Reply to Babale re: Hamas and Israel

[Kimstu]

@Sam_Stone

describe an alternate way of achieving the goal of deatroying Hamas, or alternatively, why Israel should allow Hamas to exist after such a heinous act.

Realistically speaking, I’m not sure that Hamas’s existence is something that Israel can choose to “allow” or “not allow”.

I remember very similar rhetoric in the US about “destroying” the Taliban and al-Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks. Twenty-two years after the invasion of Afghanistan and twenty years after the invasion of Iraq (both involving some notable war crimes on the part of the US), the Taliban is doing fine and al-Qaeda has ramified into Daesh/Islamic State and other terrorist organizations still doing a bunch of damage globally.

I support the capture and punishment of terrorists, but I’m not on board with subjecting civilians to massive amounts of war crime (or even small amounts of war crime) in order to pursue complete eradication of any terrorist organization, which past experience indicates is likely a futile goal anyway.

The only thing, AFAICT, that will substantially and permanently reduce the influence of violent terrorist movements in the Palestinian occupied territories is substantive change in Israeli policy so that Palestinians actually have equal rights and sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. And even that, IMO, won’t fully eradicate violent terrorism in the region.

So I think your putative simple binary choice between Israel “allowing” Hamas to exist or Israel “destroying” Hamas is a false dichotomy. I don’t see any realistic scenario in which Israel, while it continues to control and claim sovereignty over the Palestinian territories, can literally destroy Hamas. The most they can do is to severely knock back some current Hamas supporters and materiel while inflicting horrific collective punishment on tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians. (And most of the actually effective knocking-back part could probably be accomplished without the massive-war-crimes part.)

I was browsing around and found the following remarks I made on 29 September 2001:

@Kimstu

So I still don’t think it’s really justified to describe U.S. policy as “averse to violence”, or that we’re widely perceived as a “paper tiger”. It might be more apt to say that many people perceive us as a “mean but blind tiger”: when someone pulls our tail, we lash out with claws and teeth, but we can’t really tell and don’t very much care whom we get, as long as we get somebody. I think this is exactly how terrorists want us to be perceived, since they can use that in their spiel that we’re all cruel and dangerous oppressors who don’t care whom we hurt as long as we get our own way, so they must launch a holy war against us, blah blah blah. That’s why I think we need to be really, really careful and restrained about the use of violence, because whatever we do that attacks innocent victims (however unintentionally) will in the long run end up creating more terrorists than it kills.

Twenty-two years on, that remains true, not only regarding the US but regarding Israel or any other power.