Led by Defense Minister Israel Katz and IMOD Director General Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amir Baram, the effort to expand Israel’s defense industrial base and accelerate production rates across Israeli defense industries remains ongoing. The air and sea bridge serves as a critical component in this effort, strengthening operational continuity, supporting the full range of IDF needs, and enhancing readiness and stockpiles.
The air and sea bridge, which has been running continuously throughout the campaign, is led by the IMOD Defense Procurement Directorate (DPD), through its International Shipping Division, the IMOD Missions to the United States and Germany, and the IDF’s Planning Directorate. The Israel Airports Authority and the Israel Civil Aviation Authority are also partners in the operation.
I do not believe Israel will accept peace from here on out unless we geopolitically force Israel too, at least not until the region has been utterly engulfed in war.
I think Israel has imperial ambitions. Why just control Israel beset by enemies on all sides instead of conquering said enemies and rule them instead?
Edit: I just learned that the population of Israel is 10 million and it is simply not feasible for them to do so. Am I wrong to be shocked to learn that they are just 10 million? I thought for sure at least 50 or more, that is absolutely tiny.
Am I wrong to be shocked to learn that they are just 10 million?
Especially when this toxic attempt to conflate Judaism with Israel was placed into an absurd light by the fact that New York City has a population of 10 million, is the other largest concentration of jews on earth next to Israel, and happily and lovingly elected a muslim to lead their city. No problem, if people don’t like Zohran and you aren’t a rightwing ideologue it isn’t because he actually espouses any hateful ideologies towards your religion, Judaism or otherwise. Rather maybe you think his healthcare or public education policy is bad…
That is why I think Zohran’s election is so globally important, it throws a wrench in this stupid, regressive religious war narrative being supercharged by the rich and powerful right now.
There is nothing about Judaism or Islam inherently that makes either religion incompatible with the other, no matter if you can quote batshit crazy things out of either religion’s holy texts, because no matter what religion you believe in, or whether you believe in religion at all what makes you a good person isn’t whether you believe in a floating magic being in the sky.
It is less about the axioms of reality you start with and more about whether you choose to employ them to rationalize empathy or violence which in a weird way is kind of the thrust of a lot of religious philosophies, the point is you have been empowered to make a choice.
I think Israel has imperial ambitions.
Maybe it is more precise to say Israel cannot escape its imperial ambitions due to its politics and choices. Which… is a scarier statement but I think it is true and it is why I post so much stuff about Israel even though I despise antisemitism (as I do Islamophobia or any other kind of stereotyping, judge people for who they are not what categories are applied to them by others).
Yes though, Israel has explicitly stated a desire to fulfill a longstanding desire to establish a “Greater Israel”. This is a process of colonialization coupled with extermination and that is another reason I rage so endlessly about the danger of falling prety to seeing this through a lens of antisemitism or just assuming Israeli culture is uniquely rotten (though it is crushingly complict) when the reality is this is a direct extension of US and Western Colonialist processes coming to an unarguably intentional conclusion in the Middle East.
Israel’s Imperialism is bad for jews, it is bad for muslims, it is bad for christians, it is bad for everyone except conservative religious rightwing extremists who need the threat of some outside extinctionary force to distract from their incompetency, cruelty and hollowness of spirit.
"While it’s true that there are major trends that younger American Jews are more progressive and sympathetic to Palestinians, it’s also true that for as long as Zionism has existed, there have been anti-Zionist Jews,” said Miller. “I learned a lot from elders who were in their 70s, 80s and 90s who have been anti-Zionist since Israel was created because they never felt that what they wanted or needed was an ethnostate to represent them.”
I believe in judging people by their character and their actions. However, ideological or any social sub group affiliation does have relevance. I think that adherence with formally stated Western ideals of human rights is a prerequisite for me to respect another person or group of people.
There is a problem though, let’s say that you are part of some group, and that group comes under the leadership or general control of a subset of the group that skews the identity or broader intention of the group so that you no longer agree with the stated motives yet come subsumed under them? Plenty of Israelis disagree vehemently with the Israeli state’s goals and methods to reach them.
I am not sure where I am going with this, just thinking out loud I suppose.
Context is important in so far as it extends your capacity for empathy and to help you process your anger, hurt and fear into more productive aims but context never MAKES someone choose evil like the evil we are experiencing. Evil is evil because it is a choice, otherwise we are just talking about destructive chaos that could not have been stopped by any particular actor withholding malice.
Plenty of Israelis disagree vehemently with the Israeli state’s goals and methods to reach them.
Om… to be honest the polling in Israel does not support this, if people disagree at least publicly in Israel it is usually because they are even more rightwing extremist and hardline in their beliefs than Netanyahu and the current government. If you protest in Israel as a leftist you get silenced almost immediately.
Still yes of course, my point is never judge a group by some imagined measurement of an average value within it, judge people for who they are and the choices they make individually. There is no other way, as messy as it is the judgement always requires the context and act or choice is subject too.
You know I cannot in good faith argue your counterpoint because my source of information is some news article I read way back, and I am fully aware of how prevalent and efficient media propaganda is and that I am not immune to it.
Let me see if I can find something… One moment.
Well ok, I think this is what I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_hostage_deal_protests
Yes but compare polling on aspects around the Iran War or the Gaza Genocide for that matter and though you will find the US and Israel governments in lockstep about the subject in question you will find that by and large these foreign policy choices are not reflective of the beliefs of the average person in the US. To put it another way, the government of Israel largely reflects the value system of its society in this moment, whereas the same cannot even be remotely said of the US government and the society it claims to represent the desires of.
The Gaza Genocide has popular support in Israel, there functionally is no political opposition party running on a more humane or progressive change to the madness. The same can be said about the party structures of the GOP and DNC, there is bipartisan support (or was before genuine antisemitism exploded on the right) for the Gaza Genocide. The US people on the otherhand are pissed as hell about it and want creeps to stop attacking Ms Rachel for having empathy for children and throwing mud on Judaism by conflating it with Zionism.
I don’t say this to permanently condemn Israeli society but to point out how a society can become radicalized into desiring ethnic cleansing and how we must grapple with the way that is a direct result of geopolitics much of the world has been involved in, in some way or another, though the US is by far and away the most complicit next to Israel itself in this horrid offense against the value of human life. The Arab powers deserve some blame for letting this get out of hand, so does Europe. There is plenty to go around without risking drawing the bulk of the blame off of Israel and the US.
We are all in danger if we let the fundamentalist, rightwing extremists in our societies call the shots here, the world has not been this geopolitically fragile in decades.
US and Israeli governments
Obviously. I was referring to a subset of the Israeli population.
the government of Israel largely reflects the value system of its society in this moment
I do not believe this holds in general for nations around the world, just like with capitalism, I do not believe in the fundamental idea that the market responds to consumer needs and wants, but rather control those needs and wants in a top down fashion- much like governments don’t reflect as much as dictate the ideological path and if you will cultural myth of a nation.
these things are not reflective of the beliefs of the average person in the US.
I was too hasty in replying.
I don’t say this to permanently condemn Israeli society but to point out how a society can become radicalized into desiring ethnic cleansing and how we must grapple with the way that is a direct result of geopolitics much of the world has been involved in,
Agreed, I think that is what I was kind of alluding to in my previous reply. The leadership dictates. They own the media, the means of information as it were, if not directly then through other means and surreptitiously or informally. So what can even be believed?
I have felt a serious lack of reliable news coming out of and in relation to Iran since the war started, different from what I have seen in other conflicts. There is very serious information blackout around what is really going on on the ground.
Again, I am not really making any point, just conversing on the topic because I want to talk to others about their feelings and thoughts about what is going on, media isn’t providing shit.
Again, I am not really making any point, just conversing on the topic because I want to talk to others about their feelings and thoughts about what is going on, media isn’t providing shit.
The media desperately wants this to be a religious war, on all sides it seems. I am not sure the rest of the world looking on understands that and it worries me.
sigh
My only real gripe with what you have said is be careful to acknowledge that human rights are a global intersectional movement of convergent evolution. Genuinely free societies in history are like flowers, their pollen is distributed by thinkers and philosophers who wing from one context to the next across vast cultural, spatial and temporal divides. Even when everything is pavement there are still the necessary cracks for the stories to continue to spring until we get them right.
I hope we continue to strive towards truly valuing human rights in “The West” however we may define “The West” in a context, but there are many long histories and cultures with long traditions of understanding human rights in their own way that are equivalent on the important bits.
This polyphony of histories are deeply hypocritical, as are our histories, no matter we can still chart a genuine goodness through them as wide as the desires of most regular people are kind in their simplicity the world over as surely as we are all the same species.
May we learn from the best bits from all over the world and push the needle towards freedom.
To be clear I don’t mean to assume you disagree with this I just want to emphasize the point.
