Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
How are a bunch of dudes in pickup trucks and paragliders ever, EVER going to credibly threaten one of the most sophisticated armies on planet earth?
You say this like we didn't just have the Afghan war, with the US military fighting dudes in pickup trucks and with AKs and jerry-rigged IEDs.
Also, Israel is tiny It's literally about 9 miles wide from the border to the sea at one point, and it's only 20 miles from Tel Aviv to the border. How many people with AKs running around Boston would it take for the whole city to freak out and panic?
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Are the descendents of the Sudeten Germans and other Ostdeutsch who were ethnically cleansed out of eastern europe into Germany after WWII still living in refugee camps? Of course not. Population exchange is traumatic, but people can get on with their lives afterwards. The current never-ending simmer of terrorism and oppression is just categorically worse.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
“Israel wants to starve innocent people in order to ethnically cleanse the land for Israelis” is the reasonable takeaway to me, because there is no evidence of Hamas ever taking aid (1, 2),
The very first bullet point sub-head on your second link disproves your claim: "State Department disputes findings, cites video evidence of Hamas looting"
Also, there's plenty of mainstream coverage indicating that Hamas has been heavily involved in receiving food "aid" - look at this article from November last year, which outright admits:
Hamas' efforts to take a lead in securing aid supplies point to the difficulties Israel will face in a post-war Gaza, with few obvious alternatives to a group it has been trying to destroy for over a year and which it says can have no governing role. . . .
The new anti-looting force, formed of well-equipped fighters from Hamas and allied groups, has been named "The Popular and Revolutionary Committees" and is ready to open fire on hijackers who do not surrender, one of the sources, a Hamas government official, said. The official, who declined to be named because Hamas would not authorise him to speak about it, said the group operated across central and southern Gaza and had carried out at least 15 missions so far, including killing some armed gangsters.
They'll admit that Hamas is taking the aid meant for civilians if they can use Russell conjugation to make it sound pleasant - "securing aid supplies [from hijackers]" but when someone actually carries that thought through to its obvious and logical conclusion - that a combatant organization is taking aid meant for civilians - nope, no evidence!
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Unless it is Israel's intention to starve everyone in Gaza to death how does their current strategy deal with Hamas?
They are attempting to replace an ineffective aid stream that primarily benefits Hamas via confiscation and resale (UN channels) with another ineffective aid stream that attempts to cut out Hamas and provide aid directly to civilians (GHF aid, guarded by IDF and/or contractors). The goal is denying food aid to actual combatants (Hamas) and also denying combatants the ability to monetize aid by confiscating it and reselling it to the population, providing the combatants extra income and resources with which to carry on resistance.
It's not a complicated strategy.
It is not even clear to me that would be sufficient to end the threat of Hamas, as an organization, to Israel.
You are correct; Hamas is just the Gaza branch of the broader Muslim Brotherhood, which has many other branches in many other arab/islamicate countries. However, Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and the quasi-sovereign entity which attacked Israel on 10/7, therefore Israel's effort is concentrated against them. Other areas with Muslim Brotherhood parties which have not conducted such hostilities (e.g. the West Bank) are not subject to military operations.
Is literally ever member of Hamas in Gaza?
No, a bunch of them are sitting on stolen billions and living in Qatar and other luxe gulf states.
No one to pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone?
No, but if Israel were to target "everyone who might pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone" then you'd fault them for carrying on a regional rather than a local genocide; Catch-22 and bad-faith criticism.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
I doubt it; IIRC the beepers were used to "call up" Hezbollah members for service. If Hezbollah was already engaged in an all-out invasion of northern Israel as envisaged/desired by Hamas, there likely would have been no need to use/carry the beepers after the fighters had assembled and gone into combat.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Sorry, newborn baby, you are an immediate threat to this poor defenceless country and have to be crushed before you can attack it
Correct, this is what a democratic theory of sovereignty means and has always meant since the French revolution at least. If the people are responsible for empowering their government, then if a country aggresses, the people are responsible for that too.
If you don't want your people to suffer the consequences of war, don't start one. It's really not complicated.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Neither will Israel starve Gaza into releasing the hostages nor will Hamas rape Israel into recognizing a free Palestine. Nor were either Nazi Germany or the UK ever going to bomb each other into submission.
And yet Germany was starved into submission in WWI, Japan bombed into submission in WWII, Tigray starved/bombed into submission in Ethiopia, etc.
Both phrasings imply that there is some level of suffering at which point the other side will give in, that the cruelty is instrumental to achieve another terminal goal.
Yes, it is a truism that war is politics by other means.
While this might even be technically true (i.e. once the last Gazan starves, nobody will stop the IDF from retrieving the bones of the hostages) I think that the implication "and we already have made progress into making the other side give in" is simply false.
Your strawmanning aside, that's a nice hunch you have there - a shame if someone were to...test it.
In reality there is no clever terminal goal for which starving Gazans or murdering Jewish civilians is an instrumental stepping stone, so we can conclude that the cruelty is itself a terminal goal.
Blind assertion without evidence. It's quite clear that murdering Jewish civilians is envisaged as an instrumental stepping stone to "liberating" Israeli territory for Palestinians - Hamas and other Palestinian organizations openly say so. And it's not as if there is any shortage of Israeli press squabbling about the blockade, food aid issues, and what the ultimate political program that Israel should be pursuing w/r/t Gaza is (downstream of "10/7 can never happen again" of course), none of which you discuss or cite.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Given that IDF service is mandatory for everyone except the haredim, asking an Israeli about their opinion on the IDF is literally "do you like yourself and your neighbors?" - not terribly meaningful, or a useful reflection of Israeli opinion on state policy.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil.
As I understand it, the original conception for Oct. 7 was a surprise Hamas break-out, coupled with a simultaneous large-scale Hezbollah offensive, would pincer Israel and overwhelm its local defenses, potentially sufficiently to spark sympathetic uprisings in the West Bank or among Israeli arabs as well.
Notably, the Hezbollah component of the attack didn't happen, and good for the Israelis that it didn't because in terms of raw numbers of fighters and weapons, Hezbollah had a lot more than Hamas (prior to Operation Grim Beeper and collateral airstrikes, at least).
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.
Except that's a meaningful statement - "the acts of war undertaken so far have been insufficient to compel a favorable political resolution" - just glibly phrased.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
If you are the Israeli government, then yes, the lives of your citizens are more important than the lives of an adversary. That's what it means to be a nation-state.
Same for the US. I would expect the American government to prioritize the lives of Americans held abroad above the lives of citizens of enemy - or even of third party neutral - countries.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Even "pariah states" have friends somewhere; e.g. North Korea and the PRC.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Except there was a really loud leftist/arab group celebrating Oct. 7 basically immediately. There were "Al Aqsa Flood"/pro-Palestinian parades/celebratory demonstrations in several US cities in early October, 2024, and lots of random hang-glider imagery.
Huh! Interesting. What about a siege of a medieval city - not a fortress with just a military garrison, but an actual significant permanent settlement, probably including nearby farmers, villagers, etc who fled for the "safety" of the town when the attackers showed up - when the attacking army encircles the city and doesn't allow anyone or anything in or out?
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Does Israel actually want to be the ones distributing aid?
Yes, because they can prevent it from being directly hijacked by Hamas. (What hamas fighters do to Palestinians who take food to homes outside of Israeli-controlled safe zones is different, but that's a lot less efficient for Hamas than just seizing/being handed the aid while it's still loaded on the trucks as the UN was doing).
It was my impression that they kind of like the current situation, where Gaza mostly starves but it's not their fault directly
No, because that way Hamas controlled the aid and could continue to starve the population while keeping all the goodies for themselves to enable further armed resistance/rebuilding after the ultimate end of the war - and it will end, because the IDF doesn't have the full-time soldiery to keep up this occupation without calling up large numbers of reservists and disrupting the civilian economy.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
At the exact same time Israel declared independence, an ethnic cleansing/population exchange a literal order of magnitude larger was already going on in another part of the same empire.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Israel is a small state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
They have dug the world's largest tunnel network to shelter military personnel, deliberately intermingled it with the civilian population and vital civilian infrastructure, and denied those civilians the ability to shelter in it. They are trying to get their people killed.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
War crimes are only crimes insofar as both sides can agree to - and actually do - abide by particular rules of warfare, either customary or explicit by treaty. Insofar as one party either verbally refuses to or actually breaches those rules, they lose the protection of the rules and are subject to the whim of whatever the opposing party wants to do them (and can actually do/get away with doing).
Even the Red Cross accepts the concept of reprisal as a means of forcing non-conforming belligerents to shape up and fly right.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
No, because the Western-left position is oikophobic, and Israel is coded western and white because they're rich, technologically advanced, and don't play the noble savage or starving charity case. Also, there are a lot of thoroughly-assimilated western jews who in actuality have about as much to do with west bank settlers as boston unitarians have with Egyptian copts, but who fill in the western mind when they think of "jew." Also, the left has been hijacked by opportunistic arab/islamic in-group pandering.
As a result, the left is going to be anti-zionist until Israel either disappears or creates a desert and calls it peace.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
I think it is entirely reasonable to hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas. If I held the Israel government only to the standard of Hamas (whom I consider murderous thugs who need to be wiped from the face of the earth), then I would have to concede that it would be a good thing if NATO invaded Israel and occupied them for a few decades until they learned better.
No offense, but this is insane moon-logic to me, and I need help grokking it. It's completely alien to the traditional logic of international law - “it is impossible to visualize the conduct of hostilities in which one side would be bound by rules of warfare without benefitting from them, and the other side would benefit from rules of warfare without being bound by them.” (H. Lauterpacht, “The Limits of Operation of the Law of War” (1953) 30 British Year Book of Int’l Law 206, 212).
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Err, the west covers for sex trafficking kids all the time, and you don't need to be rich and powerful to get away with it (though it helps). Popular entertainers get away with it. Politicians cover massive-scale abuse - far beyond what Epstein is accused of - up and journalists look the other way to avoid having their foreign policies outed as idiotic, avoid having to be on the same side as icky migration restrictionists, or to avoid being called racist.
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