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About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.
There are several parallel subthreads already discussing to what extent the starvation actually affects Hamas, and you choose to ignore them and instead post this Twitter-level dunk.
Except that's a meaningful statement - "the acts of war undertaken so far have been insufficient to compel a favorable political resolution" - just glibly phrased.
Neither will Israel starve Gaza into releasing the hostages nor will Hamas rape Israel into recognizing a free Palestine. Nor were either Nazi Germany or the UK ever going to bomb each other into submission.
Both phrasings imply that there is some level of suffering at which point the other side will give in, that the cruelty is instrumental to achieve another terminal goal. While this might even be technically true (i.e. once the last Gazan starves, nobody will stop the IDF from retrieving the bones of the hostages) I think that the implication "and we already have made progress into making the other side give in" is simply false.
In reality there is no clever terminal goal for which starving Gazans or murdering Jewish civilians is an instrumental stepping stone, so we can conclude that the cruelty is itself a terminal goal.
And yet Germany was starved into submission in WWI, Japan bombed into submission in WWII, Tigray starved/bombed into submission in Ethiopia, etc.
Yes, it is a truism that war is politics by other means.
Your strawmanning aside, that's a nice hunch you have there - a shame if someone were to...test it.
Blind assertion without evidence. It's quite clear that murdering Jewish civilians is envisaged as an instrumental stepping stone to "liberating" Israeli territory for Palestinians - Hamas and other Palestinian organizations openly say so. And it's not as if there is any shortage of Israeli press squabbling about the blockade, food aid issues, and what the ultimate political program that Israel should be pursuing w/r/t Gaza is (downstream of "10/7 can never happen again" of course), none of which you discuss or cite.
I think Hamas is suitably different enough that you can't really compare starving their people to the blockades of Germany or Japan. Hamas and other terrorist groups consider human suffering and death to be a good thing because of their religion. There may be no upper limit to how much death they will tolerate.
In light of this, I don't really know how you solve the Hamas problem. Maybe stop letting aid in and then also give everyone guns to turn the whole thing into a Syria-esque clusterfuck and hope the people solve the Hamas problem themselves? Is that why clusterfucks like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen happen?
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If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil. The fact that Hamas' power is limited to terrorizing a few unarmed civilians and then scampering away in impotent terror when the real soldiers show up is, itself, the problem. The fact that they're too weak to have any chance of victory is the reason why their futile war crimes are so heinous. It's one thing to commit a necessary evil in order to liberate your people from oppression. It's another, much worse thing to commit a pointless evil just for the sake of doing it.
As Talleyrand once said of another act of self-destructive violence against civilians: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake."
I'm sure the USA thought the Vietcong were too weak to have a chance of victory. Or the British/Russians/USA vs their flavor of Afghani opposition.
I do actually agree with you in this case, but it's kind of a funny claim to make when we have no idea how this ends.
Anyone making confident calls about any of the insurgencies I listed above partway through ended up very wrong.
And the viet cong didn't win. The north Vietnamese Army did, yes, eventually, against South Vietnam(not the US; the USA had actually withdrawn after assurances that North Vietnam would respect the sovereignty of the south and then chosen not to intervene when they predictably broke that promise), but not the viet cong.
Of course what actually happened was getting tired of propping up the local puppet government and withdrawing to leave it to its fate, which was to get overthrown by militant groups which had consistently lost to the imperial army.
Your enemy giving up and leaving is winning. It's a shitty way to win because you have 0 initative, but you still get what you want in the end.
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Of course we have an idea of where this ends. The Palestinian aim to drive the jews, every one, out of the region and the Jews will not leave willingly. It can end with the Palestinians somehow accepting the Jews existing in the region or one side killing the other. Those are the options.
Agreed.
I predict both sides will refuse to understand this and the cycle of violence will perpetuate for our lifetimes
Both sides of the conflict clearly understand this. It's only third parties who do not.
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The Viet Cong didn't win, the Americans got tired of fighting and gave up. The Viet Cong never landed a single boot on American soil. There was never any question of the Viet Cong conquering America. In the sense that the Palestinians are too weak to conquer Israel, the Viet Cong were too weak to conquer America.
The difference between Hamas and the Viet Cong is that Hamas has invaded Israeli soil and killed Israeli civilians. The Israelis can't get tired of fighting and give up like the Americans did in Vietnam. If they could, they would have done it already. Hamas and its various sister organizations like Hezbollah will continue to attack Israel until one or the other is annihilated. Ergo, the Israelis have no choice but to continue fighting.
That is winning. It's a shitty unglamorous way to win, but they accomplished their objectives, and America did not. The Americans could have stuck around and stamped them into oblivion with unlimited political will, but they didn't have it, so they left.
I agree but also don't. Money and political will aren't infinite, they'll have to pull back and scale down eventually. The only way this really ends-ends is genocide, and they can't do that, so they'll have to give up eventually.
They can pull back, but they'll be fighting again when Hamas starts another war in a few months or years. There is no losing interest and giving up against an enemy that threatens your homeland.
If the Viet Cong had done 9/11 we would have turned their jungle into a parking lot.
Yes exactly
Hence my opinion that the Israeli strategy is bad because it's inherently unsustainable and also profoundly not going to resolve anything.
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My understanding is that the Viet Cong was stamped into oblivion in the aftermath of Tet, and American was defeated by the North Vietnamese, who didn't actually need the Viet Cong given the complete failure to build a South Vietnam that the South Vietnamese were willing to fight for.
Sure
My knowledge of the Vietnam war is shaky at best. My point is that insurgencies can win just by surviving and running out the clock
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As I understand it, the original conception for Oct. 7 was a surprise Hamas break-out, coupled with a simultaneous large-scale Hezbollah offensive, would pincer Israel and overwhelm its local defenses, potentially sufficiently to spark sympathetic uprisings in the West Bank or among Israeli arabs as well.
Notably, the Hezbollah component of the attack didn't happen, and good for the Israelis that it didn't because in terms of raw numbers of fighters and weapons, Hezbollah had a lot more than Hamas (prior to Operation Grim Beeper and collateral airstrikes, at least).
Even without Hezbollah, it was very close to major disaster. The Hamas units were not supposed to be stopping to pillage the kibbutz on the Gaza border, they were supposed to be going from army post to army post and wiping them out all the way to the Palestinian Territories. Which if they had maintained their offensive time tables they very well could have, since the IDF units in the area were terribly unprepared and badly disciplined. Fortunately local police units were much more vigilant and trained for this scenario, and they did a good job slowing down the Hamas special forces units that actually were pushing forward. There was one road intersection that the IDF and police narrowly managed to hold on to, if they hadn’t the only line for reinforcements to get into most Southwestern Israel would have been cut.
This is such funny hand wringing. What major disaster? 1000 more Israeli's die (that would suck sure)?
How are a bunch of dudes in pickup trucks and paragliders ever, EVER going to credibly threaten one of the most sophisticated armies on planet earth? Yeah they'd do more damage, it would take longer to root them out sure. But airplanes and tanks > ak's and pickups, it was always going to end like this.
"Omg Hamas almost overran Isreal" is straight melodramatic bullshit. Even if the whole gang pitched in Isreal would have won, it just would have been more like Yum Kippur and less like every other middle eastern insurgency wack-a-mole
You say this like we didn't just have the Afghan war, with the US military fighting dudes in pickup trucks and with AKs and jerry-rigged IEDs.
Also, Israel is tiny It's literally about 9 miles wide from the border to the sea at one point, and it's only 20 miles from Tel Aviv to the border. How many people with AKs running around Boston would it take for the whole city to freak out and panic?
And the USA shit stomped them with an insane k/d ratio until they got bored and left. Dude's in cars with AKs are a nightmare but can't do much against a modern army.
Not many, but I'm talking existential risk here, not "makes everything fucking awful for a week before dying"
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Afghanistan is instructive only in the fact that it shows that weak occupations will not be successful. If you are arguing using Afghanistan as an example, the only logical argument is that Israel should be more brutal, allow in less aid, bomb every building they have credible intelligence houses a Hamas agent, etc, etc. In short, if you are referencing the failure of Afghanistan, the most logical argument vis-a-vis Israel becomes that the US should authorize total war, a blockade of all supplies, and a creeping artillery barrage until nothing is left.
If that is not what you think is a good idea, perhaps use some other example.
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If a thousand more Israelis died on 10/7, Gaza would be a smoking, burning crater.
It's not hyperbole to say that Israel has no strategic depth. The distance an American drives to say, Walmart (10 miles) is further than Israel is at its narrowest width. Even a scrappy band of jihadis with no air cover can hold such a small band for a few days. With hostages? Indefinitely.
Israel doesn't get a chance to make a mistake, while its enemies only have to get lucky once to do significant damage.
No disagreement here. They could cause a lot of damage sure. Israel is crazy fragile.
But Israel has a lot of heavy gear. They'd win after a few days if they weren't worried about hostages (which in this scenario, they'd allow them to be collateral damage, I would)
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I’m sure this is an opinion that will manage to piss off everyone for different reasons, but I think the IDF is highly overrated, both historically and in its current form. It’s basically what the Russian Army would be like if they had never fought in Ukraine or Afghanistan or Chechnya, and were 1/20th in size.
Their technological achievements are mostly in the field of air defense and certain high-impact intelligence operations, both of which are genuinely impressive but aren’t necessarily going to help in an October 7th kind of situation, especially when the command and communications systems have completely broken down.
I actually don't know a ton any them so I'd love to hear why?
Their air dominance over Iran was pretty gangster though. SEAD is not easy.
Conscript/reservist army. Most of the bulk of the fighting force isn’t going to be particularly well trained. And a larger percentage of the regulars are in the technical fields like the navy, the tank corps, and the Air Force. There are only about 2,500 actually well trained shooters in the whole thing, and those run into high attrition rates since they get used for a lot of the more complex tasks. In the footage I’m seeing a lot of absolutely terrible tactical malpractice. And the IDF is doing the Vietnam strategy of rotating out the troops to fast for them to learn anything.
Decent equipment, overly reliant on tanks. Probably would have serious difficulty maintaining fuel and ammunition logistics in the event of an actual major ground war. Probably would have insufficient artillery if they could not rely on the IAF.
Poor military culture. Israel used to have a pretty good military culture but over the past 30 years they have slipped into the American/Chinese mental model of “career military service is for losers too poor or stupid to do anything else”. So crucially, you now have incompetent undertrained draftees being led by incompetent NCOs and officers. This is what lead to the absolutely horrific failures of readiness and discipline that allowed October 7 to happen.
It’s not actually that big. 650,000 reservists sounds like a lot, and is fine for the theater sizes they have fought in so far, but it would make attritional warfare or warfare fought over a wide theater difficult. Given the recent indications from the Ukraine War, and the fact that the last country to fight Iran ended up in an eight year long trench war that caused them 1.5 million casualties, this isn’t good.
Overly reliant on air power. The Air Force they have is good. But it is vulnerable to gradual attrition or sudden catastrophic losses. In the era of drones and advanced ballistic missiles, aircraft are vulnerable on the ground. Again it’s also not that large only 250 fighter aircraft. It’s about the same size as the Turkish Air Force, and smaller than Pakistan’s. Air defenses have gotten a lot better, and nobody knows how well they would do at air to air since there hasn’t been much air to air for anyone in the last fifty years. And I don’t think they can necessarily rely on their opponents being absolute hamburgers in the air anymore.
Overall it’s not terrible, and a lot of these problems aren’t unique to Israel. But I think the myth of the IDF has grown so big that people have gotten a very unrealistic view of its actual size and capabilities.
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if that had happened, they probably would've triggered 'Grim Beeper' (nice name) early, and it would've turned Hezbollah's army into a mob with guns
still would've been bad for Israel, but I suspect not bad enough that they'd lose.
I doubt it; IIRC the beepers were used to "call up" Hezbollah members for service. If Hezbollah was already engaged in an all-out invasion of northern Israel as envisaged/desired by Hamas, there likely would have been no need to use/carry the beepers after the fighters had assembled and gone into combat.
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Notice the discontinuity with your comparison.
Hamas invaded Israel, committed a bunch of war crimes, and now has no method nor seemingly intention of feeding their own people. Which apparently is Israel's fault?
You're comparing Hamas' crimes to their incompetence, and in so doing illustrating my point.
When they're the ones blocking all routes and all aid in, yes.
Does Gaza produce anything besides death cultist mouths to feed?
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
Even prisoners still produce toilet wine. Gaza seems to have been a total economic basketcase going back decades.
Toilet wine is not agriculture. It's a mere conversion of one food stuff to another, and doesn't produce nutrients. Toilet wine is made from food given to the prisoners by the guards, so it's a very poor argument in the context of food self-sufficiency of Gaza.
Keep in mind that Gaza is a desert region, so farming there is not easy. Especially since Gaza lies at the sea, so you have salt-water intrusion into the ground water. And the various disruptive behaviors of the Israeli settlers and government goes back for decades, which makes it a lot harder to farm. The area is also heavily overpopulated, in part due to the Israeli policy of taking ever more land from the Palestinians. The population density of Gaza is slightly smaller than of Hong Kong, so it is effectively a city state. It is not reasonable to expect much agriculture with that level of population density.
Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect anything else given the conditions during those decades? For example, Israel never allowed Gaza to build a harbor so they could trade with other nations. If you were in charge in Gaza, how would you create a healthy economy?
Letting Israeli settlers move to the Gaza Strip was policy after they took it from Egypt in the Six Day War in 1967 (Gaza Strip population 380 thousand), but that ended in 2005 when Israel withdrew unilaterally, leaving the Gazans (population 1.3 million) with everything within the Egyptian borders from 1948, all of which they retained for the next 18 years, until after October 7th (population 2.2 million, 40% 15 years old or younger).
Israel has been taking ever more land from the West Bank, but (correct me if I'm wrong!) the Palestinians there have generally been stuck in the enclaves there, not displaced to Gaza.
In charge de facto, with full popular support? It would have to start the same way Dresden's and Tokyo's and Hiroshima's economic recovery did: by surrendering to the vastly militarily superior opponent. The first Gazan rocket attack after the Israeli withdrawal was "several hours later"! Instead of setting internal security to torturing and killing political opponents and "collaborators", I'd reserve war-related prosecution and imprisonment for anyone who commits perfidy after the surrender.
Just "in charge" de jure, still having to negotiate peace and prevent violations of it but within a population that's still only 40% in favor of negotiations vs 30% in support of armed resistance? I'd probably shave my facial hair, try to buy a fake id, and otherwise "disappear" before the next war over who's really in charge or the victors' decision to execute me as a collaborator.
And then what? Do you believe that Israel would then come in with a Marshall Plan, like the US did after WW 2? The big issue for decades has been that Israel does not trust the Palestinians to build up an economy and not use those resources to attack Israel. Israel's policy has always been to attack innocent Palestinians and destroy their property, when even relatively minor attacks happened. That is not how you get peace, but rather, how you get a forever war, where each new generation learns that there is no hope of a good life by doing the regular things to achieve that (getting an education and investing in companies).
The childish fantasy that each and every Palestinian would magically and suddenly stop believing in violence as a solution is not a way out of the conflict. It is as realistic as thinking that Israeli settlers would suddenly stop using violence against Palestinians, which Israel also has never been able to stop (but refuses to admit to that, because then it would expose their hypocrisy). So a total surrender, whatever that even means in the chaos that is Gaza, where central control surely doesn't exist anymore, will just lead to new forms of oppression of the Palestinians, that will inevitably cause people to rebel against that oppression with violence.
Fact is that the PA has been collaborating with Israel for a very long time, and Israel had (and still has) a perfect opportunity to gradually reduce restrictions on the West Bank, to actually give Palestinians a way out, by showing that there is an opportunity to build up a prosperous Palestinian state. However, instead, Israel is treating the PA like the Judenrat where the PA is supposed to keep the Palestinians compliant, while their land is getting taken from them, and they are being kept in a closed off ghetto with no prospect of building up anything.
The fact that Israel even threats Palestinian Israeli's as second-class citizens and that Israel is explicitly society that is only supposed to serve one race shows that there is inherently no desire to allow Palestinians to co-exist on an equal level. If you see Israel for what it is, a society that aims to be racially pure, then it is absolutely no surprise that the only solutions that it is willing to accept are permanent ghetto's, ethnic cleansing and solutions of that kind, and not a reasonable solution for the Palestinians (whether that is their own state, equal rights within Israel, or whatever).
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Israel was blocking the delivery of aid, and after begrudgingly letting some through they were shooting at people going from and to the distribution points. Yes, both of those are their fault.
If you think the two cases are asymmetric, the better difference to observe is perhaps that the Israeli government routinely engages in war crimes against Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options, while Hamas routinely engages in war crimes against Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government. The average Israeli seems to deserve suffering for the Israeli government's crimes a lot more than the average Palestinian deserves suffering for Hamas's.
(And lest we go there, history did not start on Oct 7 2023.)
I don't think you know what a war crime is.
Potshots at civilians picking up groceries is a war crime.
That seems to depend on who is making the judgment, and whether the 'potshot' is an unguided missile launched at civilian population centers (which happen to include grocery stores, and maybe a few valid military targets) or IDF forces firing at what I assume they deem (validly or not) 'suspicious' actors seeking to steal or disrupt humanitarian aid distribution.
Neither really brings joy, though.
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According to polls of Palestinians conducted between October 31st and November 7th, 2023, support for Hamas stood at 76%; for the Al-Aqsa Briagades at 80%; for Palestinian Islamic Jihad at 84%; and for the Al-Qassam Brigades at 89%. In 2023, Netanyahu's approval rating among Israelis stood at 47%.
Also, a lot of the ones who don't like Hamas dislike Hamas for not killing enough Jews. This is a twenty Stalins sort of dislike. "Doesn't like Hamas" doesn't mean "is more peaceful than Hamas".
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Israel had 86.5% favourability for the IDF last year, seemingly up to 93% now but I'm only finding paywalled articles. Unfortunately there are rarely polls that measure trust in the system of government modulo the parts that it allows the public to influence (since favourability for the Netanyahu administration would more accurately correspond to something like favourability of the current Hamas leadership).
Given that IDF service is mandatory for everyone except the haredim, asking an Israeli about their opinion on the IDF is literally "do you like yourself and your neighbors?" - not terribly meaningful, or a useful reflection of Israeli opinion on state policy.
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Don't people generally have a "Support the Troops" mentality even if you disagree with what the leadership is doing with the troops?
I imagine that it gets even more so when everyone and their brother spent time in the IDF when they were young.
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That's a fair point.
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