When this latest series of attacks started there was still some room to charitably interpret what the IDF had to deal with, but we've had months of constant action and very obvious suffering and death that the IDF has been imposing upon Gaza, either intentionally or through sheer apathy. They've long since lost the "oh but think critically" excuse. The amount of suffering they are inflicting is not at all justified, it has gone far beyond just a tit-for-tat retaliation.
Since when has war ever been tit-for-tat. Since the beginning of time, if a nation where to attack and make war with another nation, they had to measure carefully the consequences if they were to lose... because losing meant losing everything. This is no different. Russia attacking Ukraine is no different. No one is tracing and counting every bullet Russia fires and certainly no world court is saying anything at all to Russia… or to Turkey, or Iran, or Syria, or anyone else… except for Israel. Gaza attacked Israel and like any nation that goes to war, they will either win or lose. Consider carefully before declaring war against your enemy…. Everything is at stake.
You're right that the violence and devastation Israel has laid upon Gaza has historic precedence. Genghis Khan completely destroyed cities that he considered cultural enemies, to give one example. You'll find many instances of genocide in the history books, even post WW2. Israel is not unique in that regard either.
But why does it matter? Does historical barbarity justify present day barbarity? It doesn't, and we all know it doesn't.
It's not the case that Israel is held to a higher standard. Russia has been widely condemned, blocked from international finance, and faces severe sanctions. On top of that, western countries have given substantial military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. Russia had reasons for their invasion of Ukraine (just like Israel has its reasons), but so what? Russia being angry at Ukraine is not a justification for destroying the country.
I also take issue with your characterization that Gaza "started it". This is a 70+ year conflict with many chapters of violence in it, and innocent Palestinians make up the bulk of the casualties. Israel is not the victim here.
Finally, it's not accurate to talk about Israel/Gaza as two nations at war. Israel controls everything coming in and going out of Gaza, electricity, water, etc. Palestine is not an independent country or a state, it's part of Israel except its citizens have no rights.
>When people say you’re not “thinking critically”, they’re saying you’re trying to portray one of the modern conflicts with the lowest civilian deaths (versus combatants) as a crime against humanity while ignoring numerous others — eg, genocides in Niger or Myanmar, and forced expulsions in Armenia/Azerbaijan.
Why is it that this is always mentioned? As if ignorance of one crime against humanity makes us incapable of criticizing the other? And where exactly are the public spokespeople from our governments talking about how any of these genocides are justified as the killers have a "right to defend themselves"? Not to talk about how an attack that killed 4000 people justifies killing 25000 non-combatants.
> They’re not interested in a tit-for-tat retaliation: they’re intending to destroy the political and military structures that made the attack possible. A smaller country can’t cry “that isn’t fair!” when they start a fight and get beaten — this isn’t a scuffle between kids at school.
This is not even comparable to what is occurring when the world is condemning Israel's actions. If Israel was interested in removing the political structures that made Hamas's attack supported by Gaza then they could've stopped the settlement of the west bank, supported the stability of the Palestinian state, and countless of other actions which would have lowered the risk of creating terrorists in Gaza.
If you followed the conflict you’d have seen that Israeli concessions (especially the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza) have only made the Palestinians more radical.
The overwhelming states goal of Palestinians is the destruction of Israel and any Israeli concession leads towards that.
Israel doesn't want peace because they're winning. Every year Palestinians lose territory, and the land that remains becomes more and more uninhabitable.
Israelis don’t want peace because every time it was attempted, it only led to more violence and misery. The suicide bombings around Oslo accords in the 90’s, the second intifada of 2000, the terror enclave that became of Gaza after the disengagement in 2005; peace is a dangerous pipe dream.
The last time Israel “attempted” peace was before the majority of Palestinians were even born. The only peace talks that had any chance of working were held by Rabin who got promptly murdered. Israel also never stopped killing Palestinians and refuses to return the land they have unlawfully occupied.
It was never theirs to begin with and they turned it into a prison. They destroyed the Gaza airport and harbor. Build a fence around it so nobody could enter or leave. Refused to negotiate with the elected officials of Gaza.
Israel still has settlements in the west bank and has annexed the Golan heights. No matter which border agreement you believe is the lawful one, Isreal hasn't honored any of them.
You’re just moving the goalposts. Israel did withdraw from Gaza and let them run it on their own. The Palestinians had full sovereignty and could have made the place into a Singapore. They built the world’s largest terror base instead. Do you know what an insane undertaking is building the amount of underground infrastructure they did? Could have built factories instead.
You know perfectly well that they are not allowed to build factories because, guess what, factories can also be used to make weapons. Gaza is not even allowed to import basic medical equipment like X-Ray machines. So much for "full sovereignty".
People have repeatedly pointed out how your facts have no bearing on reality.
Israel never prohibited any factories. They have cars, computers, and a powerful army with ballistic munition know-how that’s rare. They could have smuggled in anything. Who said there are no X-ray machines in Gaza? Gaza had many hospitals before October 7th, ironically probably more than Israel itself.
So what Gazans did after the disengagement:
1. Electing Hamas into power
2. Ceasing having elections, instead opting for a Taliban style religious Islamist rule
3. Arming themselves to the teeth
4. Routinely shooting missiles, mortars and RPGs into Israeli civilians
Cars, computers and everything else is imported. There is no manufacturing to speak of.
> Small-scale industries in Gaza City include the production of plastics, construction materials, textiles, furniture, pottery, tiles, copperware, and carpets.
Your claim that Gaza had more hospitals than Israel is absurd. Israel has 5x the population, for starters. A cursory Google search indicates Israel has 10x the number of hospitals.
I recognize your arguments because I've heard them all before. Repeated ad nauseam by people who grew up in Zionist households and got all their news from comically partisan sources. They sincerely believe what they say and fact checking their claims is completely pointless because evidence means nothing in face of a lifetime of indoctrination.
Like ultimately if there's no two state solution, then it's either a genocide or expulsion of the Palestinians or a one state solution. If it's one state it can either be Jewish or democratic, but almost certainly not both.
> We all should have worked harder at solving the problem, but a genocidal militant group
Yes, 'we all' should have worked harder when Benjamin Netanyahu actively funded Hamas and expended all possible efforts to prevent a viable Palestinian state. Genius thinking right there.
"We all should have worked harder" is such an absurd thing to be saying alongside that sorry excuse you've presented.
The entire point of human rights and rules of war is that there are certain rights the people of even small countries that started the fight are entitled to. You don't just get to excuse relentlessly bombing hospitals and aid workers. "We thought it was a military target, but we will not disclose why, nor will we disclose what we're doing to not make this mistake in the future" is not a get out of jail free card for genocides, especially when it never seems to come with any actual signs of improvement.
Campaigns to stop genocides in other places having been unsuccessful does not justify smaller genocides taking place elsewhere. That's not critical thinking, that's whataboutism.
Particularly considering that not only is America's supposedly democratic leadership not condemning the atrocities, they're actively offering the aid to continue it while claiming to want peace.
Being from India, I can relate to the troubles with islamic terrorism that Israel has faced, which is why I mentioned having initially been sympathetic. But if India engaged in this large scale indiscriminate slaughter of muslims, it'd have been rendered a pariah on a similar tier as Russia. As it stands it's already constantly accused of being undemocratic and violating the rights of Muslims, despite never having undertaken deliberate, remorseless government sanctioned slaughter of this scale.
It took far less for the current Indian prime minister to be banned from Western nations when he was chief minister of a state. All he had to do was fail to stop a much less deadly riot and get repeatedly exonerated from accusations of wrongdoing by several courts.
I've pointed out two things, bombing hospitals and bombing aid workers.
There's also targeting children, having no qualms about the collateral damage when they bomb houses to get at single targets and so on. Using systems like the one described in the article to offload further responsibility, such that if by some miracle Western nations do try to introduce the IDF to the concept of accountability, they can just blame the computer and promise to do better.
I'm using emotionally charged language because these are supposed to be emotional topics. "Critical thinking" on its own is just a pathway to justifying extreme inhumane cruelty.
I was watching one of those ww2 movies with typical evil Germans (Nazis) in it and there was this scene where the SS officer dude is about to burn down a hamlet or something because of "partisans" hiding in there.
We, Americans, are being forced to change our morality and humanity to suite an "indispensable ally". (Both of which are definitely open to question).
That said, how cute that they are blaming both the 10/7 event ("intelligence failure") and their daily killing (for our viewing pleasure) of civilians, on AI.
I think "intelligence failure" is accurate but not in the sense that was offered. It is an intelligence failure of a people to recognize that they are on the wrong side of humanity and history. You can't blame that on AI. I think it a cultural failing - an overly inflated and exaggerated sense of historic grievances, a conceit regarding God Almighty's affections, and a misread of the Global Room, and clear contempt for the "nations" watching.
> there was this scene where the SS officer dude is about to burn down a hamlet or something because of "partisans" hiding in there
And we fire bombed multiple German cities, the British with an explicit policy of killing German civilians who lived near factories. Many things are horrible and either permitted explicitly by international law or, by convention and precedent, technically illegal but widely tolerated.
Nazi Germany is nothing like Occupied Palestine. Nazi Germany had millions of people's blood on its hand at that point. That is why it was "widely tolerated".
And your bring this up is a case in point of intelligence failure I alluded to. People may seem to "tolerate" mandated group think but we're still mostly Human beings and have empathy and can tell the difference between Nazi Germany and Palestine. At some point the silent consensus will be quite vocal.
Germans are still paying for their crimes in WW2 ... Something to keep in mind.
> Nazi Germany had millions of people's blood on its hand at that point. That is why it was "widely tolerated"
This is a myth. We didn’t fight Germany to stop the Holocaust. (That said, I agree on the moral unequivalence. Hamas aren’t the Nazis. But not every German was a Nazi, either. We ultimately draw lines on even collective punishment.)
If we don’t want to use Dresden, take Vietnam. Or Cambodia. Or Afghanistan or Ukraine or the Uyghurs or Kashmir. (Or Sudan, right now. Or Eritrea in ten minutes.) It sucks. But the international laws with relevance are the ones that aren’t being systematically violated by every regional power. We aren’t changing our standards to suite Israel, this is just the first conflict in a generation we’ve bothered to pay attention to.
> what specific rules of war do you believe have been broken?
Basically every single one. We will end much faster if you just read the laws.
And this is not "a belief" or a "lets debate for a year more if this is or not a genocide while sipping tea and killing faster". The ship of good faith has parted many months ago.
Your comment is a stellar example of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle in action. You'd have us wade through untold reams of international law for specific references, a task that would likely take hours, just to rebut your glib denial of the current state of play. Oh well, I've got some time to kill...
Shit That Should Land Israel's Government and Military Apparatus In The Hague, Abridged:
- (i) Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
- (ii) Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;
- (iv) Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
- (v) Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;
- (iii) Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict;
The Israeli army has a storied history of bombing the shit out of aid workers that goes back decades, everything from shelling UN aid warehouses with white phosphorous munitions to calling in artillery strikes on aid convoys. This behavior is well-documented and certainly not limited to the current conflict.
- (xxv) Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions;
Do we really need to review the current state of play with relief aid in Gaza given it hasn't been 5 days since an Israeli patrol greased a convoy of aid workers? Shit's gotten so bad foreign governments have taken to air dropping aid.
Additionally as I'm sitting here combing through the Geneva Conventions there are a few things that stand out:
- Part I, Article 3, 2) seems to be in olay between shelling the fuck out of aid workers, bombing hospitals out of existence, and the several documented attacks on emergency response vehicles.
I'm certain there's more here but you aren't getting more of my time than the initial hour I budgeted to the task of putting together this reply. Have fun with the supplemental reading...
