It is simple really. The claim that a Jew killing platform is possible is an extraordinary claim.
The extraordinary evidence needed to substantiate that claim is entirely absent. The nearest to any evidence is ambiguous, contradictory and relies on interpretation, of a tendentious nature.
I’ve heard plenty of immigrants to Israel give reasons for moving from comfortable middle class existences in first world countries to Israel that amounted to nothing less emotional or more objectively sustainable than the Hamas nonsense you quoted a couple of posts ago. If you think that whether it is secular or religious nonsense is important feel free to argue to that effect, but it doesn’t form part of any argument I’m making.
The toy is a generic thing that both sides want. Given that each side comprises millions of people, exactly what it comprises in each case cannot be precisely defined.
I don’t believe that most on either side are actually extremist enough to want to kill all the others. I think that is empty rhetoric and propaganda.
No discussion about the situation can in my view start simply by pointing to particular acts of violence while ignoring the overall situation. In particular, where one party (mostly) doesn’t have to use violence because they can get their way due to having overwhelming physical strength, it’s inequitable to let them get away with claiming the moral high ground when the weaker party lashes out.
I am sorry that lives are being lost.
I hope President Obama can make some progress (although there is a terrible history of violence in the region).
Having said that, let me answer the OP.
My understanding is that most residents of Gaza are very poor and live in a community where there are incredible pressures on them:
If I were e.g. a baker living in Gaza, I would feel completely helpless.
Who should I vote for? Who’s going to protect me? What sort of life are my children going to have?
So my answer is that citizens of Gaza bear no blame and, as usual in war, the civilians suffer the most.
Wait… have you ever been to Israel? It’s as comfortable and first world a nation as you could hope for. Israeli security is also pretty good, especially with the security fence. As long as you’re not in Sderot, you’re pretty much golden .
Ehhhhh… as evinced by its negotiating stance in quite a few negotiations, Israel wants everything within the Green Line a portion of the West Bank. As evinced by Hamas’ genocidal rejectionism, they want to butcher the Jews and control all of the region. It seems if your analogy requires you to compare the desires of a random and small number of Israelis to the official position of an elected Palestinian government, that it’s an oversimplification at best.
Why? What causes you to disbelieve their own stated views? When Hamas’ own charter talks about how the Day of Judgment, and with it, the Resurrection, cannot come until Muslims commit genocide upon every last Jew on the planet, what makes you think it’s just empty rhetoric?
Or, I suppose to put a finer point on it, what would it take to convince you that when Hamas states what its desires are, that it’s being serious?
To begin with, you’re not able to look at the forest due to the trees. What the vast majority of Israeli wants is to not have to use violence and to live at peace with a neighbor that isn’t trying to kill them. Getting their way would mean, precisely, that they didn’t have to use violence ever again. And the weaker party isn’t dedicated to peace and isn’t just ‘lashing out’, it aims at eradicating the entire nation of Israel and deliberately targets civilians.
The ‘moral high ground’ isn’t there because Israel doesn’t have to use violence, but because the goal of the populace and politicians is to find a way to live in peace, while the goal of Hamas is to find a way to carry out a war of extermination.
By Jove, it’s extraordinary!
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Hrmmm… I’m not sure we can analyze this quote, due to its contradictory and ambiguous nature. Why, he could mean that they’ll leave not one, but two whole Jews alive! That sure is a hard quote to understand. Yep.
Luckily someone is here to defend Hamas’ good name.
The thing is, the fact that it results in a vicious cycle doesn’t make your points any less real. I mean, you can’t just shout “vicious cycle!” and end it. Sure, it’s a vicious cycle… so?
You are wrong in one thing, though: If the Palestinians back down it would strengthen the moderates on the Israeli side, not the extremists.
The people who immigrate to Israel today from first-world countries are not typical of Israelis as a whole, who largely trace their ancestry to Eastern Europe and the Muslim world, and mainly came here from secular reasons. Frankly, all too many of those first-world/middle-class immigrants are, for lack of a better term, nutjobs - and are seen as such by natural-born Israelis. Not all of them, but a lot.
Yes, yes I have. And to the West Bank and to Gaza. But you completely miss the point. The point is not that Israel is a hellhole particularly. It is this: why do people want to emigrate there from places that are as good or better? The answers tend to be of similar objective merit to those of Palestinians.
As for the rest we are not going to get anywhere because you take a lot of silly posturing by macho Hamas idiots as gospel. Their rhetoric is laughable. They don’t have the power to carry it out, and if the Palestinians ever did get the economic and other strength to carry it out the average Palestinian would be so happy living an ordinary life that they’d never get around to biting the heads off Jewish babies or filing their front teeth into little points and carving their ears into horns. Nor would they vote for Hamas.
The Israeli propagandists’ best workers are the hotheads on the Palestinian side.
Perhaps. Presumably in their list of priorities it ranks somewhere below “create a state of explicit chosen ethnicity and populate it with immigrants of that ethnicity, in a place with an existing population.”
Unfortunately this is irrelevant in this case: almost every Israeli citizen is a member of the Israeli armed forces reserve, and you cannot reliably differentiate between Palestinian civilians and Palestinian fighters. So, there’s no war crime on either side on this count.
So continuing to tighten the circle doesn’t work. What works is someone doing something regardless of the harping of extremists and hawks, to break the cycle. And the fact is it usually has to be the stronger party, because the weaker won’t perceive themselves as having sufficient ground to be able to give any away.
I’m not “wrong” in this, I never said to the contrary.
Well, because many places, even first world places, are not great for Jews to live in. Personally, I’d rather take my chances in Tel Aviv than any city in the Ukraine, just for example.
Not as gospel, but as their honest views.
I asked what it would take to convince you that what they say are their views are their actual views. I take it that the answer is “nothing could do that?”
Yes, but that’s changing the subject. The issue was whether or not Hamas really believes what they say they do, not whether or not a prosperous Palestine would still follow their lead.
Rather odd of you, though, to put it in those terms considering that goal was already accomplished.
Allowing, of course, for the fact that the Arab populace by 1948 was also mostly made up of immigrants who had moved to a place with an existing population.
If you conflate the views of sixty years ago with today, that won’t lead to an accurate view of the facts. Today, obviously current goals rank far above goals completed over half a century ago. In fact, if we’re playing straight here, we’d both agree that goals completed over half a century ago aren’t ranked among current goals at all. Being completed n’ all.
To the op …
Proportionate or disproportionate response? Scorecards of numbers from each team killed are not a valid or even meaningful metric. The issues are whether or not there is a justifiable military objective, if efforts were made to limit damage to civilians, and if civilian damage was unavoidable whether or not the military objective was valuable enough to justify it. On those counts - yes there was a justifiable military objective (responding to ongoing rocket attacks that were increasingly being made with better rockets that had better range) - efforts were made to limit civilian damage although it is likely more could have been (the final figures will take a while to sort out but it is likely that 2/3s of all killed were militants, pretty impressive for urban warfare in which the enemy is intentionally using civilians as shields) - valuable enough? I don’t think so but that depends on how much Hamas is neutralized as a threat for how long as a result.
Do the Gazans “deserve it”? No, they are caught between forces only minimally of their own making. Nevertheless they share responsibility. It is understandable to have voted against Fatah and to have hoped that Hamas would moderate once in power. But they have not. Any Palestinian supporting Hamas after that is endorsing the rejectionist position - there is no path to peace through negotiations and attacking Israel is the long term goal. And you don’t have to a be a foreign policy wonk to understand that endorsing the policy of attacking a powerful neighbor and then hiding the attackers and the weapons inside civilian populations and structures is going to have undesirable consequences. (To the civilians if not Hamas who desire those deaths as a PR tool.)
I was struck by this quote in a newspaper story about Hamas payments to Gaza residents after the fighting:
““Without Hamas and God’s help, the Israelis would have eaten us up,” says Manna, who is dressed in a black abaya robe. Next to her, a teapot rests on the embers of a fire.”
A carefully chosen example.
Take it as “The sky is yellow and fish are laptops” for all I care. I don’t know what Hamas leadership believes. I doubt they are so silly as to want to achieve what they say any more than a small dog that appears to want to rip the head off the larger dog the other side of the fence actually wants to do so, or actually wants there to be a hole in the fence. I’d believe it if they actually took steps to do it while having the power to do it.
No I’m trying to be relevant and practical. Hamas’ views are only relevant as long and to the extent that they have power. Their current extremist views get traction (resulting in them being in power) only because Palestinians are at extremes of frustration. What’s the point of worrying about what Hamas idiots would do in a situation that is never going to arise? The actual likely behaviour of Palestinians (not Hamas) in a real world situation is more important than the posturings of raving extremists. I’m done with this point.
Thanks for conceding the issue. When you understand why you just conceded the issue, we can talk more.
Hamas is ruthless to it’s own people, they encourage Israel to invade but cannot stop them, and their guerrilla tactics involve armed men hiding in my bakery with my family while enemy tanks roll by. If I was a baker I’d want peace so my business picks up and safety for my family, both of these Hamas can not provide.
Thank you. I look forward to not continuing this conversation.
Sure, but then you have to take the matter up with the armed men hiding in the bakery with your family, who might be kind of touchy when you tell them you don’t want them around anymore.
Actually, I think the analogy with Bush is quite accurate. The question of the responsibility of the citizens of a nation for the actions of the leaders they elected isn’t different in the USA, in Palestine or in any other place for that matter. Bush for instance was re-elected on a platform of staying the course in Iraq, of fighting in Afghanistan, of keeping people arbitrarily detained in Guantanamo. Those policies are going to ruffle the feathers of a number of people. Are American citizens accountable for them, and is the death of an American civilian more justified as a result than the death of, say, a Swiss citizen?
There are some things to take into account re. the responsibility of Gazans. For instance, even though the Hamas hard line stance re. Israel certainly had appeal, it is my contention that the main reason why it won the election was rather the facts that it was non-corrupt, and that it demonstrated for years a willingness to actually help Palestinians in concrete ways, something both Israel and the Fatah often failed to do. That was in my opinion what many Palestinians had in mind when they cast their votes.
Also the fact that the Hamas wasn’t specifically elected in Gaza.It just took over by force there and failed to do so in the West Bank. So, a random Palestinian living in the West Bank has exactly the same responsibility (or lack thereof) as a Palestinian living in Gaza.
Finally overthrowing the Hamas is more easily said than done. There are no lack of evidences that opposition isn’t tolerated and that Gazans live in fear (refusing for instance to contradict the Hamas stance about what happened at such or such place during the conflict, or generally to criticize it when interviewed by journalists, and mentioning this fear as a reason). From this point of view, Gazans have less responsibility than American citizens who at least could actively try to legally remove Bush from power (by publicly calling for his impeachment, for instance) besides, like the Palestinians, just overthrowing him by force.
More generally, my opinion is that collective responsibility isn’t a valid concept, except in some very limited forms (monetary restitutions, public apology by the next government, etc…). Shells don’t tell apart the peace-lover and the warmonger, the toddler and the adult, the member of the opposition and the card-carrying member of the ruling party. Each individual is only responsible to the extent of his own actions and his ability to actually influence the policies of his government, which is, for most people, almost nil.
If blame or punishment is deserved, it should be solely on an individual basis. As such, no, the death of random civilians doesn’t become more justifiable because the citizenry elected a government that did bad things. And the rule generally accepted by civilized nations according to which the civilian population must be protected as much as possible is a sound one, and failure to do so is morally condemnable, regardless of the political make-up of the country.
(Actually, I would even go as far as saying that targeting a soldier isn’t necessarily
acceptable, depending on the circumstances. A 20 yo draftee, even though in some cases he could take upon himself to refuse to serve, doesn’t have much more say in the matter than his civilian counterpart. Obviously, it’s rarely possible to avoid doing so. But I don’t think that wearing an uniform makes you a valid target in all circumstances)
All the more reason to not vote for them. Which is my point.
I think this is the crux of this recent invasion. Sure, 1,300 Palestinians died, but if Hamas had their way, every single rocket launched into Israel would have killed an Israeli. And the number of dead Israelis would be over 3100 in 2008 alone. If someone empties a magazine at me, but they miss every time, am I not allowed to shot back?
Now I have clearly stated over and over on these boards that I think Israel needs to grow the fuck up, stop and even remove the illegal settlements, and get serious about peace. But that doesn’t mean I expect them to stand still when an idiot is shooting at them.
As clairobscur has brought up–and I have been surprised that it was not mentioned much earlier–the folks of Gaza did not elect the Hamas leaders to Gaza.
While Hamas won an earlier election to control the Palestinian government, the current situation in Gaza follows a later “unity” government and a break from it by Hamas and is pretty much the result of a coup, not an election.
If shooting back means killing and injuring numerous innocent civilians and destroying the property of many more, of course not.
Ultimately I find the argument about Hamas’s intentions besides the point since the reality of their power is so far out of proportion to their intentions. I would much rather be an Israeli civilian who Hamas wants to kill but can’t than a Palestinian civilian who is actually , but oh so regrettably, killed by Israel.