On a side note, it looks like in previous conflicts, the ratio of dead Palestinians to dead Israelis was always something like 10-to-1 or 20-to-1 or even more. So in this war maybe we’re looking at 50,000+ Palestinians dead when it’s over.
This argument amounts to a claim that Palestinians are either innately flawed, immensely stupid or completely lacking in agency.
However horrific the plight of civilians in Gaza right now, what the Allies did in WWII to Germany and Japan was orders of magnitude worse for their civilian populations. But once the dreadful task of removing those evil regimes was completed, we brought massive aid and helped them reconstruct, and the civilian populations never had any difficulty understanding that our problem was not with them as peoples but with Nazism and militaristic imperialism. Within a generation those nations were thriving as allies with prosperity to rival our own.
Of course the Gazan population is not going to welcome the IDF as liberators, because they have suffered immense hardship from the blockade and been fed a constant diet of antisemitic propaganda. But nobody is born a death cult terrorist. After Hamas is removed from power, we will need to offer Palestinians much better choices, and a crucial part of that will be to marginalize the right wing extremists in Israel. But given time and a path to a viable future, I refuse to believe that the young generation of Palestinians are incapable of understanding how badly Iran and others have fucked them and used them as pawns, and that putting their faith in a terroristic death cult like Hamas can lead only to a repetition of this misery.
Exactly this.
I mostly agree with you and hope you are right. However, giving more options and offering better choices and future opportunity and prosperity also means showing some current restraint - including following the law and the provision of necessities, which is in everyone’s long-term interests. For the reasons you mention.
These countries have so much more space than Gaza though. I’ve spent some time looking at Gaza on Google Earth, and it’s just so small and so overcrowded. If they’re going to have any prosperity, they need industry and farmland and where the hell is it going to go?
I know there are farms in Gaza but it doesn’t look like enough to feed the population of the urban area.
I don’t have the answers, but I just hope that this horror is finally enough to create momentum and broad support for a two-state solution. And I hope it all backfires on Iran and that regime collapses.
That’s the trick. I sure hope it happens.
The elephant in the room is the amount of influence Hamas has had over multiple generations of Palestinians.
I don’t think it’s possible to undue the psychological damage because Hamas will continue to elicit responses to their attacks in an effort to portray Israel as the aggressor. it will become a revolving series of destruction that obscures who started what.
You also can’t ignore Iran, which is using the Palestinians as a proxy against Israel and has been providing Hamas with money and weapons.
There is also a religious element at play here. This is the very definition of a ‘wicked’ problem.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from and dismantled its settlements in the Gaza Strip.
Thought experiment: what do you think would have happened if Israel had also permanently lifted its land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza at that time?
Do you mean, by entirely opening its border with Gaza, and letting everybody who wanted come in with whatever weapons they chose? Or do you only mean, allowing Gaza to build seaports and encouraging Egypt to open its border with Gaza?
If you mean the first: I suspect that would have been suicidal. If you mean the second: I suspect Egypt would have kept its border tight shut, except for very limited access through the one crossing: on the grounds that that’s exactly what Egypt did – and I think Israel did in fact want them to open that border; they wanted Egypt to annex Gaza, and Egypt refused. What the effect would have been of allowing seaports I don’t know – maybe that would have been a good idea, maybe it would have resulted primarily in Israel having to fend off attacks from the sea.
It seems like satellite imagery could locate the Gaza tunnels.
Archeology is finding ancient settlements from imagery that shows disturbed soil. They’ve found ancient ruins hidden under the jungle canopy in central America.
A concrete lined tunnel should leave a different heat signature.
Google Earth might locate traces of digging for tunnels.
Link How Google Earth Has Revolutionized Archaeology | Discover Magazine
Basic rule: anything you or I think of in five minutes is not going to be a brilliant insight for people who’ve made their careers thinking about the subject. If they’re not doing it, it’s almost certainly because it doesn’t work.
Finding heat signatures beneath jungle is going to be very different from finding heat signatures under a built-up urban area.
Exactly. I’d love it if this rule was followed in analysis threads.
Well, that reminds me about the old economist joke about perfect markets…
Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a ten dollar bill on the ground and tells the other to pick it up. The second economist says, “That can’t be a ten dollar bill. If it was, someone would have picked it up already.”
I generally agree that when someone on the internet says, “Well obviously they should have…” it’s likely that they just don’t understand the complexities of the problem (or what they say should be done is already being done). But history is actually full of gobsmackingly stupid ideas by smart peoole, and gaping holes in planning/strategy that you’d think no one would have missed.
The flip side is that I’m completely unimpressed, especially in this case, with folks who pull the, “Oh, you don’t like what [nation] is doing here? Well then, smart guy, what’s YOUR plan?”
Obviously none of us here are military commanders, and if any of us were, we’d be court martialed for sharing vital intelligence with a bunch of dopes. Except for those of us who think we’ve discovered a sooper secret strategy that’s evaded Israel’s best military minds, we’re all of us relying on experts, whether they’re IDF experts or Red Cross experts or other experts. We’re doing our amateur best to evaluate what the different experts are saying, and concluding who’s making the most sense, or whose values most closely align with our own.
urk
Urk indeed. It’s one thing to call Hamas the “children of darkness”–their actions are so evil that I understand the mythical symbolism. But to suggest that Netanyahu is the “children of light”? Nah.
To repeat myself: the hordes of hell and the hosts of heaven trample the peasant’s garden.
It seems like thoughtless wording to me, when actual children of your own side have been killed and you’re in the process of killing actual children of the opposing side - over a thousand at current count - and the words can be interpreted as rather genocidal, which is unfortunate when many, including people that should be on your own side, are accusing you of genocide.
So now there’s a risk Iran and Hezbollah (the latter based in Lebanon) will attack Israel. What will the response from the U.S. be if that happens?