Tit for tat vengence would be wrong. For the billionth-and-second time, this is about removing Hamas from power so this (“this” encompassing both Hamas’s attack and the IDF response) doesn’t have to happen again… and again… and again… and again…
I asked before, and I’ll ask again: who is responsible for directing IDF’s general approaches to the war?
Oh no! The US and the UK deliberately devastated civilian populations hoping to intimidate them into rebelling against their governments. It didn’t, either in Europe or the Pacific. There wasn’t any eye for an eye involved. The civilians of Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg were the target. Just as they are in Gaza.
It’s not honesty, it’s an observation. Hama’s value of their children differs from mine. Hamas needs to be defeated in every sense of the word.
You left out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If that were true the war would have lasted a week.
But, you know that is not possible. Hamas is a belief that’s alive in the population.
Netanyahu has no intent of eliminating Hamas. He’s just surfing a political wave. There are 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. He can’t kill or deport them all. Hamas will still be there when he catches the next wave. As I have said upthread ‘eliminating Hamas’ is just a slogan to deflect attention from the Government/IDF total failure on Oct 7. It is a wag the dog operation. I believe that is where we diverge.
Again, if that were true the war would have lasted a week.
That is an odd claim.
Strategic bombing had little effect. There was little loss in production, it boosted morale and there was no political uprising. So, what’s your point?
No, Hamas is an organization.
My point is that your statement is wrong. If the object was to destroy all of Gaza it would have taken a week. There would be no warnings or precision bombing. It would just be bombing until every building was leveled.
No, the bombing only strengthened the will of the enemy to continue the battle. There were tons of warning pamphlets dropped in Europe and Japan. The only thing lacking was the absurd propaganda about avoiding civilian casualties.
Moderating:
As @Babale pointed out, the very next sentence of their post said that if the only way to achieve a military objective was to kill all of Palestine’s children, they would consider that military objective unobtainable.
So you have plucked this sentence out of context to make them look monstrous. That’s a serious offense. This is a warning.
Follow up question. If the current IDF actions don’t actually eliminate Hamas, or end up leading to the creation of Samah, which is reverse Hamas and even worse, and the conflict between Israel and Palestine continues, will you reevaluate how you feel about the civilian Palestinian deaths?
Not to put too fine a point in it, but defeating Hamas (while important) would be meaningless if it doesn’t lead to long-term peace.
To follow up: I’m finding that Herzi Halevi - Wikipedia is the Chief of the General Staff of the IDF, which I think is the one making military decisions? Am I wrong?
He lives in a settlement in the West Bank. Is this relevant when thinking about his political stance and about what biases may affect his approach to the war?
From the outside, it looks very much to me like whoever is making IDF’s decisions is not prioritizing Gaza civilians; rather, they’re prioritizing shock-and-awe tactics, possibly with an unconscious desire for vengeance, and possibly with a racist disregard for Palestinian life, and possibly with a desire to promote a propagandistic message that this approach to the war is the only possible approach. But I’d love to know more about who’s in charge.
The head of the IDF is Herzi Halevi. I’m not his biggest fan, but he was among the first to take responsibility for Oct 7 and I have read reports that say he plans to resign after the war, which I respect if true (if only our PM had this much integrity…)
That would be an enormous waste and tremendous tragedy, and whoever dropped the ball and caused the peace process to fail would go down alongside Yigal Amir at the top of the list of Israelis who have been most destructive to the region.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Germany and Japan were defeated. Where is this strengthened will you’re talking about? Not only that they are major trading partners with their former enemies and pillars of the Free World.
Thank you, that is a very fair take. I appreciate that you are hoping for the optimum outcome for Israel here. I believe we won’t know that outcome until long after the bullets start flying.
Given what you know about him, is it possible/plausible/likely that he is letting a desire for vengeance, an expansionist tendency, or a racist or Islamophobic bias influence his military decisions?
…I’ve shared this before, but this could be instructive.
When they first started using the system, they went from 50 targets a year, to 100 targets a day.
There simply is no shortage of targets in this campaign. I don’t see it as deliberate “shock-and-awe tactics”. It’s more they are simply going through the process.
How is it picking targets?
Key word being suspected. They’ve got a list of suspected militants that have been authorised to be assassinated. That could, quite possibly, include people detained at some stage for throwing rocks sometime in the last twenty years and released. And if you don’t even know you are on the list, you don’t even know if you are a target or not. It puts the whole “Hamas are hiding among civilians” in context.
You look at the pattern of attacks. How Gaza has been turned into a series of grids.
How people have been told to evacuate to a specific area…then that area gets bombed.
If this bombing campaign looks as if it’s being effectively run by an AI run amok…it’s because it is. It’s a peek into our dystopian future.