It is a war crime to hide weapons and combatants in a school, and to fire rockets out of civilian buildings counting on the presence of those buildings to prevent the enemy from targeting you; doing so is a war crime.
Hamas, meanwhile, targets schools that don’t have a single IDF rocket battery or solider in them. And they don’t even warn the civilians in those schools that they’re about to be blown up, unlike the IDF. So saying that Israel is worse than Hamas is pretty fucking hypocritical here.
Apparently to some Hamas, a dictatorial terrorist group who rules by fiat rather than law, is more trustworthy than Israel, a free country with very vigorous opposition parties and a free press who would love nothing more than to uncover a Netanyahu-led conspiracy to manipulate the country. Go figure. But I guess some people trust Trump’s ramblings about Coronavirus over the peer reviewed scientific process, so that’s not too surprising.
The settlers have actual defenders in this very thread.
Regardless, they definitely have them on the ground. You yourself stated:
Saddam Hussein was a vile human being, but bombing Iraq was not defensible, even if the IRG was a terrorist organization with uniforms. That’s the difference. If some European says America was wrong in 2003, I don’t run to our defense. I say “Yep, we’re fucking evil”. If you are insistent on removing him, then even if it would have cost the lives of thousands of US soldiers to remove Saddam and his cohorts, but saved most of the civilians who died, I’d call that a fair trade. I don’t get that impression from the average Israeli.
Yep, that’s why Israel needs to just bend over and take the rocket attacks, just let them keep coming until Gaza runs out of ammo. Of course a blockade would be cruel, so we gotta let aid come into Gaza unchecked, but I’m sure they won’t try to smuggle in more rocket materials and will instead stop firing any week now.
[Never mind the schools and hospitals in Israel that get destroyed in the meantime, it would be beyond the pale for Hamas to attack such buildings so I’m sure they won’t.]
I sure am glad it’s not beyond the pale for Hamas to fire rockets out of a building children or journalists use. No double standard here, no sir!
Hamas knows EXACTLY how Israel will react because this is not their first time at the rodeo. They provoke Israel knowing exactly the kind of military reaction they can expect. That is why they hide their combatants & rockets among civilian populations, schools and hospitals.
I’d say it’s because it is beyond the pale to make the people you’re attacking have to choose between defending their people and harming your children.
I am using a double standard, I fully admit that I would expect Israel to be better than a terrorist organization funded by Iran and dubious money from the Gulf.
There are other options available for a force with such technological, logistic and numerical advantage than “blow shit up”.
I am not saying Hamas are such nice people, but the Israelis could stand to ponder for a moment how a population got so disparaged that they are ok with using their schools as launch sites. – maybe they could make an effort to break that cycle? Not blowing up schools, being seen not blowing up schools would go a long way in not creating the next generation of Hamas fighters.
See, this is a more reasonable post, and I agree that this isn’t necessarily the most intelligent course of action.
What I take issue with is saying “ZOMG ISRAEL BLEW UP SKEWLS THEY HATE ARAB KIDS”
In fact, the school was being used to shelter the very people attacking Israel.
But, the criticism “blowing up the school will have only minimal effect on stopping Hamas from having the ability to wage war against Israel; further, it is likely to provide Hamas with excellent propaganda fodder to further radicalize the next generation of Palestinians, creating a more fertile recruitment pool for terrorists. With that in mind, retaliating in this way is not the best course of action in this situation” is totally fair. Unfortunately, that sort of reasoned discourse is tough to find when it comes to this topic, and that’s why I push back when I encounter arguments that lean towards the first example.
To some degree it’s true it’s a dog bites man story, but the guy who wrote the Atlantic article has made a decent argument that the net effect of that being the decision in the newsroom every single time, for 30 years creates a serious perceptual problem for the public. The fact that the journalists on the ground have a revolving door relationship with NGOs that are sources and job opportunities, and the NGOs have a bent of focusing more on holding Israel accountable (which isn’t bad, but a journalist is not an activist, or isn’t supposed to be, and it can have a bias creating effect), I think it does give people a warped view of Israel. He has some data to back his claims up, a lot of NGOs dedicated to highlighting human rights abuses regularly publish more reports on Israel than any other country, the UN Human Rights arm has gone after Israel far more than any other country etc.
It is just as dangerous to give Israel an unfair treatment as it is to give them a blank check. I think if the West is to ever have a role in solving the crisis there needs to be stark realism about it, not raising either side to a pedestal, but judging them for what they do–all that they do.
That would be one of the handful of posters who isn’t against the settlements, yes.
I don’t think these are people who support the settlements. They are people who are against the settlements in principle, but realize that getting rid of them would cause societal upheaval in Israel and take much political capital, as it would anger the religious and far right wings; and they just don’t see a reason to go through that trouble when the Palestinians aren’t currently seen as making a good faith effort at peace.
Now, my perspective is that who snubbed who last and should therefore make the first concessions to get everyone back to the table is a childish perspective, and we should move the fuck on so we can actually get to peace. But I’ve also been living in America for quite a while, and haven’t had rockets falling on me for that whole time; and I recognize that in the shoes of someone who has, I might feel differently.
From my distant perspective across an ocean and two continents, I also recognize that the Palestinians likely feel the same way, which is yet another reason to take the first step and move towards peace.
And the other factor is that the more entrenched the people in the settlements become, the harder the process of removing them eventually will be. And since that process MUST happen for a two state solution. To work, anything that makes it harder is a terrible tragedy that should be avoided.
No country on this earth would let an enemy launch rockets at them and not strike back at the source of the rockets. You aren’t just using a double standard, you are using an impossible one. It is an impossible one that Hamas knows it is abusing for its aims, and that Israel does not have an easy answer to in the moment.
Israel certainly has broader strategic and policy things it could pursue, that in my opinion would do a better job of navigating it out of the conflict than the Likud approach. But in the heat of battle Israel’s government’s highest responsibility is to protecting its citizens from a violent attack, and that is the most fundamental role of any government. It is the very reason we first constituted governments.
This is a good point. Israel is a democracy, so at the end of the day how Israel’s government reacts to international pressure will depend on what its citizens think about that international pressure. If the international community is perceived as particularly unfair towards Israel, as argued in that Atlantic article, Israeli citizens will vote for the leaders who ignore this criticism rather than those who argue that Israel should take it into account.
As much as I appreciate the sentiment of, ‘Why can we all just get along?’, it more often than not ignores realities on the ground and counteless determined efforts to do just that. If all it took to achieve peace in the middle east was for everyone to just decide to get along, we’d probably be on the cusp of celebrating 75 year anniversary of Israel’s peaceful co-existence with its neighbors.
If it is perfectly acceptable to bomb schools, why did we declare it criminal to hide weapons there?
If you are a modern army (shooting Hamas’ rockets out of the sky by the dozens) and you find a launch site in some building that really shouldn’t be bombed.
-Couldn’t you arrange some early warning system to more reliably shoot down the rockets coming from there?
-Find some way to follow/arrest/kill the people crewing/supplying said installation?
-Isn’t there more to be gained by creating a stink about it? I doubt that there are many Palestinians thrilled about using schools as launch sites.
I don’t believe so, no; not sure how you’d do that, or how you’d account for them realizing what you did and moving to the next school over.
Who would arrest them? Hamas is the ruling authority in Gaza, they aren’t gonna arrest themselves. You could use a drone to wait until they leave the school and then blow them up, but with how densely populated Gaza is, that’s not going to do much to prevent collateral damage. Or you could send IDF soldiers to arrest or kill them in person, but that would require an invasion into Gaza 2014 style, followed by a prolonged occupation.
Despite being called “The Occupied Territories” there aren’t Israeli soldiers walking around inside on a day to day basis. If they wanted to do what you propose, they’d first need to establish control of the region.
Not all Palestinians are as angry about it as you’d think; some have been radicalized to the point where they think this is a good plan for Hamas to follow. For the rest, how are you gonna make a stink about it? Hamas controls the media within Gaza.
And even if they WERE unhappy, what are they going to do about it? Hamas doesn’t run elections, now that they’re in power.
Any location that is being used to launch offensive attacks, is a valid military target. That is the actual laws of warfare. It is a war crime to intentionally use civilian infrastructure to launch offensive attacks for that very reason, and that is why attacking people committed that war crime is not itself a war crime.
Israel already has reached the limits of their current technology in shooting down missiles and warning people of detected launches. They are certainly working to improve this all the time, but expecting it to be as simple as just snapping their fingers and “getting better at it” is hilariously absurd.
A ground invasion to attack the launch sites would kill far more Palestinian civilians than what they are doing now. It would also escalate the conflict and likely lead to even more violence all around.
No, there is very little to be gained by making a stink about it. As I mentioned, most of the Western press doesn’t like to write articles about how it is inappropriate for Hamas to use schools and news bureaus as bases for rocket launches. I suspect most of the Palestinians in the area view using the facilities to attack Israel as justified because of the nature of the conflict, and likely already hate Israel so much that this isn’t actively changing their perceptions of Israel and they clearly don’t blame Hamas at all.
If you know where to look: couldn’t you focus (some of) your detecting equipment at the known source?
An army enjoying the technological, logistic and numerical advantage the Israelis have surely can raid such a target without it needing to be an occupation. I was thinking minutes not days.
Is this the first conflict ever where the enemy is completely immune to propaganda?
Eta: to elaborate, that’s completely ridiculous. That’s not the case at all, Israel can’t just pop some A-Team of soldiers into Gaza, kill their targets, and escape before the entire force of Hamas falls on them like some James Bond movie. And they certainly can’t do that successfully again and again every time Hamas makes an attack.
I completely accept that there are all kinds of difficulties in operations involving actual humans, but I do not accept that the only viable option is shooting rockets.