At the risk of being flip, they also could have responded with more violence than they did.
I think a lot of people look at what they’re seeing from Gaza and view it as particularly, distinctly awful… it feels “worse” than “similar” wars/attacks/sieges/battles.
Why is that? Well, there are several possibilities:
(1) Israel is being particularly cruel/heartless/murderous/war-crime-y/genocidal
(2) It is not, in fact, worse… it’s just an artifact of the amount of attention the world media has always focused in Israel/Palestine compared to other conflicts around the world
(2a) It is not, in fact, worse… it’s just an artifact of inaccurate information, due to some combination of deliberately biased reporting and general fog-of-war and if-it-bleeds-it-leads
(3) Geographical factors unique to Gaza (ie, population density, lack of internal water sources)
(4) Social/demographics factors unique to Gaza (ie, how Hamas is integrated into the local population)
(4a) Social/demographics factors unique to Gaza deliberately and callously engineered by Hamas
Most likely, it’s more than one of the above (plus I’m sure factors I haven’t thought of). I personally have no idea how to really fairly assess it… but I take issue at what I perceive as the immediate assumption that it’s all, or nearly entirely, due to (1).
Taking a step back for a second, it’s easy, at the remove that many of us are, to become very cold-blooded and heartless in these debates. It’s hard to imagine anyone with even a shred of human decency not to fervently wish for the killing and violence to stop… which I certainly do.
Doctors, humanitarian agencies, aid workers, UN officials, all who have worked in some of the worst warzones in the world, are calling this "one of the worst they’ve ever seen.
More journalists have died in this conflict than in any other since CPJ started records in 1992. More UN Aid workers: over 100 in Gaza, the previous high was a single bombing in 2011 with 46. They are breaking records here.
And one of the reasons why this conflict is so deadly is because the civilians in Gaza are trapped. There is literally nowhere for them to go. They were initially given 24 hours notices to “leave Northern Gaza” and head to the safe zones in the south. Then those safe zones kept getting attacked, and pushed back, and latest estimates say that 1.5 million of the 2.2 million people of Gaza are now in Rafah. In other conflicts you might just have a chance to get away and hide. But there is no hiding in Gaza. Nowhere is safe.
There is essentially no healthcare system any more. North and central Gaza have largely been bombed to buggery and they are demolishing more with controlled explosives and bulldozers.
And they are attacking Rafah now. They are literally bombing tents.
The issue here is that you are assuming we are making assumptions and not simply following along as it happens. If you want to make a fair assessment, then you listen to the humanitarian agencies on the ground. You listen to the doctors and medical teams who have done their time in what remains of the healthcare system. There really is no excuse not to be informed if you want to be.
I don’t know how to assess all of it, but i do feel i can assess the destruction of hospitals and the extremely high mortality of reporters. That’s why i mentioned those two things.
The issue isn’t that they responded with violence to violence, it’s the degree of violence, who and what they targeted it at, the lies they use to justify it, and the stubborn refusal to admit they did any of the above wrong.
All of which they absolutely have choices about.
No. We (or at least, I) think it looks all too familiarly awful. From recent (even current) wars and related atrocities where the people doing the things Israel is doing right now are very much considered wrong.
This conflict may be getting exaggerated attention because of where it is, but nothing about Israeli tactics would seem unique to a Ukrainian or a Rohingya. Possibly worse in degree, for reasons Banquet_Bear mentions, but not unique, no.
I was talking about levels of violence and tactics. Blame is a complete non sequitur.
I notice you have time for this fallacious drive-by, but neither a substantive response to the counterpoints I raised before nor a defence of your selective quoting in your previous post.
Nuremberg Tribunal. Several German leaders were convicted of stuff like plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, Of course others were charged with atrocities, but just the act of attacking and starting a war was a crime. So 'who started it" is part of war crime. Nazi Germany started WW2.
Not fallacious.
You didnt raise any counterpoints worth discussing.
Nor did I need a defense of a full quote, nothing taken out.
Sure. Only cites that the lies you reposted are now known as lies and proved as lies by the Israelis’ own official reporting. Nothing worth discussing there.
No, “just” cropped just short of its own self-contained rebuttal, and never actually properly linked to. Disingenuous is one word for it.
You can, of course, cite this “who started it” precondition for the crimes in actual IHL, right? I mean, I see nothing about “it’s OK if the people in the civilan hospital started it” in Article 13 of the relevant GC, for instance.
Take it down a notch. You already posted a substantive claim for each of these, which other posters can evaluate. Hammering repeatedly becomes attacking the poster.
I know “both sides suck” is a bit of a cop-out, but that’s where I sit now. I’m not particularly enamored of either.
And I’d be a lot more sympathetic to Israel if:
-Netanyahu’s government hadn’t empowered Hamas in an effort to avoid solving the problem
-The Israeli government gave half a crap about the settlements
-The Israeli government did anything about settler-on-Palestinian violence in the West Bank
-Netanyahu hadn’t declared two state solution dead
-Israel at least made pretenses that they have a plan to bring this thing to a reasonable conclusion
Those last three in particular make me think the real plan is to just grind it out
The success of the attack can be attributed directly to the IDF:
The IDF sucked up a billion dollars to build a siege fence then walked away from it. There was no eyes-on monitoring of the perimeter and no plan or force to respond to violations. They left security to an expensive Sci-Fi fantasy.
Allowing the Reim celebration next to the fence without IDF protection was a dereliction of duty. They did not even provide for minimum security like an emergency plan and communication facilities. I have managed Birding Festivals that were more secure.
Israeli SS reports the casualties of the attack as:
313 killed at festival
354 adult Israelis (outside of festival)
36 Israeli children
71 foreigners
372 security personnel (police, IDF and off duty IDF)
Some of the IDF losses were at attacks on three military installations. Five groups were involved. and the fence was open for most of the day. Gazans looters, rioters and partisans traveled back and forth unimpeded.
Posts of 1200 raped and killed are propagandist nonsense. There were 731 Israeli civilians killed by murder, crossfire and atrocious acts of violence, during a breakout of a population that was under siege by Israel. This could have been prevented had the IDF been engaged in defending their country. That is what they get paid for.
So, it would be more correct to say that the 731 innocent civilians killed on Oct 7 were the greatest failure of the IDF in Israeli history.
OK, maybe all three sides, because Netanyahu and his government are a big part of this. I strongly suspect (but can’t know, of course) that inside himself Netanyahu sees this as an opportunity.
So I guess it depends on whether you want to look at the IDF and the current Israeli government as one thing or two.
Just want to get ahead of the conflation of Hamas and all Palestinians that I’ve already called out multiple times (not that I think OldOlds was doing that).
I may have been lazy inasmuch as I’m prone to say “Israel” when I mean the government, but I am not tarring either population with the same brush as their respective governments.
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