…do you know what won’t guarantee the end of the bombing and demolition? Surrendering without a negotiated cease-fire to the people who have been brutal occupiers for decades, who haven’t been negotiating in good faith.
What does Hamas possibly have to negotiate with? What do they have to offer Israel? Why should Israel accept anything other than unconditional surrender from them, when it’s clear that they cannot possibly defeat Israel or even maintain control over their own territory?
…the hostages.
The hostages.
I mean, this is clearly the declared intent. They’ve said they are not going to stop until they destroy Hamas.
But Israel should stop because they don’t have a strategy to destroy Hamas, or to rescue the hostages. It’s a strategic fail. They couldn’t have done a worse job of bringing the hostages home.
So you’re legitimizing the use of hostages as bargaining chips, then.
I wonder if any of those Big Important Rules you’re so fond of have anything to say about that topic.
By my stars and garters, they DO!
…nope.
I was literally just answering your question. Nothing more.
Both sides have waged this war conducting multiple war crimes. The bombing and demolition that I want to stop is largely illegal under the very same customary rules that you cite. Neither side has clean hands. And if Israel had conducted this war without a daily litany of war crimes, we would be having a very different conversation.
And your answer was that Hamas cannot resist or negotiate with Israel without committing war crimes.
Therefore, it is morally incumbent on Hamas to surrender.
…its clear that both sides are committing warcrimes, and both sides cannot and will not negotiate without committing warcrimes. Do you agree with that statement?
Its morally incumbent on both sides to stop committing warcrimes, wouldn’t you agree? But that would be incumbent on you believing that warcrimes actually exist, that there is such a thing as the laws of war.
If you don’t believe in those things, and you’ve made it clear that you don’t, then I’m not sure why you cited IHL in the first place.
I agree that Israel has committed acts that by your overly broad and unnuanced outlook could be deemed to be war crimes.
It is incumbent on the party that is in the wrong - I.e. Hamas - to stand down.
Because you believe in it. You believe war crimes are a thing, and that it is desirable that they not occur. If both parties are committing war crimes, then the logical way of bringing about the end of those events is that the weaker party - I.e. Hamas, which is incapable of holding or defending territory or protecting the lives of its citizens - should surrender, whereupon there will be no need for the stronger party to continue with its aggression.
…it isn’t overly broad.
Both parties are in the wrong. Its incumbent on them to return the hostages. But they fear, with good reason, that Israel will not stop, even if they get the hostages back.
Yep.
And my position is that the taking of hostages by Hamas is a warcrime. You know that I think this. I’ve told you it over and over again. This isn’t a “gotcha.”
I’ve stopped quoting you here, because the concept of “weaker party” isn’t dependent on whether or not that “weaker party” is a terrorist organization like Hamas or not. This is effectively a “might makes right” argument, one that the wiki page on this subject calls the “credo of totalitarian regimes.” If this is your total argument, I couldn’t disagree with you more.
Surely both parties can’t be equally wrong. One must be less wrong than the other.
I don’t entirely agree that might makes right, because sometimes the wrong are the ones who are stronger. I do believe that in the long run history favors the strong, and fortunately, in our era it is the liberal democracies who are the strongest.
Babies and toddlers (and most Gazan civilians, for that matter) are not Hamas. You said something factually false.
…120 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza.
As of Tuesday 17 April, there were 9500 Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank in Isreali detention. Many of them without charge. Many of them nobody knows where they are. The Red Cross doesn’t have access. That number includes children.
And every single person that gets released tells the same story: there are beatings, there is humiliation, there is torture.
And this was the case for a long time before October the 7th. The numbers weren’t as high. But the reports by humanitarian agencies all said the same thing.
So when you say that one party is “less wrong” here, which party are you talking about, and by what metric? Because on the atrocity scale both sides look pretty bad to me.
Israel. Because they are the liberal democracy opposing a fascist theocracy with genocidal intentions.
…“liberal democracy” are just words. They are meaningless here. Being a self-described “liberal democracy” doesn’t magically make you better than everyone else. Surely the actions matter here.
And a so-called “liberal democracy” that was holding thousand of people in “administrative detention” before October the 7th, where the humanitarian agencies report beating and humiliation and torture were commonplace, is not a good thing, wouldn’t you agree? Being a “liberal democracy” isn’t a measure of anything.
It’s a promise to its citizens that they have rights that are protected by law, which is far more than can be said of the Hamas regime.
Sure. No democracy is perfect. America has a massive prison population comprised largely of people who are too poor to afford justice, who have been targeted by laws disproportionately engineered to inflict suffering on certain groups. That doesn’t mean America is a failed experiment. It means we are called upon to further improve our system until the promise is a reality for everyone. It certainly doesn’t make us the moral equivalent of, say, North Korea, which doesn’t even pretend to make that promise let alone live up to it.
Likewise, Israel is far better equipped to provide for the rights of its people than Hamas is, and is far likelier to do better in the future on that front than Hamas is. If all else were equal - if Gaza were a fully independent, self-reliant, self-determined, responsible state, if it were not subject to embargo, if it were fully capable of living up to the philosophical ideals of its leaders, it would still be a worse place to live than Israel, because Israel aspires towards maximum individual freedom and Gaza aspires towards fundamentalist theocracy.
…but that isn’t a measure of anything.
You suggested that “one must be less wrong than the other”, and when I asked you to quantify that, we’ve arrived at basically “no democracy is perfect.”
That doesn’t answer or address my question.
My position on this is that both sides are wrong, and its a fools errand to even attempt to quantify the degree of wrongness.
But as it stands right now: one the one hand many of the hostages are still alive. On the other hand, the IDF are killing between 50-150 people every single day, most of them (according to humanitarian agencies on the ground, and even by the numbers produced by Israel) are civilians, there are still thousands still unaccounted for in the rubble, there is famine in the north, and people dying from not being able to access basic healthcare.
A ceasefire is needed now more than ever. But a ceasefire that just gives Israel the chance to regroup and then start again where it leaves off will just end up with even more Palestinians dead. And to be clear: this is the hurdle right now.
It needs both sides to come to the bargaining table in good faith. Which means the rhetoric coming from the US administration over the last few days aren’t helpful here.
Interestingly enough, I was reading an account by an Israeli captain who was a POW during one of the Lebanese wars. He told a grisly account of daily beatings, torture, and humiliation. Apparently this is de rigeur in Middle-Eastern prisons?
…I’m not sure how relevant that is to this thread. We are talking about how the “liberal democracy” treats its prisoners (I hesitate to call them prisoners of war because it also includes those in administrative detention from the West Bank.)
I am not going to pretend I have any kind of insider’s knowledge about Israeli prisons in general, or the facility in question, but if every single person there reports being tortured then that is a big problem regardless of how liberal or democratic the regime is (or claims) to be. My point was that there does not seem to be any mechanism for enforcing humane conditions, even a basic desire for reciprocity.
…in a prison in Lebanon? That isn’t relevant here.
You don’t have to have any insiders knowledge of Israeli prisons in general. You just have to read the reports from Human Rights Watch, from Amnesty, from Israeli human rights agencies, that go back decades that talk about these very same issues in regard to how Palestinians are treated.
And to be clear, both beatings and humiliation are reported as commonplace. Torture, less so. Not every prisoner reports being tortured…not even the majority. But humiliation, stress positions, are widely reported, as are beatings.