Right, and this is exactly where I’m coming from. Israel doesn’t face an existential threat anymore. Certainly not from Palestinians. But it acts (votes) as if it does. And even when it doesn’t vote that way (see recent chain of elections in which the right is having a difficult time forming coalition governments), it turns a blind eye to the Palestinian question and is certainly not very self-reflective when it comes to its policies in that respect. We have two excellent posters on this board who currently live in Israel and whose lives are directly affected by current events. We’ve heard little from one and much more from the other. The one whose been most vocal (AFAICT) has expressed little to no criticism of Israel’s response. I can certainly appreciate why he and many Israelis would feel that way when they hear sirens going off and have to run for shelter. But in the long stretches of time between these conflagrations, there seems to be a lack of reflection even among the younger population who perhaps hasn’t experienced the wars. Though many (most?) have served in the IDF and many are still reserves or may be subject to recall. So perhaps a defensively aggressive mental posture is simply a matter of Israeli life and hence acts as a damper on seeing the current policies towards Palestinian populations as being unjust.
There’s a deficit, all right, but it’s with the idiot who thinks he can lie about what’s literally quoted one post above him.
I don’t give a shit about what you were responding to, I only responded to the part of your post that I knew was wrong, and that had jack-shit to do with Saudi Arabia.
Because, ya know, that’s how threads work.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I don’t see that you’re adding much of interest to the discussion.
Again, because you seem to be a manifestly stupid person.
foolsguinea posted this:
I think it’s fair to accuse “the entire Western World” of a moral failure by getting in bed with the Saudi royal family.
I responded with this:
Sure and I think that actually isn’t even a particularly difficult argument to make, frankly. My core issue was the Salon article engaging in what I genuinely feel is a “pattern and practice” of painting a scenario in which Israel is a “special villain” or a “representative of many of the ills of the West”, this usually is done by people with a certain bent, and often comes with completely minimizing or ignoring the varied complexities that make the conflict…complicated.
Note this all ties back to four points I made in my initial criticism of the Salon article (which none of those four points reference South Africa.):
- Ignoring Hamas illegal use of civilian facilities to launch military attacks
- Salon article’s false claim that Israel is “indiscriminately” killing civilians, which is easily shown to not be true.
- Salon articles mischaracterization of Arab displacements in the period 1947-1948
- Salon articles morally hypocrticial assault on Israel for dealings with Saudi Arabia
Passages in English occur in a sequence, it is quite obvious the segment of my post that you felt the need to quote, where I said “the varied complexities that make the conflict…complicated” are specifically referring to things previously mentioned in this discussion. At the very end of that post I mentioned that, as an example, making a simple comparison to apartheid South Africa was not a helpful stance. There is no point where I stated apartheid itself was simple.
Your tedious and useless desire to make every discussion that comes close to South African apartheid an opportunity to try and “correct” people’s views on South Africa has lead you here to categorically misrepresenting what I had said. I never said South Africa’s history or apartheid were not complex or that they were simple. I never said it directly or by implication. Your attempts to create that representation represent probably a combination of ego, stupidity, and outright deceptiveness but in any case I see little further use for you in matters of discourse.
Hamas fired off over 100 rockets indiscriminately aimed at Tel Aviv without any regard for the civilian men, women, and children who live in that city. If we’re talking war crimes, they committed one first. Yes, I realize that two wrongs don’t make a right, and I realize that their response can be considered over the top in terms of how much they’re doing. I also realize, however, that I don’t know what it is like to be surrounded by enemies who utterly hate me and want my complete destruction.
Palestinians are really suffering (presently its not just due to their daliy conditions, but from the violent events of this past week).
I, honestly, think we (western countries) are too accepting of Palestinian suffering. I don’t think we should, but what actions are available to us? What are our options? I want to do something.
Liar.
If you feel that way - you could participate in the economic sanctions in some way?
It’s that “first” comment that worries me. I don’t think it is accurate to view the current fighting as “Hamas commits war crime”, “Israel commits a war crime back.” A war crime is a specifically codified offense against the laws of war. While there is always a “fog of war” and one should consider that, and also that evidence of war crimes often emerges months or years after they were committed (since military operations are often classified for years), nothing in the current reporting to me is clear evidence of an Israeli war crime.
There is not any standard treaty concerning war operations that exempts buildings of a specific type from being targeted. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime. Whether or not bombing a specific building is a war crime depends entirely on the context and has to be evaluated on a case by case basis. As I think I’ve mentioned in this thread and I know I have mentioned in others–incidental civilian casualties are not war crimes, and the laws of war specifically were crafted to make that obvious. Largely because they are a terrible and unavoidable reality in any war. The international regime of war crimes was developed not to make war impossible (while that would be nice, state actors would not sign on for anything like that), but to try to minimize harm to civilians, remove civilians from being a deliberate target of war, and to produce other protections along the lines of what sort of weapons are legal to use, how prisoners of war ought be treated etc etc.
Now, THIS is something I can definitely agree with. The obvious answer is that politics and the balance of regional power are the main factors, but I think group psychology is an important factor, also. For many years, we have associated terrorism and its horrible atrocities with the Arab world while, on the other hand, viewing Israel as our staunch ally in the region. It’s hard to drum up a lot of public support for the Palestinians even though they deserve it.
I was just pontificating about any immediate action (financial or political) for helping those suffering, but I understand. I thank you for the link.
Perhaps, I should invovle myself more into this conflict, read more Palestinian authored content, or such things to get a good understanding of my options. Its just when I see human suffering my first question is, “Suffering is painful to see. What can I do?”, “Am I capable of any immediate action?” etc.
The question being asked this time around - certainly the question I’m asking myself more often - is whether enough is being done by Israel to minimize collateral casualties (60+ children so far, FFS!) and whether the price of killing a Hamas operative is worth it. If by some strange set of circumstance the child in the building which is being used by Hamas to launch a rocket was an Israeli child, would it change Israel’s calculus?
I think that’s a good question to ask, but I don’t know for sure that we can obtain a real answer anytime soon. This is an issue with many military conflicts, and was a consistent issue in our involvement in Iraq, for example. There are journalists on the ground, but there are things they don’t see and don’t know. And then there is the military, which puts operational secrecy over doing deep dives in the press that would let us ascertain for sure whether or not Israel is actually trying its best to minimize civilian casualties.
In the United States after enough time has passed sometimes things can be released publicly and analyses can be done. I’m not 100% sure Israel has a similar process, but if it is comparable to that of the United States, it is measured in “many years” not days or months.
I do not think it is inherently illegitimate to keep a close eye on this and try to keep Western/democratic countries honest on things like this.
But also given what I know about military operations and military ordinance (which I am not an expert in ordinance by any means, just somewhere informed), given the ultra high density, urban nature of the Gazan population, nothing in the casualty numbers so far actually suggest to me Israel isn’t trying to minimize civilian casualties. Exchange of missile strikes in highly urbanized areas are guaranteed to kill civilians no matter what precautions are taken.
I don’t think it’s a matter of them not doing enough to minimize collateral casualties. FWIW, I think they are. It’s a matter of their cost/benefit/risk analysis formula. Nobody knows so well as Israel the situation on the ground in Gaza with regards to population density. Certainly the IDF understand the statistical error rate of the weapons they are using. Arguably no other military in the world is as keenly aware of these factors or is as good at working to reduce risk. And yet, the results remain tragically disproportionate as far as civilian casualty rates.
Disproportionate to what?
Dead Hamas targets.
There’s also a lack of reflection on the suffering of Palestinians when the sirens aren’t going off. I am in no way defending Hamas - I would probably not mind a targeted assassination or two just to get the point across that ‘You’re not going to fuck with our people and sleep easy at night’ Technically, that, too, might be a war crime, but that’s a war crime I could live with. Certainly better than shooting missiles into 20-story apartment complexes. But at the same time, there has to be a posture of moving away from hyper-defense and toward some form of conciliatory policy that promotes the welfare of Palestinians - provided they behave of course.
Well, this is the argument that the Ha’aretz journalist, Gideon Levy, makes. I’d be interested in hearing how @Alessan and @chappachula see his views reflected in Israel and personally.
ISTM that Palestinians are entitled to basic human rights even if their leadership and militant factions don’t “behave”.
Palestinians have a right to live as equal citizens in their ancestral homeland. Whether that means being citizens of a single unified state of Israel-Palestine or citizens of a sovereign Palestinian state on part of the historical region of Palestine is something for politicians and diplomats to hammer out.
But whichever solution is resolved on, Palestinians are entitled to those rights as human beings, not as an optional reward from Israel for good “behavior”. Israel should not be holding Palestinian territory hostage under an indefinitely prolonged occupation, and they definitely should not be installing settlers on Palestinian lands to colonize them for Israel or dispossessing Palestinians from their ancestral homes in West Bank villages and East Jerusalem, for example.
Israel should never have started the settler movement in the first place to establish Israeli territorial claims beyond its pre-1967 borders (or in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem), and it should make all those settlers move back into Israel proper.
Hamas militants committing terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, however aggressively provoked by Israeli acts of oppression, is still unjustifiably brutal and wrong. But that doesn’t change Israel’s fundamental obligation to stop depriving Palestinians of their rights for its own advantage. (And that’s even leaving aside the secondary issue of whether Israel’s disproportionate responses to Hamas attacks qualify as war crimes.)