And so Hamas uses its citizens as human shields so the law of not harming citizens protects Hamas from attack? Is it that easy?

No! Not even close. I've been nervous to express myself because I feel like I'm in this in-between place: not directly involved in the conflict, but I know enough about the conflict that I know my country is involved. My sympathy comes from having met a guy who was born in Gaza. He lived in Wichita but would return to Gaza to visit family. One time he took me to a conference on the conflict with a group of Palestinian peace activists. That's where most of my knowledge of the history comes from -- these were peace activists in the US because they recognized how the US is involved in their struggle, and they did it through speaking about the history and talking about solutions, in spite of our darker impulses.

So you have the keys to the castle and your job is to protect Israel and assure continued random bombings and terroristic bands of rapists and butchers don't run their periodic raids.

What do you do?

Do you talk about moral ambiguity, feel the guilt of your predecessors in putting you in this place, and then set up a meeting with Hamas to discuss your displeasure at their murderous yet understandable behavior and figure out how we can go halfsies on the land so everyone will be happy?

For real, what do you propose in real terms other than the vague platitude that Israel should be careful not to hurt the innocent. Their position is that they will do their best.

So General Baden, protect your nation. What do you propose?

Do you talk about moral ambiguity, feel the guilt of your predecessors in putting you in this place, and then set up a meeting with Hamas to discuss your displeasure at their murderous yet understandable behavior and figure out how we can go halfsies on the land so everyone will be happy? — Hanover

Yes, that is the way.

And Rabin was successful at it - finally some semblance of a start of reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians.

A little too successful. Radicals within Israel had him offed.

Can't have humanism get in the way of nationalism/zionism.

Those same radicals are in charge today, by the way.

Ah. I see, that is obviously an unusual or rare way to get knowledge about this conflict. One of my oldest friends came here through Jordan as refugees of 67' war. He doesn't talk about his history much though.

Worst thing about this is that there is nothing we can do about it, or if so, virtually nothing.

And so Hamas uses its citizens as human shields so the law of not harming citizens protects Hamas from attack? Is it that easy? — Hanover

There needs to be a protected humanitarian corridor. I'm sure Israel will put effort into creating that. Unless they just want to do a massive fuckup.

Morality 101, don't bomb civilians. — frank

We bombed civilians in WW2. Did that make us the bad guys?

Yes, the Allies also committed plenty of war crimes.

Yeah... I agree.

Yes, the Allies also committed plenty of war crimes. — Benkei

But you would still prefer the Allies had won WW2, right?

We bombed civilians in WW2. Did that make us the bad guys? — RogueAI

This was a giant question for me back in the day. I had a philosophical epiphany over it. Probably off topic though?

Egypt controlled Gaza prior to 1967 via military rule under a military governor. They refused giving Palestinians the right to manage their own affairs over the course of their rule. Of course, in 1948 Egypt had, like the other Arab countries and the Palestinian leadership itself, no plans for an "independent nation of Palestine." Such a thing wasn't on any state's radar because no real distinct "Palestinian" people existed as separate from other Levantine Arabs. There was rather a linguistic gradient across the Levant and questions of local control. The land was to be partitioned between the victorious Arab states if they had won.

The distinct "Palestinian" people of today were created by the Arab states' refusal to accept "refugees," from the lands they had actively wanted to conquer. I put "refugees," in quotation marks because a good deal of these people were in homes their families had been in for generations. Yes, there were those Palestinians who fled the 1948 fighting, but there were also those who has always lived in lands the Arabs had effectively conquered in 1948, e.g. Gaza. But they were not "welcomed into the nation," that had conquered their land, ostensibly on their behalf to give them, "Arab rule by Arabs," but were instead denied citizenship, and even the bare economic and political rights offered by those states.

Why was this done? To keep the conflict alive. "You can have citizenship and be allowed to leave the military camps when you help us destroy Israel and not before."

This initial move by the Egypt in turn made it impossible for them to ever assimilate their Palestinians. Where as Israel has gotten on ok with a third of its citizens being "Israeli Arabs," and Jordan did eventually extend rights to their Palestinians, and so in many ways subsume that identity into the "Jordanian" one, Egypt never made this opening. By 1973 the PLO was its own political entity and Palestinian its own ethnicity and Egypt, being fragile in the way of autocracies, particularly poor ones who haven't provided their citizens with economic development, no longer felt it could risk having the Palestinians in Egypt.

Egypt did not want Gaza back after 1967, but it did at least consider a "land for people trade," whereby Israel would give them land they DID want in exchange for taking Palestinians. They did not ultimately accept this.

Egypt's position on not letting Gazans into Egypt is not about their ability to house refugees. They had the same attitude when they controlled Gaza; they do not want outsiders with an independent power base who could challenge the state. And this is even more true today after Hamas has given support to insurgents within Egypt.

This is more or less why Palestinians have been thrown out of many Arab countries, time and time again, at times in the hundreds of thousands (ethnic cleansing?). In part it has been because of the PLOs machinations in their host countries' affairs, at times openly challenging and supporting or engaging in war against the host countries, at times it has been simple ethnic reprisals. Kuwait didn't expell 400,000+ Palestinians because most were involved in "subverting," the state, but simply because the PLO had sided with Saddam Hussein and they wanted collective retribution. This despite the fact that Iraqi forces also dispossessed Palestinians and brutalized them during their invasion.

This is how some Israelis support a "no Palestine" solution. The claim is that the relevant grouping is "Arabs" or "Levantine Arabs," and that they indeed do have not only one state but many. "So why wouldn't/won't the Arabs accept 'their own people.'"

"850,00 Palestinians lost their homes in 1948 and over the next few years 950,000 Jews lost their property and were driven out of the Arab states. An unfortunate trade."

But this is hardly a morally supportable argument for Israel. That the Arab regimes in the region tend to act atrocious even to their own nationals is fairly well known. Israel pointing to their neighbors and saying "if you weren't so messed up you'd have taken these people," doesn't change the fact that their neighbors didn't take the people and that Israel is now responsible for the conflict they find themselves in.

And this is the crux, what it all comes down to it. In 1967 Israel didn't think it could make the Palestinians in the WB and Gaza citizens they way they had done with the Israeli Arabs because there was already too much bad blood at that point and because it would lead to an Arab majority, or near majority in the "Jewish state." Seeing this problem, they should have withdrawn from the occupied territories.

Granted, I will allow that, had Israel simply retreated to its 1948 borders soon after the Six Day War, I don't see how that would be at all likely to have put an end to the conflict, but it would not put them in the position of being prison wardens to people they cannot accept.



Indiscriminate use of force ≠ genocide. The US used indiscriminate force against cities in WWII, but I've never seen any good case that it had any intention of commiting a genocide of either the Japanese or the Germans. The indiscriminate bombing was a means to an end, not the end itself.

There are voices in Israel that essentially do advocate genocide, but they aren't the relevant voices for their military strategy and that isn't the policy they've pursued. It's not even clear to me how "indiscriminate" the current attacks are. One would expect the death toll to be massively higher if the goal was "to exterminate the Palestinians."

Having loose rules of engagement is also not genocide. Nor is collective punishment necessarily equivalent with genocide. 9/11 for instance, was indiscriminate and collective in its aims (the planners estimated they would kill 250,000 people by having the buildings topple on impact), but it was not genocide. Nor is "attacking an enemy that has fled into a dense urban area in that area without (much) regard for collateral damage," genocide. When the US and UK destroyed a great deal of all the structures in Fallujah during the Second Siege they were not engaged in genocide. Nor was Russia engaged in genocide when it began shelling residential areas to punish resistance in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Even localized massacres are not genocide; Giap wasn't trying to genocide the South Vietnamese but things like Hue did happen.

That doesn't mean those things are justifiable or acceptable. There are things that militaries can do that are both unjustifiable and not genocide.

I don't think there is currently enough evidence to know how loose Israel has gotten with its targeting, except that it clearly isn't trying to kill as many civilians as possible. It is obviously trying to inflict collective punishment on the Strip in the short term as part of its efforts to destroy Hamas and support for Hamas.

Israel can be justified in attempting to destroy Hamas and not justified in everything they do to accomplish this. In general, I would say Israel has tended to be good about how it wages its wars but not how it settles things afterwards, which is often more important to lasting peace.

sigh. This follow up question is as stupid as your question about where you'd rather live.

And yet, you didn't answer my question: who would you prefer won WW2? Let me answer for you: The Allies. I'm sure you agree. And yet, the Allies killed an ungodly number of civilians. Doesn't this suggest that in a conflict, even if one side kills huge numbers of civilians, they can still be the side to "root for"?

Let me ask you another question: Who would you rather trust with nuclear weapons? Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran or Israel? Of course, Israel.

This was a giant question for me back in the day. I had a philosophical epiphany over it. Probably off topic though? — frank

I don't know. Seems pretty on-topic.

Haha, you're an idiot. Is your tactic now, let's ask stupid hypothetical questions to deflect from the war crimes being committed? Or are your seriously suggesting that "rooting for" means acquescing to depravity? Or because life is more comfortable in Israel we just need to do whatever and accept whatever because being oppressed makes you uncomfortable? And really, the only thing that proves is the fucking privilege you apparently enjoy that the answer to that question is glaringly obvious with all the moral consequences that entails for you (let's kill some Palestinians!) Maybe take your kindergarten morality and shove it where the sun doesn't shine and stop asking me disingenuous crap.

The only "side" that ever nuked anybody was the "Allies". The only side categorically refusing to work towards peace is Israeli right wing political parties. The side that had murdered more innocents: Israeli. The side that broke more ceasefires: Israeli. The idea of marrying "trust" and "Israel" is reflective of your lack of knowledge of the history and recent politics of the region. It would be hilarious if not for the fact 80% of the dimwitted fucks that get to vote have the same myopic view.

Exactly. What you do in the war is in part justified by what your enemy has done and what you can expect them to do in the future/if they ever get more advantage over you.

But even more key is that actions to win a war are justified by what comes after. Would the US have been justified in the bombing it engaged in during WWII if it had gotten Japan and the Germans to surrendered, simply executed some leaders to feel good, then gone home and let those countries starve and the same sorts of people take control over them again?

To my mind, the US was justified more by things like the Marshall Plan, which came after the war, then by the military value of some of their campaigns. The plans that led to lasting peace required total victory, and it's what came after that justified refusing to negotiate a truce that left the original antagonists in power.

And this is where Israel has not been justified in it's more limited military actions since 1973. The entire "mowing the grass," philosophy of counter terrorism they developed was morally bankrupt because it was counter productive in terms of long term peace. It couldn't reasonably be expected to ever lead to lasting peace. Assassinating leaders might disrupt attacks, but if you also kill anyone who can actually discipline their side then you destroy any ability to negotiate.

Israel was justified in driving settlers out of Gaza at gun point, but their disengagement plan obviously failed. Simply walking away and leaving Gaza to administer itself, shrugging and saying "well lots of countries don't allow traffic across their borders," didn't set up any sort of lasting peace.

Not that I have any great ideas on what an alternative was. If they "disengaged" more by announcing that they would recognize Gaza as an independent nation and left the Egyptian border to Egypt and simply policied their own, we'd be in a very similar situation. Gaza would still be destitute. Both countries still would restrict traffick across the border. Hamas would still have plenty of reasons to justify continued attacks. This is why I am not optimistic about the future even if Hamas is destroyed.

The only "side" that ever nuked anybody was the "Allies". — Benkei

Who you rather have won WW2, the Allies or Axis? It's a really easy question to answer, is it not?

And this is where Israel has not been justified in it's more limited military actions since 1973. The entire "mowing the grass," philosophy of counter terrorism they developed was morally bankrupt because it was counter productive in terms of long term peace. It couldn't reasonably be expected to ever lead to lasting peace. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The difference here though is that after WW2 was over, Japan and Germany were done fighting. They were whipped and submitted meekly to the Allies. Would the U.S. have done the Marshall Plan if Germany was still determined to eradicate the Allies?

The side that had murdered more innocents: Israeli.

Depends on how narrowly you define the conflict and if you consider Palestinian organizations under a single umbrella (arguably unjustifiable in recent decades since they are in violent conflict).

Broadly, since the start of the conflict, Palestinian forces have killed more civilians in their actions in Lebanon alone. But note that the IDF certainly could have inflicted higher losses if it wanted to. The PLO in many cases tried to kill as many of their rivals as possible, and that is where I believe what RougeAI is getting at.

You have plenty of events like this at the PLO's doorstep:

On January 20, under the command of Fatah and as-Sa'iqa, members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and leftist Muslim Lebanese militiamen entered Damour.[12] Along with twenty Phalangist militiamen, civilians - including women, the elderly, and children, and often comprising whole families - were lined up against the walls of their homes and sprayed with machine-gun fire by Palestinians; the Palestinians then systematically dynamited and burned these homes.[13][4][12] Several of the town's young women were separated from other civilians and gang-raped.[4] Estimates of the number killed range from 100 to 582, with the overwhelming majority of these being civilians; Robert Fisk puts the number of civilians massacred at nearly 250.[4][14][15][16][2][17] Among the killed were family members of Elie Hobeika and his fiancée.[18] For several days after the massacre, 149 bodies of those executed by the Palestinians lay in the streets; this included the corpses of many women who had been raped and of babies who were shot from close range in the back of the head.[15] In the days following the massacre, Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims, some of whom were high on hashish, exhumed the coffins in the town's Christian cemetery and scattered the skeletons of several generations of the town's deceased citizens in the streets.[15]

Now this is a long time ago, and Fatah has developed into a much saner organization. But could I see Hamas doing these if it was given the chance? Absolutely.

But simply asking, "who would be more brutal if they won," or "which side would lynch you if they could," isn't fair either. It's not a relevant question unless you're actually the one in danger of being lynched.

Because justification of Israel can't come simply from "Hamas would do worse." What Israel should be doing is answered by the question "what changed such that Fatah would be very unlikely to do this sort of thing routinely anymore? How did that change happen and what IDF policy supports that?" That's where Israel can't be justified. It's not a question of "being better than Hamas."

Was Stalin good if Hitler might have been in some ways worse? Was Stalin justified in his wartime actions because of how bad Hitler was? I would say absolutely not for many of them. You can't say "I am justified because of how bad the other guy is," if your actions don't lead to the defeat of the other guy and replacement with something better. Israel is to blame in that their strategy never had any shot at truly defeating Hamas, just containing them until something like this happened. You're not justified by your opponent's evil when pursuing a losing strategy, particularly not if you're doing many of the same things as them.

And this is what I mean about "winning the peace," and why attacks on Hamas might be very justifiable. Did Lebanese Shias and Christians dispossess the Palestinians of parts of Palestine? No, but once you have a group with a culture of massacre and "anything goes," it doesn't tend to stay contained.

If all the Jews in Israel vanished tomorrow how long would it be before Hamas was at war with Fatah and the Israeli Arabs? I don't think very long, and I think we could easily see the same exact sort of thing enacted on Palestinian rivals.

The rather obvious point why I don't care about these "who would you rather be friends with? " is that that doesn't preclude friends from acting immoraly all the same. The Allies were often worse than the Germans where it concerns how the war was waged for instance. I don't want the Israelis to lose, I want them to stop committing crimes every day - not just this recent insanity of collective punishment again. I want the Palestinians to win their freedom and think violence is justified to that end but not how Hamas goes about it.

Same here, and like I said above, the difference can't be what justifies Israel. Although, I do sort of think destroying Hamas might be needed for progress. If the Israeli right is voted out, which seems likely at least for now, and if Hamas is severely weakened, then maybe something good can come.

And that's why I say the strikes could be justified. It depends on how they are being carried out and we can't know that now. A ground invasion would almost invariably lead to more civilian deaths and I don't think it works to say "if Hamas runs back to Gaza you can't go after them there except in very focused raids," because you will never defeat them that way, and I don't think there will be progress until they are defeated.

This is a group that gets plenty of references for torture from their own people to the ICHR and brutally cracks down on any protest against them. Hamas isn't Hamas because of the blockade. Hamas being Hamas is what led to the blockade in the first place. Their past attacks were specifically aimed at derailing a promising peace process. The idea was "no to independence, it will take the incentive away to push for full victory."

If the shoe were on the other foot, I would allow that Palestine might be justified in using force to remove Israel's far right leadership as well, especially with their efforts to dismantle democracy. But they lack that capability. For now, we can only hope that they are rightly blamed for this situation, which so far, they seem to be.

But why didn't they carry out terrorist resistance?

I'd say this owes to:
-The absolutely decisive character of the allied victory.
- The strong bureaucracy and history of a centralized state with a monopoly on force to constrain would be terrorists.
- The strong threat of living under Soviet dictatorship.

In the Israel situation, only the decisive victory is there. The threat of being conquered by their neighbors DID play a role in the evolution of the PLO, but because the Arabs were never able to master the PLO with the same impunity and iron fist that the Soviets employed in Eastern Europe you didn't have the same sort of effects.

And the lack of a bureaucratic history is probably the key problem here. The entire region is full of conflicts like these, they just lack the same political salience. Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, and then Egypt is in many ways unstable. Even the immense wealthy of the Gulf States has failed to make them stable states.

The Ottomans developed a strong state within the bounds of modern Turkey. This is why it's so hard for Erdogan to subvert. But they merely projected this outwards, rather than growing it indigenously in the foreign lands they administered. It's not unlike how the quality of government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire after the state expired.

And this poses a profound challenge for settling the issue. It's not that different from the sectarian splits in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq actually, except for the religious relevance of the land, Israel's ostensible status as a "developed nation," and the relative power balance. But then there is no easy solution, and narratives that try to boil it down into "wealthy colonizers versus the oppressed," miss this. Iraq's conflicts between the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds is in many ways much more similar than people who want to frame it like the British in India would like to admit. The idea that, "if the whole world began to boycott Israel like North Korea," this would solve the issue is likely mistaken, because it isn't like France in Vietnam, but more similar to Syria or Lebanon.

That's my take anyhow.

Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me but I seem to recall Israel instituting the blockade almost immediately following the election and there was alot to do about Hamas winning because nobody wanted them to.

Anyhoo, I think Hamas is multi-faceted. It has a terrorist wing, at the same time it's the "authority" we have to deal with in Gaza. There comes a point, if you want peace, that you're going to have to treat with the assholes across the table, irrespective of what they've done. Waiting until they are no longer relevant is basically doing nothing. I also think ousting the right wing Israeli parties will be a temporary thing but you're right that that could give some impetus to improvements.

Or we drop the two states solution - and if Israel insists on the shape it's gotten due to all the illegal settlements it isn't even viable - and we create a single state but then integrate Palestinians into that State. But that has even more issues in my view with respect to the stated Jewish character of Israel and obvious security problems.

Anyhoo, I think Hamas is multi-faceted. It has a terrorist wing, at the same time it's the "authority" we have to deal with in Gaza. There comes a point, if you want peace, that you're going to have to treat with the assholes across the table, irrespective of what they've done. — Benkei

But doesn't it all come down to whether the "assholes across the table" also want peace?

I think Hamas is multi-faceted. It has a terrorist wing, at the same time it's the "authority" we have to deal with in Gaza. — Benkei

Only one facet matters

Documents exclusively obtained by NBC News show that Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa'ad, to "kill as many people as possible," seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.

The "blockade," is sort of layered. There were indeed more restrictions put in place on what could go into Gaza after Hamas was elected, although these were phased in over time based on a number of crises.

I was referring to the catastrophic decoupling of the economies of the Occupied Territories from Israel, which took unemployment in them from 4-5% over prior decades to 23-30% since and chopped a third to a bit under a half off annual per capita earnings. This was the fruit of the consistent terror campaign of the 1990s, which wasn't all Hamas, but they were deeply involved.

Hamas was actually a good deal more rational in their messaging and better in their behavior initially, when they stopped boycotting elections. It seemed like the organization might change after getting a taste of the powers and burdens of administration, and even their attempts to purge rivals could be seen as simply suring up consolidated government, to some degree. That the 9/11 era US and EU policy towards them was so hostile is probably a missed turn in the whole process. But that only lasted so long. After the 2007 war between Hamas and Fatah, there was a shift away from this. Arguably, Fatah was planning to remove Hamas, or Fatah just had contingencies for this and Hamas used that as an excuse for a bloody coup. Hard to say.

And the whole thing is pretty fucking cynical. All those bombings and killings to disrupt the peace process just to say "ah, but now that I'm in control and get the benefits of power, perhaps a two state solution isn't so bad!" But that's part of the problem, the PA was very corrupt, and Hamas didn't change that. Being in power is a route to power and impunity. Real peace would require real reform which challenges the ability to rule like a crime lord.

This sort of dysfunction isn't unique. As soon as the US defacto partitioned Iraq and gave the Kurds quasi independence with the no fly zone in the 1990s they started an extensive civil war. It does make negotiations harder though.

I don't know what the ideal solution is. — Baden

I think it would be something like:

it's Israel's responsibility to act in ways that doesn't jeopardize millions of innocent lives — Tzeentch

Unfortunately, this is an impossibility...complete fantasy. The genie is out of the bottle and nothing can stop what has been unleashed.

Middle East is such a fascinating place with such a vast history of endless warfare. That's why "peace in the middle east" is such a hysterical phrase. Bearing that in mind, im not concerned at all with placing blame on the Israelis or Palestinians, they are simply acting in their eternal nature. Unless a person is actually an Israeli or Palestinian, all this blaming and taking sides is exemplary of the worst human compulsion toward narcissistic self-importance.

Nonetheless, I am very interested to see how this nightmare escalates.

There needs to be a protected humanitarian corridor. I'm sure Israel will put effort into creating that. Unless they just want to do a massive fuckup. — frank

I'm in favor of that in theory, but Gaza is tiny and massively overpopulated and pretty much in rubble. If the citizens could be moved around so that the Hamas infrastructure could be dismantled, then that would be ideal, but the truth is there is no place for anyone to go, and it's not in Hamas' interest to allow the citizens to go safely. Hamas scores points with every Palestinian death because their war can't be won militarily, so their battle is political in trying to win world support by showing Palestinian victimization.

Hamas pokes the bear by firing indiscriminate missles and raping, murdering, and kidnapping. Predictably, Israel's detractors line up and argue justification and moral equivalence and hand Palestine a political victory as the victim. The sentiment pervasive in this forum is what Hamas wished to expand throughout the West with their repugnant suicide mission.

Israel's proper response is full rejection of its detractors, with a focus only upon its own safety. That the anti-Israel world might more firmly become anti-Israel is irrelevant in how Israel should and will respond.

Only in over-intellectualized 21st century liberalism, where the weaker party is the per se victim can it be an effective political strategy to provoke a war and then to lose so badly that that you use your losing to your political advantage.

So jeer from the sidelines. Israel has a population it must protect.

So jeer from the sidelines. Israel has a population it must protect. — Hanover

I'm not jeering. I was thinking about being in one of those hospitals realizing the Israelis could supply fuel for the generators and knowing they won't do it because they want all the patients to die.

You answered me like I was just doing a liberal butt-post. :confused: