naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
28878 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.
OPSEC seems to have been airtight even within Gaza, with most of the participating groups being informed only days in advance.
I'm not sure in that context there was much of a plan for most of the forces. Some portion of troops probably had specific goals, but some portion were probably also just sent off-leash to do whatever.
To some extent I feel this is the only really interesting bit of this episode. And it does feel to me like there is another shoe to drop in the plan.
Butcher civilians and especially a bunch of good looking young females = Israel goes Old Testament on Gaza = ?????
The first Israel response seems an obvious second step in this event.
If Hamas had no foreign help then one could argue they hoped that Hezbolla and Iran would all jump into the fight. Hezbolla seems reluctant since who wants to jump into Old Testament wrath and Iran leader has strongly denied any involvement.
This play is lacking Act 3. Which would make sense if Hamas was hoping for Act 3 but didn’t plan with outside parties. The other alternative would be that Israel hasn’t done something too far to bring in Act 3 Casus Belli yet.
So far the only Act 3 has been some dumb Harvard students. Which basically helps Israel by outing some people that would support Palestine for punishment in the west (no jobs for those Harvard kids). It likely increased Trumps likelihood of being elected perhaps even pulling in some Jewish votes since he’s solid Israel.
I’ve upgraded this attack to truly a September 11 type event. Which helps Israel because it means they get to take the gloves off for the Old Testament Retribution. US had about 6-12 months of do wtf you want to global support.
Imagine we were in a small French town in the 700s that just suffered from a viking attack. Women and girls raped, the priest has been beheaded and the church looted, etc, etc. Imagine someone surveying the carnage and asking "But what larger strategic goal does this serve for the northmen?"
This is the goal. This is the point. People try too hard to imagine large strategies and 3D chess.
I agree it's not complicated, but I don't believe the Viking analogy holds.
The Vikings were there for loot. Simple as. They might have enjoyed killing monks and raping nuns, but that's not what got them to sail across the North Sea in a tiny boat.
The Palestinians aren't looting Israel. The foot soldiers are there out of pure hate. And the leaders are playing from the standard terrorist playbook.
Commit atrocity
Provoke larger atrocity from enemies
Win powerful allies to defeat enemy
This is their strategy. Their strategy sucks. It's not going to work. Peaceful mass resistance would work a lot better. Imagine unarmed Palestinians being shot as they climb the border wall to try to "immigrate to a better life in Israel". That's a message that would play well in the current zeitgeist.
In a world where a lot of financial and material support for the vilings relies on a large portion of the world not thinking they're the baddies, taking into account the larger strategic goal (or blunder) does in fact make sense.
Act 3 of the Hamas' ideal outcome involves international condemnation of Israeli human rights violations, televised slaughter of Arabs, and the hardliners within Saudi Arabia vetoing a normalizing of Israeli-Saudi relations. The beginnings of this were already visible in the Asian news tonight: the official Korean national broadcaster (KBS) had a segment focused on the blockade of humanitarian resources (with mention that fuel cuts impact hospitals) which segued into a report that Israel has dropped white phosphorous bombs. (The NYT reported one day ago that "the Israeli army denied the use of white phosphorus, saying soldiers had deployed only illumination flares." Footage was from broad daylight, so either the footage is old/repurposed, the denial is out of date, someone is lying and it was white phosphorous, or it was actually anti-SAM flares.)
A lot of terrorism has no deep political motive beyond bloodlust. Yes you can argue that Islamist attacks on civilians in the West had the motive of killing enough people that the US pulled out of the Middle East, but there’s a lot of ‘Step 2: ???’ involved with this even if you accept the premise that attacking a people doesn’t create a lust for vengeance. Much of it just desire to hurt another people as much as you think yours have been hurt.
I've read a fair amount about the IRA's guerrilla war / terrorism campaign. One of the things I noted is that quite a lot of the violence they carried out was not executed with a great deal of care - things like, making sure you're killing the right person, making sure there aren't any bystanders who you would also have to kill in addition to the planned target, making sure it's done at a time and place without too much witnesses or evidence, etc. There was only a relatively small number of hardcore members who were capable of carrying out savage violence with careful planning. I concluded from this that it's genuinely hard to find people who are both prepared to carry out gruesome acts against innocent-seeming targets and also sane and rational enough to be intelligent and careful about it.
9/11 looks slightly more defensible in historical context I think. At the time America pulled out of Somalia over comparatively minor losses, and refused to engage with the Rwandan genocide that they probably could have stopped relatively easily.
I'm honestly not even sure if Osama's plan - as opposed to post-hoc cope - was the conflict that happened. Yes, America bled and arguably has not recovered from the loss of trust in institutions and the cost but it wasn't bleeding out from the conflict. Hindsight makes it clear that the US could absorb such a loss.
He may have expected either to shock and awe the US or some sort of invasion followed by a general uprising of Muslims* or the US giving up relatively quickly. After all, it has the entire Western hemisphere to itself. Just how many Americans are willing to die in the Middle East?
This? I dunno. America stayed in the ME for a generation, and Israel has nowhere to go and is even more determined. Hamas knows this better than anyone else.
Much of it just desire to hurt another people as much as you think yours have been hurt.
Islam is a triumphalist religion. Muslims aren't supposed to be in this position. If they are, they always have the Khalid bin al-Walid out: love death more than the infidel loves life. You fight and win, or you die and "win". Either way you don't have to sit around wondering how you went from ruling the world to...this.
* Maybe some weird vanguard party logic of "lighting the spark". Not the first time it's failed.
I think there’s a case to be made that they didn’t think they’d get as far as they did, but in any case, how far did they think they’d get? Locations of military bases near Gaza are public information and well known to Hamas, if they had wanted to limit themselves to military targets only, they could have.
On the other hand, the degree of organization raises more questions. If it’s just “the elite troops trained by Iran opened the fence and stormed the border posts, then random 17 year olds with guns drove through and began killing civilians” that doesn’t square with operatives who landed by paraglided and started killing civilians, who would presumably be in the former category and who would have needed some training. And beyond a handful of border posts, there doesn’t seem to have been a concerted effort to target military sites deeper into the country.
My guess is that instructions post-breach, other than the targeting of the very nearest IDF and possibly police facilities, were pretty limited but involved capturing hostages (to use in negotiations) and maybe weapons and armor. Beyond that, they’ve obviously had no issues with terrorism in the past, so it’s hard to see why civilian casualties would be a problem.
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
I don't fully agree with it, but there's an argument that society has physical limits to how moral it 'can' be at maximum: slavery went from common-place world-wide to detestable with automation and wage manpower (and having literally any other option with war slaves), lowering infant mortality and mass-production of household necessities made it possible for women to have a place outside of the home, so on. At the extreme end, sufficient outside stressors can drive people to cannibalism surprisingly quickly. That doesn't mean that these limits make people more moral, just that they can't be better.
One of the commonly-cited examples is that mass bombing campaigns could only fall out of military necessity with the development of computerized guided missiles. And this is pretty applicable for Gazans: their artillery not only can't be more precise, it's often not even precise enough to distinguish its own launcher site from its 'target'. Leaving that weapon aside requires leaving a tremendous tactical and strategic space.
There are equivalents examples for other laws of war, including some relevant for these attacks. There are a lot of indiscriminate Biblical atrocities, after all. But they fell out of favor before the New Testament; the technology that obviated them wasn't microchips, but roads. The closest I've seen to a tactical or strategic argument is this one (cw: advocacy of outright evil, absolutely not condoned), and that's damning with faint praise: it's the logic of a tantrum, not a military plan.
In this framework, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is ambivalent in the sense that you're accepting the risk to civilian lives as part of a military plan that has not other comparable options; less ambivalent, and more accepting the costs. Maybe there's something that required the baby-murdering rapists, or Hamas was so low on armed adults that they couldn't pick and choose (but it's not like America's dabbling with baby-murdering rapists found them able to turn it off when they went home!), but it looks more like -- at best! -- absolute indifference.
I saw a retrieved dashcam video today from someone who was shot in their car. There's about a dozen Hamas fighters in it shooting up vehicles on the road. They're uniformed and look to have at least a basic level of coordination - so from that clip at least it looked more like an actual military action than a bunch of random teenagers with guns.
Some of them have uniforms (seemingly both their own and some stolen or copied IDF style uniforms), but others in the festival footage seem to be wearing civilian clothes.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
bro 6mo ago·Edited 6mo ago
Which aspects of what happened were intentionally part of the plan?
This is an objectively stupid question.
Even the parts that weren't ostensibly "part of the plan" were very much intentionally "part of the plan" because the intention was always to "send drugged up teenagers into battle unsupervised" and see what happens.
While moral culpability is certainly part of the question (I think the answer is easy enough to be uninteresting: you are right), my question is literally which parts were in the plan?
Which parts they implicitly expected would happen, vs which parts were explicitly in the plan, vs what instructions were propagated to the men, vs what actually happened.
Between any two of those, surely not all, surely not none.
If you were to fire your gun blindly into a crowd and kill someone, do you believe that claiming that you never intended to shoot that person in particular would be a valid defense against the subsequent criminal charges?
While moral culpability is certainly part of the question (I think the answer is easy enough to be uninteresting: you are right), my question is literally which parts were in the plan?
Which parts they implicitly expected would happen, vs which parts were explicitly in the plan, vs what instructions were propagated to the men, vs what actually happened.
This is a factual question
I'm curious, because your initial post was just a link to a Tweet with one statement that basically paraphrased the Tweet without adding context, what is the significance of these factual questions in this context? For instance, "How many of the attackers wore matched socks, instead of mismatched?" is also a factual question with a factual answer that has some objectively true answer, but knowing this positive integer figure doesn't seem particularly important or even meaningful in this context. Your factual questions seem only marginally more relevant to the situation than my own made-up theoretical one. But as someone who's only been tangentially keeping track of this situation (I must admit that I grew bored of the whole Israel-Palestine saga two decades ago), I could be missing some context that illuminates the importance of the questions you asked.
It is meaningful to understand what plans the Hamas leadership has. If they intentionally directed the civilian atrocities, that means something different in terms of how they plan for the situation to play out compared to mere wanton disregard for life.
It is meaningful to understand what plans the Hamas leadership has.
I'm not convinced it is. As I said below, any model of Hamas' behavior must start from the assumption that "Hamas will behave in the manner that Hamas has been observed to behave" if it wants to make any claim to accuracy.
If they intentionally directed the civilian atrocities, that means something different in terms of how they plan for the situation to play out compared to mere wanton disregard for life.
I get that this is the contention, but the part I don't get is, what is the actual meaningful difference there?
Jesus christ lol. Are you being deliberately obtuse? I am asking "was the guy aiming for the specific person he hit, or just firing wildly into the crowd", "did he leave the house in the morning intending to shoot up that mall or did he see it on the way", "was he trying to start a race war, or to impress Jodi Foster". Not as a leading question but because I want to know what literally happened.
Give up. Most human beings are apparently incapable of distinguishing between an empirical issue and a normative issue, and most people who post here are very much not an exception, in my experience.
Most human beings are apparently incapable of distinguishing between an empirical issue and a normative issue, and most people who post here are very much not an exception, in my experience.
You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Sweeping, unflattering claims about "people who post here" are toxic to the community, for a variety of reasons; often they're wrong, often they're insulting, often they're subtly consensus-building. If you want to engage in some high-effort demographic-checking, have at it, but low-effort sneers do not meet that threshold.
I read the question as "Did hamas wanted the gang rapes and decapitated babies or they didn't bother putting leash on their fighters because they didn't think they would survive long enough"
Terror like everything else is a tool. That level and kind of terror will drive whole of Israel howling for blood.
The question whether it planned or unplanned is important. At least from the Know your enemy. In the first case there may be a way of achieving Israel goals short of the complete eradication of Hamas once the punishment is over (everyone in the command chain, booths on the ground foreign consultants, political machune that was involved in this must die no questions about that) . In the other case Hamas must go and Israel must pay with enough of it's blood to achieve it.
Lives of IDF members also matter. With a huge discount (from Israel pov) so does the gaza women and children's. And depending on the expected casualties it is important to know where you can stop.
I think @bro is asking which tactical objectives were pre-planned and which were simply targets of opportunity. For example, did Hamas decide to attack the nightclub months ago or did they only learn about it after the breach and thought "YOLO LET'S GO"?
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Which aspects of what happened were intentionally part of the plan?
More effort than just posting links to some random hot-take on Twitter, please.
More options
Context Copy link
OPSEC seems to have been airtight even within Gaza, with most of the participating groups being informed only days in advance.
I'm not sure in that context there was much of a plan for most of the forces. Some portion of troops probably had specific goals, but some portion were probably also just sent off-leash to do whatever.
This would explain the tendency of hamas troops to just kind of wander around raping and killing random people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To some extent I feel this is the only really interesting bit of this episode. And it does feel to me like there is another shoe to drop in the plan.
Butcher civilians and especially a bunch of good looking young females = Israel goes Old Testament on Gaza = ?????
The first Israel response seems an obvious second step in this event.
If Hamas had no foreign help then one could argue they hoped that Hezbolla and Iran would all jump into the fight. Hezbolla seems reluctant since who wants to jump into Old Testament wrath and Iran leader has strongly denied any involvement.
This play is lacking Act 3. Which would make sense if Hamas was hoping for Act 3 but didn’t plan with outside parties. The other alternative would be that Israel hasn’t done something too far to bring in Act 3 Casus Belli yet.
So far the only Act 3 has been some dumb Harvard students. Which basically helps Israel by outing some people that would support Palestine for punishment in the west (no jobs for those Harvard kids). It likely increased Trumps likelihood of being elected perhaps even pulling in some Jewish votes since he’s solid Israel.
I’ve upgraded this attack to truly a September 11 type event. Which helps Israel because it means they get to take the gloves off for the Old Testament Retribution. US had about 6-12 months of do wtf you want to global support.
Imagine we were in a small French town in the 700s that just suffered from a viking attack. Women and girls raped, the priest has been beheaded and the church looted, etc, etc. Imagine someone surveying the carnage and asking "But what larger strategic goal does this serve for the northmen?"
This is the goal. This is the point. People try too hard to imagine large strategies and 3D chess.
I agree it's not complicated, but I don't believe the Viking analogy holds.
The Vikings were there for loot. Simple as. They might have enjoyed killing monks and raping nuns, but that's not what got them to sail across the North Sea in a tiny boat.
The Palestinians aren't looting Israel. The foot soldiers are there out of pure hate. And the leaders are playing from the standard terrorist playbook.
This is their strategy. Their strategy sucks. It's not going to work. Peaceful mass resistance would work a lot better. Imagine unarmed Palestinians being shot as they climb the border wall to try to "immigrate to a better life in Israel". That's a message that would play well in the current zeitgeist.
More options
Context Copy link
In a world where a lot of financial and material support for the vilings relies on a large portion of the world not thinking they're the baddies, taking into account the larger strategic goal (or blunder) does in fact make sense.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Act 3 of the Hamas' ideal outcome involves international condemnation of Israeli human rights violations, televised slaughter of Arabs, and the hardliners within Saudi Arabia vetoing a normalizing of Israeli-Saudi relations. The beginnings of this were already visible in the Asian news tonight: the official Korean national broadcaster (KBS) had a segment focused on the blockade of humanitarian resources (with mention that fuel cuts impact hospitals) which segued into a report that Israel has dropped white phosphorous bombs. (The NYT reported one day ago that "the Israeli army denied the use of white phosphorus, saying soldiers had deployed only illumination flares." Footage was from broad daylight, so either the footage is old/repurposed, the denial is out of date, someone is lying and it was white phosphorous, or it was actually anti-SAM flares.)
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of terrorism has no deep political motive beyond bloodlust. Yes you can argue that Islamist attacks on civilians in the West had the motive of killing enough people that the US pulled out of the Middle East, but there’s a lot of ‘Step 2: ???’ involved with this even if you accept the premise that attacking a people doesn’t create a lust for vengeance. Much of it just desire to hurt another people as much as you think yours have been hurt.
I've read a fair amount about the IRA's guerrilla war / terrorism campaign. One of the things I noted is that quite a lot of the violence they carried out was not executed with a great deal of care - things like, making sure you're killing the right person, making sure there aren't any bystanders who you would also have to kill in addition to the planned target, making sure it's done at a time and place without too much witnesses or evidence, etc. There was only a relatively small number of hardcore members who were capable of carrying out savage violence with careful planning. I concluded from this that it's genuinely hard to find people who are both prepared to carry out gruesome acts against innocent-seeming targets and also sane and rational enough to be intelligent and careful about it.
More options
Context Copy link
9/11 looks slightly more defensible in historical context I think. At the time America pulled out of Somalia over comparatively minor losses, and refused to engage with the Rwandan genocide that they probably could have stopped relatively easily.
I'm honestly not even sure if Osama's plan - as opposed to post-hoc cope - was the conflict that happened. Yes, America bled and arguably has not recovered from the loss of trust in institutions and the cost but it wasn't bleeding out from the conflict. Hindsight makes it clear that the US could absorb such a loss.
He may have expected either to shock and awe the US or some sort of invasion followed by a general uprising of Muslims* or the US giving up relatively quickly. After all, it has the entire Western hemisphere to itself. Just how many Americans are willing to die in the Middle East?
This? I dunno. America stayed in the ME for a generation, and Israel has nowhere to go and is even more determined. Hamas knows this better than anyone else.
Islam is a triumphalist religion. Muslims aren't supposed to be in this position. If they are, they always have the Khalid bin al-Walid out: love death more than the infidel loves life. You fight and win, or you die and "win". Either way you don't have to sit around wondering how you went from ruling the world to...this.
* Maybe some weird vanguard party logic of "lighting the spark". Not the first time it's failed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there’s a case to be made that they didn’t think they’d get as far as they did, but in any case, how far did they think they’d get? Locations of military bases near Gaza are public information and well known to Hamas, if they had wanted to limit themselves to military targets only, they could have.
On the other hand, the degree of organization raises more questions. If it’s just “the elite troops trained by Iran opened the fence and stormed the border posts, then random 17 year olds with guns drove through and began killing civilians” that doesn’t square with operatives who landed by paraglided and started killing civilians, who would presumably be in the former category and who would have needed some training. And beyond a handful of border posts, there doesn’t seem to have been a concerted effort to target military sites deeper into the country.
My guess is that instructions post-breach, other than the targeting of the very nearest IDF and possibly police facilities, were pretty limited but involved capturing hostages (to use in negotiations) and maybe weapons and armor. Beyond that, they’ve obviously had no issues with terrorism in the past, so it’s hard to see why civilian casualties would be a problem.
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
I don't fully agree with it, but there's an argument that society has physical limits to how moral it 'can' be at maximum: slavery went from common-place world-wide to detestable with automation and wage manpower (and having literally any other option with war slaves), lowering infant mortality and mass-production of household necessities made it possible for women to have a place outside of the home, so on. At the extreme end, sufficient outside stressors can drive people to cannibalism surprisingly quickly. That doesn't mean that these limits make people more moral, just that they can't be better.
One of the commonly-cited examples is that mass bombing campaigns could only fall out of military necessity with the development of computerized guided missiles. And this is pretty applicable for Gazans: their artillery not only can't be more precise, it's often not even precise enough to distinguish its own launcher site from its 'target'. Leaving that weapon aside requires leaving a tremendous tactical and strategic space.
There are equivalents examples for other laws of war, including some relevant for these attacks. There are a lot of indiscriminate Biblical atrocities, after all. But they fell out of favor before the New Testament; the technology that obviated them wasn't microchips, but roads. The closest I've seen to a tactical or strategic argument is this one (cw: advocacy of outright evil, absolutely not condoned), and that's damning with faint praise: it's the logic of a tantrum, not a military plan.
In this framework, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is ambivalent in the sense that you're accepting the risk to civilian lives as part of a military plan that has not other comparable options; less ambivalent, and more accepting the costs. Maybe there's something that required the baby-murdering rapists, or Hamas was so low on armed adults that they couldn't pick and choose (but it's not like America's dabbling with baby-murdering rapists found them able to turn it off when they went home!), but it looks more like -- at best! -- absolute indifference.
More options
Context Copy link
I saw a retrieved dashcam video today from someone who was shot in their car. There's about a dozen Hamas fighters in it shooting up vehicles on the road. They're uniformed and look to have at least a basic level of coordination - so from that clip at least it looked more like an actual military action than a bunch of random teenagers with guns.
Some of them have uniforms (seemingly both their own and some stolen or copied IDF style uniforms), but others in the festival footage seem to be wearing civilian clothes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is an objectively stupid question.
Even the parts that weren't ostensibly "part of the plan" were very much intentionally "part of the plan" because the intention was always to "send drugged up teenagers into battle unsupervised" and see what happens.
What drugs? What's your source on that aspect of it?
More options
Context Copy link
While moral culpability is certainly part of the question (I think the answer is easy enough to be uninteresting: you are right), my question is literally which parts were in the plan?
Which parts they implicitly expected would happen, vs which parts were explicitly in the plan, vs what instructions were propagated to the men, vs what actually happened.
Between any two of those, surely not all, surely not none.
Again, this is a stupid question.
If you were to fire your gun blindly into a crowd and kill someone, do you believe that claiming that you never intended to shoot that person in particular would be a valid defense against the subsequent criminal charges?
Please see my edits. This is a factual question, not a moral one.
I'm curious, because your initial post was just a link to a Tweet with one statement that basically paraphrased the Tweet without adding context, what is the significance of these factual questions in this context? For instance, "How many of the attackers wore matched socks, instead of mismatched?" is also a factual question with a factual answer that has some objectively true answer, but knowing this positive integer figure doesn't seem particularly important or even meaningful in this context. Your factual questions seem only marginally more relevant to the situation than my own made-up theoretical one. But as someone who's only been tangentially keeping track of this situation (I must admit that I grew bored of the whole Israel-Palestine saga two decades ago), I could be missing some context that illuminates the importance of the questions you asked.
It is meaningful to understand what plans the Hamas leadership has. If they intentionally directed the civilian atrocities, that means something different in terms of how they plan for the situation to play out compared to mere wanton disregard for life.
I'm not convinced it is. As I said below, any model of Hamas' behavior must start from the assumption that "Hamas will behave in the manner that Hamas has been observed to behave" if it wants to make any claim to accuracy.
More options
Context Copy link
I get that this is the contention, but the part I don't get is, what is the actual meaningful difference there?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Im not discussing morality, I'm discussing facts and hypotheticals. If you were to fire your gun into a crowd, what would you expect to happen?
Jesus christ lol. Are you being deliberately obtuse? I am asking "was the guy aiming for the specific person he hit, or just firing wildly into the crowd", "did he leave the house in the morning intending to shoot up that mall or did he see it on the way", "was he trying to start a race war, or to impress Jodi Foster". Not as a leading question but because I want to know what literally happened.
Give up. Most human beings are apparently incapable of distinguishing between an empirical issue and a normative issue, and most people who post here are very much not an exception, in my experience.
You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Sweeping, unflattering claims about "people who post here" are toxic to the community, for a variety of reasons; often they're wrong, often they're insulting, often they're subtly consensus-building. If you want to engage in some high-effort demographic-checking, have at it, but low-effort sneers do not meet that threshold.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, I'm trying to figure out what you're actually asking.
Are you trying to smuggle the idea that there are "legitimate reasons" to shoot up a mall in under the radar?
I read the question as "Did hamas wanted the gang rapes and decapitated babies or they didn't bother putting leash on their fighters because they didn't think they would survive long enough"
Terror like everything else is a tool. That level and kind of terror will drive whole of Israel howling for blood.
The question whether it planned or unplanned is important. At least from the Know your enemy. In the first case there may be a way of achieving Israel goals short of the complete eradication of Hamas once the punishment is over (everyone in the command chain, booths on the ground foreign consultants, political machune that was involved in this must die no questions about that) . In the other case Hamas must go and Israel must pay with enough of it's blood to achieve it.
Lives of IDF members also matter. With a huge discount (from Israel pov) so does the gaza women and children's. And depending on the expected casualties it is important to know where you can stop.
More options
Context Copy link
I think @bro is asking which tactical objectives were pre-planned and which were simply targets of opportunity. For example, did Hamas decide to attack the nightclub months ago or did they only learn about it after the breach and thought "YOLO LET'S GO"?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link