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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   28884 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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Which aspects of what happened were intentionally part of the plan?

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.

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?

  • -10

Please see my edits. This is a factual question, not a moral one.

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?

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