Atrocities aren’t standard (or shouldn’t be). Neither are years of tolerating brutalizing civilians in the West Bank. Nor withholding aid from needy civilians.
I’m not the one who called a bog standard urban war an “atrocity”. That’s exactly the framing I’m talking about.
The way you talk about Gaza, you’d think it’s El Fasher.
Atrocities are atrocities - like the kind reported by multiple IDF members. And like the withholding of vital aid to the starving or near starving.
And, of course, the years of brutalization of civilians in the WB, tolerated and encouraged by those in power.
Well, if you ever want to see what it looks like when there’s actual mass starvation, or when a city is actually wiped off the map, or when a genocide actually happens, you can just look to Sudan’s El Fasher; or if you want to see it live rather than after the fact, it looks like Kordofan is going to suffer the same fate. But there’s no way to blame that on Israel (yet), so no one is paying attention.
But don’t let me distract you from… What were you talking about before I responded? How horrible Hillary Clinton is because she doesn’t like TikTok being flooded with foreign propaganda? Got it.
No one on this board is justifying/excusing /denying those atrocities, as far as I’m aware.
We should revisit this years from now. I wonder what you’ll think then about the atrocities in Gaza we’ll probably have much more information about; I wonder if the brutalizations in the WB will still be ongoing, and still be tolerated and encouraged by those in power and I wonder if you’ll still be insisting those are an entirely separate issue rather than one that clearly shows the unwillingness of Israeli leaders to take human rights and long term peace seriously. I wonder what the surviving children of Gaza today, the future adults of Gaza, will be doing, and how they will have lived their lives after seeing so much incredible devastation (and atrocities, of course) at the hands of their Israeli neighbors.
I wonder what Golda Meir would think about the ongoing brutalization of Palestinians in the WB. I wonder what she’d say to the IDF members who reported atrocities to Haaretz. I wonder what she’d say about the withholding of aid to needy civilians.
A quick search shows that no one has ever mentioned El Fasher until this thread, and Kordofan only comes up in an ancient mid 2010s thread that appears to be about race realism. I am entirely unsure oof whether anyone on this board is aware of these events.
Sure. Like I said before, this war has gone basically how I thought it would go when it became clear we would need to enter Gaza on October 7th; even more than that, it went how I thought it would go when I imagined a potential ground invasion in 2014 (which is why, at the time, I didn’t think we should perform a ground invasion).
Since everything has gone as I expected, I’m not sure what you think the future will reveal that I’m unaware of now, but sure - we can discuss it again in the future.
I’ll fully admit I was wrong in 2014, by the way - we should have gone in and gone in hard then, it would have been a lot easier than it ended up being in 2023.
I wonder if you’ll still be brushing martyr funds and other concrete support of terrorism under the rug. Hopefully not; it looks like the PA really wants control of Gaza and they understand that neither Israel nor America would allow that without real reform, so hopefully such sweeping will simply be unnecessary.
Hopefully building a prosperous country of their own. I genuinely hope that’s the choice they make.
Are we imagining that Golda Meir is swallowing whatever +972 says hook line and sinker, or that she’s an informed member of the government who actually knows the real situation?
I’ll bookmark the thread and we can reevaluate years from now under the AOC administration, with Mamdani as Secretary of State.
Maybe in 2052. Not till after the Abundance years under President Newsom (and probably a term or two by whatever replaces the Republicans).
I’ll just like to note that only one of the two of you has a military record (even if not in urban warfare), so I’ll trust the person who actually served to know what is and isn’t “bog standard” for modern militaries.
Gaza’s future has been left vague by the putative victors. This article was illuminating.
What on Earth is ‘vague’? Israel will withdraw when Hamas disarms and the international security forces moves in. Obviously - it would be utterly idiotic to do anything else.
Documents seen by the Guardian envisage the territory split into a “green zone” under Israeli and international military control, where reconstruction would start, and a “red zone” to be left indefinitely in ruins.
The “green zone” constitutes more than half of the Gaza Strip. Who’ll be living in those reconstructed areas? Honestly, we don’t know.
So yes. The plans are vague.
I see no reason to believe that Hamas will disarm or that an international security force will be formed. It looks to me like the Israeli government likewise does not really expect those things to happen. My guess is that Chief of General Staff Zamir is saying what the politicians will not:
“The ‘yellow line’ is a new border line… We have operational control over extensive parts of the Gaza Strip and we will remain on those defence lines.”
@Babale, what part of this do you take issue with?
If Hamas doesn’t disarm, and an international security force doesn’t form, why the actual fuck should Israel withdraw? They absolutely 100% should not withdraw under those conditions (and the IDF will probably need to enter the remainder of Gaza in that case, too).
I’m less pessimistic than you are about how likely that scenario is, but if Hamas does not disarm, I’m opposed to Israel leaving Gaza. That would just be a repeat of the mistakes of 2005 onwards.
And the only thing that’s unclear here is just how Hamas will choose to behave. Israel is perfectly clear about how it will behave given the different options Hamas can take.
And thus an endless war can continue! The IDF can continue committing atrocities with no accountability (plus settlers brutalizing peaceful civilians in the WB), and Hamas can continue squeezing (and worse) the remaining Gazans. Everybody wins (except for people who actually care about human rights, as well as the Gazans and WB, of course)!
No, fighting Hamas till it’s destroyed is the exact opposite of “endless war”. Leaving them in place so we can go through this whole exercise again in a decade is, in fact, “endless war” and precisely what we should avoid.
Yes, that’s exactly what Hamas will do if they’re left in place.
Just a bit more war and everything will be just fine, guys! Pay no attention to IDF members reporting atrocities. Don’t worry about blowback or long term consequences for such incredible brutality. Everything will be fine with just a little bit more war!
Yeah, who knows that they might do! They might use hang gliders to drop Hamas fighters into a music festival, where they’ll butcher and rape unarmed civilians before dragging their broken bodies back to Gaza to parade before cheering crowds. They might chop off the heads of migrant workers with shovels.
We did it your way for 20 years. We withdrew from Gaza, and we ignored provocation after provocation, responding with a minimum of force and with no ground forces. That got us October 7th.
The problem with behaving as Hamas did on October 7th is that it demonstrates that the concept of blowback is utter bullshit. Israel had taken a kid gloved, hands off approach to Gaza for the last twenty years, and Hamas responded with absolutely astounding brutality and disdain for human life. So your warnings of “blowback” are pretty dang empty. What could they possibly try to do that they haven’t already tried to do?
Face it, Hamas is doing their utmost to destroy the state of Israel. The limit on their actions has been their limited capacity, not their goodwill because we didn’t do anything that could trigger “blowback”.
Good for Israel for spending years purposefully empowering Hamas (and disempowering their rivals) and continuing years of unaccountable brutality against Palestinians in the West Bank! There certainly hasn’t been, and could never be, any blowback or consequences for that!