I don’t think that that qualifies as an allegation, so much as one in a list of speculations, qualified with a “maybe”.
Otoh, you have a point here. Gaza is not a first world nation, and it is not being treated in anything close to a democratic fashion.
No, and until they have their own state which is actually concerned with its interests they will always get the short end of the stick, unfortunately. I think there are things Israel needs to do to reach that goal, including dismantling the settlements and allowing more commerce to occur in Gaza and the West Bank; and there are things the Palestinians need to do, like either replacing Hamas or changing it to the point where it CAN peacefully coexist with Israel. Unfortunately, every round of fighting like this hardens hearts on both sides and makes these things less likely to happen - that’s the great tragedy of the situation.
Firstly, I didn’t accuse as such, I listed it among possibilities that are not ruled out yet; I also included the IDF’s claim among the possibilities.
But secondly, I’ll say it again: the burden of proof is on the person blowing up shit. I can’t prove there wasn’t a member of Hamas in that building but Israel can at least say what they thought was there. It’s not like it’s only me asking for that evidence; many allies and international organizations want to see that too.
I agree that Israel should provide that evidence, not necessarily to you and me and not necessarily during the conflict, but eventually yes.
Fair enough, and that’s all I’m saying is that violence will not solve the problem unless Israel is willing to commit to quite a bit of it. I’m not saying that Israel plans on leveling every building and killing everyone living in Gaza. I’m just saying that that is the only way that this can be solved by destroying any buildings or killing anyone living in Gaza.
Hamas is not going to stop because some civilians were killed, they aren’t going to stop because people’s homes and lives were destroyed. They aren’t going to stop no matter how many apartment or office buildings are bombed. The civilians are simply caught in the crossfire. Israel could win them over to their side with humanitarian efforts, but bombing them is not going to do that.
You are right, and I have used that exact argument when arguing with more hardliner Israelis. “Like it or not, they are there; and they will stay there, unless you are willing to become exactly what you hate and fear most. So like it or not, deserve it or not, their fault or not, we HAVE to reach peace. There is no other option.”
Well that’s not actually accurate. It is a presumption under standards of international law and war that if you are attacked you can strike back directly at the entities that attacked you. E.g. someone launches a rocket at you, you have intrinsic rights to fire right back at that location. Israel actually curtails those rights by delaying its response and warning civilians in the area–those actions are not actually required by any international treaties etc.
Like most crimes, if one asserts a war crime, the onus is on the accuser to demonstrate proof. The system isn’t setup such that you’re presumed to have committed a war crime unless you can prove otherwise, or that any military strike hitting a civilian building is presumed a war crime unless proven otherwise.
The short end of the stick is that they don’t have their own state which is concerned with their interests. They are an occupied territory, ruled over by a govt they have no influence over.
That’d be a good start. Gaza is at the mercy of Israel. They have no control over their own fate, it is entirely in the hands of the Israelis.
I don’t know that they can just throw off Hamas that easily. Hamas is both carrot and stick to those living in Gaza. If they want to use your roof to launch some rockets, you can’t exactly say no. I don’t think that any other political coalition can grow up in that environment.
Yes, this is very true. And it is the goal of Hamas, a terrorist organization, to continue the violence, to prevent peace from breaking out.
So, it really is up to Israel, and Israel alone, as to how this all works out.
It isn’t really solely up to Israel. Any sort of end to this would require buy in not just from the Palestinian formal leadership (Hamas and the Palestine Authority), but a good segment of its people. I think there are things Israel can do to influence that, but “ignoring rocket attacks” probably isn’t in the cards. It’s highly unlikely a democratically elected politician will ever sit there and say “I’m going to let our enemies shoot us and we aren’t going to shoot back.”
Like that probably just isn’t on the table of options.
However heavy onus should be on Israel to do nothing that gives Hamas much of an “excuse” to launch rockets. Israel is largely locked in to counterattacking when attacked, but evictions in East Jerusalem and the police raid on the Al-Aqsa Mosque were not thing Israel was required to do, and those are the veneer under which this started and their proximate cause, it’s that sort of thing Israel can reign in.
But the stance I saw earlier in this thread and I see get repeated in the media a lot is that Israel is obligated to respond “proportionally” to Hamas, and proportionally has weird meanings that come down to “well if Hamas can’t score hits with most of its missiles because of Iron Dome…then Israel needs to mostly respond ineffectively.” This sort of conception of proportionality has no real historical or logical basis. I go back to…when was the last time the United States responded proportionally to its enemies? Like we lost ships and around 3,000 men at Pearl Harbor, and in response we destroyed the Empire of Japan and firebombed most of its cities and nuclear bombed two of them, then occupied Japan and forced it to change its form of government and accept perpetual occupation by our military bases. That was not a proportional response.
Entities, sure. But does collateral damage of civilians count for nothing?
Were there rockets launched from the building that the AP was in?
Sometimes, when they feel like it. Certainly not all the time, and even with a warning, I’d rather not be left homeless due to my home and everything I own that I can’t gather and carry in 5 minutes destroyed.
Is there any doubt that the IDF shot a missle into the building? Just as self defense laws in the US demand that the person who did the shooting justify why they felt it was necessary, so should firing missiles into civilian structures.
So a rocket was fired from the AP AJ building? Not even the IDF is claiming that. So what’s the relevance?
I didn’t say “war crime”. I’m not claiming that there is any particular case to be answered, but, again, the burden of proof lies here with the bomber, and the international community is asking for that information. I agree with Babale that I don’t need to see it myself personally, but I would like to see someone other than the US or Israel say that there was adequate intelligence of a serious threat.
In the meantime, like I say, we have seen heavy-handed tactics at all levels, I’m not assuming the best about these bombings.
I was speaking more generally here specifically about complaints about the destruction of civilian buildings used to launch rockets. I believe I have mentioned at least a couple of times (in this admittedly very long thread), that I was not aware of specific reasons the IDF has yet given for bombing the AJ/AP building so I wasn’t willing to speculate on whether it was justified or not. If they genuinely had no reason, then it was unjustified–and further sans a reason, targeting a civilian journalism office would likely constitute a war crime. I haven’t kept up with the specifics of the AJ/AP building in the last 2-3 days so it is possible the IDF has given some explanation, the last I was aware of they hadn’t given positive justification either way.
I’m not sure what you mean by “burden of proof lies with the bomber”, burden of proof for what? That’s a legal term usually used to refer to proving of cases in court. If you aren’t talking about a war crime scenario what sort of burden of proof do you mean, I ask so I can be clear on what you are actually saying.
Assuming the best is probably not a good stance, but I’m more saying it’s not reasonable to me, based on the history and facts to assume that any Israeli bomb dropped in Gaza was “unjust” or “Inappropriate” based on standards of international military behavior. It’s not seriously contested that Hamas started the actual bombings in this round of violence, I generally give some level of deference to national self defense when engaging in a retaliatory strike.
I do not think it is unimaginable that Israel has committed any kind of inappropriate bombings, I think they have in the past (caveat: so too has the United States, just adding that in), but just because some journalists are really upset they saw a building fall over and some kids don’t have homes anymore, or even more tragically a kid was killed, that isn’t intrinsic evidence of inappropriate behavior. It is a reflection that military conflicts create tragic results.
They certainly count as tragedies. But a legitimate retaliatory strike, targeting military aggressors and not intentionally targeting civilians, is neither immoral or unethical (if we want to drop talking strictly about war crimes, which it is not one of those either.)
I haven’t seen that claim specifically, my understanding and I’ll cop to being wrong if I missed it, is the discussion was about Israel bombing of Gaza broadly speaking, the AP building was one such bombing, but there have been many others.
And I presume most of the population of Baghdad didn’t want to lose their electricity when we started Operation Iraqi Freedom, and I doubt 50% of the civilians of Nazi Germany wanted to lose their homes.
I think it is fairly obviously people don’t want their homes destroyed. I struggle to arrive at the point you are making along these lines though. Wars are going to destroy homes.
There is no real comparison with self defense laws. Criminal law in the United States starts with an assumption that it is unlawful to kill someone, and self defense is an affirmative defense explaining why the killing was justified. There is no such regime for bombings in war. Killing and destruction are inherent parts of armed conflict. The purpose of war crimes laws and treaties is to try to “civilize” war, by minimize certain harms that it can cause. None of the men who built out the treaties that constitute our modern laws of war were unrealistic people, they understood that war was intrinsically a terrible thing that wrought great death and destruction. No treaty or piece of paper can change that, what it sought to do is get agreement from nations on how to behave in certain contexts during a war.
It really is. The people in Gaza aren’t going to buy into anything that comes from someone who just killed members of their family. The more attacks, the fewer in Gaza can ever come around.
But there is a difference between ignoring rocket attacks, and killing civilians who had nothing to do with those rocket attacks.
Yeah, not provoking would be a good start. But having humanitarian programs, getting some covid vaccines going. Giving people jobs, food, drinkable water. Maybe help them to rebuild the homes that they destroyed.
But they are responding ineffectively. What they are doing is not stopping the rockets. I don’t know that I agree with proportionate response either. Hamas, as a terrorist organization, doesn’t care about civilian casualties, on either side. Israel, as not a terrorist organization, should. If proportionate response is, “They killed 20 civilians in Israel, we should kill 20 civilians in Gaza.” then that’s proportionate, but it is also not being any better than the terrorists in the first place. And when the result is that Israel is actually killing quite a number more civilians in Gaza than are killed in Israel, that really doesn’t help matters.
Effective would be to concentrate on the tunnels that they are allegedly using, sure. If they can shoot people launching rockets as they are setting up their launchers, great.
But if they are bombing civilian buildings after they were used to launch a few rockets, they really lose any moral high ground to claim.
Once again, this was not intended to be a proportionate response, an eye for an eye type of cycle of vengeance. This was meant to destroy their capability of continuing war against us and our allies.
That model of nation on nation full out war does not apply to this situation. It really hasn’t applied to any conflict since WWII, actually. Which is why when we were attacked on 9/11 by terrorists, we engaged in useless violence in response, much of it against civilians who had nothing to do with it.
In that regard, I don’t know that we are that much better than Israel, but that doesn’t mean that we, and they, can’t at least try to be.
No, Israel can certainly improve its chances of agreement by improving quality of life in Gaza. But it does not have sole power to end the conflict. There are significant “defects of thinking” that have been historically endemic in the Palestinian side for example a large % of them believe right of return is non-negotiable, Israel will fight a war for all time before it ever agrees to a right of return, so it is unlikely unless something changes in the Palestinian mindset for that issue–one of many issues, can be resolved.
I do not believe Israel simply refusing to strike back at Hamas when Hamas strikes at them is on the cards. I do not believe even a left of center party in Israel would adhere to that policy, nor could I see any first world democracy adhere to such a policy anywhere on earth. Like I said, Israel should not give Hamas an excuse to attack, but Israel is not going to just take an attack and not respond, that is not a realistic stance to have.
And there is a difference between being mad about court evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and a police raid on Al-Aqsa Mosque, and indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel, rockets that have killed small children who had nothing to do with those evictions or the police raid.
Israel is not deliberately killing or targeting children, Hamas is.
Some of this has been done in the past for what it is worth, the history of this conflict isn’t only a few months old. One reason Israel has likely gotten more radicalized in recent years is in part because it has backed programs like that before and seen virtually no material improvement in the situation.
I believe your analysis is incorrect militarily. They are hitting Hamas leadership, they are using Iron Dome to shoot rockets out of the sky. They are destroying weapons stores. They are attacking rocket launch equipment. It took Hamas at least 10 years to smuggle in the 30,000 rockets they have, the more that are destroyed the more years it will take to get a similar stockpile back in.
What you seem to be fundamentally missing is casualty counts on each side don’t decide what is just or right or proportionate. Israel is responding to military attacks on its civilians with military attacks on the enemy’s military forces, and those forces are embedded in civilian locations, so there are civilian collateral casualties, which are mostly the fault of Hamas. I think if you simply disagree that a military has a right to defend its country, and that defense will sometimes cause collateral damage, then we have a fundamental disagreement about the rights and powers of sovereign states and the scope of appropriate military action–such basic disagreements that I doubt we can resolve and frankly it isn’t worth it to try.
They are literally doing this.
I don’t find the talk of moral high grounds useful.
And Israel has specific aims–they are targeting Hamas leaders, weapons stores and fighters. It is, actually effective militarily. It is not effective at furthering a political settlement, it is effective at degrading Hamas operational capabilities.
Hamas could try to be better as well.
Im a bit confused by the wwii Japan discussion because the firebombings and nuclear bombings were clearly war crimes in a much less ambiguous way than Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
Neither was actually a war crime under the laws of war extant at the time.
This may be a tangent, but firebombing and nuclear bombing are intended to maximise civilian casualties and if that wasn’t considered a war crime in the 1940s it should have been. We should look at those bombings as war crimes now rather than use them as an example of acceptable wartime tactics.
But what if you are fully aware that you will not be hitting the military aggressors, and only hit civilians?
I didn’t really want them to either. I was against us going into Iraq. There are some similarities here, though. Just like it was people in Afghanistan who attacked us, and we ended up shooting up one of their neighbors.
I wasn’t a huge fan of going into Afganistan either, not as a full military force. I would have supported small ops to try to kill or capture specific terrorist leaders, but not the occupation that we have imposed on them for the last couple decades.
Probably not. But, at the time, carpet bombing was the best we had to destroy Germany’s ability to continue to wage war. We have better technology now, so carpet bombing a city would be a war crime, IMHO.
Except that they are claiming that this is being done in self defense.
If the reason for the war is declared as being self defense, then it certainly should be. That killing and destruction are inherent parts of armed conflict means that people should be hesitant to resort to armed conflict, not use that as an excuse to kill civilians.
Has Israel formally declared war on Gaza?
Just to see where we are at. Let’s say that someone on the roof of a high rise in Cincinnati shoots at someone in Newport. Would Kentucky be justified in bombing the building?
Yeah I don’t want to derail this thread with a complicated topic, but there was a gap in international law as it related to aerial bombardment due partially to technology outstripping the law, and partially lack of agreement on how to regulate it prior to WWII. There was a Hague convention of 1907 that had vague applicability to aerial bombardment of cities, but the provisions of it were so broad that it provided no actual legal objection to even the most massive and indiscriminate of carpet bombings (and even including nuclear bombings.) There was another one that prohibited bombing from “balloons”, but did not apply to fixed winged aircraft.
There has been an attempt to rectify this ever since, culminating in a Geneva Convention (Protocol I) promulgated in 1977. However interestingly Israel and the United States are two of the only countries that have not signed on with Protocol I, so technically are not bound to it. Although I believe both countries “operationally” and as a matter of policy, attempt to act as if they are.
FWIW–Protocol I, because of Japanese behavior in WWII (they intentionally commingled a lot of military production and military housing with civilian housing), specifically addresses the sort of behavior Hamas engages in. It makes it a war crime to mix your military facilities and activities with civilian buildings like that, and in fact makes the deaths of those civilians a war crime for which the party being bombed is legally responsible, meaning under Protocol I of the GC if Hamas launches rockets from civilian infrastructure, Israel responds, civilians die, it is actually Hamas that has committed the war crime and is legally responsible for their deaths.
Again, I don’t know how far we want to go down this aside, but just clarifying.