I have mixed reactions to this. Argentina's vote was morally correct, in my opinion, but supporting the Zionists would have been more advantageous in a purely pragmatic sense. Especially if that support could have been leveraged into some material support with the IMF, for example. Being a friend to Israel can be profitable, and being an enemy to Israel can be damn dangerous.
I know you meant this scornfully, but there is nonetheless truth in it. Argebtina is poor and financially desperate
Rarely has being an enemy to Jews been bad in any way.
Our era is a bit better than most of the preceding ones, but a lot of the old hatreds still hold.
To single out Israel for a resolution like this is morally bankrupt. Nobody disputes that a civilian death - every civilian death - is a tragedy. But the blame for the plight of Gazans rests entirely with the rulers there. No society, anywhere, can tolerate 4000 rockets being rained down on its cities.
Imagine if rockets were raining by the hundred on the streets of Buenos Aires from Colonia or La Plata. Just imagine it for a second. If the Argentine government and military would allow it to continue, they would be criminally negligent in their duties. The first responsibility of any government and any military is to protect its people’s lives.
If the people firing these rockets would be doing so in a manner appropriate to the rules of armed combat, that would be one thing. But as has been documented ad infinitum, and confirmed every time by the absurdly biased investigating commissions, the Hamas people deliberately put their rocket launchers and weapons depots in places where taking them out carries a civilian cost. The cynical intention is to force Israel to choose between letting Hamas continue shelling innocents, or take the steps it must to defend its people - at a tragic human cost, and with the inevitably slanted headlines that result the next day. That Israel takes all steps possible to minimize casualties - notifying of an impending attack using leaflets, phone calls, and “knock-knock” bombs - is conveniently ignored.
That any of the above is remotely in dispute shows the house of mirrors we are in the moment that Israel is concerned. The most common responses are a) that it is Hamas’s right to engage in terrorism, because its people is occupied; b) that Israel is much stronger militarily than Hamas, and therefore something something; c) that all of Israel is a colonial settler apartheid state and so their people need not be defended; (d) that lots more Gazans die than Israelis.
These are all nonsense. (a) is nonsense for several reasons, not least because it reverses cause and effect. The Arab aggression against the region’s Jews predates the occupation as well as the state of Israel itself. The completely unarmed Jewish community of Hebron, a centuries-old community, was massacred in 1929; this was no isolated incident. And all the territories in question were captured by Jews in defensive wars, before which there was no occupation at all yet the Jews were still in existential danger.
(b) and (d) are varying forms of the same nonsense. If you’re shooting at me and my children, the fact that my gun is WAY bigger than yours is irrelevant. It is my right and duty to use it. And if you hide behind your own kids while shooting at mine, that does not remove my right and duty to defend mine. It makes you a double monster. But I will still shoot back at you.
(c) simply muddies the waters with words fashionable among the left and NAM to obscure the fairly clear-cut situation here.
Syria and Russia deliberately bombed hospitals, in a war where no side posed an existential threat to the other. But we’re talking about Israel. Why? We know why.
