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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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