so you’re saying that Israel should let more die until it responds?
Each rocket only has one feasible goal; to kill at least one person. They’re not going to the moon you know. If all 12000 rockets has achieved their goal, Israel’s death toll would be much higher.
I’m saying that there are far more productive responses than killing over 3,600 people, compared to 44. That’s well beyond eye-for-an-eye.
But according to you it’s justifiable because of the number of people Palestinian attacks might have killed. Please try to have some semblance of objectivity here.
It’s justifiable because it’s an act of war. If you don’t want a lot of casualties, don’t shoot at someone more powerful than you are. (And don’t fire from schools, churches, and residential areas.)
The guys firing the rockets are the criminals here, not Israel.
Uh-huh. And it was the Palestinians who forced the Israeli state on them. Nothing’s anywhere near as facile as you want to portray it.
well the Palestinians rejected the 1937 Peel Commission, the 1947 Partition, the Allan Plan, …
fact is the League of Nations mandated a Jewish homeland in the region, not country, of “Palestine.”
??? Palestinians forced the Israeli state on Gaza? I don’t see what you mean here.
Anyway, if you’re talking about fifty year old grievances, now is a really bad time to be firing ineffectual rockets into the civilian territory of a (comparative) military superpower. There isn’t any practical purpose, only random, pointless, murderous violence. How can you complain when this is responded to with targeted violence?
Maybe I’m just too much of a wargamer, but I don’t see any purpose in taking actions that are more destructive to one’s own side than to the enemy…and which have no utility in any case. The rockets won’t make Israel give up more territory, nor will they make Israel stop building settlements, and they don’t bring the world’s diplomatic recognition into sympathy with Gaza. Realpolitik suggests trying to negotiate for things the other side actually can provide.
Israel really is showing restraint.
This right here is one of those unbridgeable gulfs of morality and ethics. Do you judge the merits of an action purely by body count, or intention?
Which does one place more weight on?
If it’s pure body count, then all retorts that kill far more of the opponent in a war is treated as morally wrong and worse by definition.
Personally, I find this view of the world totally backward and trashy. If your nation is firing rockets at me, I have the right to fire back and take those rockets out. Do I care that YOU placed the rockets in the vicinity of civilians? Yes. Do I care so much that because you did that I will allow them to fire with impunity? No.
If I was a man looking at the scenario, imagining where to focus my anger and rage, I would not direct it at the people defending themselves, I would direct it at the thugs who used civilians as a god damn shield. Isn’t it interesting that you seem so unconcerned about those acts?
Isn’t it interesting that you find the act of Israeli retaliation far more immoral and vile than the murders who fire weapons from school sites, hospitals, dense urban locations?
What kind of guttural ethics reigns inside the mind of a man who looks at that scenario and thinks to themselves, how DARE those Iraelis !!! The NUMBER of people killed in their return fire was higher, THEY were the ones in the wrong here!
Or rather, they were even MORE wrong than the others because the degree of the wrongness of an act is defined by magnitude.
Ugh, Am I the only one that can taste the bile here? The depravity of properly functioning ethics, the black hole of any normative standards of right and wrong. We are lost if these trash beliefs take over. You have example after example of Palestinians using ANY means available to them to kill as many Israelis as they can, their relative failure is ONLY limited by their lack of technical capability, NOT their intention. And the primary focus of ***proper ***moral outrage, intention, is virtually ignored by people parroting your “but they suffered more casualties” BS line.
If Omar Mateen only killed a single man in his attack on that gay nightclub, his actions would be orders of magnitude worse than a man who killed dozens more in a car accident, or an officer who fired at a gunman who was firing bullets towards a crowd where the officer kills not only the gunman by several other nearby bystanders.
The act of INTENTIONAL murder, where the violence and death is the reason for being in and of itself, rather than being incidental to some other goal (i.e. stopping rocket fire from raining on Israel) is the worse moral act.
Some of you people need to grow up, the ethics of children runs rampant. I used to think it was religious people who needed training wheels to get by to keep from falling over, but there are a great many secular people as well that are astonishingly confused about basic, GRADE school ethics, the kind of ethics I could tease out properly at age 5 seems lost on so many.
Your numbers aren’t very convincing. Israel should be penalized for having better means of defending themselves? That’s what they were doing. Defending themselves. How many Americans have we lost flying drones vs. how many have we killed with those drones? I bet the “imbalance” would be staggering.
It’s not just about the raw numbers of dead. Palestinian terrorists are waging a campaign of terror. The idea behind the stabbing campaign was to make sure no Israeli would feel safe. To up the threat and transcend the number of civilians they could kill by causing panic, by striking at any time, as often as they could.
In the face of that insidious threat to spirit and human life, Israel had to watch much of the rest of the world renew their calls for Israel to give the terrorists what they want in hopes for a ceasefire of stabbings. I can only imagine how Americans would react to the same dynamic with a bordering peoples. That’s why I call it restraint. Restraint, even, in the face of a historic double standard, fueled by the UN. More restrained than any other country I can think of.
perfectly said. People like Ace should stop and think about why in most societies, there is a different between first degree murder (premeditated) and second/third degree murder (not premeditated). The Palestinians are definitely guilty of the first.
Liberalism has become a sad shadow of what it once was; it was once a way of not being bound by arbitrary “morals,” like sex outside of marriage being bad, or the importance of being religious to be moral. Now, liberalism, or “progressivism” is almost like its own religion; the western party is always oppressing to indigenous party, any time two people are fighting, the non-white one is ALWAYS right, all cultures are equal, and the preachers are the liberal arts professors. And in scenarios, like Israel/Palestinians, which isn’t even an example of “imperialism,” they have to force the narrative on it.
This sort of sweeping mass guilt is both wrong and harmful. Some Palestinians may be guilty, but not all. Some Israelis may be guilty, but not all. Neither society/group as a whole are to blame for every bad thing that happens in the region. Individuals in both groups bear some of the blame, without going into which side bears more of the blame. Israel isn’t perfect, and some Israelis (and some Israeli leaders) have done some bad things – same with the Palestinians and their leaders.
It’s not anti-Israel to point this out. In my view, the best way to help Israel in the long term is to work towards a long-term two-state peace process, since anything else will either result in the loss of a Jewish majority in Israel or the permanent oppression of millions of non-Jewish Israelis (or stateless people living in territory controlled by Israel, if that’s what you’d prefer to call them), and both of those are very bad for Israel (and the world in general), in my opinion.
Well, that tears it. I’m certainly not voting for them, this election!
There’s this concept called proportional response. A 90-to-1 kill ratio is not proportional, no matter how much you try to paint it otherwise. Bottom line, as I’ve been beating the drum for this entire thread, is that NEITHER side is clean. You can deny it all you want, but it’s the reality.
As Derek sits at home, crying for the ‘kinder, gentler’ '50’s.
Amazing how many stereotypes are purveyed in just that one paragraph.
I think of it this way: suppose someone in my neighborhood (I don’t know who) killed a policeman. The next night the police descend on my neighborhood and, in an act of “self defense,” shoot to death 100 of my neighbors. It’s a sad fact of collateral damage that some of the 100 they kill were entirely innocent. Including, say, my mother.
Do you suppose the police have acted morally? Have they reduced the potential for future violence? Are they now safer in my neighborhood than before? Do you support their actions? If so, and it was your family members that they accidentally killed, would you still support them? If not why not?
A wholly inaccurate analogy of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
“Let me, by analogy, explain why some people have a moral objection to communism.” “Ha! There’s no such thing as taking animals. Your analogy is inaccurate!”
If you were a Palestinian, would you not want to fight back?
No, what are you talking about?
I think we were talking about how it’s fine if someone kills my mother, provided it’s in the historically accurate context of the Israel/Palestinian conflict.
The problem with your argument is that “proportional response” isn’t an arithmetic exercise. It isn’t some notion of fairness, as in ‘you killed one of us, so we can only kill one of you - two at most’. Yet some people appear to assume that it is, as in “A 90-to-1 kill ratio is not proportional, no matter how much you try to paint it otherwise”.
In Just War theory, as embodied in various articulations of international law “proportionality” means that a military action is not a “war crime” if it meets a couple of tests:
(1) The attack wasn’t a deliberate attempt to kill civilians; and
(2) The attack wasn’t launched in the knowledge that gaining the civilian casualties resulting from the attack would be “clearly excessive” in relation to the military objectives that the attack was supposed to achieve. This is the “proportionality doctrine” that you are misusing here.
In short, you could in theory have a war in which one side, totally outclassed, suffers 100% of the deaths. They declare war and attack with spears against machine guns and get mowed down to the last soldier: 1000 of them die, none of their enemy. This is not a war crime and is not a violation of “proportionality” . Their enemy has exactly zero requirement to allow a “fair” distribution of deaths.
Similarly, the same advanced enemy could attack with cannon a fortress being held against them, blow a breach in the wall, and demand its surrender - and in the process kill a bunch of civilians who took shelter in that fortress. Not a war crime, as long as the “military objective” - taking the fortress - did not result in civilian casualties that were “clearly excessive” in relation to that objective.
Now, many argue that Israeli wars against Hamas in Gaza resulted in “clearly excessive” civilian casualties. The issue is not as cut and dried as simply citing the ratio of deaths, as you have done, would assume. According to the actual doctrine, you have to examine the military objectives the Israelis were pursuing when the casualties were incurred.
Here’s a concise statement of the doctrine, from Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court (in the context of the Iraq War):