naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
28896 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.
As a meta-comment on all the hawkish hot takes, I'd love it if we could gather all motte hot-takers in a no-holds barred cage fight so we could distinguish between the psychopaths, veteran fighters and pissant weaklings who try to compensate for their inferiority complex with words. I think we have to be alert to the possibility that people that talk a big game could easily wet their pants in real world life and I'd love to see who those people are.
Yeah, the ghoulish commentary from what are mostly chickenshit individuals can be a bit grating. But this is how it is in all wars. People from a distance pick sides and then cheer on them as if it were a sports team from afar.
Well I have no idea of that scenario obviously, not having been in it. I've done some minor karate/Kung Fu sparring to know my skills and strength are negligible on the curve and on the street I've come off second best in several encounters though usually extremely drunk and in my youth. I suppose I have a quiet confidence that trained and with weaponry I would stand my own under fire but it's completely hypothetical. My theory is there's some advantage to calibrating your actual skills and courage to reality, rather than some wishful ego conception, so that way when it comes to crunch you don't find yourself unable to bridge to reality.
Now of course, instigating war doesn't require the instigators to have courage, they can pass that on to others, as well as the moral torments of having directly killed innocent people.
I just think I'm tired of the over-confident manner of mottizens in general. Talk is so cheap, and real thinking so expensive. So little on here has any relevance, interesting as it may be, because there is no reality test. As far as I can tell a lot of commentary just reinforces the position and ego of the commenter without persuading anyone else one way or another. On average people just like the friction of their position relative to others rather than being willing to actually adjust their position or acknowledge epistemic deficits. I'm worried that the tendency for over confident takes is actually psychological compensation and that the motte is actually riddled with a bunch of right brain autists metaphorically jerking off in their parents garage.
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
This site is resembling Reddit with the confident geopolitical hottakes.
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
Agreed, definitely! I would therefore advocate for using this framework, and logic, to permanently silence Americans off the entire internet. The amount of ignorance demonstrated by citizens of the global hegemon is a massive net fail and the foreign policy conducted as a aggregate of and on behalf of that ignorance is, in my opinion, worth kneecapping an American with a shotgun and taking away their internet access every time they say anything about anything they know nothing about and have never experienced.
Luckily, or unluckily, we don't live in a world where people's feet are held to the fire every time they say anything stupid, so people can continue to spout their hot takes as they wish.
Can we do the same for everyone in all those foreign nations that we allegedly don't know anything about who cries out for American intervention every time they pick a fight with their neighbors and get in over their heads? I'd be more than happy for us to pull out of NATO, the Pacific, etc, and best of luck to all of the nations there dealing with China and Russia without us.
Why would Americans have a view? First, any American’s view will have zero outcome on what the American government does. Second, the impact of said foreign policy isn’t felt by most Americans. So they are rationally ignorant.
I just think I'm tired of the over-confident manner of mottizens in general. Talk is so cheap, and real thinking so expensive.
Both are free, as far as I can tell, since lurkers don't have to pay for the privilege of viewing our rants.
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
Maybe if the nurses keep pissing me off like they're doing today eh?
This site is resembling Reddit with the confident geopolitical hottakes.
I can't be too perplexed that a subreddit gone solo, if not wild, resembles its estranged parent.
We've always had hot takes, it's a quantitative chance and not a qualitative one, especially if you consider what it was like when Ukraine kicked off.
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
That's a double standard. You don't say that if someone advocates doing nothing, they should have had a relative murdered by a foreign army and had nothing done about it.
This is just an excuse to arbitrarily say that a lot of people are not allowed to advocate something.
It seems to me that the Israeli government has taken the hawkish approach that some mottizens advocated - aka wiping Hamas out of exitance but not full bloodied genocide. We should feel very proud that it was our words that swayed the famously dovish ex Sayeret Matkal Benjamin Netanyahu (a person that has seen combat) to go this course.
Another option is that people here have the extraordinary abilities to read a map and also imagine themselves in a tough situation and think about what flies.
I always wonder, why do we only get this sort of pushback on comments about warfare? I can advocate for fires being fought without somebody talking about how I might not be a very good firefighter. I can advocate for goods being delivered quickly and reliably without being a good truck driver myself. I can say putting a bridge over a river seems like a good idea without being a civil engineer. So how come it's only if I think war is necessary or suggest fighting it in a particular way that somebody will come by and claim that I'm not a good enough warrior myself? What does it matter? Can I say the reverse, that you aren't allowed to advocate for peace until you've actually watched your children be brutally murdered before your eyes by your neighbor and still advocate for peace with them?
It's easy to get detached from the consequences of war in the heat of passion if you're not the one putting your life on the line. You're probably not going to get so angry about the lack of a bridge that you completely refuse to consider the costs of building it, and the cost of building it will probably not be paid in large quantities of blood.
That's not to say that it's never valid for someone to have a stance on violence without being the one to commit it (e.g. a woman hiring a bodyguard to protect her from her stalker), but there's definitely a failure mode of a belligerent woman picking fights that don't make any sense because she expects her boyfriend to fight them for her (or the little yappy dogs that are hyper aggressive when on leash). The accusation is that we're the beliggerant woman/yappy dogs, not the sober person hiring security when necessary and appropriate.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
ShariaHeap 7mo ago
What's the point of this comment? No one is going to get in a room and fight, you're just calling people cowards and thus engaging in the same sort of Internet Tough Guy act you're accusing others of doing. Attack arguments, not people, and if you have something to say to any specific individual about the lack of congruity between their words and their actions, make sure it's relevant, not just a sneer.
Well, I've put more sauce around it in a reply, but fair comment. I'm actually looking for an escape out of my internet habits at present so I might try a voluntary ban for a period once Ive addressed any comments that arise.
I don't know what they planned but remember that Hamas has a lot of hostages. They will probably do something spectacular but useless, unless they want to sacrifice the lives of the hostages which I doubt.
There is no way in hell Europe is going to take in Palestinian refugees. It is already a hot button issue and politicians would be suicidal to let in people who just committed one of the largest terrorist attacks in recent history.
It depends on how fast they can turn them to voters thanks to more lax citizenship laws. Germany absolutely cratered theirs under this new government for this reason.
I hope you're right. The world seems absurd to me at the moment, and I can't see anything as beyond the pale.
What exactly do you expect to happen if Palestinians start getting dropped in the sea, to be picked up by the already existing transport network of NGOs?
Europe doesn’t have the stomach to blow the current refugee boats out of the water or repatriate them or whatever. I’m not ruling out that millions of terrorists might change the equation, but history is not inspiring.
If Israel drags both Sunni and Shia powers into the war, things will be unfortunate, but there will not be a united front for very long. I would expect that regional tensions between Iran and KSA will actually decrease temporarily, then the united front will fracture over time as the desires of the governments diverge from that of their populace and trust disintegrates.
I think we're less likely to see this war lead to the destruction of Israel, or WWIII, than we are to see it lead to further disintegration of MENA governments when they refuse to invade Israel as their populace demands.
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray. Turkey is very worrying wild card and they will have zero resistance if they invade bulgaria and greece. Which have nothing to stop them with. And Ergodan has some ottoman restoration dreams. They may not even have to revoke the NATO membership to make things even more confusing. And they have couple of million of refugees that they can draft.
So right now western powers have choice - protect what is left of Bulgaria - mostly Sofia, northern parts above the Balkan mountains. Protect serbia or protect Vienna. Throw the mess in Ukraine. Assume that suddenly all those muslims we already accepted suddenly decide to cause trouble - no matter if provoked or not. So you will soon have a lot of crises. And you are just one or two in asia to have world war. Thank got that latin america is peaceful at least (in not a keg of powder sense)
Assad is still cleaning up a civil war and attempting reconstruction. Egypt under Sisi certainly isn’t going to get involved in defense of Hamas / the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan isn’t either after their own history with the Palestinians.
So a “whole middle eastern war” against Israel involves who - maybe Hezbollah, Hamas and some Iranian support (probably not boots on the ground, though)? Maybe Iraqi Shia militias, although they don’t want a war now they’re in power there? the Gulf Arabs don’t want a victorious Iran turning its attention toward the holy cities and the gulf.
It’s all possible, of course, but is it likely? I don’t know.
Jordan isn’t either after their own history with the Palestinians.
Indeed; the West Bank Palestinians are more or less a poison pill preventing Jordan from invading, even if Jordan would otherwise want to. Same on for Gaza Palestinians and Egypt.
How is turkey going to succeed against greece and bulgaria where russia failed against ukraine, when they will get much more support, and presumably want to become turks even less than ukrainians want to become russians? Turkey’s military budget is 11 B (source) and greece 8 B, bulgaria 1B (This is a clue that bulgaria, contrary to greece, doesn’t think turkey is a threat to it). Given the budget ratio was 10-to-1 against ukraine, I will put turkey’s chances of conquering bulgaria and greece at approximately 0.
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray.
Why would it mean that though? There have already been at least 3 wars (48, 67, 73) involving full-scale armies from multiple Arab nations attacking Israel, and they haven't fallen yet.
On paper, the Arab nations would appear to have ample forces to do the job. But historically, they've had trouble actually coordinating and committing to attacks. I see no reason to presume that that has changed. Syria and Egypt seem to have enough internal problems these days that it's hard to see them pulling off a large-scale offensive action.
Please describe other types of wide middle eastern war?
Don't forget that the previous wars were waged against secular governments. I don't know the current state of pan arabism but I think that it is ripe for one to try and get the reigns.
I don't understand? You asserted that "A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray". Exactly what war are you picturing that would plausibly lead to Israel falling without direct intervention? I mentioned several actual wars that happened. Multiple times, the nations surrounding Israel united to attack them, and each time, Israel did not fall. A number of other wars have also happened in the Middle East, none of which involved Israel at all or led to them falling.
I actually can't think of any war in the modern era in which any of the Arab nations displayed impressive offensive capability, as in assembling a large force and sending it outside their borders to capture foreign territory held by determined adversaries. Usually they only attack each other, and mostly bog down pretty quickly unless the region they're attacking basically gives up to them. They tend to smash their faces into a brick wall every time they try to attack territory held by Westernized forces.
Whether you or I think that the area is "ripe" for a united pan-Arab movement now, the fact is that it's been tried a bunch of times over the last century and failed every time. I don't see any reason to expect anything to be different now.
Turkey isn’t going to war with Greece any time soon. The country’s membership of NATO is central to all of its defense plans and pretty important to its national identity. Entirely possible it gets drawn into the next round of Armenia-Azerbaijan though.
Probably true 15 years ago. Erdogan has played with both turkish nationalism and islamism. I wouldn't be so optimistic. The west didn't accept Turkey as equal, I am not sure at least in the mind of the elite they want to be accepted any more.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
Stefferi 6mo ago
Agree, but the likelihood is now higher than it was previously. If a set of global conflicts emerge with even loosely defined lines, I would expect it to be a product in no small part of opportunism in the face of the United States being spread too thin to be a reliable partner in stopping something like an attack on Taiwan. I don't really know how to put a meaningful percentage guess on the likelihood, but the combination of resources and materiel drained into Ukraine and naval assets being deployed to assist Israel commits the American military to a greater extent than is typical.
It seems like everyone always leaves out the possibility that China just... takes Taiwan. Like if the US does get spread pretty thin and China takes the opportunity, that doesn't automatically mean WWIII happens. Frankly, the thinner the US gets spread, the lower the odds of Taiwan being sufficient to trigger the war.
If the US is totally dominant, then China will wait and so no war occurs. If the US is severely weakened, then China will simply take Taiwan with minimal US intervention, and no world war occurs. It's only in some weird middle ground, where China perceives the US as spread too thin but the US still commits to defending Taiwan, that there's any risk of something major.
Of course, I've never been the worrying sort, and I'm not as opposed to war as the average person, so maybe I'm just underestimating the odds.
We've already seen the tendency of autocratic regimes to overestimate their own military capabilities in the current Ukraine-Russia war. And islands are notoriously easy to defend/hard to attack. If China just marches in and takes over, you're right. If China miscalculates, the first landing fails and the war turns into a longer slog/siege, the western public will most likely want to support Taiwan, similar to how it went with the Ukraine. Which may not guarantee WW3, but it adds another roll of the dice, and destabilizes the world further.
to support Taiwan, similar to how it went with the Ukraine
I agree with your overall point entirely, but this gets me thinking: would the western public have supported Ukraine if the US military/intelligence community didn't make sure that happened?
Most people's position on the war doesn't seem to be rooted in serious principles, and I have no doubt that if the regime pulled a Eurasia/Eastasia flip tomorrow, most of the public would follow.
When I created this megathread, here is what I posted to the moderator Discord:
A couple users asked for an Israel-Gaza megathread, it's maybe a bit late for that but maybe not so I went ahead and gave them one. I optimistically did not name it "World War III Opens on a Second Front."
My understanding of military decisions is exclusively historical and political, so I can't speak to the nuts and bolts of this, but every conflict like the ones in Ukraine and Israel opens the door a little wider for attacks of opportunity elsewhere. I am skeptical that China will ever invade Taiwan--the economic benefits of just rattling sabers at them for all of eternity seem far better than the ideological benefits of burning the island to cinders. I sometimes wonder if Taiwan is allowed to be what it is because someone in China read Brave New World and decided that an island of malcontent exiles was a pretty good idea, actually.
But their ability to get away with an invasion of Taiwan is certainly increased by contemporaneous conflict elsewhere.
Other contenders for the "next front in World War III" presumably include Iran and North Korea, ye olde Axis of Evil, but there are plenty of other places that could qualify. The flood of migrants arriving in Europe and the United States every day may be driven primarily by economics, but one of the worst things for any economy is armed conflict, and it is at some level armed conflict that almost all such migrants are ultimately fleeing. How much of the world needs be at war, to call it a World War?
Vox Day had some discussion on his site around the possibility of this spilling out into WW3. Basically it was through considering Ukraine/Russia, Iran/Israel and China/Taiwan as separate fronts. China and Russia both gain from flashpoints such as what is happening in Israel, as it draws focus and resources away from their spheres.
How much of the world needs be at war, to call it a World War?
When white and honorary white start to die in sufficient quantities.
You also missed the Nagorno Karabakh in "list of things that hit the fan recently" that I think is also result of embolden adversaries and weakened russia.
I always thought of the current axis of evil as laughable. All the countries there are pathetic and china wants not a part of it.
The Armenia thing is interesting. It’s one thing ethnically cleansing 30,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, quite another occupying a hostile nationalist population a third the size of your own with a different religion and 2000 year history.
A world war is when the war is global. Even 10 local conflicts don't make a world war until there are two sides and japan allies with germany even though they are not fighting on the same continent. And by that, I mean that they declare war and peace together, not that they are allies in that they help each other somehow.
The Ukraine situation contained genuine possibilities of escalation to an European war (which still wouldn't necessarily be WW3) for about a month after it started. After that, most of the WW3 talk (in the West, at least) has not been particularly good-faith from either side - either pro-Ukrainian "This is already a WW3, the West doesn't realize it, why isn't it intervening now?" spiel or Western pro-Russian "Oh no, the nukes might start flying at any moment! The West must avoid this by dropping all support to Ukraine now!" spiel.
Very low. A world war necessarily involves at least 2 of the following: NATO, Russia, China.
I can see a path where Iran does something stupid and is promptly destroyed by the United States. But that would be where it ends. Russia already has its hands full and China doesn't seem interested in this kind of foreign adventure.
I don't think the US can "promptly" destroy Iran without nukes. And nukes make a world war very likely.
The most likely reason for Iran not becoming directly involved is geography. They can't invade without traversing the entire peninsula, and it's not like Syria and Jordan are so friendly with them they'd allow it or participate. They could presumably launch missiles, but conventional missiles don't decide a war, and they obviously invite direct retaliation.
Why? The nuke mythology --- nuclear winter this, radiation that, Fallout, "glassing", end of civilization, etc. --- creates a level of fear and hesitation in excess of what the effects of the weapons warrant. (I recall reading something about the nuclear winter concept being essentially made up for leftist political reasons in the 1980s.) If someone were to use a nuke in anger, this mythology would collapse. We'd come to understand that a nuclear warhead is merely a bomb that makes a bigger boom than other bombs and view 70 years of anti-nuke agitation as ignorant hysteria. With the "nuclear taboo" aside, why would a nuclear strike (especially a counter-force tactical nuke) cause a world war when a destructive conventional strike wouldn't?
The nuclear taboo is NOT aside. And if a nuke in the Middle East swept the taboo aside, Russia is freed to use its nuclear arsenal in Ukraine and then perhaps elsewhere... which again, brings you a lot closer to WWIII.
They wouldn't be able to "destroy" Iran without nukes, but conventional attacks would probably be enough to destroy whatever military capability they have to project power beyond their own borders, and the political situation within their own borders is dicey enough that it's a wild card; i.e. a rally around the flag effect could help the government, or getting entangled in a foreign war to help terrorists could be another addition to the list of grievances for last year's protestors.
From the nuclear nations which one will be willing to risk it's own existence as retaliation for Iran? Pakistan or North Korea probably? Pakistan could be bribed with Iran territory. China could be bribed with Iran's oil. Israel will be happy. Russia will gladly shrug for lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine. UK and France - meh. India - doubt it.
North Korea - who knows, but probably extremely low. The regime there is preoccupied with its own survival. Not with geopolitics at large. They seem to be happy to turn into an island.
Anyway - I think this is time to reconsider the battleship as a ship - just a delivery vehicle for dumb artillery and lots of it. That is protected by the carrier group.
Russia would be most likely, especially if lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine weren't forthcoming. Which I expect would be the case for a US arrogant enough to nuke Iran. Russia might take that as license to nuke Kyiv, for instance. But it's not going to happen; unless Iran goes nuclear themselves (which would mean they've successfully concealed completion of a nuclear weapons program), the US isn't going to nuke them. Nor Israel, unless a general Middle East war against them has already started with their backing, which also seems unlikely.
As for battleships, you can't win a war promptly with conventional artillery either. Eventually you'll have to invade. If you just keep shelling, we'll find out if Iran can figure a way to sink a carrier group.
If you just keep shelling, we'll find out if Iran can figure a way to sink a carrier group.
And if I remember correctly, wargame scenarios from the early 2000's (when the Navy was arguably in better shape) showed this exact scenario going very very badly for the US. So much so that they had to redo the wargame from scratch with heavy restrictions of the Red Team general to save face.
That's what it was, the "Millennium Challenge." On further review, the range limitations in the exercise were definitely a factor, but it's still not inspiring.
(However, be careful in reading these. Another source claims that the motorcycle messengers thing didn't happen and I have no way to research whether it's true.)
All pathways to WW3 seem to require Iran to get involved. So far, Iran has very much not got directly involved and there were some pretty high level controlled leaks from the Iranians that they were surprised by the scale of Hamas’ attack, even if the IRGC (as reported by WSJ) may have approved some form of aggression. Iran’s relations with Hamas are more frayed than they are with Hezbollah or the Houthis; Hamas is Sunni and they were initially on opposite sides of the Syrian Civil War.
Iran lacks the ability to easily project force to Israel. While troops could march (and they’d have to go overland) through Iraq and Syria to get to Israel they would be vulnerable doing so, supply lines would be stretched, and it would annoy the Iraqi Shia militias currently making huge oil profits from Iraq’s relative state of calm. Iran has medium range missiles capable of hitting Israel, but how many they have is unknown. Israel’s options for physical retaliation would be slim, but in many ways that reduces the risk that Iran acts overly aggressive out of fear.
Iran is in a good place in the region now, and that’s especially true as long as Iraq remains peaceful and largely ruled by Shia groups allied with Iran, and as long as Assad is in power in Syria. Shuffling the deck of cards isn’t in their interest. If Hezbollah decides enough is enough and goes in the Iranians will have to make a difficult decision, but even there i think direct engagement is very, very far from guaranteed. If Hezbollah is destroyed or severely damaged, the Iranian position remains quite strong.
You are assuming that the only way the war might propagate to Iran is if Iran decides to. But Israel could very well decide that for them. Iran has been weakened by recent anti regime protests and Israel's government needs to prove they do something about the security of their citizen without hurting Hamas too much because Hamas has hostages. It's not the most plausible issue, but game-theoretically hurting Iran is somewhat sound, just like nuking Belarus as a retaliation against Russia (see The Bomb by Fred Kaplan)
Too far away. I looked it up for a previous comment on this thread.
Basically the published combat range of the aircraft in their inventory just barely reaches the closest border of Iran over the most direct possible route. Any worthwhile targets are even further. And those routes go over Jordan and Iraq, both of which are not particularly friendly to Israel. Any attempts to avoid them or fly evasive routes to be less visible to their air defense just makes the range problem even worse. The Israeli air force does have some tanker aircraft in inventory, but one or more midair refuelings in hostile airspace sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Missiles may be possible, but missiles without nukes just aren't very destructive and may not be worth the bother. A conventionally-armed missile is a strange enough thing to do that it's probably reasonable for any country to assume any medium range ballistic missile is nuclear and respond accordingly.
Israel might start with Hezbollah. It's a more realistic target than Iran, and it would be more explanable to the population (we can't get rid of the Hamas because hostages but we will get rid of hezbollah). I don't really believe it will happen, it's just something possible
Unclear in what quantities. At least for Israel analysts seem to think the number of medium range non-nuclear missiles capable of hitting Tehran is very modest.
I imagine the US told Israel and Iran “we are putting two carrier groups close to Israel. Israel will not attack Iran. If Iran does anything the carrier groups will attack Iran.”
Really decreases the odds either party “starts” something.
Iran has medium range missiles capable of hitting Israel, but how many they have is unknown. Israel’s options for physical retaliation would be slim, but in many ways that reduces the risk that Iran acts overly aggressive out of fear.
Supposing that Iran did launch missals, would Israel be able to distinguish between conventional missals and WMDs (be they chemical and nuclear)?
And given that they wouldn't know the content of the missals launched by Iran, Israel would have to assume that they might be WMDs. By this I mean to say that a rockets from Iran to Israel might have the same problem as rockets launched from Russia to the USA, it would risk nuclear escalation given that you cannot determine the content of the missals, and given that there is a possibility that the missals are in fact a nuclear first strike.
Given the risk of escalation it it would seem unlikely that Iran proper directly attacks Israel.
The most likely path to this resulting in WW3 is several other actors deciding that now is the time for military adventurism because of America's finite response capacity.
Negligible, unless retroactively incorporated into the story of WW3 just because it occurred around the same time.
There aren't any great powers on the side of Hamas, only Iran, and only partially. There are chances it could escalate to a war with Iran, but that would not be a world war.
The reality is: the next world war occurs either because China attacks Taiwan, or Russia invades a NATO country. The latter is... extremely unlikely.
None of the major non-US powers required for WW3 (Russia, India, China) have great stakes in any of this. If Russia was losing in Ukraine, I'd be more worried.
The only power that cares is the US but none of its potential adversaries in the region (Lebanon, Iran) have nukes nor are any of remaining nuclear powers willing to use theirs to defend them. So a nothingburger. Sleep tight.
I think we can cross out Russia as able to do world war now. I guess using nukes maybe. But conventionally they are essentially Italy in WW2 at best now. A very minor front participant in conventional war.
The offer was first made by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain to Theodore Herzl's Zionist group in 1903. He offered 5,000 square miles (13,000 km2) of the Mau Escarpment in what is today Kenya. The offer was a response to pogroms in the Russian Empire, and it was hoped the area could be a refuge from persecution for the Jewish people.
Its high elevation gave it a temperate climate, making it suitable for European settlement. However, the observers found a dangerous land filled with lions and other creatures. Moreover, it was populated by a large number of Maasai people, who did not seem at all amenable to an influx of people coming from Europe.
It's inexplicable what happened, and to me it seems it must have been deliberate negligence on party of Israeli military and security services.
After receiving this report, [World Zionist] Congress decided in 1905 to politely decline the British offer. Some Jews, who viewed this as a mistake, formed the Jewish Territorial Organization with the aim of establishing a Jewish state anywhere.
But the British seem to have rescinded their offer later because of opposition of white settlers?
The Zionists' proposal was met with equal controversy in the British colony.[6][7] The white British settlers were openly hostile toward the offer and formed the "Anti-Zionist Immigration Committee," which rejected the proposal through the African Standard. They believed that British poor people deserved the land more than the Jews and expressed concerns about how the black natives would react to the Jewish immigrants. Furthermore, there were worries about granting a special territory to an alien community after the troubles in Canada with the Doukhobors, and doubts about Jews' ability to engage in profitable farming. The British media also joined in the objection, amplifying these concerns.
In December 1904, the Zionist Organization dispatched a special commission to Guas Ngishu to assess if the conditions were suitable for Jewish settlement. The commission was composed of Major Alfred St Hill Gibbons, a British veteran of the Boer War and a well-known explorer; Alfred Kaiser, a Swiss orientalist and advisor for the Northwest Cameroon Company; and Nachum Wilbush, a Zionist engineer.[7][8] Although there were disparities in their final reports, with the climate used to argue for and against the Jewish settlement, the main reason for the rejection of the Plan in 1905 was partly due to the opposition by the former high commissioner of East Africa and the white settlers in the area. This led the British to withdraw the offer.
Edit:
The mentioned "Doukhobors" were a pacifist christian sect from Russia. They first tried to unsuccessfully settle in Cyprus:
… after Quaker supporters both made assurances of the Doukhobors' political inoffensiveness and provided financial guarantees against their potential indigency, officials permitted over 1,000 Doukhobors to establish farming settlements in several locations on the island beginning in the second half of 1898. However, the Cyprus experiment soon proved to be disastrous: beset by disease (made worse by insufficient food that met the Doukhobors' religious requirements) as well as internal disagreements over community organization, nearly ten percent of the colony died by early 1899.[citation needed]
In Canada their customs were peculiar (Google "Doukhobors nude protest march") and they were distrusted:
Verigin [the religious leader] persuaded his followers to free their animals, and pull their wagons and plows themselves. … Canadians, politicians, and the media were deeply suspicious of the Doukhobors. Their communal lifestyle seemed suspicious, their refusal to send children to school was considered deeply troubling, while pacifism caused anger during the First World War. … Due to the community's aversion to private ownership of land, Verigin had the land registered in the name of the community. By 1906, the Canadian Government's new Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver started requiring the registration of land in the name of individual owners. Many Doukhobors refused to comply, resulting in 1907 in the reverting of more than a third (258,880 acres (1,047.7 km2)) of Doukhobor lands back to the Crown. The loss of legal title to their land became a major grievance.
Here's my proposal for how to solve this, with a plan I am shamelessly stealing from Greg Abbot and Camp of the Saints.
Step 1, just start rounding up Palestinians and putting them on boats. Let them grab their possessions if they want to cooperate. These are nice, safe, clean boats with cameras everywhere to film all the food/medicine/clean water being provided. Maybe also Gaza is 100% blockaded and no food goes in, giving people an incentive to leave.
Step 2: the boats set sail to Iran. Egypt allows them to traverse Suez because...well keep reading.
Step 3: the unarmed boats full of refugees and cameras go directly to shore in Iran. They ignore warnings to stop. They let the Iranians inspect them for weapons. They land, tell everyone to get off, and repeat.
This puts Iran in the unenviable position of either a) having to martyr thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees on camera or b) live with Palestinians. If Egypt doesn't let them through Suez, then Egypt can have the Palestinians.
Better border security seems a lot more feasible and practical . Relocating millions of Arabs won't change anything if the funding for terrorism is intact, as is the antipathy against the West. The money for arms is coming from somewhere...focusing on that should be the main priority, combined with better border security and intelligence. Now we see why surveillance exists. 99.9% of the time it seems useless and intrusive , but then incidents like this happen.
Relocating millions of Arabs won't change anything if the funding for terrorism is intact, as is the antipathy against the West
This doesn't seem like a serious assertion. Of course relocating millions of people would change something. Probably entirely. X can't do Y if there are no more X taps temple
99.9% of the time it seems useless and intrusive , but then incidents like this happen.
But if incidents like this still happen then why are you rhetorically attempting to justify intrusive surveillance?
Moving the Palestinians would change a lot. First of all, they'd mostly be Iran's problem. If they remain prisoners in Iran-operated refugee camps, any human rights issues are the result of Persian rather than Israeli oppression. If they integrate into Iranian society, hopefully they find better things to do than become terrorists. Meanwhile the world loses a current talking point against Israel - maybe 10-20 years ago they did a forced migration, but that's ancient history. Netenyahu, the person with his name/face on the policy, is 74 today and will be dead soon.
Second, they'd be far away. No matter how terrible the Palestinians are, they aren't America's problem due to distance. To attack America they need to either get past airport security, take a boat, or something similar.
What if Iran sends the Palestinians back on boats, with food? The Palestinians want to live in Jerusalem. The Iranians want the Palestinians to live in Israel. Neither wants the Palestinians to be in Iran.
Realistically, the US/Israel are far better able to mount a logistical operation such as this than Iran is. Taking the $50B-ish of US aid to Ukraine and dividing by 2M Palestinians, that's $25k/person to spend. Can Iran throw $25B at the return trip?
Maybe not, but it's quite a gamble on the past of the US/Israel, especially because e.g. Iraq and Syria might let the Iranians bus the Palestinians to Israel.
This does of course assume that Assad has no problem taking the risk of Palestinians getting off the bus in Syria - everyone is happy with a bunch of Palestinians showing up, right?
Every Israeli needs a wearable Iron Dome to protect them from blade and projectile attacks. Border security won't be enough because the Palestinians can fly over the border in ornithopters or tunnel through the sand. Mass surveillance is a technological solution that ultimately relies on human beings to interpret the data. Having the prescience to predict attacks before they happen is a rare gift, and the Israelis don't seem to have anyone with that gift.
So massive genocide and another mass wave of refugees from the middle east. Neo con pro Israel policies always end up being a disaster for Europe and the middle east. Why not an alternative plan, arabs get to live in the same town as their grandparents lived in.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
functor 6mo ago
Why not an alternative plan, arabs get to live in the same town as their grandparents lived in.
Honestly this is the best idea. Arabs get to live in the same town, but with Jewish masters and overlords. And if they start shitting stuff up, beat them with a large stick (literally) until they learn their lessons, the stick is very effective on those humans on which words don't have any effect. Also as subjects of the state of Israel, their incoming packages can all be legally inspected at will etc. (just like how the incoming packages of any Israeli Jew can be legally inspected by Israel) and any weapons easily confiscated without the ability of the former Gazans to be able to cry "oppression" and "blockade". Israel needs to make it clear that we are your rulers, just like it has done to the Israeli Arabs who are far more civilized than the Palestinians.
Why bring back slavery? If anything, the eastern European jews who have moved there recently should be ruled by the locals. The arabs have done a fairly good job at handling jewish minorities for the last millenia. It has been the natural order in much of the middle east with an arab ruling glass and ghetto jews being an underclass.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
functor 6mo ago
It's not slavery any more than being the citizen of any democratic western country is slavery (Nozick may well have argued that that is still slavery, but most people would disagree).
It has been the natural order in much of the middle east with an arab ruling glass and ghetto jews being an underclass.
Sure, but the ruling Jews of modern day Israel are not Middle Eastern Mizrahim any more, they are high end Ashkenazim from Europe who are a superior breed, destined to rule over others in any fair system. Different people, different relative social structure.
It is possible that Iran commits genocide against the Palestinians. Quite a move, first steering them towards committing atrocities against Israel, then murder them all when they show up in need of help.
You'd need 1000 boats with 1000 person capacity to move a million refugees. Among the refugees would almost certainly be terrorists and crypto-militants. Obviously no weapons would be allowed on board, despite a small chance of smuggling efforts succeeding. So you will need a sizeable police force. And can you trust all of the police to maintain control of their weapons and populace, and not support some kind of mutiny?
Food and water could probably be handled.
Who is paying for this, and in charge? Israel? The UN? Someone will have to take responsibility for the Iran destination, and that will prove quite contentious. Iran can reasonably blockade and/or refuse port. Eventually conditions onboard deteriorate. Maybe the crew abandons ship? Iran could commandeer the ships and park them at the Port Authority of NY/NJ.
Or you need 100 boats with 1000 person capacity if each one takes 10 trips. I'm shocked at your suggestion that the Palestinians are a bunch of terrorists, rather than innocent victims of Israeli oppression!
Who is paying for this, and in charge? Israel?
As I see it, Israel + USA.
Someone will have to take responsibility for the Iran destination, and that will prove quite contentious.
USA and Israel can certainly provide tons of Israeli/American flag branded food/water/etc, which Iran can distribute as they see fit.
Someone will have to take responsibility for the Iran destination, and that will prove quite contentious. Iran can reasonably blockade and/or refuse port.
Yes, Iran certainly does have the ability to shoot guns at boats full of Palestinian refugees while the cameras broadcast videos of innocent women and children dying to the world. How is showing Iran to be bloodthirsty killers of Arabs and getting rid of Palestinians not a huge win for Israel?
Iran could commandeer the ships and park them at the Port Authority of NY/NJ.
Getting from the Meditterranean to the Persian Gulf is a far simpler logistical problem than Persian Gulf to America, and Iran is far less capable of logistics than Israel or the US.
Yes, Iran certainly does have the ability to shoot guns at boats full of Palestinian refugees while the cameras broadcast videos of innocent women and children dying to the world.
And then what does the world do? Send a strongly-worded letter? Sanction them? Maybe try to stop their nuclear program?
At some point after Iran has established they're going to shoot, I think Israel loses their plausible deniability. "oh no Iran shot them AGAIN? What are the odds?" probably wouldn't come off very well.
Assuming they don't run out of boats and/or Palestinians who would prefer to be shot by Iran than by Israel first, of course.
Or you need 100 boats with 1000 person capacity if each one takes 10 trips.
Multiple trips are not realistic. I'm happy to explain why, but that shouldn't be necessary.
As I see it, Israel + USA.
Good luck with gaining access to Iranian ports.
Yes, Iran certainly does have the ability to shoot guns at boats full of Palestinian refugees while the cameras broadcast videos of innocent women and children dying to the world.
Refusing port does not imply shooting guns.
Getting from the Meditterranean to the Persian Gulf is a far simpler logistical problem than Persian Gulf to America
The destination is rhetorical. Iran can perform the same maneuver at any port of their choosing.
Multiple trips are not realistic. I'm happy to explain why, but that shouldn't be necessary.
Please, explain.
Good luck with gaining access to Iranian ports.
Wow, so Europe can stop illegal immigrants from taking boats across the Mediterranean simply by refusing a port pass? Why haven't they thought of this?
The destination is rhetorical. Iran can perform the same maneuver at any port of their choosing.
This sounds like a problem for Iran and Saudi Arabia/the UAE/Oman/Pakistan (ports that are reasonably accessible to Iran) to work out amongst themselves. Pretty sure Israel can work out ways to stop a Suez crossing in the reverse direction if they need to.
Wow, so Europe can stop illegal immigrants from taking boats across the Mediterranean simply by refusing a port pass? Why haven't they thought of this?
I dunno about a port pass, but yes, they can. They have thought of this.
It's sometimes referred to as "turnback policy" under international maritime law, as I understand.
Foreign vessels have a right of innocent passage in a state’s territorial sea (up to 12 miles from shore) under article 17 LOSC. If passage is not innocent, such as when domestic immigration laws are breached, states can take necessary steps to prevent passage. For seaworthy vessels, this is generally unproblematic. It may be that the UK government expects to rely on some iteration of this principle.
But if a vessel determines and justifies that it is in distress, it can enter the state’s territorial sea, according to an exception in article 18 LOSC. The duty to render assistance is also still applicable, even where the state believes that migration offences have been committed by those in peril.
For this same reasoning, multiple trips to Iranian port will be denied. And when the first trip is denied, the boat remains full and unable to take on additional migrants.
Israel can of course do the same thing that African migrants to Europe are doing: ensure that by the time the Palestinians are 11.9 miles from Iran, they are in boats capable of traveling only 30 miles (i.e. not enough to cross the gulf to reach Saudi Arabia).
The Iranians can shoot them out of the sea, let them land on the beach, or even render assistance.
Kind of strange how Europe is incapable of turning back migrants, but sending migrants to Iran is of course impossible.
Yes, Europe “can’t” stop the boats in part because it’s not the migrants’ boats landing in Europe, it’s the NGO boats that pick them up just offshore near North Africa that are landing, and those boats are in large part literally funded by European governments like those of Germany, and those boats say they have passengers in distress when they return with the migrants.
To put it into context: if we are talking about moving 1 million Gazans, then in Ukraine equivalent spending this is about $100k per person to cover the logistics of it.
Laughing at the idea of sending Hamas to Iran on The Disney Wish..
It typically carries 4000 passengers and 1500 crew members. Even assuming doubling up (even expensive cruises don't have a lot of cabin space), that leaves maybe 10,000 refugees per trip. Also would need to consider how much security is needed to prevent a mutiny and capture of the vessel by its passengers.
Hilariously terrible idea. When you're relying on Iran to allow you to do things it doesn't want you to do on the basis of them being too squeamish to stop you, you know you've got a bad plan.
If you let them on to inspect for weapons, they can just shoot the crew and let the Palestinians take the boat back. If that doesn't work, they can just sink the boats. "It's terrible that the enemy forced us to kill these innocent civilians" is a time honoured rhetorical device, and it wouldn't even be wrong here.
Not to mention the passengers would be trying to kill you the whole time.
When you're relying on Iran to allow you to do things it doesn't want you to do on the basis of them being too squeamish to stop you, you know you've got a bad plan.
I'm not relying on this. Iran can murder all the Palestinians on camera as far as I'm concerned. It's a win for Israel and there's tons of footage of Persians murdering Arabs to broadcast to the Arab world. Arab/Persian conflict is a distraction from Arab/Jew conflict.
with a plan I am shamelessly stealing from Greg Abbot and Camp of the Saints.
Greg Abbott is seeing success with his immigration policy because the people he’s bussing more or less by definition want to go somewhere deep in the country that may or may not be in Texas but definitely isn’t the Rio grande valley. ‘You can go to New York, LA, Denver, Chicago, or DC’ is an appealing pitch to such people.
Of course those cities don’t want them and he’s only willing to stop sending them if they stop coming, which those cities then advocate for the federal government to enforce(and he got his way, at least as far as barriers are concerned).
In contrast, the Palestinians want to live in Tel Aviv, not Iran, and there is no policy concession Iran can give to Israel that makes the Palestinians go away.
The Palestinians didn’t want to go to Iran in the first place, and unlike the masses of economic migrants showing up at the Texas border, are controlled by a militant group of psychopathic terrorists. This makes relocating them much more difficult.
This is all so tiresome. Since we are going wild with ambitious proposals, how about we deport the Jews instead?
This would have to take place some decades in the future, when the space tech matures a little. That, or we just give the Jews longer deadlines. Everybody (by that I mean mostly the US) does their best to convince the Jews that the promised holy land is, in fact, on Mars. They are then strongly incentivized, both through threats, as well as generous funding, to use their superior IQ to settle the red planet. The place is admittedly somewhat drier, but on the other hand, a lot more spacious and with no neighbors to complain. I'm sure they'll do fine.
Benefits of my plan:
-Space development dramatically accelerated.
-Final solution to Jewish settlement problem. Jews don't bother anyone and no one is bothering the Jews.
-The Palestinians can have their cursed patch of desert all to themselves.
Why don't you just hit the mute button and watch the ads? I don't understand why people complain so much about watching a few short seconds of advertisements in exchange for dozens of minutes of FREE video.
It's my understanding that, if you don't skip until the 30-second mark, then the ad counts as having been "watched", so the uploader still gets paid. There's at least one Chrome extension that you can set up to automatically skip ads after the 30-second mark. I don't know whether Safari has anything similar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.)
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.
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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.
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Notes -
As a meta-comment on all the hawkish hot takes, I'd love it if we could gather all motte hot-takers in a no-holds barred cage fight so we could distinguish between the psychopaths, veteran fighters and pissant weaklings who try to compensate for their inferiority complex with words. I think we have to be alert to the possibility that people that talk a big game could easily wet their pants in real world life and I'd love to see who those people are.
Yeah, the ghoulish commentary from what are mostly chickenshit individuals can be a bit grating. But this is how it is in all wars. People from a distance pick sides and then cheer on them as if it were a sports team from afar.
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I'm up for this. In what video game should we all fight?
Rimworld PVP through mods.
I'm sure I can cobble up a Hamas and Israel faction, with suitable ideology and kit.
Or Arma 3, which certainly has the ability to represent it.
Zorba can officiate, at least in the former case.
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Calvinball? It's a video game because I say it is, that's within the rules, and if it wasn't, it is now!
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I left gaming at Tekken 2 or 3, which gives clues to my age and ongoing interests.
I played pong when it was the best available game, and currently play Overwatch 2.
Ah ha good ol pong ..
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I’m sorry.
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Spacewar is older and better than Pong.
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TF2. 24/7 Insta-Respawn 2Fort only.
Nope, we fight in Dota2. My Wraith King is quite something to behold. Plus the voicelines are amazing after I wipe the floor with everyone else: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/dota2_gamepedia/images/2/24/Vo_skeleton_king_wraith_attack_03.mp3/revision/latest?cb=20200525232529
NGL I think my thought process genuinely became more pro-monarchy after playing too much of the hero and constantly hearing his pre-recorded responses: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/dota2_gamepedia/images/6/60/Vo_skeleton_king_wraith_attack_06.mp3/revision/latest?cb=20200525232532
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I'm gonna engi-camp the intel room and there's nothing you can do about it
We'll see about zis, mon ami.
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I assume you're confident in your gorilla warfare skills, then? Or assuming you're not eligible since your takes are insufficiently hot?
Well I have no idea of that scenario obviously, not having been in it. I've done some minor karate/Kung Fu sparring to know my skills and strength are negligible on the curve and on the street I've come off second best in several encounters though usually extremely drunk and in my youth. I suppose I have a quiet confidence that trained and with weaponry I would stand my own under fire but it's completely hypothetical. My theory is there's some advantage to calibrating your actual skills and courage to reality, rather than some wishful ego conception, so that way when it comes to crunch you don't find yourself unable to bridge to reality.
Now of course, instigating war doesn't require the instigators to have courage, they can pass that on to others, as well as the moral torments of having directly killed innocent people.
I just think I'm tired of the over-confident manner of mottizens in general. Talk is so cheap, and real thinking so expensive. So little on here has any relevance, interesting as it may be, because there is no reality test. As far as I can tell a lot of commentary just reinforces the position and ego of the commenter without persuading anyone else one way or another. On average people just like the friction of their position relative to others rather than being willing to actually adjust their position or acknowledge epistemic deficits. I'm worried that the tendency for over confident takes is actually psychological compensation and that the motte is actually riddled with a bunch of right brain autists metaphorically jerking off in their parents garage.
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
This site is resembling Reddit with the confident geopolitical hottakes.
Agreed, definitely! I would therefore advocate for using this framework, and logic, to permanently silence Americans off the entire internet. The amount of ignorance demonstrated by citizens of the global hegemon is a massive net fail and the foreign policy conducted as a aggregate of and on behalf of that ignorance is, in my opinion, worth kneecapping an American with a shotgun and taking away their internet access every time they say anything about anything they know nothing about and have never experienced.
Luckily, or unluckily, we don't live in a world where people's feet are held to the fire every time they say anything stupid, so people can continue to spout their hot takes as they wish.
Can we do the same for everyone in all those foreign nations that we allegedly don't know anything about who cries out for American intervention every time they pick a fight with their neighbors and get in over their heads? I'd be more than happy for us to pull out of NATO, the Pacific, etc, and best of luck to all of the nations there dealing with China and Russia without us.
Definitely! As soon as they become the world leader militarily, economically, culturally, etc. while still allowing their population to vote.
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Why would Americans have a view? First, any American’s view will have zero outcome on what the American government does. Second, the impact of said foreign policy isn’t felt by most Americans. So they are rationally ignorant.
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Both are free, as far as I can tell, since lurkers don't have to pay for the privilege of viewing our rants.
Maybe if the nurses keep pissing me off like they're doing today eh?
I can't be too perplexed that a subreddit gone solo, if not wild, resembles its estranged parent.
We've always had hot takes, it's a quantitative chance and not a qualitative one, especially if you consider what it was like when Ukraine kicked off.
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That's a double standard. You don't say that if someone advocates doing nothing, they should have had a relative murdered by a foreign army and had nothing done about it.
This is just an excuse to arbitrarily say that a lot of people are not allowed to advocate something.
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It seems to me that the Israeli government has taken the hawkish approach that some mottizens advocated - aka wiping Hamas out of exitance but not full bloodied genocide. We should feel very proud that it was our words that swayed the famously dovish ex Sayeret Matkal Benjamin Netanyahu (a person that has seen combat) to go this course.
Another option is that people here have the extraordinary abilities to read a map and also imagine themselves in a tough situation and think about what flies.
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I am. I have honed them in many hours of playing Donkey Kong in Super Smash Bros.
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I always wonder, why do we only get this sort of pushback on comments about warfare? I can advocate for fires being fought without somebody talking about how I might not be a very good firefighter. I can advocate for goods being delivered quickly and reliably without being a good truck driver myself. I can say putting a bridge over a river seems like a good idea without being a civil engineer. So how come it's only if I think war is necessary or suggest fighting it in a particular way that somebody will come by and claim that I'm not a good enough warrior myself? What does it matter? Can I say the reverse, that you aren't allowed to advocate for peace until you've actually watched your children be brutally murdered before your eyes by your neighbor and still advocate for peace with them?
It's easy to get detached from the consequences of war in the heat of passion if you're not the one putting your life on the line. You're probably not going to get so angry about the lack of a bridge that you completely refuse to consider the costs of building it, and the cost of building it will probably not be paid in large quantities of blood.
That's not to say that it's never valid for someone to have a stance on violence without being the one to commit it (e.g. a woman hiring a bodyguard to protect her from her stalker), but there's definitely a failure mode of a belligerent woman picking fights that don't make any sense because she expects her boyfriend to fight them for her (or the little yappy dogs that are hyper aggressive when on leash). The accusation is that we're the beliggerant woman/yappy dogs, not the sober person hiring security when necessary and appropriate.
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What's the point of this comment? No one is going to get in a room and fight, you're just calling people cowards and thus engaging in the same sort of Internet Tough Guy act you're accusing others of doing. Attack arguments, not people, and if you have something to say to any specific individual about the lack of congruity between their words and their actions, make sure it's relevant, not just a sneer.
Well, I've put more sauce around it in a reply, but fair comment. I'm actually looking for an escape out of my internet habits at present so I might try a voluntary ban for a period once Ive addressed any comments that arise.
I think that if you want a ban, it would be better to just ask for one than to break the rules to get one.
It wasn't an intent, merely an afterthought and in the spirit of trying to demonstrate sovereignty I'll do it myself thanks.
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They’ve worked out what USA is prepared to support. They gave the UN 24 hours to evacuate forty percent of the strip.
I don't know what they planned but remember that Hamas has a lot of hostages. They will probably do something spectacular but useless, unless they want to sacrifice the lives of the hostages which I doubt.
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https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1712673207202070883
I don't think this will not be highly visible, at the very fucking least.
If they actually go through with it, I wonder if we're going to start hearing how necessary it is for Europe to take in the refugees again.
There is no way in hell Europe is going to take in Palestinian refugees. It is already a hot button issue and politicians would be suicidal to let in people who just committed one of the largest terrorist attacks in recent history.
Would it be suicidal over the long-term for leftist European politicians to take in such refugees?
It depends on how fast they can turn them to voters thanks to more lax citizenship laws. Germany absolutely cratered theirs under this new government for this reason.
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I hope you're right. The world seems absurd to me at the moment, and I can't see anything as beyond the pale.
What exactly do you expect to happen if Palestinians start getting dropped in the sea, to be picked up by the already existing transport network of NGOs?
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Europe doesn’t have the stomach to blow the current refugee boats out of the water or repatriate them or whatever. I’m not ruling out that millions of terrorists might change the equation, but history is not inspiring.
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What do you guys think are the chances this becomes WW3? ngl I'm starting to get a little worried
Very low.
If Israel drags both Sunni and Shia powers into the war, things will be unfortunate, but there will not be a united front for very long. I would expect that regional tensions between Iran and KSA will actually decrease temporarily, then the united front will fracture over time as the desires of the governments diverge from that of their populace and trust disintegrates.
I think we're less likely to see this war lead to the destruction of Israel, or WWIII, than we are to see it lead to further disintegration of MENA governments when they refuse to invade Israel as their populace demands.
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How?
Ground invasion -> Hezbollah -> USA -> Iran -> more shit idk until it's Armageddon
I admit not being exactly rational here (part of what I meant by "worried") that's why I'm asking this space
Sure, a wider Middle-Eastern war is possible, but quite a bit of a road to a genuine world war even from there.
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray. Turkey is very worrying wild card and they will have zero resistance if they invade bulgaria and greece. Which have nothing to stop them with. And Ergodan has some ottoman restoration dreams. They may not even have to revoke the NATO membership to make things even more confusing. And they have couple of million of refugees that they can draft.
So right now western powers have choice - protect what is left of Bulgaria - mostly Sofia, northern parts above the Balkan mountains. Protect serbia or protect Vienna. Throw the mess in Ukraine. Assume that suddenly all those muslims we already accepted suddenly decide to cause trouble - no matter if provoked or not. So you will soon have a lot of crises. And you are just one or two in asia to have world war. Thank got that latin america is peaceful at least (in not a keg of powder sense)
Assad is still cleaning up a civil war and attempting reconstruction. Egypt under Sisi certainly isn’t going to get involved in defense of Hamas / the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan isn’t either after their own history with the Palestinians.
So a “whole middle eastern war” against Israel involves who - maybe Hezbollah, Hamas and some Iranian support (probably not boots on the ground, though)? Maybe Iraqi Shia militias, although they don’t want a war now they’re in power there? the Gulf Arabs don’t want a victorious Iran turning its attention toward the holy cities and the gulf.
It’s all possible, of course, but is it likely? I don’t know.
Is hezbollah likely to get involved? I would think that the time to do so for them had already happened.
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Indeed; the West Bank Palestinians are more or less a poison pill preventing Jordan from invading, even if Jordan would otherwise want to. Same on for Gaza Palestinians and Egypt.
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How is turkey going to succeed against greece and bulgaria where russia failed against ukraine, when they will get much more support, and presumably want to become turks even less than ukrainians want to become russians? Turkey’s military budget is 11 B (source) and greece 8 B, bulgaria 1B (This is a clue that bulgaria, contrary to greece, doesn’t think turkey is a threat to it). Given the budget ratio was 10-to-1 against ukraine, I will put turkey’s chances of conquering bulgaria and greece at approximately 0.
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Why would it mean that though? There have already been at least 3 wars (48, 67, 73) involving full-scale armies from multiple Arab nations attacking Israel, and they haven't fallen yet.
On paper, the Arab nations would appear to have ample forces to do the job. But historically, they've had trouble actually coordinating and committing to attacks. I see no reason to presume that that has changed. Syria and Egypt seem to have enough internal problems these days that it's hard to see them pulling off a large-scale offensive action.
Please describe other types of wide middle eastern war? Don't forget that the previous wars were waged against secular governments. I don't know the current state of pan arabism but I think that it is ripe for one to try and get the reigns.
I don't understand? You asserted that "A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray". Exactly what war are you picturing that would plausibly lead to Israel falling without direct intervention? I mentioned several actual wars that happened. Multiple times, the nations surrounding Israel united to attack them, and each time, Israel did not fall. A number of other wars have also happened in the Middle East, none of which involved Israel at all or led to them falling.
I actually can't think of any war in the modern era in which any of the Arab nations displayed impressive offensive capability, as in assembling a large force and sending it outside their borders to capture foreign territory held by determined adversaries. Usually they only attack each other, and mostly bog down pretty quickly unless the region they're attacking basically gives up to them. They tend to smash their faces into a brick wall every time they try to attack territory held by Westernized forces.
Whether you or I think that the area is "ripe" for a united pan-Arab movement now, the fact is that it's been tried a bunch of times over the last century and failed every time. I don't see any reason to expect anything to be different now.
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Turkey isn’t going to war with Greece any time soon. The country’s membership of NATO is central to all of its defense plans and pretty important to its national identity. Entirely possible it gets drawn into the next round of Armenia-Azerbaijan though.
Probably true 15 years ago. Erdogan has played with both turkish nationalism and islamism. I wouldn't be so optimistic. The west didn't accept Turkey as equal, I am not sure at least in the mind of the elite they want to be accepted any more.
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Agree, but the likelihood is now higher than it was previously. If a set of global conflicts emerge with even loosely defined lines, I would expect it to be a product in no small part of opportunism in the face of the United States being spread too thin to be a reliable partner in stopping something like an attack on Taiwan. I don't really know how to put a meaningful percentage guess on the likelihood, but the combination of resources and materiel drained into Ukraine and naval assets being deployed to assist Israel commits the American military to a greater extent than is typical.
It seems like everyone always leaves out the possibility that China just... takes Taiwan. Like if the US does get spread pretty thin and China takes the opportunity, that doesn't automatically mean WWIII happens. Frankly, the thinner the US gets spread, the lower the odds of Taiwan being sufficient to trigger the war.
If the US is totally dominant, then China will wait and so no war occurs. If the US is severely weakened, then China will simply take Taiwan with minimal US intervention, and no world war occurs. It's only in some weird middle ground, where China perceives the US as spread too thin but the US still commits to defending Taiwan, that there's any risk of something major.
Of course, I've never been the worrying sort, and I'm not as opposed to war as the average person, so maybe I'm just underestimating the odds.
We've already seen the tendency of autocratic regimes to overestimate their own military capabilities in the current Ukraine-Russia war. And islands are notoriously easy to defend/hard to attack. If China just marches in and takes over, you're right. If China miscalculates, the first landing fails and the war turns into a longer slog/siege, the western public will most likely want to support Taiwan, similar to how it went with the Ukraine. Which may not guarantee WW3, but it adds another roll of the dice, and destabilizes the world further.
I agree with your overall point entirely, but this gets me thinking: would the western public have supported Ukraine if the US military/intelligence community didn't make sure that happened?
Most people's position on the war doesn't seem to be rooted in serious principles, and I have no doubt that if the regime pulled a Eurasia/Eastasia flip tomorrow, most of the public would follow.
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When I created this megathread, here is what I posted to the moderator Discord:
My understanding of military decisions is exclusively historical and political, so I can't speak to the nuts and bolts of this, but every conflict like the ones in Ukraine and Israel opens the door a little wider for attacks of opportunity elsewhere. I am skeptical that China will ever invade Taiwan--the economic benefits of just rattling sabers at them for all of eternity seem far better than the ideological benefits of burning the island to cinders. I sometimes wonder if Taiwan is allowed to be what it is because someone in China read Brave New World and decided that an island of malcontent exiles was a pretty good idea, actually.
But their ability to get away with an invasion of Taiwan is certainly increased by contemporaneous conflict elsewhere.
Other contenders for the "next front in World War III" presumably include Iran and North Korea, ye olde Axis of Evil, but there are plenty of other places that could qualify. The flood of migrants arriving in Europe and the United States every day may be driven primarily by economics, but one of the worst things for any economy is armed conflict, and it is at some level armed conflict that almost all such migrants are ultimately fleeing. How much of the world needs be at war, to call it a World War?
Vox Day had some discussion on his site around the possibility of this spilling out into WW3. Basically it was through considering Ukraine/Russia, Iran/Israel and China/Taiwan as separate fronts. China and Russia both gain from flashpoints such as what is happening in Israel, as it draws focus and resources away from their spheres.
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When white and honorary white start to die in sufficient quantities. You also missed the Nagorno Karabakh in "list of things that hit the fan recently" that I think is also result of embolden adversaries and weakened russia.
I always thought of the current axis of evil as laughable. All the countries there are pathetic and china wants not a part of it.
The Armenia thing is interesting. It’s one thing ethnically cleansing 30,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, quite another occupying a hostile nationalist population a third the size of your own with a different religion and 2000 year history.
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A world war is when the war is global. Even 10 local conflicts don't make a world war until there are two sides and japan allies with germany even though they are not fighting on the same continent. And by that, I mean that they declare war and peace together, not that they are allies in that they help each other somehow.
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Worried now? The Ukraine situation has been in danger of escalating into WW3 for almost 2 years.
This is kind of trivial in comparison.
The Ukraine situation contained genuine possibilities of escalation to an European war (which still wouldn't necessarily be WW3) for about a month after it started. After that, most of the WW3 talk (in the West, at least) has not been particularly good-faith from either side - either pro-Ukrainian "This is already a WW3, the West doesn't realize it, why isn't it intervening now?" spiel or Western pro-Russian "Oh no, the nukes might start flying at any moment! The West must avoid this by dropping all support to Ukraine now!" spiel.
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Very low. A world war necessarily involves at least 2 of the following: NATO, Russia, China.
I can see a path where Iran does something stupid and is promptly destroyed by the United States. But that would be where it ends. Russia already has its hands full and China doesn't seem interested in this kind of foreign adventure.
The situation in Ukraine was/is more dangerous.
I think the concern is that Iran gets involved, the US responds, but is a paper tiger of sorts causing China to take Taiwan.
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I don't think the US can "promptly" destroy Iran without nukes. And nukes make a world war very likely.
The most likely reason for Iran not becoming directly involved is geography. They can't invade without traversing the entire peninsula, and it's not like Syria and Jordan are so friendly with them they'd allow it or participate. They could presumably launch missiles, but conventional missiles don't decide a war, and they obviously invite direct retaliation.
Why? The nuke mythology --- nuclear winter this, radiation that, Fallout, "glassing", end of civilization, etc. --- creates a level of fear and hesitation in excess of what the effects of the weapons warrant. (I recall reading something about the nuclear winter concept being essentially made up for leftist political reasons in the 1980s.) If someone were to use a nuke in anger, this mythology would collapse. We'd come to understand that a nuclear warhead is merely a bomb that makes a bigger boom than other bombs and view 70 years of anti-nuke agitation as ignorant hysteria. With the "nuclear taboo" aside, why would a nuclear strike (especially a counter-force tactical nuke) cause a world war when a destructive conventional strike wouldn't?
The nuclear taboo is NOT aside. And if a nuke in the Middle East swept the taboo aside, Russia is freed to use its nuclear arsenal in Ukraine and then perhaps elsewhere... which again, brings you a lot closer to WWIII.
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They wouldn't be able to "destroy" Iran without nukes, but conventional attacks would probably be enough to destroy whatever military capability they have to project power beyond their own borders, and the political situation within their own borders is dicey enough that it's a wild card; i.e. a rally around the flag effect could help the government, or getting entangled in a foreign war to help terrorists could be another addition to the list of grievances for last year's protestors.
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From the nuclear nations which one will be willing to risk it's own existence as retaliation for Iran? Pakistan or North Korea probably? Pakistan could be bribed with Iran territory. China could be bribed with Iran's oil. Israel will be happy. Russia will gladly shrug for lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine. UK and France - meh. India - doubt it.
North Korea - who knows, but probably extremely low. The regime there is preoccupied with its own survival. Not with geopolitics at large. They seem to be happy to turn into an island.
Anyway - I think this is time to reconsider the battleship as a ship - just a delivery vehicle for dumb artillery and lots of it. That is protected by the carrier group.
Russia would be most likely, especially if lesser sanctions and smaller aid in Ukraine weren't forthcoming. Which I expect would be the case for a US arrogant enough to nuke Iran. Russia might take that as license to nuke Kyiv, for instance. But it's not going to happen; unless Iran goes nuclear themselves (which would mean they've successfully concealed completion of a nuclear weapons program), the US isn't going to nuke them. Nor Israel, unless a general Middle East war against them has already started with their backing, which also seems unlikely.
As for battleships, you can't win a war promptly with conventional artillery either. Eventually you'll have to invade. If you just keep shelling, we'll find out if Iran can figure a way to sink a carrier group.
And if I remember correctly, wargame scenarios from the early 2000's (when the Navy was arguably in better shape) showed this exact scenario going very very badly for the US. So much so that they had to redo the wargame from scratch with heavy restrictions of the Red Team general to save face.
That's what it was, the "Millennium Challenge." On further review, the range limitations in the exercise were definitely a factor, but it's still not inspiring.
Millennium Challenge. See also the top answer from the defense consultant in this. Basically, Red "won" by using loopholes in the rules that failed to model reality.
(However, be careful in reading these. Another source claims that the motorcycle messengers thing didn't happen and I have no way to research whether it's true.)
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All pathways to WW3 seem to require Iran to get involved. So far, Iran has very much not got directly involved and there were some pretty high level controlled leaks from the Iranians that they were surprised by the scale of Hamas’ attack, even if the IRGC (as reported by WSJ) may have approved some form of aggression. Iran’s relations with Hamas are more frayed than they are with Hezbollah or the Houthis; Hamas is Sunni and they were initially on opposite sides of the Syrian Civil War.
Iran lacks the ability to easily project force to Israel. While troops could march (and they’d have to go overland) through Iraq and Syria to get to Israel they would be vulnerable doing so, supply lines would be stretched, and it would annoy the Iraqi Shia militias currently making huge oil profits from Iraq’s relative state of calm. Iran has medium range missiles capable of hitting Israel, but how many they have is unknown. Israel’s options for physical retaliation would be slim, but in many ways that reduces the risk that Iran acts overly aggressive out of fear.
Iran is in a good place in the region now, and that’s especially true as long as Iraq remains peaceful and largely ruled by Shia groups allied with Iran, and as long as Assad is in power in Syria. Shuffling the deck of cards isn’t in their interest. If Hezbollah decides enough is enough and goes in the Iranians will have to make a difficult decision, but even there i think direct engagement is very, very far from guaranteed. If Hezbollah is destroyed or severely damaged, the Iranian position remains quite strong.
You are assuming that the only way the war might propagate to Iran is if Iran decides to. But Israel could very well decide that for them. Iran has been weakened by recent anti regime protests and Israel's government needs to prove they do something about the security of their citizen without hurting Hamas too much because Hamas has hostages. It's not the most plausible issue, but game-theoretically hurting Iran is somewhat sound, just like nuking Belarus as a retaliation against Russia (see The Bomb by Fred Kaplan)
It’s unclear Israel has the means to directly attack Iran other than with nukes.
Can you explain? Why couldn't a conventionally armed F-16, F-35, or missile without a nuclear warhead reach Iran?
Too far away. I looked it up for a previous comment on this thread.
Basically the published combat range of the aircraft in their inventory just barely reaches the closest border of Iran over the most direct possible route. Any worthwhile targets are even further. And those routes go over Jordan and Iraq, both of which are not particularly friendly to Israel. Any attempts to avoid them or fly evasive routes to be less visible to their air defense just makes the range problem even worse. The Israeli air force does have some tanker aircraft in inventory, but one or more midair refuelings in hostile airspace sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Missiles may be possible, but missiles without nukes just aren't very destructive and may not be worth the bother. A conventionally-armed missile is a strange enough thing to do that it's probably reasonable for any country to assume any medium range ballistic missile is nuclear and respond accordingly.
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Israel might start with Hezbollah. It's a more realistic target than Iran, and it would be more explanable to the population (we can't get rid of the Hamas because hostages but we will get rid of hezbollah). I don't really believe it will happen, it's just something possible
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Both countries have conventional missiles that can reach the other.
Unclear in what quantities. At least for Israel analysts seem to think the number of medium range non-nuclear missiles capable of hitting Tehran is very modest.
What if they were launched from a bomber?
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I imagine the US told Israel and Iran “we are putting two carrier groups close to Israel. Israel will not attack Iran. If Iran does anything the carrier groups will attack Iran.”
Really decreases the odds either party “starts” something.
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Supposing that Iran did launch missals, would Israel be able to distinguish between conventional missals and WMDs (be they chemical and nuclear)?
And given that they wouldn't know the content of the missals launched by Iran, Israel would have to assume that they might be WMDs. By this I mean to say that a rockets from Iran to Israel might have the same problem as rockets launched from Russia to the USA, it would risk nuclear escalation given that you cannot determine the content of the missals, and given that there is a possibility that the missals are in fact a nuclear first strike.
Given the risk of escalation it it would seem unlikely that Iran proper directly attacks Israel.
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The most likely path to this resulting in WW3 is several other actors deciding that now is the time for military adventurism because of America's finite response capacity.
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Negligible, unless retroactively incorporated into the story of WW3 just because it occurred around the same time.
There aren't any great powers on the side of Hamas, only Iran, and only partially. There are chances it could escalate to a war with Iran, but that would not be a world war.
The reality is: the next world war occurs either because China attacks Taiwan, or Russia invades a NATO country. The latter is... extremely unlikely.
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None of the major non-US powers required for WW3 (Russia, India, China) have great stakes in any of this. If Russia was losing in Ukraine, I'd be more worried.
The only power that cares is the US but none of its potential adversaries in the region (Lebanon, Iran) have nukes nor are any of remaining nuclear powers willing to use theirs to defend them. So a nothingburger. Sleep tight.
I think we can cross out Russia as able to do world war now. I guess using nukes maybe. But conventionally they are essentially Italy in WW2 at best now. A very minor front participant in conventional war.
The only path to WW is with Chinas involvement.
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They say the Jews are smart:
It's inexplicable what happened, and to me it seems it must have been deliberate negligence on party of Israeli military and security services.
The past is a strange country. Not only did the Zionists reject the offer (but Herzl was for it!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_a_Jewish_state
But the British seem to have rescinded their offer later because of opposition of white settlers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Scheme
Edit: The mentioned "Doukhobors" were a pacifist christian sect from Russia. They first tried to unsuccessfully settle in Cyprus:
In Canada their customs were peculiar (Google "Doukhobors nude protest march") and they were distrusted:
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Here's my proposal for how to solve this, with a plan I am shamelessly stealing from Greg Abbot and Camp of the Saints.
Step 1, just start rounding up Palestinians and putting them on boats. Let them grab their possessions if they want to cooperate. These are nice, safe, clean boats with cameras everywhere to film all the food/medicine/clean water being provided. Maybe also Gaza is 100% blockaded and no food goes in, giving people an incentive to leave.
Step 2: the boats set sail to Iran. Egypt allows them to traverse Suez because...well keep reading.
Step 3: the unarmed boats full of refugees and cameras go directly to shore in Iran. They ignore warnings to stop. They let the Iranians inspect them for weapons. They land, tell everyone to get off, and repeat.
This puts Iran in the unenviable position of either a) having to martyr thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees on camera or b) live with Palestinians. If Egypt doesn't let them through Suez, then Egypt can have the Palestinians.
What you guys think of this plan?
Better border security seems a lot more feasible and practical . Relocating millions of Arabs won't change anything if the funding for terrorism is intact, as is the antipathy against the West. The money for arms is coming from somewhere...focusing on that should be the main priority, combined with better border security and intelligence. Now we see why surveillance exists. 99.9% of the time it seems useless and intrusive , but then incidents like this happen.
This doesn't seem like a serious assertion. Of course relocating millions of people would change something. Probably entirely. X can't do Y if there are no more X taps temple
But if incidents like this still happen then why are you rhetorically attempting to justify intrusive surveillance?
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Moving the Palestinians would change a lot. First of all, they'd mostly be Iran's problem. If they remain prisoners in Iran-operated refugee camps, any human rights issues are the result of Persian rather than Israeli oppression. If they integrate into Iranian society, hopefully they find better things to do than become terrorists. Meanwhile the world loses a current talking point against Israel - maybe 10-20 years ago they did a forced migration, but that's ancient history. Netenyahu, the person with his name/face on the policy, is 74 today and will be dead soon.
Second, they'd be far away. No matter how terrible the Palestinians are, they aren't America's problem due to distance. To attack America they need to either get past airport security, take a boat, or something similar.
What if Iran sends the Palestinians back on boats, with food? The Palestinians want to live in Jerusalem. The Iranians want the Palestinians to live in Israel. Neither wants the Palestinians to be in Iran.
Realistically, the US/Israel are far better able to mount a logistical operation such as this than Iran is. Taking the $50B-ish of US aid to Ukraine and dividing by 2M Palestinians, that's $25k/person to spend. Can Iran throw $25B at the return trip?
Maybe not, but it's quite a gamble on the past of the US/Israel, especially because e.g. Iraq and Syria might let the Iranians bus the Palestinians to Israel.
Suppose that Syria and Iraq allow buses to drive to Israel. The buses get to the fence, which you can see pictures of here:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-gunfire-from-syria-aimed-at-military-drone-operating-along-border/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/syrian-man-shot-by-idf-after-allegedly-hurling-objects-at-golan-border/
Now what?
For comparison, Iran has 800 miles of coastline on the Persian Gulf which looks like this:
https://theculturetrip.com/middle-east/iran/articles/the-most-beautiful-beaches-in-iran
https://traveltriangle.com/blog/beaches-in-iran/
The media game begins. Israel is portrayed as an ethnic cleanser, the Palestinians as wanting to return to their homelands.
The Israelis might win the media game, but it's a gamble.
Sure, but that's the same as it always was.
This does of course assume that Assad has no problem taking the risk of Palestinians getting off the bus in Syria - everyone is happy with a bunch of Palestinians showing up, right?
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Every Israeli needs a wearable Iron Dome to protect them from blade and projectile attacks. Border security won't be enough because the Palestinians can fly over the border in ornithopters or tunnel through the sand. Mass surveillance is a technological solution that ultimately relies on human beings to interpret the data. Having the prescience to predict attacks before they happen is a rare gift, and the Israelis don't seem to have anyone with that gift.
Not if Palantir has anything to say about it.
Wait, wrong franchise.
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Wait are we talking about Palestinians or Fremen?
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So massive genocide and another mass wave of refugees from the middle east. Neo con pro Israel policies always end up being a disaster for Europe and the middle east. Why not an alternative plan, arabs get to live in the same town as their grandparents lived in.
Honestly this is the best idea. Arabs get to live in the same town, but with Jewish masters and overlords. And if they start shitting stuff up, beat them with a large stick (literally) until they learn their lessons, the stick is very effective on those humans on which words don't have any effect. Also as subjects of the state of Israel, their incoming packages can all be legally inspected at will etc. (just like how the incoming packages of any Israeli Jew can be legally inspected by Israel) and any weapons easily confiscated without the ability of the former Gazans to be able to cry "oppression" and "blockade". Israel needs to make it clear that we are your rulers, just like it has done to the Israeli Arabs who are far more civilized than the Palestinians.
Why bring back slavery? If anything, the eastern European jews who have moved there recently should be ruled by the locals. The arabs have done a fairly good job at handling jewish minorities for the last millenia. It has been the natural order in much of the middle east with an arab ruling glass and ghetto jews being an underclass.
It's not slavery any more than being the citizen of any democratic western country is slavery (Nozick may well have argued that that is still slavery, but most people would disagree).
Sure, but the ruling Jews of modern day Israel are not Middle Eastern Mizrahim any more, they are high end Ashkenazim from Europe who are a superior breed, destined to rule over others in any fair system. Different people, different relative social structure.
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Yes, the Arabs have done a great job. That's why virtually all the Jews in their countries fled or were expelled, and mostly wound up in Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956%E2%80%931957_exodus_and_expulsions_from_Egypt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Syria#Post-1948
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_of_Iranian_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Afghanistan#Anti-Jewish_campaign
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It is possible that Iran commits genocide against the Palestinians. Quite a move, first steering them towards committing atrocities against Israel, then murder them all when they show up in need of help.
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As cheeky as this is, doesn't reasonably constitute an act of war?
The "proposal" is so autistic that I hope it is trolling, but to be fair each side does like 10 things per day that constitutes an act of war.
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Against whom? The Palestiniains? Sure. They wanted a war, they got one.
Against Iran? It doesn't seem any more an act of war than Mexico or other nations cooperating with illegal immigration to the US.
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You'd need 1000 boats with 1000 person capacity to move a million refugees. Among the refugees would almost certainly be terrorists and crypto-militants. Obviously no weapons would be allowed on board, despite a small chance of smuggling efforts succeeding. So you will need a sizeable police force. And can you trust all of the police to maintain control of their weapons and populace, and not support some kind of mutiny?
Food and water could probably be handled.
Who is paying for this, and in charge? Israel? The UN? Someone will have to take responsibility for the Iran destination, and that will prove quite contentious. Iran can reasonably blockade and/or refuse port. Eventually conditions onboard deteriorate. Maybe the crew abandons ship? Iran could commandeer the ships and park them at the Port Authority of NY/NJ.
It's whimsical but seems quite unrealistic to me.
Or you need 100 boats with 1000 person capacity if each one takes 10 trips. I'm shocked at your suggestion that the Palestinians are a bunch of terrorists, rather than innocent victims of Israeli oppression!
As I see it, Israel + USA.
USA and Israel can certainly provide tons of Israeli/American flag branded food/water/etc, which Iran can distribute as they see fit.
Yes, Iran certainly does have the ability to shoot guns at boats full of Palestinian refugees while the cameras broadcast videos of innocent women and children dying to the world. How is showing Iran to be bloodthirsty killers of Arabs and getting rid of Palestinians not a huge win for Israel?
Getting from the Meditterranean to the Persian Gulf is a far simpler logistical problem than Persian Gulf to America, and Iran is far less capable of logistics than Israel or the US.
And then what does the world do? Send a strongly-worded letter? Sanction them? Maybe try to stop their nuclear program?
Just like the Palestinians, this isn't really Israel's problem anymore.
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Keep sending Palestinians until there are no more Palestinians, of course.
At some point after Iran has established they're going to shoot, I think Israel loses their plausible deniability. "oh no Iran shot them AGAIN? What are the odds?" probably wouldn't come off very well.
Assuming they don't run out of boats and/or Palestinians who would prefer to be shot by Iran than by Israel first, of course.
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Multiple trips are not realistic. I'm happy to explain why, but that shouldn't be necessary.
Good luck with gaining access to Iranian ports.
Refusing port does not imply shooting guns.
The destination is rhetorical. Iran can perform the same maneuver at any port of their choosing.
Your reply here is mostly fantasy.
Please, explain.
Wow, so Europe can stop illegal immigrants from taking boats across the Mediterranean simply by refusing a port pass? Why haven't they thought of this?
This sounds like a problem for Iran and Saudi Arabia/the UAE/Oman/Pakistan (ports that are reasonably accessible to Iran) to work out amongst themselves. Pretty sure Israel can work out ways to stop a Suez crossing in the reverse direction if they need to.
I dunno about a port pass, but yes, they can. They have thought of this.
It's sometimes referred to as "turnback policy" under international maritime law, as I understand.
For this same reasoning, multiple trips to Iranian port will be denied. And when the first trip is denied, the boat remains full and unable to take on additional migrants.
Israel can of course do the same thing that African migrants to Europe are doing: ensure that by the time the Palestinians are 11.9 miles from Iran, they are in boats capable of traveling only 30 miles (i.e. not enough to cross the gulf to reach Saudi Arabia).
The Iranians can shoot them out of the sea, let them land on the beach, or even render assistance.
Kind of strange how Europe is incapable of turning back migrants, but sending migrants to Iran is of course impossible.
Europe is certainly capable of turning back migrants. They choose not to.
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Yes, Europe “can’t” stop the boats in part because it’s not the migrants’ boats landing in Europe, it’s the NGO boats that pick them up just offshore near North Africa that are landing, and those boats are in large part literally funded by European governments like those of Germany, and those boats say they have passengers in distress when they return with the migrants.
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We just gifted like $100 Billion dollars to Ukraine. I think we can probably buy a few cruise ships to facilitate this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_ship
To put it into context: if we are talking about moving 1 million Gazans, then in Ukraine equivalent spending this is about $100k per person to cover the logistics of it.
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Laughing at the idea of sending Hamas to Iran on The Disney Wish..
It typically carries 4000 passengers and 1500 crew members. Even assuming doubling up (even expensive cruises don't have a lot of cabin space), that leaves maybe 10,000 refugees per trip. Also would need to consider how much security is needed to prevent a mutiny and capture of the vessel by its passengers.
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Hilariously terrible idea. When you're relying on Iran to allow you to do things it doesn't want you to do on the basis of them being too squeamish to stop you, you know you've got a bad plan.
If you let them on to inspect for weapons, they can just shoot the crew and let the Palestinians take the boat back. If that doesn't work, they can just sink the boats. "It's terrible that the enemy forced us to kill these innocent civilians" is a time honoured rhetorical device, and it wouldn't even be wrong here.
Not to mention the passengers would be trying to kill you the whole time.
I'm not relying on this. Iran can murder all the Palestinians on camera as far as I'm concerned. It's a win for Israel and there's tons of footage of Persians murdering Arabs to broadcast to the Arab world. Arab/Persian conflict is a distraction from Arab/Jew conflict.
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Greg Abbott is seeing success with his immigration policy because the people he’s bussing more or less by definition want to go somewhere deep in the country that may or may not be in Texas but definitely isn’t the Rio grande valley. ‘You can go to New York, LA, Denver, Chicago, or DC’ is an appealing pitch to such people.
Of course those cities don’t want them and he’s only willing to stop sending them if they stop coming, which those cities then advocate for the federal government to enforce(and he got his way, at least as far as barriers are concerned).
In contrast, the Palestinians want to live in Tel Aviv, not Iran, and there is no policy concession Iran can give to Israel that makes the Palestinians go away.
I already addressed this point. The Palestinians want to get on the boat and go to Iran because there's food in Iran, and none in Gaza.
The Palestinians didn’t want to go to Iran in the first place, and unlike the masses of economic migrants showing up at the Texas border, are controlled by a militant group of psychopathic terrorists. This makes relocating them much more difficult.
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This is all so tiresome. Since we are going wild with ambitious proposals, how about we deport the Jews instead?
This would have to take place some decades in the future, when the space tech matures a little. That, or we just give the Jews longer deadlines. Everybody (by that I mean mostly the US) does their best to convince the Jews that the promised holy land is, in fact, on Mars. They are then strongly incentivized, both through threats, as well as generous funding, to use their superior IQ to settle the red planet. The place is admittedly somewhat drier, but on the other hand, a lot more spacious and with no neighbors to complain. I'm sure they'll do fine.
Benefits of my plan:
-Space development dramatically accelerated.
-Final solution to Jewish settlement problem. Jews don't bother anyone and no one is bothering the Jews.
-The Palestinians can have their cursed patch of desert all to themselves.
This is excellent. Maybe Elon can send them some rockets.
We’ve had enough rockets, but thanks for the offer.
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Chapelle already covered Space Jews.
On an unrelated note, how the hell can I get through these YouTube "you must watch ads" pop-ups?? I am on safari with adguard
Why don't you just hit the mute button and watch the ads? I don't understand why people complain so much about watching a few short seconds of advertisements in exchange for dozens of minutes of FREE video.
It's my understanding that, if you don't skip until the 30-second mark, then the ad counts as having been "watched", so the uploader still gets paid. There's at least one Chrome extension that you can set up to automatically skip ads after the 30-second mark. I don't know whether Safari has anything similar.
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I think the Brave browser is on iOS and it has built in ad blocking.
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Mel Brooks before him:
“We’re Jews up in space.
We’re zooming along
protecting the Hebrew race
We're Jews out in space
If trouble appears
we put it right back in its place
When goyim attack us
We give 'em a smack
we'll slap them right back in the face
We’re Jews up in space.
We’re zooming along
protecting the Hebrew race"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sz7JGCj4Q5k
That was beautiful, wow.
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Usually the "and then a miracle happens" step is in the middle of a proposal, not at the very beginning.
I already mentioned the most extreme method needed to do this:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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