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Things like calling the Palestinians “amalek”, carving the Star of David into a playground with bulldozers, IDF soldiers taking about fulfilling prophecy…
by hypeit 3y ago
Things like calling the Palestinians “amalek”, carving the Star of David into a playground with bulldozers, IDF soldiers taking about fulfilling prophecy…
- tptacek 3y agoIf the claim is that militant Israelis are using religious rhetoric to justify their actions, that seems uncontroversial (though the "Amalek" thing is a misquote, and refers not to Palestinians but to Hamas itself). If instead the idea is that the "rhetoric" of "rabbis" is somehow automatically dehumanizing to Palestinians, that seems like a problematic claim.
- enterprise_cog 3y agoYou might want to let the IDF know then, cause they have taken the Amalek quote quite literally. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
- tptacek 3y agoOnce again: that quote refers to Hamas, not the Palestinian people. I am not disputing that it represents religious rhetoric used to justify IDF actions. I'm only pushing back on the notion that it refers broadly to Palestinians.
- enterprise_cog 3y agoThey have killed over 30k Palestinians. The settlers using that rhetoric are killing people in the West Bank. It’s pretty clear it means the Palestinian people.
- tptacek 3y agoKahanist extremists have used the term to refer broadly to Palestinians in the same way Christian extremists have deployed Christian tropes to dehumanize, well, everybody in the world at one time or another. But the "Amalek" quote is famous because Netanyahu said it, and we have the context for the speech in which he did: he was referring specifically to Hamas.
- enterprise_cog 3y agoAll the child and infant Hamas members. Yeah, right.
- tptacek 3y agoI don't know what you're trying to argue here. Nobody denies that an enormous number of civilians have been killed in the IDF's Gaza operation.
- khokhol 3y agoI don't know what you're trying to argue here. That you are attempting to wiggle away from the plainly obvious nature of the quote, for some reason. Nobody denies that an enormous number of civilians have been killed in the IDF's Gaza operation. Except of course numerous Israeli government officials. (They don't deny that many civilians have been killed -- but they have continually attempted to dial down the proportion of civilian casualties, along with all the rhetoric about there being "no innocents" or "no uninvolved civilians" in Gaza to begin with).
- tptacek 3y agoIn what way? You get that the Gaza offensive can be a long series of war crimes and unjustifiable civilian casualties and the quote can not mean what the parent comment said it meant, right? If you think the quote is an unimportant side detail, I think we can agree on that generally. This is a thread about rhetoric, not a judgement of the whole conflict.
- defrost 3y agoFor my part I find the implication that the rhetoric of rabbis is homogenous and aligned to be most problematic. There are those that appear to fully back Netanyahu and his longstanding views on treatment of the Palestinian state, there are others who are loudly against the actions of the Israeli state in recent years. ( I'd remark that there are more than two extremes but feel this is not the right thread to comment about rabbis on a spectrum )
- tptacek 3y agoYes, that's what snagged me here too. If the idea is just that IDF soldiers are brutalizing Palestinians while shouting religious slogans, maybe "religious language" is the better term to use. It's a common phenomenon on war and doesn't have any connotations of Jewish people being somehow exceptional about this.