…That is meant as a joke, right?
What Hamas does is not ‘resistance’. But as long as there are Westerners willing to continue making that excuse in the face of people swooping down in hangliders to rape teenagers at a music festival, why should Hamas change their behavior? The incentives are all aligned to keep going.
Only when the world makes it clear that no matter how many “brave acts of rapesistence” Hamas performs on the Israeli population, Palestine will never be “Arab from the River to the Sea” (Min el-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya) will there actually be an incentive for them to change tactics, put down their rockets and their AKs, and accept a two state solution.
…my thoughts on ICE and American police would be a suitable and interesting topic for another thread if you want to start it.
I really don’t want to spend the next few days arguing about comparative blame, justifications, etc., but to keep it short, you feel the new leaders of Hamas are at least less involved, less responsible, or less likely to repeat the horrors of October 7th, or any other prior attacks during times of relative peace.
Or at least, that’s how I read this section:
I disagree. Yes, many of the leaders behind that particular operation are gone, I do not believe that those that remain would disavow them, or not repeat them given time and opportunity. If anything, given the reprisals and excesses of Bibi’s government, I suspect them to be further entrenched in their hatred and desire for obliterating their enemy.
So, I disagree with the fundamental premise that forcing Israel alone (since you keep asking me about my concerns about dual responsibility) to abide by terms that there will be lasting peace.
I fully agree with the next section as well:
I disagree though with the next piece:
You’re wrong. Oh, I exaggerate for comical effect, but I do see, and have seen for decades shared responsibilities. Going back to the PLO era, there were good faith efforts on both sides to try to find an compromise that could be lived with, and several times, such initiatives were tanked by people on their own side, hardliners of either stripe.
So, again, reading from the regions history, these current actions have justified or not created a new generation that will hate for a lifetime - they are very unlikely to ever settle for an equal peace. So, and back to Hamas again, they, or perhaps a splinter group will take a portion, giving willingly or by force, any funds to be used for the Palestinian people to re-arm, build forces, and attack again even IF Israel is bound by international pressure to abandon their attacks, indiscriminate and otherwise.
So again, I believe (being pragmatic, jaded, realpolitik, take your choice) that for a generation at least, peace needs to be evenly enforced on both sides, where Palestinian militants need to be stopped and judged from carrying out their own indiscriminate (if not always effective) attacks on Israelis, and similarly, settler aggression and IDF abuse (general term, but including rape, murder, torture, too many to list all by either group) on the same basis.
Now, once again, I don’t blame you for disagreeing on the shared responsibility, or a faith in new Palestinian leadership being able to make a real change. I just don’t agree with it.
If anything, I think you’re likely more an idealist than I, which can be admirable. I just draw very different conclusions on how the situation can and will be resolved.
And the point of the original hypothetical was to focus back on some of the fundamental disagreements rather than the over-specific arguments in the thread: what specific responses or actions are proportionate, or justified, or excusable. I think that’s the wrong place to argue from. We need to find something that works to reduce the harm first, to prevent justifiable or not violent response, and then build towards a lasting peace and a possible future where both sides cooperate (probably grudgingly) or at least take no active violent actions against the other.
…this is a strawman.
My argument isn’t that “forcing Israel alone” is the way forward.
My argument is that there are two sides at the table, and one side is in compliance with the ceasefire, and the other is actively committing ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Both sides need to abide by the terms. But one side IS abiding by the terms. And the other side is not. We should not treat these as equal.
I believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. My belief is shared by every single major reputable humanitarian agency in the world and a broad consensus of genocide and Holocaust scholars. There is an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice, which has issued interim orders in order to prevent genocide.
There aren’t “two sides” to an ongoing genocide. You are looking for a compromise. I think we should be looking to end the genocide. Then we need to end the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Then we need to end the Isreali torture chambers. Then we need to end the illegal occupation of Palestine.
THEN we can start looking for compromise.
I can’t see how we start with compromise when the cards are all stacked on the other side. Gaza is destroyed. The West Bank lives under apartheid. Thousands of Palestinians are being tortured as we speak. What should they be compromising on?
My question to you again is, “Do you not think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza?” Because if you don’t think that’s happening, how would you characterize it?
…I’m not talking about Hamas.
So quote the portion of the Guardian piece in which they report that the facts justify Israel’s failure to prosecute. I’ll wait.
I already quoted the article. The Guardian would not make such an editorial comment in a news article.
The article makes no characterization of the Israeli officials’ assertions. Just like it often reports Trump’s statements (even when they’re lies, as they usually are). They are not reporting that the assertions are accurate – they are only reporting that the assertions were made.
If you’re unable to show a single quote justifying your trust of these Israeli officials’ assertions, then I stand by what I said. You haven’t provided anything at all to refute it.
No should it. It quoted them, and checked the facts.
I am not putting trust in them, I am putting trust in the Guardian and several other reliable News Sources, noted for their fact checking. Now you are asking me to fly to Israel and check the fact myself, no one needs to do that- you trust certain media sources.
This is ridiculous. You quote VERY dubious news sources, then when others quote reliable, trusted unbiased News sources, you wont accept them.
The Guardian did not “check” and support any facts that refuted what I said. If you disagree, show me the specific quote. It shouldn’t be hard – the article is short.
Especially given the rest of your post, this seems like another “gotcha” that I’ve been expressly trying to avoid, because it leads to a lot of rancor and snapbacks, as seen in this thread and others. But fine, I’ll answer this question directly, though I question why you feel Israel being forced to stop will prevent factions in Gaza from continuing attacks into Israel.
Direct answer to the question: “I don’t think the entirety of the Israeli Government or even IDF are attempting Genocide in Gaza, but the results of those in power and the actions they support/endorse/do not punish will result in Genocide given long enough.” Or we’re long past the point of excessive reprisals and into indiscriminate violence.
So, back to your points. Given supreme executive power for a single day, I’d make the IDF go home, to a minimum of the pre-October 7 points of control, and let verified humanitarian aid through. I’d require the Israeli government to stop all further expansion of any current Settlements (freeze on materials shipping beyond maintenance) and stop and evacuate any settlements under construction.
I’d require third party observers (ones accepted by both sides as fair) to monitor the situation. Any break in the ceasefire by either side will be dealt with by that same side immediately but completely. I can’t stop Omerta policies, but I’ll require a ton of documentation and make sure witnesses have a chance to talk on neutral ground.
Israel for the shortish term will not be allowed reprisals on attacks launched from Gazan territory that do no/minimal injury. But the DCAG and their advisors will be required to do the exact same complete investigation ASAP. I acknowledge that they’ll have a lot on their plate, which is why I preferred having a third party handle these evaluations, but if you don’t want that, then they have to be able to step up quickly to do good faith investigations and punishments for their own people who are violating the ceasefire.
Everyone, Everyone is telling themselves and their people that this resistance level, or this reprisal is fully justified. Fine, justification is as much an individual moral or ethical judgement as it’s a legal/political one. Reality says that if the retaliations aren’t stopped by BOTH Israel and Hamas then no ceasefire will hold for more than a few months to a year.
Israel letting off settlers slaps on the wrist, or IDF soldiers killing without credible, verifiable cause or raping (No if ands or buts!) has to end. Hamas or splinter forces sending rockets they can’t or won’t control into Israeli territory has to end as well, since while not exceptionally complicated, they aren’t credibly single man operations either. There’s a whole world of gray in the middle that can be hard to control, whether it be individual settlers or individual crazed knife wielders stabbing civilians, but seeing both sets of leaders coming down hard on their OWN people for violations is probably going to encourage others to let the peace have at least a chance.
That is factually inaccurate if you read the article.
“We are conducting a full review of the names on our lists to confirm that no one who was actively engaged in combat is listed in our data.”
CPJ expects its review to be completed in July.
The fact that thousands of people were killed in a few days in South Sudan and you guys don’t care. Or the fact that Iran killed tens of thousands of protesters and you don’t care. or the fact that there are 6 or 7 genocides going on on earth and you don’t care.
You view the conflict in Israel through the lens of white western oppressors vs black native oppressees. Because of that you laser focus on Israel while ignoring larger injustices on earth. You hold Israel to insane standards but hold Palestine to no standards, and ignore injustices everywhere else on earth since they don’t fit into your campist paradigm that the white Judeochristian west is the oppressor and the non-white, non-western, non-christian group are the oppressed.
This proves my point. Ro Khanna was mildly inconvenienced for an hour. the fact that to you, that is a global injustice while you ignore all the other injustices in the world tells me what I need to know about your priorities.
People like you don’t get to decide if what you do is bigotry. Your victims decide that. The fact that you hold the only Jewish nation on earth to higher standards than any other nation, the fact that you excuse every crime committed against the only jewish nation on earth, the fact that people promote ancient anti-semitic conspiracy theories about ‘the Jews secretly controlling the US government’.
If a white supremacist fires a black guy for something trivial like being 1 minute late but lets white people do far worse things like steal or not show up at all, people rightly point out the injustice. Its the same thing here.
There are valid criticisms of Israel. And saying all criticisms are anti-semitism is silly. But the fact that Israel is held to a standard no nation on earth is, and that people who normally talk about how horrible bigotry is are repeating 19th century anti-semetic tropes about Israel and AIPAC controlling the US government is troubling.
People like you don’t get to decide if you are a bigot, your victims make that decision.
From your source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_torture_of_Palestinians#During_the_Gaza_war
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) stated that there was a “lot of evidence of cases of violence and cruel and humiliating treatment by prison guards”, and called for an investigation into the deaths of detainees in Israeli custody.[46] PCATI stated they had documented nine clear instances of torture, including sexual violence.[47] On January 3, 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that Palestinian workers from Gaza detained in Israel since October 7 had been photographed naked, attacked by dogs, and dragged faced down in the gravel.[48] In a report on allegations of torture in Israeli prisons, Euro-Med Monitor stated prisoners were being treated like animals.[49] The Wall Street Journal found detainees underwent psychological and physical abuse, including beatings during interrogations.[50] Doctors reported humiliation, beatings, and being forced to kneel for hours.[51] Adalah reported, “We’re seeing really widespread and systemic use of many, many tools in order to inflict torture and ill-treatment on Palestinians”.[52]
This is like when Fox news finds a brown skinned, muslim immigrant beating up a white woman and makes it front page news for months, but ignores the millions of native born, white christian men who beat up white women everyday.
Fox news doesn’t care about the violence, they just know certain kinds of violence serves their socio-political narrative. That is why they amplify that violence, and ignore other forms of violence. It depends on whether the violence serves their narrative. We all do it, but I feel like in this situation a lot of people aren’t aware they do it. The violence isn’t the issue, the underlying sociological narrative is the issue. The violence is just cherry picked to justify the narrative.
Injustice needs to be investigated. But nine people being tortured is the worst injustice on earth? Do you know what happens in a lot of countries in the region? Nine people being tortured is daily business in a small town in egypt.
Does it need to be investigated, yes. However why do you not care about the fact that far far worse things happen to many other people? Its because you are viewing this through the lens of oppressive west vs oppressed non-west. Not all of us see it that way.
Yeah, detained for a whole hour and got a nice news bite out of it. Really a win for Khanna. altho at that time, a bit scary.
Rather than sound bites like this, why not try to take on individual criticisms, if you think they’re inaccurate? If they’re not inaccurate, then what are you complaining about? This thread is about this specific conflict. Feel free to start other threads about other conflicts and other atrocities if you desire.
Also I don’t want to get any warnings, because this info is very on topic. We all do it.
Consider the racial hierarchy in the US. We place whites above POC, native born above immigrants, etc.
When a white police officer, who is acting as an official of the state, brutalizes a black person it triggers a deep sense of injustice among people who are opposed to the racial hierarchy. It reminds them of the deep seated injustice. If a white police officer kills a white mentally ill person, or a black gang member kills a black gang member, it doesn’t trigger that deep injustice about racial hierarchies.
Meanwhile some people like these racial hierarchies. They want to live in a society where whites are above non-whites, christians above muslims, native born above immigrants. So when they see a POC attack a white person, a muslim attack a christian, an immigrant attack a native born person, etc it fills them with rage, because they can use that violence to justify their desire to reinforce the hierarchy. If anything, a white cop killing black people make them support the police more. Hence all the back the blue flags (back the blue stops applying when ‘the blue’ start investigating Trump or Jan 6th anyway).
Its important to understand the underlying sociopolitical agenda under the violence and what violence is considered unbearable, what violence is considered justified and what violence is ignored, even if the acts are the same.
A lot of Arab muslims in the Levant want to live in a racially and religiously pure ethnostate and they view the Jews as an impurity to purge. A lot of leftists in the west feel that the caucasian west is an imperialist, colonialist power that steals land from brown skinned natives and calls them terrorists when they fight back. They ally in a red-green alliance against Israel.
Not all of us view this issue through that lens.
What a coincidence! A lot of Israelis want the same thing!
…it wasn’t a “gotcha.”
Genocide isn’t something that might happen “given long enough.”
The genocide convention says:
Bolding mine. The important part is “intent.”
That’s a threshold that a significant number of humanitarian agencies, along with a broad consensus of genocide scholars, think has been met here. They’ve published reports that outline in detail why they think this is the case.
It’s why South Africa bought a case to the International Court of Justice. Again: I’ve cited their submission up-thread. The evidence was strong enough that the ICJ ordered several interim measures (again, cited up thread) to Israel in order to prevent genocide. Isreal ignored them.
The evidence that each of these agencies has presented and the evidence that was presented to the International Court of Justice are significant and quite overwhelming. Normally intent is the hardest element to prove. But in Isreal’s case, they just “tweeted it out.”
Again: this isn’t a gotcha. My intent here is to explain why I think these hypotheticals are meaningless. I think pretending you have “supreme executive power for a single day” trivializes what’s at stake here and the urgency with which the international community needs to act.
This isn’t a “settler” problem. This is the Israeli government attempting to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian people. They did that during the conflict, at times imposing a total siege on food. They did that by deliberately targeting infrastructure, by systematically targeting the healthcare system, by systematically targeting healthcare workers, journalists, academics, police, by destroying schools and Mosques and universities and civic buildings.
This here really is emblematic of the problem of your position:
Under what legal theory does Israel have the right to decide what does or doesn’t get into Gaza? There isn’t one. The blockade that has been in place over Gaza for decades was illegal under international law. It’s why Gaza is still considered occupied. (Even more so now that Israel controls over 60% of the land in Gaza).
The issue isn’t the ceasefire. You had “supreme executive power for a single day,” but you didn’t do anything about the torture camps.
I believe we no longer can pretend that stuff like this wasn’t happening. And if you are wondering why Israel is becoming less popular and why over 70% of Democrat voters think they should stop financially supporting Israel’s war machine, it’s because of this.
This was the first live-streamed genocide. Over the course of a couple of years I watched as people I followed online stopped posting…because they had been killed. Every single night I’d see the most horrific scenes. Babies with no head. Parents scooping up what was left of their children in garbage bags. There were the Al Shifa massacres. The GHF massacres. The Flour massacres. The Nuseirat massacre. The paramedics’ massacre. We had the total siege in 2025 that engineered a famine. American doctors who spent time in Gaza return with stories about how children were deliberately targeted by drones.
I watched this happen live.
IDF soldiers sent a zip-tied prisoner into Nasser Hospital with a message that the hospital had to be evacuated. His mum, who was in the hospital at the time, pleaded with him not to return, but he said he had to because if he didn’t, then everyone else would be in danger. So he left. And the IDF shot him dead. Three times in the chest.
It’s these atrocities, these war crimes, that are very much the point. The IDF even murdered three of their own escaping hostages; they had their hands up in surrender, but they shot them anyway. Two of them died instantly; the third was wounded but escaped. He was persuaded to exit his hiding place and then was promptly shot and killed.
There is a generation that witnessed that. A generation that doesn’t care that a lifetime ago the PLO did something or about the history of the region or historical context. None of that matters. What matters is what is happening right now. It’s a generation that got literally beaten up on campuses, kicked out of their housing, and fired from their jobs. A generation that is being gaslit by the establishment that pretends that the atrocities they witnessed didn’t happen.
There is no going back on this.
Under international law, Isreal is illegally occupying Palestine. It stands credibly accused of genocide in Gaza and of committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. We don’t use these words casually or lightly. We are well aware of what they mean. The ceasefire and the settlers are just a tiny piece of a much larger picture.
Then, for the last time, we don’t agree on any number of issues. We don’t agree on first causes, levels of justification, or shared responsibility so I don’t think we can ever come to a mutual understanding. Which, as I said 3-4 posts ago, is fine. I’ll leave the discussion to you rather than arguing unproductively and creating discord. Peace.
The legal theory that when your latest war of annihilation against your neighbor fails once again, you don’t get to dictate terms.
Hamas launched the war, they lost, and now you’re asking why they should suffer having terms dictated to them?
I guess you think they didn’t lose and should carry on fighting, then?