u/Equivalent_Style_835

Time stamp: 8:24

Netanyahu says some Lebanese Christian villages asked to be 'annexed' by Israel | The Times of Israel

There is a massive hypocrisy in how people use "international law" to talk about Gaza.

The rule that allows targeting fighters during a war was made to protect civilians. It has nothing to do with who is right or who is the oppressor. It is just a basic guideline.

But when it comes to Palestine, the media and Western governments have twisted this rule. Here are two big double standards we are forced to accept:

1. Normalizing Total Destruction

People have been conditioned to accept that killing anyone connected to Hamas is totally fine. But think about the logic: even if you believe Hamas should be stopped because of war crimes on October 7th, why is the Israeli army the one allowed to do it?

We are talking about a military with a decades-long history of illegal occupation, apartheid, and documented violence. If the world actually cared about stopping war crimes, why are many people cheering on a brutal occupying army to destroy an entire movement and society?

2. The Asymmetry of Punishment

Where does the rule come from that says if a group commits a crime, the entire organization, and the cities they live in, must be completely eliminated? International law does not say that. And it definitely doesn't say an illegal occupying army gets to be the judge and executioner.

Look at the result:

The Resistance: Thousands of fighters are killed, and the entire movement is being wiped out by force.

The Israeli Army: Soldiers who film themselves committing obvious war crimes face zero consequences. The army gets total immunity.

Palestinians have a right to resist occupation. Resistance fighters are human beings living under extreme pressure. They can commit crimes, just like their occupiers do. But a crime by a fighter shouldn't be an excuse to wipe out the whole resistance.

These fighters did not appear out of nowhere. They are the direct result of decades of siege and settler colonialism. They are the children of Palestinians who were displaced or killed by state violence.

If these people truly cared about human rights and ending oppression, they would stop acting like the violence of the oppressed is the only problem, while treating the massive, daily violence of the occupier as completely normal.

> Netanyahu says: “I greatly appreciate the support we have received — and that I have secured over the years — from our American friends. But today I say: We need our own independent weapons-production system. We must manufacture our own armaments

>We need to free ourselves from dependence, continue building more and more strength, incorporate more and more technology, and train more and more generations of commanders like you — because ultimately that is what will determine our position,” Netanyahu adds.

>US Vice President JD Vance remarked in a press conference last week that in recent months, “two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected [Israel]” were US-made and funded by American tax dollars.

I feel that due to the unlimted money and support Western imperialism flooded Israel with since before its establishement, Israelis think for real that they might be strong or in full control of their situation.

>An Israeli battalion whose name became internationally associated with the killing of six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab during the Gaza genocide has suffered a major loss in southern Lebanon, with its commander among four soldiers killed in a deadly ambush.

>The Israeli military announced on Friday that Lt. Col. Dor Ben Shimchon, commander of the 52nd Battalion of the 401st Armored Brigade, was killed alongside three other soldiers during a security incident near Kfar Tibnit in southern Lebanon.

A core Zionist talking point claims that Palestinians are the ones trying to "destroy reality" by seeking the dismantling of Israel. But if you look closely at Middle Eastern history, the opposite is true. To establish and maintain its existence, Israel has always been the entity forcing radical demographic and geographic engineering onto a region that naturally resists it.

1. Erasing the Local Population: diplomatically with the British-backed Peel Commission of 1937 - by force during the 1948 Nakba through Plan Dalet

2. Redrawing Neighboring Countries: At the secret Sèvres Conference in 1956, David Ben-Gurion presented a "Grand Design" to completely partition the Middle East. He proposed dismantling Jordan (annexing the West Bank to Israel and the East Bank goes to Iraq, loyal to the British king), annexing southern Lebanon up to the Litani River and force a Christian proxy state in the rest, and stripping Egypt of the Strait of Tiran.

3. Dividing and Weaponizing Regional Minorities: most notably arming Christian militias in Lebanon, backing Iraqi Kurdish factions against Baghdad, and supporting southern Sudanese rebels. (Edit: Netanyahu's new Middle East vision, which he recently lost it from Iran)

A nation isn’t a reality just because of a UN vote, a military budget, or top-down deals signed with regional dictators. A true, lasting reality is an organic network of human beings who share thousands of years of geography, trade, culture, and social relationships.

Egypt, Iran, Palestine and other societies of the Levant are deep-rooted realities. Their people have lived together, hated, and loved each other for millennia. Settler colonies that managed to survive into the modern era did so via total demographic replacement (like the Americas genocide).

But that option is no longer historically viable, nor does the Zionist project have the human resources to pull it off. Drawing from a global pool of only ~15 million people, half of whom choose to live in the diaspora, Israel lacks the organic numbers to absorb or permanently alter a region of hundreds of millions.

Because it cannot become an organic part of the region's human fabric, Israel is stuck in a permanent cycle of trying to violently bend the reality of the Middle East to its will.

* To be clear, Israel is obviously not the only issue facing the Middle East, nor did it invent the complex regional conflicts involving ethnic and religious minorities. My focus here is strictly on how Israel has strategically weaponized and used these pre-existing internal fractures against its own existential threats, and exactly where that motive comes from. Since this is a subreddit focused on the Palestine/Israel conflict, it makes sense to analyze Israel's regional engineering rather than drifting into deep domestic Iraqi or Lebanese political history.

Historically, Israel’s major territorial withdrawals have almost always been precipitated by the unsustainable cost of military conflict or armed resistance:

Southern Lebanon (2000): Israel ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon unilaterally, primarily due to the relentless guerrilla warfare waged by Hezbollah, which made the "security zone" a political and literal minefield for Israeli troops. This was a major historical milestone, as Israel withdrew without requiring a formal peace treaty.

The Gaza Strip (2005): The Unilateral Disengagement was heavily influenced by the Second Intifada. Continuous, heavy attacks from Hamas and other Palestinian factions inflicted a toll too severe for the Israeli military to ignore or avoid. Protecting roughly 8,000 settlers surrounded by over a million Palestinians became a security nightmare and an immense financial drain, forcing the IDF to dismantle the settlements and pull back. However, Israel maintained control of Gaza's borders, airspace, and maritime territory via a blockade, and continued its occupation of the West Bank.

The Sinai Peninsula (Egypt, 1979): Before the 1973 War, Israel rejected Egyptian peace overtures (such as the 1971 Jarring Mission) that required a full withdrawal from Sinai. It was only after Egypt's surprise military assault in 1973 proved that Arab armies could inflict massive casualties and shatter Israel's sense of military invincibility that Israeli leadership seriously pursued the "land for peace" formula, culminating in the 1979 treaty.

*Note on the Oslo Accords: While the 1990s peace process created areas of limited Palestinian self-rule, it did not constitute a real withdrawal. In fact, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza nearly doubled during the Oslo years, proving that diplomacy alone did not stop or reverse territorial expansion.

Apart from these specific instances, there are no other examples where Israel has willingly given up lands it occupied or settled.

In October 1956, in a town called Sèvres in Paris. Representatives from Britain, France, and Israel, including Ben Gurion, Shimon Peres, and Moshe Dayan, met to plan a tripartite war against Egypt.

During these discussions, Ben Gurion laid out a sweeping, radical geopolitical strategy that historians refer to as his "Grand Design." Ben Gurion proposed completely redrawing the map of the Middle East to restructure the demographics of neighboring countries, ensuring Israel’s long-term regional dominance.

His specific proposals for each country were as follows:

Jordan: Ben-Gurion viewed Jordan as an artificial, "unviable" state. He proposed partitioning it so that Israel would annex the West Bank (or large portions of it), while the East Bank would be annexed by Iraq (then ruled by a pro-British monarchy). This was on the explicit condition that Iraq permanently resettle Palestinian refugees to effectively eliminate their cause.

Lebanon: He proposed tearing away southern Lebanon up to the Litani River and annexing it to Israel. He argued this would rid Lebanon of its heavy Muslim population concentration in the south, allowing it to be re-established as a stable, pro-Western "Christian state or emirate" allied with Israel.

The Suez Canal & Straits of Tiran: He called for internationalizing the Suez Canal to strip it from Egyptian sovereignty, while placing the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba under full Israeli military control to guarantee freedom of navigation.

Sinai: He aspired to seize the eastern half of Sinai along a line stretching from El Arish to Sharm El Sheikh, annexing it to Israel and taking control of the strategic oil fields in Abu Rudeis.

*This plan is deeply documented by historian Avi Shlaim in his landmark paper "The Protocol of Sèvres, 1956: Anatomy of a War Plot". A comprehensive summary of his findings can be found on the Protocol of Sèvres Wikipedia Page.

*It was also recorded in the book "The Gates of Gaza: Israel’s Road to Suez and Back, 1955-1957" (published 1994). It was written by Mordechai Bar-On, who served as the head of the military-diplomatic office and personally attended these meetings and recorded the details.