This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
That's pretty much it. You can spend hours looking up historical practice around sieges, I don't know what else you expect to find.
Sounds simple but comes across as a bit ignorant of the facts.
2 is kind of wrong. The IDF controls a ton of the territory, and I think if it wanted could make that 100%. This from April says they control over 50% and its way more now.
3 also ignores the biggest and most universal problem of all armies: logistics. Hamas barely even counts as an army anymore, they are full on hiding. When was the last time they launched an offensive action? It happens but is rare. 456 in two years is not a lot. Most of them are IED deaths like the linked example. Sometimes you get ambushed. Here is a recent one. 5 soldiers killed. They were attacked by under a dozen Hamas members.
There are two million people in Gaza. Civilians! Hamas is in some sense more like a rounding error. Let that sink in. Some math here about Israel can’t make up its mind about how much Hamas is left, but not much… unless they recruit starving people which they will obviously. Thus no clear end state.
However the point I want to make more was about your claim 3. Hamas will indirectly obtain aid. But directly? By force? Seems doubtful for a group in hiding. Logistics! If the IDF were to try seriously, they could distribute food to civilians themselves. And if so Hamas could hardly take large amounts without being noticed. In fact most of the hard reporting we have indicates that gangs, here formed somewhat as a mutual survival pact, are the ones stealing some food, when it happens!
And let’s call it like it is. I’d say 20k Hamas are left on the high end like IDF sometimes thinks, and 2 million civilians, that’s literally 1 in 100. If 100 hostages are barricaded somewhere with a gunman (who isn’t even trying to kill them, just human shields), do you starve the 100 because maybe 1 will get some food? Obviously not. The wartime thing is an excuse and doesn’t fit the facts on the ground overall. It’s literally not a siege, what’s the last siege you heard of where the besieges control three quarters of the city already?
If it's really 100 hostages to each Hamas, I'd have long expected actually-starving Gazans to bum rush every gunman then immediately declare a total and unconditional surrender.
Then again, that's kind of the core problem. They're hungry, but they're not actually "surrender hostilities and return the hostages"-hungry.
So aggregate action is always harder than individual action. If the IDF offered food and a trip out of Gaza for the family of anyone who accurately reported Hamas hiding spots I bet they would win fast. Also the people are some degree of starving, so it makes fighting harder, and they may not have the weapons or chance to fight effectively at all. (Could some hungry Gazans really do better than the IDF at killing Hamas?) If Hamas is bunkered down in literal bunkers and tunnels, you can’t do shit even if you have a mob. Still the point remains that they are ultimately civilians and should this be treated like bystanders and in an ideal world as equal value as humans, like any other human.
Despite in some sense being victim blaming (it’s a toxic relationship, everyone is at least a little toxic, Hamas can be monsters and Gazans can be victims both) if we look at surveys support is dropping albeit slowly. But over focusing on the Israeli hostages is probably a poor framing since most seem to believe giving up the hostages would do nothing to stop the war. In fact a large number oppose disarmament because they think it wouldn’t stop the war either (distrust, basically). Thus fatalism is on the rise in Gaza (martyrdom is shrinking interestingly and isn’t the majority view). To be fair when asked if they would evict Hamas to stop the war, this was interesting to me, it’s still like 2/3 no and 1/3 yes. So I think it’s fair to blame Gazans to some extent absolutely yes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Doesn't Israel claim sovereignity over the area? This isn't "they won't feed foreigners", this is "people are starving within their claimed jurisdiction" which I think plenty of countries have been blamed for in the past. A pretty significant chunk of Mao and Stalin deaths were starvation in their own territory after all.
They do not. They even removed Israelis from it in decades past.
But even if they did, the fact that Hamas controls it at this moment would mean that they are not responsible. A nation is responsible in humanitarian law for areas that one actually controls, not for areas that it makes normative claims.
For example, the ROC isn't responsible for Mao's starvation even though they still (remarkably) claim they are the sovereign government of all of China.
More options
Context Copy link
No, they do not.
I don't think they recognize any state's claim to the territory, do they? I guess that's not completely unprecedented, but I think in practice it is for populated territory.
I believe Israel recognizes the Palestinian Authority's claim, but they don't recognize the PA as a state.
Even with that, the PA doesn't really control Gaza anyway.
Yes, but recognizing one entity's claim to a territory that another entity controls isn't unprecedented at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Amazingly enough, what is permissible conduct in wartime has varied greatly based on tech levels. "So after we won, we killed all the males and forced the women into marriages with us" was SOP a few thousand years ago, yet today it would be considered a war crime. For millennia, the sacking of cities involved the looting, murder and rape of civilians for the crime of living in a city which had not surrendered.
Before railroads were a thing, food logistics were often a big operational factor. The only way to move a large army to the land without them starving was to "forage", which meant sending out looting parties to nearby civilian settlements to steal their grain supplies and likely condemn them to starvation. Sieges fall into the same time.
But civilization marches on. Wartime rape is considered a war crime. Food logistics are not a big issue in most contexts. International humanitarian law recognizes that starvation is no longer a valid weapon of war.
Most damningly, just about nobody believes that starvation is effective against Hamas. If for every kid which starved to death, a Hamas militant also starved to death, I would grudgingly grant you that this might be a better way to defeat them than bombs. Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want. "Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool. Assuming they have food stashes, you would have to starve most of Gaza to death before the shortages will really affect them.
Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids. While you might claim that the actual goal is to hit the Hamas guy, it is very predictable that all your bullets will hit the kids and be stopped long before they reach the baddie.
So is "hey your baby/sister/mom/friend/polycule member starved to death in your arms, want to blow up the people we feel are responsible?"
More options
Context Copy link
Indeed, which is why Hamas should stop starving the populace of Gaza.
Hamas, as the governing body (such as it is), is the one obligated to provide for their own people's food. This whole thing is predicated on the idea that feeding Gaza is the job of literally anyone else on the planet except the actual people who are responsible for doing so.
No one actually considers Hamas to be the actual governing body of Gaza at the moment. Why on earth would they be responsible (under your contradictory logic)? To say nothing of the fact Gaza wasn’t self sustaining food wise even before the war, or the fact that Israel controls the borders. Common sense clearly says Israel is the de facto group responsible. Who does Israel themselves recognize as the rightful government of the Gaza Strip? At the moment only themselves. They certainly have no problem ordering around the populace (and they have, many times, see the various evacuation orders at a minimum)
Because they are the folks with guns that have a near-monopoly on violence. Or at least were on 10/6.
No, they have been casting about for a responsible government for years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Look at Northern Ireland. The greatest recruiting campaigns for the IRA were when the British Army did something stupid and cruel.
If you're a Palestinian, your choice is between "Trust the Israelis and the IDF, the same IDF targeting hospitals, the same IDF shooting kids collecting water. Or Hamas, who may be sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches".
I don't think the limiting factor for Hamas is recruits or manpower. It's not a binding constraint.
Meanwhile, the Japanese didn't have any trouble trusting the US even after we obliterated an entire city, hospitals and all. Or maybe they didn't trust us but realized that when one starts a war, one takes the chance that they will lose and be conquered, at which point they wouldn't have a choice one way or the other.
All the Japanese had to trust is that if they kept on we'd keep killing them until they surrendered, were all dead, or at least mere remnants scattered through the countryside with all the cities and industry destroyed. And that the alternative of surrender was better than that. And they were right -- the US didn't have any more nukes at the time so it would have taken more time and US lives than they may have thought, but they had no winning scenario at that point.
Gazans either think they can win because of some outside force making Israel back down to the point of ceasing to exist, or they don't care -- they prefer fighting uselessly against Israel to the alternatives. And given that the demonstrated alternative was living in Gaza, being fed by the UN and still being able to shoot rockets over the wall from time to time, that's pretty damned dumb. If they'd been willing to actually stop shooting rockets and stirring up trouble in Egypt, they'd have done better than that. But they aren't.
Groves thought a third bomb would be ready to drop on Japan a week after Nagasaki and could be dropped as soon as weather permitted after that. Even after the surrender, the next bomb was still ready by the end of August. After that things slow up a lot for the next year, from an expected rate of 3 accelerating to 7 bombs per month down to only enough plutonium cores for a bomb every month or two, but I'm not sure if that's because of unexpected difficulties or just because they declined to ramp up production after their expected target finally surrendered.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would say that it is not Israel's responsibility to feed the civilian population in Hamas-controlled territories. However, they are obliged to let in humanitarian aid. From my understanding, Israel's refusal to let the trucks in is why Gaza is starving, not because the international community is unwilling to buy food for Gaza.
If Hamas were to burn food as it enters Gaza, then you would be correct to say that Hamas is starving Gaza (but my model of them says they would not actually do that).
Likewise, while you can blame the Soviets for much starvation, you can not blame them for the starvation during the siege of Leningrad. That blood is on the hands of the Nazis who decided not to let any food in.
Israel has been asking the UN to send the trucks in, it is the UN who has been refusing to do so as long as the Israelis are the ones distributing it.
Please forward me a link to that. I'm hearing that the Israelis do things like deliberately route aid convoys the long way round and into territory where they will be ambushed and robbed, and similar fun things like that. Oh those wacky Zionist boys, such a sense of humour!
What I'm hearing is the Israeli ambassador claiming this, and at this point I don't believe one word out of any Israeli officials, not even "water is wet". They pulled their ambassador out because apparently us here in Ireland are so anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, maybe that's why their army is shooting at our diplomats. And our peacekeeping troops.
Okay, maybe I believe the words of the likes of this Israeli minister, because he's not pretending about what's going on:
I mean I can give you links, but they're all going to add up to "Israeli official says they're not stopping the UN" so I don't think that will do much for you, since you are unwilling to believe anything an Israeli official says.
The AP:
MSN:
Interesting that the AP claims the UN doesn't want military escorts because it could bring harm to civilians, while MSN gives us the UN claiming they can't send their aid in because their trucks might be ransacked by gangs. So which is it: do they not want an escort because of potential civilian harms, or are they saying they can't do it without an escort because they'll get robbed? It seems to me that they just want the new Israeli aid organization to fail so that they will let UNRWA back in, and any excuse to keep aid out of Gaza is good enough to blame on the Israelis.
I don't believe the Israelis. After all this time, I don't trust them, I don't think they're honest, and how they are cracking down (not) on the [settlers](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c776x78517po0 who are literally and not metaphorically shooting people reveals their actual preferences, not what they're saying.
I'm going to light my hair on fire here, but Israel is imitating how Germany decided to deal with its 'Jewish problem': can we get any foreign country to take them off our hands? No, nobody wants a bunch of these guys because they are trash? Okay, let's solve this by taking their property, confining them in sequestered areas, and then shipping them off to camps - for their own protection, of course.
There are no settlers in Gaza.
The Gaza Palestinians are not Israelis. Israel has never incorporated the territory they now occupy, though it has (and does) hold it under occupation. They tried, in 2005, leaving the territory entirely to the Palestinans. The result is that the Palestinians made war on them. Your stubborn refusal to acknowledge this does not make it not-so. If you care to make an analogy to Germany and its Jews, the analogs to the Jews are Israeli Arabs. Who, you may note, are not being expelled.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Does Hamas control anything at this point, in the sense that I could go to an office and talk to my local boss to get something?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If it is damning of anyone it is damning of the Hamas militant. I do not recall any Western warrior mythos that would permit a warrior to hide behind children. At most it would happen once before the warrior realizes that the enemy is actually not bluffing, and then comes out to fight.
Guerrilla warfare certainly isn't uniquely Western but is positively viewed and admired. Most Americans seem to have broadly positive views of the Viet Cong, whose calling card was using innocent villagers as cover.
"The Vietname war was a mistake" is a common sentiment among Americans, but "the VC were good guys" is not.
Okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but Westerners don't have a problem with guerrilla tactics if it's their side doing it.
There is a moral universe of difference between ambushing patrols in the jungle versus using your children as human shields, or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance. The latter in particular literally assumes that your enemy is morally superior to you.
Ironically, the set of people that's less likely to work on are also the set more likely to believe pulling the trigger in that case would be ending two lives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I do not believe that "Americans who think positively of Viet Cong" and "Americans who know Viet Cong's calling card was using innocent villagers as cover" are sets that overlap too much.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It isn't necessary to starve Hamas, merely to deprive them of money. Hamas's allies in the various NGOs and aid organizations help them steal most of the food that comes into Gaza, far more than they can eat themselves. They then sell that food to the starving civilians at high prices, which nets them millions of dollars to fund their war effort.
Israel is under no obligation to help the UN finance a terrorist organization.
There is no exception to the requirement to let humanitarian aid through if your enemy uses it to gain a financial advantage.
Also, I doubt that the average Gazan has a lot of savings which they could pay Hamas by now, and Hamas certainly has other ways to extract any resources from the Gazan population. For example, they might require a donation to be exempt from human shield duty. Also, flooding Gaza with food (to the degree that NGOs are able to provide it) would likely collapse the food prices in Gaza and cut out that stream of resources for Hamas.
Realistically, most of the funding of Hamas probably comes from Iran anyhow.
Flooding Gaza with food would lead to Hamas taking it all, selling it to Gazans, and destroying that part that they can't sell.
It's not as if having excess food means that the food goes to people who need it. Hamas is just as capable of taking excess food as they are of taking necessary food.
More options
Context Copy link
I am not aware of any requirement that would need an exception to be made. Allowing neutral actors to provide humanitarian aid to civilians is one thing. Allowing hostile actors to aid and abet active combatants is something else entirely. As a credible case has been made that this falls under the latter rather than the former, I don't think there is any international law that actually requires the Israelis to do anything.
As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place. That's why they only ban weapons that are too impractical to actually use, like mustard gas and bioweapons. Nobody would ever seriously suggest banning stealth bombers or cruise missiles, because none of the states that have those things would ever agree to stop using them.
Indeed, even the Geneva Conventions generally say things like "if your opponent makes use of this for their advantage, it loses protection under these conventions in that instance". They really wanted to discourage people trying to gain a strategic advantage by breaking the rules and hoping their opponent was too moral to then ignore said rules.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's exactly why Israel needs to do it: it is impossible to prevent civilians from starving because Hamas takes all the food. Israel taking the food affects only Hamas (although there are plenty of civilians to point to, who will be starved regardless of what Israel does but who can be blamed on Israel.)
Which you may have to do (at least to the extent of getting blamed for killing them). Hamas hiding behind civilians and forcing Israel to kill them, or to look like they're trying to kill them, has been a ubiquitous tactic already.
Pretty much no one was starving to death before Israel implemented more stringent aid restrictions this March.
Almost everyone claiming that Gazans are starving now has been claiming the very same thing since the war started.
There's been widespread malnutrition and hunger of course, but few actual deaths directly from starvation until recently.
Again, everyone (apart from you) claiming that people are dying of starvation now has been claiming this since the end of 2023.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I thought Gaza has been continuously starving for 40+ years. I was told this, anyways. Despite the massive population growth.
Gaza pre war had an obesity problem. I don't think anyone was accusing them of being underfed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The aid organizations were helping Hamas and had to be stopped regardless of whether they were also providing food.
I'd also ask just how much "pretty much no one" is and how many are starving now. Hamas is known to have used food to control the people even before October 7, so I do not believe "nobody used to be starving".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link