Mandela’s imprisonment was a big deal in the west, despite governments labeling him as a terrorist, his story galvanized significant international support.

Oh, you mean a primary operative of the ANC that pushed hard to start their guerilla efforts? lmao

Cute that you accuse me of fairy tales while you’re the one spouting all the messaging about a clearly losing party that could only win if only the air planes went away.

I haven't said that, actually. You have confused yourself again.

I’m afraid complexity is real, though.

Complexity is real, but this topic is not. You are just incurious and, like other liberals, decide to whitewash that ignorance as a recognition of (unstated, unidentifiable) complexity. A cop-out, basically. Notice that you have basically nothing to say about the alleged complexity. Nothing that actually challenges anything I've said.

Humans are a mess, and do things for all manner of reasons, despite our faiths trying to oversimplify everything into some imaginary god or single philosophy of materialism.

Okay bro just one more toke bro. You are so confused, I don't even know where to begin. When did we begin discussing materialism or philosophy? Buddy, we are stuck at the basics of things like not lying and remembering what we are talking about and how you should read before sharing opinions.

You may have addressed it, but you’re simply nonsensical.

I don't know what you're referring to and I don't care to try to figure out out. Be clearer in your thoughts and words or use the quote feature.

Nitpicking pointless details. Fine, all fighters for the North Vietnamese were not the sole cause for victory.

I didn't say anything like that either lmao. You seem to have no idea what is happening most of the time, it's like you don't even read what I said.

It takes two sides to end a war, a side has to accept its defeat. The US only accepted its defeat due to domestic factors, there were plenty of war hawks keen to keep going.

I've already addressed this. I will wait for you to respond to what I said instead of endlessly repeating yourself.

No, I am not the one looking at a sole cause. I acknowledged the efficacy of the guerilla campaign. The one looking at sole causes is you, pointing to that guerilla campaign. I am saying it alone is not enough, more factors were necessary.

Same as before, I don't know what you're referring to and don't care to go and figure it out. Use the quote feature or organize your thoughts.

Uh huh, shift all the blame to cover for yourself, very convenient. It’s pretty clear to see a political agenda instead of an honest intellectual conversation though.

I am having a very honest conversation, but it is in no way intellectual. We are, as I said, stuck at very basic things like, "is it okay to lie?" and, "do I need to actually go and try to learn things before having and sharing my half-baked opinions?" and, "maybe what will help is a series of confused generalizations about faith and god and philosophy of materialism with no relation to what anyone else is talking about". We could only ever have an intellectual conversation if you were in any way interested in an intellectual topic. To be perfectly frank, this topic does not require much in the way of an intellectual discussion, it is mostly about establishing basic facts of which you are entirely ignorant and obstinately refuse to engage with our educate yourself about, but you do seem to think that I am at fault for not accepting your nonsense fabrications you offer as substitute.

Your whole thrust is in defense of hamas.

I'm not certain that I've even mentioned Hamas in this conversation. I certainly wouldn't reduce the Palestinian resistance to only Hamas. I think you are just projecting your own lightweight understanding of the topic onto me.

Mine is not in support of Israel’s genocide, though, just in an accurate understanding of what’s going on, no matter who it reflects poorly upon.

But you have no understanding of what is going on. Nearly everything is clearly a revelation to you. There is rarely anything concrete or specific in what you say and when there is it is usually wrong or misleading. When I provide concrete specifics you just make things up to be contrarian and rescue your prior fibbing. You are acting in the exact opposite way that you are currently claiming.

The real propagandist here is pretty clearly you, you are attempting to positively participate in an ongoing military conflict, and help one of the two sides. I understand, but don’t throw stones when the real agent is yourself.

Agent? What? I of course stand with the Palestinian resistance, this is obvious and I in no way hide it. And propaganda is just an attempt to convince others of political positions through argument and presentation. We all engage in it. But mine is accurate, informed, and just.

Unfortunately you have decided that the important thing here is your ego and not, say, the Palestinians themselves. God forbid you learn anything about them.

You seem to like your “truths”, but that just speaks to your deep and abiding faith. That’s religious talk.

Those are your words, not mine. You're just telling yourself stories and believing them again.

I prefer hard evidence, and I don’t trust internet anecdotes.

You clearly do not, you are not interested in investigating this topic whatsoever. You prefer to use requests for evidence to have other people fetch things for you and then use them purely rhetorically.

The borders around Gaza have been set for decades, it isn’t the West Bank. These aren’t fresh settlements of right wing settlers that just moved in.

Decades is not a very long time, per this topic. Refugees in Gaza exist who were kicked from their homes in the nearby area in living memory. If you actually stated your point, though, it might be easier to address it.

There was no evidence of any sort of successful widescale resistance to the Oct 7th attack, which would not have been the case had the border kibbutz been camps of armed jailors, as you attempt to portray.

So many qualifiers. The Kibbutzim did fire back, it is one of the reasons many were killed in the first place, per first hand accounts. Several articles have been written about Kibbutz Be’eri, presumably to provide the most favorable of narratives, and in dire need of a skeptical lens, but of course these articles tend to mention that the Kibbutz has an armory of M16 rifles that the settlers almost immediately ran to. This is standard in such locations, they are little walled, armed communities. You would know this if you were ever in any way curious about the topic instead of approaching what I say with ignorant contrarianism.

No more generalized than your sweeping assertion of material causes.

Hardly. My claims re: material basis is about actual settler-colonial bases, both current and historical, and this is an inarguable fact of settler-colonialism: it requires that the settlers feel reasonably safe and secure on their stolen lands. Israeli society makes much of this, they talk about their iron dome often and the necessity, but also success, of their high level of militarization against Palestinians. And when you look to polling, and the politics of Israel, you will find that they are outraged over a loss of status, of an inability to return the hostages, of being forced from the area around Gaza and from Northern Israel, and that in return they want military escalation and death. When the government launches new campaigns, when they bomb residential neighborhoods, their ratings go up.

If you deigned to read and engage with what I had said about this material basis, you would not be saying such silly things.

Not everything is concrete, ultimately, humans do very stupid shit sometimes. Like I said, fundamentally illogical. Our decisions are based on the firing of neurons in our brains, which are not limited to solely material causes. If you weren’t faith-blinded, you could see this. It’s common sense, and very much an everyday occurrence.

This sounds like the "deep" thoughts of an high mediocre college freshman. Who knows what your point is. Apparently you think your appeal to your belief in "illogic" is somehow comparable to the decades of settler colonialism and the psychology basis of settlers, long studied and described by the oppressed who wage resistance against them. You seem to think your imaginary vague idea of people "being illogical" is far more reliable analysis than, say, settlers needing to feel secure in their occupation, arming themselves, building up a series of racist oppressions to do so, etc. You have no real response to this, which is why you can barely string these thoughts together.

The IDF is 400k strong by last estimate, who knows what it’s up to now. This is more of your faith speaking

Again these are your words and then you say it is "more of my faith", lmao. You are deeply confused.

PS the IDF is mostly teenagers and young 20-somethings with inflated titles that fall apart in any real fight. The Zionist press is absolutely chock full of articles about how "the troops" lack capacity due to attrition (casualties and psychologically) and cannot fight in Lebanon.

a blind trust that without advanced weaponry, Israel somehow falls apart.

I actually already mentioned some specific examples of why their doctrine falls apart without constant supplies from the US. If only you had the courage of your convictions to directly address what I had said. Instead you play little games.

It makes no sense in the cold light of day. 400k soldiers is a lot. You can man a border and enforce a famine with that many.

These forces can't even push much more than a hair into Lebanon and that is with massive air support.

Wow. I think Israel’s early wars, where the entire Arab coalition was crushed without the aid of air power

Israel has never won a war without air power and full support of a major imperialist sponsor, whether it was the British or US. You are simply making things up again.

Fine, allow me to clarify my question.

It occurs to me that you don't know how to use the quote feature of Lemmy. Perhaps you are too proud to ask? It is not always clear what you are responding to.

Does Netanyahu’s government look like it is failing in its current objectives?

This question is too vague. An entire government has many objectives addressing different topics. Do you want me to list objectives for you? Or do you have some in mind to make your question more clear?

Huh, so you’re saying the destruction of Gaza was all part of the plan? An indication of weakness? That’s a pretty twisted path to victory, you’re just going to get them all killed. Unfortunately, far more genocides have succeeded through history than liberation battles. That’s the sad reality of the world we live in, it’s what we have to work with.

Every resistance fighter in Palestine knows that the Zionists will respond with incredible cruelty and a massively outsized response. The ratios of killed or wounded are typically 10:1 or more. These decisions are made with full eyes about what it means to provoke and escalate, but it is the same logic as those of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is people who see a slow genocide and displacement as guaranteed from the status quo and from all other realistic paths provided. And they set out a plan to disrupt the Zionist entity, to agitate, which will, knowingly, create a disproportionate response, in order to forward their goals of resistance, to undermine Zionist security, to test their own capacity for war, to bleed their enemy through the tactics I have already mentioned.

If you actually cared to learn anything about this topic, you would already know this. They have repeatedly made public statements about this. There is a reason they call their fallen compatriots martyrs. There is a reason they place emphasis on mourning via righteousness and solidarity and not simply despair.

That’s cute, but again, your path to victory is a farce. Israel is not losing, except in your fantasies. It’s objectives move steadily closer and closer to success, hamas’ do not.

Israel is now well-known to be a genocidal ethnostate, a rogue state. The world stands against them. Again, something you would know if you weren't locked in a box of propaganda. Along with regional allies, Israel is in turmoil and on the brink of falling apart, with its credit ratings tanking every few months. It is a country dependent on finance capitalism, with related industries like tech, and those workers have largely fled. It is attempting to lash out and provoke further war, and it is succeeding only at, yet again, mass killing of civilians without actually addressing the fundamental collapse within.

If you cared about this topic you would already know these things.

No, air power is not necessary to man a border or keep checkpoints closed, that’s silly.

It is when you are a 19-year-old Israeli brigadier-general whose CO just got sniped in front of them. They can barely operate without overhwelming air support. This is their war doctrine, it is identical to the Americans'. You would already know this if you cared about this topic.

Okay, so what about the ground assaults the IDF has conducted into Gaza?

They only occur after massive civilian bombing campaigns and they routinely lose to guerillas. They declare an area cleared and then resistance fighters pop back up a few days later. Their allegedly new strategy in North Gaza is to begin more thoroughly razing it via bombings because they simply cannot win against the guerillas with their soldiers.

You would already know this if you cared about this topic. One wonders if you will someday acquire shame at this poor behavior.

Quite a large amount of footage came out from both hamas and IDF sources showing ground fighting. The IDF continued to advance.

All of this occurred under conditions of full air support and bombing campaigns. Did you forget what we were talking about? I think so.

Israel has domestic manufacturing too, by the way, they produce their own tanks and small arms, drones are not difficult.

Nowhere near enough. They are dependent on US weapons and materials and logistical support.

The ANC was driven underground, its leadership fled or arrested. That’s crushed.

The ANC, as well as the rest of the tripartite group, was underground for 3 decades during which it made nearly all of its major advances. "Crushed", lmao. Who do you think the apartheid government negotiated with? You know nothing about this topic.

Yes, it persisted underground, and eventually entered peaceful negotiations, this is true, but alone it would have never accomplished these goals.

Nobody ever said the ANC was alone. It had quite a substantial amount of support from the Soviets, for example, as well as the Cubans and the Palestinian resistance. You are simply ignorant of the history.