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.
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from committing all the sins of every other nationalist project and acted accordingly, but gradually they have been replaced by native true born sabras shed of these pathetic inferiority complexes and also growing up in a society at more or less permanent war with one or more of its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
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.
Imo you are probably not relocating the Palestinian population either through ethnic cleansing or voluntary emigration. You are probably just stuck with them.
>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.
Do you have evidence for this? I'd think that many Israelis - even right-wing ones would be happy to pay another country to take Gazans - it's not like the money would even be going to Gazans, so why would it be any more unpalatable than going to war with Gazans, which also entails "spending money on them?"
>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.
> "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?
He's mocking the logic behind - but using that logic was very adaptive for a very long time. Murder is murder obviously and killing innocents is never okay.
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.
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!.
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.
Hmm, "never" is a long time. I'm not personally jewish or living in Israel, so it's not like I have a direct dog in this fight, but there will come a time when the world doesn't rely nearly as much on Middle-Eastern oil imports, and I expect the geopolitical calculus will be rather different then.
I would not use the word 'never' but we are nowhere near a global political climate where Israel could engage in forced ethnic cleansing without debilitating sanctions. Even without the influence of gulf states.
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
> "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"
Well then I guess the Egyptian people can install a government that goes to war with Israel, get bombed stupid for a while, then go back behind whatever borders get drawn and learn whatever conclusions they like from it. Happened already during the 6 days' war, hopefully won't take much longer.
> "It's not a silly argument tho I'm skeptical of it myself"
It is a silly argument. It's deliberately intended to induce confusion between two very distinct concepts, which is dangerous if, e.g, controlled remigration avoids a civil war and/or actual genocide.
They are distinct concepts but they are not exclusive. And of course there is the similar motivating factor for both crimes. "controlled immigration" is hardly the only thing here when it comes with doing so by leveling the place and making the place unliveable and a bunch of indiscriminate violence. And it's not like "controlled immigration", clearly just ethnic cleansing is not a crime in itself, if it wasn't it wouldn't be something Israelis themselves whine about for centuries now.
And I wouldn't be so confident about Israel hegemony in perpetuity.
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.
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
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.
Apropos of nothing — is there a term for contrarislop? Should we just call it that?
Imo you are probably not relocating the Palestinian population either through ethnic cleansing or voluntary emigration. You are probably just stuck with them.
Welcome to the AI doomer club, your membership card is in the mail.
>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.
Do you have evidence for this? I'd think that many Israelis - even right-wing ones would be happy to pay another country to take Gazans - it's not like the money would even be going to Gazans, so why would it be any more unpalatable than going to war with Gazans, which also entails "spending money on them?"
>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.
> "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?
Is it entirely unjustified while the Holocaust is in living memory?
So in like 5 years give or take it won't be justified anymore?
He's mocking the logic behind - but using that logic was very adaptive for a very long time. Murder is murder obviously and killing innocents is never okay.
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.
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!.
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.
Hmm, "never" is a long time. I'm not personally jewish or living in Israel, so it's not like I have a direct dog in this fight, but there will come a time when the world doesn't rely nearly as much on Middle-Eastern oil imports, and I expect the geopolitical calculus will be rather different then.
I would not use the word 'never' but we are nowhere near a global political climate where Israel could engage in forced ethnic cleansing without debilitating sanctions. Even without the influence of gulf states.
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
> "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"
Well then I guess the Egyptian people can install a government that goes to war with Israel, get bombed stupid for a while, then go back behind whatever borders get drawn and learn whatever conclusions they like from it. Happened already during the 6 days' war, hopefully won't take much longer.
> "It's not a silly argument tho I'm skeptical of it myself"
It is a silly argument. It's deliberately intended to induce confusion between two very distinct concepts, which is dangerous if, e.g, controlled remigration avoids a civil war and/or actual genocide.
They are distinct concepts but they are not exclusive. And of course there is the similar motivating factor for both crimes. "controlled immigration" is hardly the only thing here when it comes with doing so by leveling the place and making the place unliveable and a bunch of indiscriminate violence. And it's not like "controlled immigration", clearly just ethnic cleansing is not a crime in itself, if it wasn't it wouldn't be something Israelis themselves whine about for centuries now.
And I wouldn't be so confident about Israel hegemony in perpetuity.