Wait a minute...

sometimes a sith deals in generalities

Black and white thinking is what people do here in the comments. It's a good thing to have IDF tanks. If they didn't have tanks, every day would be October 7th.

The bad thing is what they do with these tanks. Tanks can be used as a force of defense. If the Ukraine had enough tanks, Russia would never have attacked. If Israeli tanks would not be used in a Genocide in Gaza, but for the protection of Israeli people, they would be a good thing.

will always hold my hot take that Christianity’s greatest marketing-optics failure was that one time Constantine put the cross symbol on his shield

idk if he was the first one to hit that vibe but the trend it set off is one of humanity’s greatest blights

"if we want to survive as a people, we must exterminate them, or else they will exterminate us"

a common excuse for genocide, as well as Literally Nazi Propaganda

Literally what the Nazis said, btw

This is essentially the Zionist stance.

It started with a view that 'in order for Jews to escape persecution, an ethnostate for the Jewish faith must be established'. During this time it was still in contention within the movement on where Zion should be established, but it's also noteable that independant zionist groups were buying land in Palestine for establishing Zion at the same time. This was during the time that Palestinians (and Arabs within the Ottoman empire in general) were helping the British with destabilizing the Ottoman empire under the agreement that these resistance groups would be given their land back from the Ottomans.

Then the Balfour Declaration occurred in 1917 which promised British support in making Palestine a safehaven for Jews, and shortly after the promise of giving Palestinians their land was reevaluated.

As tensions and conflict arose between the well-funded Zionist collective growing in Palestine and the Palestinian forces who wanted the Zionist project out of Palestine, a new tone ended up showing up in Zionist literature. A noteable essay, 'The Iron Wall' by Ze'ev Jabotinsky communicates that shift fairly well.

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

Essentially Ze'ev concludes in his essay that the Zionist project will fail unless it takes on a fully colonialist design. This was also just after Winston Churchill prohibited Zionists from settling on the East side of the Jordan River in 1923.

These are mostly snippets of the whole history, but it is essentially the trajectory we've followed since, from what I've read.

Cycle of abuse mentality.

I was thinking it probably means that "the only way for us to prevent Holocaust ever happening again is strong defence" not so much that "we need to roll tanks into Gaza" type of thing

But this is not what that quote is saying.... Do you think the person who the quote is from (who survived the holocaust - who btw died in 2016) would be okay wirh another genocide? The quote is about having the means to protect yourself, not to do whats been done to you....

I'd rather boot scoot and boogie

people often forget that “self defense” narratives like this was hitler’s excuse for institutionalizing antisemitism. he literally fed the flames of the racist narrative that jewish people were to blame for germany’s economic woes in order to get support.

like this isn’t godwins law this is literally what hitler did

If you are not getting genocided you are probably genociding right now!

It actually isn't.

Not to agree with the other commenter leaping right to fallacies... I feel like I know how you meant it, but it's important to avoid dehumanizing people - yeah even repulsive war criminals and bigots.

Not to police phrasing in the middle of a genocide. It's just we sometimes have legit bigots or bad actors wading into these threads and trying to muddy the waters.

The zionist occupation predates the holocaust. And the "star of david" was a symbol that got famous for being a symbol for it.

nah. sure, it might be called “understandable,” just as any cycle of violence has a predictable, “understandable” tendency to repeat. that doesn’t make it acceptable, though.

this quote isn’t from 1946. a quick search shows that israeli forces first used tanks extensively around 1973. this situates Kertész’s remarks not just in response to the Holocaust, but in the context of over two decades of the Nakba, displacement, destruction, occupation, and the early stages of apartheid against 1.4 million Palestinians.

i don’t see evidence that Kertész was a zealous zionist, but this quote—given the atrocity lurking behind the words—is definitely worthy of interrogation and critique. that kind of questioning is part of universal healing, understanding, and growth.

Even then, I think religious symbols being national symbols and therefore on national flags and tanks is inherently bad.

I think we can trust everyone involved to know exactly what the question meant and what the reply means.

If he would think in your categories he could have answered something like "I would be happy if it wouldn't be needed." Or reply back with "In which context?" or something.

He immediately jumped to making it "its either tanks or holocaust for us."

I think, in western media at least, that the tank is rarely used as an image of defence. A tank’s artillery is not personal or protective, it obliterates its targets from a distance. Its treads allow it to travel in terrain that has been decimated by war. The image of a tank ominously rolling over rubble and bodies in a war zone is contractually obliged to be in every war movie.

The heavy armour on a tank is perhaps its only ‘defensive’ trait, but it only exists to let the men inside blow things up for as long as possible.

It’s an all terrain cannon, and a country owning a fleet of them requires their neighbours to also invest in a fleet of them, just in case. This then causes their neighbours to invest in more tanks just to be extra ‘safe’