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So what, the IDF machine-guns them to avoid crowd crushes??? They draw invisible, imaginary lines that, when crossed, get the Gazans shot? Come on, there's a very simple answer here. Few would justify Palestinian suicide bombings like this - 'it was for the Israeli's own good that the Palestinians blew up that bus full of civilians, they crossed an invisible Palestinian security line or something.' Suicide bombings are acts of hatred.
The Israelis also hate the Palestinians. That's why they torture them, blow them up, steal their land, knock down their houses, use all these elaborate terror tactics, shoot them when they're unarmed and obviously no threat. They've been doing this for years, before and after the present conflict.
The Palestinians sure are easy to hate. But there's no way to replace 'Israeli hatred' in the equation here. I fully imagine a skeptical mottizen might try to look into this, is there context, could he have thought she was carrying a bomb? Of course not:
Naturally the soldiers leave the command post, there's this random girl they need to kill!
Hatred is a clear and necessary requirement to understand what's going on in key elements of the Israeli military and society. Otherwise we're just left with absurdities like 'we were shooting the children with heavy machineguns and artillery so that older men wouldn't steal all the food and leave them with nothing'. The 'drug addict who gets let out of jail for the 15th time' analogy isn't appropriate, it's a case where some well-organized, well-connected home-invaders beat the crap out of the home-owner, lock him up in the basement and while lambasting his poverty and squalid conditions, use them as proof of why they should be in charge.
Countries do this, that's how borders get made after all. But dressing it up like this is ridiculous. Israel can't have it's anti-genocide, anti-imperialist, we're just defending ourselves cake and chow down on imperial expansion, ethnic cleansing and forceful subjugation.
Let's not forget these guys outwitted Mossad and the whole Israeli-American intelligence complex with their surprise attack on October 7th. You'd think these high-IQ Israelis with all the most amazing gadgetry wouldn't get sneak-attacked a second time on Yom Kippur but apparently that little bit of readiness is too much to ask.
I mean the situation for 70 years has been Israel gives the tiniest bit of leeway to Palestinians, which jihadists immediately exploit to kill Israelis. It’s obviously not a good thing, but there’s no line that won’t be crossed by Palestinians, and thus Israel no longer has any social trust whatsoever for Palestinians. They’ve been suckered too many times, so the6 see no reason to give quarter. Your “obviously unarmed” Palestinian might well be wearing a bomb (this happened for decades, which is why when Israelis strip captures to their underwear — looking for suicide vests. The supposedly apartheid tactic of making Palestinians use a separate bus stop and be searched before getting on a bus is a response to bus bombings in the 1990s.
So the logical, rational thing to do is to go out, chase her down as she runs away and magdump her?
The captain didn't believe she had a bomb, he just wanted to kill this girl.
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Secular Israeli society is also undergoing severe genetic decline as a consequence of Ashkenazi - Mizrachi intermarriage, and the more endogamous Charedim don’t serve in the IDF or Mossad, so you will find no disagreement from me there.
It was extremely common in the mid 90s in mainstream Western leftist (not even radically, mainstream-ish publications like the NYRB, the Guardian’s opinion section, the Center-left French and Italian press) to justify the first intifada’s terror attacks against civilians including teenagers and children on similar grounds, that these were dispossessed people just trying to defend their land and doing what they could in protest. It’s nothing new, it’s common even.
If some Native American terror movement rises out of the alcoholic emptiness of the reservations to start committing terror attacks against white American civilians, including children then I fully expect that the reaction on this sub will be the same as the Israeli one.
These narratives were justifying Palestinian hatred of Israel, which is different from saying 'They’re boys who try to storm the food distribution sites'. It's the same kind of difference between 'Yes the Palestinians attack Israeli civilians but that's OK because X' and 'actually, there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian, they're fighting-age men/women and due to conscription they're all military targets - anything is permitted'. The former is an attempt at some kind of moral argument excusing admitted hatred, the latter is a way to cover up actions that stem from hatred as practical necessity. If the Israelis were really so concerned about old men and women/children getting food, they wouldn't restrict food aid so much. There are many better ways to prevent crowd crush or rationalize food distribution besides machine-gun fire and artillery!
The whole concept is bizarre. Suppose the Palestinians somehow laid so many roadside bombs Israelis couldn't get food without being gruesomely maimed. Then the Palestinians say 'oh they were clearly trying to steal food, we were simply punishing thieves per age-old traditions - cutting a leg here or there with a landmine works wonders to prevent theft'. It's just adding insult to injury.
The key difference is that native Americans get all kinds of special privileges in America. Native Americans get special casino rights, scholarships and all kinds of affirmative action.
Many on this forum are too accustomed to dismissing racism and oppression. Most of the time, the concept is used inappropriately. Blacks in America receive all kinds of special privileges, the US media and govt tries to sweep black anti-white terror attacks under the rug. So the narrative that they're systemically oppressed doesn't hold. The US military doesn't set up 'if you come near our command post we will shoot you and then confirm the kill' zones in black neighbourhoods. If George Floyd was a 13 year old girl being shot at from long range, people here would likely have a different stance.
Nevertheless, it is possible for one people to actually oppress another. Palestinians don't get to jury-vote their coethnics out of crimes in Israeli courts, there is/was no Palestinian president of Israel... they're actually being oppressed.
Sure, but why? Because they’ve engaged in a (so far) futile decades-long campaign to reverse the Jewish settlement of the levant that eventually angered the settlers enough that they imposed a series of escalating forms of oppression on them. Losing East Jerusalem, much of the West Bank, various other territories was the direct consequence of losing wars (just as it was for the Native Americans) many times in a row. The walls and checkpoints that prevent many Palestinians from living and working in Israel were likewise erected solely in response to terror attacks on Israeli civilians committed by these people and in their name. At every juncture, the noose tightened slowly because the Palestinians did not admit defeat and surrender, culturally and militarily, which is the route to survival for any conquered people.
Native Americans have reservations and affirmative action, sure, but many live on territory far removed from their ancestral homeland due to the westward forced migrations of the 19th century, and in total they have only a tiny percentage of their historical holdings (obviously), far less proportionally than the Palestinians have. Much of the Indian welfare and casino apparatus also only came into being a century or more after the great majority of the country was ethnically cleansed of most or all of its native population, so Israel has time yet.
There has been no effective organized black nationalist movement in American history, and the last ineffective one fizzled out in the 1970s. Crime stats are one thing (almost no black-on-white crime is ‘terrorism’, that ascribes a political and ideological aspiration to the perpetrators that, as mentioned, they just don’t have), 300 armed and trained black men aren’t invading the country club to slaughter the men and rape the women as part of a race war against whites designed to drive them back to Europe, that isn’t something that happens in America.
There is a world in which the Palestinians accepted the reasonable 1967 borders (after already losing to Israel twice), kept a substantial proportion of their land, fortified their borders with the help of their Arab neighbors (such that no settlers would be coming in) and set up a relatively peaceful coexistence with Israel. As they did before and after, they chose otherwise. Gaza would not have been destroyed if Hamas hadn’t gambled on Hezbollah and West Bank Palestinians successfully joining a huge uprising on October 7th.
The Arabs are actually oppressed, certainly. But they are oppressed because they have continued to make very bad decisions in service of their pride over their comfort, liberty and life for so many years and show no sign of stopping. They had options and still do, if worse ones.
You're just describing how imperialism works, that's how countries get their borders. My point is that defensive violence is basically reasonable. It can't be less reasonable than offensive violence.
Most accept this and would take it a step further, viewing defensive violence as legitimate and offensive violence as wrong. Israel routinely says it's fighting a defensive struggle for survival to justify its tactics and campaigns, to justify foreign military aid and diplomatic assistance. But they're fighting offensively.
The Israelis didn't accept those borders and rejected them, that's why they took various territories beyond '67 borders in the Six Day War. They changed those borders and have continued to cement their territorial holdings by splitting up the Palestinian held land in the West Bank, creating new settlements.
Reasonable borders are based on power and Israeli power is unstable.
Israel is not a great power due to its small size and doesn't have the luxury of prosecuting this kind of campaign, they only get away with it due to US diplomatic and military support. Without America, they would've run out of bombs to blow up Gaza with and much else besides. Without America, their missile defence would be much less effective. Without American diplomacy and aid deals their neighbours would be much more hostile. The Israeli situation is unstable, they have a high-tech economy dependent on not being sanctioned, a high-tech military dependent on US weapons, a fractious democracy unsuited for juche-style isolation.
Constantly angering the Arab and Islamic world is not a smart idea. Israelis may be better at fighting but they're vastly outnumbered. This is not America vs native Americans. It is provocative and obnoxious behaviour to derive national legitimacy from harsh treatment in the ghettoes and expulsions in Eastern Europe and then ghettoize the locals of a graciously granted strip of land, while continuously striving to expand it for lebensraum. This kind of behaviour has and will reduce favourability in the West.
The Palestinians have made bad decisions, so has Israel. There may not be much sympathy for yet another Israeli crisis where they 'need' a surge of aid and support to get out of a fix. What is their plan for China inciting trouble, getting Hamas some first-rate MANPADs, ATGMs and killer drones to drag the US into more MENA drama? What is their plan for EU sanctions or the US walking away? Or even just a prolonged insurgency and skirmishing with Iran that wrecks their economy? Vae victis works both ways.
Yes, Israel was founded in the wrong place.
I reject the characterization of colonialism as wrong. The end of empire led to a sustained and considerable decline in quality of life in many parts of the world.
While I agree that Israel’s future is very uncertain Israeli unreasonableness has yet to be tested. In the event of European sanctions and American disengagement, an end to all aid, a prolonged military crisis and food supply issues, I think there’s every chance that in the resulting domestic political upheaval they negotiate with the Europeans and Gulf Arabs and agree to some kind of two-state solution; they know if they’re overrun its lights out forever, or at least another 2000 years.
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What do you suggest the IDF do instead? Let them take all the food?
Machine-gunning and shelling people to avoid crowd crushes is obviously and inherently counter-productive.
If the IDF cared so much about how food was distributed in Gaza, they should try doing some food distributions themselves, win hearts and minds. Having food makes you popular amongst the hungry! US/British troops were very, very popular in Germany post-war since they controlled the food and treated the Germans with a very, very basic level of respect - even though they'd just bombed and blasted the country to ruins.
The IDF doesn't want to distribute food, they think it's too risky getting close to these guys? Then let some UN or NGOs do it.
But the IDF wants to starve the population as part of their campaign strategy and out of hatred, which is why they shoot people trying to get food and make it so extremely difficult to bring food in at all.
US/British troops post-war were in full control of Germany, so they didn't have to deal with Nazis who would forcibly take the food when they tried distributing food to German civilians.
US troops also were in full control of Japan, a nation expected to violently resist such, but they didn't, in part due to a careful occupation and how we actually imported quite large quantities of food to keep them from starvation there too. What do you know, now we're allies. Weird.
We should also just get this out of the way - if there's a sufficient amount of food going in to Gaza, food riots don't happen. Because, you know, people have enough food. Israel dropped the ball on food imports from the very early days! If I remember right, they declared a blockade a few days after the attack, and it was almost two weeks or something like that until food began flowing again - and even then, slowly and not enough. I feel like people aren't really aware of, or thinking through, the absolute numbers involved. A bit down this page there's a nice little chart. Before the attacks, it took 500 trucks a day to "break even" food-wise. That's about 15,000 truckloads per month, yes? Please look at that chart. November 2023 only 2,548 trucks entered over the entire month. Now, people have disputed these numbers, and I'm not 100% sure of the correct ones. But some have tried, here's one attempt which landed on a ca. 200/day figure, or 6,000 per month. That was never hit even once even at maximum aid flow. The chart shows that aid showed up more in the 3,000 per month range. So there's quite obviously a major gap here. And by gap I mean malnutrition, and even death, because food distribution systems have variability in coverage, even the really good ones.
It built up to critical mass over the last nearly two years. And now some people are stating with a straight face, oh look at all the riots, it's the fault of the Gazans, as if the situation just happened out of nowhere. That's a good example of victim blaming missing the point.
The point is that they could only do this because they were in full control. Israel cannot do this, because they don't have full control over Gaza.
That doesn't follow. Food that goes into Gaza freely would just be taken by Hamas. Hamas would then offer it only to people who follow their orders, up to and including becoming suicide bombers so their family gets fed.
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Yes, let the organizations that are actively trying to secure a Hamas win distribute food. That'll definitely fix the problem.
An explicitly pro-Israel NGO doing it would have better results, because they will genuinely attempt to make sure that does not occur, but their work would be frustrated because of (and by) the above.
So the army doesn't want to distribute food. They don't want to let anyone else distribute food. But they do want to shoot people coming up to get food... Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here! And it's not a sincere concern for crowd crush and equitable distribution of aid.
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Airdrop an overwhelming amount of non-perishable food into Gaza. Hamas wants to control the population by controlling the food supply? Make sure that everyone has access to such large amounts of food that Hamas can't realistically take it from everyone.
This doesn't help. There's no amount of food that Hamas can't realistically take. There's an amount that they can't realistically eat themselves, but they'd just take it and destroy the amount they can't eat.
I'm pretty sure there is zero evidence of this, and it frankly doesn't make any sense. Especially this far into the war, most of "Hamas" is probably not grizzled veterans, they're young men who have been radicalized by suffering around them - in other words, regular Palestinians who have an affinity for the local people (because they are the local people). They aren't going to be destroying food to spite Israel by some kind of convoluted logic.
They wouldn't do it to spite Israel, they would do it because having control over the food supply means having control over the people.
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Seems like the sort of thing that would be easy to document terrible optics for Hamas. They're usually pretty good at managing optics.
Hamas has done plenty of things that are terrible optics already. The media just refuses to publicize them.
Even sending rockets into Israel was terrible optics, but Hamas got away with it.
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I also want an overwhelming number of guns (specifically pistols) airdropped into Gaza too. A Tokarev for every man, woman, and child.
Hamas is already as armed as they need to be and wouldn't benefit from more guns (and these personal defense weapons aren't really suitable for waging a non-civil war). I want everyone else to be, so that when Hamas tries to seize the food or set up forward bases in places in which they are not welcome they get shot the fuck up. Israel already has to assume every Palestinian is armed because Palestinians and Hamasi look the exact same, so it's not hurting them.
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That is a fantastic idea, and I would strongly endorse it. how much would this cost? It can't possibly be more than we waste on any number of military or social programs of far more dubious effectiveness.
My estimate is that it'd cost ~$10B / year to drop 2 humanitarian daily rations per person per day (4400 calories / person / day) on Gaza by helicopter. You might be able to cut those costs by 3x in a reasonable way, I'm doubtful that you could drop them by 10x.
On the other hand I bet you wouldn't actually need to keep it up for a year to break the Hamas stranglehold on food distribution.
What's your estimate on flight costs for helicopter versus C-130? Because I bet you could figure out a way to drop those things out the back of a cargo aircraft by the palletload and have 90%+ reach the ground intact; from eating MREs a few times, I don't remember them being very heavy for their volume, and the packaging is durable...
Maybe ditch the Humanitarian rations and just start dropping sacks of dry beans and rice with cut-rate parachutes? Like, really optimize for usable calories on the ground for the cheapest price possible, where harm to the payload is a minimal concern.
I think a literal palletload of MREs dropped out of a C130 has a pretty high chance of being an accidental kinetic weapon. Probably possible to do a bit better though.
Part of it, though, is that helicopters are just not that expensive in the grand scheme of things - I see $2400 / ton from the World Food Program for their program of doing very similar airdrops of food over South Sudan.
And yeah beans and rice are cheaper, but even if you cut the cost of the food itself to $0 you still need to ship about 1-1.5kg / person / day, which works out to 1M metric tons / year of food. At that point the cost of delivering the food by air is the strong limiting constraint.
Israel has already spent $30B on this war, so if getting costs down by 10x really is viable I am even more confused why they haven't done it, absent the obvious explanation of "they really are trying to put food pressure on Gaza".
I was thinking more hot-glue two packs to a stick and see if you can get them to airfoil like a maple-seed, or even just dump the packs out loose from, say, 200 feet up. I've never seen one of these packs, I'm going off handling MRE packs before, which were relatively light and packaged in very tough plastic.
My assumption is that Israel is absolutely trying to put food pressure on Gaza; I think there was a link in the international thread that 10% of the gazan population is now dead, and I would expect that number to increase significantly before this is over.
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Israel and friends did parachute pallets in late July/early August in coordination with the UAE and Jordan. Footage and image of a pallet. It was criticized for being a dangerous (probably untrue) and token (true) effort.
A big Berlin airlift that aims to feed everyone is doable if the US is supporting in a major way. Israel has maybe 15 Hercules. UAE/Jordan around the same between them. If everyone tries hard, and the US matches with airframes and maintenance support, you get 40 planes.
Running the numbers through the robot, bottleneck is space (only 6-8 pallets per flight) and available airframes. Somewhere between 200-400 flights to deliver one daily ration of ~2100 calories to 2 million mouths. The high numbers were when I tried to get a guesstimate on the GHF's 20kg 3-5 day rations. To get to the low end we need x5 sorties per day from our fleet of 40. If, however, you managed to fill the back of the plane with loose grains of rice until max load, you could cut that down to 60 flights. The robot tried really hard to convince me "you can’t pour loose grain in the cabin" because "loose bulk will shift during flight and create dangerous center-of-gravity," but I am not convinced.
Actually, I saw something about how dangerous it is for ships, I imagine it's similar issues for planes.
If this video is to be believed, such an incident (poorly secured cargo shifting on a plane) was responsible for a Tu-104 crashing and taking out 16 of the USSR Pacific Fleet's top admirals in a single shot.
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Unironically, you could probably also figure out a way to shoot them out of a canon. Or a literal trebuchet.
Wouldn't be the best way to do so, obviously, but if we're looking for cost-efficient airdrops, why not blimps and zepplins?
Maybe we could get steampunk zepplins after all.
yeah, I see the skepticism over cost as a challenge. 4.70 per ratpack x 2 ratpacks x 2,050,000 inhabitants = $18.8 million, so obviously the large majority of the cost estimate here is delivery. I'm pretty sure cargo planes have <10x the capacity of a helicopter with significantly lower costs per flight hour.
Greater (>10x), since you can pack a helicopter into the largest ones, and yes (mostly), but also not necessarily.
The larger issue is more the relative precision of drops. You can not only greatly increase the survival / receipt of food delivery when doing it via helicopter rather than plane, but you can also even manage a loose idea of who will receive it. Such as, say, a clan enclave that has defensible positions against a Hamas seizure/retaliation group, as opposed to airdropping into Israel or the Mediterranean. So you could absolutely carry X ration packages cheaper in the plane, but you'd also need to carry far more than X packages on Y planes to get the same effect.
High-air drops aren't really effective, and tend to assume you have relatively free mobility across the land area being dropped upon. There's a reason the Berlin Airbridge was overwhelmingly land-unloads while the airdrops were propaganda.
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While I think it's trivially true that there's a lot of Palestinian hatred going around in Israel, I don't agree that it's a "necessary requirement" for what we observe. The Israeli forces could conceivably have decided to engage in this sort of savagery as a calculated 'terrorist' tactic intended to break their enemies' spirits and force a surrender. Even a completely dispassionate army could come up with that strategy, though actual hatred among the soldiery is unquestionably helpful in ensuring it is implemented.
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