US/Israel may have opened the current front, but the Iranian regime has been waging proxy warfare since the early 80s. They also attempted to assassinate our president. It's misleading to paint US/Israel as the aggressors for occasionally responding to years of indirect or unsuccessful attacks.

To look at it another way: if US/Israel hadn't responded directly, but instead paid Erdogan a large bribe to strike a list of coordinates in Iran, while also supplying the missiles and the training, would that get around your concern? Probably not.

Most ordinary Iranians, sure; certainly not the Islamic regime. It was their decision to train, fund and supply weapons to terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ and the Houthis since the early 80s.

Soldiers have uniforms with distinguishing colors/marks in open display, yet millions of soldiers have died by friendly fire. Lots of friendly planes have been shot down too despite IFF. No system for identifying friendly (or neutral) assets is foolproof.

It's strange how this 59-year-old incident keeps getting brought up. Friendly fire happens all the time, and Israel apologized and paid reparations ages ago.

So where is this evidence that you say exists?

They published allegations from a questionable source with no evidence. I think most people would agree that "Israel trains dogs to rape on command" is rather absurd and implausible on its face.

This is a very weird way to frame a highly targeted attack against Hezbollah, which achieved a far better civilian casualty ratio than what's possible with conventional warfare.

"Unprovoked" is wildly inaccurate, and not even the most anti-Israel historians like Pappé claim that. The provocation was very clear: the PLO paramilitary bombarding Israeli towns from southern Lebanon.

If Mexican cartels started bombarding San Diego, would anyone say that a US response was "unprovoked"?

Considering the extra details in the Jewish Insider article, what he said was basically "if someone rejects the Jewish peoples' right to self-determination and rejects Israel's existence, then we have a fundamental difference in values, and they might decide that working here isn't a good fit".

That's pretty far from the MEE's dishonest summary of "support Israel or resign", or TRNN's dishonest summary of "demands allegiance to Israel". One can criticize a government without rejecting the country's very existence. Israelis themselves do it all the time.

[1] https://jewishinsider.com/2026/04/politicos-owner-axel-sprin...

There's no transcript though, mostly paraphrasing from an outlet whose almost sole focus is smearing Israel, so it's hard to know what was actually said.

For a much more serious example of lack of religious freedom, we could look to Palestinian law, which only permits Islamic or Christian marriages. Not to mention that selling land to a Jew is high treason.

A decent number of Israeli Jews have to do that as well, since Israel recognizes Jewish marriages only under orthodox rabbis. Some Israeli Jews are not even considered Jews under strict orthodox rules.

> if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say

You're not making an argument here. Again, do you think the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War, considering the 1:100 or so ratio there? How about when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, with an "infinitely bad" casualty ratio of 1:0? Does that make NATO infinitely evil?

> Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this.

The principle of proportionality has nothing to do with how many of their own civilians the military in question has lost.

What's unfair about it? In both cases, one side suffered less civilian harm because there wasn't much fighting in its own territory.

I think the point stands that "Israel must be bad because it only lost 2 civilians" makes as little sense as "the Nazis must be good because they lost a lot more civilians than Western allies".

If a framework for trying to judge morality penalizes states for effectively protecting their own civilian population, then it's a very bad framework.

If we're interested in an actual end to the violence, the focus should be on enforcing UNSC 1701. It's not like Israel can just ignore attacks against it.