Albert wrote:You know when you did History at School, and you read about some past awful atrocity (Slavery, War etc) and you would think to yourself, "No way that could happen today, the people/world just wouldn't stand for it...."
I have never known so many people who I like/respect etc, who seem to still be supporting Israel. I feel like I'm in some strange Twilight Zone episode.
Yeah, we do tend to see the past as an entirely different world but on the whole people now are still pretty similar to a century ago. There were plenty more people with progressive ideas in the distant past than we generally give credit to and I don't feel there's a logical reason for us to think that the horrors of various atrocities can be consigned to being a series of dark chapters of human history. A population can still be conditioned to consider a group of people as being less human and being less entitled to the level of human rights as they are, and that hasn't really stopped being the case across the world despite the post-WW2 liberal international order. I think there's also an ingrained element of feeling here that conflict in certain parts of the world is just the natural order of things.
A lot of people who are outside of the actual conflict also like to advise others that this is too complicated a situation to have any real kind of opinion on or that there is nothing that can be done to stop this conflict on the international stage. Sure, a generations long dispute over a population being forced from their territory is going to be extremely difficult to resolve, but the average person sees cities being made unliveable or children being deliberately sniped at and it doesn't feel like being opposed to that is really a very complicated position to hold at all. Israeli politicians made it abundantly clear within days of Hamas' 7th October terror attacks what the scale of their military's response would be. Their allies in the US, UK, EU, and elsewhere were explicit that they would have their unwavering backing and resources to carry out all manner of actions that most people would rightly identify as being inhumane, if not outright war crimes or potential acts of genocide.
