Dean
6d ago
It wouldn't be an imposition to them, and in fact they'd probably be thrilled to let you know if they had anything else. Researcher groups like that often love when their research is noticed, and policy-support research in particular loves to know when research they provided can change an opinion. You questions / testimony and reasoning why (concern of male disposability) and what assauged your concern (awareness of Ukrainian views on the subject) would be the sort of thing that might tailor future questions and such.
Well, I'll let you keep your good opinion a little longer, but I do have my irritation points. But in the spirit of trying to good faith questions-
One of the dominant trends of Arab/Muslim resistance movements over the last few decades has been a general commitment to blend-end strategies where rather than clearly identifiable uniforms insurgents will wear civilian clothes so they can pass for harmless civilians as soon as they ditch the weapons and adjust their clothes, and one of the trends of this conflict in particular is that Hamas has a strategy of maximizing civilian casualties by various forms. Hamas has a long habit of using human shield strategies in various ways, whether from launching rocket attacks from civilian residences while preventing the civilians from fleeing (so that Israel would be blamed for killing civilians in their homes if they counter-fire) to using civilians as couriers / carriers / observors supporting the armed members, and so on. The purpose of these types of strategies are exploit rules of engagement restricting fires in order to gain asymetric advantages, and to generate/exploit propaganda when the other side shoots back. To be clear- shooting people who appear to be harmless civilians is not actually against the laws of war if they are assisting a belligerant power, and there are tactics to deliberately conflate the categories.
There is no Abu-Ghraib-level scandal because this is a very well established, and not at all novel, tactic, and one which Hamas and the supporters of Hamas regularly acknowledge even as it obviously leads to more risk to civilians who might actually be honest neutrals. The Pro-Palestinian position is that the onus is on the Israelis to distinguish, even as the pro-Israeli position is that the onus is on the Palestinians to not deliberately obfusicate the differences. And given that the Hamas strategy as a whole is to run up the civilian casualty count in order to drive an international response against Israel, and that they will continue to do so, there's no real point to viewing it as a Abu-Ghraib scandal when no amount of Israel discretion will prevent the opportunity for video propaganda to be generated.
Further- and in a broader sense- if you accept that you need to stop a person with a bad practice, you have to be willing to endure the bad practice which the opponent will invoke in order to deter you. This is the classic 'if you are known to succumb to blackmail, your blackmailer will continue to blackmail you' except with civilian collateral. The casualties become scandals more in the contexts of mindsets where Israel is not accepted to have a need/right to stop Hamas that justies tolerating casualties (that Hamas will generate as a matter of strategy).
Note that this makes no claim on the veracity of any videos you may have seen, or whether they are/are not war crimes. However, video propaganda is very easy to generate since the presenter is the one who gets to present context and can remove it via editing or simply lack other perspectives needed for context on specific issues. A X minute video will rarely provide insight as to what happened Y minutes before the video.
The answer to both is yes. This is what happens when major trauma shocks hit a national culture, and this was an expected and intended result of the Hamas attack planning, as the propaganda strategy of, during, and since has been tailored to incite Israeli retaliation.
I find it unpersuasive.
It is a common refrain that moves agency to the Israelis rather than the Palestinians, a hyperagency versus hypoagency issue where the hyperagent's influence is treated as far more significant than local agent actions reducing them to the role of recipient. It's politically convenient and a sort of emotional cope for Israeli political opponents in the aftermath of a demonstrated lack of control to claim the current situation is actually the result of control by bad leaders, and it's also politically convenient and a form of morality laundering for opponents of Israel in general to claim that the Palestinian actions on 7OCT is really the responsibility of Israel leaders with agency. Agency arguments are a format by which moral responsibility is reduced from the hypoagent not on the basis of their individual morality, but subordinating it to structural paradigms that allocate moral responsibility for hypoagents who, by their nature, have the agency to act.
But the truth is nothing about what the Israels did in that theory dictated the results of 7OCT, or even that Hamas would win the Hamas-PLO power struggle by throwing PLO leaders off skyscrapers after a decisive electoral thumping when Gazan-Palestinians voted out a PLO broadly seen as corrupt and unpopular. There were many, many years of intervening choices, decisions, options, and failures by various actors that were required to reach the point. Selectively choosing to focus on one isn't particularly good analysis, even if it makes for good propaganda, because results and consequences are rarely so clear cut. (To be clear, they sometimes do- Osama Bin Laden directly changed his practices when a US Congressperson said on TV that the US was listening to his phone, which directly led to improved secrecy needed for 9-11, but these are much more often the exception than the norm in multi-agent problems.)
You are also using the much mis-used concept of blowback, which presents negative consequences in present times as a consequence of decisions in the past who are deemed bad because they resulted in negative consequences. However, blowback is banal when treated well, but can quickly become stupid when treated as something to avoid entirely because there is no such thing as major policies with no future costs. That framing of blowback is a bad decision analysis model, because it's retroactive rationalization that assumes clear causality (it judges people on how complex contexts turned out as if they should have known this would happen, when people don't actually make decisions with the benefit of knowing how all future things will unfold), because it negates the relevance of many other factors that contribute to a situation (Hamas was more popular than the PLO in the Gazan elections in part because running on a platform of genocide the jews is popular with the Gazan electorate, and in part because PLO was unpopular due to being corrupt, but not because Israel didn't target it as harshly decades ago- an alteranative genocide-the-jews party would still have had the conditions to succeed), and because it doesn't accept that even good / well justified strategies can deliver significant costs.
Just as a concept, think of strategy games with strategies which allow you to trade health / casualties / debuffs in exchange for potentially advantageous options: the costs and the benefits are both real, and inseparable, but the presence of costs doesn't mean it was an inferior option. You could expect to face equivalent of worse costs. However, pop-culture blowback analysis would be to fixate on the costs tied to the policy, and ignore / pretend that other costs wouldn't have happened if you chose the other options. To pick a video game trope, consider the habit of many players to not use their healing potions in RPGs because they might need it later in a tough boss fight. As a result, they either risk losing in a current fight for not using the resource, or they spend a lot of time grinding so they don't need the resource in the current fight when they could have spent the same time in a later area gaining more XP and better loot if they'd just pushed forward. Blowback analysis is the equivalent of critiquing the players who used the rare potion earlier because they did need one of those later, regardless of if they're in a better position or not (i.e. in an area where rare potions are easier to find with less grind).
To very much simplify how to evaluation policy decisions and strategies, the basis of merit of a choice isn't if bad results occur- it's whether more or worse bad results occur compared to the plausible alternative choices. Note that one of the points of a strategy for dividing the PLO would be so that no single Palestinian faction could cause a two-front war with a single call to uprising... and note that the current conflict is not a two front war. Would this have occurred if the nebulous organization of Hamas was defeated/absorbed into the PLO, creating a stronger for-war wing of the PLO? After the PLO was central Israeli in the first two Intifadas? You can't just assume that if the PLO had successfully absorbed the Hamas-minded parts of Palestinian society, it would have retained the same internal political balances that led to it's current status and avoided all the conflicts that Hamas wanted but it didn't.
To put it in different terms- is the current Gazan War an Israeli strategy failure, for there being a conflict, or a success, for a conflict being far smaller and more manageable than it would otherwise be?
And by similar alternatives: was the surprising success of Oct 7 and terribly delayed Iraeli response a Hamas strategic victory, for doing better than it expected, or was it in fact a strategic disaster, because it failed to ignite the regional conflict that they were aiming for in part due to the nature of the propaganda effect of doing better than expected?
Blowback analysis can't answer either of these, because it treats any blowback as proof of failure (or else it wouldn't be blowback), has no mechanism for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable costs, and no consistency for what it deems blowback to focus on.
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