If you want to compare before and after:

https://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649... - then click "show historical imagery" next to the search box.

The horror of the "Playground" marker here: https://earth.google.com/web/@31.28532193,34.25349609,77.611...

It's sad that most world leaders do nothing to combat such genocide. There are so few sanctions against the state, or specific people, of Israel. Foreign forums are very much still open for business to them.

What do you think world leaders should've done differently?

Cut off weapon gifts+sales to Israel, impose sanctions. Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.

Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).

Nuclear weapons sure, but what is this about Epstein?

Do not forget that world leaders are heads of sovereign states that are in charge of their self defense. Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies, need to make public statements that are not hypocritical about what they would do for self defense. This is why both U.S. administrations support Israel's actions

Pretty sure that's not why US administrations support Israel's actions.

Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.

For a great example of this, look at this pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZcMbdFcx87PrqoYNA

And here's a pin of where the farms were spared https://maps.app.goo.gl/iZbbTH4iH27FCz4s9

They just use bulldozers to flatten whatever the bombs don't. They can drive a bulldozer pretty precisely, especially when they don't care who's in front of it or under it.

Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9

By the time the bulldozers are there civilians have long moved out of the area.

I don't quite understand your argument here. In your first pin I'm struggling to find a single building that isn't leveled, or at least severely damaged. Even buildings far away from the city center in the boonies are leveled.

They are saying that this is genocidal destruction. In a war sometimes civilian infrastructure is hit as collateral. But here, all infrastructure is destroyed and it's clear this wasn't done by 1 or 2 errant bombs but rather because of direct targeting. It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.

this is entirely purposeful

Please check Norman Finkelstein's latest book namely Gaza's Gravediggers on this matter [1].

He also has a very telling and chilling interview recently on Palestine and Gaza [2].

[1] Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places [book].

[2] Norman Finkelstein Reveals Shocking Discoveries While Researching History of Israel’s Gaza Obsession [video]:

https://youtu.be/Jmv2h1WYnNo

What a nice, objective guy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/uyqjn2/norman_fink...

He also promotes transphobia. Chomsky was friends with Epstein and acquaintance of Steve Bannon. I don’t think that discredits his entire body of work, but I think we should stop promoting him when there are sources that are less problematic.

A war requires at least two militaries. This is what happens when a well armed military engages a mostly unarmed civilian society unable to mount significant opposition.

Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.

Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.

You can also see a lot of buildings demolished on the Egyptian side too.

In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.

Sergey Brin, who founded and owns most of Google with Larry Page, said recently (during the genocide) that he visited Ben Shapiro (genocide advocate) and had fun. They show these things in Google Maps, but don't forget that Google is not a 'neutral' company in this conflict.

This is not factually accurate to say they own most of Google, the most I’ve seen of the two of them combined owning presently is 12%

Israeli here. Maybe I can give some helpful context.

Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this - any “support” for Palestinians is seen as a very far-left idea after Oct 7. There are still many here who oppose the extent of the war - I see regular demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for peace. I will note that there seems to be fairly universal agreement that _something_ needed to be done after Oct 7. If you want to understand the Israeli perspective (doesn’t seem like most commenters do, but I’m not writing this for them), you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.

But anyways, don’t take my word for anything, pay attention to our upcoming elections. We will see how big the tents are then.

Wishing for peace, for saner voices to rise, and for an end to this cycle of violence.

Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame? That Zionism is a European colonial ideology and at it's very core requires ethnic cleansing? I feel like most of the world has become educated enough to reach this conclusion and thus stands against Israel. The only peaceful way out of the situation Israel is in would be serious and massive reparations (similar to what Germany has given to Jewish people). Is there any support for that?

Israelis generally do learn about the Nakba in school. But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII. We don’t see it in the way you describe. For us it was a matter of the survival of our people.

Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.

I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.

Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.

An ethno state is a stupid backwards idea.

EDIT: how is anyone downvoting thos. Who thinks it's a good idea?

Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?

It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?

There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.

As is true in every war.

The question is who started it.

My own country lost its mind after 2,977 people died in one terrorist attack a quarter of a century ago and we made many many bad decisions for a long time afterwards. It sucked. In October 2023 I had hoped that my country's well publicized example would help your country not make the same choices but it's hard to learn from other people's mistakes.

America didn't do things like this after 9/11, we tried to build democracies in a naive way, failed, and got a lot of people killed unnecessarily. Iraq was completely unjustified and based on fabrications.

But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.

A lot of the stories that came out of Abu Ghraib sure sound like they have very strong parallels to what is happening today. At the level of "poorly trained reservists trying to do something difficult without sufficient oversight and getting frustrated and turning to torture" it sounds very similar.

And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).

Abu Ghraib was a scandal, some people got punished, probably not all of the right ones.

When it came out that Israel was systematically sodomizing detainees with nightsticks, they had protestors come out in favor of the guards. It's still ongoing, all charges have been dropped. Nobody is scandalized by it.

"That's an entirely different category of crime" - cut the moralizing bullshit please. You have killed shitload of people and that is all that matters.

I mean if the same thing happened to us we'd easily have had 50%+ support for glassing all of Palestine with nukes.

This is a false equivalence. 9/11 is not Oct 7 and the US is nothing like Israel, in fact the US was attacked for (amongst other things) it's support of Israel. America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.

Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception. Gaza is a refugee camp of descendents of people displaced from their homes during the Nakba. There's a saying there: "My Grandmother is older than Israel" -- and it is true.

To look at Oct. 7 as some sort of isolated incident ignores the history of the project: After the holocaust Western Jews decided to move to an area already occupied by other people based on some loose notion of having claim to it millennia ago. They used western governments to push this concept forward. Sure, America displaced Native Americans, but Israel did it during modernity... and those natives also happen to have access to modern heavy weaponry... what did they expect to happen?

I think Israeli people are ingenious and talented but they picked the wrong patch of land to occupy -- the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is as sacred as the Vatican and you have 1.5 billion (often crazy) Muslim people revolving around this sacred conceptualization. This is why the common people even of places like UAE/Saudi all back Palestine despite the political actions of such states. It is a recipe destined for disaster, especially with the Iran war de-coupling the Gulf States from the USA. It seems to me there is no way out.

It's a genocide and Israel showed the dark side is in everyone even in our modern, supposedly more enlightened time.

Humanity has a deep darkness and no society is immune. USA is a partner in this and as someone living here I'm deeply ashamed.

“Genocide” = this makes me feel bad

Destroying all the buildings while only killing 50k civilians out of a population of 2.2M is not a genocide. Insofar as words mean things (and they don’t to most of humanity) it’s not genocide.

When you understand that 99.99% of humanity is only capable of using words to express psychological valence or to manipulate rather than assay truth, then political discourse makes a lot more sense.

The only thing that 99.99% of humanity is capable of navigating and assaying with words is their own personal financial situation, their business, their portfolio, etc. In this domain everyone is a philosopher.

Does this help you sleep? Rationalization is a coping mechanism.

The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.

So don't be proud of "only 50k" and destroying everyones home. Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.

It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.

This "lawyer" mentality is so dumb.

You, nor I have the credentialing to be able to call something a genocide with any authority. I’ll leave it up to the phd-experts to call it.

“The world's leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o

I support Israel, but not wholeheartedly. I understand how Nakba was a matter of survival of your people. But why is this still going on today? Why is Israel continuing to expand settlements? Can you not understand how Palestinians must feel to constantly live in fear of being pushed out of their own homes? This is what gives me heartache. Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?

Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?

I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.

Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.

Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.

As someone that’s watched the conflict and learned about the history, the Nakba and the displacement of Palestinians far before the years of Malcolm X and Martin Luther, the conflict with Palestine didn’t start on October 7th as this comment purports.

When I didn’t have any context of the history, I took comments like this one at face value.

However it is difficult to take comments like this in good faith as it frames Israelis as folks who are pushed beyond their conscience by their government, similar to Americans in current America, when the statistics are to the contrary.

47% support the genocidal approach - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support...

56/67/82% (depending on the polling method) support expulsion of Palestinians - https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...

This is the typical type of propaganda that many supporters post and write hoping to reinforce the narrative to the uninformed folks of their innocence.

While I can acknowledge that there are genuinely folks who oppose the ongoing genocide, what the world ought to look out for is whether after the next set of elections, an actual change of power and direction occurs.

And when I point to elections, the potential replacement candidates all support the same policies of genocide and expulsion. Some may be less, some are absolutely more, but if nothing changes, that is on the Israeli people.

As Americans hold responsibility for the current state of politics, Israeli’s hold the responsibility for their country as well.

Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?

What's the point of a democracy if it acts against it's people like the UK does?