So the solution is to deprive innocent civilians of water, food and power?
That sounds like a war crime to me.
It seems to me that Israel has basically three choices, then:
- Allow no fuel to enter. Hamas can’t top off their tanks, and civilians suffer mass casualties from dehydration and disease. Children will be hit the hardest.
- Allow only a little fuel in. Hamas tops off their tanks, and civilians suffer mass casualties from dehydration and disease. Children will be hit the hardest.
- Allow significant fuel in. Hamas tops off their tanks, and civilians don’t suffer mass casualties.
Obviously #2 is a terrible choice. #1 results in fewer IDF casualties. #3 keeps babies from dying.
This doesn’t seem right – if your suppositions are accurate, then only #3 keeps babies from dying.
Dammit, I got #1 and #3 mixed up. I’ll edit it. Thanks!
Does it keep babies from dying, or does it prolong the war and lead to more babies dying in airstrikes?
Water and food are being sent in through the UN. Power is only off because Hamas is choosing not to distribute their power to hospitals. Since Israel is not yet in control of the regions where the hospitals or the fuel are, how is Israel supposed to make Hamas distribute the fuel?
I think you’re leaving out some options. If an organization’s plan is to kill babies now to prevent themselves from killing babies in the future, they need to step back and re-evaluate.
Taking it as given that Hamas is going to continue to be fucking awful and hoard fuel, Israel’s choice is between the options I gave earlier. If they choose #3, children won’t die as much.
Israel’s blocking of fuel is not killing babies if there is plenty of fuel in the strip. Hamas’s refusal to use the fuel for productive purposes is.
If I am your landlord and I tell you rent is due, and you decide that you’re going to pay the rent and use the rest of your money to buy Fortnite skins, and therefore your kids starve to death - I did not cause your kids to starve.
If you had no money at all and I came in and took your bread in lieu of payment and then your kids starved, then yeah, my fault. But if there was plenty of money and you just refused to use money earmarked for Fortnite on food, that’s on you.
We can take Hamas’s bad behavior as a given; that does not mean we take responsibility for their actions or the consequences thereof. That’s like blaming Israel for the hospital bombing, not because you think they did it, but because the Palestinian rocket was fired at Israel, so it’s Israel’s fault it was fired and their fault people died.
There may be a fundamental difference in the way we conceive of moral responsibility.
As I see it: we share responsibility for the foreseeable outcomes of our decisions. The closer we are to the outcome, the greater our share of the responsibility.
Hamas is a bad actor. We know they’re a bad actor. We make our decisions in light of their predictable bad actions. We can’t evade our responsibility by shifting the blame onto them: while they’re certainly to blame, we also are to blame if we take actions that predictably result in deaths.
Not really, because that incident wasn’t a predictable outcome.
Israel pumps water into Gaza. They also supply electricity to Gaza. They also control the entry of fuel into Gaza (along with Egypt). When Hamas attacked Israel, they stopped all 3 things in response. @Thing.Fish said “Israel should turn the water back on…”. Of these 3 things, water is the only one that HAS been turned back on (at least in part). Maybe @Think.Fish can clarify if they meant something else, but otherwise I take them at their word and assume they didn’t know the water has been back on for quite a while.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
So what exactly is Israel trying to accomplish? I have no suggestions. I was strongly opposed to the US’s reaction to 9/11. I realize Israel is far smaller than the US. But to this relatively uninterested outsider, Israel’s actions look a lot like just satisfying the urge to strike back in some way, whether or not that will significantly improve things in the long run.
Unconditional surrender. Take over Gaza and rebuild it along the lines of the Marshal Plan.
The Marshall Plan did not involve ethnically cleansing the residents of the area being rebuilt. There is more than one high-level minister in the current Israel government that is pro-ethnic cleansing and pro-genocide. I don’t think a Marshall Plan is feasible with the current government makeup of Israel.
No bombing of Gaza, however extensive, will make Palestinian militants surrender. But conversely, no redevelopment of Gaza, however extensive, will persuade Palestinian militants (or their civilian supporters, or their patrons abroad) to stop using the territory as a base to try to eliminate Israel. Such material incentives, by themselves, cannot resolve or even ease the conflict. This is one reason why most historical analogies to the Israel/Palestine situation fall flat.
But even if this is true, it’s not just about the militants. If large majorities of most Palestinians (and most Israelis) were to accept some agreed peace proposal that codified two states, the peaceful majority would restrain the violent minority. Sure, there might be occasional incidents, but as long as there are governments on each sides with mandates to keep the peace as best they can, occasional incidents wouldn’t necessarily destroy long term peace.
All of that is a long, long haul from where we are now, but I don’t see why the existence of militants makes it somehow impossible.
Right. Israeli right-wing fanatics who commit or encourage violence against Palestinians go to prison. Maybe the conviction or prosecution rate could be higher, I’m sure you can point to individual incidents where someone escaped justice; but on the whole the country makes a serious effort to hold people accountable for that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, how does the Palestinian Authority punish those who hurt Israelis?
But as I’ve said before, I see this sort of meddling as a positive sign. It tells me that without the Palestinian Authority and their foreign backers pushing terrorism so hard, the terrorism would stop.
Since I am not a politician, I view all this one state, two states, three state stuff more as a paperwork problem. If a region is stable, it should normally not matter. For example, I have met people who live in France and commute to and from work in Geneva every day; except for their tax paperwork, what difference does it make? Note, it was not that long ago (a couple of decades) that there was not even a Gaza Wall type of border.
Biden says he does not trust the casualty numbers reported out of Gaza:
Anybody know whether Hamas ever admitted that the hospital casualty figures were overblown? If not, does that mean the 6,500 figure includes the 500 “killed” at the hospital?
If only it were that simple. The problem is that the state has demographic concerns; it exists exclusively for benefit of one ethnoreligious group with the population of the other major ethnic group their being strictly circumscribed.
You’re correct. Gaza exists completely for Arabs, and the West Bank would be similarly Judenrein if Israel ended its occupation thereof. Only in Israel do Jews and other non-Arabs live alongside Arabs with civil rights of any sort.