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Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza. Reddit discussion.
This makes him the first right winger I've seen say anything about starvation after something happened recently that made lots of places start talking about it, maybe the move to GHF food distribution? I can't really trust the UN when they talk about it, since they may have been still pissed that Israel cut UNRWA out, plus I heard it was only two dedicated Gaza writers putting out statements of that kind. I can't really trust leftists when they post about it, because they fail to show me their homework and seem to argue a very motivated stance. But Trump talking about it... I don't know about that either. He has spoken off the cuff before. But it brings me to ask: how bad is it? What footage did he see and is it reflected in the data?
Supposing that there is starvation: is that Israel's intention? What is Israel's strategy going forward? I thought that making camps to move civilians into was a good idea, and then once everyone's out, painstakingly clear the whole place, but I think that the international community wouldn't accept that because it's technically ethnic cleansing. There isn't actually anything the international community would be satisfied by except for total ceasefire and return to October 6th. But I don't actually know what the intention is, is the intention to draw Hamas out of hiding to get to the food somehow? I have a hard time discerning what is true about the war and what isn't.
The default assumption at this point is that Israel is waging a cargo-cult war. They're shooting people, and blockading checkpoints, and bombing suspected targets, but they don't seem to have any coherent goal beyond, "do war stuff to bad guys". They know cutting off supplies to the enemy is good, but they're also scared of the mass starvation that would ensue if they won too much.
If we take as an assumption that Israel knows what they're doing, then it sort of looks like their strategy is to technically let in enough food to feed the population of Gaza, but simultaneously to destroy the institutional infrastructure that would enable actual distribution. That way they can go, "see, we gave them enough food, Hamas was just too evil to give it to their people. They ethnically cleansed themselves," as if effectively rationing supplies to an entire population is no big deal.
That doesn't look like it to me, so why would it be the default assumption?
What it looks like to me is Israel is fighting with two hands tied behind its back. What they, IMO correctly, perceive is that most of "the international community" doesn't want them to win, nor would it tolerate them using META strategies in furtherance of an Israeli victory. So what they end up doing, and we end up observing, is a bunch of tiny motions in the direction of victory that advance the goals of Israel a little bit at a time, while mostly carefully avoiding any dramatic moves in that direction, which would have a high likelihood of generating massive blow-back, even if there was no alternative plausible avenue to generating whatever that strategic gain is/was.
I don't know what this is intended to mean. Is META an acronym for something? Or what are "metastrategies" in this context?
Most Effective Tactics Available
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I've heard some people in gaming think meta refers to "most effective tactics available." Maybe that?
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Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food? They can't pay for it, and actively stymie distribution of any food that arrives onshore. Thefts are unattributable because Hamas keeps its uniforms only for parades not for enforcement or fighting Israel - which it has largely stopped doing only because its proximate threat is the Gaza clans that now have a chance of fighting for their own slice of the narrow pies.
However you slice it, the governing body of the Gaza refuses surrender yet demands food for its own people from the Israelis it swears to destroy. When Armenia held Nagarno it supplied the enclave, not the Azerbaijanis. Israel ceded occupying power decades ago, yet the Gazans have expected Israeli water food and electricity without any expectation of paying for it even when waging war. If Gazans want to not starve perhaps kicking Hamas out might help.
A combination of "with great power comes great responsibility" and "you break it you bought it".
They're not entitled by default, but given the amount of control Isreal likes to exert over the strip (and who can blame them), they are now de-facto responsible for the outcomes.
If Isreal decided "fuck it, Gaza's borders are open. We're just gonna sit behind the border wall and do our thing, the people of Gaza are free to do whatever" then yeah, I would assign them zero responsibility.
They don't like having rockets shot at them (fair), so they don't do this. But because they chose to do something, they get to inherit the consequences.
They did do this in 2005 when they removed (sometimes at gunpoint) all the Jewish settlers in Gaza. The naval blockade and walls went up years later in response to the rockets and other attacks. I think this is part of why the Israelis question whether peace is possible at this point: Gaza's government, and arguably it's populace that hasn't overthrown it, supports attacks on Israel, even questionably effective ones, at almost any cost to themselves.
Yeah it's an absolute mess. At this point I honestly think both sides deserve each other. They've built an incredible human suffering machine and now they get to ask wallow in it.
I feel awful for the children though, they didn't choose this.
So when pointed out that Israel actually followed your suggestion, you don't assign them "zero responsibility" as promised, instead you revert to "both sides" and assign equal responsibility.
No?
In 2005 I wouldn't hold them responsible for Gazans starving, because they backed off
In 2025 I do, because they are very much controlling the inflow of goods and also levelling the area/generally wrecking lots of destruction
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Well, human rights come to mind. Rather, they're the reason individual Palestinians are entitled to food generally, whatever it takes to get it to them - not Palestine as a political entity, and not Israeli food in particular.
Do those human rights exist if neither side chooses to enforce them?
Hamas has relied on the concept of human rights to win the ideological part of this war. They don't believe in it, but they know we do, so they weaponize it. Western liberals demand Israel enforce this idea of human rights because they are the more capable and, supposedly, moral side. Liberals invoke human rights when it comes to Israel, all while Hamas intentionally holds their own people hostage in order to create a moral dilemma and pit Western countries against Israel. The Stockholm syndrome cannot be denied.
Imagine for a moment if Hamas and Palestinians knew these human rights would no longer be upheld by other countries. Would the majority of Palestinians continue to support Hamas? Maybe they would, and maybe they would rather starve to death or get blown up than cede ground to Israelis. My instincts tell me that a majority wouldn't continue to support them, but then again I'm a Westerner and can't really put myself in that situation. What seems obvious to me though is that the cost-benefit analysis for Hamas continuing their strategy appears much more feasible when you have 3rd parties supplying aid and moral support.
I acknowledge that what is happening to Palestinians is horrible. I don't wish it on any human. However, third party empathy is Hamas' greatest weapon. Israel knows this but Westerners don't, and I do not expect Israel to cave to outside pressure. What this means (and what it has resulted in thus far) is an even more prolonged ordeal, where more Palestinians die and Hamas gains more support from other countries. Maybe this will result in Israel's demise at some point. It's a brilliant strategy by Hamas, but it will come at a great cost because Israel will not succumb to the empathy games directed at the world's liberals. They believe that might equals right and nobody has been able to prove otherwise.
Well, if you aren't a nihilist, yes. The morally correct course of action remains the morally correct course of action even if nobody implements it. Under most western ethical philosophy, the right thing is under no cosmic obligation to be easily achievable for people who are also trying to secure geopolitical goals. Sometimes doing the right thing for the needy means you risk your own comfort and safety, and that's just the way it is.
We instinctively understand this where individual life-or-death situations are involved, eg running into a burning building. But somehow when we're talking about whole populations, both sides of the conversation pretend that a case that XYZ is the right thing to do also needs to prove it's the advantageous thing to do. No. It's perfectly coherent to say "The right thing to do is to prevent children from starving. It might in fact result in losing the war, but it's the right thing to do anyway. A victory that can only be won by starving children to death through inaction would be morally bankrupt and is not worth pursuing."
It's coherent but you are invoking a moral truth, whereas I am discussing realpolitik. Can you enforce what you believe in? I think not. Will Israel's "morally bankrupt" actions have consequences down the road? Potentially, yes.
Will you convince an entity who believes that their existence is under threat that they are morally wrong if they feel they are protecting themselves? Maybe later, but not in the moment. What can that moral correctness without leverage really accomplish in the moment?
Perhaps you are, but I think talking about "human rights" in terms of realpolitik is a category error. I was originally springing off of 2D3D asking what entitled Palestinians to Israeli food. "Moral rights," I replied. Your jumping to say 'what are these human rights worth, if no state actually enforces them?' is the equivalent of bringing up gun ownership and effective self-defense in the context of a conversation about whether innocent people getting murdered is wrong.
Even if it can't sway Israel (let alone Hamas), it can influences the choices of people on the sidelines ie the rest of the world. Whether we're talking about the big picture of "should America support Israel's war effort even though it results in starving children", or the small picture of "should I, personally, donate to that online fundraiser to send help to starving little Abdul".
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The strategy seems to be based on eroding the power base of Hamas, possibly with a side of forcing Gazans to confront the reality of their situation and their complete military defeat.
Apparently Hamas had previously been seizing food and using it to maintain power and influence by controlling who got what, which the new system pushed by Israel and the US is designed to thwart. This makes sense and seems like it would be effective, so I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas and those aligned with them would do a great deal to try and undermine that effort.
If your military victory left you a completely unruly population that you can't control outside of genociding them and you can't completely genocide them without compromising your military victory then I'm not sure you have a military victory.
Israel feeding Gazan children will create Gazan men and women. Those men and women are raised with a strong sense of having more Gazan children. To that extent I'm not sure if claims by either side of who is trying to starve who are in any way sensical.
The "completely unruly" part is doing the heavy lifting here. The only reason Hamas and the broader Palestinian movement keeps waging its pointless self-destructive war against Israel is because of its quixotic belief that Israel could ever be defeated militarily. As Richard Hanania argues, Israel must crush Palestinian hopes. If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests. If Israel can achieve a durable peace in the region without having to resort to genocide or ethnic cleansing, I'm sure they'd vastly prefer that over the alternative.
There won't be a current generation, they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood. And any who do survive will have learned: you don't have a place here. Israel wants you gone. Not even toleration, they intend to take this land and give it to their people.
You and Hanania are telling the Warsaw Ghetto to just play nice with the German government, then it'll all be okay once they have total rule.
Are you predicting that literally no Palestinian children in Gaza will survive to adulthood?
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I think that 1) that is totally true and 2) this is profoundly unlikely given the long history of these two peoples and human nature to say "fuck you don't tell me what to do" with a side helping of Isreal being unable to keep its hands to itself re: settlements, etc
We shall see!
I have no idea whether it's a plausible outcome. But it does have precedent in living memory, namely the post-war American occupations of Germany and (especially) Japan. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility.
That's true
Less of a long painful history though.
Also both Germany and Japan had much better cultural scaffolding for bootstrapping back into friendly productive 20th century neighbors.
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I would be inclined to agree with you and others as far as peace goes but this is ignoring expansionist ambitions of Israel. Israel wants land occupied by Palestinians. All Palestinians have to do on that front is not leave. To that extent they can win battles and drag the conflict towards a stalemate of sorts.
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Then your definition of victory is narrow and unsuited to this conflict, or any other of the many interminable conflicts that clutter up the history books, there are kinds of victory other than those which are absolute or permanent.
Degrading or destroying Hamas reduces the danger posed by Gaza substantially, the remaining population can be as unruly as they like, if they lack the equipment, networks or know-how of how to turn ther discontent into military force then they simply are not a threat, not in the short to medium term at least. Sure they might eventually overcome these shortcomings and become an actual threat again in the long term, but in the meantime Israel can enjoy peace and security, which is absolutely a win.
This all assumes that the Gazans decide that yes, they really are going to learn nothing from this whole experience and just repeat the exact same mistakes that lead to them being bombed flat for 0 gain, which I really don't think is guaranteed. Yes the Gazans aren't going to come out of this experience overflowing with love for Israel, but I can't imagine they'll be very happy with Hamas either, or anyone who has the really bright idea of triggering an unwinnable war over what amounted to a very violent PR stunt. By all accounts Palestinians before the war had a delusional perspective on the conflict and their chances of victory against Israel, vastly overestimating their own population and vastly underestimating that of the Israelis, there is a chance that this conflict might knock some sense into them.
If you need to broaden the definition of victory to include whatever short term gain you allege Israel has now and preclude any longer term concerns then I'm not sure my definitions are the problem.
I mean, the peace and security Israel bought for itself seems extremely hard fought and eerily similar to what they had before. Outside of the Oct.7 attack, which was a defensive blunder, is all the manpower and material spent on this battle justifiable in any sense if we are comparing before and after?
In 2021, there was a singular combat casualty for the IDF. And of the 54 attempted significant terror attacks, there were 3 deaths and 34 wounded. And 2021 seems to be on the lower end of average.
I stand thoroughly unconvinced.
If they didn't fight, it would be October 7 constantly. You are saying that there's no danger, so the military operation isn't needed. But there's no danger only because of the military operation.
Well, that's the question. Hamas would certainly attempt October 7 constantly. But "Oct 7 was a fluke caused by an unforced error in the Israeli defense strategy, Hamas did not have the capacity to achieve regular Oct 7-level attacks and Oct 7 itself could easily have failed if Israel had put in a bit more effort" is a reasonable claim.
But it didn't. And once it happens everyone knows it's possible. And now that's the reality both governments have to live in. Just as Israel has to respond if only for domestic reasons, Hamas may also be emboldened.
We're also operating with hindsight about how (in)effective Hezbollah would be here. A situation where Hezbollah is also emboldened while Hamas is still effective and untouched looks significantly more dangerous after Oct. 7.
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It sets up strong push pressure for their upcoming "voluntary migration" plans.
Migrating where? Which country would take 2.1 million refugees?
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