Protesters calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war blocked northbound traffic on Interstate 5 in Seattle for several hours Saturday.

Can someone please calmly explain how blocking a freeway across an ocean and a country on a different continent, is supposed to have any effect on a political issue in the middle east?

          • @[email protected]
            3•10 months ago

            I mean, our tax dollars regularly go to heinous shit. Just the fact that like 50% of the US budget for living memory goes to the military means that you’re already starting deeply in the moral red.

    • @[email protected]
      14•10 months ago

      Also the even more direct fact that Israel exists primarily to provide the US control over middle eastern oil. It’s an air base and port and provides air space through which to it can attack countries in the region. The constant war carried out by Israel against neighbors and within it’s own border destabalizes the region, making it easier to maintain US supported authoritarians.

      Making life harder for people in cars is actually direct action against one of the root causes of the genocide. If you are in a car, you are complicit in genocide.

      • @jimbo
        -2•10 months ago

        deleted by creator

      • @neatchee
        -12•10 months ago

        Not all anti-Israel commentary is antisemitic…but this sure as hell is.

        Israel exists primarily to provide the US control over oil in the region? That’s its purpose for existing?

        That argument shows complete disregard for the millions of Jews living there and the sequence of events that led to the need for a sovereign Jewish state in the first place

        • @[email protected]
          15•10 months ago

          This seems like conflating purpose and reason, or current function.

          Israel acts independently and has it’s own interests, which sometimes conflict with US interests, but often align. The US continues to prop Israel up because it needs access to the region.

          Saying that the British and later Americans used Jews in the same way they used Scotch Irish or other marginalized people to colonize land they wanted to control by proxy is just a statement about history. It would be anti-semetic to suggest that Israel is somehow able to manipulate the US in to funding and arming it, rather than the relationship going primarily the opposite direction… As the US does with it’s many other proxies all over the world. It would be anti-semetic to suggest that Israel is somehow unique in being funded and supported by the US without being part of US global strategy. If we can accept that Israel is just another US proxy, then we ask, “given the local geopolitics, would Israel exist without US support?”

          The history of persecution that allowed the British and Americans to exploit Jews to colonize Palestine isn’t what my post was about. I can understand the confusion. I assume it was in good faith.

          • @neatchee
            -2•10 months ago

            …he said to the Jew. Op literally said the reason for Israel’s existence is oil interests.

            Israel IS an apartheid state. Fuck the Israeli government and fuck Netenyahu especially. But that doesn’t make OP right

            • @[email protected]
              6•10 months ago

              Jewish people can be antisemitic, lmao.

              Equating zionism with jewishness is antisemitic

              Some of my family didn’t survive a death camp to be used as a cudgel for a settler colonial project.

              That argument shows complete disregard for the millions of Jews living there and the sequence of events that led to the need for a sovereign Jewish state in the first place

              This is using the holocaust to justify Israel, it is ahistorical and disgusting.

            • @[email protected]
              5•10 months ago

              The reason for the creation of the Israeli state where it is was absolutely a political decision by the big Western powers (just like the repeated backing of Arab religious fanaticism over secular nationalism, btw). If the primary concern was providing a home for displaced Jews, land in Germany or the US would have made much more sense.

          • @neatchee
            -1•10 months ago

            Israeli government can fuck off. They are horrific. Doesn’t mean Israel exists for the purpose of defending oil interests

    • @luckyhunter
      -19•10 months ago

      The people delayed in traffic on the other hand have zero influence. And more than likely are now massive Israel supporters due to being so pissed off by the protesters.

      • NoneOfUrBusiness
        30•10 months ago

        The economy being affected by the protest does, though. But setting aside the effectiveness of this method of protesting, lemme just quote MLK here.

        I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

        This is your attitude now.