Define “control”. No, Israel does not run the day to day administration of either of these territories.
And define “most” of Gaza, too - the IDF controls slightly more than half of the strip, by most of the population lives in areas controlled by Hamas, so no, I wouldn’t say that Israel has control over the population of Gaza.
As we already established multiple times, no, not all of the people under 18 are innocent civilians with nothing to do with the conflict. Many are in fact Hamas fighters. So it seems very strange that you’d claim that “certainly all of the children” are not responsible.
It really is amazing how all Palestinians are peaceful and opposed to terrorist groups like Hamas, yet Hamas easily remains in power. It’s almost like they actually enjoy widespread support. I mean, that’s also what the polls say, but those polls must be lying because Andy assured me that actually all Palestinians oppose Hamas.
If the vast majority of people hated Hamas and wanted nothing to do with it, Hamas couldn’t rule Gaza.
We’ve not established this, unless the bare-bones “some non-zero number of under-18 Gazans probably fight for Hamas”. I don’t concede anything beyond this, since there’s no evidence I’m aware of any specific number.
No idea what this is responding to. I’ve made no such claims. Please respond to my actual and specific words, not these fantasies. No, I do not believe the poll responses of a brutalized and violently oppressed people tell us anything about their collective responsibility for the violent actions of a relatively tiny number of evil people, any more than the poll responses of everyday Israelis mean that they own some responsibility for the brutalization and murder of Palestinian civilians in the WB and Gaza.
Human beings are responsible for their actions, and I’m not aware of any actions by most Palestinians that means they bear some responsibility for Hamas’s atrocities. Having opinions does not mean they bear any responsibility for the actions of others.
And I think this is another big piece of the disagreement – you appear to think the Palestinians deserve some sort of collective punishment, I do not. I most very strongly do not.
You’re the one who said “all”, not “the vast majority” or “children who don’t fight for Hamas”
Wtf? What kind of gotcha is that meant to be?
Yes, obviously, Israeli civilians deserve some “blame” (I would argue we should call it credit) for the way the war has gone. I think it’s very impressive how Israeli society was able to unite to face the threat. For example, there were fighter pilots who were striking to oppose the judicial reform bill before the war, they did what needed to be done during the fight with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and now they’re continuing to oppose Netanyahu’s overreach. I think that’s very admirable.
And obviously I disagree with your characterization of this war as Palestinians being “brutalized and murdered”.
Of course, that’s not what I said.how did you put it?
Another fantasy - I don’t support collective punishment. What I support is the people of Gaza being liberated from Hamas’ control.
I don’t think WWII was collective punishment of the Germans or Japanese. Likewise, removing Hamas from power isn’t “collective punishment”, it is the only way forward.
Is a child soldier under brutal conditions to blame? I don’t know.
It’s a fact that many Palestinians are being brutalized and murdered. Obviously in the WB, and I’m all but certain this happening frequently in Gaza. Do you deny that, over the last few years, many Palestinians have been brutalized, and murdered, by Israeli (regular, settler, or otherwise) forces? If so, then that’s another MASSIVE disagreement, and another point on which we can probably end discussion. We’re getting awfully close to explaining every single point at which we disagree.
But you’ve said that Palestinians as a whole bear some responsibility for the actions of Hamas. Or am I mistaken? If you believe that, do you not believe they deserve some consequences for that responsibility? If that’s not what you believe, then what is your belief with regards to collective Palestinian responsibility for Hamas atrocities?
As for “removing Hamas”, Israel continues to utterly fail at this, in my understanding based on a combination of incompetence and (likely IMO) sabotage at the top (since Netanyahu obviously wants the fighting to continue forever). But broader than that… at what cost? It’s already cost far more civilian deaths than Hamas ever caused. What if the only way to remove Hamas is to kill or expel every single Gazan? Is there no point at which you’d say “this is not worth the cost of removing a relatively small and weak organization that can only seriously harm us when our defense and security forces are utterly incompetent”?
No more than an 18 year old who was drafted and sent into Gaza. In other words - yes, if he acts heinously enough.
No, some of the settler groups are fucking terrorists, and they often get into clashes with Israel because of it.
The difference between Israel and Palestine is that the hilltop youth are a maligned minority group in Israel who are opposed by most of society while Hamas is the governing body of Gaza.
If Ben Gvir and his settler friends won an election and formed a government, they’d be comparable to Hamas. But that’s never been even close to happening.
And Germans as a whole bore some responsibility for Germany’s behavior during WWII; likewise, Americans or Brits or Canadians or Australians as a whole deserve some credit for the way their country behaved during the war.
Sure - the consequence they deserve is having their terrorist government toppled and undergoing foreign occupation for some time until a new government can be established.
Like most productive consequences (as opposed to ‘punishment’, it’s actually in their own self interest.
How do you figure? The UN just approved a plan that gets us closer than we’ve been in decades to a peaceful resolution. If Gaza is actually occupied by an international force, we could very well see Hamas destroyed and displaced shortly - exactly the prescription I offered at the start of the war, and one I was pretty pessimistic about actually seeing the world step up and do.
How on Earth did Israel “utterly fail”?
How would that work? Wouldn’t that require every single Gazan to be a Hamas member, or at least willing to join up once Hamas is weak enough? I thought you assured me that Hamas is actually very unpopular?
Palestinians are human beings, not bloodthirsty monsters. If it was possible to get Germany to give up Nazism without killing or removing every last German, it’s surely possible to get Palestinians to agree to live next to Israelis without removing all of them.
No, there is no point at which I would say “I am ok with someone who really wants to kill me and has tried to do it many times living next to me just because I know I am stronger than him”.
I never said that, but why did you not cite it in the first place? And it would be nice if you directly responded instead of "What about"ing questions.
I think we’ve drilled down to the points of disagreement (in this discussion today and past ones) – IMO there is clear and strong evidence Israel is overseeing/has overseen, and tried/trying to conceal, multiple incidents of atrocities;
IMO Palestinians as a whole, aside from the relatively few active participants, bear not a single SHRED of responsibility for the actions of Hamas;
IMO this Israeli government is so corrupt and immoral, and has been for so long, that the IDF is similarly morally and informationally compromised such that they can’t be trusted to tell the truth or do the right thing any more than the Netanyahu or Trump administrations (or Hamas, for that matter) – we can see the moral and honesty degradation of the US military happening in real time with Trump and Hegseth in charge – imagine how bad it would be if they had been in power as long as Netanyahu and his coalition?;
IMO the destruction of Gaza and deaths of so many civilians are colossally out of scale with the harm done to Israel;
IMO through so many years of toleration and sometimes encouragement of brutal mistreatment of Palestinians in the WB, this Israeli government has demonstrated no interest (and in fact, active hostility) towards peace or human rights for Palestinians;
IMO the multiple Israeli political leaders who have made supremacist or pro-genocide remarks are closer to the norm rather than outliers when compared to the actual reported conditions in Gaza and the WB (which are atrocious – apartheid-like in the WB, and utter devastation in Gaza);
IMO Israel is responsible for vast suffering even beyond just the bombings and shootings in Gaza (and the tolerated brutality in the WB) due to the colossal (and likely purposeful) incompetence of the GHF in distributing aid in Gaza when it faced famine conditions;
IMO the multiple international organizations reporting that a genocide is or has been taking place are likely accurate even if many or most members of the IDF aren’t actively trying to kill every single Gazan (such a widespread motive is not necessary for a genocide or attempted genocide to take place);
and finally, IMO this Israeli administration is no more able to achieve peace and security, and human rights for Palestinians, than Hamas is, or than the Trump administration would be in a similar conflict. Evil and dishonest people at the top are literally incapable of humanely solving complex problems.
Why would a story coming from the AJC mean “you can see why I would try to keep it unattributed”?
Because I wasn’t talking about that article. I was talking about discussions that happened here on the Dope right after Oct 17, 2023 when the articles in question were posted here. But linking to those articles wouldn’t help now, because these are ‘live update’ type links where the contents of the same page changes as new information comes out. So after you demanded a cite, I went out and found one; I was speaking from personal experience, not from what I learned reading the article.
Pretty sure I did. Andy asked if there would be any point at which I decide that rooting out Hamas is not worth it, and the answer is no; there would be no point at which I tolerate an organization like Hamas existing next door.
This is the kind of attitude that enables atrocities up to and including genocide, IMO. YMMV, but I’d rather leave my home and go elsewhere than commit any atrocity, if that were the only way to keep my home safe.
The appropriate steps to take will of course vary based on how powerful Hamas is; for example, if they were a fringe terrorist group inside an independent Palestine, I’d consider it Palestine’s responsibility to deal with them and would support diplomatic solutions to make Palestine’s own law enforcement or security apparatus deal with them.
But just shrugging and saying “There’s a terrorist group that wants to kill us - let’s just ignore them and hope they go away, like a middle school bully” is never going to be an option.
Who said anything about committing attrocities?
I’m saying I would not be OK with giving up and accepting that Hamas will continue to work towards my destruction. That doesn’t mean I think we should commit attrocities to stop them. We should respond with the appropriate amount of force that it takes to stop them.
I agree that’s not an option. But there are things that could be done between “nothing” and “utter destruction of Gaza up to and including the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians”. Israel jumped right into invasion and devastation without even considering other options. And that’s even without all the evidence of atrocities, dishonesty, malevolence, sabotage of aid, etc.
Speaking purely strategically, with no regard for human rights or decency: because of factual reporting of conditions in Gaza, Israel has utterly destroyed the two-party US consensus to favor Israel over the Palestinians. It’s probably destroyed for a generation, if not longer. Is what they’ve accomplished worth the loss of the rock-solid allyship of the US? If after Oct 7th, Israel had slowed down, ratchet up and fixed their defenses, stopped brutalizing people in the WB, mourned, and engaged the international community in how to actually get rid of Hamas and build long-term peace (and I recognize that with Netanyahu in charge this would have been a total fantasy), would things really be worse for Israel at present, and in the medium-long term? ISTM that Israel has done massive harm to their long-term future just to (maybe) kill a relative handful of members of a, globally speaking, podunk group of murderers.
Would things really be so, so bad if Israel hadn’t killed tens of thousands of civilians, and thus hadn’t lost the long-term support and allyship of Americans like me?
I agree. And in case you haven’t noticed, Gaza has not in fact been utterly destroyed.
Untrue - first of all, the last few go-arounds with Hamas involved Israel being exceedingly circumspect, avoiding a ground invasion at all costs - and we’ve learned, from 2008 and DEFINITELY from 2014, that this just doesn’t work. You can’t claim that Israel didn’t try anything else first when it fought two wars with minimal ground forces precisely for the reasons you mention, and that strategy has “utterly failed” as you described and led to October 7.
And secondly, even limiting our analysis to the current conflict, Israel didn’t “jump right in” without considering alternatives; Israel waited for a full 20 days before entering Gaza in force, cautiously doing exactly what you say: weighing options and considering strategy.
The idea that Israel just jumped from 0 to 100 is just ahistorical revisionism. In both prior wars and this one, Israel showed remarkable restraint.
Yes. That would have been a HUGE win for Hamas. It would mean the hostages would still be rotting in Hamas tunnels; it would likely have meant followup attacks after Oct 7. And it would have meant Hamas could tell their allies and people and other Arab countries, “we humbled the Zionist Entity and they are too cowed to respond!”.
