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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).
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.
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).
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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.
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.
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