Damuri Ajashi:
Well, the guy with the boot on his neck could, you know, surrender and formally agree to cease hostilities, with a genuine treaty. Once the one wearing the boot has some assurance that removing the boot won’t result in renewed attack, then the boot can be removed, and the neck can be free.
(1) I’m not sure this is effective retaliation. Effective at killing Palestinians, sure, but effective at ending the rocket strikes?
(2) I don’t have an exact number in mind like “You’re allowed to kill X people if they kill Y”, but I think that there must be some point at which the response is clearly disproportionate. Do you disagree? And moreover, it seems to me that killing 100 people and injuring hundreds more, in response to attacks that didn’t kill anyone, is almost sure to exceed whatever cutoff one could pick for a disproportionate response.
I’m aware of a seeming contradiction here: I’m saying “You shouldn’t strike back militarily if it won’t actually end (or significantly curtail) the attacks”, and also “you shouldn’t strike back with disproportionate force”. But what if the only amount of military force that could end the violence is a disproportionate force? My answer to that would be “Then the military solution isn’t the right option.” There’s a point at which the number of people you’d have to kill to solve it by killing is more than you should be willing to kill. (Especially given that we’re not talking about an existential threat to Israel here, we’re talking about a series of mostly-ineffectual attacks.)
Agreed - see my post above yours (post 10 in this thread).
What I disagree with, is the apparent reflex to make that judgment on the mere basis that Israel has killed 100 Palestinians.
There is every evidence that Hamas can, in fact, be influenced by Israeli pressure. Israeli attacks cannot solve the conflict permanently - they can press Hamas into accepting a face-saving “cease fire”. Or at least, they have in the past.
This is effectively the “do nothing” option.
In a democratic society, a government that opted to do nothing in the face of attacks on its civilians would not remain the government for very long.
It does however guarantee that if any children are killed, they will be killed in your country.
Thing is though, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is–well, it doesn’t make much sense, does it?
How will the airstrikes stop rocket attacks? OK, you can blow up a few launchers, target Hamas leaders. Then they’ll get some more rockets and fire them at Israel.
One thing I find hard to understand is that Israelis don’t seem to believe that Palestinians react the same way Israelis do. If Palestinians bomb Israel, Israelis are outraged and want to attack Palestinians. But when Israel bombs Palestinians, they someone expect Palestinians to become intimidated. This in the face of 50 years of Palestinians not being deterred by Israeli attacks.
For attacks to be morally acceptable, they have to have some hope of accomplishing their stated objective. If there is no hope that the attack can accomplish the objective, then it doesn’t matter whether the objective is moral or immoral. A suicide bomber blowing up a restaurant isn’t going to convince Israel to give up. Bombs dropped on apartment buildings isn’t going to convince Hamas to give up. Arguing that the civilian casualties are Hamas’s fault might be convincing to Israelis, but it sure isn’t going to be convincing to the Gazans. The fact that Hamas is intentionally sheltering among civilians in order to force Israel to cause civilian collateral damage doesn’t change the fact that the Gazans will blame Israel for the casualties, not Hamas. Whether that’s rational or not, it’s a fact.
So what’s the end game here? Keep this up forever? The bombing isn’t going to stop the rocket attacks. So now what?
How many Palestinians were killed before that happened, and how long did the cease-fire last? (These are genuine questions on my part, not an attempt to score some debating point. I am very far from an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations, and part of why I started the thread was to try to understand the Israeli side.)
“‘Attempted murder,’ now honestly, did they ever give anyone a Nobel prize for ‘attempted chemistry?’”
Again, these all appear to argue in favour of doing nothing. The part that is missing, is any sort of proof that (a) the attacks will not ‘work’ in the sense of pressuring Hamas to stop or rendering Hamas attacks ineffectual; and (b) that the ‘killing ratio’ is proof positive that the retaliation is “disproportionate”.
I think you do not really understand what “disproportionate” means in this context - it means "disproportionate to the military objective sought’ - in this case, the ‘military objective’ being to (1) physically destroy Hamas rocket launchers; (2) make launching rockets extremely dangerous - this ensuring that if any are launched, they are done in a hurry and so ineffectively; and (3) putting pressure on Hamas to stop doing it.
The inneffectuality of the Hamas military campaign may, in fact, be evidence that the Israeli military campaign is a success. By attacking launchers remorselessly, it could be argued, Israel is doing exactly what a military is supposed to do - that is, protect its own country from damage. Assuming this is the case (and I admit I do not know), it would be hard to argue that its campaign is “disproportionate”.
In short, your position appears to demand that Israel allow itself to suffer significant civilian casualties before it is ‘justified’ in protecting itself. Not a position, I would imagine, likely to be popular among Israeli civilians.
But they’re asking for different things. The Israelis are asking for the two sides to live in peace. The Hamas people are asking for the Israelis to be driven out of the country.
It’s more reasonable to think “maybe these guys would prefer to live in peace than to be bombed” than to think “maybe these guys would prefer to be driven out of the country than to be bombed”.
I don’t know, and a few years.
What is Hamas demanding? Specifically now, I mean, not “drive the Jews into the sea,” which might be the sort of general policy-goal they pretty much always have to say in their political context.
The objective isn’t to convince Hamas to “give up” and accept Israel as a nation like any other - they are religious fanatics, and will never “give up”.
The objective is to ensure that Hamas attacks are ineffectual, and pressure them into a “cease fire”.
Given that so far Hamas has not in fact succeeded in killing anyone despite its best efforts, it strikes me that there is pretty good evidence that the Israeli military actions are - doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
. . . something of an overreaction.
What they’re demanding is that the state of Israel be destroyed. What they’re apparently willing to live with as a practical matter - at least for the short term - is a semi-cease-fire, where they or their allies kill a few Israelis here and there and the Israelis do nothing in response.
That’s very generous of you. They say it, they act as if they mean it, but you expect the Israelis to wave it away as mere rhetoric and act as if it’s not a danger. Easy for you, because it’s not your neck out there.
Hamas leaders are encouraging civilians to act as human shield against the airstrikes which are meant to target Hamas leaders. Israel has been informing civilians in Gaza of impending airstrikes and encouraging them to move out of the zone of danger prior to firing any missiles. For a cite, see This NY Times article and this video aired on Al-Aqsa TV.
Allegedly, its immediate demands are an end to all restrictions on importing weapons into Gaza, and a release of Palestinain prisoners recently arrested by Israel.
“I’ll keep hitting you unless you let me re-arm, so I can cause you more serious damage in the future”. :dubious:
Its long-term demands are, as always, that Israel cease to exist.
If you deliberately invite death and destruction onto your own population while knowing you are unable to materially change the original scenario due to your military weakness then I’d put the onus on Hamas.
Now obviously Hamas would like to have many many more domestic victims while managing not to kill too many Israelis. Too many Israeli dead and they’ll be pushed into a corner and have to deal with either a loss of international support or an Israel government that must respond in order to protect its citizens.
You are having something of a problem with “cause” and “effect” here. 
Yes, if this was a contest to see who many each side could kill, killing 100 Palestinians would be an “overreaction” to Hamas killing 0 Israelis.
But it isn’t.
The point of Israeli military actions is not to murder random Palestinains, but to degrade Hamas’s attempts to attack Israeli civilians. The fact that Hamas has so far succeeded in killing 0 Israeli civilians is reasonable proof that Israel’s actions are, in fact, working.
How would you make that judgement? In your view, as long as they’re doing “the best they can” to avoid hitting civilians, is that good enough, even if they know every single one of their Hamas targets is surrounded by civilians and large numbers of civilian casualties are inevitable? Is there a response that you would consider appropriate if Hamas had killed a hundred Israelis, but that you wouldn’t consider appropriate if Hamas had killed, say, five, or zero? Or do you feel like that makes no difference in what level of response is appropriate?
As in my response to Fotheringay-Phipps, I’m happy to be educated on this point. In addition to my questions I asked him, I’d be interested to know whether the “cease fire” was negotiated in some way, and if a third party was involved, or if Hamas eventually just gave up.
Maybe in the short term. It seems possible to me that if Israel consistently pursued a strategy of non-violence and diplomacy with the Palestinians, it could eventually lead to some sort of lasting peace, even if it might take a couple decades to get there. (I’ll probably be called naive for saying so, but so be it.) Whereas if they respond to every Palestinian attack with disproportionate force, I find it unlikely that things will be any better 50 years from now.
These attacks aren’t an existential threat to Israel. Or I guess you’re saying that if they didn’t authorize the attacks, others would be elected who would? But I don’t really think a politician trying to save their own job is a good reason for killing a hundred people.
And in this case, it would probably guarantee that the total number of children killed on both sides was much, much lower.
It has been reported repeatedly in the media that Israel gives notice and warning before launching any strike at a ‘civilian’ site (most, if not all, of which harbour rockets, rocket launchers, or Hamas operatives). Likewise, it is reported that most of the said civilians at those sites either choose to weather the attack or are compelled by Hamas not to leave.
Earlier today, one of the Israeli leaders said something that sums up much of the death toll disparity:
Israel uses its weapons to protect it citizens.
Hamas uses its citizens to protect its weapons.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s more Hamas’s fault than Israel’s. It doesn’t necessarily follow that Israel’s actions are moral and justified. If someone walks up to me and shoves me to the ground, and I respond by pulling out a gun and shooting them, I would say (1) The altercation was primarily their fault, and (2) my response was disproportionate and not morally justified (unless I believed my life was actually in danger).
To be clear, I am not trying to suggest in any way that Hamas’s actions are moral, or even that they’re more moral than Israel. I’m trying to discuss what’s the right response for Israel to take, which is more of a concern for me because they’re the side with the power to kill large numbers of people. Thankfully Hamas isn’t nearly so well armed.
Not to be a SDMB cliche, but can you provide a link to such media reports? This may well be true, but I haven’t read it in the coverage I’ve seen.