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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.
Eh, they're not "release the hostages" starving yet.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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