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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Certainly it's possible to morally evaluate Israeli and Iranian attacks - bluntly, if I zoom out and look at them in a bigger context, I find plenty sympathetic in both cases. Israeli fear of attack is an understandable reaction to having been surrounded by states determined to destroy it. Iranian hatred of America, going back decades, is an understandable response to unilateral Western and later American aggression against them. There's a sense in which I think Israel is right to oppose its neighbouring Arab states, much less Iran, and in which I think Iran is right to oppose America.

In this case specifically, I just don't want to waste your or my time scrutinising this or that specific claim about an Israeli action. Take, say, Gaza. If we trust wiki around 73k Palestinians have been killed, of which 80% are civilians, so let's say 58k civilian casualties. Let's also for the sake of argument assume that figure is heavily inflated, so let's cut it in half and suppose there are 29k real casualties. Let's also be maximally generous to Israel and cut it down again, since maybe a lot of that number is Hamas human shields or somesuch. So let's suppose that Israel has killed 15k or so innocent people in Gaza.

Is that enough to count as 'behaving badly'? Let's compare this to some other conflicts. The Azerbaijanis took Artsakh and killed a few hundred people. The recent South Yemen offensive seems to have also killed something in the range of hundreds. Those are significantly less. Wiki gives post-2024 casualties in Syria as around 10k overall, which is comparable to our minimal guess at Gaza - am I allowed to say that any of these groups are behaving badly? When the Russians fought that insurgency in Chechnya, they killed a few thousand people - can I say that the Russians behaved badly? How many dead civilians are necessary? I think my threshold is set at a pretty reasonable level.

I think that Israel is behaving more-or-less comparably to its neighbours in similar situations. I don't think it's behaving uniquely badly, but I do think it's fair to say that, overall, it is killing enough civilians that the word "bad" is merited.

In this case specifically, I just don't want to waste your or my time scrutinising this or that specific claim about an Israeli action. T

If (1) you refuse to back up your claim that Israel has been behaving "very badly,"; and (2) you refuse to concede, for the sake of argument that Israel has NOT been behaving "very badly," then there is nothing more to discuss. All I can tell you is that you are wrong.