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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.
I don't think it's propaganda? I feel like genocide and ethnic cleansing are different ways of slicing the same flavor of activity by severity. I'd define ethnic cleansing as what I said above, and genocide as that + "with the intent to permanently eliminate the group".
Ethnic group: Palestinians
Religion: Muslims
Where are they getting moved: ping-ponging back and forth between the North and South of the strip, the Israeli's would be even happier to push them into Egypt, but they can't.
Israel has an easy time bc Israeli Jews don't live in Gaza, but if they did, they obviously wouldn't be getting shuffled around the strip. I don't think ethnic cleansing requires there to be unaffected people in the geography to contrast against the effected people.
I genuinely have no idea what's true at this point with this conflict but this is pretty on the nose, even for the Levant gang
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rp31lk7mzo
If the "ping" in "ping-ponging" is ethnic cleansing, would the "pong" be "ethnic dirtying"? Getting someone out of an area permanently because you want to settle there would be ethnic cleansing, but getting someone out temporarily because it's an active war zone and then bringing them back when it's safe is just good manners, not ethnic cleansing.
There may be ethnic cleansing to come later, because the Israelis can't possibly have failed to notice that "thread the West Back back and forth with settlers" turned out to be a surprisingly secure situation relative to "leave Gaza entirely and hope that leads to peace and then watch your civilians get massacred", but if you want to retain the trust and moral standing to oppose ethnic cleansing when it happens, don't go all boy-who-cried-wolf in the meantime.
There are Israelis who would be happy to push the Gazans into Egypt; there are other Israelis who were happy to bring Gazans to Israel en masse for medical care, even ones who really didn't deserve it (poor link, original is paywalled).
Were the latter just suckers, to take such risks only to have critics ignore their existence? On a moral level, they seem exemplary: you do good for its own sake, not to prevent people from slandering you as evil. But on a practical level, the incentives created by these indiscriminate libels are reminiscent of another old and tragic story. What's the penalty for being unable to end a war without collateral damage? Genocide accusations. What's the penalty for outright expelling the nation who started the war? Genocide accusations. Well, there's no such thing as a war without collateral damage...
I just meant ping-ponging as having them shuffle back and forth across the strip, not a metaphor.
I agree, except with 2 caveats:
I think shuffling a bunch of humans around an area as you bomb it into gravel in an effort to wipe out an organization who's primary recruiting tool is the anger generated in humans who are being shuffled around an area as its bombed into gravel is equal parts evil and stupid. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
given this area will never stop being an active war zone (only more or less intense of one), and frankly given neither side has any interest in making it not that, I feel like "being wildly unwilling to create a lasting peace" somewhat offsets the good manners part of moving people around to keep them safe in the micro level (i.e. day to day or month to month), when on the macro level you have absolutely 0 interest in them ever actually being safe.
Yes
Amusingly, the Chen Sheng story strikes me as the perfect summary of how the Gazans feel. It's not quite as extreme, but this is literally how Hamas has a never ending string of young men signing up to get blown up
"The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down."
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