly state they want settlement construction to kill any viable Palestinian state (Netanyahu and his far-right pals).
If the whole of Gaza can be held responsible for voting for Hamas in 2006 (and not once after since Hamas did away with elections), the whole of Isreal can be held accountable.
I don't think either population is morally responsible for what their so-called leaders do. Subsets of them, sure, but Israelis or Palestinians as a whole? Not a chance. People are not responsible for actions they had no hand in, or which they actively opposed.
I totally agree.
I'm just following the logic of those who claim the carpet bombing of Gaza is acceptable because the Palestinians once voted for Hamas.
A. It's not carpet bombing. Less than one casualty per bomb dropped even if you round up.
B. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-nazi-case-for-hamas/
Any before and after photos of entire demolished Gaza neighbourhoods makes it clear what a farce your claim is.
May you never experience a true carpet bombing.
The death toll would be in the 100k+
In Dresden in the B link 60k died in one night.
Didn't work for his defense then doesn't now. It's the basis of the laws of war and Geneva Conventions.
As it turns out a place the size of jersey city with 500km of tunnels is entrenched
It's not a claim it's a fact that Gaza isn't being carpet bombed. Overlay the maps of damage from satellite imagery with where tunnels were known to be previously in public knowledge.
So one of the most common forms of social media deception is posting screen shots but not the links themselves.
I'm curious about your screen shots, can you send the links?
Sure.
https://x.com/GLNoronha/status/1718988399057551639?s=20
https://x.com/IsraelinUSA/status/1718021899056210213?s=20
E: here's also a UN submitted report on the fact Hamas uses child soldiers and indoctrinated them. https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/AHRC46NGO42_050321.pdf
https://youtu.be/dtErUuBvcRc?si=f7DeVBj8ahJMiybY and here's a video published by a preschool where they teach the kids to do some fucked up things.
Also here's another interview with the former heir of one of Hamas' co-founders and leaders in the West Bank. I have others in my comment history from this guy who is actually pretty famous.
(I don't like the interviewer but he mostly shuts up and let's the Palestinian who was in and out of Israeli prisons for years since he was 10 talk. Yousef touches on a lot of the same points across the different interviews he's done but this one has a bit more nuance.)
https://youtu.be/B8YYmrgAeqw?si=r-ZNTEdfUrLjc9yE
Thanks for the links.
Happy to help anyone who wants to know more about the regional context.
There's just so fucking much of it too.
It's not every day that you hear propaganda from the 40's. The total death toll of the Dresden carpet bombings was 25k.
Really funny how people down vote you because they believe in collective punishment as long as it's the side they don't like.
Which is the status quo for the region.
Still doesn't change the Geneva Conventions definition of a military target.
Meanwhile over in Pakistan there's massive protests for Palestine nominally.
As they are genociding 1.4 million Afghan refugees. https://www.rferl.org/a/pakistan-afghanistan-deportations-migrant-crackdown/32658618.html the stated reason is that the refugee population keeps suicide bombing stuff amongst other militant actions. Sound familiar?
Yeah except the person you're responding to probably doesn't hold all of Gaza responsible for what Hamas has done since being voted into power.
Also, the Israeli left actually now has their own egotistically altruistic motive to shut down the settler shit, that being that shutting off the valve of right of return and no longer counting the votes of settlers in the west bank gives them an electoral edge.
And after the shit Bibi's pulled, you could bet good money that the courts would look the other way on them doing it too since the judges will for a long time see right wing governments as a threat to their judicial autonomy.
The United States regularly votes for warmongers and theocrats, it doesn't mean there aren't a lot of Americans who think they're wrong.
And even this one is complex. A lot of the support for the settlers comes from American evangelical Christians. They believe that Jesus will come back under two conditions.
The first is that Jews run Israel. That's a check. The second is that Israel suffers a major attack. Well, that won't happen so that evangelicals send money to the settlers. Not only does it align with their "Israel should have the biblical borders" beliefs, but it adds fuel to the fire - worsening the conflict and making it more likely for a huge "Jesus will return this time" attack to happen.
They also support right wing Israeli politicians for the same reason. They don't want a guy running Israel who says "let's get a lasting peace with the Palestinians." They want a guy that says "I'll burn every Palestinian house to the ground and then burn the Palestinians themselves!"
This isn't meant to excuse actions by anyone else. It just shows that three situations are complex with a lot of people all over the place working against peace.
Well, he won't, he's an arsehole.
"Stop genocideing quite so hard, Israel, you're making us look bad."
Riiiight... the US is so "upset" at Israel that they will only be giving Israel hundreds of billions in genocide money in the coming few years instead of trillions.
Riiiight.
Total aid to Israel since its inception is no where near 1 trillion dollars, let alone multiple trillions. We're currently in the range of $3.8B per year, which is a lot. In the 75 years or so that Israel has existed the US has given something on the order of $160B total.
Yes... that's sarcastic hyperbole on my part.
Try $317.9B.
Yitzhak Rabin
They're saying this just 70 - 80 years too late.
They’ve been saying this, and getting traction on it, for decades.
It’s really easy to tell the people who just became aware of issues in the region over the past few weeks.
Not really? They can be hardly said to be "saying it and getting traction" while arming Israel to the hilt. They have and have had massive leverage over Israel and have largely chosen empty symbolic gestures while continuing to prop up the occupying state.
...and the extremists running Israel, while he's at it
Or what?
Or we will send you weapons and ammunition, but we will look upset doing it
I don't think he has an interest.
just draft them. problem "solved".
I dread to think what they would do in the military
Maybe the US should stop vetoing UN resolutions then.
For what it's worth, a large portion of Zionist—I'd wager a majority of those in Israel, and a very large majority elsewhere in the world—think that settlements suck and Israel needs to work much harder to stop their expansion. And Netanyahu is extremely unpopular internationally, and there's no way he'll win another election in Israel. But there's some context—on the practical level and on the political level—that might be helpful to understand why this problem persists.
First, why is Netanyahu prime minister again? His second real rise to power occurred in 2009. Back in 2005, Netanyahu advocated against Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. The Sharon government went ahead with it, but terrorism in Gaza skyrocketed as a result. So Netanyahu was seen by many as the conservative who was right all along, the only one who really wanted to keep Israelis safe from terrorists. But over time, Israelis slowly realized that his way was somehow just as shitty, and also that he was a corrupt piece of shit.
So Netanyahu was brought on criminal charges for corruption.
Israel had like 87 elections, and kept trying to form a majority coalition in its government. It kind of did a couple of times, but it fell apart fast, until Netanyahu managed to form a coalition again. Except now, his main goal was to not go to prison, so he was pretty fucking desperate. He cozied up to far-right nuts and made a really strange government. Their actions led to massive protests in Israel, and they didn't feel like negotiating with the opposition or listening to protestors. They made judicial reforms, they engaged in harsher / anti-Palestinian / super-fucking-racist policies, and made other changes to Israeli law that generally just sucked.
With regards to settlements... This is going to be a dramatically oversimplified take, and some portion of settlements are on disputed territory, but let's focus on the straight up West Bank territory... basically, the usual pattern is, Israelis building in Palestine is generally against Israeli law, but some developers do it anyway, and the government generally punishes them, but also doesn't condone bombing settlements or murdering Israeli civilians because they moved into those settlements (they usually move there because they can't afford to live in more expensive parts of Israel, or because they work in the West Bank, but sometimes because they're assholes who want to expand Israeli territory for some dumb religious reason). And basically, the far right is less interested in punishing, more interested in protecting. And there's also some licensing thing I don't really understand... And freedom of movement issues, and a whole lot of other pieces, but yeah, there are a lot of complicated factors. But some of the real nutjobs in Netanyahu's coalition are actually pro-settlement, so... that sucks.
Also, people now blame him for mistakes surrounding the attack, which... We're not going to dig into, because people are going to make it something it isn't.
Bruh israeli colonists are literally going around shooting people and throwing grenades in the west bank and the military is standing behind them to guard them from retaliation.
You're not gonna sit here and pretend israelis "get in trouble" for stealing Palestinian land. They get encouraged to do it.