Norman Finkelstein on his parents hating Germans - not Nazis - for the rest of their lives:

“It was unthinkable that they would have a kind word to say about Germans… I accepted, that given their life experience, they had the RIGHT to hate the people who destroyed their lives. And the people of Gaza have the RIGHT to hate the people who destroyed their lives”

the only innocent israelis are underage children, palestinians, their pets, and the handful of people who do prison time rather than be conscripted.

I just want to put this out there: from a haaretz poll, 31% of secular israelis believe that when an enemy city is captured, all inhabitants should be killed. That number only goes up as people get more orthodox.

Thats not to say they deserve the inhumane treatment they have visited upon palestinians to be visited upon them. But it is to say that never again is an incomplete sentence. It should read never again, by any means neccessary.

(cw sv) And ultimately, dying in a missile attack is far more humane than

being gangremovedd to death.

I dont know what dezionification should look like. But im pretty sure that if its done by the west it will look like denazification - that is to say, a small number of elites will be blamed and killed/imprisoned, and the people on the ground committing atrocities will walk free. Their children and grandchildren will receive zionist indoctrination, and no real education about why zionism is bad will take place.

The israelis and zionists more broadly, have done too much harm and acted too fucking gross about it for me to feel anything but joy at their suffering and death. In cases where it's just distasteful / harmful to others to celebrate their suffering, the best I can give them is to feel nothing.

Honestly, it's kind of like the Romanov kids at this point. It's sad they were killed in a sort of moral vacuum, but it's just so much harder to give a shit in the context of a war in which countless families were slaughtered, mostly by the White army. The invocation of their deaths and the expectation of sympathy becomes almost insulting, because no such concern or compassion, or even historical memory, is granted to the far greater sum of dead that died because of that royal family.

This genocide has damaged my soul. I categorically hate Israelis and have no sympathies for their losses. It has made me a worse person.

I pray that one day their fascist society is completely destroyed, and something less monstrous rises from the ashes. Then maybe we can heal together.

But until then, I hate every Israeli.

It’s good to be averse to cruelty, yeah. Don’t let anyone tell you that you should try to lose that part of yourself.

When I think of what I want to happen to people who have done terrible things, I think the most satisfying thing to imagine is a future in which they are denied ever having any power over others. Not a future in which they’re tortured or suffering or anything like that.

I just can't give a fuck about Israel. Between the high rate of military service, the broad public support for the genocide in Gaza, and the fact that so many can literally go somewhere else where they have citizenship... I'll save my sympathy until their cities look like Gaza.

I will be more sad for the jewish residents of various countries who will inevitably be put in the same pot as the racist entity. Modern day israelis have the "privilege" for actually being able to be more aware of the genocide of palestinians, unlike germans, italians, slovaks, japanese, croats, romanians and hungarians in ww2 who to various degrees had decades of resistance against fascism behind them. You can not compare them, sorry.

IMO it’s not losing your humanity to say that settlers and perpetrators of genocide not only deserve to be fought tooth and nail, but NEED to be, and it should be celebrated when they take hits as it is a step towards decolonization and the end of genocide. If the zionists don’t want to be in harm’s way they can always go home to Brooklyn or wherever and stop occupying. Once the state of “israel” is gone and a secular, just Palestinian state created, then we can talk about reform, reeducation, integration of settlers and their descendants. For now though I have no empathy for anybody there but the children and draft dodgers.

I have none. Don’t let yourself become another one of their victims. If someone cares about the future of humanity, it makes sense to hate them.

Nobody, not even Benjamin Netanyahu or Itamar Ben-Gvir, deserves having to pick up a family member's remains and stuff them in a plastic bag

I think they do deserve that, but it would be bad because the family wouldn't. Like if we could somehow create cruelty-free body parts for them to have to pick up forever as a form of "look what you have inflicted on others"-type punishment, I would be fine with that. If we could somehow Matrix VR them into that situation. But yeah, I agree with your post

Eh, the Isntrealis can choose peace, just as they claimed (but refused to offer the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians, etc) their victims could. They genuinely can, the Iranians are more civilized than settlers could ever hope to be in a thousand years.

I'm not gonna cry for the Hitler Youth and SS brigades, staunchly holding onto their genocidal ethos, getting mowed down in their entirety. They can always just- leave. Or throw down their weapons, join the other side.

Hating Israelis is inherently justified, just as Russian hatred toward Germans during World War II was born out of wartime atrocities, not ethnicity. But just as that hatred faded and Russians later lived peacefully with Germans in the GDR, emotions driven by conflict don’t define people forever. No group is irredeemable.

"now is the time of monsters"

I read that as what moral people must compromise to face immoral people. You must give up some of your humanity to confront evil.

Israel has shown us some of the absolute worst that humanity is capable of. The cruelty and sadism even normal Israeli civilians have displayed towards the Palestinians has been appalling and shocking. But I don't want to believe that the majority of people in Israel are ontologically evil, irredeemable psychopaths, I want to believe that they are normal people at their core. The inhumane hatred they feel for the Palestinian people isn't some unique phenomenon exclusive to Jewish settlers or Republican congressmen, but something any of us could experience for another group of people under the wrong circumstances.

True and yet also true of Waffen SS. Of Auschwitz guards, of many leadership in Nazi Germany so it rings a bit hollow and academic. In the sense that they were not born this way and if plucked by time travel at age 6 into the USSR and the red army they would have been entirely different individuals. These aren't demons summoned from beyond but humans. But their choices make them monsters as do their thoughts and support of these criminal acts.

Our hate for them is pure. It's not a hate born of who they were born as but who they chose to be. As Marx said, we will not apologize for the terror.

The only innocents are underage children, perhaps those under 24 or so as well as you can't necessarily instantly leave a place once you hit 19, you need money, resources, job prospects. But you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, empires don't fall without good people suffering too. Blowing up the death star may have killed some slaves or janitors who didn't even want to be there and were just trying to work through yet it was the correct thing to do. Shelling Berlin resulted in some kids dying, some people who probably hated the Nazi regime dying, yet it wasn't avoidable, their deaths, their blood is not on our hands and should not be on our conscious, it is on their neighbors and those of the majority around them who supported and created this. We are blameless for taking action to put them down and should feel no guilt over the matter. We should feel relief at the deaths of the fascists and should shrug at the few innocents lost among them, writing them down not as victims of us but of fascism.

We, I, will save pity and sadness and empathy for Gazans, for the Palestinian victims of the genocide, for Iranians now suffering and probably going to suffer more from this war, for those in Lebanon, for the resistance in Yemen and elsewhere. There's not room in my heart for sympathy for the perpetrators, for the aggressors.

I want the genocide to stop. There are different forces that could stop the genocide.

In a perfect world, the genocide wouldn't have started at all because it would have been stopped by the decency of the israeli people carrying it out. That clearly hasn't happened.

In a just world, the genocide would have been stopped through application of international law. However, because , institutions of international law are not stopping the genocide.

In a somewhat just world, the genocide would have been stopped through the resistance of the people being genocided. Despite phenomenal courage and some amazing successes amid the horror, those being genocided have not imposed a sufficient cost on Israel to stop the genocide.

In the unjust world we live in, where neither Israeli decency, international law, or the resistance have been sufficient to stop the genocide, the only thing I can see stopping the genocide is force. Iran isn't striking Israel to stop the genocide, but if their strikes either degrade Israel's ability to execute a genocide or draw their forces away from Palestine, then so much the better.

I don't celebrate these retaliatory strikes for their own sake, but because in the face of a sociopathic Israeli society, empty and racist international law, and resistance that to date has been insufficient to stop the genocide, they are the only foreseeable act that has potential to stop the genocide.

I feel like this all applies to USians too. After all the US is the largest purveyor of misery around the world, including the enablement and encouragement of israel's genocide of the Palestinians.

I try not to consider empathy a limited resource. A lot of people committed the crime of just being born there.

That said, there is also broad support of Zionism in Israel. Propaganda and education control do work, but many people aren't really interested in challenging it if it costs them something.

I think you're allowed to just be sad about the state of things, even the "best case" realistic outcomes involve screaming children and crying parents. That's just incomprehensibly sad.

There's no guarantee that doing the best you can will feel good.

I feel this a lot too. While I do enjoy and cheer for bombs falling on the fascist regime, there's still the part of me that understands how sickening it is to cheer for violence. Even if that violence is completely called for and is a tiny percentage of the violence the Israelis have inflicted upon others, the bombs weren't even targeted towards civilians and kids, while Israel is literally shooting starved people waiting for food.

There's a part of Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Losurdo that is quite relevant with this. In the process of debunking the deportations and concentration capms that the Soviets did to the Nazis, Losurdo describes the general sentiment the world had against Germans after their defeat. Westerners really went way over the top and wanted to do everything the Nazis did against them, even to their children. Soviets on the other hand were usually much more moderate. While in Czech and Polish concentration camps Germans were left to starve literally, Soviets still saw them as people. The Nazis that were guilty for war crimes would be tried and sentenced while the workers and peasant would be re-educated and reintegrated to society. This goes to show how much an ideology that's rooted in equality and doesn't believe in racial theories affects people in contrast with capitalism.

I hope that when Israel finally gets defeated, we will have the constraint to leave the monstrosities in the past and reintegrate most of the Israelis back to a healthy society without race supremacy and Zionism. People like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir deserve no compassion though. Straight to the wall, the most compassion you can show these monsters is to give them a quick death, something that no Palestinian has had the privilege of.

Don't lose that part of yourself otherwise you'll become like me and that is a bad place to be.

I just want them to have a shred of empathy and understanding they are doing this to others.

Well not JUST.

But I don't want to believe that the majority of people in Israel are ontologically evil, irredeemable psychopaths, I want to believe that they are normal people at their core. The inhumane hatred they feel for the Palestinian people isn't some unique phenomenon exclusive to Jewish settlers or Republican congressmen, but something any of us could experience for another group of people under the wrong circumstances.

I was raised in a somewhat conservative household in a somewhat conservative area and had planned on doing what most male members on both sides of my family going back multiple generations did and serve in the military before embarking on a different path entirely. It wasn't like I was ever expected to serve in the military and it's not like I defied social norms by going off to college. I'd like to think I would've anyway if there had been social or legal requirements, but it's a hypothetical.

So while I can't say I wouldn't be embarking on anti Palestinian pogroms if I had been adopted by a West Bank family as a baby and raised up in that culture, I can't really find it in my heart to care about those folks. Every day I spend in the imperial core makes me a passive participant in any number of unimaginable cruelties. Slavery, child labor, inhumane working conditions, the continued destruction of planetary ecology through pollution and over exploitation. And some folks want to go and pile more suffering on top of that? They need to contribute to the rivers of blood with their own two hands? I'm not going to waste time and energy trying to parse that mindset or try to figure out what quirk of social conditions or genetics separates me from them, or if they'd just be normal, sane-looking burger Americans if they came here. Fact of the matter was they had the choice and they made the wrong one and there should be consequences for that.

I honestly believe you are right that we should not lose our humanity over the Israelis. Gotta say, however, that while I logically agree with you, after all the horrors they have already inflicted and everything I've learned in the last almost 2 years about them, it's emotionally difficult, to say the least, to keep this in mind.

I thank you, sincerely, for posting this, because I know I'll have to remind myself regularly that beneath all that propaganda, slaughter, and crimes against humanity, they're still people.

The majority of Israel supports genocide so I’m not going to be sad about Israelis reaping their rewards. When the dust settles and Isreal dies, may the survivors grow empathy

I don't know what to do with this rage that I feel all the time.

While Israeli's are on the front lines of the expansion and preservation of western interests, and therefore actively committing unspeakable horrors reflexively, the rest of us living within the sphere of western hegemony should not feel like we are much better than the Israelis - while they are the weaponized vassal which is at the end of the chain of imperial brutality, we share in their machinery of imperial exploitation. We cannot distance and absolve ourselves from our own nation's participation in Israel's genocidal mania.

I write the above not to shield Israelis from the retributive justice that they deserve, but to thwart our base compulsions to escape into a focused criticism of Israel rather than organizing against our own governments which enable the acts of terror perpetrated directly by Israel. Even after the fall of Israel, if we do not confront our own ruling class by means of revolution, there will be another militant vassal of western empire in our future.

Nah, I'm out of empathy budget, it's been all used up caring about the victims of the various genocides the western colonial empire has carried out against oppressed peoples.

Sure don't dehumanize yourself, but no, hatred is not dehumanizing.

"Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself" comes with a corollary: as others do unto others, so they bring back upon themselves.

It is disgusting and fundamentally unfair that Nazis and Zionazis murder so many innocent people but then go on to enjoy long and happy lives. Where they ruin people's lives and make them suffer horrific losses, they get to go home and be happy. I feel no shame in saying that if oppressors killed my family, I would want to take their families away in exchange, so that they could feel some of the same pain they inflicted upon me.

I was raised Muslim, and I took great comfort in believing that the monsters who chose to butcher millions of Iraqis by invading Iraq would go to Hell and would suffer for what they'd done. The agony of those who died, and the torments of those who survived but lost their families and would carry that grief with them for the rest of their lives, had to be repaid somehow. It would be fundamentally wrong and unjust for those butchers to be "forgiven", as the Christians believed was possible through confession.

Now, there certainly are problems with doing exactly to the perpetrators what they've done to their victims, because some things are just undignified. For example, it'd be impossible to ethically

spoiler

SA

IDF guards who did that to Palestinian captives. So instead, they should be punished in a way that doesn't debase the people who enact the punishment, while still making them suffer to a degree approximately comparable to the degree to which their victims suffered at their hands. Life in prison under harsh conditions is one such option.

Should a Zionist Nazi's kid be killed because they supported killing Palestinian kids? On the one hand, eh, maybe, because then they feel the grief of their kid being killed. But more emphatically, no because that's unfair to the child and the child may be able to be salvaged by intensive re-education and rehabilitation programs. Instead, an equivalent approximation of suffering is called for, and that may mean imprisonment of the adults under harsh conditions, or it may mean Hell. Hell is a concept for a reason. It lets people call for retributive torture without sounding psychotic and expresses intense feelings of being wronged and needing the scales to be evened. The best way to even the scales is to bring the dead back to life. Since that is impossible, revenge will have to suffice. While revenge does not make anything better, it is better to bring down the perpetrators than to let them go on to enjoy their lives after ruining other people's lives. But leaving punishment to a Hell that likely does not exist is not really fair either, and that's why it is good when bad things happen to war criminals and those who support them.

Even the most despicable Zionist you can think of deserves better than what the Palestinians are going through.

Absolutely fucking not. Way to spit on the graves of the dead. Way to spit on the wounded hearts of those who've lost their whole families to these genocidal fucks. The most despicable Zionist deserves at least as much as they wish upon the Palestinians, but preferably more, because an eye for an eye is an unfair trade -- when someone takes the eye of an innocent, they implicitly consent to having their eye taken in turn, which means that the harm of doing something unjust to someone against their will cannot be repaid simply by taking their eye back. An evil eye for an innocent eye is not enough. I say instead, an evil head for an innocent eye!

Chastise the pacifist in your head, for it spits on the graves of the victims. Zionazis celebrate when they murder Palestinians. Well, as they want for others, they deserve for themselves. I'm not advocating a counter-genocide to pay them back for genocide because genocide is an act that inherently debases and dehumanizes the perpetrators and the Palestinians do not deserve to be made into monsters by the people who brutalized them, but I will never shed a single tear for any dead Isntreali unless they died as traitors against their apartheid state fighting for Palestinian liberation.

Similarly, I'm going to say it was really cool that Nakam (Revenge), the "terrorist" group of Jewish partisans, tried to kill 6 million Germans by poisoning a city's water supply and it's too bad British intelligence foiled their designs. It is the right of genocided peoples to extract a price in blood from their oppressors. Not from other people, as Nakam went on to do after their plans were interrupted (many of them went to Israel to do war crimes against undeserving Palestinians instead of deserving Germans), but from their oppressors. We joke all the time about how Germany did not de-Nazify, Stalin should not have stopped at Berlin, and that the whole country was complicit, and should stand by those principles even when they lead to uncomfortable conclusions such as "it's totally fine to kill people who have been genociding you".

Let it never get to the point where we cheer for some IDF general to get murked alongside 7 members of his family I'm not to the point where I'll cheer, but I'd get some grim satisfaction that Nazis are getting what they've done to others. I also find it difficult to imagine being married to some IDF general and not either doing a Lysistrata to get him to quit or murking him in his sleep to avenge his victims, so I don't have any sympathy for his wife. The kids? Sure, a little sympathy for the kids because kids are stupid and impressionable and can in theory be saved by re-educating them, but I'll be honest, I grew up around a lot of Zionist kids and they were so despicably racist to my family that I don't really care what happens to them.

The most compelling reason I can think of to not target civilians or the families of these Nazis, the reason I say they should not be targeted, is that there are rules against targeting civilians for a reason, and it debases and dishonors a fighting force to deliberately target civilians. It is not immoral, but it is undignified.

(I am an atheist, ex-muslim, none of my religious takes should be taken as the take of a true believer).

In practical terms: Any sort of durable peace process will mean that the vast majority of evildoers go unpunished. The vast majority of victims will go unavenged. This is just because of the practical realities of forging political peace and an end to fighting. So I'm not going to waste any emotional energy feeling sorry for Zionazis when they suffer a fraction of what they've done to Palestinians, or what they've cheered being done to Palestinians. Just as I didn't waste any emotional energy feeling sorry for American soldiers or their families when American soldiers would come home from doing war crimes in the middle east with PTSD and blown-off limbs. They have it coming and they are getting off easy already, there's no need to have any empathy for these ghouls.

In some level it is important to realize that it the Israeli project is founded on their own abuse and exploitation. Take a bunch of traumatized Europeans give them guns and point them at brown people. They were always dogs sent to war to empower the same people that hurt them.

That being said. Nuking the place would be a reasonable way to break the chain of generational trauma. The problem is the west will just invent a new colonial police force once the glass cools. I mean, also that we aren't ever going to get to push the button on this one.

Here's how I see it, when you support an agressive war you support dying for your country, now it happens that there are ways for states to wage wars without the war's supporters dying. But when that does happen, it's surprise pikachu face