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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   28875 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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For those who haven't seen it - drone footage of the aftermath of the music festival attack (no gore): https://twitter.com/samueloakford/status/1711174266706682029

I have to admit I've been moving from a position of sympathy for Gaza towards more sympathy for Israel in the last years, and this attack perfectly exemplifies the reasons why.

Israel aims to destroy military targets, and at most you can complain about a lack of concern for civilians. Though in general they at least attempt to minimize civilian casualties. Hamas actively targets civilians, gleefully massacres them en masse, and then parades their naked bodies through the streets where common people spit on their corpses, so it isn't even just Hamas specifically. And they happily put all of it online, where other arabs cheer them on. WTF would you even attack a music festival?

On top, even when an Israeli attack kills a large number of civilians, you'll often find out that it's because Hamas deliberately put a military base inside a civilian building, actively aiming for this outcome.

Sure the Israelis also have plenty of questionable tactics such as the creeping settlements in the west bank, but everything they do just seems so much ... saner in comparison. It's the difference between a cutthroat CEO who'll backstab you in a corporate deal when it is beneficial for him to do so, and the murderhobo who'll physically backstab you because you were the nearest person and fuck jews, that's why.

parades their naked bodies through the streets

Is there a video or picture of this? This claim is repeated everywhere I look, but if you mean the short video of the corpse of that German-Israeli woman, she's not naked.

In online media, they keep referring to her only as "German", which I think isn't entirely a coincidence. One article I've found about this but am too lazy to dig up right now did mention after multiple paragraphs that not only is she in fact a dual German-Israeli citizen but had in fact lived in Israel for 6 years. Some X post also claimed she's actually an IDF reservist, but I'm not sure.

When I was browsing 4chan I've seen images of Hamas soldiers showing off a dead girl with only underpants on. No links though.

If you want to quibble that it's technically not fully nude be my guest, but that's about as convincing to me as "well it wasn't rape bc she was already dead".

It's not 'technically not fully nude', just normal not nude, complete with something on her back that looks like a strap of a top. From what I've seen it's not really clear she was stripped of anything at all.

I don't know what you think I'm trying to convince you of, seeing falsehoods repeated irks me, that's my angle here.

I saw one of a live woman with blood and shit on the rear of her trousers being paraded before she was loaded into a truck. I leave it to the viewer to decide if she's been gangraped or developed an untimely attack of anal fissuring.

Clearly, it was a burrito. It's the sacrifice you have to make to eat something so delicious.

Yes, I saw that one, too. Not very nice either.

Hamas actively targets civilians, gleefully massacres them en masse, and then parades their naked bodies through the streets where common people spit on their corpses, so it isn't even just Hamas specifically.

The usual suspects online say that since most Israelis have served in the army, they are all technically combatants and can be shot at. Of course, this is a rhetorical trap, since by saying that this doesn't mean you have to parade their naked bodies through the streets where common people spit on their corpses you implicitly agree that it's fine to shoot at them without desecrating their corpses.

That is such an insane understanding of international war conventions that I'm hard-pressed to believe anyone is making that argument in good faith. By that logic, Swedish citizens are fair game for the Taliban.

Also, would not apply to many of people from the festival.

It's the sort of stuff one says when they are losing a debate and has to quickly to think of something, anything to save face.

The usual suspects online say that since most Israelis have served in the army, they are all technically combatants and can be shot at.

Which is nonsense on toast. That's the sort of thing I mean by saying the Israelis are held to a standard which sort of rhymes with international conventions.

The thing that has blackpilled me about the conflict more than anything is Corey Gil-Shuster's youtube channel. He goes and asks random Israelis and Palestinians on the streets various questions, which I find really illuminating because it gives a sense of the distribution of views and how well thought out they are, etc. And after you watch a few of those you can't avoid the stark reality that there is a large critical mass of Palestinians who absolutely adamantly refuse to consider any outcome short of the total destruction of Israel.

And given that is the case, and that Israel will absolutely not accept its own erasure, there is just no possible compromise or deal to be had. All you can do is keep fighting for another hundred years and hope some future generation is smarter, I guess.

Yeah, I can't say Corey Gil-Shuster's videos showed me anything I didn't already know, but repeatedly he (or his viewers) have tried to ask Palestinians some form of "What would peace look like, since the Israelis aren't going to all pack up and leave?" and the answers are almost always, with varying degrees of circumlocution, "Kill them all." Sure, they'll say in the abstract they "want peace" or they don't personally want to kill anyone, but dig hard enough and they believe "peace" will not be possible until all the Israelis are, literally, gone, and if that means (someone else, of course) kills them all, well, ma sha'allah.

Or the unthinkable option, of course. Always lurking in the background.

It really is odd. I’m not juvenile enough to be shocked that shit happens during war and young military age men do shitty things. The difference is most participants know what they are doing isn’t permissible so they don’t broadcast it to the world. Take for instance abu ghraib. While the soldiers had bad opsec, they weren’t posting the pictures on fucking MySpace.

Also, lets take Russia: they are at least claiming to be not targeting civilians (though in traditional Russian style they blatantly lie that no civilians whatsoever were harmed when it is clearly false).

And they parade tanks and other materiel captured from enemy, not dead civilians.

You're operating from a mistaken assumption, that what they are doing isn't permissible. Hamas could surround fighters with a wall of infants and machine-gun Israelis from that position, and when one Israeli sniper shot a fighter and the bullet injured an infant, the headline in the New York Times would be "Israeli Commandos Shoot Innocent Palestinian Infant". Israel is held to a set of standards that sort of rhymes with international conventions but is in fact much stricter, while Palestinians are held to none at all.

I mean, sorta. The people who support Hamas hold them to no standard, because if they had standards, they wouldn't support Hamas.

The brutality and cynical tactics that Hamas uses do lead to them having lower support than they would if they were less sociopathic though. There's a lot of people who would totally be on board with a "Free Palestine" agenda if it didn't mean parading the mangled corpses of naked girls through the street.

The brutality and cynical tactics that Hamas uses do lead to them having lower support than they would if they were less sociopathic though.

That's the weird thing though: their cynical tactics used to be launching rockets from hospital rooftops and parading the inevitable Palestinian corpses, or having Palestinian kids shot for throwing stones, etc etc. The grift has always been provoking Israel to violence and posing as an underdog.

But this, parading enemy civilian corpses around, is a diametrically opposite thing. It's something you do when you have several thousands of tanks ready to roll over the enemy capital, you expect to win, and you want to demoralize the enemy to win easier.

So I don't know, either Hamas expects Iran to nuke Israel, or the old guard that understood the nature of the grift all retired or something and the new leadership got terminally high on their own supply.

So I don't know, either Hamas expects Iran to nuke Israel

Yeah they did make a statement calling on the Arab countries to join the fight and so forth. So maybe the plan was something like 1.Pierce the illusion of Israeli invulnerability 2. Israel's neighbours see the weakness and pounce 3. Palestine is free from the river to the sea.

Or maybe it was just about stirring up enough heat that the Israel-Saudi normalisation doesn't happen. I dunno.

Or maybe it was just about stirring up enough heat that the Israel-Saudi normalisation doesn't happen. I dunno.

I don't see how this was supposed to work. A small terrorist act that causes Israel to respond disproportionally, all right. 400 paratroopers killing Israeli civilians? Again, this is a thing that you do when you have 5000 tanks ready to roll towards Tel Aviv and you want to show your potential Saudi allies that you mean business. They don't have a single tank. Saudis will be like, fuck those idiots.

The brutality and cynical tactics that Hamas uses do lead to them having lower support than they would if they were less sociopathic though. There's a lot of people who would totally be on board with a "Free Palestine" agenda if it didn't mean parading the mangled corpses of naked girls through the street.

What makes you think this?

Hamas does this because they live in tribal societies where parading the mangled corpses of your enemy's girls through the street is worthy of high praise. It doesn't lead to them having lower support; it leads to them having higher support.

Don't typical-mind. You would be horrified by such things. The people who Hamas needs to convince are overjoyed by it.

When I'm saying they would have higher support, I mean among westerners looking on from the outside. I'm not talking about internal Gazan politics, I'm talking about The Discourse and the international response. I think there's e.g. a lot of Germans who are a lot more sympathetic to "we want our land back" than to gunning down bus stops.

Well, at least it convinced EU to pause providing funding to Palestine (not entirely sure how well it was done but likely it effectively funded Hamas).

If Hamas didn't do what they did, they'd either be killed and replaced by someone who would (if they stopped killing Israelis) or killed by the Israelis (if they stopped using protected buildings and people as shields).

WTF would you even attack a music festival?

They probably didn't know it was one. It was just there and easy to hit as a soft target.

The Hamas objective appears to have been to kill as many civilians as possible, to maximize the initial terror and perception of Israeli impotence. This, in turn, is likely for the strategic purpose of derailing Saudi-Israeli normalization, which has been in the works for some time. It may have also had a tertiary goal of trying to draw out an assessed increase of Palestinian support in various (particularly European) countries to demonstrate/lead to Israeli diplomatic isolation in the response.

For this purpose, a music festival meets the nominal purpose of the objective. It will probably turn out that the music festival was the single biggest source of deaths during the night, as you have a combination of large numbers of people, density, poorly defended, and isolated from response or natural strongpoints to rally a defense.

However, I doubt it was chosen per see. The time-day timing of the attack was almost certainly done for historical, not contemporary, purposes, while the rave was for a weekend because they were expecting to need time to sober up / get over the drug use before the weekend.

Further, the rave almost certainly wouldn't have been targetted deliberately had the multinational nature been known. The night without the raid was a disaster for Israel, but the prominent multinational victims- most notably the German girl- killed and worse internationalized the impact to a much broader audience in a way not-good for the likely intended 'we think this is bad, but you shouldn't retaliate too much' goal Hamas was likely going for.

I have been to similar raves in that area. It is a popular place for such events because lots of open space and the desert at night is beautiful. It is not like this was the event of the year in Israel or something. (I feel like the natural demographics of the Motte might not be super interested in such things but there are a lot of music festivals everywhere all the time if you are into that sort of thing and Israel has a massive techno scene)

WTF would you even attack a music festival?

There are a lot of attractive young women at music festivals and it's a soft target. This seems like the most straightforward answer and I haven't heard any alternative explanations.

Sure the Israelis also have plenty of questionable tactics such as the creeping settlements in the west bank, but everything they do just seems so much ... saner in comparison. It's the difference between a cutthroat CEO who'll backstab you in a corporate deal when it is beneficial for him to do so, and the murderhobo who'll physically backstab you because you were the nearest person and fuck jews, that's why.

Some of this disparity will be pretty similar to the disparity between a CEO destroying someone and a murderhobo destroying someone - the rich guy has a lot more tools at his disposal, many more options, and the competence to do it while maintaining the position that he's acting legally and reasonably and that you're the lunatic for losing your temper. Don't get me wrong, I remain firmly on the Israeli side of things, but the asymmetry of position is pretty clear.

How is demolishing mosques, spitting on Christians, urinating on dead Palestinians and bombing entire apartment buildings less gruesome? Israel is far more violent and kills far more Palestinians while there war has a much bigger impact on Palestinian expansion.

How is demolishing mosques, spitting on Christians, urinating on dead Palestinians and bombing entire apartment buildings less gruesome?

Body gore prominence seems like an obvious one. Self-congratulatory spectacle presentation of the corpses is another. Israelis typically aren't doing their misdeed to chants of how great their god is over the bodies of the victims, and that's without their established roof-knock technique.

I would be curious which mosque demolishment or Christian spitting or urination incident you felt was more gruesome than, say, the Palestinians' self-advertised raid shelter results. One category is boorish, and the other might as well have come out of Daesh propaganda.

It's rather unfortunate that Jihadis have the habit of yelling 'Allahu Akbar' every time they're on video. I know intellectually that they're saying the equivalent of 'praise the Lord', but now the phrase is just burned into my brain as the thing that young Arab men say when they're desecrating a corpse.

I don't think that's "unfortunate" so much as a feature of Islam's historic role and self-image as a totalizing religion of conquest. Sure, there are plenty of examples of Muslim subcultures that have evolved past that conception, but it's not like it's weird for a conquering Islamic force to praise their God while they put their enemies to the sword. While this might be in bad taste now, it's not new:

Historically, the takbir has been used as a cry of victory.[23] Ibn Ishaq's Life of Mohammed narrates at least two incidents in which it was so used.

"When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him, and I rode behind Abu Talha with my foot touching the apostle's foot. We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, 'Muhammad with his force,' and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, 'Allah akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people's square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned.'" (page 511) "So he got off his horse and came at him and 'Ali advanced with his shield. 'Amr aimed a blow which cut deeply into the shield so that the sword stuck in it and struck his head. But 'Ali gave him a blow on the vein at the base of the neck and he fell to the ground. The dust rose and the apostle heard the cry, 'Allah Akbar' and knew that 'Ali had killed him." (page 456)[24]

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