I would like to thank the participants of this thread for giving me much to think about regarding this terrible conflict. I often learn much from banquet_bear in other threads and this thread is no different. Kimstu is also a great source of wisdom, and while not as active in this thread, I took note of these insights too.
I consider myself pro-Israel, and what I see here, and what I learned from this thread is that friends of Israel are allowed to be concerned with the actions of Israel. To me, it is like seeing a good friend act like an asshole. Still a friend, but you need to call out bad behavior, even if ‘someone else started it.’ I don’t mean to make trite comparisons. Israel’s actions diminish its standing on the world stage, and I think a friend of Israel would tell them so. Maybe they don’t care, but I’d like them to.
In mid October, I would have been shocked to learn that anyone would dare to criticize Israel after what happened. But now? The criticism makes sense; and that is truly scary.
See, that’s why Israelis are so confused with the world’s reaction. Any of us could have told you on the afternoon of October 7 what the scale of Israel’s response would be and that it would involve very large numbers of dead Palestinians. I’m pretty sure I said so myself at the time. Nothing that has happened so far has exceeded expectations. When the world supported us after Black Saturday, we assumed that we were all on the same page, that they supported us in the full knowledge of what we had to do. The fact that the world is suddenly acting shocked - shocked, I say! - by what’s going on is frankly kind of disappointing.
So some serious polls are out today, in Yedioy Acharonot, Israel’s largest newspaper. I’d say there are good news and bad news. The bad news is that Israelis’ faith in the peace process is at a record low: only 26% of the public supports negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, and only 7% believes that negotiations will bring peace. This is the lowest it’s ever been since the Oslo Accords in 1993. So there’s a long way to go for any sort of peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, and it’s certainly not going to be a platform any politician will be running on.
The good news is that Bibi Netanyahu’s approval ratings are also at a record low, as are most of the Likud’s. When asked to grade how much they want to see him lead the country, Israeli voters gave him 36 out of 100, and none of his far-right coalition members get much higher. Opposition leader (and current emergency cabinet member) Banny Gantz got a 67. The graveyards are full of people who have eulogized Netanyahu, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s very, very unlikely he’ll still be in office in a year’s time. So at least there’s that.
I feel like the hostages are probably all dead and Israel knows it but doesn’t want to say it. I have no evidence for this other than my intuition, based on observing the severity of the attack on Gaza and the fact that it shows no sign of letting up and the feeling that Hamas would not be above executing the hostages if they felt they had no leverage. Am I totally off the mark here or what?
I am surprised that the Israelis are destroying tunnels without investigating them further. It would be extremely dangerous, but I would believe at east some of the hostages are in tunnels. Perhaps Israel knows they are dead or being held else where.
Dead UN workers - the UN is one of the largest employers in the Gaza Strip, so statistically, yes, I expected some deaths. Besides, UN deaths benefit Hamas, so they’d be sure to facilitate them.
Dead journalists - again, there are a lot of journalists in Gaza, and the line between a journalist and a Hamas activist can be pretty vague. Besides, journalists there have become used to the low-scale antiterror warfare we’ve seen over the years, where a man with a PRESS vest can usually walk safely between the battle lines. This is a different kind of war, a much larger-scale, destructive type. F-15s or 155mm howitzers can’t see what vest you’re wearing. That would have been obvious from the get-go. Journalists should stay far away from the battlefield, unless they know they’re going to be on the winning side.
Assaults on hospitals - it’s been a commonly known fact for years that Hamas had built its important bases below Gaza hospitals. I could have told you from the start that they’d be targets. If you want to win a war, you have to go where the enemy is.
Look, do you want Israel to defeat Hamas or not? If you want Hamas to win, fine - I have nothing to say to you and you have nothing to say to me. But if you want them to lose, this is the way to do it. There is no less destructive path to victory. This is what war is.
I want Israel to have a shot at peace. I’m not sold that “defeating Hamas” is the winning move to get there. I suspect that “defeating Hamas” means “creating a generation of bitter orphans who will forever want to destroy Israel” and will also alienate a lot of Israel’s allies. The latter will probably get over it, but the former will be a thorn in Israel’s side for decades.
A story in the Times of Israel. “The IDF has indicated it does not have plans to engage in tunnel warfare, as the passages are likely to be booby-trapped. Instead, it is demolishing the tunnels as they are being found.”
We reached the saturation point for that years ago. Everybody in Gaza wants to destroy Israel anyway, so what’s a few more? What we’re trying to do now is create a generation of Gazans who want to destroy Israel, but know they can’t. Once we’ve reached that point - once they’ve lost all hope of victory through violence - then we can talk peace.
How do you know this for sure? Of course there will be civilian casualties, but how do you know the IDF is doing the best job they possibly can at minimizing such collateral damage?
ISTM that it’s absolutely appropriate to scrutinize the IDF and government decisions, especially considering the many times so far that they’ve shown they’re not entirely acting in good faith (see the settler attacks in the WB, the IDF spokesman who said there’s “no humanitarian crisis in Gaza”, and more).
Writing off two million people like this seems like an extraordinarily unwise move if you really want peace. We’ve already seen Gazans protest and criticize Hamas, just in the last week or so.
The problem is Hamas (and Hizbollah, etc.), and the Israeli right wing. The problem is not Gazans and Palestinians. Those who want long term peace for Israel should be working to defeat those actual enemies of peace.
To “lose all hope of victory through violence” is a wonderful thing, but this isn’t only a Gazan sin. No one has faith in the peace process, on either side. People on both sides simply see violence as the only viable option for victory.
Its remarkably obtuse to think Gazans will drop violence if only given a strong application of violence. I mean, history tells us no. When the dust settles, there will be still no viable pathways to peace for Gazans.
In regard to whether Israel is trying to minimize casualties, I read this BBC article about calls made from Israeli intelligence to civilians in order to evacuate them before a bombing. I wouldn’t begin to say that Israel is perfect, but it is pretty clear that the civilians aren’t their target. I’ve never heard of any military going to those lengths to avoid casualties.
How does that change if Israel doesn’t in any sense defeat Hamas? Hamas will educate the children under their control to create generations of bitter people who will forever want to destroy Israel – that’s what they’ve been doing.
I don’t see any good way out of this mess. I don’t know whether what Israel’s doing now is the least bad way, and I’m afraid that some of it might not be; but “Israel mustn’t do X because that will cause the same situation that Hamas will cause if they don’t” doesn’t seem to me a very persuasive argument.
In my understanding, there’s a long continuum from unhappy->desperate->furious->hateful->rhetorically supportive of violence->materially supportive of violence->engaging in violence. I have little doubt that the vast majority of Gazans and Palestinians are somewhere on this continuum, but the idea that they’re all as far to the right as they possibly can is obviously false.
But I don’t buy the idea that Gazans are all so stupid that they cannot figure out that Hamas murdering Israelis brought this down on them, and that if they go down that death cult path again the same thing is going to happen again and again. It does not require them to love Israel to figure this out, just to work out that Israel is not going to disappear or put up with their citizens being murdered.
And Gazan civilians know better than skeptics in the West exactly why Israel is attacking hospitals.
War does not result in eternal hatred. What matters is what happens afterwards.
@iiandyiiii, I think the reason that you and some of those making similar points to you on one end and @Alessan and I are having a hard time communicating here is that there are is a whole ball of issues tangled together here, which I totally understand when looking at the situation from an outside perspective, but which is just not the way those of us looking at it from the inside conceptualize the situation. I have run into this when talking about things with my wife, who is American.
You bring up some very, very good points, which I completely agree on; but I don’t think they are relevant to the question of IDF behavior in Gaza. Let me see if I can explain.
First, let’s talk about Netanyahu. I think you and I both agree that he has been an unmitigated disaster for Israel, for a long time; and as his corruption finally caught up to him, Netanyahu went from simply implementing policy that I disagree with, to outright selling out his nation to fanatic, zealous, messianic whackjobs in order to keep out of jail. Like most Israelis, I blame Netanyahu’s leadership (if you can call it that) and policies (if you can call them that) for landing us in this mess.
I agree with you about the settlements as well. I think Rabin correctly described them as a cancer upon Israeli society, and like any cancer they have the potential to kill the whole thing. The settlers are fanatic, apocalyptic, messianic nutjobs. They are a massive drain on Israeli society; they produce nothing, they drag us into conflict with the Palestinians of the West Bank, and their regressive policies would see Israel dragged back to the bronze age. Enabling their spread hampers the peace process and causes strife and radicalization in the West Bank; in appeasing his far right enablers Netanyahu has been moving troops from the Gaza border to the West Bank throughout the earlier part of this year, which undoubtedly contributed to this disaster. There is much blood on their hands - and this is before we consider the fact that yes, some of them are quite literally terrorists in their own right; and even further, who are are dealt with by Shabak, taking away resources from combatting Hamas.
One of these terrorists is indeed Ben Gvir, who famously in his youth stole the decal off of Rabin’s car and gave a TV interview where he threatened that just as they can reach Rabin’s car, they can reach Rabin himself - shortly before he was assassinated by yet another fanatic, messianic terrorist - Yigal Amir.
I have nothing but revulsion for these far right fanatics. Keep in mind that as they spend day and night denouncing the leftists who they claim ruin Israel and have forgotten what Judaism is, the vast majority of them have never spent a day in the army, and many of their supporters ‘study Torah’ and don’t pay taxes - thus contributing absolutely nothing to the nation they are determined to ruin. You already know that they refuse to serve in the army, and that they study in Yeshivas on the government’s dime rather than doing something that might contribute to society, and you already know that some of them throw rocks at Palestinians in the West Bank or even shoot them. But they also spit on little girls for dressing ‘immodestly’ on the bus, victim blame female soldiers who are murdered by terrorists,, and otherwise do their best to drag us back to the bronze age.
And I agree that so long as the pre-war coalition remains in power for the post-war cleanup, there is little hope of a meaningful path towards peace. The good news, as Alessan mentioned, is that the idea that Bibi or his regime survive this war seems completely impossible. Even Likud supporters think Netanyahu should resign (and Likud is nothing without Netanyahu. There is no meaningful successor.) The question is whether the next government will be one that takes the meaningful steps needed, and that’s indeed a tougher question; Netanyahu himself doesn’t have much of an ideology, but there are anti-peace currents in Israeli society that he was able to tap into, the fanatic religious zealots being one but not the only such movement. And that is something that needs to be addressed.
And no, the IDF is by no means flawless. There are certainly some commanders of this messianic Zionism ideological branch, and some of those even serve in the West Bank, which is an incredibly dangerous situation, and one that I don’t think a government that isn’t pandering to the far-right zealots like Netanyahu has been would tolerate.
However. With ALL that being said. The bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza, and the civilian casualties that result, is not part of that equation.
Like Alessan said, the moment that it became clear that a ground invasion of Gaza was going to occur, it was clear to me that this is the sort of situation we would be dealing with. This is because none of what is happening is new. Hamas headquarters being located underneath hospitals and dense residential neighborhoods is something that has come up in every interaction with Gaza since 2006. The impossibility of striking at Hamas without putting civilians in harms’ way is not a new twist to the strategic equation; it is a constant that has been present since the very beginning.
Ehud Barak, former prime minister from the Labor party, was interviewed by Time a few days ago. He’s exceedingly critical of Netanyahu and the government’s actions in bringing us here, and I think he makes a lot of excellent points. There are many people who I would love to be in charge at this time over Netanyahu, and Barak is definitely the type of person who’d be near the top of that list. But read his responses to the questions about civilian casualties. This is a man who is certainly a believer in a two state solution, and one of the people who has done the most to bring that about. But he isn’t under an illusion that removing Hamas without a costly and bloody ground war is possible.
If we had had a more left-wing government - say, led by Labor - for the last few years, then perhaps we wouldn’t have ended up in this situation. Certainly the IDF would not have had its forces on the Gaza border dwindled to protect settlements in the West Bank. Certainly there would not have been a divisive judicial reform bill rammed through that would sow such division, including in the IDF’s ranks. So even if an attack had occurred, perhaps we would have been better prepared.
But given the current situation - a horrible attack by Hamas that made it clear that it would need to be destroyed, a huge number of Israeli casualties an hostages - I do not think a believe that a left wing government would have the IDF behaving significantly differently in Gaza. In the West Bank, yes, and I agree that Israel should behave differently there. In Gaza, though, you can’t just throw troops at fortified positions without significant air and artillery support. Not just because it would result in unacceptably high casualties (including civilian casualties, because even boots on the ground use rockets and mortars) but because it is also unlikely to actually defeat Hamas.
[You can maybe see why I have stepped back from posting in these threads. It took about an hour to compose this post, but I think doing otherwise gets sloppy results.]