The idea that the actions of world powers are in any way governed by morality is largely a myth. Politicians will try to twist reality and use morality to justify killing people abroad and sometimes morality does align with their interests by coincidence.
But the motivations are always about furthering financial and strategic interests. See the overthrow of the Iranian regime in 1953 to protect oil interests, CIA coups and supporting murderous dictators in countless South American and other countries around the world, the recent Iraq war etc. If a government gets elected somewhere that would threaten our business interests (by taxing or nationalising them for example), we have historically supported bloody coups to remove them and install murderous facist regimes that enable us to keep making money at the cost of countless innocent lives.
Strategic in the sense that we prevent other powers in a region from becoming strong enough to challenge us. Keeping ourselves on top and in charge by keeping others down. Israel is a valuable ally in this regard - they maintain power in the region by keeping others down and keep them focused more on destroying Israel than attacking us.
Palestinian lives aren’t important to our governments. They have no real power and there’s no real profit to be made from them. Our strategic interest in supporting Israel will always trump any humanitarian interest in preventing genocide.
brot@feddit.org 8 months ago
Let’s be honest: No country would act different from Israel when facing a situation as with Gaza. No country could tolerate an attack like Oct 7th on its territory, esp with everything that happened before with all the rocket and suicide attacks. Just think about how the Americans reacted to 9/11. They started bombing Afghanistan and Iraq even if both countries really didn’t have much to do with 9/11. In this case it would be a scenario like “9/11 was done by a narco cartel in a small part of Mexico where central authority lost control” or something like that.
Combine it with the fact that all western states have no sympathies for islamist extremists like Hamas, because they are not muslim and also because most western states suffered from islamist attacks. Most states also see Hamas (an Hezbollah) as an Iranian proxy militia (which they are) and have also no sympathies to Iran, its theocratic dictatorship, its nuclear program and its military alliance with Russia.
ultranaut@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t think this is honesty because you are only addressing Hamas. Of course any nation would respond to an Oct. 7th type event, but Israel has very obviously gone far beyond that. The pogroms in the West Bank for example, there’s no connection between Hamas and the villages being emptied and seized. Smotrich and his ilk have been very explicit about the intent of Israeli actions.