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Let's talk about Israel and Palestine.
Okay, I can hear you sighing already. But before you look away, let's talk about Clausewitz.
War is a continuation of politics by other means. In our ideological age, where everything is political, it may not seem profound: but it establishes a commonality between the military and civilian where analogies can be made. Like, 'what if we have no ability to fight a war, but continue it anyway?' Could we just... filibuster, our enemies, until they give us the political ends we desire?
This concept is similar to the Trotskyite concept of 'no war, no peace'. (That the policy ended in disaster and Brest-Litovsk bodes ill.) In the Clausewitzian model, war is conducted between states. The loser gives concessions to the winner, with the assumption that even a bad peace is better than a bad war, that ending hostilities - even for the moment - is the best way to bring about revanchist policy.
The differential between Palestine and Israel in terms of military capacity is greater than ever: it was never at par, even in 1948. Seventy-five years later and the Arabs might as well be Ewoks against the Empire. Not to say that they lack the capacity to harm the Israelis, but they have no military capacity to enforce political goals on their enemy. Even now, their demands for a ceasefire are entirely one sided: they are simply outmatched in every conceivable military dimension.
There exists a hope in the Palestinian cause, that there will be a tipping point where they can present to the international community of some Israeli atrocity that will bring about a external intervention. It is the only card they have to play. But now that Israel has control of the food aid that goes into Gaza with the ousting of UNWRA, time is no longer on their side. Their enemy will never consent to a return to the former status quo, no matter how urgently the international community chastises them.
Not coming to terms and holding on for maximalist goals may seem like a cheat in insurgency warfare. But inevitably, reality and physical limits intrude onto the nationalist fantasy. It is chutzpah of the highest order to rely on the charity and good will of your enemy to feed your people. This conflict - indefinitely sustained by Soviet leftist dregs of the anti-colonialist cause - will come to an end not through some master stroke of diplomacy, but a famine long in the making.
Hamas sought to use international sympathy as a weapon, relying on the services provided by American and European NGOs so that they could devote all the funds they neglected to invest in their civilians into their military. Now that military is destroyed, they have no leverage at all. The Israelis are not bluffing. They will not give in, no matter what the pressure. They are perfectly willing to watch Gaza starve until some entity comes out of the territory that they can negotiate with.
As Calgacus would say, "They make a desert and call it peace." Modern problems require Roman solutions. The fatal Palestinian mistake was that they always assumed Israel would come to the negotiating table. After fifty years of fruitless negotiation, the Israelis finally have had enough. There will be no more deals, no more bargains. Just the short, terminal drop to destruction.
Look at it from the perspective of Hamas. Their victory condition is to destroy Israel and build an Islamic theocracy in its place. They might be fanatics, but they are not stupid to the point that they realize they have no chance to defeat Israel on the battlefield.
Before the Oct-7 attacks, Israel was in the process of normalizing its relationship with Arab neighbors. An entrenched peaceful coexistence would be the death knell to Hamas ambitions. While killing Jews is always seen as a good thing by Hamas, I think the real objective was to provoke Israel into destroying Gaza.
I think that on a grand strategy level, everything is going according to plan for Hamas. Gazan kids are getting killed through bombs or starvation, but that it just their purpose in this war, they become martyrs (which is a pretty great outcome for them, if you believe the nutjobs) and while Israel has certainly killed a lot of Hamas fighters (again, not a bad outcome for the nutjobs), they have barely made a dent in the population of Gaza. Now Israel is in charge of the caring for a civilian population which hate them and can not feed itself. This is a pretty sweet trap to place your opponent in. Sure, the IDF can start genociding in earnest, but likely even Trump's MAGA base will have enough before they are half-way done. Meanwhile, their support in the rest of the West is evaporating.
If the IDF wanted to enact an Endloesung to their Gaza problem, the best thing way to accomplish it would have been nuking Gaza directly in response to Oct-7. Most of the Western world (apart from the glider-button minority) was still in shock. People are generally scope insensitive, their reaction to "the IDF killed 2M in a day" will not be that different to them killing merely a few k. It would have been a PR disaster (nukes!) and likely cost them most of their Western support, but any way they try to genocide their way out of the Gaza mess now (starvation? targeted bombing of civilians?) would cost them a lot more support. Not that I think that genocide is the answer here, obviously.
I think that the two responses which would have been reasonable by Israel would have been to either not do much (drone strike a few Hamas commanders, rescue a few hostages) or to go into Gaza with the goal of occupying it for a few decades (in the knowledge that they will get a lot of their soldiers killed in the process).
No, it's not.
It was not expected that Israel would curb stomp Hezbollah and Iran, and that Assad's regime would fall.
The Axis of Resistance is pretty well fucked for the indefinite future.
First off, does Hamas really care about what happens to Assad or Iran? They take Iranian weapons but they also backed the Syrian rebels against Assad, they aren't exactly a full on proxy of Iran like Hezbollah. If anything the fact that Iran was ultimately dragged into the fight despite desperately trying to stay out of it directly is a Hamas W.
Second, the damage to the AoR seems pretty overblown:
Syria is a real loss but Assad was always the weakest link and his fall had more to do with his own incompetence than Israeli brilliance, otherwise they would have rolled southern Lebanon the way Al-Jolani rolled Syria.
Assad, no. Iran and Hezbollah, yes. One needs supplies.
Hamas is Sunni, not Shia, but the shared devotion to destroying Israel gave them an otherwise strange set of Islamic allies.
Sure, they wanted the whole Islamic world to rise up. The more the merrier. Except for the part where Iran and Hezbollah got their ass handed to them. That's not the result one wants for one's allies.
This is not true. Israel was largely considered to be the loser in that conflict, or at least having underperformed. In 2025, Israel blew the fuck out of Hezbollah after demonstrating that Hezbollah was almost entirely militarily ineffective.
Hezbollah is much weaker than in 2006, and will remain that way if the Israelis aren't exaggerating about their intent.
They are doing pretty well, yes. But they are overall the least important bit as demonstrated by the fact that they're having a great time while their allies get wrecked.
Thanks to Trump, so far yes the regime survives. However, it's in a much weaker position than it was before, and longstanding problems like the economy continue to worsen. I've seen some credible-sounding reports that moderates/reformers are rising in power/prominence due to the embarrassing defeat, and how much Khamenei is in touch with reality is hard to know. His succession will be much more fraught than it would have been if it had happened without the 12-Day War.
Iran's missile production and launching capacities were hammered pretty hard, so you really have to squint to see the silver lining in the dark clouds of "we launched a bunch of our prized military capability at Israel and had nearly zero military effect."
It remains to be seen what Israel's red lines will actually be for e.g. Iran rebuilding certain military capacities. But the IAF demonstrated the ability to conduct air strikes at will and there's little hope for Iran that they can suddenly acquire or develop top-tier air defense systems. And assassinations on the ground are also always a fun fear for Iranian leaders.
Who suggested otherwise? Israel was not the primary factor there. The Turks did more, I think. Plus the fact that Iran and Russia both had to back off the level of support given their other military priorities.
It's not a great time for Iran. They spent decades preparing to put up a good fight against Israel and/or the U.S. and in a matter of days they were revealed to be a paper tiger against Israel, with just a dash of U.S. involvement. They can try to pretend they did more damage to Israel than they actually did, but they can't deny their own high losses, or that Israel could do it all again.
The overwhelming majority of Hamas's supplies are made in Gaza, though. There's a blockade, after all.
Yet the ceasefire imposed after 2006 and resulting situation, other than the assassination of Nasrallah, was identical from Hezbollah's perspective. They were bombed one-sidedly after the ceasefire was signed, they were repressed by the Lebanese government and they were portrayed as being incapable of fighting again. If anything the Lebanese government of 2006 was both more powerful and more explicitly anti-Hezbollah than the current one.
To this day the majority of Israelis from northern communities have yet to return and a significant proportion have stated they'll never return. Considering that the goal of the Lebanon War was to return Israelis to the border I'd call that a failure.
When Israel actually blew the fuck out of the PLO their ground forces weren't held up at the first villages they entered, they pushed all the way to Beirut, forced the PLO out of Lebanon and occupied all of southern Lebanon for the next two decades. Whereas this time around they were unable to even conquer the first frontline villages of Khiam and Al-Naqoura without getting, as you say, "blown the fuck out".
All the credible reports I've heard from Iran are that the hardliners are the ones rising in power while the reformers were humiliated by getting betrayed in the middle of negotiations. If your story were accurate we would expect new concessions in negotiations whereas in reality Iran hasn't moved an inch and has refused to even reopen negotiations.
An odd comparison, how is Israel's economy doing? Last I checked the Houthis had entirely shut down the Port of Eilat, the Bazan Gas Refinery is still partially shut down more than a month after eating Iranian missiles and the Israeli deficit is gigantic. And this is in a world with unlimited American and European backing, what do you think happens to Israel's economy in a world where it's trade partners turn hostile?
Iran's missile production and launching capacities are quite literally underground. There's zero evidence that they took significant losses in that respect, whereas the fact that it took less than 10 missiles on day 12 to land hits when on day 1 it took more than a hundred proves that Israel's air defenses were collapsing. If anything it's the Israeli strikes that had zero military effect.
clearly you missed the funeral where half the "dead IRGC hardliners" miraculously turned up alive. Again: if the hardliners lost big then where are the diplomatic concessions?
Israel has demonstrated that it can launch missiles from over the horizon and hit targets in Iran, but they don't have the ability to actually fly directly over Iran dropping bombs, something that would be necessary to inflict any damage to their underground strategic infrastructure.
If anything, the fact that Israel barked so hard about the possibility of resuming strikes is another indication that they lost. Because Israel doesn't bark when they want to bomb Syria, they just do it. Syria actually has zero air defenses, and there is actual footage of Israeli jets flying freely over Syria dropping bombs. There is no such footage of Israeli jets over Iran.
Again, if Israel didn't receive an ass-whooping from Iran they would still be bombing Iran. Remember, Trump also told them to stop bombing Syria and Lebanon and they were ignored.
You think those tunnels to Egypt were for tourists? This is a decades-long relationship.
They were "unable" or that wasn't their plan? I'm just aware of what the general sentiment was about how things went in 2006 vs. 2025 and in the latter it's widely agreed Hezbollah got beaten to an embarrassing degree. The fact that Israel could do it without a major ground invasion adds to Hezbollah's embarrassment.
I haven't seen a good story on things for like a month now. It's funny to see the sentence "hardliners rising in power" since that's their default position for the last very long while, minus a bit when Rohani looked like he might be succeeding. My belief is that it's pretty unlikely Iran goes the pragmatist route and we see a renewal of the conflict.
The real negotiations with Iran tend to happen in secret. That was true of the JCPOA and I imagine it will be true for anything else. They have until almost the end of August to deal with the E3 re: snapback sanctions.
I will say shit like this is hilarious in that Iran's secular nationalists used to run the place, but were friendly with Israel. If the theocracy goes there's no reason to be in conflict with Israel! That article is also funny because it never seems to mention the fact that your average would-be protestor knows that they're likely to get gunned down right now if they try anything for any reason, so the lack of protests might not be because of greater solidarity.
Do you have any idea how weak Iran's economy is? Israel is orders of magnitude better off, which is why it can win a war against a country nearly 10x its size.
Two survivors is not "half" of what was claimed, lol. There were a lot of coffins.
Ok now you're just being delusional and I have to doubt you know what a "credible" source is here. Iran's launchers are not all underground. That's total nonsense. You have to believe that the IDF is just lying I guess and that all those bombs they dropped didn't do much.
So the IAF is just lying about this? Also they were dropping JDAMs and bunker busters. There are photos of the damage.
You're confused about how Israel decides to do things in light of U.S. pressure and risk. Israel does not want to piss Trump off about Iran.
Oh so you don't believe the footage of Iran shooting down F-35? The IAF had drones over Iranian airspace, which are much easier to shoot down. Hard to believe they didn't have faster combat aircraft dropping munitions. I'd imagine that the aircraft stayed much higher in Iranian airspace because of the risk being much higher than in Syria.
In your mind Iran came out better here? Israel called off aircraft mid-flight because Trump demanded it, but you think Israel was actually glad to stop.
That's incredible. What are you reading that causes you to credulously believe Iranian propaganda like this?
If we're to believe the IDF those have been out of commission since they took over the Philadelphi Corridor over a year ago. Also, both Israeli casualty reports and Qassam combat footage overwhelmingly shows the use of indigenous IEDs and other weapons that could only be manufactured locally. It would be silly for a cell based organization like Hamas to depend on imports.
The IDF very clearly tried to take Al-Khiam for a photo-op at the former detention center and failed. The primary difference between 2006 and 2025 is expectations: they both featured failed ground offensives but in the former case Netanyahu avoided making big promises about destroying Hezbollah forever like Ehud Olmert did (though I do recall him claiming he'd occupy everything south of the Litani, a goal he fell well short of) whereas Hezbollah set a goal beyond simply surviving that they weren't able to meet.
T&P claims that JDAMs were used but the citation used to "prove" this is an article which only ever claims that jets took off carrying JDAMs, with none of the strikes identified as using bunker busters or even regular bombs. Nearly all were above ground soft targets like buildings and the strikes on underground facilities were aimed at entrances rather than the repeated direct strikes on bunkers one would expect if Israel actually had total freedom of operation over Iran. Ironically even your own pro-Israeli sources basically support my thesis.
So far your only source is the IDF and people who uncritically believe claims made by the IDF. And yes, the IAF is definitely lying because by day six they were reduced to reposting footage of destroyed missile launchers from day one. If they actually owned the skies and were picking off Iranian launchers all war then why did all the footage come out right at the beginning and then get reused?
If Iran were legitimately totally defenseless then why would Israel care about what Trump thinks? Again, they've had no problem pissing him off about Lebanon and Syria. If anything Trump has been significantly more friendly to Jolani than the Iranians so you'd think pissing him off about Syria would be more risky. For that matter, why would he care? Every indication is that he had no problem with Israel one sidedly bombing Iran forever, it was only when Iran started landing counterpunches that he became interested in deescalation.
On the flipside, they had drones that were shot down so it's just as easy to imagine that Netanyahu simply didn't bother taking the risk. In this case the burden of proof that Israel was dropping bombs in Iranian airspace is on you, since basically all of the identified strikes look like the result of air launched missiles, not bombs.
On the first day Israel went for a decapitation strike followed by regime change while the Iranians were totally caught with their pants down. Yet the regime did not collapse and after a few hours of chaos they reorganized and proceeded to return fire in sufficient volume to break Israeli AD nearly every day. They hit strategic sites at will, including the Weizmann Institute, the Bazan oil refinery and Camp Moshe Dayan. Not with piddly Hamas bottle rockets but seriously destructive ballistic missiles, a single of which was able to destroy enough real estate in Tel Aviv to leave 2000 Israelis homeless.
In contrast, the quality of Israeli targets fell considerably; on day 1 they were wiping out commanders with ease, on day 12 they were reduced to hitting a giant clock in Tehran and hitting a prison, killing a bunch of dissidents and achieving the nearly impossible feat of making Iranian dissidents cheer for the IRGC. America blew through nearly a quarter of the GLOBAL ballistic missile interceptor stockpile, suggesting that Israel would already be defenseless by day 12 if not for American help.
Had the war continued it would have continued to get worse and worse for Israel. Fortunately Israel was able to leverage the threat of direct American offensive involvement beyond choreographed bombings that result in zero injuries, otherwise the Iranians would have had little reason to agree to a deal.
Right off the bat, let's see if you can admit a clear factual error or two. I really should have done this before writing the rest, but ah well.
Do you acknowledge that Iran's ballistic missile production facilities and launchers are not all underground? This is a very easy one.
Do you acknowledge that the volume of Iran's launches against Israel dropped off considerably? Here's a clue: https://jinsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Iranian-Ballistic-Missile-Estimates-6-26-2025-6.pdf
Frankly it's remarkable to see someone try to flip the script on one of the most one-sided wars in history, but then I suppose the Egyptians tried to pretend they had won the Yom Kippur War.
Never did I say the majority of their stock was Iranian. But Iran has been a major supporter for decades.
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/10/19/hamas-used-iranian-produced-weapons-in-october-7-terror-attack-in-israel/
https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/captured-documents-reveal-how-iran-smuggles-weapons-via-syria-and-jordan/
That's not particularly relevant in evaluating the overall status at the end of the conflict, where Israel overwhelmingly kicked Hezbollah in the nuts by killing its leader, a bunch of its personnel, maimed a shit ton more of them, and also significantly reduced their missile stockpile, all while taking relatively light casualties and rendering the missile threat mostly ineffective.
Tellingly, they didn't do much to help out their pals in Tehran. Weird way to behave if actually they weren't hurting so badly. Kinda defeats the point of having an alliance.
Why would Israel care about what it's single most important ally thinks about a conflict it has been assisting with? Seriously? The stuff in Syria is small potatoes.
The most retarded bit of logic here is that if we, for the sake of argument, grant that you're correct about only IAF drones poking around Iranian airspace then, wow, the IAF is really capable of doing a lot of damage to buildings using air-launched missiles at scale. Also, hitting the Mashhad airport at 1400 miles strongly implies operating within Iranian airspace even with ALBMs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-air-superiority-lets-strike-191600442.html
So all those photos of IAF aircraft loaded with bombs were just for propaganda purposes? Why? Who are they trying to convince? The U.S. and Iranian militaries know the reality regardless.
There's no good reason to believe the IAF is lying here, but you need it to fit your highly evidence-challenged view that actually Iran was the one winning this conflict. The real irony here is that the Iranians don't contest that the IAF was operating in Iranian airspace, they just pretended to shoot an F-35 or two down. You're doing more work than even the Iranian propagandists!
Why send drones on obvious suicide missions if air defenses are not suppressed much at all?
The IAF demolished large buildings and took out at least one command bunker, we know. Hard and expensive to do that with merely missiles.
How many missiles do ya reckon this took? Would the IAF really use its fancy LORAs on a TV broadcaster?
https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/israel-iran-missile-attacks-photos-irib-cfc83190c9bc8f84db79f7624c1309b0
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-us-weapons-prove-themselves-in-iran-strikes-1001512893
There's plenty of evidence Israel dropped bombs in Iran, just none you find compelling enough that you have to accept it. You resist the obvious because your narrative collapses if actually the IAF did have air dominance and you can pretend they were going to run out of ALBMs before Iran ran out of its ballistic missiles.
Trump's change in preference came right after the U.S. strikes on the nuclear facilities, obviously. The volume of Iranian missile strikes was going down and Israel was not taking meaningful damage relative to Iran.
Israel did not expect to get regime change that easily. Come on now. As far as we know, the Supreme Leader was not targeted (whether by impossibility or choice I'm not sure).
No, they very much did not. All those missiles, so few strategic sites hit. Blowing up grandmas doesn't win wars, even when they were able to do that.
This is backwards logic. The IAF could afford to start hitting secondary targets on day 12 because they had been so successful the previous 11 days. It's not like they suddenly couldn't hit Tehran, as you've pointed out.
There was no "deal" here. It was just an unofficial ceasefire. If Iran was on the verge of really turning the tide against their main enemy who did a surprise attack and killed a bunch of its top leaders and destroyed a bunch of their military and nuclear sites, why would they have stopped instead of getting even? They knew the U.S. really did not want to get drawn in beyond the attack on the nuclear sites. Why would Iran let Israel get away with it?
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I think you're 80% right, but they underestimated how hard the counter-punch would be, and now the (original) plan is dead. Israel is likely going to be right back on track to normalize relations with their neighbors in a few years, they lost more manpower and leadership than anticipated, and although yes they won some major international sympathy, for Hamas themselves it doesn't look like they will be able (or allowed) to reassert themselves as the leadership of Gaza again (because they'd just wait 15 years and then try the same playbook a second/third time). So yeah, part "success", but if the ultimate goal is an overthrow of Israel then I think it's a bit of a wash strategically. Of course, we should say that the Hamas plan is absolutely cynical and even evil. It's all the more sad that Israel reacted so, well, predictably.
At any rate people are not as scope insensitive as you say. If anything, isn't the Gaza war a great example of how people are sensitive to scope? Before the war, it was pretty common for Israel to have a rough 10 to 1 ratio for retaliation. Kind of a crappy baseline for human rights, but that's what the reality was usually. And sure enough, right about when they blew past that standard, was right when sympathies started to swing. At the beginning there was plenty of support because most people could recognize it's their 9/11, and states don't respond meekly to things like that. Even as we speak Israeli support continues to slowly ebb, and that's because what, 1200 Israelis died, and they've killed more than 12,000. We're up to what, almost 60k? I've called it something like 'callousness bordering on genocide' for a while now, which upsets a lot of people on both sides (evidence in favor?) but I think that continues to be true... but about a few months more of it and I think even I might finally be calling it a genocide. There's a fixed amount of food that must be imported for survival, and Israel isn't meeting that, and so it's obviously their responsibility. And seriously, Israel, what's the reconstruction plan? There was a recent blowup over a giant humanitarian camp plan, which is already controversial, but Netanyahu vetoed the plan because... he thinks the military can do it faster? Meanwhile, nothing happens. Yikes.
Is this a genocide?
Loosely, yes. Although in the case of Israel and Gaza, Israel fully controls all the entry and exit points, and in theory controls (and asserts the sole right to control) all the internal area as well, whereas WWI Germany still had options, just worse ones, so we can't shift quite the same burden of blame on their opponents when they themselves can pick some up. So for those reasons I'd shy away from using the term as such; overall however there's a reason WWI is a major step toward "total war" as a concept. I mean we could get in the weeds about the different 'axes' for which we judge a genocide, but I'd say it falls on the 'spectrum' somewhere.
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?
Depends on the siege. Some effectively were genocides of a sort. They could even be religious. Anciently Carthage, as traditionally recorded at least, certainly counts. I mean they tore down all the buildings, killed or sold into slavery all the inhabitants, and salted the earth after (expensive, yet actually very effective, at destroying future crop yields). That's like, textbook genocide, right? Though I'd note that one of the aforementioned axes that deserves calling out is the type of 'intentionality' behind it. In a siege, are you, the invader, secretly (or not so secretly) hoping they don't surrender because you hate them, or are you just annoyed that the city is in your way and resisting? And do you view the civilian occupants of the city as unrelated/irrelevant, as hostages to take or to punish if you can't get to the military opponents, or the actual enemy themselves? Did you actually kill lots of civilians, or did you just burn down their houses and leave? Did you encourage rape and looting and murder, or was there an attempt at discipline? (And then there's the Mongols, who would commit atrocities on purpose, but out of pure, heartless political calculus to maintain their reputation and reinforce their rule, which is almost like a third way)
To a significant extent it's a bit of a loaded word, especially due to modern-day connotations that said genocide or pogrom is state-supported or directed, and I think some leftist scholars and activists go a little too crazy in trying to slice and dice and define it (often in overly broad terms) or even predict it in an attempt to stop it internally in its nascent state (I view the "Ten Stages" as a bad example of this). The fact remains, however, that severity, intentionality, passion vs premeditation, causality, etc. all matter when we assign punishment for crimes like murder on an individual level. We see this in a very real way in state sentencing guidelines and the criminal code! First vs second degree murder vs manslaughter sounds, casually, like a ridiculous distinction until you actually attend a trial with all the messy details. Why not attempt to consider the same factors when it comes to group actions, especially if there's a latent implication that other groups or states have a moral duty to intervene at some point along the way? The bystander effect for states is just as real as it is for individuals, right?
I think the use, or even abuse, of the term as a political cudgel is sometimes cynical, sometimes idealistic, but virtually everyone other than the hardcore realpolitikers can probably agree that we can't totally dodge the ideas even if the words are a little fuzzy. So the temptation is there to treat it like a woke, bleeding-heart liberal thing, but that's unfair.
Indeed, I think it does depend on the siege. But also (with notable exceptions) it rarely happened when the besieged surrendered in good order.
Realistically anyway, the only hope anyway is that the attacker's forces are drawn away, starves or that a friendly army comes to relieve them. No defenders ever actively won a seiege, although many skills played for time and got one of the above 3 relief.
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There is nothing I've seen that would indicate that people somehow became not ok with it once the ratio went slightly over 10 to 1. Rather it seemed to be that Israel became mainstream news, that's all. People whose special interest was the Israel-Palestine conflict have been harping about "genocidal settlers" well before the war.
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You really can't compare raw numbers, given a) Israel tried to keep its own people alive, b) Hamas tries to put its own people in harms way, c) the war is being fought in Gaza and not in Israel proper, and d) Israel is the stronger faction. Nobody would say, "Well, only X US soldiers and civilians were killed in Pearl Harbor, and now that the US is winning in the Philippines, the casualty ratio is shifting significantly, that means the US is doing warfare wrong and needs to sue for peace".
If you exclude civilian ship crews, the total number of US civilian deaths in WWII is around 100, and single-digits if you only count state territories at the time (not Alaska or Hawaii). British civilian deaths, despite the Blitz, were still pretty small compared to Germany and Japan. Civilian casualty ratios are a terrible metric unless you want to be an Axis (or Soviet) apologist.
But we don't exclude them do we?
The international laws of warfare are somewhat vague about blockades sinking cargo vessels carrying materiel in times of war: it's something the Allies did their fair share of too. Even if you include them, it's on the order of 10k deaths, and still weights poorly against the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and I think the point still stands.
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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.
Per WP, there have been about 70k Gazans and 1k IDF killed since Israel responded to the Oct-7 attacks. Let's assume that 40k of the Gazans were civilians as a ballpark number.
The ratio at which your own soldiers die relative to enemy civilians is reflective of the value system of the society waging the war, what the factor before the count in the utility function is for enemy civilians and your soldiers.
Approximately, the relation of death tolls should reflect the quotient of these values. (The distribution of tactical options is also relevant, of course, if you only ever have to decide between two of your soldiers and one civilian, you might end up killing a zillion civilians and none of your soldiers despite valuing them equally, but I think it is unlikely that this distorts the effects too much in reality.)
A toy example would be that you are harassed by an enemy sniper in a building (back when Gaza had buildings), which is also expected to be inhabited by civilians. You can either call an airstrike, thereby killing an estimated X civilians, or storm the building with infantry, losing an estimated Y soldiers in the process.
I am not saying that you need to value enemy civilians as much as your troops. Few armies would gamble a soldier to rescue an enemy civilian (probably non-allied civilian would be a more appropriate phrasing) in a double or nothing scenario.
But if you have 40 civilans dead for every one of your soldiers, then it becomes reasonable to suppose that you have a callous disregard for the lives of the civilian population, and that is the point where the IDF is right now.
Yes, basically this. If anything, the level of care given to variously 'friendly', 'neutral', or 'hostile' civilians is one of the most direct indicators of how morally the society is treating war. No war is perfect, civilian casualties are inevitable, even in significant numbers. But surely some conclusions can be drawn from the decisions made, both at a tactical level (e.g. what rules of engagement are you following, and what risk tolerance do you have, how high a confidence level do you require) and a general level (e.g. how often does Israel use bombs larger than necessary, how much exposure do you accept in terms of boots on the ground, and so forth). None of this should be construed to mean that I don't understand those real trade-offs.
Pre-war, what I'm trying to say is they had struck some kind of balance. While you could try and judge that on its own, we could be a little lazy and just call it a local, contextual "baseline" level of care. And it was already pretty lopsided. I realize 10 to 1 is an oversimplification, but that's how it is. Just picking out a google result from 2014, not fully randomly but partially (googled IDF riot deaths in a 2014-2016 date span, first relevant result with figures), an article has this to say:
Note that despite the large number of rockets, few people are typically killed as a result because of Iron Dome (whether you think the rockets are normally launched because of this, or in spite of this, is a separate question). But look at those overall numbers for a second. A series of highly emotional murders (cycle of violence) sparks riots which sparks a mini-war. And at our snapshot in time, we have 32-25 dead Israelis/non-Palestinians, and over 700 Palestinians dead. That's a 20x ratio in this case! Not uncommon for the region.
Now let it sink in for a second that the current ratio, as the result of the now almost 2 year war, is up to 35x. I know numbers can lie, but... I really think that the figure should at the very least offer a strong hint as to what's going on, yeah? This seems to align with the anecdotes we get about IDF decisions about use of force on almost all levels. They are decisions, at the end of the day, not inevitabilities, at least within a certain range. Yes, I know the numbers are fuzzy, and you can slice it different ways. There's wiggle room. But historically for modern conflicts, these are pretty high numbers (Gazan density makes exact comparisons tricky) as a quick glance at military vs civilian casualties in recent wars such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan, even Syria over the course of the whole war, can according to some estimates get under 1x, though if you consider 20k Hamas fighters killed as is the Israeli claim, the ratio dips to a "mere" 2-3x or so military to civilian. Again I don't want to oversell these numbers, but the general trends combined with what I've read (from both sides) about current Israeli tactics and strategy seems to point pretty strongly on the side of callousness. The sad truth is a situation of "so what if they are using five human shields, kill them all," like the infamous trolley problem, varies in response to how sympathetically you view the human shields - dare I say you can actually use it as a rough barometer?
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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).
However, Israel factually is bound by rules of warfare without benefitting from them; while Hamas factually does benefit from rules of warfare without being bound by them ('there is a class of citizen that laws bind but do not protect, and then there is one that is protected by laws that do not bind').
Note that in the West, citizens in the latter class know it, and thus are far more likely to support Palestine- because not doing so is a refutation of their rights to that special protection in their own societies. Queers for Palestine is perfectly coherent through this lens.
The actual solution is to simply withdraw the protection that society has- if they don't want to follow the laws of war, they must lose the protection of those laws. Laws against genocide are there to protect a society that goes to war and loses from being slaughtered to the last; if a society wants to go to war and not fight that way, the law against genocide must then no longer apply. There is no right to the self-determination of a people without first respecting their right to self-destruction.
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I think that this hinges a lot on the distinction between soldiers and civilians. An enemy soldier for a side which does not respect the Geneva conventions is owed nothing more than a quick death when captured.
By contrast, non-combatants have a (limited) right not to be injured by war no matter whose side they are nominally on. If a bunch of neolithic tribe members were isekaied to the trenches of WW1, they would be entitled to protection, you can not just say "obviously their tribe is not a signatory to the Geneva conventions, so it is fine to bomb them".
It is hard to fight an enemy on equal footing when you are bound by some moral constraints, but often, either the moral constraints are not all that hampering (allowing advancing Jewish GI's to carry out mass shootings against German civilians in retaliation for what the Nazi's did would have been wrong, but it would also not have given the Allies much of an edge), or the fight is very much not on equal footing.
If a police unit is trying to catch a band of letter bombers, they have a lot of advances over their enemies. Sure, there might occasionally be situations where the best tactical option would be for them to send bombs to the band themselves, but they can still win without that.
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Or perhaps your enemy is good at hiding amongst civilians, but bad at killing their opponents.
Keep in mind how many rockets were launched by Hamas from Gaza against Israel with the intent to kill civilians. Just looking at the deaths without considering the causation of the numbers leads to poor judgements. Context matters.
You can't assign immorality to the side with greater competence against the side with demonstrated malicious intent with a low success rates.
Let's put it another way. How many Israeli combatants died in the recent war with Iran? How many Iranian civilians?
Good luck dividing by zero.
The sheer malice of Hamas is pretty much how they convinced me that they should be utterly destroyed.
I think that in the missile exchanges with Iran, there was little in the way of trading risk to soldiers vs risk to civilians.
I also believe that in the context of Gaza, a significant fraction of civilian deaths are the result of decisions with such trade-offs. Infantry is vastly less deadly to civilians than bombs are, but of infantry is also much more at risk from Hamas than bomber pilots are.
I agree; Hamas is just not a "normal" actor that can be viewed the way an opposing side usually is. Unfortunately, the same is true of the Gaza-based Palestinians. There's a reason Hamas has been in control the way they have been, and some of their rivals are just as bloodthirsty. There's not much room for compromise under these circumstances, where on average Israel cares more about the lives of Palestinians than Hamas does.
In the missile exchanges with Iran, Israel signed up for accepting that their interceptions would not be perfect and some level of civilian casualties would be suffered. As it turned out, they lost far fewer than they were prepared for (I don't know what the number was that they projected, or that they were willing to accept). Israel was prepared, reportedly, to put boots on the ground to take out nuclear sites if the U.S. did not lend a helping hand. That would have placed some hundreds, if not thousands, of troops in harm's way.
The IAF also did not lose a single manned combat aircraft, which beat their expectations.
Keep in mind you're comparing "moral infantryman with overmatch in urban warfare" to "precision bombing at scale." Against an opponent with basically the world's best tunnel network.
I do not know enough about how exactly the Israeli military has conducted its operations in Gaza to make a confident judgement. But from my experience in the US Army, the Israelis are clearly trying pretty hard to minimize collateral damage. As hard as the US military does? I'm not sure.
To roughly paraphrase a sentiment I saw on twitter, every dead Israeli soldier is a blood sacrifice for the Palestinian people.
This whole conflict is immensely frustrating and I don't know how far Israel would have to go before I was forced to reconsider my support for them. But I do think one must keep in mind that Israel had to fight several wars of survival against pretty overwhelming odds, that the Arab countries maintain the identity of Palestinian Arabs (as opposed to Levantine) as a useful weapon, and that making forced deportation of a population (i.e. ethnic cleansing) a crime against humanity kinda makes it impossible to deal with a persistently hostile group in any "legal" way.
What's worse, forcing the migration of a population one is at risk of continual war with, or killing them war by war?
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I mean, you absolutely can assign greater culpability to the more effective side.
I have a new kitten who is just three months old, and a one year old cat. The kitten loves attacking the bigger cat, but I have to be very careful to keep him from hurting her.
That being said, as Hamas’s intent is seemingly “genocide all Israelis,” I do have very little sympathy for them.
You cannot do so without, as your cat example demonstrates, having a holistic understanding of all the relevant factors at play.
The proposed loss ratio standard is a metric worth considering, but it is hardly a good single metric. If Hamas was better at fighting, more Israeli soldiers and civilians would be dead because they have tried, but not succeeded most of the time.
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If the enemy sniper somehow is always accompanied by 40 civilians, which one of us is callously disregarding their lives - me or the sniper? It seems pretty clear which one of us would prefer there to be fewer civilians on the site and which one would like more.
Unfortunately, if your enemy does not give a fuck about civilians, that does not mean that you do not have to give a fuck either. If a police department solved a hostage situation by bombing the building and killing everyone inside, they could claim that actually who was really responsible for the civilian deaths was the hostage taker. Still, it would reflect horribly on them.
As an aside, I don't recall that the IDF has made much of a credible move to get the civilians out of the Gaza war. If they had offered a ICRC run shelter where the IDF kept the peace to every Gazan who did not want to die for Hamas when they started invading, that would have updated me a lot towards "the IDF does their best to keep civilians safe". Instead, they told them "we are fighting here, go there" sometimes, but were generally unwilling to allow them into places where Israel would be responsible for their needs.
A police department's job is to protect the civilians of their state. An army's job is not to protect the civilians of other states.
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Isnt the Hamas plan to let their citizens get killed by Israelis while they run a propaganda campaign that gets Western leftists to send them money so their leadership can live cushy lives in Dubai and London?
Nah, I do not think that the Hamas leaders had a financial motive for Oct-7, at least not raking in donations from Westerners. Before the attacks, Hamas leaders were living the good life: getting their cuts of bribes or taxes/protection money from the Gazans, as well as skimming of donations, while being left in peace by Nethanyahu.
Now, they no longer get cuts from Gazan "taxes" or foreign donations to Gaza, and on top of that they have to worry about Mossad murdering them. Still very much first world problems compared to their citizens, but likely not an improvement in material wealth.
I mean more long-game. I suppose my view of Palestine is colored by my run-ins with it's propaganda and activist-industrial complex.
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Isn't that pretty much what they're doing now?
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