"Living Under Israel's Missiles"

KilgoreTrout

http://www.thenation.com/article/video-living-under-israels-missiles/

Muntasir’s case [of PTSD] is even more dire, as he becomes tense before losing consciousness and collapsing. Once a happy and well-liked boy, Muntasir has become aggressive toward his family members and has repeatedly attempted suicide. Like many boys who saw family members killed in front of them, he now aspires to join the ranks of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, Gaza’s largest armed resistance faction.

They are just creating more terrorists with this approach.

Nyktos

You're assuming that's not the point.

KilgoreTrout

But why would they want to do that?

I mean, okay, I get having a boogeyman around can help you politically, if you do what Bush did and say "I'm the only one who can protect you from these evil terrorists, so vote for me," and that Netanyahu resorted to fearmongering in the last election.

But as difficult as it is for Hamas to kill Israelis, sometimes they do succeed. So any leader who cared at all about their people would not try to provoke others into taking hostile action against those people.

InsanityAddict

It's a long con, at least to some(note: Israeli leadership is not a monolith, as in all political machines you have true believers, cynical dicks, clueless peeps who just go along with what has 'worked' so far, people fighting for reform, etcetera). The more desperate you make the Palestinians, the more they clutch to radical ideologies or just break, the easier you can take heavier and heavier measures to slowly destroy their spirit and culture(look at the hullaboola the wall initially generated and now everyone just accepts it as fact). It's ethnocide, plain and simple. 

KilgoreTrout

Well, shit. I always thought it was a case of Well-Intentioned Extremists in government who were doing terrible things but who legitimately thought they had no other option--and like you say, there are probably people like that in Israeli politics.

But I never once considered the possibility that there might be other people who were like "We don't really have to go this far, and doing it will probably make even more people want to kill us who otherwise would have been content to leave us alone, but we're going to do it anyway because we..." And I have no idea how to finish that sentence. I mean, just...why???

Naas_Human

There are horrible people in the world. Sometimes they're in a position to make things worse for everybody.

lrdgck

I think the other people you speak of are a minority, or political mavericks. 

If I'm to pretend I'm smart, I'd add something about national trauma. Or not even trauma, but it's a trauma on Israel's part. USA, as a nation, has this deep belief that they're destined to spread freeduhm and democracy and apple pies throughout the world, then comes an awkward moment when some drone blows up a wedding party. Israel was literally founded on the aftermath of Holocaust, so they got this fear of 2d4 Hitlers springing up whenever they show a whiff of softness.

KilgoreTrout

That much I understand, and I know that it's common for people who were born after the end of WWII to have been told by their parents all about the Holocaust to make them good and scared of it happening again, so it just goes on and on.

It's been, what, 69 years now since the Nazis were defeated? 70? I understand the fear of another Holocaust, but the longer it goes without anything like that happening, the more far-fetched that fear seems, and the more it seems to me that it's rooted in horror stories told to children.

Because Israel is simply too well-armed and too well-connected for it to ever be the victim of anything like a second Holocaust.

As Art Spiegelman, creator of the graphic novel Maus, said once: "Israel is like some badly battered child with PTSD who has grown up to batter others."

For this next part I'm speaking with partial knowledge here instead of comprehensive knowledge, so hopefully that won't cause me to make any errors. But, going by what I remember from high school history class (which was in the '90s for me), what I've seen other people say, and what I picked up from quickly glancing at Wikipedia just now: as I understand it, part of the reason Hitler rose to power in the first place was because of how Germany was treated after World War One. Things like the Treaty of Versailles.

As I remember hearing it (and I am completely open to the possibility that I'm mistaken about things, so feel free to correct me if it turns out I am), Germany's economy was in the shitter, and the German populace was resentful about how severely they were being punished by the war's victors. The Depression hitting didn't make life any better for the average German. They wanted to feel strong and in control again, wanted to make their tormentors pay, and this made them more receptive to Hitler's message.

Compare that to the Marshall Plan, which did the opposite: instead of demanding that the defeated Germany pay reparations as the Treaty of Versailles did, money was spent to help Germany be rebuilt. And this, in turn, resulted in a German populace that felt very different from the way they'd felt following WWI.

Being absolutely merciless to a defeated enemy just makes them keep hating you, and it means that if they ever get the chance for revenge, they'll take it. Doing your best to bury the hatchet afterwards makes them not hate you and gives them no reason to take advantage of any revenge opportunities.

Bee

Another bunch of Nazis is more likely to happen in Eastern Europe than the Middle East.  See Golden Dawn, etc.

lrdgck

Yeah, but it's not so much which Nazi is the Naziest, but which is closer. At least, were. By now we're stuck with leftovers of the mindset coming from, like, the seventies or something like that. So it's not much about Jew-hatery in today's Greece.