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Pro-Palestinian protesters block traffic on Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco

A pro-Palestinian protest action briefly blocked all traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Wednesday morning.

Starting at about 7:45 a.m. Protesters stopped cars and stretched banners across the roadway denouncing Israel's bombing of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and demanding that the U.S. stop arming Israel.

Northbound and southbound traffic on the bridge was at a standstill as of 8 a.m.

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  • Those were the criminal proceedings that took that long. The case against Israel right now is the application to institute proceedings. The Rwanda application was filed to the ICJ in 2002 and the final judgment was in 2006. The Yugoslav application was filed to the ICJ in 1993 and final judgment was in 2007.

    You're talking about the individual criminal proceedings of the special trial courts (the ICTR and the ICTY) against the perpetrators of charged crimes, which were mandated by the final judgments on the applications to institute proceedings.

    The evidence in both of those cases, as far as my memory serves at this moment, included literal mass killings where civilians were lined up and shot, soldiers going door to door killing everyone inside houses, with a heavy helping of torture and mutilations. The stories were very real, as opposed to the allegations in South Africa's application, which is loaded with innuendo, half truths, unverified stories from Qatari and Iranian media, and circular reasoning, a yes a helping of what appear to be very real war crimes. In Rwanda there were plenty of mutilated women and children there to say who did it. If the ICJ institutes proceedings against Israel at a special criminal tribunal, it will take decades to find and prosecute those responsible, and if Israel is telling the truth about what it has for intelligence, most of those proceedings are going to end in aquitals.

    Either way, if South Africa's claims were as clear cut and dry as the mob of this community believes they are, the ICJ could have granted any of the preliminary relief South Africa sought, but it didn't. The UN isn't going to open a new tribunal for isolated war crimes of invidiual soldiers as long as Israel is making good faith prosecutions on its own, and it is, as ICJ noted in its preliminary decision, denying South Africa's proposed relief.

    Of course, I guess since I've not included links to the the original legal decisions of the ICJ, the moderators might come along and delete this post for being disinformation if they can find an Al Jazeera link that implies in a few second something other than what I've said.

    • You’re correct throughout your post. We are at the super early phase, and the ICJ has elected to keep the case open because there’s credible allegations, along with a fuckload of disinformation.

      I chose those two to highlight how long these proceedings and subsequent convictions take, hence my use of “prosecuted”. They are not the same severity nor wanton butchery, absolutely not. But international courts aren’t full of successful cases to draw parallels to - the situation in Ukraine or the Uyghurs resulted in condemnation but zero concrete action, and they’re much closer analogies to Palestine.

      • Thank you for the mature response. I've been thinking of those two analogies, also, though in my view the situation is Gaza is unprecedented and incomparable to anything the world has seen for two reasons: the tunnels and the martyrdom, which in large part are related.

        • The tunnels are the game changing factor, and precisely why the ground invasion was so foolish. The nightmare scenario of a 360 urban battlefield, where suddenly previously cleared buildings get used for ambushes that evaporate immediately, cannot be overstated enough. It restricts your preferred options, all the way through Nth preference, until you’re bringing the combat engineers with D9s in and leveling everything. All while your force is being attritted and even MBTs with cutting edge protections are getting knocked out with decent regularity.

          It reduces your viable options to scorched earth, not participating, or a looooong siege of starvation. Which would be brutal but understandable as a part of war, and defendable in court if there wasn’t ~2 million civilians in the mix. But they’re there, and tend to feature as an afterthought behind the IDF protecting itself, and the IDF attacking targets.

          Martyrdom is an optics problem but Palestinian youth have been throwing their lives away for decades. Fedayeen chose suicide bombings, Fatah less so, and now it’s suicidal attacks hoping for maximum damage. Driving a car over a checkpoint guard isn’t going to liberate your people. Neither would Oct7

          • I don't see the tunnels as a threat for the kind of long term guerrilla warfare you're suggesting, at least, not once Israel has finished bombing and clearing them, or flooding them, or filling them. And, I would say it's because of those ~2,000,000 people that such an aggressive campaign against the tunnels and Hamas is necessary. The longer Hamas is able to stay combat capable holed up in tunnels, dragging it out, the more innocent Palestinian's are going to die, which is absolutely fine by Hamas, but I think genuinely not fine by Israel and the world. Ending this as fast as reasonably possible, even if it's at the expense of tens of thousands of additional dead civilians, is preferable to a slow, drawn out conflict, which would likely kill hundreds of thousands of people. For anyone following along, six figures > five figures.

            With martyrdom, I'm not so much talking about the typical extreme Islamist suicide-bomber type of martyrdom, I'm talking about the Hamas-brand Martyrdom,™ where they block evacuation routes, tell people the evacuation calls and warning are hoaxes, and tell people to go stand on the roofs of their buildings to stop the IDF from bombing them, as well as when Hamas members and loyalists force their extended families and friends and neighbors to live above the tunnels, to have tunnels under their schools and hospitals, or even to huddle around them as literal human shields. Then, when they all get killed, Hamas comes to the international community all shocked Pikachu and says "how could the IDF do this?"

            Indeed, October 7 was not going to liberate a single Palestinian person. I'm still waiting for one of the local Hamas supporters to explain to me what they thought was going to happen and how that attack wasn't just handing to Israel the justification it needed to fully annex Gaza and destroy Hamas to the man; did they not trade any hope they had for statehood just to kill 1,200 civilians and first responders?

            • Oh look at all this evidence for Israel committing apartheid that you somehow conveniently ignore

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_apartheid

              • Actual psychopath: yes I am ware of the arguments that some people make.

                As I pointed out, apartheid is a system of minority rule.

                When it's majority rule it's called democracy. That's the good one.

                • Actual psychopath: yes I am ware of the arguments that some people make.

                  You mean experts make.

                • ...How the fuck is the majortiy ruling if Palestinians can't vote?

                  You're saying that if a group of people has a larger number in their group and they butcher another group and rob them of rights and land, it's still a democracy? What kind of shitty dystopian thinking is this?

            • , I’m talking about the Hamas-brand Martyrdom,™ where they block evacuation routes, tell people the evacuation calls and warning are hoaxes, and tell people to go stand on the roofs of their buildings to stop the IDF from bombing them, as well as when Hamas members and loyalists force their extended families and friends and neighbors to live above the tunnels, to have tunnels under their schools and hospitals, or even to huddle around them as literal human shields.

              Bruh, sounds to me like a bunch of "reports". How can you believe any of this? Ahjj wait because the IDF said so and you love licking their boots.

              Only when Palestinians are torn limb from limb is something a "report” to you, or "just one small isolated war crime".

249 comments