I mean it's true that Israel messed up lots and committed lots of war crimes and this hurt international sympathy. I do think it was inevitable that the public opinion was going to turn hostile to Israel given the inevitable Palestinian civilian deaths, third-worldism, and just straight up Jew-hate. But I do agree that Israel made lots of mistakes that worsened the situation. The paramedic massacre is really bad. Yehuda Vach is known to say things like any military-aged male who ignores evacuation orders is a combatant.
The "cope" that is actually correct is that there's now a peace deal and the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide. With the war ending, things will get better. This idiot government gets voted out in 2026 too. The other thing is that Palestinoids are so dumb that they will do really dumb things and lose Western public sympathy again and again. All Israel has to do is wait and not fight any big wars and it will be fine.
You may be right that the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide, but they're almost certainly not going to rule that Israel didn't commit genocide.
And I think you're counting out "this idiot government" way too soon.
Permanent damage has been done to Israel's reputation.
The city of San Francisco, generally considered one of the most progressive, liberal bastions in the US, lit up City Hall in blue and white in support of Israel for several days after Oct 7 and there was essentially zero negative public fuss about it.
The National Museum of American Jewish History is there, in a super-prominent place - right in the common area with the Liberty Bell Center, the Visitor's center, etc.
You can see the museum from an open unimpeded vantage point. They had a massive Israeli flag up the day I was there, and this was right after some big gathering had taken place in the common area.
I was on a guided walk and I asked the leader if that had caused any issues & he looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.
No, there were no problems with a giant Israeli flag in the middle of Philadelphia's historic tourist district. But... I wonder if it would be different now.
I agree that it is frustrating when Zionists act as if the Keir Starmers of the world were marching for Palestine on October 8, but I think you underestimate the extent to which hasbarists are kinda right about the obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred (even if it is not an endlessly mutating "antisemitism," but a mongrel mix of Islamism, right wing conspiracy bullshit, and Soviet-era propaganda). Like I don't think if other countries approached a war against an enemy like Hamas the way Israel did they'd be getting hauled in front of the ICJ. Perhaps this is just reality, but I think it is fair to complain about such a reality.
The ICJ isn't made up of Islamo-gauchists. The real difference I suppose, is that in the case of median generic country, there wouldn't be another country like South Africa which saw a way to boost its cred by brining the case. But if a country did bring a case, I'm pretty sure the ICJ would hear it.
So you think if, say, Egypt prosecuted a war against Hamas in a similar way it'd be treated the same as Israel has been treated by the international community?
In some ways it would have been treated more harshly (it certainly wouldn't have been given anything like the amount of emergency aid Israel received), and in some ways more leniently in terms of scrutiny of specific actions. How leniently would depend to a large extent on how it managed its relations with Turkey and Qatar who control a lot of media perception.
" obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred "
It is. I just didn't see a lot of it after October 7, except from the usual quarters. I observed a pro-Hamas demo in mid-October in Manhattan - the one that "Maskil' refers to in the poast -- it was tiny, confined to a small area in the west 40s, and 99% Muslim immigrants & progeny. The photos are deceiving.
Also, if I weren't a total weirdo who spends too much time online, I would not have known about Columbia or the demos at various parts of NYC. Life went on as normal. This was not Vietnam, when demonstrations shut down the city.
You know it's funny, I think Zionism isn't an airtight ideology and it certainly has some issues, but if this blog is the best its critics can do, it really speaks volumes. In this particular article I find it funny that the author is guilty of the same thing he accuses "Zios" (a term invented by David Duke) of doing: i.e. cherry-picking examples to suit his thesis.
For example, hundreds of people celebrating October 7th around the world isn't representative of anything, but a single comment by a Portuguese politician is enough to declare the entire narrative a "myth." From what I could tell, the vast majority of politicians, including the President of the United States Joe Biden, went with the "both sides" and "all lives matter" approach. Not exactly a wave of sympathy for the Israelis.
A couple of other points of clarification: that "someone" at the DSA who was talking about "hipsters" was Ahmed Husain, then a member of the DSA’s National Political Committee. Not exactly some random nobody who wandered in off the street, and even if he were his comments got huge cheers, laughs, and applause.
Here are some more progressives who expressly celebrated October 7th, and didn't just express sadness for the Palestinians who died:
* Students for Justice in Palestine: "The Palestinian resistance stormed the border fence…Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity…".
* Ali Abunimah, head of the website Electronic Intifada: "Palestinians in Palestine and around the world are elated that their resistance broke out of the ghetto and humiliated the enemy oppressor."
* 170 faculty at Columbia University: "[it was] a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years"
* Joseph Massad, prominent pro-Palestinian academic at Columbia: "an innovative Palestinian resistance...the sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to the Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march in support of the Palestinians in their battle against their cruel colonizers."
* The UK Socialist Workers Party: "The Palestinians have every right to respond in any way they choose to the violence that the Israeli state metes out to them every day. Victory to the Resistance."
* The director of CAIR: “[I am] happy to see Palestinians break out of Gaza on Oct. 7" and that "Palestinians in Gaza “have the right to self-defense.”
* A pro-Palestinian student group at the University of Michigan: "Palestinians in Gaza are fighting back", "Palestinians have broken free of their cage," and that, "This is the response of a people pushed beyond endurace."
* “It wasn’t Hamas that resisted; it was the Palestinian people who resisted. You can’t separate Hamas from the Palestinians. Hamas is the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are Hamas.” - MK Zoabi
* Noura Erekat: “We, as advocates and as scholars, have been insisting that you cannot defeat Hamas militarily, that it is part of the national and political fabric of Palestinians, and that they must be engaged with diplomatically.”
* Palestine Solidarity Activist: "Most of us understand the heroism behind Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the resistance that has thrived in Palestine for over a century."
* Founder of CAIR at an AMP event: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on October 7…And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,”
* Rima Hassan, member of the European Parliament: "It’s not just Hamas that commissioned the October 7 attack, it’s all components of Palestinian society"
* WOL: "We will not condemn October 7th. We will not condemn our people’s resistance forces."
I'll stop there for the sake of brevity, but one last thing: the tearing down of the hostage posters being due to "desperation" is pure cope. They drew swastikas on Kfir Bibas' forehead out of desperation too? The only desperation I can see is from the anti-Zionists and non-Zionists of the world now that they're realizing Israel has won the war yet again.
Woah, you're telling me that the Socialist Workers Party, Electronic Intifada AND Noura Erekat responded to October 7th by criticising Israel? This totally disproves my point.
Joe Biden responded by giving Israel 13 billion dollars.
While I mostly agree with this, there are real constraints that the army operates under. A big one is the simple fact that the soldiers do not want to die, and have significant uncertainty around who is a combatant. Even much better run armies like the US and UK have many egregious war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the shock and awe air strikes there were a bunch of screw ups and tons of civilian death. This is relevant not because that makes it ok, but because it raises the question of whether it’s really possible to train kids to kill and have a sufficiently robust supervisory system to have them all color within the lines all the time.
Sure, so I think you should adjust your tactics to comport with the ability to control your troops. Is there a US war crime in Iraq as bad as the ambulance massacre?
Shock and Awe doesn't seem a relevant comparison, because in the equivalent stage of the Gaza war Israel was getting a pass.
I'm skeptical that if America had universal conscription and genocidal neighbors that wanted to kill us, rather than a professional army that vetted people, that we would do a better job than Israel. In fact I think we would do a worse job if anything. America has plenty of dumb rightoids that would commit a lot of war crimes. Obviously that isn't great either, and it doesn't mean we don't criticize Israel for the paramedics massacre.
I do think it's worth emphasizing that Israel isn't some kind of uniquely evil country, and has to kill a bunch of third-worlders in wars because of its circumstances. The Gaza War was a war of necessity. Iraq and Afghanistan? That's the US killing a bunch of third-worlders in a stupid and pointless war.
I agree they should do that. I guess I’m saying it’s not uncommon for these things to happen, likely because of organizational constraints in any army (internal policing inevitably results in prosecuting gray areas, and making the force less effective). I know in any organization, adding compliance requirements adds cost and lowers effectiveness at the margins. Well designed compliance rules and departments can mitigate that. My overall impression is that really bad war crimes are inevitable and it takes a lot of effort and cost to effectively reduce and penalize them. The US does an OK job of this. Israel seems to do a mediocre job of it, and in this war there seem to have been many pockets of doing a poor job. But I think there were real resource and morale constraints.
By the way, the Korean War was orders of magnitude worse than Gaza on just about every dimension. Technically after genocide convention, but perhaps gets grandfathered in to the WW2 way of waging war.
I think it's kind of difficult to evaluate Israeli actions in Gaza because there isn't much to compare it to. When developed countries fight wars nowadays, they are usually under very different circumstances. The Gaza War was FAR more justified than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's not even close.
I also think in terms of cultural attitudes it's very hard to thread the needle of not having too many self-hating leftists who don't want to win the war and not having too many rightoids who commit war crimes. There are only so many small-l liberal elite human capital people on the center-right (fortunately likely next PM Naftali Bennett is such a person). I think that Yehuda Vach, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir are absolutely horrible people. But I also think that a center-left government, which I'd certainly prefer in peacetime, would have gotten a far worse hostage deal.
Every Israeli war has a deadline that is measured not in time but in bad PR. The goal for the government is to push off that deadline as much as possible by acting affirmatively to show how much they're trying not to kill civilians and do war crimes. Unfortunately, this requires not having ministers of the government not bragging about how much they love war crimes, and usually a genuine effort to avoid doing war crimes. Ah well
the attempt to "starve Hamas" by withholding aid from Gaza. After spending months having the hasbarists and sympathetic pro-Israel people express disgust at accusations that Israel would use "weaponize hunger" or use "access to food as a weapon" the government of Israel decided it would do just that and then acted bewildered when they started getting accused of famine. for a lot of people who were not anti-israel before this made the concept of genocide much more plausible
the failed attempt to arrest the prison guards for sodomizing a prisoner which led to RW nut jobs storming the prisons to free them, the prison guards becoming minor celebrities who escaped any punishment, and ben gvir - the guy in charge of the prisons crowing about how much they deserved it - and helped cement the idea that israel regularly and systematically rapes the Palestinians it imprisons
It wasn’t just things Israel did, it was also the media’s briefly-suppressed hatred of Israel, as most clearly seen in the Al Shifa Hospital incident.
The claim the media gleefully spread around was that Israel had killed 500 people in or near a hospital. The truth when the dust cleared is that a Palestinian rocket had killed fewer than 50 people, maybe far fewer.
But it was obvious from the beginning that there were holes in the story, including because Al Jazeera happened to randomly *see the rocket impact* in their coverage; they pulled it quickly but not quickly enough. The media might have, I don’t know, done the bare minimum of fact checking before repeating the claim. But they didn’t, and it was an inflection point.
It’s clear that the IDF needs to clean house. It’s at least as clear that the media does, too. Of the two, personally, I think there’s at least a chance the IDF will.
Yep, imagery matters to people with limited attention span. Still, in Europe this summer I was surprised by over the top reactions by Spaniards against Israel.
> The next big cope is that Israel’s isolation is temporary because the far Right are going to take over in Europe and only bugmen and blue-haired pansexuals have a problem with killing 65,000 people.
I think you're right here. The far right in some form or other probably will have a big influence in Europe, in control of many countries, but they are more likely to have pro-European than pro-Israel policies. (The exception here in Britain which because of its history with the EU has a large anti-European tinge to its politics and if Farage wins the next election (he probably will) he is very unlikely to rejoin the EU or any new European institutions that may be set up.)
The guy who made the comment about “hipsters” at the Nova Festival is Eugene Puryear, who is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), not DSA. You may not care about the difference, but accuracy is important. https://www.pettimatthew.com/p/journalists-falsely-report-democratic
I don’t mean to disagree with you, but I believe you can strengthen the opposing view. You could argue that Israel generally faces high levels of hostility around the world, and that the events of October 7th were just a blip in that context. Even if Israel had done nothing, over time, things would likely return to the way they were. i would be interested to see your analysis of peace deal, will it stand or crumble, will hamas regain power in gaza.
Mistakes happen and innocent civilians die in any war. The amount rises dramatically when one side fights from civilian buildings and not in uniform. Even Hamas’s own propaganda videos clearly show that they fight from civilian building and not in uniform. Yet I frequently see on NYC subways the arrow that Hamas uses in those videos to point at the Israeli tanks they claim they hit plastered to the wall as the symbol of resistance and identification with it. Do the people hanging them up really care about the children in Gaza?
In general, as Golda Meir put it “We would rather always be dealing with the worlds condemnations than it’s condolences”
"Normies" would dissociate themself from any group that is pro war. It should be a political liability to be supported by groups like "Students for Justice in Palestine" or "Jewish voice for Peace" since those groups are pro war and pro the dismantling of a nominal Western democracy in favor of an Islamic Authoritarian state (at best). That isn't the case. I understand someone being anti-Israel. What is not acceptable is if that person isn't also very anti Palestinian, since there is no large Palestinian group that even pays lip service to being interested in installing a government that won't be worse than Israel in whatever Israel is accused of.
Normies are wrong, killing a five-digit number of people in a once in a century war does not mean that the only first-world democracy with above-replacement TFR including among smart people, a huge tech industry, a GDP/capita that exceeds the UK's and is growing, tons of smart people (and again, a growing population of smart people), free speech, affirmative action for Arabs, and a great attitude towards genetic enhancement is a sucky country. It's a great country. Of course it's imperfect and does a lot of bad things. The same is true of America. America is a great country. Of course America is imperfect and does a lot of bad things.
Yes I know none of these arguments, correct as they are, will convince normies at least in the near term. I have good news though. What will convince normies is winning and not having too many future wars. The ICJ verdict will help too. So will continued growth of Israeli tech and the concordant continued growing importance of Israeli tech to the US. I'm optimistic that there will be "peace" or quiet. The TikTok purchase by Ellison will help too.
“We would rather always be dealing with the worlds condemnations than it’s condolences”
I really hate this line because people abuse to justify anything. It's just a conversation ender. Oh you think it's bad to kill 100 children to get one unnamed Hamas commander? Well we'd rather be receiving your condemnations than your condolences.
It's a conversation ender because of how well it explains Israel's situation leaving it critics speechless. It's tragic if 100 children get killed because one unnamed Hamas commander surrounded himself by them. The supporters, sympathizers and apologists of Hamas really need to make Hamas understand that they don't accept them fighting from near civilian locations in civilian clothing. They don't. Because the concept doesn't really bother them.
I mean it's true that Israel messed up lots and committed lots of war crimes and this hurt international sympathy. I do think it was inevitable that the public opinion was going to turn hostile to Israel given the inevitable Palestinian civilian deaths, third-worldism, and just straight up Jew-hate. But I do agree that Israel made lots of mistakes that worsened the situation. The paramedic massacre is really bad. Yehuda Vach is known to say things like any military-aged male who ignores evacuation orders is a combatant.
The "cope" that is actually correct is that there's now a peace deal and the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide. With the war ending, things will get better. This idiot government gets voted out in 2026 too. The other thing is that Palestinoids are so dumb that they will do really dumb things and lose Western public sympathy again and again. All Israel has to do is wait and not fight any big wars and it will be fine.
You may be right that the ICJ isn't going to rule that Israel committed genocide, but they're almost certainly not going to rule that Israel didn't commit genocide.
And I think you're counting out "this idiot government" way too soon.
Permanent damage has been done to Israel's reputation.
https://manifold.markets/Shump/will-the-icj-determine-that-israel
I agree you may be right that the ICJ won't rule that Israel committed genocide but it's not going to exonerate them either.
They'll likely find some violation of international law, but I think that falsely alleging genocide is pretty costly.
Excellent.
I remember post-October 7 quite clearly - I have to admit, I was a bit nervous about the response.
I got nothing but support from non-Jewish friends and they weren't all from NYC (NYers don't count).
I even saw a black homeless guy on the street telling an Orthodox Jew, coherently, about his sympathy for "the Jews."
I mention this because the activists say that the support was only official and not grass roots.
It was both.
The city of San Francisco, generally considered one of the most progressive, liberal bastions in the US, lit up City Hall in blue and white in support of Israel for several days after Oct 7 and there was essentially zero negative public fuss about it.
I was in Philly some time in 2024.
The National Museum of American Jewish History is there, in a super-prominent place - right in the common area with the Liberty Bell Center, the Visitor's center, etc.
You can see the museum from an open unimpeded vantage point. They had a massive Israeli flag up the day I was there, and this was right after some big gathering had taken place in the common area.
I was on a guided walk and I asked the leader if that had caused any issues & he looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.
No, there were no problems with a giant Israeli flag in the middle of Philadelphia's historic tourist district. But... I wonder if it would be different now.
It is:
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/weitzman-national-museum-of-american-jewish-history-philadelphia-vandalism-spraypaint/4259490/
Thanks Anonymous. What does one incident prove?
https://6abc.com/post/suspect-weitzman-national-museum-american-jewish-history-vandalism-philadelphia-turns-himself-police/17778170/
It shows things are different.
It shows one sicko did something.
Diana seems to have blocked me, but I'm glad to hear it
I agree that it is frustrating when Zionists act as if the Keir Starmers of the world were marching for Palestine on October 8, but I think you underestimate the extent to which hasbarists are kinda right about the obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred (even if it is not an endlessly mutating "antisemitism," but a mongrel mix of Islamism, right wing conspiracy bullshit, and Soviet-era propaganda). Like I don't think if other countries approached a war against an enemy like Hamas the way Israel did they'd be getting hauled in front of the ICJ. Perhaps this is just reality, but I think it is fair to complain about such a reality.
The ICJ isn't made up of Islamo-gauchists. The real difference I suppose, is that in the case of median generic country, there wouldn't be another country like South Africa which saw a way to boost its cred by brining the case. But if a country did bring a case, I'm pretty sure the ICJ would hear it.
So you think if, say, Egypt prosecuted a war against Hamas in a similar way it'd be treated the same as Israel has been treated by the international community?
In some ways it would have been treated more harshly (it certainly wouldn't have been given anything like the amount of emergency aid Israel received), and in some ways more leniently in terms of scrutiny of specific actions. How leniently would depend to a large extent on how it managed its relations with Turkey and Qatar who control a lot of media perception.
" obsessive Israel hate being grounded in some form of Jew-hatred "
It is. I just didn't see a lot of it after October 7, except from the usual quarters. I observed a pro-Hamas demo in mid-October in Manhattan - the one that "Maskil' refers to in the poast -- it was tiny, confined to a small area in the west 40s, and 99% Muslim immigrants & progeny. The photos are deceiving.
Also, if I weren't a total weirdo who spends too much time online, I would not have known about Columbia or the demos at various parts of NYC. Life went on as normal. This was not Vietnam, when demonstrations shut down the city.
You know it's funny, I think Zionism isn't an airtight ideology and it certainly has some issues, but if this blog is the best its critics can do, it really speaks volumes. In this particular article I find it funny that the author is guilty of the same thing he accuses "Zios" (a term invented by David Duke) of doing: i.e. cherry-picking examples to suit his thesis.
For example, hundreds of people celebrating October 7th around the world isn't representative of anything, but a single comment by a Portuguese politician is enough to declare the entire narrative a "myth." From what I could tell, the vast majority of politicians, including the President of the United States Joe Biden, went with the "both sides" and "all lives matter" approach. Not exactly a wave of sympathy for the Israelis.
A couple of other points of clarification: that "someone" at the DSA who was talking about "hipsters" was Ahmed Husain, then a member of the DSA’s National Political Committee. Not exactly some random nobody who wandered in off the street, and even if he were his comments got huge cheers, laughs, and applause.
Here are some more progressives who expressly celebrated October 7th, and didn't just express sadness for the Palestinians who died:
* Students for Justice in Palestine: "The Palestinian resistance stormed the border fence…Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity…".
* Ali Abunimah, head of the website Electronic Intifada: "Palestinians in Palestine and around the world are elated that their resistance broke out of the ghetto and humiliated the enemy oppressor."
* 170 faculty at Columbia University: "[it was] a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years"
* Joseph Massad, prominent pro-Palestinian academic at Columbia: "an innovative Palestinian resistance...the sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to the Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march in support of the Palestinians in their battle against their cruel colonizers."
* The UK Socialist Workers Party: "The Palestinians have every right to respond in any way they choose to the violence that the Israeli state metes out to them every day. Victory to the Resistance."
* The director of CAIR: “[I am] happy to see Palestinians break out of Gaza on Oct. 7" and that "Palestinians in Gaza “have the right to self-defense.”
* A pro-Palestinian student group at the University of Michigan: "Palestinians in Gaza are fighting back", "Palestinians have broken free of their cage," and that, "This is the response of a people pushed beyond endurace."
* “It wasn’t Hamas that resisted; it was the Palestinian people who resisted. You can’t separate Hamas from the Palestinians. Hamas is the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are Hamas.” - MK Zoabi
* Noura Erekat: “We, as advocates and as scholars, have been insisting that you cannot defeat Hamas militarily, that it is part of the national and political fabric of Palestinians, and that they must be engaged with diplomatically.”
* Palestine Solidarity Activist: "Most of us understand the heroism behind Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the resistance that has thrived in Palestine for over a century."
* Founder of CAIR at an AMP event: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on October 7…And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,”
* Rima Hassan, member of the European Parliament: "It’s not just Hamas that commissioned the October 7 attack, it’s all components of Palestinian society"
* WOL: "We will not condemn October 7th. We will not condemn our people’s resistance forces."
I'll stop there for the sake of brevity, but one last thing: the tearing down of the hostage posters being due to "desperation" is pure cope. They drew swastikas on Kfir Bibas' forehead out of desperation too? The only desperation I can see is from the anti-Zionists and non-Zionists of the world now that they're realizing Israel has won the war yet again.
Woah, you're telling me that the Socialist Workers Party, Electronic Intifada AND Noura Erekat responded to October 7th by criticising Israel? This totally disproves my point.
Joe Biden responded by giving Israel 13 billion dollars.
Thanks for proving my point.
Which statement(s) made by Biden in the first days after Oct. 7 are you thinking of?
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/18/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-october-7th-terrorist-attacks-and-the-resilience-of-the-state-of-israel-and-its-people-tel-aviv-israel/
While I mostly agree with this, there are real constraints that the army operates under. A big one is the simple fact that the soldiers do not want to die, and have significant uncertainty around who is a combatant. Even much better run armies like the US and UK have many egregious war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the shock and awe air strikes there were a bunch of screw ups and tons of civilian death. This is relevant not because that makes it ok, but because it raises the question of whether it’s really possible to train kids to kill and have a sufficiently robust supervisory system to have them all color within the lines all the time.
Sure, so I think you should adjust your tactics to comport with the ability to control your troops. Is there a US war crime in Iraq as bad as the ambulance massacre?
Shock and Awe doesn't seem a relevant comparison, because in the equivalent stage of the Gaza war Israel was getting a pass.
Not in Iraq, but the US bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, investigated itself and found it did nothing wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike
Fair. I think that was substantially Obama-halo effect. I recall more principled lefties complaining about this.
I'm skeptical that if America had universal conscription and genocidal neighbors that wanted to kill us, rather than a professional army that vetted people, that we would do a better job than Israel. In fact I think we would do a worse job if anything. America has plenty of dumb rightoids that would commit a lot of war crimes. Obviously that isn't great either, and it doesn't mean we don't criticize Israel for the paramedics massacre.
Probably, but you don't and won't. You might as well say Israel wouldn't commit any war crimes if it was on the moon.
When is Beresheet 2 going to be launched?
I do think it's worth emphasizing that Israel isn't some kind of uniquely evil country, and has to kill a bunch of third-worlders in wars because of its circumstances. The Gaza War was a war of necessity. Iraq and Afghanistan? That's the US killing a bunch of third-worlders in a stupid and pointless war.
I agree they should do that. I guess I’m saying it’s not uncommon for these things to happen, likely because of organizational constraints in any army (internal policing inevitably results in prosecuting gray areas, and making the force less effective). I know in any organization, adding compliance requirements adds cost and lowers effectiveness at the margins. Well designed compliance rules and departments can mitigate that. My overall impression is that really bad war crimes are inevitable and it takes a lot of effort and cost to effectively reduce and penalize them. The US does an OK job of this. Israel seems to do a mediocre job of it, and in this war there seem to have been many pockets of doing a poor job. But I think there were real resource and morale constraints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaqi_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massacre
This is a good Gemini summary of Iraq war, though as always needs to be double checked:
https://g.co/gemini/share/2cc0152821fe
By the way, the Korean War was orders of magnitude worse than Gaza on just about every dimension. Technically after genocide convention, but perhaps gets grandfathered in to the WW2 way of waging war.
Yeah, Korea was off the chain. I agree, it was kind of winding down from WW2.
Thanks for links.
I think it's kind of difficult to evaluate Israeli actions in Gaza because there isn't much to compare it to. When developed countries fight wars nowadays, they are usually under very different circumstances. The Gaza War was FAR more justified than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's not even close.
Totally agree. There are lots of reasons we should expect it to be worse:
- higher military necessity than anything US has fought since war of 1812
- Hamas tactics (uniforms, use of mosques and hospitals)
- density
- no evacuation of civilians out of Gaza
- reservist army
I also think in terms of cultural attitudes it's very hard to thread the needle of not having too many self-hating leftists who don't want to win the war and not having too many rightoids who commit war crimes. There are only so many small-l liberal elite human capital people on the center-right (fortunately likely next PM Naftali Bennett is such a person). I think that Yehuda Vach, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir are absolutely horrible people. But I also think that a center-left government, which I'd certainly prefer in peacetime, would have gotten a far worse hostage deal.
Egypt 🥱
Let's fuss about Israel 🙄
Every Israeli war has a deadline that is measured not in time but in bad PR. The goal for the government is to push off that deadline as much as possible by acting affirmatively to show how much they're trying not to kill civilians and do war crimes. Unfortunately, this requires not having ministers of the government not bragging about how much they love war crimes, and usually a genuine effort to avoid doing war crimes. Ah well
Some other big own goals:
the attempt to "starve Hamas" by withholding aid from Gaza. After spending months having the hasbarists and sympathetic pro-Israel people express disgust at accusations that Israel would use "weaponize hunger" or use "access to food as a weapon" the government of Israel decided it would do just that and then acted bewildered when they started getting accused of famine. for a lot of people who were not anti-israel before this made the concept of genocide much more plausible
the failed attempt to arrest the prison guards for sodomizing a prisoner which led to RW nut jobs storming the prisons to free them, the prison guards becoming minor celebrities who escaped any punishment, and ben gvir - the guy in charge of the prisons crowing about how much they deserved it - and helped cement the idea that israel regularly and systematically rapes the Palestinians it imprisons
It wasn’t just things Israel did, it was also the media’s briefly-suppressed hatred of Israel, as most clearly seen in the Al Shifa Hospital incident.
The claim the media gleefully spread around was that Israel had killed 500 people in or near a hospital. The truth when the dust cleared is that a Palestinian rocket had killed fewer than 50 people, maybe far fewer.
But it was obvious from the beginning that there were holes in the story, including because Al Jazeera happened to randomly *see the rocket impact* in their coverage; they pulled it quickly but not quickly enough. The media might have, I don’t know, done the bare minimum of fact checking before repeating the claim. But they didn’t, and it was an inflection point.
It’s clear that the IDF needs to clean house. It’s at least as clear that the media does, too. Of the two, personally, I think there’s at least a chance the IDF will.
Yep, imagery matters to people with limited attention span. Still, in Europe this summer I was surprised by over the top reactions by Spaniards against Israel.
> The next big cope is that Israel’s isolation is temporary because the far Right are going to take over in Europe and only bugmen and blue-haired pansexuals have a problem with killing 65,000 people.
I think you're right here. The far right in some form or other probably will have a big influence in Europe, in control of many countries, but they are more likely to have pro-European than pro-Israel policies. (The exception here in Britain which because of its history with the EU has a large anti-European tinge to its politics and if Farage wins the next election (he probably will) he is very unlikely to rejoin the EU or any new European institutions that may be set up.)
The guy who made the comment about “hipsters” at the Nova Festival is Eugene Puryear, who is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), not DSA. You may not care about the difference, but accuracy is important. https://www.pettimatthew.com/p/journalists-falsely-report-democratic
I don’t mean to disagree with you, but I believe you can strengthen the opposing view. You could argue that Israel generally faces high levels of hostility around the world, and that the events of October 7th were just a blip in that context. Even if Israel had done nothing, over time, things would likely return to the way they were. i would be interested to see your analysis of peace deal, will it stand or crumble, will hamas regain power in gaza.
Mistakes happen and innocent civilians die in any war. The amount rises dramatically when one side fights from civilian buildings and not in uniform. Even Hamas’s own propaganda videos clearly show that they fight from civilian building and not in uniform. Yet I frequently see on NYC subways the arrow that Hamas uses in those videos to point at the Israeli tanks they claim they hit plastered to the wall as the symbol of resistance and identification with it. Do the people hanging them up really care about the children in Gaza?
In general, as Golda Meir put it “We would rather always be dealing with the worlds condemnations than it’s condolences”
"Do the people hanging them up really care about the children in Gaza?"
Almost certainly not. But average normies do. Not enough to upend their lives over it, but enough to think Israel sucks.
"Normies" would dissociate themself from any group that is pro war. It should be a political liability to be supported by groups like "Students for Justice in Palestine" or "Jewish voice for Peace" since those groups are pro war and pro the dismantling of a nominal Western democracy in favor of an Islamic Authoritarian state (at best). That isn't the case. I understand someone being anti-Israel. What is not acceptable is if that person isn't also very anti Palestinian, since there is no large Palestinian group that even pays lip service to being interested in installing a government that won't be worse than Israel in whatever Israel is accused of.
Normies are wrong, killing a five-digit number of people in a once in a century war does not mean that the only first-world democracy with above-replacement TFR including among smart people, a huge tech industry, a GDP/capita that exceeds the UK's and is growing, tons of smart people (and again, a growing population of smart people), free speech, affirmative action for Arabs, and a great attitude towards genetic enhancement is a sucky country. It's a great country. Of course it's imperfect and does a lot of bad things. The same is true of America. America is a great country. Of course America is imperfect and does a lot of bad things.
Yes I know none of these arguments, correct as they are, will convince normies at least in the near term. I have good news though. What will convince normies is winning and not having too many future wars. The ICJ verdict will help too. So will continued growth of Israeli tech and the concordant continued growing importance of Israeli tech to the US. I'm optimistic that there will be "peace" or quiet. The TikTok purchase by Ellison will help too.
If you are correct in your premises, you are also likely correct in your conclusion.
“We would rather always be dealing with the worlds condemnations than it’s condolences”
I really hate this line because people abuse to justify anything. It's just a conversation ender. Oh you think it's bad to kill 100 children to get one unnamed Hamas commander? Well we'd rather be receiving your condemnations than your condolences.
It's a conversation ender because of how well it explains Israel's situation leaving it critics speechless. It's tragic if 100 children get killed because one unnamed Hamas commander surrounded himself by them. The supporters, sympathizers and apologists of Hamas really need to make Hamas understand that they don't accept them fighting from near civilian locations in civilian clothing. They don't. Because the concept doesn't really bother them.