Seems to be the style.
and
I note a certain … resemblence.
You’re right that single anecdote proves that attitudes towards Palestinians in israel is generally benign.
Normally, marrying an Israeli citizen qualifies you for Israeli citizenship and makes all your children israeli citizens. This is not the case if the Israeli citizen marries a Palestinian. If an Israeli citizen marries a Palestinian, the Palestinian is not eligible for citizenship and their children born in Israel are not Israeli citizens.
There’s nothing racist about that law is there?
I understand the demographic threat to “Israel as a Jewish state” but isn’t it much like the threat to American as white country?
The one state solution has been advocated by palestinians since day one. The problem has always been that Israeli zionists (a politically powerful minority) do not want to see an israel with a mojority non-Jewish no matter how much sense it makes.
And the Israelis hate the Palestinians and don’t recognize their right to exist.
Give up pretending that you have the moral superiority here … you don’t.
Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps the Israelis can succeed at squelching peaceful resistance where the British Empire failed.
We should obviously deprive them of those shields by dropping bombs on those women and children.
Right, because the terrorists are shiedling themselves with their own kids, they are just that crazy. How about something that doesn’t result in over 10 times the “accidental civilian casualties” caused by the Israelis compared to the intentional civilian casualties caused by Palestinian terrorists.
I am still at a loss to explain how you can call IDF military action proportional or respects the rules of war when Hamas “intentionally” kills 100 Israeli civilians and Israel “accidentally” kills 1000 civilians. Its hard to square that with the notion taht the IDF really gives a crap about Palestinian civilian casualties.
I don’t mean that deaths of civilians in another country can’t be morally justifiable. I’m saying that there is a higher burden than just making your nation safer. Can we agree that killing one civilian in another land to protect 1000 of your own is justifiable? Can we likewise agree that killing 1000 civilians in another country to protect 1 of your own is not. I do not believe an Israeli’s life is more valuable than a Palestinian’s. Therefore if Israel takes actions that result in more Palestinians deaths than Israeli lives being saved, I’m going to consider those actions to be morally reprehensible.
Then what was the point of implying that the baby in the picture holding a gun was going to become a terrorist? I understand that Israel was invaded in 1948 but at this point you have win hearts and minds or deal with terrorists forever.
This is like two paupers comparing their wealth. You are both morally bankrupt.
Yeah, when would that ever happen?
[
](Nizar Rayyan of Hamas on God's Hatred of Jews - The Atlantic)
Scare quotes aside, perform a little thought experiment. If tomorrow all Hamas forces moved to the abandoned Israeli agricultural areas in the Gaza strip and launched their rockets from there, would Israel’s counter strikes hit the Hamas forces, or would they ignore the Hamas forces and hit Palestinian civilians?
Please cite which rules of war are being violated.
Second, your demand for proportionality is sophistry, or do you actually want Israel to launch a random rocket into Gaza for each rocket Hamas sends at Israel? Anti-Personnel Rocket Bingo? Really, you want proportional reactions?
Or does your argument ignore the fact that Israelis tend to survive rocket attack because pretty much every Israeli population center has bomb shelters like American cities have Walmarts, and Palestinians tend to take civilian casualties because their military forces hide among civilians and it is impossible to hit them without either invading and fighting house-to-house or using precision munitions which still have a kill radius greater than their intended targets?
Of course, which is why we’ve seen carpet bombing on the scale of Dresden with each phase of the conflict.
The issue is not whether the life of a person in nation A is more valuable than that of a person in nation B in some sort of moral sense - it is that the job of the armed forces of nation A is to protect the citizens of nation A.
It is utterly bizzare to me, and quite counter-intuitive, that the armed forces of a nation should be required out of some sort of moral sensibility or balance or “fairness” to cheerfully allow the armed forces of nation B (or “terrorists”. “freedom fighters” or whatever) to kill exactly as many civilians as they do.
This does not mean that the armed forces of nation A can do whatever they want to the citizens of nation B. Rather, they should follow the moral rules for “just war”: they should take reasonable measures to minimize the civilian casualties caused by their (undoubtedly reasonable) efforts to protect their own citizens.
This is not some sort of Israel-specific argument - it goes for any nation, anywhere. Is the war or military action they are fighting or taking “justified”? [Latin tag: Jus ad bellum ] Are the means by which they conduct the fight “just”? [Latin tag: Jus in bello ].
What we are arguing about is the latter, and in particular the concept of “proportionality”. This concept states that “An attack cannot be launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage”.
Unfortunately, this is riddled with subjective judgments: in particular, how important the “anticipated military advantage” is likely to be.
What it does not[ demand is some sort of one-for-one civilian casualty count. It doesn’t because such a standard is completely meaningless and impossible to apply. The intent is to avoid so-called “military actions” which are nothing more than excuses to terrorize civilians, or wipe them out.
It is a simple equation. Just take the square root of the average age of the killed bystander and multiply by…
Obviously there isn’t an exact black line separating rightness and wrongness. Even the line between civilians and compatents can get pretty blurry. And of course it is subjective, all morality is subjective. I do however think if we can agree that a line does exist and that the line is the same for Israel as it is for any other sovereign nation than we could start to get somewhere.
And since there have been quite a few strange arguments advanced, I figure that a more reasonable one should be addressed:
There are a few problems with that. While it is true that an occupying power is responsible for the general welfare of its occupied populace, the international laws governing war explicitly state in a few places that military necessity and the security of the occupying power can come before the living conditions and sometimes even the lives of the occupied populace. The fact that Israel practices conscription to ensure its defense also means that under your metric, being conscripted into the IDF means that their lives become “worth less” than all the civilians involved in the conflict.
I don’t think that either of us would disagree with the fact that any military should take all reasonable precautions to minimize collateral damage while prosecuting a campaign against valid military targets. But it seems to me that it’s much more problematic to categorically state that security forces have to put civilian lives before their own.
You mean civilians on the opposing side, don’t you?
Or do you think the security forces members are more important than Israeli citizens, too?
I said “You seem to want the Israelis to wipe out large areas of Palestine indiscriminantly…” because you show a cavalier attitude towards casualties. So my comments were directed at you, not the Israelis.
Avoiding doesn’t mean complete and total cessation of activities that might lead to civilian deaths. I said Israel should send in commandos for targeted raids and strikes. However, it does mean no targeting schools or hospitals, ever, with the kind of imprecise airstrikes that would lead to mass casualties
If the only two options are a strike on a school or no strike, then DON’T STRIKE THE SCHOOL. Try harder using some other plan. A commando raid with guns blazing will still probably cause less damage and death than a plan dropping a bomb from a plane.
If you don’t want people to make assumptions on your willingness to kill innocent people, you shouldn’t make statements that amount to giving a casual dismissal of civilian deaths as if they don’t matter and further justifying it by calling a nation senseless to try to observe it. Try to reply by talking about minimizing casualties instead of explaining why it cannot be done. Israel needs to adopt a more pacifistic stance against it’s enemies. It doesn’t have to give up all strikes, but leave the damn schools and hospitals alone, no matter what. As the more powerful and resourceful side in this conflict, it has the capability of fielding a more careful plan that lowers the amount of innocent deaths on the other side. It ought to do that.
[quote=“FinnAgain, post:89, topic:538840”]
Yeah, when would that ever happen?
[url=http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2009/01/nizar-rayyan-of-hamas-on-god-apos-s-hatred-of-jews/9278/]
[quote]
I see where it says he was killed while with his wife and children but I don’t see where he was using his own kids as human shields. And if he was, does that excuse the killing of the children of non-militants in the attempt to get at militants?
If the only folks there were Hamas forces (by forces I presume you mean military type folks) then I don’t understand how they would be civilians?
The one taht says taht you have to minimize civilian casualties.
Proportional doesn’t mean identical but when the civilian body count is 10 times higher on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side, it is hard to see how the response could have been proportional.
Then go house to house when you invade.
So Dresden is the demarcation line where too many civilian casualties occur? All you have to do is kill fewer civilians than the Allies did in Dresden and that means you are minimizing civilian casualties?
I think that sums up my opinion. As long as we aren’t using a special yardstick for Israel, I’m OK with reasonable civilian casualties.
I would add that in some cases you pass on a military target because its just not worth the civilian casualties it would cause. So, for example, you wouldn’t bomb a school to get that one kid that shot a rocket off the roof.
Yes, I realize it was directed at me.
It was, however, a totally unjustified comment, and not in fact based on anything I said.
The only reasonable explaination is that, unable to contradict what I did say, you invented out if thin air some completely unrealated (and unreasonable) thing that you wish I had said, and kicked the ever-living shit out of that instead.
This is what is technically known as a “straw man” argument. Straw man arguments are not convincing.
Once again, that isn’t even close to anything I actually said. I am not responsible for your creation of straw-man arguments; you are.
I have never said anything else.
My objection to the strong critique of the Israeli military is that it is often they who are imposing a special, Israel-only test that they would be unwilling to abide by in the case of their own nations.
I don’t complain.
Israel is under siege.
Has been since day one.