> The majority of Israelis (45%) are Mizrahi or Eastern Sephardi
That's irrelevant to the OP's point. Mizrahi Jews only started arriving after Israel was founded. The people who founded Israel were almost 100% Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe.
> The people who founded Israel were almost 100% Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe.
Israelis like Geulah Cohen, Moshe Barzani, Eliyahu Hakim, Shimon Tzabar, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, Mordechai Alkahi, Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, Eliezer Kashani, and Shmuel Tankus were all prominent Mizrahi leaders and commanders in Lehi, Irgun, and the Haganah.
Kurdish, Iraqi, Levantine, and Turkish Jews had been a prominent demographic in what became Israel well before 1948 due to it's former Ottoman status along with communal incidents in Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria, and Turkiye well before 1948.
In addition, in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the Ashkenazi who arrived in the Levant at the time aligned with "Ottomanization" [0] or assimilating into Ottoman Turkish culture and dropping any trappings of European culture, hence David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi becoming students at the Dârülfünûn-ı Şâhâne in Istanbul and assimilating into Turkish culture during their formative years.
The Labor Zionist movement tended to be primarily Ashkenazi, but they were not alone in founding Israel. Mizrahis were overrepresented in the Irgun and Lehi, both of who's political wings became the Likud.
The existence of individual Arab Jews in Israel in 1948 does not change the point that the founders of Israel were almost all Ashkenazi Jews.
Almost every important Israeli politician in the founding years was Ashkenazi (and to this day, every prime minister has been Ashkenazi, surprisingly enough). Yes, you can name various individual members of the pre-state militias / terrorist groups who were not Ashenazi, but they were a tiny minority in a movement dominated by people from Central / Eastern Europe.
Yes - Hamas killing Gaza people who criticised them - was that reported? Hamas also kills and / or bashes Palestine reporters who report about them if story is not favourable to Hamas
Israel has targeted and killed 180 - 240 Palestinian journalists and media workers. Citations are easily found.
This is the deadliest conflict for journalists and all of the ones referred to above where murdered by one side, Israel.
This does not take into account the family members, children and others they killed in their often indiscriminate and deadly targeting of those that might report on what is happening in Gaza.
+972 Magazine is reputable. They have broken several major stories during this war, which have held up under scrutiny.
They revealed the Israeli "Lavender" system, for example, which is used to carry out mass AI-driven targeting of supposed Hamas members (and it turns out they target tons of tenuously related people, as well as anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of those people).
The reason why +972 Magazine has been able to break these stories is because it has anonymous sources inside the Israeli military and intelligence establishments. There are still people in Israel who do not agree with everything their government is doing, and some are willing to talk to journalists.
+972 Magazine is pretty rare, in that it's a collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian journalists. Their "motives" are that the Israeli journalists at +972 are much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than most Israelis are, and the Palestinian journalists believe in working together with Israelis to end the military occupation.
A journalist is murdered (deliberately, by the admission of the perpetrators) by an army that is carrying out a genocidal war against a civilian population, and this is your response? "But why didn't he report on XYZ?"
> Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.
Terrorism and insurgency are not mutually exclusive.
The classic example of a modern insurgency, the Algerian resistance against the French, was led by a terrorist organization, the Front de libération nationale (FLN). More correctly, it was a political organization that used terrorism as a tactic, and which eventually became the government of an independent country.
Hamas is a pretty similar case to the FLN (though the PLO was more similar in the old days, in terms of ideology).
Defeating the government of an impoverished, low-tech country in 60 days is not exactly like Napoleon crossing the Alps. It's also not victory.
The US fought for 20 years, could never eliminate the insurgency, and then withdrew with its tail between its legs, leaving the old government to come back to power.
Yes, if you kill 10%, 20%, 30% of the population, maybe you'll eventually destroy the insurgency, though that approach hasn't worked yet for Israel in Gaza. But if you're not completely genocidal, that's not an option.
> This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars
The world wars were not counterinsurgency operations (except from the German and Japanese side in the occupied countries). They were traditional wars between major powers.
By today's standards, mass rapes against german civilian women by the soviet army and other allied forces[0] or bombing of various cities of no industrial importance, such as Dresden would be easily considered as war crimes.
Saying "but they were nazis" is no different that when the Hamas explains that every Israeli civilian is a soldier to justify their actions.
A lot of people say "We did Dresden" to justify Israel's crimes but they don't realize Dresden was viewed very negatively even by the allies and the people involved in the attack after the war...
The Germans weren't a stateless people who had lived under an oppressive foreign military occupation for over half a century, after getting kicked out of their homeland. They were a major world power that decided to launch a war of conquest against the rest of Europe and beyond.
These are more not remotely similar situations.
What is the ideology that is even supposed to be eliminated in Gaza? Killing people who are oppressed is not going to make them start loving their oppressors.
The Gaza Health Ministry has a very good track record of providing verifiable death counts.
It works on the basis of reports from hospitals, and keeps information (like name, ID number, age and gender) for every deceased person. A lot of that information can actually be verified by Israel, since Israel controls the Gaza population Registry. If these people later showed up alive, that would easily prove the Health Ministry is lying. Yet that hasn't happened.
After past conflicts, outside organizations have reviewed the Health Ministry's numbers, and have determined them to be accurate, which is why major news organizations consider it reliable.[0] Even the Israeli government privately considers the numbers to be reliable and uses them in internal discussions, though it publicly claims them to be unreliable (the reader can guess why). Israeli intelligence has surveilled the Health Ministry, and came to the conclusion that it was working in good faith.[1] Again, this is completely different from what the Israeli government says in public.
The Gaza Health Ministry has periodically released its entire list of verified deaths. You can read every person's name, age, etc.[2]
The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
> The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
Just to back this up - this study published in the Lancet estimates a 41% undercount for deaths up to June 30, 2024.
This is exactly the sort of brain-dead take that my comment was meant to correct.
The Gaza Health Ministry is a professional organization that has been found again and again to work reliably. Even Israeli intelligence has determined that the Gaza Health Ministry is reliable. Look, I don't like the fact that a far-right political party (founded by a literal terrorist, Menachem Begin) that wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza runs the Israeli government, but I still trust morgue data that comes out of Israel. The same goes for Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry was also completely destroyed in March 2024, because the increasing death toll was inconvenient. Since then, the most cited death toll ("more than 50,000") has been the one that was current in March 2024.
You'll have to explain that to the Israeli intelligence services, which surveiled Gaza Health Ministry staff (e.g., listening to their phone calls) and determined that they were working in good faith.
Just because the governing political party carries out terrorist attacks against Israel, that does not mean that literally every institution in Gaza is unreliable. The IDF carries out war crimes all the time and is known to be extremely unreliable,[0] but there are still many institutions inside Israel that are reliable.
0. There are way, way too many examples of this to list here, but I'll just highlight one. The IDF attacked a convoy of Palestinian ambulances in Rafah, killing almost all of the paramedics. When this came out, the IDF put out a statement claiming that the ambulances were actually being used as a cover for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and had approached an IDF position with their lights off. Then, a video surfaced of the incident, showing that the ambulances were flashing their emergency lights, and that the paramedics were unarmed and had been gunned down by the IDF. It also came out that the IDF had subsequently buried the ambulances, in order to try to hide the evidence. In other words, the IDF committed a war crime, tried to cover it up, and then concocted an elaborate series of lies that they put out for public consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre.
It's very convenient to assert that literally nothing that goes on within Gaza is knowable, in exclusion of any other facts, "because Hamas", but you're not actually engaging with the reality that external validation and corroboration can still exist.
reply