Palestine
A community for everything related to Palestine and the occupation currently underway by the occupying force known as Israel.
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Existence is resistance for Palestinians.
Please refer to Israel as Occupied Palestine, or occupied territories. The IDF is a fascist and ethnonationalist occupying force. Israelis are settlers. We understand however that the imperial narrative (which tries to legitimise Israel) is internalised in the imperial core and slip-ups are naturally expected.
We always take the sides of Palestine and Palestinians and are unapologetic about it. Israel is an occupying power whose "defence force"'s (note the contradiction) sole purpose for existing is to push Palestinians out so they can resettle their rightful land. If you have anything positive to say about Israel we do not care.
view the rest of the comments
Do Yanis Varoufakis and Brian Eno genuinely don't know/understand that the ICC only exists to prosecute people from Slavic and African countries, making them jump through hoops for "inclusion" into the "world community", thus subjecting them to its will? Or are they using the Israel-Palestine conflict to promote their shitty starry-eyed socdem project with which they think they can turn the EU into a social-democratic paradise. All they're doing is weaking the actual socialist/communist parties/organisation by directing volunteers and activists towards performative bullshit.
Are IDF reservists/active duty considered civilians?
It's fair to consider reservists as civilians imo. There's plenty of countries with mandatory conscription and it would be absurd to consider anyone that has completed it as military instead of civilian
Completing basic military training doesn't make you a reservist. Reservist is the status you get when you go to your annual (or whatever) checkups and are listed as can be called for active duty. You're basically active duty but you're not needed at the moment.
Reservists aren't civilians. Look at Switzerland, they have a citizen-army with people holding their weapons at home with annual (or whatever) training and inspection of your gear. That's probably a big reason why Switzerland stays neutral, because nearly every house and nearly every adult-aged male is a legit military target.
Calling the IDF reservists at the psytrance festival "civilians" only feeds into pro-Israeli propaganda.
Isn't this what happens when you complete your compulsory military training? You can then be called for service at any time. I still don't see the difference
No. Most countries do not require you to serve a month every year like the IOF does.
They're still reservists in those others countries though, right? Fundamentally it seems like the same thing to me. And your quote says "at most"; I doubt every military aged person is serving a month every year
No. The yearly physical/readiness checkups are the key here. There's the "reserve" pool of military-trained people, this pool consists of all the people who have completed military training. But this pool also has lots of people who gained weight, became ill, got essential jobs, are in education, etc. so when a country taps into this reserve they say "we need x number of troops from the reserve". This is what happened during the partial mobilisation in Russia. Russia has a pool of around 2 million "reservists" but then they had to find some 300k within that pool who were in good physical health, not too old and able to undergo the refresher training course.
Israel, on the other hand, has an "active reserve". Their reservists undergo yearly training, active duty and readiness check. Calling the psytrance festivalgoers "civilians" ignores the possibility that a large number of them had been active in the IOF in the past year.
Israel loves to flaunt women in the IDF, spreading their pictures all over social media, yet october 7 happens and all of a sudden every woman in Israel is a civilian. Give me a break.