Your understanding is wrong, Hague also speaks about civilians (specifically in the context of bombardment.)
From my perspective, the process has to look something like this:
-Israel continues to attack the shit out of Hamas wherever Hamas appears–but takes much greater care in engagement with civilians.
-Israel increases the amount of aid going into Gaza a hundredfold. This will get aid to Hamas–but more importantly, it’ll remove Hamas’s ability to bottleneck aid going to Palestinians, remove their ability to position themselves as providers.
-Israel spearheads an international effort to rebuild Gaza, with an emphasis on medical care, sanitation, water, food, and shelter, followed by well-equipped schools. Marshall Plan Part II.
-Israel treats Hamas during this period like Goebbel’s fantasies about Werewolves: rogue and doomed resistant fighters dedicated to a murderous and fallen regime. Kill the shit out of them, but don’t
-Israel eventually sets up protocols for elections in Gaza, with the caveat that any party running for election must commit to recognizing Israel as a state and must commit to engaging in peace talks and must commit to holding regular elections.
By your logic, the way that the Troubles in Northern Ireland would have been solved would have been through militarily destroying the IRA and removing Sinn Féin from leadership of the Republican side, presumably by killing them all.
Spoiler: That was not the way it was solved. It was solved through a political process.
I could equally say that by your logic Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler was the correct approach.
Spoiler: That was not the way it was solved.
Different situations require different solutions.
Did the IRA charter include the goal of “Eradicating all English and establishing a Catholic Irish State in the entirely of the British Isles”? Because if you want to use that as an equivalent situation here…
No, of course not, because they did not claim the entirety of the British Isles as their homeland, only Northern Ireland.
I think you are comparing completely different things.
Gosh, was I? I guess I need to spell out the rhetorical point. It was that YOU comparing two different things without any analysis of whether they are analogous is worthless.
Oh, actually I see I did spell it out in a part of my post that you snipped:
Thank you–you’re absolutely right. Here’s the text for anyone else who might’ve been confused:
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 don’t appear to use the word “bombardment” except a single time, to say you shouldn’t bombard prisoners or others in internment camps. But as I understand it, they set up significant new restrictions on how civilians are treated.
Are you serious?
People have been comparing the Northern Ireland and Palestine-Israel situations for decades.
Google hits on the first page:
- Comparing the Palestinian and Irish-Catholic Struggles
- Israel is making the same errors as Britain did over Northern Ireland 50 years ago
- Palestine and Ireland: A history of shared struggle
- Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The View From Northern Ireland
- What Can Israelis and Palestinians Learn From Northern Ireland
- UN expert compares Middle East conflict to NI Troubles he criticises Gaza siege
- Ireland, Palestine: A tale of 2 struggles
- Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine: Spoilers and the Politics of Inclusion
- Lessons from Northern Ireland for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- Ethos of conflict as the prism to evaluate the Northern Irish and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts by the involved societies
Actually, I was thinking of Article 25 as well:
Art. 25. The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended, is prohibited.
And it requires careful analysis to decide what aspects are similar and what aspects are not.
“People have been comparing conflict A to conflict B for decades, therefore the solution to conflict B is exactly the same as the solution to conflict A” isn’t going to cut it.
I feel entirely confident in saying that many, many people have applied careful analysis and believe there are lessons that can be learned.
In this bad analogy, you are assuming that the two sides are morally equal.
I hope you realize that:
- Netanyahu is the leader of a democratic country which wants peace.
- Hamas is…not.
If Putin was hospitalized and Ukraine blows up his hospital, would you feel oh so sorry for all those poor innocent Russian patients in the same building?
Or how about that guy Adolf back in 1943? I assume you would never, never,never agree to bombing his hospital bed in Berlin…think of all those innocent patients!
War is hell, and innocent people get killed.
But sometimes war is justified.
=====
On another topic:
for all those saying that Israel is making a mistake because the bombing creates more new terrorists than they are killing:
This is irrelevant, because there will always be terrorists, and there is no hope of ever making peace, due to the fanatic, irrational culture of Gaza.
After WWII, the Germans and Japanese abandoned their fanatic, irrational culture, and returned to normal civilized behavior
They admitted defeat, laid down ALL their weapons (try imagining Hamas doing that!), accepted that their fanatic warmonging had been a bad idea, and willingly rebuilt their society.
There is zero chance that this could happen in Gaza, just as there is zero chance that this could happen with Osama Bin Ladin or the Taliban
So the importance of the mass destruction in Gaza is to teach the only lesson which might sink in, for both Hamas in Gaza, for Hizbollah in Lebanon, and for Iran.
The lesson is that attacking Israel is likely to do you more damage than you want, so don’t start anything. In the next war, Israel will have learned that the level of damage done to Gaza in 2023 was not enough.
There is no other alternative, unfortunately.
As I said above, War is hell.
But sometimes war is justified.
I’m not, though.
I’m assuming that in any conflict, both sides think they’re the good guys, and in this one absolutely both sides say, “We have been historically oppressed, and this is our homeland, and the other guys keep committing horiffic acts against us, and we have no choice but to respond.” I’m assuming that even the good guys must be restrained by the laws of war.
I’m assuming that one of the biggest problems with Hamas is that they kill civilians. If Hamas limited their actions to attacks on IDF soldiers, they’d be a lot less despicable. I’m assuming that their attacks on civilians is the main reason why they’re the bad guys.
It is those assumptions that lead to the analogy.
You’re asking me to imagine Hamas doing something that I know the Nazis did?
Okay, done.
“Culture” is a code word here, isn’t it?
What is the level where that lesson would be learned by Palestinian terrorists and extremists? I don’t think it exists which is in part why I think that a lesson learned on the part of Israel that they didn’t do enough damage to Gaza is and will be the wrong one.
That’s the huge difference…the culture of the German people allowed them to accept the changes forced on them by defeat.
The culture of Gaza is not so flexible. Martyrdom is deeply imbedded in their culture and their mindset…
I mean Hamas does have a bigger problem that has no analogy in the Israeli government which is that they believe in an extremist religious fantasy that could never actually happen. Even if they established themselves as a government over a Palestinian state with entirely legitimate military means (i.e. by attacking military targets and getting the Israeli government to agree to surrender/peace) the result would be a terror state similar to the Taliban regime where they would only succeed in suppressing their people and could not possibly bring about their impossible utopia.