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Pasha sounds like an ideologue with too many opinions and too few facts. First of all there is no genocide in Gaza , the fact that this delusion has continued for this long is astonishing. The numbers hamas pumps out are completely tampered with and problematic in many many ways. Israel is a nuclear power , and even if it wasn't , it still has shown the capability to take arab coalitions 1 versus many. The dramatic tone in his words reminds me of a jihadi hoping for victory over the jewish enemy. It's over buddy , you tried many times , it ain't happening. The two things we have learned from this war is , firstly , the complete inability of the western civilian , and by extension politician, to understand what war actually is and secondly the strength of propaganda which has managed to convince westerners that Israel is commiting something even close to a genocide and killing kids on purpose. Absolute nonsense. None of these things will matter much in the future since it this exact weakness in the western constitution that will make war more and more common until the Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan or the russians attempt to grab a chunk of something they deem russian (or both ) and all hell breaks loose.
It is a genocide. First off 80% of the population of Gaza are there because they or their ancestors were forced into Gaza and have been locked in Gaza ever since.
Israel has denied them food, bombed them at an astounding rate and murdered tens of thousands of people. Judaism is a religion which holidays are celebrations of Bronze age genocides of neighbouring tribes and that rhetoric has been used liberally during the war. While Israeli soldiers have been committing war crimes on an industrial scale they haven't been shy about referencing their historic genoicides.
Israel has shown that it is incapable of of taking an area the size of a city against an enemy with no logistics. The war started with Israeli soldiers crying in a bathroom of a well fortified position while getting smoked by men in sandals, and ended with Israelis being unable to fight. Israel has ended up deeply divided and is in a permanent state of crisis. Israels situation today is similar to the situation of French Algeria in the 50s or Vietnam in the 60s. They have a population that hates them and the cost of containing it is too great. Israel isn't a sustainable state and the Arabs know that they can outlast them as long as they sustain the pressure.
Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor. The cowardly and brutal fighting style has once again reminded Europeans why the jewish mindset is fundamentally incompatible with the western mindset and how the Semitic/MENA culture simply is not anything we want to deal with. Israel's popularity has plummeted in the west, especially among younger people who consume their news through social media, which is less controlled by the ADL. The same Jewish institutions who attack westerners for the slightest ethnocentrism have the chutzpah to try to justify bombing the Christians in the middle east so they can build summer homes on the west bank.
Since densely populated urban centres have become commonplace, how many Europeans have comported themselves in such a manner in wartime? There was plenty of deliberate bombing of exclusively civilian targets on the part of the Allies in the second world war, for example (Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki). Likewise the deliberate bombing of villages by Americans in the Vietnam war. Evidently this "cowardly and brutal" fighting style is not unique to Jews.
And that's not even addressing the obvious point, that civilian collateral damage is literally unavoidable when engaged in a conflict with a belligerent which employs guerrilla warfare tactics and uses civilians as human shields, fully anticipating - even hoping - that they will get caught in the crossfire.
None of these cities were purely civilian targets, particularly if you think military industry is fair game. Hiroshima was a Japanese army headquarters, and at Nagasaki the bomb detonated between an arsenal and an arms factory, while the Doolittle raid hit an aircraft carrier and various industrial targets (and also civilian buildings, but AFAIK the Raiders were not instructed to target e.g. schools). The Dresden bombing was planned to hit German industrial centers and a railroad yard - there were apparently some ancillary military assets there (such as barracks) but the real target was the military industrial center that was believed to be there.
Now, that being said, I tend to agree with your overall point - there's certainly a case to be made that these bombing raids were not proportionate and therefore not justified under the laws of war. But there were certainly military or at a minimum industrial targets relevant to the war effort at all four of those locations.
This is also true for Gaza.
Yes, I agree – Gaza, as a whole, is not a purely civilian target. This, at least in my estimation, does not mean that carpet bombing it is necessarily a proportionate response – particularly given that modern precision-guided weaponry and the lack of Gazan air defenses means that Israel faces a different calculus than the Allies did during World War Two (and even then, from what I know, I think you could reasonably argue at least some of the Allied bombing strikes weren't justified).
Note that I am not saying the Israelis have been carpet-bombing Gaza – I do not believe that to be a correct description of their actions. Just pointing out there's a material difference at play.
This is the piece of the puzzle that I think you are missing. The bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and dozens of other strategic air raid targets are totally unjustifiable by modern standards. They fail the tests of both proportionality and distinction. Were we to be using the standards of the allies in WWII (which were still higher than the standards of the Axis) then Israel turning the Gaza strip to rubble with carpet bombing or nukes would be, if not justifiable, at least comfortably within the window of normality.
Dresden, perhaps. With Hiroshima and Nagasaki it depends on if you take into account that they won the damned war. Critics like to not count that part. If you balance Hiroshima and Nagasaki against continued conventional warfare to a conclusion, they look a lot more proportional.
I wouldn't count myself as a critic of the atomic bombings. It was a war crime in a war that was war crimes from beginning to end. Was it justifiable (in the moral sense) on the basis that not dropping the bombs would have resulted in ultimately a far worse outcome for all involved? Personally, I think so. But under the modern Law of Armed Conflict, such a bombing would not even be close to passing muster.
Sure, in hindsight it probably won the war, but all military acts are designed to win the war in some sense. That does not give all actors carte blanche to do anything they want on the basis that it may just be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Ostensibly, the military infrastructure of Hiroshima was the true target of the bombing. the ~100k collateral civilian deaths caused by the bomb would certainly not be considered proportional to the military value of destroying those enemy assets.
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