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Whenever I try to figure out how mad I should be about this I do my best to translate it to a local Western frame.
If Canadian native peoples crossed the border, raped and murdered a bunch of US civilians at Burning Man, dragged hostages back to Vancouver and the Canadian government was like "lol get fukt America u r settler colonialists" I would absolutely support blowing the shit out of them until every native was dead or captured and every hostage was returned. If every Canadian starves to death as a result, well that sucks but they should consider revolting against their own government if they have a problem with that.
We're responsible for our people and I will be furious if we fuck around at all with bringing them home.
Looking at it this way makes me sympathize with Israel so much more.
The funny thing is we don’t have to play hypotheticals. 9/11 and Afghanistan is right there! Did it just not occur to you or what? Seriously.
Thousands killed in a terror attack check; popular rage against the terrorists check; death to America attitude check; hiding among the local population check; local population supports them check; even that their society kinda sucks, check. What did we do? Bombed the shit out of them yes, invaded yes… but what else? Did we engage in a war of annihilation to destroy all Afghans? No. No! We gave them a shitton of money to rebuild stuff, tried mostly to avoid civilian deaths, helped them set up a new government for themselves, tried all sorts of education and policy interventions, lots of stuff! Okay later we tortured some people but look at how we treated the general population.
What has Israel done? Bombed the shit out of them yes, invaded yes… but then destroyed not just some poppy fields but functionally everything. Have they tried to set up a new government? Worked with the people? What’s the plan? Oh yes, the most recent plan: “let’s pitch a bunch of tents somewhere and move them all into the tents”. That’s it. That’s the whole plan. To say nothing of the starvation, it just doesn’t compare.
Certainly in practice the US in a similar situation didn’t say “screw it, too hard, just kill all the Afghans”.
I mean Israel has done this too over the years, It tried to create a government for the Palestinians in the PA through the Oslo accords. You need to extend the Afghan analogy. All of America's, much larger, neighbors would need to explicitly support the Taliban. You have to remove the Ocean separating the countries so that the Taliban can plausibly be in any city in American in under an hour if not held at bay. You need the aim of the Taliban not to be to kick Ameicans out of Afghanistan but actually out of all of America or preferably kill every last American. The existential threat is pretty important, America could always have just left Afghanistan, that's just not an option for Israel.
That’s fair to an extent. I think it hews much more closely to the history of the West Bank though. Also, how much has Israel tried to do anything real with the PA in recent decades, let’s be honest, not much at all. My understanding of the timeline is the nation-building was decent for the first five years or so but the Second Intifada, Camp David failure, and re-occupation in 2002ish wiped it almost all out, both trust and infrastructure, to fitfully restart a bit again for a few years, until Bibi 2.0 around 2009. Basically as soon as he showed up it went into a permanent stall/holding pattern at best, and Bibi’s preference was deliberately for a weak PA, so if anything state unofficial policy has been to undermine the PA where possible. That’s been the status ever since, for 15 years or so now. I should also note that the few years immediately before 10/7, this was especially noticeable (eg the PA was ignored in the Abraham accords). For fairness we should note 2009 is also when Abbas began clinging to power undemocratically.
The Gaza situation is a bit harder to parse. We follow a similar trajectory but with more radicalism and less autonomy and more violence on both sides (not equipped to discern scale but I think in this time some assassinations took place). Until the increasing violence, withdrawal, and 2006 elections with Hamas getting a plurality followed by a swift 2007 civil war overthrow. I think with respect to the analogy, for Gaza the clock on the analogy basically restarts there: a failed and violent state with religious extremist terrorists in charge, a total war of annihilation, occupation, all the things I compared.
So for West Bank you’d be fairly accurate in saying nation-building was tried (and the relative stability of West Bank is probably owed to this!) but for Gaza I think the Israelis need to seriously consider a similar game plan as the US.
Well in Gaza Israel pulled out their own settlers and things only got worse. I'm not sure I understand what the American Afghan informed model really looks like. They did try to have the PA control Gaza, the Gazans voted for Hamas and then Hamas ended elections. The US was able to drive the Taliban into the mountains separate from the main population where they could try their nation building. You could describe what Israel is doing now as the part where America drove the Taliban out but rather than separate mountains the Hamas compounds are endless miles of tunnels under Gaza itself so you can't actually achieve this separation. I'm basically at a point of pessimism on the topic, even in the more favorable Afghan situation the Americans with even more security failed to do what you're suggesting Israel should do, this just isn't going to work any way you slice it.
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Afghanistan is not Gaza though. The entire population was relatively indifferent to us. They're also on the other side of the planet, not next door neighbors constantly threatening our security. The Taliban also offered to surrender OBL almost immediately after we invaded and they didn't take a bunch of US civilians as hostages.
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Would you say that this strategy was successful?
Depends how you define success. Kabul was doing kinda okay for a while. And important for our context here, we didn’t genocide or ethnic cleanse Afghans, nor do anything proximate. I feel okayish overall about it. They ended up deciding they preferred Taliban rule by revealed preference basically, and we did, eventually, greatly reduce (some would even say completely eliminate) international terrorism from that region, which was the original goal. There isn’t a high enough degree of depraved bad actions that we would want to intervene.
Israel still looks terrible in comparison. Not that it’s a perfect comparison, but it’s pretty great compared to the tortured examples otherwise found in this subthread. Again, Afghanistan is right there as an example, why reach?
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I feel like you're also approaching this from the assumption that the Canadian attack is an unprovoked sucker punch against an innocent America. In which, yeah, fuck them.
How would your feelings about this change if America was on its 20th(ish?) year of controlling Canada's borders, the country was absolutely destitute, and America kept pushing the border further into Ontario? Also I guess in this metaphor America is also pumping the water out of the great lakes as fast as they could, regardless of how many Canadians used it to drink.
Further continuing this absolutely tortured metaphor, how much responsibility do you assign to the roughly 50% of the population who if I remember correctly, is under the age of 20? These children were born into a world of shitty poverty, have absolutely no freedom to leave their shitty poverty city, and are profoundly aware that the reason they can't have nice things is the hostile mega-power that gets to decide things like "how much food and medicine they get on a monthly basis". They're propagandized too by Hamas sure, but the Isreali's don't exactly make Hamas propaganda job hard.
In some ways, Isreal has developed Gaza into one of the world's foremost Jihadist factories. I have a hard time imagining a setup that would radicalized young people born into it better than the current status quo.
We don’t have to imagine fake Canadian history, we can imagine real American history. Let’s say tomorrow the Navajo decide they’re done being the white man’s bitch and attack the Grand Canyon with smuggled Iranian weaponry. They kill about a thousand people and take a few hundred tourists hostage. The entire white population of the Navajo reservation is evacuated. Twitter is overflowing with clips of Navajo warriors doing the ghost dance over the dead bodies of raped American girls. Big Chief Leaping Antelope declares no surrender until the entire Colorado basin is free of American influence. Bands of raiders take potshots at towns across the Southwest. Dozens of American troops are killed or wounded every week during the attempted occupation by ununiformed partisans blending in with the population.
You know exactly what would happen next, the same thing that happened to all the other tribes who refused to accept American sovereignty.
Totally
I don't blame the Israeli people for being mad. I just don't think disproportionate violence is okay, even if provoked
I understand why everyone feels how they do, but as the peanut gallery I'm pointing and judging
Is there a (consistent) way to win a war without disproportionate violence? If you're better at fighting than your opponent, you will inflict more violence upon them than they do upon you (and if you're fighting in enemy territory/homeland, their civilians will suffer more than yours).
You're right
I struggle to call this a war though. It's insurgency whack a mole with a sprinkling of ethnic cleansing
There's no ethnic cleansing.
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area"
I'd say we're basically there
Which ethnic group, and where have they been moved? Calling anything that's going on "ethnic cleansing" is propaganda used when the propagandist thinks that "genocide" won't go over well. Israel has moved the population of Gaza around, but not along ethnic, racial, or religious lines.
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The American government sponsored multiple real life cross-border terrorist attacks into Canada. The Fenian Brotherhood was pretty well behaved towards civilians but they did kill dozens of Canadian soldiers.
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Now put the situation in the greater context of what the UK/US did in the founding of Israel, the wiping out villages, the absolute inhumanity of the IDF in the Intifada towards the Palestinians and the fact half the western world decided to back Israel to fuck everyone in the region. And you just might start to consider when they say From the River to the sea, they might have a point.
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I'll go a bit further: if Hamas were white evangelicals wearing MAGA hats, rather than brownish Muslims, a large amount of the people claiming Israel is doing warcrimes would be calling for the IDF to take its gloves off and turn the land into a parking lot.
This is true, but by the same token, a lot of people wringing their hands over the poor Palestinians being ethnically cleansed, if it was another Arab nation doing it would not give one single fuck.
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And if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.
And if the debate centered around how people's views of your aunt depended on her belonging to a specific outgroup, such as women, whether or not she had balls would be pretty relevant.
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Israel may do what it pleases (as is the right of a sovereign state) but it doesn't necessarily follow that Israel should be given tens of billions in supplementary US military aid, on top of already existing military aid. I don't accuse you of calling for this but Israeli strategy can only sensibly be considered in context, just like how one can't look at Hamas or the Houthis as sole actors. $18 billion in just one year, more since then. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-military-aid-for-israel-tops-17-9-billion-since-last-oct-7
America and to a lesser extent Britain are enabling Israeli strategic incoherence, providing air cover and munitions. If it weren't for US munitions the Israelis would need to wrap things up quickly because they would not be able to prosecute this extended, bizarre campaign.
What is this military aid buying? It's buying enemies in the Islamic world, it's depleting Western arsenals of air defence missiles. Years of THAAD and SM-3 production down the drain defending Israel. In the short term these air defence missiles are priceless, there's no capacity to quickly ramp up production.
It makes no sense to send aid to Gaza so they can survive and send munitions to Israel so they can kill them. Better to do nothing at all.
Ah yes, enemies.
We can see that Osama Bin Laden was pretty upset with Israel. It, amongst other things, motivated him and he caused no small amount of trouble for the US and the West in general. How many new Bin Laden's are going to emerge from this current episode?
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If such aid was not given and this was signaled well in advance, do you still think they would need to wrap up quickly, or could they just have spent more on military and gotten the same result?
Israel is a small country, and they can only afford spending this much of their economic power on military before they would start looking like North Korea. This whole narrative that the aid isn't actually necessary because our allies are strong and can win on their own just fine (but we must urgently Do The Right Thing and send more of it!), seen also in the context of Ukraine, is among the more intellectually galling aspects of Western propaganda.
I dont think Ive particularly seen that messaging, and Im genuinely asking. Obviously Ukraine isnt like that, but Israel generally seems more diplomatically than materially limited. Looking things up now, Israels military spending was about 5% of GDP in previous years, up to 9% last year. US aid was approximately(second chart) at 1%, increased to 3% last year (and presumably continuing for the current conflict). Probably those numbers dont include everything, but thats far from "obviously impossible" territory. North Korea is quite a bit higher than that, and you can see in the first link that Israel was there previously. For another comparsion, support for the former east german states seems to have been around 5% of west german GDP in the initial years.
North Korea has a fairly substantial steel and chemicals industry and a large munitions industry, they have the whole of the warmaking pyramid (save the very top in advanced avionics, aircraft engines and the like). That's what juche is about, self-reliance. Israel just has the top section of the pyramid in advanced manufacturing and R&D. They're reliant on imports of precursor materials and are quite rate-limited in basic things like shells and bombs. Ukraine for instance is a proper industrial power, they have/had a large metallurgical sector.
GDP and dollar figures aren't the right way to look at military production. North Korea is a dollar pygmy but a munitions giant.
There's no liquid market for bombs or shells in the short term, spending more can just raise the price you buy at rather than increasing production. That's why North Korea has been able to provide more munitions to Russia than the EU to Ukraine.
Im not talking about a US thats opposed to Israel. They still give them weapons (and steel/chemicals/whatever), just expecting payment. Im also not necessarily talking about short-term buying, thats why it matters things are signaled in advance, so they can make their own stockpile if thats important.
The GDP stuff is about the political aspect of the spending. Is there something left from the objection after that? Are NK rockets cheaper to make than youd expect based on quality and local labour costs?
If Israel had to buy its munitions (either in the short term or long term) it would impose more pressure to finish the war quickly, or in general do more diplomacy and less bombing. Easy to spend other people's money or take risks if your friends will bail you out, people are usually more frugal with their own money.
The US also helps Israel with key enablers that aren't really for sale - satellite surveillance, in-air refuelling, electronic signals gathering and B-2 bomber strikes. It would be impractical for Israel to try and replace what the US does for them, they can't afford a blue-water navy to put ships in the Persian gulf and shoot at Iranian missiles from there, nor can Israel really put much pressure on Yemen. Once you have a navy, using it is easy enough but if you don't then getting one is hard.
Israel could establish a stockpile of munitions purchased from overseas but it wouldn't be very economical or reliable compared to domestic production or getting resupplied straight from the US.
The quickest way to win a war against an intransigent opponent when you have total military supremacy isn't less bombing and more diplomacy, rather the opposite. Same goes for people's plans to defund the iron dome. The cheapest way to do things is the bloodiest.
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Sure. The pressure you talked about initially sounded more like a hard deadline approaching, but of course money isnt free.
Point taken about the "key enablers", though I couldnt say how important they are. Yemen for example seems to have been more of a problem for the rest of the world, without US involvement it either wouldnt be a problem, or else the US would deal with it for its own reasons.
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Which is to say, stable and at peace (if an uneasy one) with their neighbors?
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I was saying this in December of 2023. If the Mexican cartels breached the San Diego/Tijuana border, killed 40,000 people and kidnapped 8,000, the United States Military would be boots-on-the-ground occupying Baja California, Sonora, and probably Chihuahua within a month, if not 2 weeks.
and if the Mexican government objected, it'd probably only take us another 2 weeks to be in Mexico City.
Yes this is indeed actually more plausible.
I still prefer my version because it's clear to me I would even be willing to annihilate very white Canadians if they supported something like a 10/07 on America.
The fact that Palestinians are full of jihadis makes them repulsive to me but the basis of my indifference is game theory.
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American soldiers wouldn't be shooting innocent civilians, especially unarmed children in the process of trying to obtain food; were they to do so, the backlash would make "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" look positively quaint.
If Andrew Anglin and his ilk want to convince the normies that Jews are all ethno-chauvinists who will excuse any atrocity committed by their co-ethnics, they'd just point to this thread, where Mottizens hilariously (and mendaciously) insist that shooting kids at aid stations trying to obtain food is completely justified because Israel isn't required to feed Gazans (wtf?!?!?! how does this even make sense to you?)
Are you really sure about that?
Canadians are (mostly) white though.
So are afghans and Iraqis.
Not white enough for Americans to care all that much about them, no.
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We're not going to get to verify this, but I'd be willing to bet this is absolutely not how it would play out. The response would be police, not military, and you'd be called racist for saying that the larger group is responsible for the actions of their people.
The response would be police because the Canadian government wouldn't actually say "get fucked"; they'd track down said native group using both their own resources and those the US provided. A world where the Canadian government would say "get fucked" is one different enough that Canada could indeed be invaded over it.
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This hugely depends on the degree of association between the group messing with Americans and the government of the territory they operate off. The Taliban were clearly happy to host Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Quaeda training camps and they got regime changed, but the US was never willing to engage in total war against Afghanistan. Mohammed Atta actually planned 9-11 out of Germany, but nobody supported punitive operations against Germany because he was very obviously operating without the support of the German government and people.
The 7th October attackers were not uniformed Hamas soldiers, but only because they were perfidiously fighting out of uniform. Hamas publicly praised the attacks and boasted about its responsibility for them. That level of involvement is closer to "Japan did Pearl Harbor" than "Afghanistan did 9-11." And the US was absolutely up for total war against Japan after Pearl Harbor.
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