How to talk about Israel on the internet.

  One issue that I've avoided a lot is Israeli politics. And yet the pendulum has swung so far against the Israelis that there seems to be a way to start knocking some sense into the Israelis who for some reason are still defending their country. 

I've realised quite a while ago that it's pretty futile to be debating them on the specific facts of their situation: they will always have some piece of information that you don't have and you will lose points on that. 

Also, it's not entirely wrong to say that they are fighting against terrorists. What they are saying is that the Palestinians are denying their right to exist. On the face of it, this is true. But if you were living under Japanese occupation during the Second World War in East Asia, you would wish that the Japanese were wiped off the face of the earth. That's a pretty natural reaction and not because you are an evil person. I don't feel that sad when they dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

What I can do instead is to appeal to their self-interest. I can remind the Israeli that I'm from East Asia, which is a place that's not directly involved in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I can remind them that I'm a bystander, and that Israel is seriously losing their soft power and their moral high ground. 

I can highlight the progress that countries that are not at war are making, and tell them with this stupid war going on, they are being left behind and will go back to being rubble. 

And I can move away as far as I can from giving them any reason to feel smug and satisfied. Some people get an ego trip from being told that they're hated. Under no circumstances should you make them feel like they are martyrs or heroes. You have to emphasise that war is stupid, Israelis like to make war, and therefore Israelis are stupid. And I probably want to press home the point that absolutely none of them will live long enough to see the end of Israel being in conflict. 

They can't carry on feeling that they're winners. They're losers. I don't think I'm harming them like that. For them to think that the conflict can carry on just like that, for them to carry on getting the drug hit that Netanyahu and his right wing crazy people shoot up their vein, that would be the true disservice to them. So it's important to highlight the advances that people from other civilisations - the East Asians in particular - have made. Israel likes to think of itself as a bastion of civilisation in the midst of barbarians, but you can show them that the Gulf States and East Asia have leapfrogged them in terms of human development. 

Most importantly, they have to understand that by prolonging this conflict, it is they who are the losers of this conflict. It is a lose-lose situation, and Israel will eventually go down the tubes. Somebody made the point that traditional war is a bit outmoded: today's conflicts are about soft power and Israel is losing. And at the same time it's hard to see if they're going to wake up and see the light: they don't seem to ever learn from anything.