4 Reasons Why Israel is a Rogue State

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Theoretically, the Samson option would be employed even if they are starving due to being completely cut off. I don't think it would matter much why they perceive they have run out of any chances to avoid total defeat followed by Holocaust 2.0.

Any acting upon Mutually Assured Destruction is unethical to the highest order. Here in America during the Cold War if hundreds of Soviet nukes were incoming America was going to be destroyed no matter what. Killing hundreds of millions of Soviets and messing up much of the rest of the world would not have changed that.

I said theoretically because nobody knows how people will react in that situation. The Americans probably would have retaliated with their nukes because the people manning the nukes were very highly trained and the decision to retaliate had to be made immediately.

There are two plausible scenarios where Israel would face being extinguished as a recognizable entity. Be it Iran, or a terrorist organization hits Israel with a few well-placed rockets armed with WMDs. As a small country, there would be no time or place to escape or avoid it. Of course, whoever does that would probably understand there would be massive casualties on their side even without Israeli retaliation. That is apparently what Hamas was willing to sacrifice. The other one is everyone gets more and more fed up. The younger generations start taking power. In this scenario, the process would be gradual, Israel would have years to realize their choice is either to comply or lose everything. The idea that you can pressure Israel to give up goes back to the founding of the PLO in the 1960s who were inspired by what had just happened in Algeria where nationalists through guerilla warfare/terrorism made the French give up. The idea that other countries could be pressured enough to pressure Israel did not start with BDS but with the Arab Oil Boycott of 1973 that caused significant disruption. That did not work but for a number of reasons specifically a much more transparent world, the idea that someday the world will cut off Israel completely is now realistic.

I contend that for historical reasons Israeli Jews would be more likely to perceive losing means being slaughtered than other countries facing total defeat. Therefore they would be less likely to comply like the Germans and Japanese did to end WWII. That does not necessarily mean the Samson option, it could be the Masada option of mass suicide, like I said you just don't know.

Idk they think it is fine to kill the human shields even if they are hostages...maybe that is a sign that Israel is not pointed in the right direction.

A) Christian Zionism is older than Jewish Zionism. But before the 20th Century they didnt call it that. They called it "Restorationism".

B) But Christian Zionism did NOT predate the Protestant Reformation kicked off in 1517.

Restorationism/Christian Zionism, though not spelled out specifically as a heresy, did not fit into Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, nor even into the first waves of Protestantism. The view was that Christ had changed the covenant. So now all Christians were (spiritually speaking) the "new Israel", so having blood descent from the ancient Holly Land gave you no privileges to that Holy Land. All us Christians are "the people of God". If you're a Jew who did not convert to Christianity...who gives a darn? And if you did find Jesus...you still dont need the Holy Land because none of the rest us Christians need it.

But as the Protestant Reformation got underway and got more radical -the Calvinist in Britain had new interpretations of scripture.

British Protestant clergy in the 1600s wanted Jews to return to Palestine. The reason for this demand was so God can get this whole end times thing started already so Christ can return already ...for chrissakes. And when the Jews did this (gathered back into the Holy Land) and Christ returned then...those Jews all gathered back in the Holy Land would all...either then all convert to Christianity or...be sent to H. So Christian Zionism was NOT "pro Jewish" nor was it opposed to Antisemitism.

Modern American Evangelical Christian Zionists retain these beliefs. And Israeli Zionist Jews consequentially have distrust and "mixed feelings" (to say the least) about these Gentile allies of theirs.

Not sure about the Twentieth Century Catholic Church. I assume that after the Holocaust the Popes, like most Western leaders, were basically sympathetic to the cause of a Jewish homeland.

This is unlikely to happen, given that all of the relevant potential enemy countries and militant groups embrace some form of Islam, and Israel contains lots of Muslim holy sites. (Here is a list of ten of them.) Most Muslim-dominated states and militias would not want to destroy Muslim holy sites. On the contrary, one of their motives for fighting against Israel, in the first place, would likely be to protect those holy sites. So they would not want to destroy Israel in its entirety with a WMD.

Recall that all of Hamas's attacks on Israel, up to and including the October 7 attack, have occurred in response to some conjunction of the following two types of provocations by the Israeli government: (1) yet another bunch of Palestinian families getting evicted (usually in East Jerusalem) to make way for yet another wave of Israeli Jewish settlers, plus (2) Israeli soldiers invading a Muslim holy place, usually either the Al Aqsa mosque or the Dome of the Rock.

The one Muslim-identified militant group I can think of that would have no compunction about destroying Muslim holy sites, and hence no compunction about destroying all of Israel, is Da'esh (a.k.a. "ISIS" or the "Islamic State"). If I understand correctly, they are anti-"idolatry" zealots who reject the very idea of any Muslim holy sites other than Mecca and Medina. But, as far as I can tell, Da'esh seems to be more interested in fighting against other, more mainstream Muslims (and against Shi'ites, and against miscellaneous religious minorities whom they happen to run into, such as the Yezidi) than they are in fighting against Israel.

Face of Boo, if you see this, please tell me if I am wrong about any of the above.


Big difference, of course: The French colonialists in Algeria had a home to go back to, whereas many Israeli Jews did not.


Still, probably not likely. For example, there's a growing alliance between Israel and India. It's likely this will continue to grow, especially if India's government continues to be dominated by Hindu nationalists. Zionists and Hindu nationalists are natural allies due to a shared enmity against the Muslim world.

It is also likely that some African and/or South American countries may become allies of Israel, due to the spread of neo-charismatic forms of Christianity there (if neo-charismatics continue to be Zionist, and, as far as I can tell, it seems likely that neo-charismatics will cling to Christian Zionism longer than most other branches of evangelical Christianity).

More generally, we now live in a multi-polar world, with numerous rival would-be superpowers, each eager to find allies wherever they can. So it's unlikely that the entire world can be persuaded to gang up on any one country. There will always be some country, somewhere, that sees unpopular countries, anywhere, as opportunities to pick up new loyal allies.

But I think the U.S.A. should stop unconditionally supporting Israel. At the very least, we should stop being actively complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.

As for what it will take to pressure Israel to substantially reform itself, my guess is that one necessary precondition would be for Israel to be loudly and persistently shamed by lots of other Jews, both in the U.S.A. and around the world. Therefore, the growing numbers of young anti-Zionist Jews have an essential role.

The rest of us need to encourage them by, among other things, not letting the U.S.A.'s hopefully-growing disenchantment with Zionism turn into general anti-Jewish bigotry.

Two points.

I wrote “WMD”. That does not necessarily mean nuclear. It could mean chemical or biological weapons which would not destroy the holy sites unless they were directly hit. With now decades of Israeli warnings about Iran’s nuclear program perhaps the existential danger to Israel from non nuclear WMD’s is yet another area where Israel has blinders on.

There is also a neutron bomb which is a nuclear bomb that destroys far less property. I have no idea if any of the parties involved have that weapon.

While Iran or its proxies may have no intent of using a weapons that destroy holy sites during wars “red lines” often fall by the wayside.



You mentioned that unlike the French the original Israelis had no home to go to. Probably some Ashkenazi Jews would have places to immigrate to. That may not be as certain as it seems because
1. General rising anti immigrant sentiment
2. Not wanting “losers”
3. A belief that they should not be helped because it is their fault.

Mona, correct me if I am wrong but your anti zionist beliefs do not seem to based on the idea that excluding West Bank settlers Israeli Jews are not colonists. You are an outlier among anti-Zionists in that regard, Israelis as colonizers is and has always been central to the anti zionist argument. True, partially true, or false the perception of Israeli Jews as colonizers and Palestinians as indigenous people makes it easier to believe the ultimate long term goal is to have no Jews there.

That's a possibility.

But, given the geography, chemical or biological weapons would surely harm (directly, not just via retaliation from Israel) lots of Palestinians, and lots of Arabs in the neighboring Arab countries, as well as Israelis. On the other hand, the people least likely to be harmed by such weapons would be the very Israelis most hated of all: the settlers and IDF soldiers on militarily-strategic West Bank hill-tops. (Poison gas and liquids typically run downhill and accumulate in valleys. Biological agents do their worst damage in crowded cities, such as the ones most Palestinians live in.)

So, again, it seems to me that attacking Israel with WMD's of these kinds would not exactly be a good way to win a popularity contest in either the Arab world or Muslim world.

It seems to me that the main actual military danger Israel faces is from Hezbollah's rockets, which are not WMD's, but, if I understand correctly, are much more precise, lethal, and numerous than Hamas's rockets ever were. No doubt Iran itself has plenty of similar rockets too. Ditto, probably, for at least some of the various other militant groups sponsored by Iran (but not Hamas, for whatever reason -- perhaps because Hamas isn't Shi'ite?).


Organized Zionism is/was indeed a settler-colonial project, almost from the get-go.

What makes it settler-colonialist is/was settler-colonialist behaviors, not the mere fact that many (though not all) Israeli Jews came from Europe, nor the mere fact that Lord Balfour was British. See the Wikipedia page on settler-colonialism, and see the Epedia article What is the Difference Between Settler Colonialism and Colonialism. See also the Wikipedia article on Zionism as settler colonialism.

Starting in about 1905 or so, Jewish Zionist immigrants to Palestine were doing things like buying up large tracts of land from absentee landlords and evicting all the former inhabitants, or starting businesses that originally employed local Arabs, but then suddenly fired them all in favor of newly-arriving Jews.

That sort of behavior greatly alarmed local Arabs. Had the Jewish Zionists immigrated in a less overbearing, less disruptive way, they would have been just immigrants, not settler-colonialists. Palestine had a long prior history of welcoming various groups of refugees, e.g. Armenians and Circassians.

Then, along came the Partition Plan, which was rejected by the Arabs as totally uncalled-for. Given that the Zionist Jews were still only a very small fraction of the population of Palestine, why should they be given the majority of the land, at the expense of the many more people who were already living there?

And then, in 1948, there was the Nakba, which has a lot in common with the Trail of Tears and other forced migrations of indigenous Americans here in the U.S.A. The Wikipedia articles on the Nakba and on the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight have a map showing all the forcibly depopulated villages.


That's not a reasonable goal at this point.

The U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are settler-colonial societies too, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect all their non-indigenous inhabitants to move back to Europe or wherever our ancestors came from.

Ditto for South Africa, which was effectively de-colonized, to a significant degree at least, by the ending of Apartheid -- although there are still some unresolved, highly controversial issues such as land reform.

The French exodus from Algeria is a very unusual outcome for a settler-colonial society. Such an exodus is much more typical of the end of ordinary colonialism (dependencies, e.g. British rule in India) than of settler-colonialism. It is clearly not reasonable to expect this in Israel.

By the way, the facts that Israeli Jews come from many different countries around the world and that many of them cannot go back is a point of similarity to settler-colonialism as practiced here in the U.S.A during the century or so after the U.S.A. became an independent country, but while it was still in process of conquering the indigenous people. During that time, the U.S.A. was very welcoming of immigrants from all parts of Europe and sometimes from Asia too, telling both them and already-existing American citizens to "go West, young man!" -- so as to have more settlers to help put down the indigenous people and be rewarded with cheap land. Israel likewise goes out of its way to welcome Jewish immigrants from all over the world, for what it euphemistically calls "demographic" reasons. And, just like many of the Jews who came to Israel after World War II, many immigrants to the U.S.A. were likewise fleeing persecution, wars, famines, and other unlivable conditions elsewhere in the world.

I've created the following two new threads for the off-topic digressions here:

- Israel/Palestine and settler-colonialism
- Hezbollah and its intentions and capabilities?