Smapti is Pitted

The BBQ Pit
1681

Okay. Murderers are an existential threat to me and any other individual. If I came up with a plan that would kill all murderers, but would also kill 10 innocent people for every murderer, would you say that was okay thing to do?

Or would you realize that there is no practical way to use violence to eliminate the existence of all murderers?

That’s where we are here. Except I’m being very conservative with the numbers of Palestinians being killed or which will be killed based on Israel’s current plans. They’re using weapons that aren’t designed to be used in populated places.

While eliminating Hamas is a viable long term goal, it is not a viable short term one. The US spend 20 years trying to eliminate Al Qaeda with military force. What happened?

The whole idea that they need to eliminate Hamas first is fucking stupid. It only justified a forever war.

The actual goal of a proper military action would be to significantly destroy their fighting abilities, and get started working on fixing their ridiculous intelligence failure so they’ll actually next time know ahead of time that something is being planned stop it before the attack actually happens.

Long term, you need a fucking two state solution. Make it where Hamas doesn’t need to exist. Slowly deradicalize them until they’re just a normal government. You can’t beat an ideological war with violence.

@WalterBishop: I had intended to make a less angry post in reply to you and your more reasonable question. But I got distracted when I saw this angering post. Still, I think you can get most of what I was going to say from this. The elimination of Hamas is not a reasonable or necessary short term goal.

Because every person from Hamas they kill, they create at least two more new recruits. Eliminating Hamas is a decades long thing, and is not in any way a reasonable point to use to end the war.

And, whenever Israel does stop, Hamas will not be gone, any more than Al Qaeda or ISIS were gone. And yet, as it stands right now, millions of Palestinians will have either died from the way too big bombs that Israel is using or from starvation.

It’s not fucking hard not to block aid, like Israel did. How can any of you argue that that was a necessary thing? How was it necessary to create a famine that is currently present in northern Gaza? (Note real questions, BTW. It isn’t.)

I hate this argument that Israel is just doing what they had to do, when literally everyone has been saying what they could have done. Fucking Biden, who everyone thinks is pro-Israel, was telling Israel what they should do. Argh!

1682

Except, Gaza is 45 miles from Tel Aviv. Gaza has been flinging missiles at Tel Aviv (and other cities) for decades. Imagine Tijuana, Mexico doing the same to San Diego, California (which are a little closer). If you lived in San Diego you’d tell us that the US should not stop Tijuana from doing that? You’d live with missiles lobbed at you on a regular basis?

Now, let’s say Israel does as many want and just leaves Gaza. Stops the whole thing and goes home. Hamas is still there and it is a certainty they will start this all over again and start throwing missiles on a regular basis and the occasional rampage into Israel to kill anyone they can.

Is that the solution Israel should take?

1683

Glad to hear that Israel is doing everything perfectly with not a single mistake! Thanks for the education.

1684

Israel is utterly failing in their stated goals for many reasons, but the most significant is that their leaders refuse to put forward a long term plan for Gaza. Even if they manage to destroy Hamas (which I think is impossible on their current path), what happens afterwards? Without a plan that should have been in place months ago, Hamas just recreates itself, again and again.

Israel will fail (meaning the cycle of violence will repeat) as long as corrupt and malevolent people like Netanyahu are leading it.

1685

What are Israel’s options?

  • Leave Gaza and start the whole shit-show again.
  • Do a military occupation of Gaza on a massive scale (a different kind of shit-show).
  • Push all Palestinians out of Gaza and take it for themselves (making Israel a pariah in the international community…also a shit-show).

If there is a good option, or at least a less shitty option, I’d love to hear it. I do not see one.

Remember, Iran (at least, probably Russia too and maybe others) very much want the shit-show to continue and will work to see to that it does.

1686

It’s not the fault of Gazan civilians that Israeli leaders have pushed the country into a corner. That doesn’t justify continuing a war that has failed to do anything significant but kill thousands of Gazans. What should they do? Something other than “kill lots more civilians”.

I’ve suggested details on what Israel should have done in the other thread.

1687

Instead of looking for gotchas, I would suggest you actually read the stuff you reply to. You apparently didn’t even read what you quoted.

In what you quoted, I said eliminating Hamas is not a short term option. And elsewhere in my post, I also clearly said that degrading their military ability so that they can’t
viably attack again is a valid action. You’re literally asking me “but what if they don’t do the thing you said they should do?”

You also seem to be forgetting about the Iron Dome. You know, Israel’s defense that took out most of those missiles. The whole issue here is what happened in October when they were able to get past those defenses. That is the existential threat that they actually need to stop. Israel is not some sitting duck that allows every attack.

Israel had an intelligence failure because Hamas used more traditional offline communication, and they were relying on more technological stuff like radios and the Internet. That’s why they didn’t know that Hamas was planning this attack. If they’d known about it ahead of time, they could have stopped it. It’s not like Hamas’s attack is more sophisticated than anything Israel has or can stop.

Does that mean it’s Israel’s fault? No. But it does tell you that killing every single person in Hamas is not the only possible way to stop an attack. It shows that this rhetoric that they can only be safe if they kill them all is bunk.

And I’m not sure where to go from here. This is such a wide topic that any attempt at a conclusion just brings up more stuff. The entire paradigm that a lot of you have about this war is just flawed. When you heard Israel claim that they would accept nothing less than eliminating Hamas, that should have been a red flag.

They are making something they’ve been unable to do for decades as the criteria for ending this war. Something no other country has ever done with any other quasi-military terrorist group.

1688

I dunno. Maybe agreeing to the terms of the ceasefire that Israel was almost ready to sign before they reneged and went into Raffah?

You know, the one with the foreign neutral peacekeeping force that goes into Gaza, and which opens up the aid to save the Palestinians FROM THE FUCKING FAMINE THEY CAUSED. All the while working towards Palestinian self-governance and a path towards a two state solution.

It’s literally the plan that Biden has been pushing. But I guess you know more about foreign policy than the foreign policy experts.

That’s why this idea that Israel is doing the only thing they can is so ridiculous. EVERYONE has been telling them the better plan.

This is bullshit is why I so rarely talk about this here. I had thought that this thread, where we were calling out Smapti for his pro-Israel take would be fine, as I assumed that meant none of the rest of you bought into the same nonsense. But I guess not.

Israel has not been forced into these options. It has chosen them over the objections of the experts all along the way.

1689

The hubris in this…

Do you think a two-state solution is a new idea? It was part of the Oslo Accords back in the early 90’s. Here we are, 30+ years later and are they any closer to it?

Israel has rejected it and Hamas doesn’t seem keen on it either. Indeed, Hamas has reiterated that, two-state solution or not, their goal is still about ending Israel. They are explicit about this and have been since as long as they have existed.

Imagine having your next door neighbor tell you that their #1 goal in life is to kill you and your family and they will bend all their efforts towards that goal.

Sensing a groundswell of anti-Israel sentiment in the international community, Hamas has also begun flirting with the idea of a two-state solution. Khalil al-Hayya, who represents Gaza City on the suspended Palestinian Legislative Council and is a member of Hamas’s Qatar-based Political Bureau, stated that the terrorist organization would disband its military units, the al-Qassam Brigades, if a “fully sovereign Palestinian state” were recognized.

However, al-Hayya said separately to a London-based Arabic newspaper that any accommodation with Israel would merely be an interim measure and asserted a commitment to the “historic right to all Palestinian lands” — by which he means all of the former Mandate for Palestine, including what is now the State of Israel.

This is hardly surprising: Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, a ranting document of wild-eyed antisemitism, lays claim to “every inch of Palestine,” which it describes as “an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day.”

The charter was updated in 2017, but the revision was deeply ambivalent. There was a concession to the notion of a Palestinian state on the borders existing before the 1967 Six Day War, but Khaled Mashal, then chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau, told al-Jazeera at the time that “our national principles have remained unchanged. There is no contradiction.” The likelihood of Hamas and the government of Israel reaching a mutually intelligible understanding of a “two-state solution” is therefore small. - SOURCE

1690

It is the only thing that has the possibility of working, short of one side completely eliminating the other.

1691

But it won’t work because Iran (at the least*) absolutely does not want it to work and will work diligently to make sure it never happens (as they have done for decades with great success). It is trivially easy for them to stir the pot.

Until that is sorted I doubt we will ever see any peace there.

*Willing to bet Russia doesn’t want peace there and will work against it. Probably Turkey too and Syria and Yemen. Maybe Iraq and Egypt and maybe even Saudi Arabia (not sure about Jordan either). Hell, probably China as well.

1692

I hear ya. But what is one idea that is better than a two state solution?

1693

The IDF has been so successful in removing Hamas that Hamas has returned to parts of Gaza that were already “cleared”:

1694

Add Netanyahu and the Israeli right (i.e. Israel’s current government) to this list. ISTM that they’re actually the most important member of the “NEVER TWO STATE” coalition, alongside Hamas.

1695

Fair point. Another reason why a two-state solution is simply not in the cards no matter how much Biden wants to cling to it. I’m sure Biden knows it but he has nothing else but needs to look like he is doing something (a thing every US president has faced with peace in the Middle East).

It’s a mess all around and there really are no remotely good solutions in sight.

1696

There’s plenty of bad and there’s even worse. The IDF continuing to fuck everything up and kill thousands of civilians while Hamas is regaining control of parts of Gaza that were already “cleared” counts as even worse.

1697

And here I thought Israel was supposed to be genociding everyone and so there shouldn’t be anyone left to return to those areas.

1698

Goddamn, man. You might think something sounds clever and glib in your head, but maybe take a breath before you type it out for all the world to see? Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt, y’know?

1699

By the same logic, the fact that there are Holocaust survivors means that the Holocaust wasn’t a genocide. God you’re dumb.

1700

The Holocaust wiped out about two-thirds of European Jews.

The 34,000 casualties in Gaza thus far is about 1.5% of the population, and this war is almost over.

Some genocide.