The Israel-Gaza war is “taking away the focus” from the conflict in Ukraine, the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has admitted.
He said this was “one of the goals” of Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
And he denied that fighting in Ukraine had reached a stalemate, despite a recent assessment to this effect by the country’s top military general.
Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the south has so far made little headway.
This has prompted fears of war fatigue among Kyiv’s Western allies, with suggestions of growing reluctance in some capitals to continue giving Ukraine advanced weapons and funds.
No it isn’t. “Israel has a right to defend itself.” He said the line.
That is not the same as calling for ethnic cleansing.
Someone punches you in the face, you have a right to defend yourself. You don’t have a right to kill them, burn their house down, murder their entire family, and then take out the rest of the block “just to be sure”.
Okay devoid of all context and reality and focusing only on the rhetoric, you have a point.
Now imagine if I commit a genocide while claiming a right to defend myself, like the Nazis did? How is that phrase being deployed in that historical example?
If you claim a right to defend yourself while committing a genocide, it is in fact the same as calling for genocide.
Because the Nazis weren’t defending themselves?
If you had asked them, they would have told you differently. They would have told you about the long and complicated history that brought them to that point and the necessity of their actions. They would have told you about the barbarism of their enemies and the atrocities they carried out.
It doesn’t matter what they told you, it’s an objective truth that they were not being attacked by the groups they were seeking to exterminate.
There are heroic stories from the Warsaw ghetto and partisans who refused to be captured and took to the forests that you’d be erasing by making such a claim. Martyrs. Examples you and I could only hope to live up to if we found ourselves in their shoes. Resilience against pain and suffering the likes of which we can only read about. The human spirit will not allow itself to be extinguished without a struggle. Those who wish to extinguish it will always have examples of violence occurring against them.
After they were ghettoized… they did nothing to GET ghettoized.