Basically what's going on is that Jews are doing a speed run through 2 millenia of being goyim like all the other nations crammed into a few decades.
up until the 1990s the country was being run by golus jews with their liberal ideals and their hypersensitivity to not looking bad in front of the goyim (this even includes menachem begin) who believed that their long history as oppressed minorities devoted to torah and/or the enlightenment should/would innoculate their ethnostate from committing all the sins of every other nationalist project and acted accordingly, but gradually they have been replaced by native true born sabras shed of these pathetic inferiority complexes and also growing up in a society at more or less permanent war with one or more of its surrounding barbaric fanatic religious neighbors, so they naturaly became true blue card carrying members of THE MIDDLE EAST who think the solution to every atrocity is more atrocities in an ever more fruitless attempt to signal to the irrational enemy that they're even more committed to atrocities than the irrational enemy so the irrational enemy should act rationally and give up. anyone who criticizes this merely aids and abets the enemy either intentionally or as a useless idiot.
i see no obvious way to break this cycle - nobody's going to invade and occupy Israel, instead other countries will simply stop dealing with israel and the israelis who stay will be the most militant MIDDLE EAST types who will continue snarkily insisting that there are 0 negative consequences to an eternal military autarky and that the world really needs davka israeli high tech workers because the baltics can't possibly fill the void or mossad intelligence on what the houthis are doing
>It would be a lot cheaper to pay someone to take them than to keep blowing stuff up and becoming an international pariah, but the fact is that too many Israelis hate Palestinians more than they love their own children. They don’t mind spending the money, but they sure as hell won’t put up with it being spent on them.
This doesn't seem correct. It seems that even right-wing Israelis would be happy to pay for another country to take Gazans. After all, even war with Gaza entails "spending money on them."
In fact, Ben-Gvir, himself, proposed an emigration plan (https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-unveils-voluntary-emigration-plan-to-remove-most-palestinians-from-gaza/) which would include not only paying host countries, but also the Gazans, themselves: "He said emigrants would receive an “absorption package” including “assistance with travel, initial housing, vocational training, employment and support for up to 24 months,” as well as payments to host countries based on the number of Gazans they take in."
>If there was a local Hamas police chief in a building with 20, 30, 40 … well we don’t know because they won’t say, but we have allegations and a lot of circumstantial evidence.
What's the circumstantial evidence? Given that the ratio of civilians to militants killed is probably an order of magnitude lower than that, it would seem that that would have been highly atypical.
I think it's obvious. If a politician rolled out a generous package that actually seriously dealt with the question of how to help Palestinians successfully settle elsewhere and not want to come back he would be denounced as erev rav, galut mentality, love our enemies more than ourselves etc. Maybe Ben Gvir can do it on the 'only Ariel Sharon can make peace' principle, but I reckon the second a Hamas 'terrorist' gets his relocation package the whole plan gets dropped.
Even before the Israeli politician would be accused by Israelis of being a Smolan, he would be accused by the Palestinain's "friends" abroad of ethnic cleansing, and probably genocide, and that's the main reason such a plan would never even get off the ground. But you know that.
Agree with you on 1. But the crux of 3 and partially 2 is that you think the strategy was bad. If the strategy is bad, if war is ineffective, then its cruelty is barbaric. That's all fair, but also seems debatable, certainly given information at the time, and even now - Hamas is very weak, and will remain weak through attrition. That's a real achievement. Could that have been accomplished more effectively by letting the PA in? Probably. But it's much more gray than what you are saying.
"way, way beyond what is normal in contemporary warfare" this sounds convincing but is actually not useful. Which war? In which war has a western country fought where the military need is this high, and the enemy is this embedded with civilians? It's just not a convincing point, which is why NAZA is silly.
Imo you are probably not relocating the Palestinian population either through ethnic cleansing or voluntary emigration. You are probably just stuck with them.
I am curious what are your veiws on AI. Personally I think the end of days are probably coming, either a utopian singularity where we upload our concioussnesses to bevome semi angelic beings or human extinction at the hands of semi angelic AI. I expect to soon either see Eliyahu or discover Judaism is false.
It’s funny I thought of writing about this next article. I have this terrible fear that a post-scarcity future is awaiting humanity and the last thing we did before we got there was lay waste to Gaza.
I am not brave enough to write about the possible impacts AGI would have in Middle East conflicts, because it sounds so silly, but I think about this often. I think it would make for a very interesting article.
Why would laying waste to Gaza make the post scarcity worse? As in I get how laying waste to Gaza can cause issues, but why would those issues be compounded by post scarcity?
Actually Israel would pay a lot to relocate a good portion of the Gazans, and it would be good for all parties, but the "international community" has decided that this is forbidden and any country which could be interested (although I'm not sure why a country would need this headache) is scared away. Europe was willing to absorb millions of Syrian civil war refugees, Afghans, Pakistanis, etc - but the Gazans should stay where they are, to serve Justice I guess.
Thank you for using the word "we" when describing who is committing these atrocities. For us Jews that is the only correct way to describe it, as affirmed every year during Yom Kippur.
This article is so strange. What in fact did the IDF do in Gaza, and what led to that?
As Israel said, the war had three objectives that were sometimes in conflict: 1. Apply military pressure to return hostages (understandable for strategic and moral reasons to not just give in to what hostage-takers demand) 2. Ensure Gaza is never able to invade Israel again 3. Maybe end Hamas rule over Gaza.
It balanced 1 and 2 well, and tried 3 for awhile but given Israeli reluctance for understandable reasons to not take even temporary control of the population, 3 failed. In fact I'm guessing you found the core way it tried 3, taking over food supply via GHF, to be more objectionable than the existing system in which the world sends food free of charge and with zero conditions to Gaza, Hamas controls it, taxes it, and uses the flow to remain in power and build its military capabilities, and further radicalize the population.
As for achieving 1 and 2, you note how this was all achieved with some amount of accuracy and yet somehow morally condemn the IDF for reasons I don't understand. So Israel should allow more buildings its enemy uses to kill Israeli soldiers and attack Israeli border towns now and in the future (Gaza hasn't surrendered) because...you don't like looking at pictures of specifically Gaza's destruction? When Israel mourns its dead and acts to protect its people and forces, apparently it's a crybaby. When Gaza starts wars, promises to never give up until Israel is destroyed...well then isn't it sad to see the buildings they used to kill Israelis are no longer there, how cruel.
Gaza has never surrendered but the hostages have been returned, Gaza's capabilities have been greatly reduced, and its ability to invade has been seriously degraded by pushing it away from Israel's border. Previous approaches to achieve peace with Israel, like negotiated partition and then unilateral withdrawal combined with deterrence, containment, and economic incentives failed and culminated in Oct 7.
Given Israel's understandable and moral desire to not rule over two million plus Gazans and take responsibility for reforming them, and given the world would likely not allow this even temporarily (see the starvation propaganda campaign when Israel stood up the GHF, and the world's complete failure and hostility to reform Palestinian society towards peace or support Palestinian political forces interested in true peace and coexistence), and given that Gaza still hasn't surrendered and there are few signs a political revolution in Gaza is on the horizon, it makes sense that the best Israel can do for now is destroy their capabilities and maintain a sizable buffer zone.
It did this at considerable cost to its own army, despite the author's pitiless sneering at Israel's sacrifice.
Exactly this. On October 8th there were 250 Israelis held hostage in Gaza. Today there are none. On Oct 8th thousands of rockets were launched from Gaza towards Israel. Today there are none. Today Israel maintains a security buffer inside of Gaza that prevents the exact kind of invasion on Oct 7th. There will be no surprise attack from Gaza for the foreseeable future.
The idea that Israel is unable to ethnically cleanse Gaza because Israelis are too cheap is laughable. In the 21st century, ethnic cleansing is anathema (unless you're Azerbaijan or Turkey or Sudan or....). No country will take them, and Israel is not going to invade Egypt in order to push Gazans into the Sinai.
If by "strategic goals" NZ means a war that leads to a permanent political solution, that sadly has never been on the table.
There's truth in some of this. But I also doubt that Israel would have both got the hostages back and had Hamas agree to the IDF remaining in most of Gaza without Israel destroying much of Gaza first, which is presumably why Hamas agreed to what they spent a long time insisting they wouldn't agree to - releasing all the hostages without full IDF withdrawal. The alternative, which much of the opposition supported, was to take the hostages and withdraw at a much earlier stage, which would essentially have risked allowing Hamas to rebuild both its army and tunnel network very quickly. Now Hamas is operating from tents and there's half of Gaza separating it from Israeli towns.
The Gaza campaign is breathtaking in its lack of strategic goals, or better put, meaningful movement towards the stated strategic goal of destroying Hamas, which I am proud to say I anticipated would be the case several days to weeks after Oct7.
My idea is to give every gazan a few tens of thousands of dollars, and bribe some country enough to agree to take them, and settle it. My calculations are it will cost a few hundred billion dollars, but rebuilding Gaza will probably come out to be a third as expensive anyway, and it's not like they will be paying for it.
your article reinspires my confidence that the kanoish line taken by the chareidi gedolim of trying to have as little to do with the war as possible is correct. If anything Chareidi society need to be less openly hawkish.
That being said, 90% of the criticism of Israel comes from outright anti -semites, their useful idiots, or grifters like Tucker and Macklemore, and most Gazans/palestinians/muslims were happy that Oct7 happened, which isn't so much a justification as a reason to withhold my sympathy.
> "My chief objection to voluntary emigration as a strategy for solving the problem is that if you don’t do it in the required volume, it just makes the problem worse by removing the most reasonable and pragmatic Gazans and leaving behind all the hopeless nutters who then breed themselves back to the original level."
I don't really understand how even voluntary emigration is supposed to work at this scale. If they could just leave voluntarily, why would Jordan and Egypt have these fenced-off border crossings? Are they all supposed to getting passports for Argentina or Russia or Ireland or something?
I'm also curious as to what the source for Al-Aqsa Flood having a 2:1 civilian/combatant death ratio- is this including any reservists for the IDF as "combatants" for these purposes?
The argument that Israel has no goal is constantly made by Israeli critiques tho, and it's one of the main justification for the genocide label because they believe that is because Israel has a more pernicious goal it doesn't want to publicize. So i don't think Israel opponents don't understand the rule of war is the issue. Also even in other cases, you can clearly see they just disagree that the rule of war should be that way.
With me, collateral damage seems morally weird, where we could kill 100 people to get Osama Bin Laden, basically in a way implying Laden life is worth 100 innocent ones and those ones by bein innocent somehow got their worth reduced collectively to less tha Laden's. One could alos argue that forces wiuld clearly be even more enthusiastic about killing 100 bin Ladens in the same place, but I'm not sure that fixes the issue. There's s
Collateral damage calculations and ratios are in a fundamental sense morally unjustifiable for exactly the reason you're saying. Declaring that killing Osama Bin Laden is a good worth killing 100 innocent people feels monstrous. The clearest justification is a claim that letting Bin Laden live will result in even more innocent deaths, but it's clearly not really possible to assert this with any precision in the great majority of cases.
On the other hand, if a military decided that it would never knowingly kill civilians, it would be defeated by any enemy willing to put civilians in harms way. And a world where militaries that do care about civilians are defeated by militaries that don't care about civilians is a world ruled by the worst people.
There's a simple sort of response to October 7th that I've seen a lot of people have, of essentially saying that it's immoral to kill more than 1000 civilians in response to the death of 1000 civilians. That logic leads to exactly this problem: it leads to a situation where an entity like Hamas has practical impunity for its actions. But it's also clearly the case that October 7th doesn't justify any number of civilian deaths. In my mind, I think there are two questions. The first: what strategy that was actually likely to work would have eliminated the threat from Hamas in the way that harmed civilians the least? If the actual strategy was much more harmful than an alternative that would likely have worked, then the actual strategy was immoral. The second: is even the least harmful strategy too harmful to be justified? In other words, there's a certain point where the right thing is to accept that your enemy can and will harm you and to absorb that harm if the alternative is too horrific. Moving from rocket attacks that killed few people to a massacre of more than 1000 people made it less reasonable to expect Israelis to just absorb the harm, but there's still a ceiling on how much harm they can justify inflicting in order to avoid another October 7th.
I've tried to get myself to a point of clarity on both of these questions, and I've honestly struggled. A big part of the problem is that it's hard to find many sources of information that seem to have a real understanding of the military situation and the options and aren't horribly biased in one direction or the other (actually, even getting one of the two is hard). But my general sense is that Israel could have conducted the beginning of the war especially in a way that killed far fewer civilians and still ended up where we are now. Israel certainly could have avoided widespread hunger in Gaza while still ending up where we are now. It may have been possible to save many many lives and even more suffering by building refugee camps inside Israel to give people somewhere to go, and to empower the PA to administer areas taken by the Israeli military. But I don't know that there was a path to degrading Hamas's capabilities to the degree they've been degraded that wouldn't have involved tens of thousands of civilian deaths and mass physical destruction of Gaza.
On the question of how much destruction is worth it, I also don't know how to think about this. I'm American, not Israeli, so I'm not at risk. We responded to 9/11 by overthrowing two foreign governments (at least) and carrying out military occupations that killed, depending on how you count, hundreds of thousands to millions of people. I was against that not because I thought it wouldn't prevent another 9/11 but because I thought it was an unjustifiable amount of carnage to give us the safety it gave us. Maybe I would see it differently if I saw secret intelligence that Al Qaida and/or Saddam Hussein were actually close to getting nuclear or biological weapons that could have killed huge numbers of people. Even then, what we did would have been disproportionate, but I think every society is entitled, to a certain degree, to react disproportionately to attacks on it. It's a question of where to draw the line. What, to me, makes Israel's actions in Gaza feel unjustifiable and not worth it is that the extreme destruction hasn't led to any sort of stable or sustainable solution. There's no plan for Gazans or Gaza, and Hamas is still in charge of most Gazans. Hamas doesn't have the capability for another big sophisticated attack like October 7th, but if the plan is just to leave Gaza so utterly broken that it never regenerates that capacity, it's a plan for unbelievable suffering without end for two million people that is completely disproportionate to preventing a horrific attack every 20 years. Maybe there was never any way to make a Marshall Plan for Gaza work, but if so, the destruction of World War II isn't a fair analogy. We (or, I) would see that war very differently if Germans and Japanese were still living in shanty towns and being regularly bombed to keep them in submission.
1) Any analysis based on false information is worthless. Your writing "Israel certainly could have avoided widespread hunger in Gaza" while we now know that there never was widespread hunger in Gaza (and knew that in real time actually) indicates that you at least need to reassess.
2) The comparison between the outcome of WWII, or any past event, to the current situation in Gaza to determine whether decisions taken were moral in real time is senseless, since e.g. the allies didn't know in advance how WWII would pan out.
3) "Hamas doesn't have the capability for another big sophisticated attack like October 7th" - nor of firing thousands of rockets - justifies a lot, as you seem to admit. Where to draw the line with regard to costs is indeed a gut feeling, and depends in a large measure on where your own personal gut, and that if your loved ones, is located.
Not sure what exactly is your bar for “widespread”, but at a minimum tens of thousands of children in Gaza were pushed into malnutrition by the food blockade. And that was entirely avoidable.
For context, even if your numbers are correct, that would put the rate of Gaza malnutrition (not famine!) at the height of the crisis at levels similar to the normal levels of malnutrition in neighboring countries such as Egypt and Jordan ... whether even that was avoidable is not clear at all.
Current (2026) UNICEF numbers are:
Regional Comparison of Acute Malnutrition (Under-5)
Yes i get that defense of collateral damage, it's just not very satisfying. I also get the defense that it would make war impossible if you commit to absolutely no civilian casualty, doesn't make the ethic/morality of the whole thing easier to digest tho. I remember some old norm is this part of the world (Africa, Nigeria), where they killed various slaves to be buried alongside important figures and that's often what collateral damage looks like to me (of course the sacrifices were much dumber and evil of course). I want us to move to a simulated war, but how to get loser ti commit to not putting their lives on the line after losing in tbe simulation anyways?
The thing is that, the hamas being embedded in civilian place is almost unavoidable once you clear the bar that they want to be an army. Israel isn't letting them build millitary infrastructure seperately like that, the place is too small in the first place (funny enough, israel also used justification that Israel was too small so any attack on millitary infrastructure would harm civilians! During one of the tit for tat with Iran in 2024 or so). I don't think Hamas is trying to minimize civilian casualty, but i also doubt they are so worried about their own lives or trying to maximize civilian casualty.
The whole thing gets even more messy when we are getting some evidence, Israel was targeting entire buildings to get rid of Low level millitary and political targets with links to Hamas. Like they were bombing banks in Lebanon for 'funding Hezbollah", it's like bombing Israel banks for that reason, or the news station in Iran for 'being mouthpiece of Regime", something rhey did in Gaza a lot too. And some evidence point to the fact that they attack building on filmsy excuse and work to backwardly justify it when it leads to controversy. Like they blew up a photographer cause they mistook a camera drone for an actual drone. Even the hospitals they attacked, they were doing 3d simulation to show what they found, whixh i question cause why not show the actual footage or pictures from the actual place?
Of course i never expected no disproportionate response but then 50-100X is way too much. And 911 is another reason i think Americans should have restrained Israel more, because they should understand indeed, period of victimhood is when people feel the greatest justification and sorta need the greatest restraint, America response to 911 was very disproportionate and full of ethical, moral abd factual errors. Israel was attacking Iran, Qatar something it wouldn't be doing if it thought America wouldn't back it if these people fought back in full force. Let's be honest, i don't think Hezbollah was a real threat like that, they would shoot their nonsense rockets, but if they wanted to actually join the war, they would have been more aggressive and Iran even while Israel was clearly provoking it, was doing perfonative strikes that it informed the world of in public and private.
There's this thing where people define Al Qaeda and Hamas as existential threats, when they clearly aren't, their attacks are clearly desperate attempts by a weaker party. Or their even less justifiable stuff in Syria, clearly just took more land, and do daily incursions into their territory.
By the 3 month of that war, Israel already decapitated Hamas and Hamas already agreed in theory to almost exactly what it now agrees with now, it was basically just hunting down Hamas after that and yet that was the time it demolished much of Gaza. And it would be easier to believe they needed to demolish like 90% of the place (highly unlikely Hamas hid under 90% of buildings) if therew wasn't Bibi, and other officials professing other reasons they might be doing that!.
I agree that the ethical justification for collateral damage is deeply unsatisfying. And in a strange way the more precision and intelligence is brought to bear on it the less satisfying it is. Dropping a bomb on a building that you know houses 15 children, 8 old people, 6 adults with no known connection to Hamas and two Hamas officers feels closer to deliberately shooting a child than does dropping a bomb on a building that you know houses a Hamas officer and probably also houses civilians. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all (if I remember correctly) hit schools and daycares with rockets over the course of the war, but they did so because they were firing inaccurate rockets with no specific target. It's a different sensation of culpability than the US had when we launched a precision strike on a girl's school in Iran due to faulty intelligence. To some degree, this suggests to me that my ethical feelings here can't be trusted too far--it's clearly more ethical for a military to try to get as much intelligence as possible and use as precise of weapons as possible, even if that means that it's making more clear-eyed decisions to kill innocent people.
I disagree with you to a fairly large extent about Hamas, and to a much smaller extent about Israel.
I don't think it's true that Hamas couldn't distinguish fighters from civilians more than they did because Gaza is such a dense environment. It's possible to wear uniforms in a dense environment. It's also possible to build specifically military buildings, or designate specific buildings as military bases. It's also possible to facilitate civilian evacuation of active combat zones: the Ukrainian military has done house to house, building to building urban combat at several points during the war, but they did their best to evacuate civilians and worked with Russia (to a limited extent) to designate civilian evacuation corridors. Hamas repeatedly actively resisted civilian efforts to flee areas that the Israeli military announced they would attack, and repeatedly used designated civilian areas to hide senior officers (such as Mohammed Deif) and launch attacks. A version of Hamas that embedded its military among civilians only as much as Israel does (i.e. putting military buildings in dense urban areas, having soldiers often sleep at home, using civilian hospitals to treat military wounded and vice versa, but also putting most soldiers in uniform) could have been fought with far fewer civilian deaths and much less destruction. Even a Hamas that did all of that but also built a tunnel network under effectively every building, including civilian buildings, could have been fought with far fewer civilian deaths. I think you're right that Hamas didn't necessarily *maximize* civilian deaths, for instance by commanding civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings that housed commanders, but they made a large number of choices that greatly increased civilian deaths.
With Israel:
My understanding of the situation matches yours in that I think Israel in many cases chose to kill civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure when the military benefit was nowhere near enough to justify it. It's very hard to say this with certainty about any particular strike because it's reasonable for a military not to share everything they knew that led to a strike, but this is the overall sense that I get. That said, I'm not sure that I'd say that it's clearly unjustifiable, for instance, to bomb a bank that is funding Hezbollah. If an army attacked Israel with the actual intent of defeating its military, they probably would try to destroy key economic targets as well as military targets, and my understanding (which might be wrong!) is that this isn't necessarily against the laws of war. I can easily imagine a compelling argument that destroying Hezbollah's ability to pay its soldiers and its civilian supporters could lead to the collapse of Hezbollah's fighting ability more quickly and with fewer civilian deaths than trying to kill all the Hezbollah fighters.
Likewise, while it's probably unlikely that there were Hamas fighters under 90% of buildings in Gaza at any given time, I think it's quite plausible that there were access tunnels that could allow fighters to move into buildings and use them as ambush sites across 90% of Gaza, and even more plausible that it wouldn't be possible to determine which buildings do and don't have tunnel entrances without risking soldier's lives, so that 90% of buildings posed a credible danger to nearby troops. Does that justify destroying 90% of buildings? I think it depends on what the alternatives are and what happens next. Honestly, if Israel had provided real shelter to civilians, then demolished 90% of buildings to clear the tunnel networks, and then made any serious attempt to rebuild something habitable in cleared areas, I'd be willing to see it as a plausibly justifiable response to the threat of the tunnels. Leaving everything destroyed and making people live in tents indefinitely is unjustifiable.
I'm not sure what you mean, specifically, in saying that Israel had already decapitated Hamas and Hamas had already agreed to current conditions within 3 months. Yahya Sinwar wasn't killed until a year into the war, and Hamas commanders have continued to be killed up to the present, including fairly senior people. Of course there will always be another person to kill unless Hamas completely ceases to exist, but I don't know that you can say that there's a point where the project of decapitating Hamas or degrading its military capacity was clearly finished. I'm also not sure what terms you mean specifically: my understanding is that Hamas just agreed to Trump's disarmament plan (which Netanyahu shamefully rejected)--this is not something that they were willing to agree to at any previous point, as far as I'm aware. I've read Gershon Baskin, for instance, arguing that Hamas has been consistently willing to make a deal, but the details here seem fairly important if the question is whether Hamas was either surrendering its capacity to launch a major attack on Israel or having that capacity destroyed. I should say though: I'm very open to the argument that Israel has dragged the war out unnecessarily and with minimal benefit.
In my mind, the tactical questions are very important, but in some ways a bigger question is what can realistically be accomplished by military action and whether what can be accomplished is valuable enough to justify the harm of fighting a war. From that perspective, the thing that most distinguishes Hamas's attack on October 7th from Israel's response, in my mind, is the question of what could be accomplished. Hamas's attack didn't seriously degrade Israel's ability to kill Palestinians, nor do I think it ever had a real chance of doing so. To the extent that it succeeded at something, it succeeded at degrading Israel's standing in the world and weaking its alliances, but that accomplishment only came because of the massive harm to Palestinian civilians, and it's unclear if it will ever have good consequences for Palestinians. In contrast, while I don't think this is worth the amount of damage Israel's campaign caused, it is clear that Israel massively degraded the ability of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to attack Israel. Hamas fired several thousand rockets a year into Israel before October 7th, and in the early war Hamas and Hezbollah shot I believe tens of thousands of rockets. A lot of territory in Northern Israel was completely evacuated because of Hezbollah rockets. At this point, there are hardly any rockets fired from Lebanon or Gaza.
A consequence of that view is, basically, that it's more moral for strong armies to fight wars than for weak armies to do so. This is pretty self-serving coming from a citizen of the country with the strongest army in world history, but I also think it's right. Fighting a losing war is immoral! It involves all the horrors of war and doesn't accomplish anything!
A last thing I'll say on this: I agree that Al Qaida never posed anything like an existential threat to the United States. Even if they'd gotten a dirty nuke and blew up half of Manhattan, there are 40 cities in the country with more than half a million people. Hurricane Katrina caused massive damage to a US city unlikely to be topped by any terrorist attack and it didn't threaten the existence of the US in any way. I'd say the same for Hamas+Hezbollah's ability to threaten Israel's existence, though the threat is I think much bigger. That said, I don't think powerful countries can be expected to ignore threats that aren't existential. People want their societies to protect them from harm even if the harm is endurable, and I think basically all societies that are able to do so react disproportionately when attacked. I think from a game theory perspective, the best we can hope for is an acceptance that strong countries will react disproportionately to being attacked, for this to be a disincentive to attack strong countries, but for that acceptance to have a limit.
Okay, gonna take that as a no (i think), no worries, here goes (Substack says this is too long for a reply so this article is just for format reasons and for you only, to be deleted after:
An ethnic cleansing/relocation scheme is the most discernible goal- or would be if Israel had negotiated any kind of settlement with another country to take them- but that's not equivalent to a genocide.
(might want to run your post through a spell-check, btw)
Here are the main reasons why countries wouldn't go along with relocating Palestinians.
1. Countries like Egypt and Jordan don't want more mouths to feed. People will bring up events like Palestinians attempting to overthrow the government of jordan, which did happen, but aren't the main reason why countries wouldn't want them. Palestinians aren't per se more problematic than the local populations already there, but those countries are poor and don't have much money and don't want to feed, clothe, employee and house more people.
2. No country whether Arab or otherwise wants to be seen as helping the Israelis do ethnic cleansing and ending the Palestinian cause.
You could try forcibly relocating them and expelling them to neighboring countries, but this would likely trigger a major regional conflict.
The other option is actually doing genocide. But I'm not sure Israelis actually have the stomach to do it.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the arguments- at minimum there would have to be some kind of humanitarian aid package and jobs program to go with the relocation.
Oh I never claimed it was genocide to relocate people. Ethnic cleansing or voluntary relocation are clearly different things than actual genocide. I'm saying the only way you'll ever actually be free of the Palestinians is by actually doing genocide not that relocation would be the same thing as genocide.
I could but probably won't do that. You got my point didn't you?
Also the ethnic cleansing thing is not surprising, Neither America nor other Israel allies would take 2 (or 7 or so for the whole Palestinians) million people that easily. Even at the height of the Holocaust, these states weren't that enthusiastic about it. And moving them to Egypt or Jordan or Syria wouldn't solve the issue because the population in these places hate Israel too, they'd just amplify the hatred over time and it wouldn't stop the threat to Israel.
And there's an argument that trying to destroy their presence by force in other ti push them out and destroy their national presence on the land qualifies as genocide or something.
> "And moving them to Egypt or Jordan or Syria wouldn't solve the issue because the population in these places hate Israel too, they'd just amplify the hatred over time and it wouldn't stop the threat to Israel"
Possibly, possibly not. Egypt in particular is huge enough that in principle you could take a couple million people and scatter them thinly enough and they wouldn't have the numbers to influence public opinion much. (Plus Egypt has a lot more leeway for cracking down on dissent.) Jordan is arguably more culturally compatible and a fair chunk of Palestinian refugees are already living there more-or-less peacefully, albeit from a much earlier time. But I won't say it's not complicated.
> "And there's an argument that trying to destroy their presence by force in other ti push them out and destroy their national presence on the land qualifies as genocide or something."
Yeah, but that's a silly argument, since it means every forced population transfer/relocation qualifies as genocide, and these are clearly not equally bad things.
Not really, the Palestinians would just get huge cultural cache even in Egypt, the people are already very very anti Israel, spreading out the Palestinians would not fix the issue at all. Ridiculously easy for the Palestinians to get cultural cache here cause the opposition wouldn't be able to meaningfully oppose anti israeo demands without risking losing most of theie support to the general anti Israel populace. The Jordan thing has been tried and they just gained easy political influence qnd were indeed just going to make Jordan a vehicle for their animus.
It's not a silly argument tho I'm skeptical of it myself. But the genocide convention is pretty broad in some ways. And nit all ethnic cleansing could meat the bar but sone would if the way you do it is carpet bombing a place with strong evidence of some notable level of indiscrimination. And there's a common trend in genocide and ethnic cleansing anyways
I mean, it's basic math. Israel did everything to protect its civilians from 30,000 indiscriminate projectiles. Hence the civilian casualties were low on Israel's side. Not because Hamás, Iran, Houthies or Hezbollah cared
Whereas in the frontlines, Israel had to encounter virtually 100% civilians, not because there were no Hamasniks, but because Hamasniks don't use military attire except when they want to parade Jewish babies' coffins. Only in skirmishes would that change, but even then Hamas' tactics probably put civilians in danger, on purpose.
Finally, when targeting infrastructure - the fact that "only" 3% of Gaza perished when 80% of buildings were destroyed should be considered a marvelous feat. The gender and age distribution of the casualties show that they follow a very male and adult mode, unlike the Gaza population pyramid.
What remains are the children that died. Most died because, beyond the evacuation of 97% of the population and all measures taken, it was likely logistically impossible to get to 100% - basic pareto math.
There were probably some war crimes due to lack of discipline or some degree of impunity. There were probably even fewer crimes against humanity, probably because there aren't always cameras everywhere. But again - you cannot demand a total lack of impunity on Israel's side when there is total impunity on the side of Israel's enemies - and there are largely no western countries with a total lack of impunity - except for countries that are ill with 'suicidal empathy' - putting the lives of your enemies ahead of those of your kin, which is preposterous. Some of Israel's enemies, conveniently, think Israel should value Gazan civilian life more than the life of their own soldiers, which is obviously an absurd demand.
"Finally, when targeting infrastructure - the fact that "only" 3% of Gaza perished when 80% of buildings were destroyed should be considered a marvelous feat. The gender and age distribution of the casualties show that they follow a very male and adult mode, unlike the Gaza population pyramid."
Not really, because most buildings were destroyed after the area was already cleared.
Basically what's going on is that Jews are doing a speed run through 2 millenia of being goyim like all the other nations crammed into a few decades.
up until the 1990s the country was being run by golus jews with their liberal ideals and their hypersensitivity to not looking bad in front of the goyim (this even includes menachem begin) who believed that their long history as oppressed minorities devoted to torah and/or the enlightenment should/would innoculate their ethnostate from committing all the sins of every other nationalist project and acted accordingly, but gradually they have been replaced by native true born sabras shed of these pathetic inferiority complexes and also growing up in a society at more or less permanent war with one or more of its surrounding barbaric fanatic religious neighbors, so they naturaly became true blue card carrying members of THE MIDDLE EAST who think the solution to every atrocity is more atrocities in an ever more fruitless attempt to signal to the irrational enemy that they're even more committed to atrocities than the irrational enemy so the irrational enemy should act rationally and give up. anyone who criticizes this merely aids and abets the enemy either intentionally or as a useless idiot.
i see no obvious way to break this cycle - nobody's going to invade and occupy Israel, instead other countries will simply stop dealing with israel and the israelis who stay will be the most militant MIDDLE EAST types who will continue snarkily insisting that there are 0 negative consequences to an eternal military autarky and that the world really needs davka israeli high tech workers because the baltics can't possibly fill the void or mossad intelligence on what the houthis are doing
Well it may be that those golus jews were the really wise ones and the demagogic right will end up wrecking the country.
This makes sense until you use the bare minimum of critical thinking
What kind of a non-response is that?
Do you have a real argument you would like to share instead?
>It would be a lot cheaper to pay someone to take them than to keep blowing stuff up and becoming an international pariah, but the fact is that too many Israelis hate Palestinians more than they love their own children. They don’t mind spending the money, but they sure as hell won’t put up with it being spent on them.
This doesn't seem correct. It seems that even right-wing Israelis would be happy to pay for another country to take Gazans. After all, even war with Gaza entails "spending money on them."
In fact, Ben-Gvir, himself, proposed an emigration plan (https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-unveils-voluntary-emigration-plan-to-remove-most-palestinians-from-gaza/) which would include not only paying host countries, but also the Gazans, themselves: "He said emigrants would receive an “absorption package” including “assistance with travel, initial housing, vocational training, employment and support for up to 24 months,” as well as payments to host countries based on the number of Gazans they take in."
>If there was a local Hamas police chief in a building with 20, 30, 40 … well we don’t know because they won’t say, but we have allegations and a lot of circumstantial evidence.
What's the circumstantial evidence? Given that the ratio of civilians to militants killed is probably an order of magnitude lower than that, it would seem that that would have been highly atypical.
I think it's obvious. If a politician rolled out a generous package that actually seriously dealt with the question of how to help Palestinians successfully settle elsewhere and not want to come back he would be denounced as erev rav, galut mentality, love our enemies more than ourselves etc. Maybe Ben Gvir can do it on the 'only Ariel Sharon can make peace' principle, but I reckon the second a Hamas 'terrorist' gets his relocation package the whole plan gets dropped.
Even before the Israeli politician would be accused by Israelis of being a Smolan, he would be accused by the Palestinain's "friends" abroad of ethnic cleansing, and probably genocide, and that's the main reason such a plan would never even get off the ground. But you know that.
The idea that the only thing stopping a "pay for ethnic cleansing" scheme is Israeli racism is a deranged take, even for this blog.
Agree with you on 1. But the crux of 3 and partially 2 is that you think the strategy was bad. If the strategy is bad, if war is ineffective, then its cruelty is barbaric. That's all fair, but also seems debatable, certainly given information at the time, and even now - Hamas is very weak, and will remain weak through attrition. That's a real achievement. Could that have been accomplished more effectively by letting the PA in? Probably. But it's much more gray than what you are saying.
"way, way beyond what is normal in contemporary warfare" this sounds convincing but is actually not useful. Which war? In which war has a western country fought where the military need is this high, and the enemy is this embedded with civilians? It's just not a convincing point, which is why NAZA is silly.
Imo you are probably not relocating the Palestinian population either through ethnic cleansing or voluntary emigration. You are probably just stuck with them.
Apropos of nothing — is there a term for contrarislop? Should we just call it that?
I am curious what are your veiws on AI. Personally I think the end of days are probably coming, either a utopian singularity where we upload our concioussnesses to bevome semi angelic beings or human extinction at the hands of semi angelic AI. I expect to soon either see Eliyahu or discover Judaism is false.
It’s funny I thought of writing about this next article. I have this terrible fear that a post-scarcity future is awaiting humanity and the last thing we did before we got there was lay waste to Gaza.
I am not brave enough to write about the possible impacts AGI would have in Middle East conflicts, because it sounds so silly, but I think about this often. I think it would make for a very interesting article.
It would you should write it
You should write it
Why would laying waste to Gaza make the post scarcity worse? As in I get how laying waste to Gaza can cause issues, but why would those issues be compounded by post scarcity?
It's the last thing we do as humans. Our parting message to the world. Like dying with cack in your pants.
Did you ever read Houellebecq's "Island"?
Considering the people making the AI are Jewish (disproportionately and ofc the CEOs) - the last thing we did was create AGI
Yeah you should read Ed Zitron first and have a nice cold shower.
Actually Israel would pay a lot to relocate a good portion of the Gazans, and it would be good for all parties, but the "international community" has decided that this is forbidden and any country which could be interested (although I'm not sure why a country would need this headache) is scared away. Europe was willing to absorb millions of Syrian civil war refugees, Afghans, Pakistanis, etc - but the Gazans should stay where they are, to serve Justice I guess.
Thank you for using the word "we" when describing who is committing these atrocities. For us Jews that is the only correct way to describe it, as affirmed every year during Yom Kippur.
This article is so strange. What in fact did the IDF do in Gaza, and what led to that?
As Israel said, the war had three objectives that were sometimes in conflict: 1. Apply military pressure to return hostages (understandable for strategic and moral reasons to not just give in to what hostage-takers demand) 2. Ensure Gaza is never able to invade Israel again 3. Maybe end Hamas rule over Gaza.
It balanced 1 and 2 well, and tried 3 for awhile but given Israeli reluctance for understandable reasons to not take even temporary control of the population, 3 failed. In fact I'm guessing you found the core way it tried 3, taking over food supply via GHF, to be more objectionable than the existing system in which the world sends food free of charge and with zero conditions to Gaza, Hamas controls it, taxes it, and uses the flow to remain in power and build its military capabilities, and further radicalize the population.
As for achieving 1 and 2, you note how this was all achieved with some amount of accuracy and yet somehow morally condemn the IDF for reasons I don't understand. So Israel should allow more buildings its enemy uses to kill Israeli soldiers and attack Israeli border towns now and in the future (Gaza hasn't surrendered) because...you don't like looking at pictures of specifically Gaza's destruction? When Israel mourns its dead and acts to protect its people and forces, apparently it's a crybaby. When Gaza starts wars, promises to never give up until Israel is destroyed...well then isn't it sad to see the buildings they used to kill Israelis are no longer there, how cruel.
Gaza has never surrendered but the hostages have been returned, Gaza's capabilities have been greatly reduced, and its ability to invade has been seriously degraded by pushing it away from Israel's border. Previous approaches to achieve peace with Israel, like negotiated partition and then unilateral withdrawal combined with deterrence, containment, and economic incentives failed and culminated in Oct 7.
Given Israel's understandable and moral desire to not rule over two million plus Gazans and take responsibility for reforming them, and given the world would likely not allow this even temporarily (see the starvation propaganda campaign when Israel stood up the GHF, and the world's complete failure and hostility to reform Palestinian society towards peace or support Palestinian political forces interested in true peace and coexistence), and given that Gaza still hasn't surrendered and there are few signs a political revolution in Gaza is on the horizon, it makes sense that the best Israel can do for now is destroy their capabilities and maintain a sizable buffer zone.
It did this at considerable cost to its own army, despite the author's pitiless sneering at Israel's sacrifice.
Exactly this. On October 8th there were 250 Israelis held hostage in Gaza. Today there are none. On Oct 8th thousands of rockets were launched from Gaza towards Israel. Today there are none. Today Israel maintains a security buffer inside of Gaza that prevents the exact kind of invasion on Oct 7th. There will be no surprise attack from Gaza for the foreseeable future.
The idea that Israel is unable to ethnically cleanse Gaza because Israelis are too cheap is laughable. In the 21st century, ethnic cleansing is anathema (unless you're Azerbaijan or Turkey or Sudan or....). No country will take them, and Israel is not going to invade Egypt in order to push Gazans into the Sinai.
If by "strategic goals" NZ means a war that leads to a permanent political solution, that sadly has never been on the table.
There's truth in some of this. But I also doubt that Israel would have both got the hostages back and had Hamas agree to the IDF remaining in most of Gaza without Israel destroying much of Gaza first, which is presumably why Hamas agreed to what they spent a long time insisting they wouldn't agree to - releasing all the hostages without full IDF withdrawal. The alternative, which much of the opposition supported, was to take the hostages and withdraw at a much earlier stage, which would essentially have risked allowing Hamas to rebuild both its army and tunnel network very quickly. Now Hamas is operating from tents and there's half of Gaza separating it from Israeli towns.
The Gaza campaign is breathtaking in its lack of strategic goals, or better put, meaningful movement towards the stated strategic goal of destroying Hamas, which I am proud to say I anticipated would be the case several days to weeks after Oct7.
My idea is to give every gazan a few tens of thousands of dollars, and bribe some country enough to agree to take them, and settle it. My calculations are it will cost a few hundred billion dollars, but rebuilding Gaza will probably come out to be a third as expensive anyway, and it's not like they will be paying for it.
your article reinspires my confidence that the kanoish line taken by the chareidi gedolim of trying to have as little to do with the war as possible is correct. If anything Chareidi society need to be less openly hawkish.
That being said, 90% of the criticism of Israel comes from outright anti -semites, their useful idiots, or grifters like Tucker and Macklemore, and most Gazans/palestinians/muslims were happy that Oct7 happened, which isn't so much a justification as a reason to withhold my sympathy.
Welcome to the AI doomer club, your membership card is in the mail.
> "My chief objection to voluntary emigration as a strategy for solving the problem is that if you don’t do it in the required volume, it just makes the problem worse by removing the most reasonable and pragmatic Gazans and leaving behind all the hopeless nutters who then breed themselves back to the original level."
I don't really understand how even voluntary emigration is supposed to work at this scale. If they could just leave voluntarily, why would Jordan and Egypt have these fenced-off border crossings? Are they all supposed to getting passports for Argentina or Russia or Ireland or something?
I'm also curious as to what the source for Al-Aqsa Flood having a 2:1 civilian/combatant death ratio- is this including any reservists for the IDF as "combatants" for these purposes?
The argument that Israel has no goal is constantly made by Israeli critiques tho, and it's one of the main justification for the genocide label because they believe that is because Israel has a more pernicious goal it doesn't want to publicize. So i don't think Israel opponents don't understand the rule of war is the issue. Also even in other cases, you can clearly see they just disagree that the rule of war should be that way.
With me, collateral damage seems morally weird, where we could kill 100 people to get Osama Bin Laden, basically in a way implying Laden life is worth 100 innocent ones and those ones by bein innocent somehow got their worth reduced collectively to less tha Laden's. One could alos argue that forces wiuld clearly be even more enthusiastic about killing 100 bin Ladens in the same place, but I'm not sure that fixes the issue. There's s
My sense is basically:
Collateral damage calculations and ratios are in a fundamental sense morally unjustifiable for exactly the reason you're saying. Declaring that killing Osama Bin Laden is a good worth killing 100 innocent people feels monstrous. The clearest justification is a claim that letting Bin Laden live will result in even more innocent deaths, but it's clearly not really possible to assert this with any precision in the great majority of cases.
On the other hand, if a military decided that it would never knowingly kill civilians, it would be defeated by any enemy willing to put civilians in harms way. And a world where militaries that do care about civilians are defeated by militaries that don't care about civilians is a world ruled by the worst people.
There's a simple sort of response to October 7th that I've seen a lot of people have, of essentially saying that it's immoral to kill more than 1000 civilians in response to the death of 1000 civilians. That logic leads to exactly this problem: it leads to a situation where an entity like Hamas has practical impunity for its actions. But it's also clearly the case that October 7th doesn't justify any number of civilian deaths. In my mind, I think there are two questions. The first: what strategy that was actually likely to work would have eliminated the threat from Hamas in the way that harmed civilians the least? If the actual strategy was much more harmful than an alternative that would likely have worked, then the actual strategy was immoral. The second: is even the least harmful strategy too harmful to be justified? In other words, there's a certain point where the right thing is to accept that your enemy can and will harm you and to absorb that harm if the alternative is too horrific. Moving from rocket attacks that killed few people to a massacre of more than 1000 people made it less reasonable to expect Israelis to just absorb the harm, but there's still a ceiling on how much harm they can justify inflicting in order to avoid another October 7th.
I've tried to get myself to a point of clarity on both of these questions, and I've honestly struggled. A big part of the problem is that it's hard to find many sources of information that seem to have a real understanding of the military situation and the options and aren't horribly biased in one direction or the other (actually, even getting one of the two is hard). But my general sense is that Israel could have conducted the beginning of the war especially in a way that killed far fewer civilians and still ended up where we are now. Israel certainly could have avoided widespread hunger in Gaza while still ending up where we are now. It may have been possible to save many many lives and even more suffering by building refugee camps inside Israel to give people somewhere to go, and to empower the PA to administer areas taken by the Israeli military. But I don't know that there was a path to degrading Hamas's capabilities to the degree they've been degraded that wouldn't have involved tens of thousands of civilian deaths and mass physical destruction of Gaza.
On the question of how much destruction is worth it, I also don't know how to think about this. I'm American, not Israeli, so I'm not at risk. We responded to 9/11 by overthrowing two foreign governments (at least) and carrying out military occupations that killed, depending on how you count, hundreds of thousands to millions of people. I was against that not because I thought it wouldn't prevent another 9/11 but because I thought it was an unjustifiable amount of carnage to give us the safety it gave us. Maybe I would see it differently if I saw secret intelligence that Al Qaida and/or Saddam Hussein were actually close to getting nuclear or biological weapons that could have killed huge numbers of people. Even then, what we did would have been disproportionate, but I think every society is entitled, to a certain degree, to react disproportionately to attacks on it. It's a question of where to draw the line. What, to me, makes Israel's actions in Gaza feel unjustifiable and not worth it is that the extreme destruction hasn't led to any sort of stable or sustainable solution. There's no plan for Gazans or Gaza, and Hamas is still in charge of most Gazans. Hamas doesn't have the capability for another big sophisticated attack like October 7th, but if the plan is just to leave Gaza so utterly broken that it never regenerates that capacity, it's a plan for unbelievable suffering without end for two million people that is completely disproportionate to preventing a horrific attack every 20 years. Maybe there was never any way to make a Marshall Plan for Gaza work, but if so, the destruction of World War II isn't a fair analogy. We (or, I) would see that war very differently if Germans and Japanese were still living in shanty towns and being regularly bombed to keep them in submission.
1) Any analysis based on false information is worthless. Your writing "Israel certainly could have avoided widespread hunger in Gaza" while we now know that there never was widespread hunger in Gaza (and knew that in real time actually) indicates that you at least need to reassess.
2) The comparison between the outcome of WWII, or any past event, to the current situation in Gaza to determine whether decisions taken were moral in real time is senseless, since e.g. the allies didn't know in advance how WWII would pan out.
3) "Hamas doesn't have the capability for another big sophisticated attack like October 7th" - nor of firing thousands of rockets - justifies a lot, as you seem to admit. Where to draw the line with regard to costs is indeed a gut feeling, and depends in a large measure on where your own personal gut, and that if your loved ones, is located.
Not sure what exactly is your bar for “widespread”, but at a minimum tens of thousands of children in Gaza were pushed into malnutrition by the food blockade. And that was entirely avoidable.
For context, even if your numbers are correct, that would put the rate of Gaza malnutrition (not famine!) at the height of the crisis at levels similar to the normal levels of malnutrition in neighboring countries such as Egypt and Jordan ... whether even that was avoidable is not clear at all.
Current (2026) UNICEF numbers are:
Regional Comparison of Acute Malnutrition (Under-5)
Gaza: 0.2% – 0.8% (weight-for-height) / 1.3% (MUAC)
Jordan: 2.0% – 2.3%
Egypt: 2.9% – 3.3%
Saudi Arabia: 3.9%
Iran: 4.2% – 4.3%
Syria: 12.0% – 12.2%
Yes i get that defense of collateral damage, it's just not very satisfying. I also get the defense that it would make war impossible if you commit to absolutely no civilian casualty, doesn't make the ethic/morality of the whole thing easier to digest tho. I remember some old norm is this part of the world (Africa, Nigeria), where they killed various slaves to be buried alongside important figures and that's often what collateral damage looks like to me (of course the sacrifices were much dumber and evil of course). I want us to move to a simulated war, but how to get loser ti commit to not putting their lives on the line after losing in tbe simulation anyways?
The thing is that, the hamas being embedded in civilian place is almost unavoidable once you clear the bar that they want to be an army. Israel isn't letting them build millitary infrastructure seperately like that, the place is too small in the first place (funny enough, israel also used justification that Israel was too small so any attack on millitary infrastructure would harm civilians! During one of the tit for tat with Iran in 2024 or so). I don't think Hamas is trying to minimize civilian casualty, but i also doubt they are so worried about their own lives or trying to maximize civilian casualty.
The whole thing gets even more messy when we are getting some evidence, Israel was targeting entire buildings to get rid of Low level millitary and political targets with links to Hamas. Like they were bombing banks in Lebanon for 'funding Hezbollah", it's like bombing Israel banks for that reason, or the news station in Iran for 'being mouthpiece of Regime", something rhey did in Gaza a lot too. And some evidence point to the fact that they attack building on filmsy excuse and work to backwardly justify it when it leads to controversy. Like they blew up a photographer cause they mistook a camera drone for an actual drone. Even the hospitals they attacked, they were doing 3d simulation to show what they found, whixh i question cause why not show the actual footage or pictures from the actual place?
Of course i never expected no disproportionate response but then 50-100X is way too much. And 911 is another reason i think Americans should have restrained Israel more, because they should understand indeed, period of victimhood is when people feel the greatest justification and sorta need the greatest restraint, America response to 911 was very disproportionate and full of ethical, moral abd factual errors. Israel was attacking Iran, Qatar something it wouldn't be doing if it thought America wouldn't back it if these people fought back in full force. Let's be honest, i don't think Hezbollah was a real threat like that, they would shoot their nonsense rockets, but if they wanted to actually join the war, they would have been more aggressive and Iran even while Israel was clearly provoking it, was doing perfonative strikes that it informed the world of in public and private.
There's this thing where people define Al Qaeda and Hamas as existential threats, when they clearly aren't, their attacks are clearly desperate attempts by a weaker party. Or their even less justifiable stuff in Syria, clearly just took more land, and do daily incursions into their territory.
By the 3 month of that war, Israel already decapitated Hamas and Hamas already agreed in theory to almost exactly what it now agrees with now, it was basically just hunting down Hamas after that and yet that was the time it demolished much of Gaza. And it would be easier to believe they needed to demolish like 90% of the place (highly unlikely Hamas hid under 90% of buildings) if therew wasn't Bibi, and other officials professing other reasons they might be doing that!.
I agree that the ethical justification for collateral damage is deeply unsatisfying. And in a strange way the more precision and intelligence is brought to bear on it the less satisfying it is. Dropping a bomb on a building that you know houses 15 children, 8 old people, 6 adults with no known connection to Hamas and two Hamas officers feels closer to deliberately shooting a child than does dropping a bomb on a building that you know houses a Hamas officer and probably also houses civilians. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all (if I remember correctly) hit schools and daycares with rockets over the course of the war, but they did so because they were firing inaccurate rockets with no specific target. It's a different sensation of culpability than the US had when we launched a precision strike on a girl's school in Iran due to faulty intelligence. To some degree, this suggests to me that my ethical feelings here can't be trusted too far--it's clearly more ethical for a military to try to get as much intelligence as possible and use as precise of weapons as possible, even if that means that it's making more clear-eyed decisions to kill innocent people.
I disagree with you to a fairly large extent about Hamas, and to a much smaller extent about Israel.
I don't think it's true that Hamas couldn't distinguish fighters from civilians more than they did because Gaza is such a dense environment. It's possible to wear uniforms in a dense environment. It's also possible to build specifically military buildings, or designate specific buildings as military bases. It's also possible to facilitate civilian evacuation of active combat zones: the Ukrainian military has done house to house, building to building urban combat at several points during the war, but they did their best to evacuate civilians and worked with Russia (to a limited extent) to designate civilian evacuation corridors. Hamas repeatedly actively resisted civilian efforts to flee areas that the Israeli military announced they would attack, and repeatedly used designated civilian areas to hide senior officers (such as Mohammed Deif) and launch attacks. A version of Hamas that embedded its military among civilians only as much as Israel does (i.e. putting military buildings in dense urban areas, having soldiers often sleep at home, using civilian hospitals to treat military wounded and vice versa, but also putting most soldiers in uniform) could have been fought with far fewer civilian deaths and much less destruction. Even a Hamas that did all of that but also built a tunnel network under effectively every building, including civilian buildings, could have been fought with far fewer civilian deaths. I think you're right that Hamas didn't necessarily *maximize* civilian deaths, for instance by commanding civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings that housed commanders, but they made a large number of choices that greatly increased civilian deaths.
With Israel:
My understanding of the situation matches yours in that I think Israel in many cases chose to kill civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure when the military benefit was nowhere near enough to justify it. It's very hard to say this with certainty about any particular strike because it's reasonable for a military not to share everything they knew that led to a strike, but this is the overall sense that I get. That said, I'm not sure that I'd say that it's clearly unjustifiable, for instance, to bomb a bank that is funding Hezbollah. If an army attacked Israel with the actual intent of defeating its military, they probably would try to destroy key economic targets as well as military targets, and my understanding (which might be wrong!) is that this isn't necessarily against the laws of war. I can easily imagine a compelling argument that destroying Hezbollah's ability to pay its soldiers and its civilian supporters could lead to the collapse of Hezbollah's fighting ability more quickly and with fewer civilian deaths than trying to kill all the Hezbollah fighters.
Likewise, while it's probably unlikely that there were Hamas fighters under 90% of buildings in Gaza at any given time, I think it's quite plausible that there were access tunnels that could allow fighters to move into buildings and use them as ambush sites across 90% of Gaza, and even more plausible that it wouldn't be possible to determine which buildings do and don't have tunnel entrances without risking soldier's lives, so that 90% of buildings posed a credible danger to nearby troops. Does that justify destroying 90% of buildings? I think it depends on what the alternatives are and what happens next. Honestly, if Israel had provided real shelter to civilians, then demolished 90% of buildings to clear the tunnel networks, and then made any serious attempt to rebuild something habitable in cleared areas, I'd be willing to see it as a plausibly justifiable response to the threat of the tunnels. Leaving everything destroyed and making people live in tents indefinitely is unjustifiable.
I'm not sure what you mean, specifically, in saying that Israel had already decapitated Hamas and Hamas had already agreed to current conditions within 3 months. Yahya Sinwar wasn't killed until a year into the war, and Hamas commanders have continued to be killed up to the present, including fairly senior people. Of course there will always be another person to kill unless Hamas completely ceases to exist, but I don't know that you can say that there's a point where the project of decapitating Hamas or degrading its military capacity was clearly finished. I'm also not sure what terms you mean specifically: my understanding is that Hamas just agreed to Trump's disarmament plan (which Netanyahu shamefully rejected)--this is not something that they were willing to agree to at any previous point, as far as I'm aware. I've read Gershon Baskin, for instance, arguing that Hamas has been consistently willing to make a deal, but the details here seem fairly important if the question is whether Hamas was either surrendering its capacity to launch a major attack on Israel or having that capacity destroyed. I should say though: I'm very open to the argument that Israel has dragged the war out unnecessarily and with minimal benefit.
In my mind, the tactical questions are very important, but in some ways a bigger question is what can realistically be accomplished by military action and whether what can be accomplished is valuable enough to justify the harm of fighting a war. From that perspective, the thing that most distinguishes Hamas's attack on October 7th from Israel's response, in my mind, is the question of what could be accomplished. Hamas's attack didn't seriously degrade Israel's ability to kill Palestinians, nor do I think it ever had a real chance of doing so. To the extent that it succeeded at something, it succeeded at degrading Israel's standing in the world and weaking its alliances, but that accomplishment only came because of the massive harm to Palestinian civilians, and it's unclear if it will ever have good consequences for Palestinians. In contrast, while I don't think this is worth the amount of damage Israel's campaign caused, it is clear that Israel massively degraded the ability of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to attack Israel. Hamas fired several thousand rockets a year into Israel before October 7th, and in the early war Hamas and Hezbollah shot I believe tens of thousands of rockets. A lot of territory in Northern Israel was completely evacuated because of Hezbollah rockets. At this point, there are hardly any rockets fired from Lebanon or Gaza.
A consequence of that view is, basically, that it's more moral for strong armies to fight wars than for weak armies to do so. This is pretty self-serving coming from a citizen of the country with the strongest army in world history, but I also think it's right. Fighting a losing war is immoral! It involves all the horrors of war and doesn't accomplish anything!
A last thing I'll say on this: I agree that Al Qaida never posed anything like an existential threat to the United States. Even if they'd gotten a dirty nuke and blew up half of Manhattan, there are 40 cities in the country with more than half a million people. Hurricane Katrina caused massive damage to a US city unlikely to be topped by any terrorist attack and it didn't threaten the existence of the US in any way. I'd say the same for Hamas+Hezbollah's ability to threaten Israel's existence, though the threat is I think much bigger. That said, I don't think powerful countries can be expected to ignore threats that aren't existential. People want their societies to protect them from harm even if the harm is endurable, and I think basically all societies that are able to do so react disproportionately when attacked. I think from a game theory perspective, the best we can hope for is an acceptance that strong countries will react disproportionately to being attacked, for this to be a disincentive to attack strong countries, but for that acceptance to have a limit.
Permission to move this into your DMs? This is getting a bit too inconvenient for the reply section
Okay, gonna take that as a no (i think), no worries, here goes (Substack says this is too long for a reply so this article is just for format reasons and for you only, to be deleted after:
https://seqyve.substack.com/p/response-to-guy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4ak8cq
An ethnic cleansing/relocation scheme is the most discernible goal- or would be if Israel had negotiated any kind of settlement with another country to take them- but that's not equivalent to a genocide.
(might want to run your post through a spell-check, btw)
Here are the main reasons why countries wouldn't go along with relocating Palestinians.
1. Countries like Egypt and Jordan don't want more mouths to feed. People will bring up events like Palestinians attempting to overthrow the government of jordan, which did happen, but aren't the main reason why countries wouldn't want them. Palestinians aren't per se more problematic than the local populations already there, but those countries are poor and don't have much money and don't want to feed, clothe, employee and house more people.
2. No country whether Arab or otherwise wants to be seen as helping the Israelis do ethnic cleansing and ending the Palestinian cause.
You could try forcibly relocating them and expelling them to neighboring countries, but this would likely trigger a major regional conflict.
The other option is actually doing genocide. But I'm not sure Israelis actually have the stomach to do it.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the arguments- at minimum there would have to be some kind of humanitarian aid package and jobs program to go with the relocation.
https://nonzionism.com/p/thinking-about-what-we-did/comment/344901331
I'm not saying this is some sort of complication-free solution, I'm just saying it's not equivalent to genocide.
Oh I never claimed it was genocide to relocate people. Ethnic cleansing or voluntary relocation are clearly different things than actual genocide. I'm saying the only way you'll ever actually be free of the Palestinians is by actually doing genocide not that relocation would be the same thing as genocide.
I could but probably won't do that. You got my point didn't you?
Also the ethnic cleansing thing is not surprising, Neither America nor other Israel allies would take 2 (or 7 or so for the whole Palestinians) million people that easily. Even at the height of the Holocaust, these states weren't that enthusiastic about it. And moving them to Egypt or Jordan or Syria wouldn't solve the issue because the population in these places hate Israel too, they'd just amplify the hatred over time and it wouldn't stop the threat to Israel.
And there's an argument that trying to destroy their presence by force in other ti push them out and destroy their national presence on the land qualifies as genocide or something.
> "And moving them to Egypt or Jordan or Syria wouldn't solve the issue because the population in these places hate Israel too, they'd just amplify the hatred over time and it wouldn't stop the threat to Israel"
Possibly, possibly not. Egypt in particular is huge enough that in principle you could take a couple million people and scatter them thinly enough and they wouldn't have the numbers to influence public opinion much. (Plus Egypt has a lot more leeway for cracking down on dissent.) Jordan is arguably more culturally compatible and a fair chunk of Palestinian refugees are already living there more-or-less peacefully, albeit from a much earlier time. But I won't say it's not complicated.
> "And there's an argument that trying to destroy their presence by force in other ti push them out and destroy their national presence on the land qualifies as genocide or something."
Yeah, but that's a silly argument, since it means every forced population transfer/relocation qualifies as genocide, and these are clearly not equally bad things.
Not really, the Palestinians would just get huge cultural cache even in Egypt, the people are already very very anti Israel, spreading out the Palestinians would not fix the issue at all. Ridiculously easy for the Palestinians to get cultural cache here cause the opposition wouldn't be able to meaningfully oppose anti israeo demands without risking losing most of theie support to the general anti Israel populace. The Jordan thing has been tried and they just gained easy political influence qnd were indeed just going to make Jordan a vehicle for their animus.
It's not a silly argument tho I'm skeptical of it myself. But the genocide convention is pretty broad in some ways. And nit all ethnic cleansing could meat the bar but sone would if the way you do it is carpet bombing a place with strong evidence of some notable level of indiscrimination. And there's a common trend in genocide and ethnic cleansing anyways
“ I am generally unmoved by ethnonationalist claims to connections between soil and bloodlines”
Were you born in Israel?
I mean, it's basic math. Israel did everything to protect its civilians from 30,000 indiscriminate projectiles. Hence the civilian casualties were low on Israel's side. Not because Hamás, Iran, Houthies or Hezbollah cared
Whereas in the frontlines, Israel had to encounter virtually 100% civilians, not because there were no Hamasniks, but because Hamasniks don't use military attire except when they want to parade Jewish babies' coffins. Only in skirmishes would that change, but even then Hamas' tactics probably put civilians in danger, on purpose.
Finally, when targeting infrastructure - the fact that "only" 3% of Gaza perished when 80% of buildings were destroyed should be considered a marvelous feat. The gender and age distribution of the casualties show that they follow a very male and adult mode, unlike the Gaza population pyramid.
What remains are the children that died. Most died because, beyond the evacuation of 97% of the population and all measures taken, it was likely logistically impossible to get to 100% - basic pareto math.
There were probably some war crimes due to lack of discipline or some degree of impunity. There were probably even fewer crimes against humanity, probably because there aren't always cameras everywhere. But again - you cannot demand a total lack of impunity on Israel's side when there is total impunity on the side of Israel's enemies - and there are largely no western countries with a total lack of impunity - except for countries that are ill with 'suicidal empathy' - putting the lives of your enemies ahead of those of your kin, which is preposterous. Some of Israel's enemies, conveniently, think Israel should value Gazan civilian life more than the life of their own soldiers, which is obviously an absurd demand.
"Finally, when targeting infrastructure - the fact that "only" 3% of Gaza perished when 80% of buildings were destroyed should be considered a marvelous feat. The gender and age distribution of the casualties show that they follow a very male and adult mode, unlike the Gaza population pyramid."
Not really, because most buildings were destroyed after the area was already cleared.