naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed 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.
How much should I read into the fact that nations which have condemned Israel’s treatment of Gaza have not offered to accept any Palestinian refugees?
It strikes me as deeply cynical that the nation with the most obligation to do well by them is the one that a huge swath of the Islamic world considers the great evil.
How much of current homicidal anti-Semitic sentiment across the Islamic world is because Jews settled Palestine? I can understand if they think Israel has to atone for this, but I suspect Palestine is simply a wedge issue that the Islamic world considers useful ammunition against Jews.
How much should I read into the fact that nations which have condemned Israel’s treatment of Gaza have not offered to accept any Palestinian refugees?
There's the obvious self-interested explanations. But it's also worth remembering that they did take in refugees before and the seeming result is that they'll never go back.
This is not just a civil war or natural disaster. It's an ethnic struggle for land.
There's a real fear that taking them as refugees not only saddles you with a poor population infiltrated with troublesome radicals, but that it creates an incentive for certain people to seek a more permanent solution to the Palestinian issue.
I frequently see people in the West calling for Hamas to release the hostages or complaining that other people aren't calling on Hamas to release the hostages.
I don't see the point behind this. Hamas doesn't care what people in the west are calling for. Secondly, it's hard to imagine what Israel can be expected to give them in exchange for the hostages considering that Hamas already killed 1400, and they can't give those lives back. Furthermore, if Israel does make a ceasefire in exchange for the hostages, it rewards Hamas for taking hostages in the first place, which is not something anyone wants.
Ironically, I think that if people in the west are calling on Israel to make a ceasefire, but not on Hamas to release the hostages, it's a sign that they're more aligned with Israel than with Hamas because they seem to feel like they have agency over Israel's actions. Meanwhile, they feel no agency over Hamas's actions, which is why they don't call on Hamas to do anything. To them, Hamas might as well be an animal that you can't expect it to not attack because attacking is in it's nature.
Hamas doesn't care what people in the west are calling for.
Actually they do. I suppose they don’t particularly care what the student Union of OMG-Who-The-Hell-Cares State University is calling for, but they definitely care that The White House pressured Israel into allowing humanitarian aid shipments from Egypt.
You are right that calling for Hamas to release the hostages is more of a rhetorical strategy than a realizable demand. What it does is remind everyone that the continued existence of the Hamas government of the Gaza Strip is a massive net negative on the rest of the world, that they won’t even release innocent civilian hostages captured in a terrorist attack without major concessions, that their refusal to comply with the most basic standards of decency places them in the Hobbesian state of nature, where the clear best course of action is to let them die of cholera in their own filth without access to outside food, water, electricity, or fuel.
they won’t even release innocent civilian hostages captured in a terrorist attack without major concessions,
Sorry, but this is misinformation. Hamas did actually release two hostages without major concessions (at least publicly, maybe the IDF struck a deal behind the scenes).
Yes, it is a counter to the claim that they won't release innocent civilian hostages without major concessions, because they observably did. It does nothing to address the claim that they never took hostages and are innocent of such an act, but nobody claimed that so it doesn't have to.
Yes, they didn't release the main bulk of their hostages without getting concessions - i.e. the same approach that Israel takes. You can't really condemn them for that without also condemning Israel, which is why the fact that they actually released two hostages without any concessions is notable and worth mentioning.
They were paid in propaganda and media coverage obviously. And got someone to be on tv begging for the release of I believe her husband whose still captivity.
right. may as well ask why people are putting up posters of the hostages in america/england/other not-gaza places, or why other people are tearing them down.
More on the hospital blast. NYTimes Visual Investigations is now issuing a debunk on the supposed “lynchpin evidence” in the American and Israeli intelligence finding. A thread from NYT’s Aric Toler (previously Bellingcat) —
Israeli and U.S. intelligence officials believe that a projectile captured on videos shortly before the Ahli Arab Hospital explosion was a Palestinian rocket. nytimes Visual Investigations found that this object was launched from Israel, and likely unrelated to the deadly blast.
An IDF spokesperson went on CNN and the BBC with a printed-out screenshot from an Al Jazeera livestream showing this projectile, claiming it was the rocket that hit the hospital. We also believe that American officials are incorrectly assessing this to be a Palestinian rocket
this projectile launch from the north, south, east and west. By drawing lines of perspective, three of which can be seen here, we assessed that this project was launched from near the Israeli city of Nahal Oz.
Three days before the blast, a 155mm illumination shell, commonly used by the Israeli military and not in use by Palestinian militias, was fired into the Al-Ahli Hospital. Hospital administrators said that they had received warnings from the IDF telling them to evacuate.
Our analysis does not answer what actually did cause the blast or who was responsible, but it does undercut one of the most-publicized pieces of evidence used by both American and Israeli officials.
I hope we will eventually find out what caused the blast. This NYTimes article might wind up confirming my bias that we shouldn’t trust the immediate Israeli/American intel.* Interestingly, the NYTimes conclusion is based on a relatively obscure twitter thread by some random researcher on the 19th. So a +1 for twitter, I guess.
[edit + wording change*] small update, Le Monde agrees with the NYT assessment of the projectile.
On an off-topic note, the mention of Visual Investigations brings back memories to me. I remember finding that series on the NYT's Youtube channel a couple of years ago, and later watching a bunch of parts. I thought they were generally good, and the responses on YT were also generally favorable. But whenever they released a video on subjects deeply triggering to the Blue Tribe audience, like the Capitol "insurrection" and the Rittenhouse incident, it always ended up being obviously biased, and the responses on YT were accordingly dismissive and negative in usual.
The last part I've seen was the one on the Bucha Massacre, and while it seemed convincing and high-quality overall, I found it strange that 1. they identified an airborne unit as the perpetrators even though the overall mainstream consensus had been for months that a completely different unit was responsible 2. the entire argument of the video hinged on using one piece of supposedly captured Russian army document as evidence, which seemed suspect 3. they presented drone and CCTV footage as newly available sensational evidence, even though it was obvious that all that footage have been available to the Ukrainian authorities for almost a year at that point.
The big picture here is that Hamas claimed a hospital was bombed by Israel and 500-800 people were killed. Mainstream outlets, including NYT, ran with that narrative. A hospital was not bombed and I don't think there is a credible estimate on deaths. The downstream effects of this misinformation included widespread anti-Israel demonstrations in the Middle East and cancelled meetings between Arab and Western countries. The NYT faced a lot of backlash over this and isn't exactly a disinterested party. Israel being responsible for the blast would help them save some face.
Let's say the NYT knew everything it knows now. Would "parking lot bombed, 30 people killed" have caused this much ruckus. Instead, ISRAEL BOMBS HOSPITAL is what is anchored in the minds of Middle Easterners.
There was a blast in the inner courtyard of the hospital where patients, families, children, and women were sleeping. You are free, I suppose, to not consider this “the hospital has been bombed”. But it’s just as morally significant. And, of course, on the 15th an Israeli artillery strike did hit the hospital.
It’s true that we don’t know the precise death toll. I’m hoping that the hospital workers come out with an authoritative statement on that. The Anglicans who oversee the hospital confirm hundreds of mostly women and children have died however. So perhaps 200, perhaps as high as 400? We don’t know for sure.
What makes you think "hospital workers" will be given the freedom to come up with an authoritative statement that is independent of Hamas' messaging on this? Did Hamas allow 3rd party investigators in to survey the blast, collect shrapnel fragments, etc? If this were an Israeli strike, isn't it in their interest to allow outsiders to investigate the site?
What I would like to know (and currently do not) is whether there were British Anglicans who visited and/or worked at the hospital at the time of the blast. The Anglicans have put out official statements per above, and they most likely have consulted with the hospital workers they employ. But if there are British Anglicans who can testify “yes I saw *x bodies” that’s the best evidence we will get IMHO. For the record, I don’t think anyone should trust either Hamas or Israel/US assessments on casualties given the obvious conflict of interest. The question of whether we can trust the Palestinians who work in the hospital as doctors is a separate but interesting question, too.
A hospital was not bombed and I don't think there is a credible estimate on deaths.
Come on, if a parking garage at a hospital was bombed, especially if there was a congregation of people seeking treatment or refuge, it would be considered a hospital bombing. It was part of the facility.
I think the point is “Israel bombs hospital, 500 dead” and “hospital
parking lot fire causes 30 wounded” differ both in scale, blame, and incendiariness
This is the point. There is no way this becomes a major international story that dominates discourse if we knew what we know today about the location and size of the blast. But the misinformation got out and we're dealing with the fallout.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
sickamore 6mo ago
If it were 30 wounded and 0 dead then yeah that would be significant.
But my point is that there's a difference between the immediate reaction of the Press reporting breaking news out of Gaza, when they have no opportunity to have reporters on the ground, and the reports from the supposedly "independent investigations" which all concluded the same incorrect thing all based on the same error in interpretation of the same piece of evidence. I maintain it's more significant that the Press was systematically all wrong in the same direction in their "independent investigations" than it is that they reported the Hamas-claimed death toll with varying degrees of qualification.
This NYTimes article proves once again that we should not trust Israel’s assessments or American intelligence assessments on Israel.
This language falls on the wrong side of the "consensus building" line. Speculative analysis by an American news organization (or Twitter randos, or known terrorist sympathizers, or...) may or may not be more reliable than official reports from American or Israeli governments; you and others are free to make the argument either way. But this NYT article does not appear to prove anything, must less prove anything that has already been proven (i.e. "once again"). While you do not actually write the words "everyone knows," you do not present the matter as open to discussion, instead treating certain matters as clearly settled. Your engagement on the topic (which is rapidly approaching "single issue poster" status) does not communicate any willingness to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong. Rather, your rhetoric here looks like an attempt to build a consensus about what "we" should think on a question that is open (and may, given the circumstances, forever remain open). That is a way of waging the culture wars instead of discussing them, and is against the rules here.
Fair point, it is my assertion or opinion that America / Israel routinely lie about intelligence regarding strikes, misfires, etc. Next time I’ll link to scholars who agree with my assertion and preface it as such.
single issue poster
Hmm, would you say someone who exclusively posts about D Day in a WWII thread to be “single issue”? Or the bombing of Nagasaki in a WWII thread? The hospital strike is the second most important event in the whole conflict, the first being the actual Hamas invasion. It was front page news for about four days and a major point of discussion. It’s entirely possible that this is the wrong forum to be discussing one of the two most important topics of the conflict, but that wouldn’t be because it’s not worthy of discussion. It would probably be for less rigid and more human reasons.
I can’t help but remember what you replied to me in my last post on this issue:
This strikes me as complete FUD. Every claim I've seen suggesting this was anything other than Hamas weaponry (whether as a false flag or just incompetence, who knows) appears primarily based on "but I want it to have been Israel, so let's imagine the possibilities, shall we?"
This was accusing me, or at least my information, as intentionally false. Then you aimed to build consensus with a “claims suggesting anything other than Hamas are primarily based around fantasy”. You didn’t provide any source, of course. But some of that information I posted has been reinforced by a major NYTimes piece.
Hmm, would you say someone who exclusively posts about D Day in a WWII thread to be “single issue”?
At some point, sure. Depending on how often they posted about it, whether their posts ever really added interesting information or just flogged the same dead horse repeatedly while showing no interest in entertaining the possibility that they might be mistaken, etc.
This was accusing me, or at least my information, as intentionally false.
While it is possible that you or your sources are lying, that is neither what I said nor what I meant. I suggested that the people I see making these claims appear mostly to be wishcasting, and as far as I can tell that remains true. I don't know if you're a propagandist or just a useful tool to someone who is, but you have shown no interest I can see in discussing the hospital incident with anything approaching epistemic humility--only in spreading a particular slant on it. Either of us, or both of us, could be mistaken about what is actually happening--that's not the point. For purposes of the rules, your problem is that you're not writing in a way that is sufficiently open to that possibility.
Then you aimed to build consensus
No, you apparently don't know what "build consensus" means in this context. I never made any claims about what "we" believe (or should believe), or treated my interpretation of events as anything but my interpretation of events--hence phrases like "strikes me," "I've seen," and "appears primarily."
I definitely have a substantive view on these matters, which I expressed to you previously. But that is a separate thing from the way you have approached your rhetoric here.
It seems pretty clear it wasn't THAT rocket which caused the explosion at the hospital; that was a malfunctioning rocket that blew up in mid-air. I don't share the NYTs confidence that THAT rocket was Israeli; their analysis seems to have enough uncertainty to place it on either side of the border. Anyway, I'm sure if a Tamir had hit the hospital, Hamas would be parading the pieces through the streets by now.
Their "debunk" is nonsensical, however. They claim their analysis contradicts a US intelligence assessment that the video showed a Palestinian rocket undergoing catastrophic motor failure and then crashing onto hospital grounds. But if you follow the claim, not only is the US intelligence assessment just an anonymous source, but it fails to specify that it was these particular videos they analyzed.
Anyway, I'm sure if a Tamir had hit the hospital, Hamas would be parading the pieces through the streets by now.
This is really is the most important piece of evidence. Within minutes of the blast, this was international news. If it had been an Israeli missile, wouldn't Hamas be highly incentivized to allow Western investigators full access to the debris the next day? Have they done anything like this? If instead, they hastily scrubbed the area of any evidence, that points to them being responsible.
someone did clear the area of evidence. We can assume it’s not IDF since it’s in Gaza and ground invasion hasn’t started, who could possibly have a vested interest here….
Didn't CNN, the AP, and the WSJ, et al. all rely on this video as a "key piece of evidence" for their conclusion? And this video was cited by IDF spokesman in media interviews.
A key video in the analysis came shortly before 7 p.m. local time, when the Arabic-language news channel Al Jazeera was airing live coverage of the Gaza City skyline. As a correspondent speaks, the camera pans to zoom in on a volley of rockets being fired from the ground nearby.
Didn't CNN, the AP, and the WSJ, et al. all rely on this video as a "key piece of evidence" for their conclusion?
So one media company says one thing and others says another? So what? Some angles of the hospital explosion show two explosions; it seems likely one was this rocket and the other the hospital explosion, and they were probably unrelated (I can't rule out weird crap where a large piece of rocket and fuel managed to get as far as the hospital, but it seems unlikely). But there was a lot of ordnance in the air that night so showing me one rocket which wasn't involved doesn't move the needle much. It's like claiming a bite wasn't caused by a dog because you found one particular dog whose teeth don't match.
And this video was cited by IDF spokesman in media interviews.
As a correspondent speaks, the camera pans to zoom in on a volley of rockets being fired from the ground nearby.
This is clearly not the same launch; the rocket in the disputed video is singular, not part of a volley.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
The_Nybbler 6mo ago·Edited 6mo ago
Is there a different video you would say provides the best evidence that the explosion was due to a rocket failure? From the beginning I found that story hard to believe, but I considered the now-debunked video the best evidence for it (like all the news orgs etc). Without that, the recording released by Israel seems to be the strongest evidence... And that's not saying much.
In any case, certain people here have absolutely jumped the gun by accusing the press of being "stenographers for terrorism." The situation is murkier than that, and if anything the Press has helped Israel's narrative by appealing to a now-debunked piece of evidence to all draw "high-confidence" conclusions...
Is there a different video you would say provides the best evidence that the explosion was due to a rocket failure?
The best evidence I've seen is the damage photos. It doesn't look like a large HE explosion (not enough damage), nor a small one (too much of the wrong sort of damage, especially fire). It looks like a fuel explosion; the bright fireball at the hospital site in some videos matches that also. I don't say this definitely indicates a rocket failure, but as far as I know there aren't any purpose-built munitions the Israelis are using that would create that sort of explosion.
Is there a different video you would say provides the best evidence that the explosion was due to a rocket failure?
IIRC this launch corresponded to PIJ announcing they were using one of their new longer-range (read: bigger) rockets, so the prior spontaneous failure rate probably should be estimated to be pretty high.
As someone who is reasonably familiar with high-power rocketry and has at least read the literature on making large solid motors (which is what these are), scaling up is hard: even small imperfections in the solid grain can cause explosive failures. Fail to get all the bubbles out when casting? Your burn rate (and thus chamber pressure, which can cause explosive failures) will vary drastically. Or maybe your grain cracks and pieces clog the nozzle: now you have a bomb.
Best results require starting with precisely-sized powders, high-grade chemicals, and some industrial equipment (mixing, vacuum casting) that scales with the size of motor you're trying to make. Most of that is something Hamas is having to make or smuggle in. And even for well-prepared amateurs it doesn't always succeed the first time.
IIRC this launch corresponded to PIJ announcing they were using one of their new longer-range (read: bigger) rockets, so the prior spontaneous failure rate probably should be estimated to be pretty high.
What's the distribution of mortality among these rocket failures? This would be a massive outlier, even assuming only 50 casualties. It hit the perfect spot, at some unspecified distance from where NYT reports that Israel was striking only two minutes before. My priors are just that it was an intentional strike, and "this launch corresponded to PIJ announcing they were using one of their new longer-range (read: bigger) rockets" is just weak evidence of a rocket failing in such a way and happening to strike that spot. It's another assumption of a new type of rocket other than the thousands others that have been launched from Hamas. So my priors are moving in the opposite direction if these are the sort of assumptions that need to be layered on to make the Israeli side of the story plausible.
Without the video which did show some sort of rocket failing at about the same time (and turned out to be an Israeli rocket !!), I don't know what evidence there actually is that this extremely unusual thing actually happened. Like I said, this video formulated previously what I thought was the strongest evidence for the Israeli side (but it didn't convince me then), so it's significant it's debunked.
The press (including the most 'reputable' outlets like the BBC) spent the first day after the hospital explosion credulously repeating "Israeli strike on hospital kills 550" (or even 800 in some cases).
It is now clear that even if Israel caused the explosion, which seems very much a debatable matter still, it didn't kill anywhere near the 500-800 people that Hamas' health ministry claimed.
There is no way this event would have been front page news, knowing what we know now. "Parking Lot bombed, 30 killed" doesn't have the same ring as "Hospital bombed, 500 killed".
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
2rafa 6mo ago
I do wonder if these initial reports spooked the IDF into instituting a flat denial of what would have been an intentional strike that was less extraordinary than initially reported.
In any case, the press initially reported excessive death tolls (how excessive is TBD) but then in the subsequent days and weeks their narrative shifted to relying on a bad piece of evidence to draw conclusions with high confidence. The initial press reaction to the news that was coming out of Gaza (where reporters are not allowed) is less telling than the narrative the congealed in the days and weeks after, a narrative that appears to have been based on bad evidence that they all got wrong.
The Guardian would clearly prefer for Israel to stop further military interventions.
I am used to the Guardian being somewhat partisan, but still surprised by this level of one-sidedness.
The alternative to an invasion of Gaza is the status quo. Hamas stays in power while Israel forbids the import of anything which could be used to craft weapons, thus severely limiting the quality of life inside the strip. Hamas continues to fire rockets, Israel continues to respond with airstrikes.
I think an occupation of Gaza (while obviously the thing Hamas wants Israel to attempt) might be preferable in the long run for the surviving Gazans. Gaza is not Afghanistan, size-wise. Instead of having an open air prison run by the most homicidal inmates, turn it into an panopticon. For those who would rather die than live under occupation, grant them their wish when they try anything. Be culturally sensitive by limiting the freedom of speech to levels customary in Iran or Saudi Arabia: imprison anyone who advocates violence against Israel. Don't let people starve, don't kill civilians when you can avoid it. Invest. If, a generation down the road, a huge majority is in favor of peaceful relations with Israel, give them self-determination.
It is less clear how such an occupation might benefit the Interests of Israel (or any other state), though. Winning the war against Hamas will take a huge toll both in IDF lives and bad PR (pictures of dead kids), and the occupation will likely be a drain on resources for decades. And then there is a decent chance that the moment you retreat, Hamas is back in power. The alternative of just continuing low intensity air strikes indefinitely (even the Guardian can hardly run stories about innocent airstrike victims for years) and otherwise fortify your border.
The Grauniad's readers are considerably more psychotic than their staff:
But what if Israel had not met horror with horror? What if, with restraint and dignity, it had mourned its dead, leaving the depravity and hatred of the Hamas project for the world to behold? What if the international community had learned the lesson of Iraq, and insisted that Israelis and Palestinians find ways to live side by side, or even, as they surely eventually must, together?
It's really not possible to talk to someone who thinks you could shame the Arab street into compliance by turning the other cheek and ignoring a major terrorist attack.
Echoing @HalloweenSnarry, this isn't so much psychosis as it is a mix of naivete, delusion, wishcasting, and some typical-minding. I had a conversation earlier this week with someone who basically holds this kind of turn-the-other-cheek view about both the Hamas attacks and the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on the US. To him, quiet national stoicism and a call for peace would have had such a psychologically-resonant impact that terrorists would see the error of their ways, realize that Jews and Christians aren't the evil monsters the terrorists envision them to be, and just lay down their weapons. Maybe a round of Kumbaya while we're at it.
And honestly, I think it might work for some small margin of people, but to think Hamas is going be emotionally overcome by that kind of sentiment is foolhardy at best.
It would, nevertheless, probably have been in Israel's long-term best interests to have "[left] the depravity and hatred of the Hamas project for the world to behold." Of course, it would not have been in the short-term interests of the current Israeli administration to do so, so it was not going to happen.
Nor is the only choice either 1) ignoring the attack or 2) responding in a manner which will inevitably kill large numbers of civilians. See, eg, Israel's response to the Munich Olympics attack.
Please show me where I said that Israel should not respond. As I explicitly said, there are options other than not responding and responding in a manner which will inevitably kill large numbers of civilians.
I already mentioned the response to the Munich Olympics incident.
More importantly, what do you think would have happened, that it would be in some way advantageous to Israel?
Well, for one thing, this would have been more likely to come to fruition. As would various other arrangements between Israel and local governments which are not particularly enamored of Iran and its proxies. There are a lot of potential advantages to not giving your enemies credible grounds for accusing you of war crimes.
You expect Israelis to conduct covert assassinations of thousands of Hamasniks inside the Gaza strip, by foot? That’s not very realistic. Unless you meant assassinating Hamas leaders in Qatar, which I’m all for. It doesn’t solve the issue, though, so I don’t see the point.
How does a deal with Saudi help with removing Hamas monsters from Gaza? Or at all, in this context? This is just unrelated.
It doesn’t solve the issue, though, so I don’t see the point.
There is not going to be a perfect solution. The point is simply that there are choices other than the imperfect solution of doing nothing and the imperfect solution of using force in a manner that is guaranteed to kill large numbers of civilians. But making leaders pay for their decisions will certainly encourage the next leaders to make different decisions in the future.
How does a deal with Saudi help with removing Hamas monsters from Gaza?
I didn't say it did. You asked what would happen that "would be in some way advantageous to Israel."
Of course, it would not have been in the short-term interests of the current Israeli administration to do so, so it was not going to happen.
I agree that this over-determined the Israeli response. "Hamas breaks out of Gaza and attacks Israeli citizens" is not exactly the type of black swan event as "Jihadists crash planes into the WTC". So Hamas did not only commit their atrocities, but they also showed up the Israeli administration (which has security as a big part of their platform, I think) and their intelligence services and military which failed to stop them.
Under these circumstances, the people involved in deciding whether to invade are unlikely to decide that it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so.
the people involved in deciding whether to invade are unlikely to decide that it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so.
I think it is rather that they might take actions despite believing that it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so. Or, more likely, without making a sufficient effort to determine whether it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so.
That seems incredibly naïve to me. If you're surrounded by people who would gladly see you dead, it would be a fatal mistake to broadcast to them that they can kill you without fear of retribution.
Israel's response to the Munich Olympics attack involved very different circumstances, since they were assassinating PLO members living in Lebanon and various parts of Europe. They obviously couldn't kill large numbers of civilians in sovereign states they weren't at war with. There are some Hamas leaders living in Turkey and Qatar, but the rank-and-file of Hamas live in Gaza, among the civilian population.
If you're surrounded by people who would gladly see you dead, it would be a fatal mistake to broadcast to them that they can kill you without fear of retribution.
It's interesting you don't seem to even think to apply this same mode of thought to Palestinians.
Also I strongly doubt the reason the Gaza attack happened was because Hamas was mistaken in believing they could GTA it and dodge any sort of counter attack. If one is to believe the conspiracy theory that this is related to closening Israeli-Saudi relations one might think they were even counting on it.
Who said anything about no retribution? As I explicitly said, there is a third choice, other than 1) No retribution; and 2) retribution which inevitability kills large numbers of civilians. Which was the purpose of mentioning the response to the Munich Olympics, which was obvious a case of retribution.
Ok, so what is the third choice here? There's nothing explicit about gesturing to "a better way" without spelling out exactly what that way is. That's just smugness masquerading as nuance. Is Israel supposed to follow the Munich strategy in a dense urban area filled with hostile civilians?
The Munich strategy was to send covert assassination teams, so why not? And, there is nothing to prevent Israel from pursuing non-military options, especially with backing from the US, EU, and local enemies of Iran. The leaders of Qatar might find it to be in their interests to arrest Hamas's leader, for example.
And, you are completely ignoring the key issue, which is that a different response might well be in the long-term best interests of Israel. It would certainly make Saudi recognition more likely, that's for sure.
The Guardian view on the power of forgiveness: a freed hostage’s gesture should not be forgotten
Just violently take hostages (where some die) and then you can have a gesture that shouldn't be forgotten. The only thing that can't be forgotten is that they are radical Islamists and will Jihad if given the opportunity. You can't reason with them or negotiate. Leftists are incapable of understanding radical Islam.
Has there been any discussion within Israel or within the broader Jewish diaspora about a change in approach to gun rights?
I can't be the only one who realizes that if the Israelis were armed in the same way that The Americans are, that 10/7 would have looked a lot different. Not the music festival, obviously, but the houses/villages for sure. But actually: maybe the music festival too[1]. Just looking out the window and considering the guns that I know for a fact that my neighbors have (I live in the downtown area of a major, liberal American city), there is absolutely 0 chance that Hamas would be going door to door executing anybody in my neighborhood.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns. To the people who aren't aware: gun nerds have kindof moved past just being into guns at this point. Yeah they own AR-15s, but the are also really into training, physical fitness, radio skills, orienteering, and own some pretty fucking advanced sensing equipment. 15 years ago it was cool to have an Ar15, now dudes are (almost commonly) out here with full on panoramic thermal/nightvision, body armor, etc. It's insane.
[1]: Even the yogi far left borderline authleft people I go to music festivals with own guns. Americans really own a fucking shit load of guns.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns.
I recently got into deer hunting. Game meat is really healthy, you know? Also it's more humane, I think? Anyway, It started with buying a bolt action rifle with a scope, my first firearm ever. Now that I have one, I need to go to the range to practice. This means I need glasses and also ear protection. Best to get the ear muffs that have loud noise cancellation so you can hear conversation. Oh, and there’s an aux input in case I hunt with other hunters and need a radio. Pretty cool. It even comes with two tone American flag velcro patch. Call of Duty vibe intensifies.
Obviously need a full assortment of camo to go with it. No no hunting camo, not like digital pattern camo don't be silly. Well, the military digital camo is cheaper actually, may as well.
Hey hunting deer is actually really challenging and the season is halfway over. Maybe I should branch out into wild turkey hunting. Oh, I need a shotgun for that? Well, why not. Should probably get slugs and buckshot, just for versatility.
While on some hunts I realized I was the only one without a sidearm. What’s the sidearm for? In case bears and cougars attack! Well shit, now I need to go shop for one of those. What will have enough stopping power? Let me head to the indoor range and rent a few and try them out. Hmm, yeah. I think the Glock 40 10mm should do, let me buy that.
Hey, since I have a handgun now, I may as well take a few extra steps to get it ready for home defense: add a silencer and light so I don't go blind and deaf shooting it indoors at night at an intruder.
Good good. Actually, why don’t I get a concealed carry license? May as well carry it with me just in case. It'd be super annoying to get mugged on the street when I have a perfectly good handgun at home. Probably I should take some classes on proper self defense though. Maybe also drill some tactics in case I end up in an active shooter situation. Again, it'd be pretty annoying to have a handgun with a concealed carry license but not know how to handle an active shooter...
Panoramic thermal/nightvision sounds like it'd be really handy for hunting, now that you mention it. Orienteering is probably a good skill to develop just in case I go too far off trails chasing wounded game...
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.
Meal Team 6 is kinda wasting their time practicing with guns though. If you want to be ready for the war with the federal government you gotta be going all-in drone warfare.
There are a lot of up front costs with responsible gun ownership. Gun safe, range membership, knowledge of local firearms laws.
So the marginal cost of additional guns is relatively low. Plus if you're putting in range time then guns are officially one of your hobbies. Might as well get more guns.
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids
Cheapest semi-automatic rifle firing the cheapest rifle cartridge (and only coincidentally, the best rifle ever made). Full-power rifles suck to actually shoot more than a few times be it on or off a bench, but you can shoot this literally all day.
Provided the deer in your area are small enough this can be an excellent (first) rifle for dealing with them.
Digital form 4s are currently sitting at 201 days estimated processing time for individuals, 236 days for trusts. Between the wait times, the fingerprinting, name and address on a federal registration and just the extra 200 dollars, getting into NFA items is something most people still pass on. eForms (that notionally promised faster processing times but 12% faster on a 270 day isn't much to brag about) silencershop kiosks/form filling software/trust services are changing that a bit but culturally still rare. There also used to be a lot of misinformation and mystery about the process.
That said once you get one stamp, most of the mental and bureaucratic hurdles are cleared and stamp collecting becomes much more likely. After waiting the better part of a year for a can, one to two months to "manufacture" an SBR you can more easily maneuver through a hallway without potential legal implications seems comparatively easy. (And practically speaking actual stocks are more comfortable and ergonomic than braces.)
Yes, it has. I’m a member of a few groups that advocate for gun rights in Israel - membership has gone up significantly.
There is an extra Israeli specific issue to consider, though: most Jewish Israelis don’t want Arab Israelis to have guns, with a few obvious exceptions like Abu Gosh residents and Druze outside the Golan heights. The way to filter out such “disloyal” populations from owning a gun is to require military service of some sort for a gun license.
In the more immediate term, license requirements have been relaxed slightly just last week - allowing a few hundred thousand more Israelis if the “right” sort to qualify, myself included.
Additionally, city watches are forming in more cities further away from the borders. These watches are normally armed with a rifle of some sort.
I’d just like to point out that Israel is currently kvetching over wether an obvious way to enhance their own protection, might be offensive to some of her citizens.
Think about the stark contrast there. Israel is making themselves objectively more unsafe because they don’t want to be mean to the Muslims. Incredible.
I’m sorry, maybe I wasn’t being clear. The point is to give guns only to Jews, because most Arabs can’t be trusted with them. It’s literally the opposite of trying to not be mean to them.
I see. But some Arabs should have guns - the ones that proved their loyalty by serving. Besides, I think there’s a difference of kind between straight-up racist legislation and offensiveness.
More like don’t trust them not to contribute to the problem, either by arming Gazans or by causing more sectarian violence on the Israel side of the barrier. If you live on the far side of Jerusalem, which feels more threatening—a once-in-a-decade paraglider raid, or all your Arab neighbors buying rifles?
I’m not saying this is the correct assessment, but it tracks with what I’d expect non-gun-owners to think about the value of increased gun rights.
No you miss my point. The obvious, rational move would be to say: Israeli Jews can own guns, but Muslims can’t. The test is literally: are you a Muslim? Then you can’t have a gun because you are a dangerous person in a suicide cult.
This is what Israel wants, but it doesn’t do this because of how mean it would be to the Muslims.
Even with the US armed to the teeth we unfortunately can’t seem to stop mass shooters. In fact the deadliest shooting in the US was one man firing into a music festival into the busiest tourist area in the country. Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
You believe this because you have been told it - CCW holders and cops stop plenty of mass shootings. The stories are buried at best.
The main point has already been made by @roystgnr . One man army mass murder events are more impactful for the US, that's for sure, but eliminating them is an intractable problem.
Well just this morning I was “told” about 22 more people killed in a mass shooting. The police and CCW holders may have stopped “plenty”, but I think the idea that US gun owners could stop a Hamas attack to be a pure fantasy.
It is funny - I heard about the shooting last night and thought "the guy I responded to on the Motte is definitely going to hold it up as proof he's right"
I think being a firearms instructor and nailing people at a bowling alley may be different than Hamas' door to door executions and roaming through residential areas.
The deadliest mass shooting in the US was the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War battle with 7000 deaths.
The deadliest mass shooting of non-soldiers in the US was the Wounded Knee Massacre, a gun confiscation gone wrong with 200 civilian deaths.
The Vegas shooting was horrifyingly awful, but it's still a factor of three below the lesser of those.
(This does suggest that Israel think carefully before letting the genie out of that bottle too; the plurality anti-mass-shooting position in the USA is probably "do a million gun confiscations, and hope they don't go wrong or start a civil war", and it's not because nobody's looking for good ideas instead)
Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
If mass murderers are motivated and competent enough it's an impossible problem to solve. A guy with dozens of powerful rifles and a hotel room full of ammo killed 61 people; a guy with a rental truck full of fertilizer and fuel killed 168. Your average one-man-army is a lesser potential terrorism threat than your average farmer, if the latter doesn't worry about getting caught.
In the US we track fertilizer sales more closely now (and farmers aren't generally the mass-murdering type), and many would-be bombers range from incompetent (the Columbine killers planted nearly a hundred bombs, which failed to work; guns were their backup plan) to anti-competent (one suspect in any bombing is the victim, because it's hilariously common for murderers and would-be murderers to blow themselves up by accident) ... but even with Gaza blockaded, Hamas manages to manufacture and employ working explosives and even mostly-working rockets readily enough. Not driving truck bombs through the breach this month was a tactical choice, not a tactical necessity.
On the other hand, even reducing a problem with a non-100%-solution is better than nothing. These hypothetical truck bombs might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by an airstrike, and likewise the non-hypothetical gunmen might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by a more-armed citizenry. A more-armed Israeli citizenry might lead to other unintended deaths, but so do Israeli airstrikes.
Not the parent but, to paraphrase, the mass shootings which the media focuses on have relatively small impact compared to state-sanctioned violence. They also have a small impact compared to the garden variety inner-city homicide which kills more than 1000 Columbines worth of people every year.
The media chooses to amplify the mass shooting events because it's great for ratings and it plays to their prejudices about red states.
Sadly, the media is literally™ killing people because the focus on these events makes them more likely to occur.
The OP thinks personal gun ownership might help defend against Hamas terror attacks. YouEssAy is skeptical because US gun ownership hasn’t defended against a different sort of attack. I lose the thread when royst says, uh, enough soldiers shooting back and forth is worse. What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
The second half of my comment was less conclusive than the first. From the right perspective, is that really such a bad thing? The right way to reason is to start with raw facts and hope you can eventually accumulate enough of them to deduce conclusions. If you don't start reasoning until you have all the implications in hand then you're doing it exactly backwards. That's supposed to be an unconscious flaw in human reasoning, not a conscious goal!
Admittedly I might not have chimed in on such a grossly hard problem with a nuanced and inconclusive answer if vague points with varying consequences were all I had to add. But someone said the deadliest mass shooting in the US was Vegas, and it wasn't, and so I gave two counterexamples, but then tried to keep at least partly on-topic afterwards.
If someone says "2 + 2 = 5, therefore you shouldn't kick puppies and you should agree with my politics", then I'm the sort of person who'll point out "2 + 2 = 4" even if I don't have much to add to the rest of the sentence.
I do find it interesting to see the responses when I do that, though. Sometimes you get "Oh, so it is; but here are some unrelated good reasons for not puppy-kicking or disagreeing with my politics". Other times you get "those just aren't sufficiently large values of 2!" or "why should I listen to what an obvious puppy-kicker has to say!"
I’ve got nothing against your choice to include musings, but I mistook them for a single argument. Hence my confusion.
I do have to object to calling military actions mass shootings, though. Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare, and some of them don’t even include robberies and terrorism. There are assumptions of asymmetry in number and preparedness.
I understand that you think this is motivated reasoning. That doesn’t justify diluting the term. Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
That doesn’t justify diluting the term.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
Well, admittedly it's only a Mass Shooting (PDO) if it comes from the Valley of Motivated Reasoning; otherwise it's merely a sparkling mass of people getting shot.
bases were overrun, neighborhood watch with former IDF were mostly overrun (some stories of successful Kibbutz defenses, mostly farther from Gaza so they had more time).
I think it would have helped if everyone there had an AR15 ready though. It seemed like those communities only had handguns, which ends up not being powerful in the face of a few dudes with rifles
The Kibbutzim that were attacked near the Gaza border typically had border posts, fencing, security that was monitored, and an armed neighborhood guard comprised of ex-IDF (soldiers rather than just conscripts) and led by a more senior former officer. Those were some of the first victims in these communities.
I really don’t think the modal heavily gun-owning Southern town would fare much better, unless they can spontaneously wake all the adult men, form into a trained town militia, and come up with and execute a strategic plan to counter a large number of trained, armed young men with maps and a plan who also didn’t wake up halfway through the attack.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
2rafa 6mo ago
unless they can spontaneously wake all the adult men, form into a trained town militia, and come up with and execute a strategic plan to counter a large number of trained, armed young men with maps and a plan who also didn’t wake up halfway through the attack
You could also train them to do this quickly and call the resulting militia something like hour-men or second-men, I am bad at naming things. I wonder if any countries have tried this in the past, perhaps the US could learn from their experience?
Ironically, this is one scenario where the local police showing up with ex-military MRAPs might actually be useful. Then again, a lot of that militarization started after the North Hollywood Shootout, where the police did find themselves under-prepared and had to borrow materiel from a local gun store.
I think you're right in that the element of surprise probably negates local armaments, but there are examples (Sutherland Springs comes to mind) of quick-thinking locals stopping spree killers. But no American town has faced more than a half-dozen armed opponents in probably the last century.
Very high-variance. There's a lot of people who are 'mall ninjas', who buy a ton of tacticool crap without much serious training or skill with any of it, for whom guns and equipment are probably better modeled as a status or investment thing. On the other hand, there's also a lot of training-as-hobby that goes to pretty high extremes, ranging from cowboy action shooting at the LARPy end, multigun in the middle, and score-based SWAT training at the other end.
There's part of the latter groups who I would rather have than police or even some military people.
What I think is that Israel can't allow American-style gun rights without either allowing Israeli Arabs to also heavily arm themselves, which would make it easier for pro-Palestinian militants to also obtain guns, or writing ethnicity-based gun laws that would make it clear that Israel is an apartheid ethnostate.
Imagine for example a law that allowed American whites to own guns, but not American blacks. I know that here at TheMotte probably a good number of people would support such a law, but out in the wider world of the West this is something that has been completely outside of the Overton window for probably like 60 years now.
but out in the wider world of the West this is something that has been completely outside of the Overton window for probably like 60 years now.
Israel is an apartheid ethnostate and they don't even bother trying to hide it. They don't give a shit about the Overton window, and this policy would be less objectionable than the "dna testing for citizenship" they already practice.
Serving in a country's armed forces is about as far as one can go towards making oneself the direct tool of the country's government, so a law that restricts gun ownership to people who have served in the armed forces is very close to a law that makes it so that the only people who can own guns are either people who support the government or people who are willing to at least hold their noses and pretend to support it.
If the idea of such a law was raised in the US, I imagine that the right would be outraged despite its general love of the military. For example, such a law would essentially mean that if you were born at some point after 2004 or so, you would only be able to own guns if you had been vaccinated against COVID.
The US is not Israel. It's appropriate, I think, for a nation like Israel that is credibly threatened by their neighbours, to demand a higher standard of cooperation and assurances of loyalty from their citizens. I think if the US was at war, or engaged in conflict with a neighbour, it would be appropriate to control the ownership of firearms, including taking them away from anyone that can't demonstrate their loyalty. In times of peace, of course, such restrictions should be abandoned.
If there was a credible threat of US citizens rising up against government tyranny, which pro-gun-rights people seem to believe to be a central motivation for gun rights, I'm sure the US government could come up with some external threat that justifies requiring demonstrations of loyalty from gun owners. (Russia would probably do by twisting the knob on the election interference narrative just a little bit.) This is usually found somewhere on the first page of those "dictatorship playbook" writeups.
This isn't my experience with ex military in the US at least. It seems to be an even split between licking boots more fervently or realizing that any entity who has figured out how to pay $100 for a steel bolt used in helicopters is beyond saving or supporting.
Here’s my take. Compliant with my own “50 year rule” that holds that any political injustice or status quo that’s persisted for more than 50ish years should be accepted automatically and we simply move on (since by that point most people originally involved are either dead or too old to matter, plus “sins of the father” rhetoric), I think a two state solution is just permanently dead.
What Palestinians, broadly speaking, need most is a return to open elections (new leadership - the PA has been useless for years and doesn’t actually seem to care about getting an actual solution) coupled with a sustained series of publicized Kumbiya moments of forgiveness and unity. Ideally with a charismatic leader on one or both sides. Then a sustained push for equal rights. Possibly combined with some mild economic and land reform/incentives. This will probably work fine for the West Bank and Gaza will probably remain slum-like, without a great near term solution. Focus on the equal treatment bits and learning to live as a multicultural society. I’m not saying Israeli government is like Apartheid, and we shouldn’t treat it the same, but if we are honest it certainly shares some attributes and Israeli doesn’t yet treat all Arabs the same.
I think this approach is completely plausible. It just will take work and a willingness from Palestinians and Israelis alike. For those who think a lifetime of war and conflict and oppression is inevitable, as well as those trapped in the recent news, I think it’s helpful to continue to consider what a medium term resolution can or could be like.
I believe Jim Crow segregation persisted for at least 50 years, depending on exactly how you define things. So you could almost certainly pick a number of years where this rule would define that as something we should just accept and move on from.
I suspect you didn't mean that, but then we have a much tricker problem about defining what constitutes ongoing oppressions versus historical grievances for the purpose of such a rule.
Weiss, who worked at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times before launching her own media outlet, revealed Sunday on X that she had discovered the message “F*** Jews” scrawled on the wall outside of her office.
“This was scrawled outside of our offices this week,” she said. “If the antisemites who did this think it will intimidate me and the journalists of @TheFP, they don’t know me, they don’t know us, and they have no idea what we stand for.”
I am used to these being hoxes, but this looks legit. At least they spelled 'Israel' correct. Looking at the floor, it appears it was scribbled from inside a building:
Id suggest it’s fake because white leftists probably wouldn’t say “fuck Jews”, while both rightists and Muslims have ‘more important’ targets than Bari Weiss, and the only faction ‘critical’ of this IDW stuff is the left.
while both rightists and Muslims have ‘more important’ targets than Bari Weiss
Having seen videos of people tearing down posters and harassing cars that try to get through their protests I think a lot of people just want to let loose and sow a little chaos and slake some bloodlust and they've been given an excuse.
These people aren't serious revolutionaries anymore than Meatball is, no matter the rhetoric. What do they give a shit if there're more important targets? By definition, those take more work!
The role of female soldiers in the IDF has always been somewhere between fascinating and horrifying to me. The below post by @CrashedPsychonaut mentions that the capture of an IDF garrison near the border fence involved a number of hapless young female soldiers, isolated at their posts and overrun. I imagine that some of these women were shot and killed, and I presume that others surrendered and were rounded up as hostages; the subsequent fate of these women is very distressing to imagine.
Some quick Googling indicates that approximately 40% of the IDF’s conscript soldiers were female as of 2021, comprising 25% of officers and 18% of combat soldiers. The latter two numbers, and especially the last one, are shockingly high to me. I had been under the impression that the IDF’s female conscripts were overwhelmingly shunted away into positions where a whole lot of things would need to go very unexpectedly wrong before there was any significant chance of them facing real combat. And, to be fair, it seems like in the case of that garrison, a whole lot of things did go very unexpectedly wrong. Still, it’s insane to me that a country with such overwhelmingly security concerns and so many threats surrounding it would put literally any important responsibility in the hands of female soldiers.
I’ve always been under the vague impression that the IDF’s inclusion of so many female soldiers was mostly a PR ploy; filling their ranks with photogenic young women makes people more likely to feel positively-inclined and prescribe towards it. It also allows them to circulate photos of busty women in camo wielding large guns, an archetype which seems to have significant (and, to me, inexplicable) appeal to a certain segment of the American mainstream right. The thought that these smiling young women could actually be sent to the front lines to do hand-to-hand urban combat against battle-hardened men is both inconceivable and appalling to me. I would expect most of them to surrender almost immediately if confronted with life-threatening combat situations. The impact on IDF morale of having a substantial number of its female soldiers captured or killed seems like it would be catastrophic, to say nothing of its practical strategic effects.
Can anyone offer more insight into the role of women in the IDF, and specifically their role in actual combat operations? Both historically and in terms of what we can expect to see in whatever upcoming operations are going to take place as a result of the current crisis?
The IDF uses female soldiers to great effect as trainers and instructors. From what I understand, male soldiers have been shown to be much more attentive and learn better when the instructor is an attractive female. This is what Gal Gadot did in her military service.
Most of the female soldiers in bases that were overrun during the initial attack were "lookouts" (tatspitaniot). Their job is to monitor the surveillance technology that tracks the Gaza border and alert about anything that seems suspicious. I don't think there's any reason to think that they would be at a disadvantage in a job like that compared to a male soldier, and it frees up the male soldier for a combat role which requires his physical abilities.
There are some border patrol units that are now mixed gender, but the traditional infantry and armor units are still male only. There was a famous Supreme Court case a few decades ago that required the IDF to allow women to enter the pilots course, but as I understand it only a handful of women have passed since then.
I’m not going to call modern combat the same thing as hunting, but a surprisingly large number of women post their big game hunting pics on Facebook groups. Yesterday one posted a picture of a cougar, and she had its dead bloody carcass slung over both shoulders. Another posted a pic of a deer she shot at 400 yards.
Women seem like they can be trained to kill with guns just fine. Are they as good as men? Perhaps not. But are they worse than not having them at all? Definitely not.
The funny thing's that if you really want to go nuts HBD-wise, there's a reasonable argument women have an advantage for some shooting sports and styles, famously including a couple Olympic-level matters.
Whether that extrapolates to combat is a separate matter -- not just for aggression reasons, but because combined small-arms armor and ammo is a lot of weight, which has to be fairly high on the body -- and there are some obvious issues with additional war crimes risks, but it's a funny aspect.
Squad of female IDF combat troops eliminated nearly 100 Hamas terrorists
Lt.-Col. Or Ben Yehuda, Caracal Battalion, praises her troops' bravery against Hamas, silencing doubts about female combat soldiers with their training, heroism, and life-saving actions.
Of course because of the fog of war the article is propaganda and scant with information about casualties.
There are two groups of analysis here; individual performance and unit culture.
On individual performance, female combat soldiers, at the median, are far, far worse than their male counterparts. This is to the surprise of no one. In the general population, bone density, upper body strength, and grip strength don't overlap more than 1- 2 % (meaning the bottom 1-2% of males with the top 1-2% of females). Even if a female is very motivated and hits the gym, the amount of room she has to make up is nigh on impossible.
Where this gets compounded is over time and with compounding adversity. What I mean here is that a Superwoman might be able to pass things the a PFT (physical fitness test), marksmanship test, and things like obstacle courses and land nav over a single day on a U.S. base. In the field (and field exercises) however, the compounding of sleep deprivation and multiple days of moving combat loads and speed catches up. I couldn't find the article with quick Googling (I might later), but there was a report in the 2018 range of female US Marines admitting "we can hump the weight of a combat load for a long time, but we just can't move as fast from objective to objective." There's a saying in the SOF community that "selection is everyday." Just because you passed the test that first time and became an infantryman / ranger / SEAL / etc. doesn't mean that you're automatically a super solider for life. You have to work everyday and you have to perform everyday. In Ranger Battalion in the U.S. Army, there's something called RFS or Released For Standards. This means that you get kicked out for not being good enough in one way or another. Often times its leadership related (to keep guys from just making rank by hanging out forever) but it also isn't uncommon for a Ranger to all of a sudden fuck up a PFT because they had been slacking off and drinking every weekend. Back to Superwoman - she might be able to get through an indoc and selection, but I would put the odds of her maintaining those standards in a unit over time to be effectively zero.
Unit culture is the next layer. Every person in a unit is a mix of talents. One guy is a really great shot, and kind of OK at PT. Another guy is a PT stud, but isn't so great at land nav. The unit commander (say at the platoon level) is above average at PT and shooting, but isn't an all around badass, but he does get a bunch of gucci gear because he knows how to do acquisition voodoo. A female (especially enlisted) will, probably, be at the bottom of all of these categories. Her treatment will be no different than a male who is at the bottom of all of those categories; "you're last on the run, you can't shoot straight, you fell asleep on patrol, you can't carry the 240B with a full complement of ammo." It singles you out for extra ridicule and scrutiny. Sure, you're passing all of the minimums and standards, but you aren't great or even good at any one thing. It means the unit has to plan contingency around you always instead of slotting you into things you're good at to compensate for the things you're worse at.
I'll leave it there for now because I think those are the two main and enduring cases against women in combat. There are some edge things that also raise questions; what happens when (and it will happen) a female gets pregnant in combat? Will females potentially use sex to curry favor from peers and superiors (of course not, it's a professional force! that would never happen.
As far as Israeli female combat soldiers go; First, the definition of "combat" is a little stretched. Border guards are one thing (as are pilots), but a maneuver unit (infantry, armor, artillery) is another. Second, the Israeli model is still built heavily on conscripts and reservists supporting the active duty while not being anywhere near the latter's standards. I think the unfortunately reality is that many female Israeli "combat" soldiers didn't quite get into combat by choice.
As far as Israeli female combat soldiers go; First, the definition of "combat" is a little stretched. Border guards are one thing (as are pilots), but a maneuver unit (infantry, armor, artillery) is another. Second, the Israeli model is still built heavily on conscripts and reservists supporting the active duty while not being anywhere near the latter's standards. I think the unfortunately reality is that many female Israeli "combat" soldiers didn't quite get into combat by choice.
Yeah this part I think is relevant. The two most well-known (read: PR profiles of them) high percentage female infantry units are the 33rd Caracal and the 41st Lions of Jordan battalions stationed in relatively (and relative here being very operative) safe border areas. The area the 33rd are supposed to have been was overrun by Hamas during the 10/7 assault so not that safe.
How much less effective do you expect a woman to be in an average MOS?
I would expect the most difference in extreme positions (special forces) and those requiring the most brute strength. Kicking down doors and lugging heavy weapons, for example. But my intuition is that aiming and shooting a rifle—or manning a checkpoint—is roughly as easy for women as men. Per @naraburns’ link, the IDF seems to agree, and is disinclined to put women in the 10% most strenuous positions. Though it also says most armored units are male-only, and I can’t tell why that would be more physically demanding.
I’m not even sure if the IDF cav is volunteer/professional or if conscripts can be assigned to it. If the latter, then culture isn’t necessarily the deciding factor.
The original article statement was that 90% of jobs were “equally available” to men and women. Exceptions included urban commando units and some armored crews. Sounds like they wouldn’t even take volunteers, not that there weren’t enough of them.
Though it also says most armored units are male-only, and I can’t tell why that would be more physically demanding.
120mm cannon shells weigh something like 50 pounds, and the loader needs to sling them fast in a combat situation. .50 browning ammo is likewise bulky and heavy. Gas cans and hoses are heavy. Maintenance tools for tanks, equipment for tanks generally and the tasks involved, especially in the field, all are likely to involve a fair amount of strenuous activity. Think of the physical stereotypes for truckers and mechanics, or other jobs involving heavy machinery.
It is not only loading. On average Abrams tank requires 8 manhours of maintenance for 1 hour of operation. That is one of the reasons why Abrams is so big with crew of 4 instead of 3 and autoloader for Russian tanks: the fourth crew member is indispensable when it comes to making sure the tank is operational, as crew of four working on a tank will decrease the ratio of 8:1 to 2:1 with some redundancy there.
Even with a fully automated military making warfare something closer to Call of Duty, there's no reason to expect a meritocratic force to be anywhere close to parity. How many top Call of Duty players are female?
why you think so? have you checked how it worked so far?
That’s why I’m asking people who are more knowledgeable about specific history to weigh in. I’m not pretending to have any significant background knowledge on the topic. I have my intuitions based on my observations of human behavior, but I would like to have those intuitions confirmed or disconfirmed by actual examples or research. I wouldn’t really know where to start in terms of finding out how effective female soldiers have been throughout the history of the IDF, and I don’t think I would be able to trust the information I would find using my rudimentary searching skills.
From the Israeli point of view, there never was a choice. The women are already in the fight whether they like it or not, might as well teach them to be good at it.
Israel is a tiny place, about the size of New Hampshire. It has porous borders, which due to the settlements, cannot practically be secured. Israel's enemies are visually identical and do not wear uniforms. Violence can, and will, pop up anywhere, and Israel's enemies prefer to target women and children.
Israeli women are combatants, whether they like it or not. Giving them the training, experience, and equipment to deal with that unfortunate fact seems to be the only logical step.
There's a bit of a perversity here though, in that while apparently women cannot be spared from combat, Haredi Jews can. Okay, fair enough if you're in an existential fight for survival and you need all the soldiers you can get, male or female. But for women to be drafted into combat while men stay safe behind them studying the Torah is gross to me.
Unsettling though that might be, there are a lot more women than Haredim. Apparently this was even more true in 1948, and the original exemption only covered a few hundred wordcels scholars. Meanwhile the female conscription excluded mothers and banned women from frontline positions. That was relaxed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's be honest - a woman captured by an enemy - especially Jewish woman by hamas - her end will be worse, prolonged and more painful than that of men if they have the time to soare. Women have a huge vulnerability that a small weak men don't. Hamas are not equal opportunities gang rapists.
And you have to ballance that. So it is best if they are not on the first line, especially against the likes of Hamaa/ISIS - then save the last bullet for yourself is probably a good advice.
I can’t tell if your main objection is that you think they’re completely useless or if it’s a chivalry/”we must protect the eggs” thing. Every ‘defense’ of women on that subject straddles that line. Do you have any reason to assume male soldiers would have been more effective in the towers?
As for me, though I applaud the IDF’s efforts, I don’t think 18% (and corresponding casualties – though they are not corresponding at present) is quite cutting it, politically speaking. Women’s voting rights, all voting rights (like those of pacifists), should be curtailed to the group's casualty/combat proportion, ie, 18% would mean they get less than a quarter the voting power of a man. Political power ultimately derives from the barrel of a gun. One man, one gun, one pint of blood, one vote. We in the west, by and large living on “strategic islands”, can afford to ignore that reality, but israel cannot carry freeloaders indefinitely.
Do you have any reason to assume male soldiers would have been more effective in the towers?
No but probably would have gotten a cleaner/faster death
From what I have read about the attack and the atrocities - when hamas had time and were feeling playful it was the women and children that paid the higher price.
I can’t tell if your main objection is that you think they’re completely useless or if it’s a chivalry/”we must protect the eggs” thing. Every ‘defense’ of women on that subject straddles that line. Do you have any reason to assume male soldiers would have been more effective in the towers?
¿Por qué no los dos?
Look, I’ve never served in the military and never seen combat. I’ve never watched anybody die. I’ve never even been in a fistfight. It’s possible that my intuitions around this issue are totally miscalibrated.
But yes, it does seem very likely to me that the modal female soldier is substantially less effective in close combat than the modal male soldier is. There are very significant differences in temperament, personality, hormonal distribution, etc., between men and women. Testosterone levels alone would seem incredibly relevant to one’s performance in a fast-moving and harrowing scenario in which a combination of violent aggression, mental clarity under pressure, and quick and decisive reactions are required.
I’m not suggesting that women are useless, but simply that their usefulness in combat is considerably outweighed by the importance of their survival as future bearers of children. And also, as I mentioned, it seems that combat morale and unit cohesion are impacted significantly and negatively by the presence of women, at least according to studies that have been published. Again, the idea of large numbers of young women being put in direct harm’s way and then being captured to later be raped or tortured is utterly appalling to me, and would seem likely to have a significant mental effect on IDF soldiers in a way over and above the effect of a similar number of male soldiers being captured or killed.
There are very significant differences in temperament, personality, hormonal distribution, etc., between men and women.
I am not a soldier. But I am on the far end of the distribution for ‘ability to deal with killing’. I’m not a psychopath, I don’t like slaughtering animals though nor do I find it burdensome, but there is a surprising number of full grown men- and an unsurprisingly huge number of women- who can’t directly kill a complex mammal. I have watched full grown and not effeminate men have crying fits over slaughtering lambs and hogs; talked to toughened older men with no shortage of trauma who recounted near tears in their eyes that, working at the slaughterhouse when younger, they insisted on moving from the kill side to the cut side because killing cattle was too difficult to deal with psychologically.
And the biggest correlate of the ability to just put a gun up against an animal’s head, pull the trigger now it’s dead, eat it for dinner or send it to the freezer, is having a beard along your whole jawline. I presume this has something to do with testosterone. And obviously people aren’t animals, I hope I never have to find out whether I can kill a person without flinching. But regardless, ‘difficulty with killing an animal in a calm, cold way’ is probably very strongly correlated with ‘inability to kill your enemies without panicking and doing stupid things out of instinct’. And I suspect the distribution between the two sexes is such that 99.8% of humans with the latter ability are male.
I think you need to differentiate killing humans versus killing animals. I think it's common for people to be more disturbed by videos of animal cruelty than even the most gruesome tortures and executions of human beings. I wouldn't assume that someone who has difficulty killing an animal would have difficulty killing a person that they felt justified in killing.
Look, I’ve never served in the military and never seen combat. I’ve never watched anybody die. I’ve never even been in a fistfight. It’s possible that my intuitions around this issue are totally miscalibrated.
But yes, it does seem very likely to me that the modal female soldier is substantially less effective in close combat than the modal male soldier is.
I don't have direct personal experience here either, but I am a connoisseur of police bodycam footage. Having watched well over a thousand of them at this point (I know because I download them and can count how many are in the folder), I can confidently offer my opinion, whatever it's worth, that women are indeed substantially worse than men at dealing with life or death situations, on average. And presumably female police officers are already a more selective group than female conscripts in this regard.
There are commendable exceptions, of course, but in general I notice women are just far more likely to become paralyzed with fear or behave erratically and clumsily, doing things like confusing their gun for a taser, or confusing their taser for a gun and just generally exhibiting less courage and tactical intuition and improvisation. The difference in physical strength obviously comes into play, too.
Given the obvious difference in evolutionary pressure between the sexes with regards to violence, I think our baseline expectation, even in the absence of evidence and anecdotes, should be that there's a significant sex difference here.
but in general I notice women are just far more likely to become paralyzed with fear
Funny thing is, in another context this is used as a defense of women (e.g. Don Lemon got a bunch of shit for asking why an assault victim froze up instead of fighting - or biting - back)
Here's one of the most amazing videos I've seen, where a female cop shoots the wrong person after allowing an awful situation to brew, and a male cop shows up and regulates in 5 seconds: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RguOVwO2PjA
The quantity of wombs is not the limiting factor in human reproduction anymore. If societies cared, they would draft women's wombs like they draft men's lives.
I don't recognize the need to accomodate your squeamishness, rooted as it is in disregard for the lives of my kind. What is rape to death? However, if you feel that strongly about it, you could shelter one woman from her obligations by taking on both her duty and yours, bleeding twice. Just as long as I don't have to do double-duty myself.
Last time I checked, the IDF was fighting with assault rifles and the like, not sticks and stones.
If you get hit with an assault rifle, there will be little difference if the shooter was a man, woman or child.
I think it would be sensible to tie commando roles to physical ability, which would make them overwhelmingly male, but sometimes you just want a warm body with a rifle.
Child soldiers exist, and likely are on average weaker than adult women. If they were very ineffective (like one adult male being as effective as ten of them) African warlords would likely prefer to use their limited amount of weapons to arm adults (even though they are harder to control).
And if you go to complex weapon systems, the male advantage gets even smaller. Even if there was some inherent male advantage to steering drones or driving trucks, you likely have so many drones and trucks that you will look for "ok" and not "best of the best" when hiring.
I do not share your intuition that women are more likely to surrender in life-threatening situations. Especially when the enemy is Hamas, where the only sex difference in a surrender outcome is that they might rape women before they kill them.
I have never seen it stated in so many words, but my impression is that a big factor here is sheer numbers. When PM Ben-Gurion implemented the draft, the population of Israel was about 1.5 million. Israel's Muslim/Arab neighbors were not then inclined to train or field female soldiers at all, but in the fight against the existence of Israel there was no need: they were (and are) substantially more numerous. I cannot tell you whether the Six-Day War could have been won without the conscripting of women; perhaps it is so. But in the history that happened, conscripting of women was baked in as part of Israel's strategy, and that strategy carried the day. So here we are.
Some former members of the IDF who served on the border have in recent days testified on social media that the fence really was a technological marvel. Not so much as a stray cat could get anywhere near the border without setting off alarms, they recall. And the government and military certainly seem to have believed it was indeed impenetrable and really had changed the reality on the ground; hence partly why, by the start of this month, they had redeployed most of their regular military forces to guard the West Bank and northern border instead.
...
In any case, Hamas was able to begin their attack with the element of surprise. This was aided by an initial early-morning barrage of rocket fire, which was a relatively routine experience for the Israeli garrison forces, but which survivors recall sent most of their number hurrying as a standard precaution into fortified bunkers where – critically – they could not physically observe the approach to the border. They would normally have instead relied on the surveillance cameras to monitor the situation. Hamas, however, used small, off-the-shelf drones rigged with mortar rounds and other explosives to attack and disable the communications towers powering the network. These drones were too small and low-flying for radar to detect, so would have had to have been spotted by eye and ear. Without the cellular data link provided by the towers, the cameras did not function, and neither did the sensors and alarm systems.
With the surveillance and communications systems down, Hamas commandos then used their now infamous paragliders to simply fly over the fence. There they faced little armed opposition. The remote-controlled machine gun emplacements, if they could even operate without wireless data, had also been destroyed by drones. Now isolated, 23 high-tech observation posts each manned by a single soldier – all of them young women – were ambushed and rapidly overwhelmed by the first attackers. Those who tried to report the attacks would have found they couldn’t easily communicate. Meanwhile Hamas used bulldozers and wire cutters to quickly level around 30 sections of the fence without resistance. All of this took only a matter of minutes.
Operational command and control of the IDF division guarding the border had been concentrated into a single centralized base close to the fence. As some 1,500 Hamas terrorists surged across the now open border, this base was quickly overrun and the senior officers there killed or captured. They likely received little-to-no warning, given pictures circulating of scores of soldiers having been shot while asleep in their barracks, many still in their underwear. The subsequent sudden absence of central leadership and breakdown in the chain of command, along with the communications problems, meant that the scope and gravity of the overall situation could not easily be pieced together or communicated to either local forces or to national-level military command. Thus in the end it took hours for leaders to fully grasp what was happening and for reinforcements from elsewhere in the country to be successfully contacted, mobilized, coordinated, and moved to the south to confront the threat.
In my tech career I've always treated monitors that have lost signal with the same priority as the monitored value exceeding some critical bounds. The idea being that without signal, the monitored value very well could be in a critical state, and loss of signal itself could be caused by some greater issue.
I have no military experience. Does the military not do something similar? For example, a lost camera feed must be treated as an attack until proven otherwise.
To support your point from an IT perspective, at a previous job, the server monitoring system malfunctioning is what tipped me off to a ransomware attack being triggered. Of course, as with anything this has to be calibrated so there aren't so many false positives that alerts or downtime is ignored, but an otherwise robust system going down for seemingly no reason should arouse suspicion.
I'd be curious to see a timeline of the entire event. Maybe they were able to time it quickly enough that the people monitoring these things didn't have a proper chance to respond before the para-gliders were on top of them.
The failure rate on, say, CCTV cameras is high enough that it’s not tenable.
Source: my manager was assigned to Afghanistan as a surveillance contractor. He noted that they had to run the cables between cameras at the top of the walls, or rats would chew them overnight. And they’d still try their best to get at the anchor points.
The whole point of running a surveillance system is to freak out when something goes wrong, even if it's rats 99.9% of the time. We have a burglar alarm at our summer cabin and so far it has been triggered only by power loss or by one of the family members tripping it because the were deep in their thoughts. I am sure it's the same for everyone else in the area and a sign that says "This home is protected by Unity Security Services" is enough of a deterrent. But the deterrent only works if you actually know that if you trip the alarm, the patrol will be there quicker than you can get that TV over the fence, even if 99% of the time they are met by the embarrassed owner who really had to take a dump pronto.
Or take fire drills. Can you imagine how terrible it is to walk all the way from the 70th floor of your skyscraper after you've sprained your ankle jogging? You need to find that weird-looking wheelchair with grippy runners, find someone willing to push it down one hundred and thirty eight flights of stairs, it's always raining when there's a fire drill because why wouldn't it, and then you have to limp back to the elevators and explain to your boss why your report is overdue. You sprain your ankle on September 10th, 2001 and limp to work the next day.
That's a fine theory, but it goes against human nature to expect people to not detect patterns like: each time I investigate, it turns out to be a rat. So you then need a mechanism to prevent people from acting normally, which is a hard problem to solve.
it seems to me that this kind of mass attack will always succeed to some extent. maybe it was made worse in this particular situation for a bunch of reasons but even if everything went right for the israelis i think hamas would have had some kind of success. unless you have some kind of massive DMZ and large permanent deployment of troops an enemy will always be able to surge at a critical point and have some short term success.
There are different definitions of success. Palestinians breaching into Israel and having engagements with IDF is one thing. The slaughter and carnage that ensured is different.
You can make Israel bleed - it is not hard to do. Making it hurt is harder. And however we cut it - on tactical level it's win for Hamas.
This is interesting, and it's nice to have confirmation (?kinda? I'm not sure how much to trust this guy) of some suspected details, or at least someone else suspecting them, but a lot of these raise further questions than they answer.
The author loves the KISS principle, and he's not wrong, but the details he's proposing are less descriptions of a complex system falling so much as a fragile system failing unnoticed. I really hope that the IDF's tower comms were not solely 'cellular', but even if he's using that as a shorthand for a combination of cellular, microwave point-to-point, and packet radio (LoRA's cheap!) that I'd consider the bare minimum for a short-term deployment, this stuff's been deployed for close to a decade and there's really no excuse to not have physical ground links and conventional radio installations. The threat of drone-delivered explosives has been present in the public info since 2017, and commercially-available data links are notoriously fragile not just to attacks but even to stuff like nearby lightning strikes.
You can't harden these things against every possible attack, but you can have enough physically separate systems that anything breaking too many of them is an obvious attack, and at least some of these tools can treat an unnatural down state from a natural one, (and some, like flares, can be a signal only available when nothing is an option). Which sounds like ass-covering, but the counterfactual environment where you had a hundred IDF soldiers on a wall against a thousand-plus Hamas soldiers with a lot of explosives still sounds like an environment where you need to call for backup, and cellular is the obvious and simple and wrong answer there, too.
Which doesn't speak to the broader point, but leaves me concerned about how precise the rest of the analysis is.
The author loves the KISS principle, and he's not wrong, but the details he's proposing are less descriptions of a complex system falling so much as a fragile system failing unnoticed. I really hope that the IDF's tower comms were not solely 'cellular', but even if he's using that as a shorthand for a combination of cellular, microwave point-to-point, and packet radio (LoRA's cheap!) that I'd consider the bare minimum for a short-term deployment, this stuff's been deployed for close to a decade and there's really no excuse to not have physical ground links and conventional radio installations.
This is largely my thinking too. The original wireless communications setup is cost effective for hundreds of kilometers of perimeter, but centralised failure points like towers are too vulnerable. Buried cable is more expensive, but resistant to jamming or drone/rpg attacks. There needs to be much more redundancy in communications.
The other major issue is probably the majority of guards running for bunkers under the rocket attack, seemingly without means to shelter in place or to monitor the perimeter. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and presume CCTV monitors in the bunkers, but the monitors are useless if cameras were taken out and they can't physically observe the fenceline.
Regarding KISS, I think the author is conflating multiple overlaying and interconnected barriers (as in Defense in Depth) with the systems reliance on the comms tower. He's right that there shouldn't be a single point of failure for the majority of the systems in place (which seemed to be the case). There should be redundancy and the use of multiple technologies and procedures carried out by humans. Flares, Radio, heck even periscopes from the bunkers could all have been useful as failsafes. These multiple systems should ideally function independently, and by doing so become a nightmare to overcome in an assault.
Bin Salman tasks Saudi "scholars" to 'Islamically inform' the population that citizens should stop discussing #Gaza because "leaders know the issue better than you" and "you are not qualified and have nothing to offer", and "your analyses are burdensome". "Trust [Bin Salman]".
The Original video comes from here, with the translated comment is:
Sheikh Ali Al-Shibl, may God protect him
For the Saudi people:
(( You are a slug with nothing ))
Just because the son of the Arabian Peninsula and the son of the Hijaz want to stand with his brothers in Gaza, this respected sheikh (( is a worthless spit )) .
But the ruler (( the dashing bear )) only knows what is good and what is bad
It has a #غزة_تستغيث tag, which seems to mean "Gaza is crying out for help", which leads me to think the poster is perhaps against religious leaders prohibiting their congregations from political discourse. I cannot tell if this original poster was being sarcastic, as their follow up tweet says:
The original clip: Perhaps I have wronged the honorable Sheikh.
If there is anyone who can explain to the Sheikh, he would be grateful
note: Please do not insult or accuse the Sheikh
Taken together, some questions / thoughts:
Most important thing: does this show MBS still wants normalization with Israel? It seems almost certain that Iran is behind Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias that are attacking US interests in Iraq, AND are/were funding Houthis to fight Saudis for all these years, it's natural that Israel and other Arab countries would informally ally against Iran.
If yes, then what happened to the Saudi-Iran deal that China was supposed to have brokered?
How effective is this, trying to control discourse via religion? Has MBS, or Saudi in general, tried this in the recent past? (I assume everyone's tried this 1000 years ago, but how about after the internet). Or is modern social media so recent and powerful there's no historic precedence for this?
I thought everyone would have to have a Chinese-like system of internet censorship and blocking/firewall to limit thought and discourse, but can religion do this effectively as an alternative?
is Saudi secularizing at a rate that this actually doesn't matter?
Who is this guy in the video, is he important? And was the original poster being sarcastic? Any info there would be super helpful as I have no idea what the Saudi-twitterverse is like.
How effective is this, trying to control discourse via religion? Has MBS, or Saudi in general, tried this in the recent past?
My understanding was that the fundamental basis for the Saudi state was a unification of interests between the royal house of Saud's exercise of secular power to keep order for and on behalf of the Wahhabist religious sect. In particular, the Saudi's maintenance of holy sites (primarily, but not exclusively, Mecca) and the annual hajj pilgramage, is a major source of prestige and legitimacy.
well the King plays a real role in the religions, as the Custodian of Mecca and Medina. Definitely prestigue/power. Unsure about Wahhabism as I thought that came later?
you are not qualified and have nothing to offer", and "your analyses are burdensome."
Every so often you get reminded just how based absolute monarchy is.
Seems like Saudi's leadership / MBS is tasking at least one religious authority (Imam? Ulema? mufti?) to tell people in Saudia to not talk about Gaza anymore (quote-tweeted video on twitter).
Didn’t MBS give Kushner a few billion to manage just to stay in the Trump family’s good books? MBS must know that if Trump’s in power then a combination of his own family and friends, his closeness to various conservative zionists, his moving of the embassy, congressional republicans including neocons and evangelicals, and various other things will drive him invariably to take a hardline (moreso than Biden) pro-Israel stance.
If that happens and Saudi Arabia is on the ‘Arab’ side of that kind of conflict, that risks his whole play with Kushner, risks support versus Iran and with the Houthis etc. Most Arab leaders clearly want this to go away as soon as possible, even if the status quo returns to where it was (which they were largely fine with).
Isn't that a fun trick of wordplay? It would be fair to say "Alice gave her car to Bob" if Bob is working the Valet Parking dropoff, but leave out that bit of context and suddenly the still-technically-accurate statement becomes grossly misleading. Bob is probably getting a nice tip for a nice car, but in the end he's not getting a nice car.
Most of the reporting I've seen on Kushner has been clear about the distinction, but not all...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
roystgnr 6mo ago
Eh, giving kusher 2 bn to manage so he can collect fees is like giving him like $20 million each year while his expenses will be minimal (he could literally stick it in an index fund and laugh all the way to the bank), not as blatant as giving him 2 bn, but still giving him a substantial amount.
With my little amount of knowledge, I'd say that MBS wants to steer the narrative in a particular way, and that he does indeed expect theocratic fiat to just work even in an age of social media.
I would further expect theocratic fiat to work better on the segment of the Saudi population which deeply cares about Israel/Palestine, moreso than the segment which doesn’t.
Israel bent the knee, unsurprisingly. The siege is all but broken. There are also reports floating around that the US is pressuring Israel to delay the invasion. The Israelis basically tried a genteel version of ethnic cleansing by enticing Egypt to take them in, apparently with the blessing of EU+US. But it flopped and the Egyptians told the Europeans that the refugees would be allowed to stream into Europe the first possible moment. Given the explosive politics re: mass migration in Europe, I suspect the Europeans got cold feet and backed off.
So we're seeing two different versions of reality playing out. Israeli statements continue to be incredibly hawkish and all-but-confirming an invasion. Meanwhile the US is undercutting and undermining those efforts by either reversing or delaying Israeli decisions. If Israel will not be able to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip - which it transparently wants to do - then I don't see how they are not walking straight into a trap here.
You can’t really get away with what Israel wants in the 21st century in this context. Too many Muslims care too much about this particular conflict, and there are two billion of them now. Occupying without either indoctrinating, killing or driving out the 2 million locals will accomplish nothing.
The only high casualty thing that could have ‘worked’ (not really) is if Israel had carpet bombed Gaza and killed maybe 100,000 of them in the first day after the Hamas attacks, then it could have been rolled into some general numbness and slipped under the radar. The longer you wait, the more time the NGO and media apparatus has to prepare the narrative. Presidencies are kind of similar, hence the importance of getting whatever you want done ASAP before institutions respond to your methods.
The only outcome for Israel and Gaza is the continued locking up of the Palestinians indefinitely. The Arabs don’t want them, and neither does anyone else. As @orthoxerox says, they’ll fortify the Gaza border to make a ground invasion much more difficult, then call it a day.
Invading Gaza without ethnically cleansing the local population is strategically idiotic. Israel doesn’t have the resources to go full Xinjiang yet, it might be feasible with AI and modern tech in general but would be an extraordinary expense and lead to a permanent stream of bad PR with the Muslim world because unlike Xinjiang they’d have to let international observers and media in.
Too many Muslims care too much about this particular conflict, and there are two billion of them now
and what can they possibly do? Americans are vastly outnumbered by Chinese, Hindus, etc. Americans have always been outnumbered, yet this does not stop it from throwing its weight around. This is similar Taleb's argument on Twitter, which is that upsetting these Muslims is a potential 'Black Swan' event; I disagree. It's only a tiny percentage of Muslims , mostly in the Middle East, that are going to take up arms.
I mean, Israel has had to fight wars against multiple neighbours simultaneously on repeated occasions. It's not that outlandish to imagine it happening again.
And yeah, they won all those wars. But they only need to lose once.
I've heard before that Egypt and Jordan don't want Palestinians, but do we know why? Is it the raw number of immigrants or the fact that their Palestinian? I don't get it.
Letting radicalized refugee populations into your country is destabilizing and dangerous generally. In particular, the Arab states near Israel are not particularly stable, vulnerable to Islamist appeals, and have a history of sneakily collaborating with Israel under the table while denouncing them in public that would not endear them to their new Palestinian residents. Most of all, they remember the fairly disastrous war that previous generations of Palestinian refugees waged on the Jordanian state.
Letting Palestinian refugees in would in effect abet whatever Israeli aims there are to drive Arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza. I'm not sure the Egyptian or Jordanian regime would want to be seen as doing something like that.
While the main reasons for the direct neighbors were already mentioned (Muslim Brotherhood, civil war, attacks on Israel which invite reprisals), for the bigger well established, oil-rich Muslim countries further away from Israel, one reason might be that they see the Gazans as a welcome thorn in Israels side. You would think that the Iranian or Qatari leadership, if they really cared about that Palestinians being subjected to "war crimes", the first thing they would do would be to open their borders to refugees. Instead, they sponsor Hamas.
Hamas is an offshoot of the people the current Egyptian government overthrew a couple years back. Last time Jordan let in a significant number of Palestinians, it led to a civil war.
Too many Muslims care too much about this particular conflict, and there are two billion of them now.
Muslims wouldn't hate Israel any more if Israel genocided the Palestinians, and the memory of a massacre in the past likely wouldn't keep the hatred in the forefront of their minds the way the occasional flare-ups do. The problem is Israel would lose the support of the west (and quite possibly many of their own people) if they did that.
Most people are scope insensitive. If Hitler killed only half as many Jews, do you think he would be any more popular with the survivors?
If Israel killed 5000 Gazans instead of the 500 Hamas claimed they killed in that one instance, do you suppose that ten times as many Muslims would protest?
Like The_Nybbler said, Western response is one constraint on genocide. Another is that violence begets violence. If Israel turned Gaza into a parking lot, that would technically solve their Hamas problem. It would also change how the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians would feel about them and the prospect of peaceful coexistence. They might even face violent opposition from the liberal Jewish population. Unless they are willing to go full Macbeth and just murder their way into some totalitarian theocracy, they would be in a worse spot than where they started out.
I actually think the numbers do matter. If Israel kills, directly or indirectly, 50,000 Gazans it is way different than 5,000. People start to know people individually affected. International reaction is different. Refugee pressures increase proportionally. Unrest spreads and worsens in the West Bank. Iran starts to feel more tempted to get involved directly. Hezbollah, who for now seems to be totally disinterested in getting pulled into another massive war and getting Beirut leveled again, starts to feel pressure to actually do something.
Scope isn’t the only thing that matters and is often fallible (i.e. doesn’t solely determine responses or determine them absolutely). But it sure as hell does matter all the same.
There is no obligation in the Refugee Convention, either explicit or implicit, to claim asylum in the first safe country reached by a refugees. We have previously looked in detail at the definition of a refugee (if you want more check out our online course on refugee law) and it is entirely focussed on whether a person has a well-founded fear of being persecuted in his or her country or origin. Whether that person travelled through several countries before claiming asylum simply has no bearing on fear of persecution at home. It is all about the refugee’s relationship with their country of nationality, not other countries through which the refugee may have passed.
I do not believe that any law is ontologically binding, and European countries have displayed general willingness to abide by the international law (which they've pioneered in codifying). So it is in fact important what the law says.
Cannot Europeans simply deny the refugees passage on grounds that Egypt is already a safe country for them?
The Europeans could do a wide range of things, both inside and outside the ambit of international law. Pakistan is expelling nearly 2 million Afghan immigrants. However, there is no will to use force to keep large waves of immigrants outside of Europe - that has been rendered so morally-unconscionable in their view that just about any justification to ignore the problem or refrain from action will be accepted.
However, there is no will to use force to keep large waves of immigrants outside of Europe - that has been rendered so morally-unconscionable in their view that just about any justification to ignore the problem or refrain from action will be accepted.
Polish border guards routinely used force (in ways considered illegal by some) and were kicking migrants back to Belarus. Curiously, it was one of things where Brussels was not really complaining (despite hating PiS).
I stand corrected, but would suggest that Poland, Denmark, and Hungary, are very much the exceptions that prove the rule (e.g. Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Greece, UK, etc.)
Turkey announced that it was unilaterally opening its borders to Europe to refugees and migrants, ordering the security forces located on the border with Greece to do not obstruct their passage.
The Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu, in statements, urged refugees and migrants to go to Greece via the Evros River, saying: "This is just the beginning. In some places (of Evros) the level from the rain dropped to 40 to 45 cm. What does this mean? That on foot you can easily cross. Mitsotakis does not have the ability to keep them at the border. See what happens next. It's not just what has happened so far, but also what will happen next."
Oh, and Poland also granted massive number of visa (see also bribery scandal) if someone wants to complain. And avoids economical migrants from Africa mostly by being poor.
The statement that the European political establishment is not willing to use enough force top stop mass-immigration is correct. The fact that some European countries are willing to use some force to make the immigration slightly less massive does not change that.
Also, Greeks used force and pushbacks with at least implicit support from EU during the Greek-Turkish border crisis of 2020 (which has been memoryholed pretty efficiently due to Covid restrictions starting at the same time.)
This is a self-imposed constraint no? The US and Canada made a deal that prevents refugees cherrypicking one or the other. I guess people can accuse the CanUS of violating international law in that regard, but nobody cares as far as I can tell.
What Europe will eventually do is find some offshore country to use as a prison for migrants, but there will probably be another few years of huge flows, terror attacks etc before that happens.
Even if it weren't the law, once a refugee is on your soil it's practically impossible to return them anywhere without the consent of another country. If someone shows up on the shores of Sicily with no papers and no other country wants them what can you even do? You can't stick them on a piece of driftwood and kick them back into the ocean.
I'm not sure that Israel wants or would prefer 'genteel' ethnic cleansing, even ignoring the US and EU reactions to such a thing. Some of the individual settler-groups, sure, but from the IDF's perspective it's kinda a white elephant. And as bad as the issue of the Gazan Strip is today, at least the IDF wasn't considering a war with Egypt every time a few hitch-hikers get kidnapped.
Of course, on the flip side, I don't think Egypt wants to handle just the civilians who want to leave the Strip, or just the civilians for only a few months, and is willing to threaten to mass ship them to the EU even if Israel could credibly commit, and Israel can't credibly commit. So it doesn't really matter.
On the gripping hand, there were a lot of options on the table that involved ground forces (or prolonged active bombing campaigns), without permanently taking the Gaza Strip, but I'm not sure the delays -- especially in when combined with unsearch humanitarian aid -- are compatible with them. Maybe Biden's just trying to buy time before those more energetic efforts start, either to try to line up some Muslim custodian government or for hostage negotiation or both, but a lot of stuff coming from the White House right now seem like they're just pivoting really hard to the Squad alignment.
Which... boots on the ground in the Gazan Strip seems like a recipe for years of bloodbaths, so maybe that just works out? But there's a limit to the model of war as politics by other means. Trivially, 'just barrier down Hamas and lob a bomb in there when you spot someone with a big hat' was the pre-2023 Likud philosophy, and it doesn't seem like there's some obvious way to prevent a re-occurrence of 10/7 or some similar category of catastrophe. Yes, obviously the intel failures and work permit program and some imports will be getting a lot of scrutiny, but that's a really fancy way of saying 'try again harder' that isn't likely to be perfect for forty years.
And even if you can persuade Netanyahu to make the 'right' decision today, there's little or no reason to suspect that he'll be in charge forever: the opposing coalition is in a double-digit lead right now, and not especially dovish right now. If you persuade them without persuading the people voting for them, they'll just get replaced in turn. And if you could persuade the broader populace, you wouldn't need to set up a game of musical chairs for the political leadership.
I think referring to this, unless I misunderstood. It's been claimed to have 400+ signatories, but I don't know if a draft has been made publicly available or how much I trust those numbers.
I have no idea what extent, if any, the State dissent memo has any real meaning, or even if the claimed numbers are genuine.
Providing aid and funding to Hamas without credible commitments against military use or for searches by a third party to limit weapons smuggling is what I'd consider failing to bring table stakes. The public emphasis on antisemitism and Islamophobia wouldn't be nutty if it came from Red Tribers, but for the same reason that All Lives Matters were unacceptable slogans for two years straight, it's a very specific sort of message to have on an official account. (EDIT: the message has now turned into justIslamophobia). More generally, there's been no serious (and arguably no) Sister Souljah moment in response to the Squad and especially Tliab, even as they've gotten pretty brazen.
Yeah, a lot of this has been pretty mask off from the left, and it seems like the mask off part is just how little control the ‘moderates’/‘adults in the room’/establishment whatever you want to call it has over the activist class.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
gattsuru 6mo ago
there's some obvious way to prevent a re-occurrence of 10/7 or some similar category of catastrophe
Having a heavily-mined no-man's land on your side of the border fence? There's a strip that is tens to a hundred meters wide already, make it 500m everywhere, dig anti-vehicle ditches, build electric fences, saturate the ground with landmines, turn the only remaining border crossing into a fortress.
Points for thinking about it, but I'm skeptical on both the political and pragmatic side.
Israel isn't a signatory to the Ottowa Treaty, but large deployments of landmines near a civilian area would be a long-lasting cause celebre even before some teenager became an example, and their use in the past at the West Bank / Golan Heights in much more conventional military contexts had previously been a matter of a lot of international fuckery. There are also just pretty high upper limits to the utility of landmines in an open environment where your sappers would be near-constantly observed. Electric fences are so simultaneously useless (defeated by gloves!) and politically controversial that they've been a goto slur for electronic monitoring.
A lot of the remainder of your suggests are just things already present, but harder, in ways that may not be possible. Israel hadn't closed all but one border crossing, but the number of crossings dropped dramatically from 2005-2011, culminating in the closure of the Karni crossing, while the remaining handful had been heavily fortified. Of the three major remaining ones, Rafah is in Egyptian territory and Kerem Shalom is politically necessary as part of relationships with Egypt. There's already some use of anti-vehicle ditches and other terrain.
10/7 seems like it depended on overwhelming observation, surveillance, and quick-response features so fast and so heavily that the IDF response took hours; I'm not seeing how 500m would have changed much of it.
And, yes, as 2fara points out, you need to block of not just the tactics from 10/7, but the whole class of any successful attack of this scale.
I think you’re overestimating the efficiency of land mines. They aren’t just dump-and-forget. See this manual for some of the complexities involved. Note in particular figure 2-2: possible effects of minefields. Disrupt the enemy, slow him down, turn him towards a different angle of approach…or maybe, maybe stop his advance. All of these are only considered effective when combined with integrated fires. In other words, if you give the enemy a passive obstacle, he will circumvent it.
Getting enough mines to cover the border is achievable. At which point irregular forces of terrorists just…start tossing explosives in that direction. Sending dogs or prisoners out to find—or make—a path. They don’t even have to exploit any gaps, just waste Israeli time and money repairing and replacing static obstacles.
Put millions of mines behind your barrier wall. So only people who breached it are going to explode.
Yes, having a sterile (buffer) zone between two fence lines with clear signage is the way to go here. There would not be children wandering in. Intruders would have to deliberately defeat the outer fence before wandering into the mine field.
Edit: A big vulnerability is tunneling. A captive motivated population with a lot of time on their hands can dig more tunnels. There are vibration sensors for this, but deploying them along the entire border would be a very expensive prospect.
There are vibration sensors for this, but deploying them along the entire border would be a very expensive prospect.
Ignorant question: how expensive? Vibration sensors range from like @$0.50 for "cheap vibration-triggered switch for your kid's Arduino project" to @$1000+ for "high-frequency accelerometer for your industrial turbine", but I have no idea where in that range (or beyond it?) a tunneling detector would fall ... nor how many such detectors they'd need per linear distance.
You really want a digital seismometer network. Google cache indicates that digital seismometers used to be advertised on Amazon for $8999 each. Which is a steal for defense technology, but the real engineering costs probably come from setting up the network and the analysis software to detect tunnelling without triggering on nearby trucks or nearby uses of bunker-busting munitions.
You're honest in your ignorance, but I am too. I don't have a cost per kilometer (200km?) vs depth of tunnel detection analysis. I just know that tunnel detection vs video motion analysis, vs drone/para-glider detection across the entire Gaza border needs to be calculated, put into a brief, and given to cabinet. They'll run those numbers against whatever the ethnic cleansing numbers are and eventually make a decision.
I have a strong suspicion that the Americans and Europeans would happily help foot the bill in exchange for closing off various Israeli revenge options.
The real question is how the to deal with the tunnels themselves once detected. If you're going the landmine route, I've heard unironic advocacy for digging a moat around gaza from the Mediterranean. Not particularly well thought advocacy, probably, but unironic, with the premise of 'if tunnel detected, flood it.'
I would actually stick with a dual fence sterile zone without mines, supported by CCTV, vibration sensors and a (QRF) response force . Largely for pragmatic maintenance reasons.
A moat could be defeated given time (and planning). It would potentially prevent the use of heavy vehicles, but would otherwise be useless against tunneling, or even ground based assault with bridging (planned ahead of time).
Most modern security theory revolves around risk management and the concept that breaches are unavoidable. It is more about detecting and responding to the breach, and where possible, mitigating the damage.
With an open checkbook, it could be done. Israeli defense force would have to commit.
Edit: As for counter tunneling, there are many ways to respond as long as the tunnel can be detected early enough. which is likely with a large enough sterile zone to accommodate fly over LIDAR (which is problematic in urban areas). Tunneling is slow, so detection is a larger issue than response. Again, vibration sensors are expensive.
Before the 2005 disengagement Israeli military maintained a one-kilometer buffer zone within Gaza along the border wall which prevented the militants to approach the border, sometimes with gunfire. After the IDF withdrawal the border became easily reachable by the Palestinians.
Oh. Well, I guess they kept the idea.
Overall, the first barrier is a barbed-wire fence without sensors. The second barrier codenamed Hoovers A is 20 meters off and consist of a road and a fence with sensors. These existed before 2005. A new element is a 70-150 meter wide buffer zone codenamed Hoovers B with motion sensors in the ground and surrounded by a new sensor-equipped fence with watchtowers…
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
gattsuru 6mo ago
On the gripping hand
As an aside, how many people using this phrase have actually read the eponymous book? I picked the practice from the Wiki (the Wiki, the original one), but I haven't read anything by Niven other than the first few Ringworld novels. This reminds me of people that use "clay" when discussing about territorial claims without realizing it comes from polandball comics.
I dunno how common it is to use the phrase without being familiar with the book. At least in my case, I read the first two, though I haven't gotten around to Outies.
The phrase was important enough in the story to be the title and a central conceit of the second book, but the Moties series never had the cultural niche of Ringworld, even among scifi fans. While the phrase itself ended up in the Jargon File (and without a lot of the important context), it's kinda important to the series and the phrase's early use among hackers that it be not just the third item in a list, but that it also represent something unexpected or breaking from a false belief of only two options.
The Mote In God's Eye is much weaker as a character story, but I'd argue it's better as speculative fiction than Known Space series. And I say that not just as a specific critique of genetic luck or the Fruit of Life stuff.
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Notes -
How much should I read into the fact that nations which have condemned Israel’s treatment of Gaza have not offered to accept any Palestinian refugees?
It strikes me as deeply cynical that the nation with the most obligation to do well by them is the one that a huge swath of the Islamic world considers the great evil.
How much of current homicidal anti-Semitic sentiment across the Islamic world is because Jews settled Palestine? I can understand if they think Israel has to atone for this, but I suspect Palestine is simply a wedge issue that the Islamic world considers useful ammunition against Jews.
There's the obvious self-interested explanations. But it's also worth remembering that they did take in refugees before and the seeming result is that they'll never go back.
This is not just a civil war or natural disaster. It's an ethnic struggle for land.
There's a real fear that taking them as refugees not only saddles you with a poor population infiltrated with troublesome radicals, but that it creates an incentive for certain people to seek a more permanent solution to the Palestinian issue.
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I frequently see people in the West calling for Hamas to release the hostages or complaining that other people aren't calling on Hamas to release the hostages.
I don't see the point behind this. Hamas doesn't care what people in the west are calling for. Secondly, it's hard to imagine what Israel can be expected to give them in exchange for the hostages considering that Hamas already killed 1400, and they can't give those lives back. Furthermore, if Israel does make a ceasefire in exchange for the hostages, it rewards Hamas for taking hostages in the first place, which is not something anyone wants.
Ironically, I think that if people in the west are calling on Israel to make a ceasefire, but not on Hamas to release the hostages, it's a sign that they're more aligned with Israel than with Hamas because they seem to feel like they have agency over Israel's actions. Meanwhile, they feel no agency over Hamas's actions, which is why they don't call on Hamas to do anything. To them, Hamas might as well be an animal that you can't expect it to not attack because attacking is in it's nature.
Actually they do. I suppose they don’t particularly care what the student Union of OMG-Who-The-Hell-Cares State University is calling for, but they definitely care that The White House pressured Israel into allowing humanitarian aid shipments from Egypt.
You are right that calling for Hamas to release the hostages is more of a rhetorical strategy than a realizable demand. What it does is remind everyone that the continued existence of the Hamas government of the Gaza Strip is a massive net negative on the rest of the world, that they won’t even release innocent civilian hostages captured in a terrorist attack without major concessions, that their refusal to comply with the most basic standards of decency places them in the Hobbesian state of nature, where the clear best course of action is to let them die of cholera in their own filth without access to outside food, water, electricity, or fuel.
Sorry, but this is misinformation. Hamas did actually release two hostages without major concessions (at least publicly, maybe the IDF struck a deal behind the scenes).
Release 2 but keep hundreds? Is that really a counter or just something they did to make it look like they could be a reasonable party.
Aren’t they still holding innocent civilians? That’s like Madoff saying I’m not guilty I gave 2% back.
Yes, it is a counter to the claim that they won't release innocent civilian hostages without major concessions, because they observably did. It does nothing to address the claim that they never took hostages and are innocent of such an act, but nobody claimed that so it doesn't have to.
Not exactly. They won’t release the vast majority. It’s like taking 1002 hostages when you wanted a 1000 so now people like you do some technicality.
Yes, they didn't release the main bulk of their hostages without getting concessions - i.e. the same approach that Israel takes. You can't really condemn them for that without also condemning Israel, which is why the fact that they actually released two hostages without any concessions is notable and worth mentioning.
They were paid in propaganda and media coverage obviously. And got someone to be on tv begging for the release of I believe her husband whose still captivity.
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I know they released the Americans (lol, could they get any more transparent?)
This is probably due to the SEAL teams and Delta Force units sitting off their coast. America has a long history of hostage rescue of American Citizens in war zones, so releasing US hostages is just self-preservation.
Strong "I am Roman citizen" energy.
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No, they actually released at least one Israeli hostage. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/freed-israeli-grandmother-is-peace-activist-who-helped-sick-gazans-grandson-says-2023-10-23/
They released the two Americans, and two elderly Israeli women. Only one of them gave an interview.
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The point is signaling political affiliation to other Westerners.
right. may as well ask why people are putting up posters of the hostages in america/england/other not-gaza places, or why other people are tearing them down.
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More on the hospital blast. NYTimes Visual Investigations is now issuing a debunk on the supposed “lynchpin evidence” in the American and Israeli intelligence finding. A thread from NYT’s Aric Toler (previously Bellingcat) —
The NYTimes article is archived here: https://archive.ph/ngGpq
I hope we will eventually find out what caused the blast. This NYTimes article might wind up confirming my bias that we shouldn’t trust the immediate Israeli/American intel.* Interestingly, the NYTimes conclusion is based on a relatively obscure twitter thread by some random researcher on the 19th. So a +1 for twitter, I guess.
[edit + wording change*] small update, Le Monde agrees with the NYT assessment of the projectile.
On an off-topic note, the mention of Visual Investigations brings back memories to me. I remember finding that series on the NYT's Youtube channel a couple of years ago, and later watching a bunch of parts. I thought they were generally good, and the responses on YT were also generally favorable. But whenever they released a video on subjects deeply triggering to the Blue Tribe audience, like the Capitol "insurrection" and the Rittenhouse incident, it always ended up being obviously biased, and the responses on YT were accordingly dismissive and negative in usual.
The last part I've seen was the one on the Bucha Massacre, and while it seemed convincing and high-quality overall, I found it strange that 1. they identified an airborne unit as the perpetrators even though the overall mainstream consensus had been for months that a completely different unit was responsible 2. the entire argument of the video hinged on using one piece of supposedly captured Russian army document as evidence, which seemed suspect 3. they presented drone and CCTV footage as newly available sensational evidence, even though it was obvious that all that footage have been available to the Ukrainian authorities for almost a year at that point.
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The big picture here is that Hamas claimed a hospital was bombed by Israel and 500-800 people were killed. Mainstream outlets, including NYT, ran with that narrative. A hospital was not bombed and I don't think there is a credible estimate on deaths. The downstream effects of this misinformation included widespread anti-Israel demonstrations in the Middle East and cancelled meetings between Arab and Western countries. The NYT faced a lot of backlash over this and isn't exactly a disinterested party. Israel being responsible for the blast would help them save some face.
Let's say the NYT knew everything it knows now. Would "parking lot bombed, 30 people killed" have caused this much ruckus. Instead, ISRAEL BOMBS HOSPITAL is what is anchored in the minds of Middle Easterners.
I’d like to point out that this is just a media motte-and-bailey.
Bailey: Israel intentionally bombs hospital, hundreds dead!
Motte 1, new bailey: Israel accidentally bombs hospital parking lot, maybe some dead?
Motte 2, for when Motte 1 fails: The IDF showed a video that maybe isn’t from this incident. No mention of casualties.
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There was a blast in the inner courtyard of the hospital where patients, families, children, and women were sleeping. You are free, I suppose, to not consider this “the hospital has been bombed”. But it’s just as morally significant. And, of course, on the 15th an Israeli artillery strike did hit the hospital.
It’s true that we don’t know the precise death toll. I’m hoping that the hospital workers come out with an authoritative statement on that. The Anglicans who oversee the hospital confirm hundreds of mostly women and children have died however. So perhaps 200, perhaps as high as 400? We don’t know for sure.
What makes you think "hospital workers" will be given the freedom to come up with an authoritative statement that is independent of Hamas' messaging on this? Did Hamas allow 3rd party investigators in to survey the blast, collect shrapnel fragments, etc? If this were an Israeli strike, isn't it in their interest to allow outsiders to investigate the site?
What I would like to know (and currently do not) is whether there were British Anglicans who visited and/or worked at the hospital at the time of the blast. The Anglicans have put out official statements per above, and they most likely have consulted with the hospital workers they employ. But if there are British Anglicans who can testify “yes I saw *x bodies” that’s the best evidence we will get IMHO. For the record, I don’t think anyone should trust either Hamas or Israel/US assessments on casualties given the obvious conflict of interest. The question of whether we can trust the Palestinians who work in the hospital as doctors is a separate but interesting question, too.
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Come on, if a parking garage at a hospital was bombed, especially if there was a congregation of people seeking treatment or refuge, it would be considered a hospital bombing. It was part of the facility.
I think the point is “Israel bombs hospital, 500 dead” and “hospital parking lot fire causes 30 wounded” differ both in scale, blame, and incendiariness
This is the point. There is no way this becomes a major international story that dominates discourse if we knew what we know today about the location and size of the blast. But the misinformation got out and we're dealing with the fallout.
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If it were 30 wounded and 0 dead then yeah that would be significant.
But my point is that there's a difference between the immediate reaction of the Press reporting breaking news out of Gaza, when they have no opportunity to have reporters on the ground, and the reports from the supposedly "independent investigations" which all concluded the same incorrect thing all based on the same error in interpretation of the same piece of evidence. I maintain it's more significant that the Press was systematically all wrong in the same direction in their "independent investigations" than it is that they reported the Hamas-claimed death toll with varying degrees of qualification.
yes agreed. To me, it brings all kinds of doubts to other Gaza death tolls too
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This language falls on the wrong side of the "consensus building" line. Speculative analysis by an American news organization (or Twitter randos, or known terrorist sympathizers, or...) may or may not be more reliable than official reports from American or Israeli governments; you and others are free to make the argument either way. But this NYT article does not appear to prove anything, must less prove anything that has already been proven (i.e. "once again"). While you do not actually write the words "everyone knows," you do not present the matter as open to discussion, instead treating certain matters as clearly settled. Your engagement on the topic (which is rapidly approaching "single issue poster" status) does not communicate any willingness to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong. Rather, your rhetoric here looks like an attempt to build a consensus about what "we" should think on a question that is open (and may, given the circumstances, forever remain open). That is a way of waging the culture wars instead of discussing them, and is against the rules here.
Fair point, it is my assertion or opinion that America / Israel routinely lie about intelligence regarding strikes, misfires, etc. Next time I’ll link to scholars who agree with my assertion and preface it as such.
Hmm, would you say someone who exclusively posts about D Day in a WWII thread to be “single issue”? Or the bombing of Nagasaki in a WWII thread? The hospital strike is the second most important event in the whole conflict, the first being the actual Hamas invasion. It was front page news for about four days and a major point of discussion. It’s entirely possible that this is the wrong forum to be discussing one of the two most important topics of the conflict, but that wouldn’t be because it’s not worthy of discussion. It would probably be for less rigid and more human reasons.
I can’t help but remember what you replied to me in my last post on this issue:
This was accusing me, or at least my information, as intentionally false. Then you aimed to build consensus with a “claims suggesting anything other than Hamas are primarily based around fantasy”. You didn’t provide any source, of course. But some of that information I posted has been reinforced by a major NYTimes piece.
At some point, sure. Depending on how often they posted about it, whether their posts ever really added interesting information or just flogged the same dead horse repeatedly while showing no interest in entertaining the possibility that they might be mistaken, etc.
While it is possible that you or your sources are lying, that is neither what I said nor what I meant. I suggested that the people I see making these claims appear mostly to be wishcasting, and as far as I can tell that remains true. I don't know if you're a propagandist or just a useful tool to someone who is, but you have shown no interest I can see in discussing the hospital incident with anything approaching epistemic humility--only in spreading a particular slant on it. Either of us, or both of us, could be mistaken about what is actually happening--that's not the point. For purposes of the rules, your problem is that you're not writing in a way that is sufficiently open to that possibility.
No, you apparently don't know what "build consensus" means in this context. I never made any claims about what "we" believe (or should believe), or treated my interpretation of events as anything but my interpretation of events--hence phrases like "strikes me," "I've seen," and "appears primarily."
I definitely have a substantive view on these matters, which I expressed to you previously. But that is a separate thing from the way you have approached your rhetoric here.
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It seems pretty clear it wasn't THAT rocket which caused the explosion at the hospital; that was a malfunctioning rocket that blew up in mid-air. I don't share the NYTs confidence that THAT rocket was Israeli; their analysis seems to have enough uncertainty to place it on either side of the border. Anyway, I'm sure if a Tamir had hit the hospital, Hamas would be parading the pieces through the streets by now.
Their "debunk" is nonsensical, however. They claim their analysis contradicts a US intelligence assessment that the video showed a Palestinian rocket undergoing catastrophic motor failure and then crashing onto hospital grounds. But if you follow the claim, not only is the US intelligence assessment just an anonymous source, but it fails to specify that it was these particular videos they analyzed.
This is really is the most important piece of evidence. Within minutes of the blast, this was international news. If it had been an Israeli missile, wouldn't Hamas be highly incentivized to allow Western investigators full access to the debris the next day? Have they done anything like this? If instead, they hastily scrubbed the area of any evidence, that points to them being responsible.
someone did clear the area of evidence. We can assume it’s not IDF since it’s in Gaza and ground invasion hasn’t started, who could possibly have a vested interest here….
Hamas is either covering up evidence or they're missing a golden PR opportunity.
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Didn't CNN, the AP, and the WSJ, et al. all rely on this video as a "key piece of evidence" for their conclusion? And this video was cited by IDF spokesman in media interviews.
So one media company says one thing and others says another? So what? Some angles of the hospital explosion show two explosions; it seems likely one was this rocket and the other the hospital explosion, and they were probably unrelated (I can't rule out weird crap where a large piece of rocket and fuel managed to get as far as the hospital, but it seems unlikely). But there was a lot of ordnance in the air that night so showing me one rocket which wasn't involved doesn't move the needle much. It's like claiming a bite wasn't caused by a dog because you found one particular dog whose teeth don't match.
This is clearly not the same launch; the rocket in the disputed video is singular, not part of a volley.
Is there a different video you would say provides the best evidence that the explosion was due to a rocket failure? From the beginning I found that story hard to believe, but I considered the now-debunked video the best evidence for it (like all the news orgs etc). Without that, the recording released by Israel seems to be the strongest evidence... And that's not saying much.
In any case, certain people here have absolutely jumped the gun by accusing the press of being "stenographers for terrorism." The situation is murkier than that, and if anything the Press has helped Israel's narrative by appealing to a now-debunked piece of evidence to all draw "high-confidence" conclusions...
The best evidence I've seen is the damage photos. It doesn't look like a large HE explosion (not enough damage), nor a small one (too much of the wrong sort of damage, especially fire). It looks like a fuel explosion; the bright fireball at the hospital site in some videos matches that also. I don't say this definitely indicates a rocket failure, but as far as I know there aren't any purpose-built munitions the Israelis are using that would create that sort of explosion.
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IIRC this launch corresponded to PIJ announcing they were using one of their new longer-range (read: bigger) rockets, so the prior spontaneous failure rate probably should be estimated to be pretty high.
As someone who is reasonably familiar with high-power rocketry and has at least read the literature on making large solid motors (which is what these are), scaling up is hard: even small imperfections in the solid grain can cause explosive failures. Fail to get all the bubbles out when casting? Your burn rate (and thus chamber pressure, which can cause explosive failures) will vary drastically. Or maybe your grain cracks and pieces clog the nozzle: now you have a bomb.
Best results require starting with precisely-sized powders, high-grade chemicals, and some industrial equipment (mixing, vacuum casting) that scales with the size of motor you're trying to make. Most of that is something Hamas is having to make or smuggle in. And even for well-prepared amateurs it doesn't always succeed the first time.
What's the distribution of mortality among these rocket failures? This would be a massive outlier, even assuming only 50 casualties. It hit the perfect spot, at some unspecified distance from where NYT reports that Israel was striking only two minutes before. My priors are just that it was an intentional strike, and "this launch corresponded to PIJ announcing they were using one of their new longer-range (read: bigger) rockets" is just weak evidence of a rocket failing in such a way and happening to strike that spot. It's another assumption of a new type of rocket other than the thousands others that have been launched from Hamas. So my priors are moving in the opposite direction if these are the sort of assumptions that need to be layered on to make the Israeli side of the story plausible.
Without the video which did show some sort of rocket failing at about the same time (and turned out to be an Israeli rocket !!), I don't know what evidence there actually is that this extremely unusual thing actually happened. Like I said, this video formulated previously what I thought was the strongest evidence for the Israeli side (but it didn't convince me then), so it's significant it's debunked.
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The press (including the most 'reputable' outlets like the BBC) spent the first day after the hospital explosion credulously repeating "Israeli strike on hospital kills 550" (or even 800 in some cases).
It is now clear that even if Israel caused the explosion, which seems very much a debatable matter still, it didn't kill anywhere near the 500-800 people that Hamas' health ministry claimed.
There is no way this event would have been front page news, knowing what we know now. "Parking Lot bombed, 30 killed" doesn't have the same ring as "Hospital bombed, 500 killed".
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I do wonder if these initial reports spooked the IDF into instituting a flat denial of what would have been an intentional strike that was less extraordinary than initially reported.
In any case, the press initially reported excessive death tolls (how excessive is TBD) but then in the subsequent days and weeks their narrative shifted to relying on a bad piece of evidence to draw conclusions with high confidence. The initial press reaction to the news that was coming out of Gaza (where reporters are not allowed) is less telling than the narrative the congealed in the days and weeks after, a narrative that appears to have been based on bad evidence that they all got wrong.
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The Guardian would clearly prefer for Israel to stop further military interventions. I am used to the Guardian being somewhat partisan, but still surprised by this level of one-sidedness. The alternative to an invasion of Gaza is the status quo. Hamas stays in power while Israel forbids the import of anything which could be used to craft weapons, thus severely limiting the quality of life inside the strip. Hamas continues to fire rockets, Israel continues to respond with airstrikes.
I think an occupation of Gaza (while obviously the thing Hamas wants Israel to attempt) might be preferable in the long run for the surviving Gazans. Gaza is not Afghanistan, size-wise. Instead of having an open air prison run by the most homicidal inmates, turn it into an panopticon. For those who would rather die than live under occupation, grant them their wish when they try anything. Be culturally sensitive by limiting the freedom of speech to levels customary in Iran or Saudi Arabia: imprison anyone who advocates violence against Israel. Don't let people starve, don't kill civilians when you can avoid it. Invest. If, a generation down the road, a huge majority is in favor of peaceful relations with Israel, give them self-determination.
It is less clear how such an occupation might benefit the Interests of Israel (or any other state), though. Winning the war against Hamas will take a huge toll both in IDF lives and bad PR (pictures of dead kids), and the occupation will likely be a drain on resources for decades. And then there is a decent chance that the moment you retreat, Hamas is back in power. The alternative of just continuing low intensity air strikes indefinitely (even the Guardian can hardly run stories about innocent airstrike victims for years) and otherwise fortify your border.
The Grauniad's readers are considerably more psychotic than their staff:
It's really not possible to talk to someone who thinks you could shame the Arab street into compliance by turning the other cheek and ignoring a major terrorist attack.
Echoing @HalloweenSnarry, this isn't so much psychosis as it is a mix of naivete, delusion, wishcasting, and some typical-minding. I had a conversation earlier this week with someone who basically holds this kind of turn-the-other-cheek view about both the Hamas attacks and the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on the US. To him, quiet national stoicism and a call for peace would have had such a psychologically-resonant impact that terrorists would see the error of their ways, realize that Jews and Christians aren't the evil monsters the terrorists envision them to be, and just lay down their weapons. Maybe a round of Kumbaya while we're at it.
And honestly, I think it might work for some small margin of people, but to think Hamas is going be emotionally overcome by that kind of sentiment is foolhardy at best.
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I don't think that's psychosis, that's just naivete.
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It would, nevertheless, probably have been in Israel's long-term best interests to have "[left] the depravity and hatred of the Hamas project for the world to behold." Of course, it would not have been in the short-term interests of the current Israeli administration to do so, so it was not going to happen.
Nor is the only choice either 1) ignoring the attack or 2) responding in a manner which will inevitably kill large numbers of civilians. See, eg, Israel's response to the Munich Olympics attack.
What, specifically, do you think would have happened if Israel did not respond?
Please show me where I said that Israel should not respond. As I explicitly said, there are options other than not responding and responding in a manner which will inevitably kill large numbers of civilians.
What do you think would have been the best response for Israel here and why?
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Such as? Again, be specific please.
More importantly, what do you think would have happened, that it would be in some way advantageous to Israel?
I already mentioned the response to the Munich Olympics incident.
Well, for one thing, this would have been more likely to come to fruition. As would various other arrangements between Israel and local governments which are not particularly enamored of Iran and its proxies. There are a lot of potential advantages to not giving your enemies credible grounds for accusing you of war crimes.
You expect Israelis to conduct covert assassinations of thousands of Hamasniks inside the Gaza strip, by foot? That’s not very realistic. Unless you meant assassinating Hamas leaders in Qatar, which I’m all for. It doesn’t solve the issue, though, so I don’t see the point.
How does a deal with Saudi help with removing Hamas monsters from Gaza? Or at all, in this context? This is just unrelated.
There is not going to be a perfect solution. The point is simply that there are choices other than the imperfect solution of doing nothing and the imperfect solution of using force in a manner that is guaranteed to kill large numbers of civilians. But making leaders pay for their decisions will certainly encourage the next leaders to make different decisions in the future.
I didn't say it did. You asked what would happen that "would be in some way advantageous to Israel."
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I agree that this over-determined the Israeli response. "Hamas breaks out of Gaza and attacks Israeli citizens" is not exactly the type of black swan event as "Jihadists crash planes into the WTC". So Hamas did not only commit their atrocities, but they also showed up the Israeli administration (which has security as a big part of their platform, I think) and their intelligence services and military which failed to stop them.
Under these circumstances, the people involved in deciding whether to invade are unlikely to decide that it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so.
I think it is rather that they might take actions despite believing that it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so. Or, more likely, without making a sufficient effort to determine whether it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so.
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That seems incredibly naïve to me. If you're surrounded by people who would gladly see you dead, it would be a fatal mistake to broadcast to them that they can kill you without fear of retribution.
Israel's response to the Munich Olympics attack involved very different circumstances, since they were assassinating PLO members living in Lebanon and various parts of Europe. They obviously couldn't kill large numbers of civilians in sovereign states they weren't at war with. There are some Hamas leaders living in Turkey and Qatar, but the rank-and-file of Hamas live in Gaza, among the civilian population.
It's interesting you don't seem to even think to apply this same mode of thought to Palestinians.
Also I strongly doubt the reason the Gaza attack happened was because Hamas was mistaken in believing they could GTA it and dodge any sort of counter attack. If one is to believe the conspiracy theory that this is related to closening Israeli-Saudi relations one might think they were even counting on it.
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Who said anything about no retribution? As I explicitly said, there is a third choice, other than 1) No retribution; and 2) retribution which inevitability kills large numbers of civilians. Which was the purpose of mentioning the response to the Munich Olympics, which was obvious a case of retribution.
Ok, so what is the third choice here? There's nothing explicit about gesturing to "a better way" without spelling out exactly what that way is. That's just smugness masquerading as nuance. Is Israel supposed to follow the Munich strategy in a dense urban area filled with hostile civilians?
The Munich strategy was to send covert assassination teams, so why not? And, there is nothing to prevent Israel from pursuing non-military options, especially with backing from the US, EU, and local enemies of Iran. The leaders of Qatar might find it to be in their interests to arrest Hamas's leader, for example.
And, you are completely ignoring the key issue, which is that a different response might well be in the long-term best interests of Israel. It would certainly make Saudi recognition more likely, that's for sure.
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Just violently take hostages (where some die) and then you can have a gesture that shouldn't be forgotten. The only thing that can't be forgotten is that they are radical Islamists and will Jihad if given the opportunity. You can't reason with them or negotiate. Leftists are incapable of understanding radical Islam.
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Has there been any discussion within Israel or within the broader Jewish diaspora about a change in approach to gun rights?
I can't be the only one who realizes that if the Israelis were armed in the same way that The Americans are, that 10/7 would have looked a lot different. Not the music festival, obviously, but the houses/villages for sure. But actually: maybe the music festival too[1]. Just looking out the window and considering the guns that I know for a fact that my neighbors have (I live in the downtown area of a major, liberal American city), there is absolutely 0 chance that Hamas would be going door to door executing anybody in my neighborhood.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns. To the people who aren't aware: gun nerds have kindof moved past just being into guns at this point. Yeah they own AR-15s, but the are also really into training, physical fitness, radio skills, orienteering, and own some pretty fucking advanced sensing equipment. 15 years ago it was cool to have an Ar15, now dudes are (almost commonly) out here with full on panoramic thermal/nightvision, body armor, etc. It's insane.
[1]: Even the yogi far left borderline authleft people I go to music festivals with own guns. Americans really own a fucking shit load of guns.
I recently got into deer hunting. Game meat is really healthy, you know? Also it's more humane, I think? Anyway, It started with buying a bolt action rifle with a scope, my first firearm ever. Now that I have one, I need to go to the range to practice. This means I need glasses and also ear protection. Best to get the ear muffs that have loud noise cancellation so you can hear conversation. Oh, and there’s an aux input in case I hunt with other hunters and need a radio. Pretty cool. It even comes with two tone American flag velcro patch. Call of Duty vibe intensifies.
Obviously need a full assortment of camo to go with it. No no hunting camo, not like digital pattern camo don't be silly. Well, the military digital camo is cheaper actually, may as well.
Hey hunting deer is actually really challenging and the season is halfway over. Maybe I should branch out into wild turkey hunting. Oh, I need a shotgun for that? Well, why not. Should probably get slugs and buckshot, just for versatility.
While on some hunts I realized I was the only one without a sidearm. What’s the sidearm for? In case bears and cougars attack! Well shit, now I need to go shop for one of those. What will have enough stopping power? Let me head to the indoor range and rent a few and try them out. Hmm, yeah. I think the Glock 40 10mm should do, let me buy that.
Hey, since I have a handgun now, I may as well take a few extra steps to get it ready for home defense: add a silencer and light so I don't go blind and deaf shooting it indoors at night at an intruder.
Good good. Actually, why don’t I get a concealed carry license? May as well carry it with me just in case. It'd be super annoying to get mugged on the street when I have a perfectly good handgun at home. Probably I should take some classes on proper self defense though. Maybe also drill some tactics in case I end up in an active shooter situation. Again, it'd be pretty annoying to have a handgun with a concealed carry license but not know how to handle an active shooter...
Panoramic thermal/nightvision sounds like it'd be really handy for hunting, now that you mention it. Orienteering is probably a good skill to develop just in case I go too far off trails chasing wounded game...
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.
Meal Team 6 is kinda wasting their time practicing with guns though. If you want to be ready for the war with the federal government you gotta be going all-in drone warfare.
There are a lot of up front costs with responsible gun ownership. Gun safe, range membership, knowledge of local firearms laws.
So the marginal cost of additional guns is relatively low. Plus if you're putting in range time then guns are officially one of your hobbies. Might as well get more guns.
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Cheapest semi-automatic rifle firing the cheapest rifle cartridge (and only coincidentally, the best rifle ever made). Full-power rifles suck to actually shoot more than a few times be it on or off a bench, but you can shoot this literally all day.
Provided the deer in your area are small enough this can be an excellent (first) rifle for dealing with them.
They are not. The typical recommended deer caliber range for white tailed deer is from .243 to 30-06. .223 falls below this range.
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Digital form 4s are currently sitting at 201 days estimated processing time for individuals, 236 days for trusts. Between the wait times, the fingerprinting, name and address on a federal registration and just the extra 200 dollars, getting into NFA items is something most people still pass on. eForms (that notionally promised faster processing times but 12% faster on a 270 day isn't much to brag about) silencershop kiosks/form filling software/trust services are changing that a bit but culturally still rare. There also used to be a lot of misinformation and mystery about the process.
That said once you get one stamp, most of the mental and bureaucratic hurdles are cleared and stamp collecting becomes much more likely. After waiting the better part of a year for a can, one to two months to "manufacture" an SBR you can more easily maneuver through a hallway without potential legal implications seems comparatively easy. (And practically speaking actual stocks are more comfortable and ergonomic than braces.)
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Yes, it has. I’m a member of a few groups that advocate for gun rights in Israel - membership has gone up significantly.
There is an extra Israeli specific issue to consider, though: most Jewish Israelis don’t want Arab Israelis to have guns, with a few obvious exceptions like Abu Gosh residents and Druze outside the Golan heights. The way to filter out such “disloyal” populations from owning a gun is to require military service of some sort for a gun license.
In the more immediate term, license requirements have been relaxed slightly just last week - allowing a few hundred thousand more Israelis if the “right” sort to qualify, myself included.
Additionally, city watches are forming in more cities further away from the borders. These watches are normally armed with a rifle of some sort.
I’d just like to point out that Israel is currently kvetching over wether an obvious way to enhance their own protection, might be offensive to some of her citizens.
Think about the stark contrast there. Israel is making themselves objectively more unsafe because they don’t want to be mean to the Muslims. Incredible.
I’m sorry, maybe I wasn’t being clear. The point is to give guns only to Jews, because most Arabs can’t be trusted with them. It’s literally the opposite of trying to not be mean to them.
I think their point is instead of Israel saying straight out, “Arabs can’t have guns”, they prefer to make it harder for everyone to get guns.
Yes exactly that.
I see. But some Arabs should have guns - the ones that proved their loyalty by serving. Besides, I think there’s a difference of kind between straight-up racist legislation and offensiveness.
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Sounds like its on par with the rest of the "western" world.
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Don’t want to be mean?
More like don’t trust them not to contribute to the problem, either by arming Gazans or by causing more sectarian violence on the Israel side of the barrier. If you live on the far side of Jerusalem, which feels more threatening—a once-in-a-decade paraglider raid, or all your Arab neighbors buying rifles?
I’m not saying this is the correct assessment, but it tracks with what I’d expect non-gun-owners to think about the value of increased gun rights.
No you miss my point. The obvious, rational move would be to say: Israeli Jews can own guns, but Muslims can’t. The test is literally: are you a Muslim? Then you can’t have a gun because you are a dangerous person in a suicide cult.
This is what Israel wants, but it doesn’t do this because of how mean it would be to the Muslims.
It's not because of how mean it would be to the Muslims, it's because of how it would provide fuel to the narrative that Israel is an aparteid state.
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Among the diaspora, Randy Barnett has been hammering that argument at length, and has been arguing it for a while; the JPFO have unsurprisingly had a field day, for whatever they're worth now.
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Even with the US armed to the teeth we unfortunately can’t seem to stop mass shooters. In fact the deadliest shooting in the US was one man firing into a music festival into the busiest tourist area in the country. Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
You believe this because you have been told it - CCW holders and cops stop plenty of mass shootings. The stories are buried at best.
The main point has already been made by @roystgnr . One man army mass murder events are more impactful for the US, that's for sure, but eliminating them is an intractable problem.
Well just this morning I was “told” about 22 more people killed in a mass shooting. The police and CCW holders may have stopped “plenty”, but I think the idea that US gun owners could stop a Hamas attack to be a pure fantasy.
It is funny - I heard about the shooting last night and thought "the guy I responded to on the Motte is definitely going to hold it up as proof he's right"
I think being a firearms instructor and nailing people at a bowling alley may be different than Hamas' door to door executions and roaming through residential areas.
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The deadliest mass shooting in the US was the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War battle with 7000 deaths.
The deadliest mass shooting of non-soldiers in the US was the Wounded Knee Massacre, a gun confiscation gone wrong with 200 civilian deaths.
The Vegas shooting was horrifyingly awful, but it's still a factor of three below the lesser of those.
(This does suggest that Israel think carefully before letting the genie out of that bottle too; the plurality anti-mass-shooting position in the USA is probably "do a million gun confiscations, and hope they don't go wrong or start a civil war", and it's not because nobody's looking for good ideas instead)
If mass murderers are motivated and competent enough it's an impossible problem to solve. A guy with dozens of powerful rifles and a hotel room full of ammo killed 61 people; a guy with a rental truck full of fertilizer and fuel killed 168. Your average one-man-army is a lesser potential terrorism threat than your average farmer, if the latter doesn't worry about getting caught.
In the US we track fertilizer sales more closely now (and farmers aren't generally the mass-murdering type), and many would-be bombers range from incompetent (the Columbine killers planted nearly a hundred bombs, which failed to work; guns were their backup plan) to anti-competent (one suspect in any bombing is the victim, because it's hilariously common for murderers and would-be murderers to blow themselves up by accident) ... but even with Gaza blockaded, Hamas manages to manufacture and employ working explosives and even mostly-working rockets readily enough. Not driving truck bombs through the breach this month was a tactical choice, not a tactical necessity.
On the other hand, even reducing a problem with a non-100%-solution is better than nothing. These hypothetical truck bombs might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by an airstrike, and likewise the non-hypothetical gunmen might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by a more-armed citizenry. A more-armed Israeli citizenry might lead to other unintended deaths, but so do Israeli airstrikes.
That…neither of those is a mass shooting.
I’m not sure I follow what you’re proposing. Or dismissing.
Not the parent but, to paraphrase, the mass shootings which the media focuses on have relatively small impact compared to state-sanctioned violence. They also have a small impact compared to the garden variety inner-city homicide which kills more than 1000 Columbines worth of people every year.
The media chooses to amplify the mass shooting events because it's great for ratings and it plays to their prejudices about red states.
Sadly, the media is literally™ killing people because the focus on these events makes them more likely to occur.
What’s the implication for the Israelis, then?
The OP thinks personal gun ownership might help defend against Hamas terror attacks. YouEssAy is skeptical because US gun ownership hasn’t defended against a different sort of attack. I lose the thread when royst says, uh, enough soldiers shooting back and forth is worse. What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
The second half of my comment was less conclusive than the first. From the right perspective, is that really such a bad thing? The right way to reason is to start with raw facts and hope you can eventually accumulate enough of them to deduce conclusions. If you don't start reasoning until you have all the implications in hand then you're doing it exactly backwards. That's supposed to be an unconscious flaw in human reasoning, not a conscious goal!
Admittedly I might not have chimed in on such a grossly hard problem with a nuanced and inconclusive answer if vague points with varying consequences were all I had to add. But someone said the deadliest mass shooting in the US was Vegas, and it wasn't, and so I gave two counterexamples, but then tried to keep at least partly on-topic afterwards.
If someone says "2 + 2 = 5, therefore you shouldn't kick puppies and you should agree with my politics", then I'm the sort of person who'll point out "2 + 2 = 4" even if I don't have much to add to the rest of the sentence.
I do find it interesting to see the responses when I do that, though. Sometimes you get "Oh, so it is; but here are some unrelated good reasons for not puppy-kicking or disagreeing with my politics". Other times you get "those just aren't sufficiently large values of 2!" or "why should I listen to what an obvious puppy-kicker has to say!"
I’ve got nothing against your choice to include musings, but I mistook them for a single argument. Hence my confusion.
I do have to object to calling military actions mass shootings, though. Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare, and some of them don’t even include robberies and terrorism. There are assumptions of asymmetry in number and preparedness.
I understand that you think this is motivated reasoning. That doesn’t justify diluting the term. Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
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Well, admittedly it's only a Mass Shooting (PDO) if it comes from the Valley of Motivated Reasoning; otherwise it's merely a sparkling mass of people getting shot.
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bases were overrun, neighborhood watch with former IDF were mostly overrun (some stories of successful Kibbutz defenses, mostly farther from Gaza so they had more time).
I think it would have helped if everyone there had an AR15 ready though. It seemed like those communities only had handguns, which ends up not being powerful in the face of a few dudes with rifles
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The Kibbutzim that were attacked near the Gaza border typically had border posts, fencing, security that was monitored, and an armed neighborhood guard comprised of ex-IDF (soldiers rather than just conscripts) and led by a more senior former officer. Those were some of the first victims in these communities.
I really don’t think the modal heavily gun-owning Southern town would fare much better, unless they can spontaneously wake all the adult men, form into a trained town militia, and come up with and execute a strategic plan to counter a large number of trained, armed young men with maps and a plan who also didn’t wake up halfway through the attack.
You could also train them to do this quickly and call the resulting militia something like hour-men or second-men, I am bad at naming things. I wonder if any countries have tried this in the past, perhaps the US could learn from their experience?
Sure, but that’s not the current situation in the US.
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Ironically, this is one scenario where the local police showing up with ex-military MRAPs might actually be useful. Then again, a lot of that militarization started after the North Hollywood Shootout, where the police did find themselves under-prepared and had to borrow materiel from a local gun store.
I think you're right in that the element of surprise probably negates local armaments, but there are examples (Sutherland Springs comes to mind) of quick-thinking locals stopping spree killers. But no American town has faced more than a half-dozen armed opponents in probably the last century.
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Does all this intense hobbyist stuff make them especially useful as combatants or an ad hoc militia, though?
Very high-variance. There's a lot of people who are 'mall ninjas', who buy a ton of tacticool crap without much serious training or skill with any of it, for whom guns and equipment are probably better modeled as a status or investment thing. On the other hand, there's also a lot of training-as-hobby that goes to pretty high extremes, ranging from cowboy action shooting at the LARPy end, multigun in the middle, and score-based SWAT training at the other end.
There's part of the latter groups who I would rather have than police or even some military people.
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Some previous discussion: https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/146562?context=8#context
What I think is that Israel can't allow American-style gun rights without either allowing Israeli Arabs to also heavily arm themselves, which would make it easier for pro-Palestinian militants to also obtain guns, or writing ethnicity-based gun laws that would make it clear that Israel is an apartheid ethnostate.
Imagine for example a law that allowed American whites to own guns, but not American blacks. I know that here at TheMotte probably a good number of people would support such a law, but out in the wider world of the West this is something that has been completely outside of the Overton window for probably like 60 years now.
Israel is an apartheid ethnostate and they don't even bother trying to hide it. They don't give a shit about the Overton window, and this policy would be less objectionable than the "dna testing for citizenship" they already practice.
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Well, it's easy: make gun ownership dependent on completing your military service. Israeli Arabs can't serve in the IDF with some exceptions.
Serving in a country's armed forces is about as far as one can go towards making oneself the direct tool of the country's government, so a law that restricts gun ownership to people who have served in the armed forces is very close to a law that makes it so that the only people who can own guns are either people who support the government or people who are willing to at least hold their noses and pretend to support it.
If the idea of such a law was raised in the US, I imagine that the right would be outraged despite its general love of the military. For example, such a law would essentially mean that if you were born at some point after 2004 or so, you would only be able to own guns if you had been vaccinated against COVID.
The US is not Israel. It's appropriate, I think, for a nation like Israel that is credibly threatened by their neighbours, to demand a higher standard of cooperation and assurances of loyalty from their citizens. I think if the US was at war, or engaged in conflict with a neighbour, it would be appropriate to control the ownership of firearms, including taking them away from anyone that can't demonstrate their loyalty. In times of peace, of course, such restrictions should be abandoned.
If there was a credible threat of US citizens rising up against government tyranny, which pro-gun-rights people seem to believe to be a central motivation for gun rights, I'm sure the US government could come up with some external threat that justifies requiring demonstrations of loyalty from gun owners. (Russia would probably do by twisting the knob on the election interference narrative just a little bit.) This is usually found somewhere on the first page of those "dictatorship playbook" writeups.
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This isn't my experience with ex military in the US at least. It seems to be an even split between licking boots more fervently or realizing that any entity who has figured out how to pay $100 for a steel bolt used in helicopters is beyond saving or supporting.
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Isn’t it rather that Israeli Arabs are permitted to serve, but are exempt from conscription, with some exceptions? That is what this IDF webpage says.
Right, thanks for the correction. Even so, an Arab that served in the IDF would be unlikely to be pro-Palestinian.
No, I wouldn't think so.
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Here’s my take. Compliant with my own “50 year rule” that holds that any political injustice or status quo that’s persisted for more than 50ish years should be accepted automatically and we simply move on (since by that point most people originally involved are either dead or too old to matter, plus “sins of the father” rhetoric), I think a two state solution is just permanently dead.
What Palestinians, broadly speaking, need most is a return to open elections (new leadership - the PA has been useless for years and doesn’t actually seem to care about getting an actual solution) coupled with a sustained series of publicized Kumbiya moments of forgiveness and unity. Ideally with a charismatic leader on one or both sides. Then a sustained push for equal rights. Possibly combined with some mild economic and land reform/incentives. This will probably work fine for the West Bank and Gaza will probably remain slum-like, without a great near term solution. Focus on the equal treatment bits and learning to live as a multicultural society. I’m not saying Israeli government is like Apartheid, and we shouldn’t treat it the same, but if we are honest it certainly shares some attributes and Israeli doesn’t yet treat all Arabs the same.
I think this approach is completely plausible. It just will take work and a willingness from Palestinians and Israelis alike. For those who think a lifetime of war and conflict and oppression is inevitable, as well as those trapped in the recent news, I think it’s helpful to continue to consider what a medium term resolution can or could be like.
I believe Jim Crow segregation persisted for at least 50 years, depending on exactly how you define things. So you could almost certainly pick a number of years where this rule would define that as something we should just accept and move on from.
I suspect you didn't mean that, but then we have a much tricker problem about defining what constitutes ongoing oppressions versus historical grievances for the purpose of such a rule.
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Sir, this situation is arguably harming multiculturalism in the West as a mere side effect
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50 years seems to be too short to me.
this is oxymoron :)
The figure has a directly relevant precedent backing it, however.
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Wow ‘F*** Jews’: Antisemites Vandalize the Office of Bari Weiss’s Media Outlet
I am used to these being hoxes, but this looks legit. At least they spelled 'Israel' correct. Looking at the floor, it appears it was scribbled from inside a building:
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1716196517613281517/photo/2
Id suggest it’s fake because white leftists probably wouldn’t say “fuck Jews”, while both rightists and Muslims have ‘more important’ targets than Bari Weiss, and the only faction ‘critical’ of this IDW stuff is the left.
No idea whether it’s credible, but I don’t agree with your reasoning here. Careful word choice and target selection are not all that likely.
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Having seen videos of people tearing down posters and harassing cars that try to get through their protests I think a lot of people just want to let loose and sow a little chaos and slake some bloodlust and they've been given an excuse.
These people aren't serious revolutionaries anymore than Meatball is, no matter the rhetoric. What do they give a shit if there're more important targets? By definition, those take more work!
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I'm guessing an inside job. Lefties hire lefties even after they've been burned a few times.
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The role of female soldiers in the IDF has always been somewhere between fascinating and horrifying to me. The below post by @CrashedPsychonaut mentions that the capture of an IDF garrison near the border fence involved a number of hapless young female soldiers, isolated at their posts and overrun. I imagine that some of these women were shot and killed, and I presume that others surrendered and were rounded up as hostages; the subsequent fate of these women is very distressing to imagine.
Some quick Googling indicates that approximately 40% of the IDF’s conscript soldiers were female as of 2021, comprising 25% of officers and 18% of combat soldiers. The latter two numbers, and especially the last one, are shockingly high to me. I had been under the impression that the IDF’s female conscripts were overwhelmingly shunted away into positions where a whole lot of things would need to go very unexpectedly wrong before there was any significant chance of them facing real combat. And, to be fair, it seems like in the case of that garrison, a whole lot of things did go very unexpectedly wrong. Still, it’s insane to me that a country with such overwhelmingly security concerns and so many threats surrounding it would put literally any important responsibility in the hands of female soldiers.
I’ve always been under the vague impression that the IDF’s inclusion of so many female soldiers was mostly a PR ploy; filling their ranks with photogenic young women makes people more likely to feel positively-inclined and prescribe towards it. It also allows them to circulate photos of busty women in camo wielding large guns, an archetype which seems to have significant (and, to me, inexplicable) appeal to a certain segment of the American mainstream right. The thought that these smiling young women could actually be sent to the front lines to do hand-to-hand urban combat against battle-hardened men is both inconceivable and appalling to me. I would expect most of them to surrender almost immediately if confronted with life-threatening combat situations. The impact on IDF morale of having a substantial number of its female soldiers captured or killed seems like it would be catastrophic, to say nothing of its practical strategic effects.
Can anyone offer more insight into the role of women in the IDF, and specifically their role in actual combat operations? Both historically and in terms of what we can expect to see in whatever upcoming operations are going to take place as a result of the current crisis?
The IDF uses female soldiers to great effect as trainers and instructors. From what I understand, male soldiers have been shown to be much more attentive and learn better when the instructor is an attractive female. This is what Gal Gadot did in her military service.
Most of the female soldiers in bases that were overrun during the initial attack were "lookouts" (tatspitaniot). Their job is to monitor the surveillance technology that tracks the Gaza border and alert about anything that seems suspicious. I don't think there's any reason to think that they would be at a disadvantage in a job like that compared to a male soldier, and it frees up the male soldier for a combat role which requires his physical abilities.
There are some border patrol units that are now mixed gender, but the traditional infantry and armor units are still male only. There was a famous Supreme Court case a few decades ago that required the IDF to allow women to enter the pilots course, but as I understand it only a handful of women have passed since then.
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I’m not going to call modern combat the same thing as hunting, but a surprisingly large number of women post their big game hunting pics on Facebook groups. Yesterday one posted a picture of a cougar, and she had its dead bloody carcass slung over both shoulders. Another posted a pic of a deer she shot at 400 yards.
Women seem like they can be trained to kill with guns just fine. Are they as good as men? Perhaps not. But are they worse than not having them at all? Definitely not.
The funny thing's that if you really want to go nuts HBD-wise, there's a reasonable argument women have an advantage for some shooting sports and styles, famously including a couple Olympic-level matters.
Whether that extrapolates to combat is a separate matter -- not just for aggression reasons, but because combined small-arms armor and ammo is a lot of weight, which has to be fairly high on the body -- and there are some obvious issues with additional war crimes risks, but it's a funny aspect.
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This cuts both ways: Imagine being so inferior to the IDF that your brave warriors are killed by women
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-769134
Of course because of the fog of war the article is propaganda and scant with information about casualties.
The Ghosts of Tel Aviv they are, I suppose.
ghosts they may be, but they are women ghosts!!
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I've been following this, and it's US Military cousin, for years.
In fact, we've a fresh article on it.
There are two groups of analysis here; individual performance and unit culture.
On individual performance, female combat soldiers, at the median, are far, far worse than their male counterparts. This is to the surprise of no one. In the general population, bone density, upper body strength, and grip strength don't overlap more than 1- 2 % (meaning the bottom 1-2% of males with the top 1-2% of females). Even if a female is very motivated and hits the gym, the amount of room she has to make up is nigh on impossible.
Where this gets compounded is over time and with compounding adversity. What I mean here is that a Superwoman might be able to pass things the a PFT (physical fitness test), marksmanship test, and things like obstacle courses and land nav over a single day on a U.S. base. In the field (and field exercises) however, the compounding of sleep deprivation and multiple days of moving combat loads and speed catches up. I couldn't find the article with quick Googling (I might later), but there was a report in the 2018 range of female US Marines admitting "we can hump the weight of a combat load for a long time, but we just can't move as fast from objective to objective." There's a saying in the SOF community that "selection is everyday." Just because you passed the test that first time and became an infantryman / ranger / SEAL / etc. doesn't mean that you're automatically a super solider for life. You have to work everyday and you have to perform everyday. In Ranger Battalion in the U.S. Army, there's something called RFS or Released For Standards. This means that you get kicked out for not being good enough in one way or another. Often times its leadership related (to keep guys from just making rank by hanging out forever) but it also isn't uncommon for a Ranger to all of a sudden fuck up a PFT because they had been slacking off and drinking every weekend. Back to Superwoman - she might be able to get through an indoc and selection, but I would put the odds of her maintaining those standards in a unit over time to be effectively zero.
Unit culture is the next layer. Every person in a unit is a mix of talents. One guy is a really great shot, and kind of OK at PT. Another guy is a PT stud, but isn't so great at land nav. The unit commander (say at the platoon level) is above average at PT and shooting, but isn't an all around badass, but he does get a bunch of gucci gear because he knows how to do acquisition voodoo. A female (especially enlisted) will, probably, be at the bottom of all of these categories. Her treatment will be no different than a male who is at the bottom of all of those categories; "you're last on the run, you can't shoot straight, you fell asleep on patrol, you can't carry the 240B with a full complement of ammo." It singles you out for extra ridicule and scrutiny. Sure, you're passing all of the minimums and standards, but you aren't great or even good at any one thing. It means the unit has to plan contingency around you always instead of slotting you into things you're good at to compensate for the things you're worse at.
I'll leave it there for now because I think those are the two main and enduring cases against women in combat. There are some edge things that also raise questions; what happens when (and it will happen) a female gets pregnant in combat? Will females potentially use sex to curry favor from peers and superiors (of course not, it's a professional force! that would never happen.
As far as Israeli female combat soldiers go; First, the definition of "combat" is a little stretched. Border guards are one thing (as are pilots), but a maneuver unit (infantry, armor, artillery) is another. Second, the Israeli model is still built heavily on conscripts and reservists supporting the active duty while not being anywhere near the latter's standards. I think the unfortunately reality is that many female Israeli "combat" soldiers didn't quite get into combat by choice.
Yeah this part I think is relevant. The two most well-known (read: PR profiles of them) high percentage female infantry units are the 33rd Caracal and the 41st Lions of Jordan battalions stationed in relatively (and relative here being very operative) safe border areas. The area the 33rd are supposed to have been was overrun by Hamas during the 10/7 assault so not that safe.
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How much less effective do you expect a woman to be in an average MOS?
I would expect the most difference in extreme positions (special forces) and those requiring the most brute strength. Kicking down doors and lugging heavy weapons, for example. But my intuition is that aiming and shooting a rifle—or manning a checkpoint—is roughly as easy for women as men. Per @naraburns’ link, the IDF seems to agree, and is disinclined to put women in the 10% most strenuous positions. Though it also says most armored units are male-only, and I can’t tell why that would be more physically demanding.
Re: Armor units. They have their own cultural flavor. To the point where my friends who are officers can spot dudes in the calvary from a distance.
It's not the sort of culture that attracts women.
I’m not even sure if the IDF cav is volunteer/professional or if conscripts can be assigned to it. If the latter, then culture isn’t necessarily the deciding factor.
The original article statement was that 90% of jobs were “equally available” to men and women. Exceptions included urban commando units and some armored crews. Sounds like they wouldn’t even take volunteers, not that there weren’t enough of them.
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120mm cannon shells weigh something like 50 pounds, and the loader needs to sling them fast in a combat situation. .50 browning ammo is likewise bulky and heavy. Gas cans and hoses are heavy. Maintenance tools for tanks, equipment for tanks generally and the tasks involved, especially in the field, all are likely to involve a fair amount of strenuous activity. Think of the physical stereotypes for truckers and mechanics, or other jobs involving heavy machinery.
You mean to say a high schooler wouldn't be able to do it with ease?
She does appear to be struggling.
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Can’t believe I forgot about loading. Good point.
It is not only loading. On average Abrams tank requires 8 manhours of maintenance for 1 hour of operation. That is one of the reasons why Abrams is so big with crew of 4 instead of 3 and autoloader for Russian tanks: the fourth crew member is indispensable when it comes to making sure the tank is operational, as crew of four working on a tank will decrease the ratio of 8:1 to 2:1 with some redundancy there.
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Even with a fully automated military making warfare something closer to Call of Duty, there's no reason to expect a meritocratic force to be anywhere close to parity. How many top Call of Duty players are female?
You’ve lost me.
I don’t think I said anything about parity? There are apparently 10% of IDF jobs which don’t allow women outright.
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why you think so? have you checked how it worked so far?
They are pushed into position such as support roles at airports, drone operators, in observation posts (last one worked out poorly this time).
That’s why I’m asking people who are more knowledgeable about specific history to weigh in. I’m not pretending to have any significant background knowledge on the topic. I have my intuitions based on my observations of human behavior, but I would like to have those intuitions confirmed or disconfirmed by actual examples or research. I wouldn’t really know where to start in terms of finding out how effective female soldiers have been throughout the history of the IDF, and I don’t think I would be able to trust the information I would find using my rudimentary searching skills.
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From the Israeli point of view, there never was a choice. The women are already in the fight whether they like it or not, might as well teach them to be good at it.
Israel is a tiny place, about the size of New Hampshire. It has porous borders, which due to the settlements, cannot practically be secured. Israel's enemies are visually identical and do not wear uniforms. Violence can, and will, pop up anywhere, and Israel's enemies prefer to target women and children.
Israeli women are combatants, whether they like it or not. Giving them the training, experience, and equipment to deal with that unfortunate fact seems to be the only logical step.
There's a bit of a perversity here though, in that while apparently women cannot be spared from combat, Haredi Jews can. Okay, fair enough if you're in an existential fight for survival and you need all the soldiers you can get, male or female. But for women to be drafted into combat while men stay safe behind them studying the Torah is gross to me.
This is politics, unfortunately. But since the Hamas attack thousands of Haredim have volunteered to be drafted.
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Haredi participation in the IDF has been growing, actually leading to conflicts about the gender-integrated nature of the IDF.
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Unsettling though that might be, there are a lot more women than Haredim. Apparently this was even more true in 1948, and the original exemption only covered a few hundred
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Let's be honest - a woman captured by an enemy - especially Jewish woman by hamas - her end will be worse, prolonged and more painful than that of men if they have the time to soare. Women have a huge vulnerability that a small weak men don't. Hamas are not equal opportunities gang rapists.
And you have to ballance that. So it is best if they are not on the first line, especially against the likes of Hamaa/ISIS - then save the last bullet for yourself is probably a good advice.
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I can’t tell if your main objection is that you think they’re completely useless or if it’s a chivalry/”we must protect the eggs” thing. Every ‘defense’ of women on that subject straddles that line. Do you have any reason to assume male soldiers would have been more effective in the towers?
As for me, though I applaud the IDF’s efforts, I don’t think 18% (and corresponding casualties – though they are not corresponding at present) is quite cutting it, politically speaking. Women’s voting rights, all voting rights (like those of pacifists), should be curtailed to the group's casualty/combat proportion, ie, 18% would mean they get less than a quarter the voting power of a man. Political power ultimately derives from the barrel of a gun. One man, one gun, one pint of blood, one vote. We in the west, by and large living on “strategic islands”, can afford to ignore that reality, but israel cannot carry freeloaders indefinitely.
No but probably would have gotten a cleaner/faster death
From what I have read about the attack and the atrocities - when hamas had time and were feeling playful it was the women and children that paid the higher price.
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¿Por qué no los dos?
Look, I’ve never served in the military and never seen combat. I’ve never watched anybody die. I’ve never even been in a fistfight. It’s possible that my intuitions around this issue are totally miscalibrated.
But yes, it does seem very likely to me that the modal female soldier is substantially less effective in close combat than the modal male soldier is. There are very significant differences in temperament, personality, hormonal distribution, etc., between men and women. Testosterone levels alone would seem incredibly relevant to one’s performance in a fast-moving and harrowing scenario in which a combination of violent aggression, mental clarity under pressure, and quick and decisive reactions are required.
I’m not suggesting that women are useless, but simply that their usefulness in combat is considerably outweighed by the importance of their survival as future bearers of children. And also, as I mentioned, it seems that combat morale and unit cohesion are impacted significantly and negatively by the presence of women, at least according to studies that have been published. Again, the idea of large numbers of young women being put in direct harm’s way and then being captured to later be raped or tortured is utterly appalling to me, and would seem likely to have a significant mental effect on IDF soldiers in a way over and above the effect of a similar number of male soldiers being captured or killed.
I am not a soldier. But I am on the far end of the distribution for ‘ability to deal with killing’. I’m not a psychopath, I don’t like slaughtering animals though nor do I find it burdensome, but there is a surprising number of full grown men- and an unsurprisingly huge number of women- who can’t directly kill a complex mammal. I have watched full grown and not effeminate men have crying fits over slaughtering lambs and hogs; talked to toughened older men with no shortage of trauma who recounted near tears in their eyes that, working at the slaughterhouse when younger, they insisted on moving from the kill side to the cut side because killing cattle was too difficult to deal with psychologically.
And the biggest correlate of the ability to just put a gun up against an animal’s head, pull the trigger now it’s dead, eat it for dinner or send it to the freezer, is having a beard along your whole jawline. I presume this has something to do with testosterone. And obviously people aren’t animals, I hope I never have to find out whether I can kill a person without flinching. But regardless, ‘difficulty with killing an animal in a calm, cold way’ is probably very strongly correlated with ‘inability to kill your enemies without panicking and doing stupid things out of instinct’. And I suspect the distribution between the two sexes is such that 99.8% of humans with the latter ability are male.
I think you need to differentiate killing humans versus killing animals. I think it's common for people to be more disturbed by videos of animal cruelty than even the most gruesome tortures and executions of human beings. I wouldn't assume that someone who has difficulty killing an animal would have difficulty killing a person that they felt justified in killing.
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That is extreme claim, and I doubt that it is true (from proxies like violently abusive women).
1:499 seems way too extreme to me.
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I don't have direct personal experience here either, but I am a connoisseur of police bodycam footage. Having watched well over a thousand of them at this point (I know because I download them and can count how many are in the folder), I can confidently offer my opinion, whatever it's worth, that women are indeed substantially worse than men at dealing with life or death situations, on average. And presumably female police officers are already a more selective group than female conscripts in this regard.
There are commendable exceptions, of course, but in general I notice women are just far more likely to become paralyzed with fear or behave erratically and clumsily, doing things like confusing their gun for a taser, or confusing their taser for a gun and just generally exhibiting less courage and tactical intuition and improvisation. The difference in physical strength obviously comes into play, too.
Given the obvious difference in evolutionary pressure between the sexes with regards to violence, I think our baseline expectation, even in the absence of evidence and anecdotes, should be that there's a significant sex difference here.
Funny thing is, in another context this is used as a defense of women (e.g. Don Lemon got a bunch of shit for asking why an assault victim froze up instead of fighting - or biting - back)
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Here's one of the most amazing videos I've seen, where a female cop shoots the wrong person after allowing an awful situation to brew, and a male cop shows up and regulates in 5 seconds: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RguOVwO2PjA
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The quantity of wombs is not the limiting factor in human reproduction anymore. If societies cared, they would draft women's wombs like they draft men's lives.
I don't recognize the need to accomodate your squeamishness, rooted as it is in disregard for the lives of my kind. What is rape to death? However, if you feel that strongly about it, you could shelter one woman from her obligations by taking on both her duty and yours, bleeding twice. Just as long as I don't have to do double-duty myself.
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Last time I checked, the IDF was fighting with assault rifles and the like, not sticks and stones.
If you get hit with an assault rifle, there will be little difference if the shooter was a man, woman or child.
I think it would be sensible to tie commando roles to physical ability, which would make them overwhelmingly male, but sometimes you just want a warm body with a rifle.
Child soldiers exist, and likely are on average weaker than adult women. If they were very ineffective (like one adult male being as effective as ten of them) African warlords would likely prefer to use their limited amount of weapons to arm adults (even though they are harder to control).
And if you go to complex weapon systems, the male advantage gets even smaller. Even if there was some inherent male advantage to steering drones or driving trucks, you likely have so many drones and trucks that you will look for "ok" and not "best of the best" when hiring.
I do not share your intuition that women are more likely to surrender in life-threatening situations. Especially when the enemy is Hamas, where the only sex difference in a surrender outcome is that they might rape women before they kill them.
Weapons are not exactly in low supply in Africa.
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Their combat role is supposed to be limited, due to obvious physiological differences.
I have never seen it stated in so many words, but my impression is that a big factor here is sheer numbers. When PM Ben-Gurion implemented the draft, the population of Israel was about 1.5 million. Israel's Muslim/Arab neighbors were not then inclined to train or field female soldiers at all, but in the fight against the existence of Israel there was no need: they were (and are) substantially more numerous. I cannot tell you whether the Six-Day War could have been won without the conscripting of women; perhaps it is so. But in the history that happened, conscripting of women was baked in as part of Israel's strategy, and that strategy carried the day. So here we are.
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Pretty interesting analysis of the complex systems fuckup that the Hamas attack was:
...
In my tech career I've always treated monitors that have lost signal with the same priority as the monitored value exceeding some critical bounds. The idea being that without signal, the monitored value very well could be in a critical state, and loss of signal itself could be caused by some greater issue.
I have no military experience. Does the military not do something similar? For example, a lost camera feed must be treated as an attack until proven otherwise.
To support your point from an IT perspective, at a previous job, the server monitoring system malfunctioning is what tipped me off to a ransomware attack being triggered. Of course, as with anything this has to be calibrated so there aren't so many false positives that alerts or downtime is ignored, but an otherwise robust system going down for seemingly no reason should arouse suspicion.
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I'd be curious to see a timeline of the entire event. Maybe they were able to time it quickly enough that the people monitoring these things didn't have a proper chance to respond before the para-gliders were on top of them.
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The failure rate on, say, CCTV cameras is high enough that it’s not tenable.
Source: my manager was assigned to Afghanistan as a surveillance contractor. He noted that they had to run the cables between cameras at the top of the walls, or rats would chew them overnight. And they’d still try their best to get at the anchor points.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work
The whole point of running a surveillance system is to freak out when something goes wrong, even if it's rats 99.9% of the time. We have a burglar alarm at our summer cabin and so far it has been triggered only by power loss or by one of the family members tripping it because the were deep in their thoughts. I am sure it's the same for everyone else in the area and a sign that says "This home is protected by Unity Security Services" is enough of a deterrent. But the deterrent only works if you actually know that if you trip the alarm, the patrol will be there quicker than you can get that TV over the fence, even if 99% of the time they are met by the embarrassed owner who really had to take a dump pronto.
Or take fire drills. Can you imagine how terrible it is to walk all the way from the 70th floor of your skyscraper after you've sprained your ankle jogging? You need to find that weird-looking wheelchair with grippy runners, find someone willing to push it down one hundred and thirty eight flights of stairs, it's always raining when there's a fire drill because why wouldn't it, and then you have to limp back to the elevators and explain to your boss why your report is overdue. You sprain your ankle on September 10th, 2001 and limp to work the next day.
That's a fine theory, but it goes against human nature to expect people to not detect patterns like: each time I investigate, it turns out to be a rat. So you then need a mechanism to prevent people from acting normally, which is a hard problem to solve.
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it seems to me that this kind of mass attack will always succeed to some extent. maybe it was made worse in this particular situation for a bunch of reasons but even if everything went right for the israelis i think hamas would have had some kind of success. unless you have some kind of massive DMZ and large permanent deployment of troops an enemy will always be able to surge at a critical point and have some short term success.
There are different definitions of success. Palestinians breaching into Israel and having engagements with IDF is one thing. The slaughter and carnage that ensured is different.
You can make Israel bleed - it is not hard to do. Making it hurt is harder. And however we cut it - on tactical level it's win for Hamas.
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This is interesting, and it's nice to have confirmation (?kinda? I'm not sure how much to trust this guy) of some suspected details, or at least someone else suspecting them, but a lot of these raise further questions than they answer.
The author loves the KISS principle, and he's not wrong, but the details he's proposing are less descriptions of a complex system falling so much as a fragile system failing unnoticed. I really hope that the IDF's tower comms were not solely 'cellular', but even if he's using that as a shorthand for a combination of cellular, microwave point-to-point, and packet radio (LoRA's cheap!) that I'd consider the bare minimum for a short-term deployment, this stuff's been deployed for close to a decade and there's really no excuse to not have physical ground links and conventional radio installations. The threat of drone-delivered explosives has been present in the public info since 2017, and commercially-available data links are notoriously fragile not just to attacks but even to stuff like nearby lightning strikes.
You can't harden these things against every possible attack, but you can have enough physically separate systems that anything breaking too many of them is an obvious attack, and at least some of these tools can treat an unnatural down state from a natural one, (and some, like flares, can be a signal only available when nothing is an option). Which sounds like ass-covering, but the counterfactual environment where you had a hundred IDF soldiers on a wall against a thousand-plus Hamas soldiers with a lot of explosives still sounds like an environment where you need to call for backup, and cellular is the obvious and simple and wrong answer there, too.
Which doesn't speak to the broader point, but leaves me concerned about how precise the rest of the analysis is.
This is largely my thinking too. The original wireless communications setup is cost effective for hundreds of kilometers of perimeter, but centralised failure points like towers are too vulnerable. Buried cable is more expensive, but resistant to jamming or drone/rpg attacks. There needs to be much more redundancy in communications.
The other major issue is probably the majority of guards running for bunkers under the rocket attack, seemingly without means to shelter in place or to monitor the perimeter. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and presume CCTV monitors in the bunkers, but the monitors are useless if cameras were taken out and they can't physically observe the fenceline.
Regarding KISS, I think the author is conflating multiple overlaying and interconnected barriers (as in Defense in Depth) with the systems reliance on the comms tower. He's right that there shouldn't be a single point of failure for the majority of the systems in place (which seemed to be the case). There should be redundancy and the use of multiple technologies and procedures carried out by humans. Flares, Radio, heck even periscopes from the bunkers could all have been useful as failsafes. These multiple systems should ideally function independently, and by doing so become a nightmare to overcome in an assault.
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Seems like Saudi's leadership / MBS is tasking at least one religious authority (Imam? Ulema? mufti?) to tell people in Saudia to not talk about Gaza anymore (quote-tweeted video on twitter).
Quote tweeter Sam Hamdi writes:
The Original video comes from here, with the translated comment is:
It has a
#غزة_تستغيثtag, which seems to mean "Gaza is crying out for help", which leads me to think the poster is perhaps against religious leaders prohibiting their congregations from political discourse. I cannot tell if this original poster was being sarcastic, as their follow up tweet says:Taken together, some questions / thoughts:
My understanding was that the fundamental basis for the Saudi state was a unification of interests between the royal house of Saud's exercise of secular power to keep order for and on behalf of the Wahhabist religious sect. In particular, the Saudi's maintenance of holy sites (primarily, but not exclusively, Mecca) and the annual hajj pilgramage, is a major source of prestige and legitimacy.
The basis for the House of Saud’s ruling of Saudi Arabia is the British decision at the end of empire. There is little further basis than that.
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well the King plays a real role in the religions, as the Custodian of Mecca and Medina. Definitely prestigue/power. Unsure about Wahhabism as I thought that came later?
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Every so often you get reminded just how based absolute monarchy is.
Didn’t MBS give Kushner a few billion to manage just to stay in the Trump family’s good books? MBS must know that if Trump’s in power then a combination of his own family and friends, his closeness to various conservative zionists, his moving of the embassy, congressional republicans including neocons and evangelicals, and various other things will drive him invariably to take a hardline (moreso than Biden) pro-Israel stance.
If that happens and Saudi Arabia is on the ‘Arab’ side of that kind of conflict, that risks his whole play with Kushner, risks support versus Iran and with the Houthis etc. Most Arab leaders clearly want this to go away as soon as possible, even if the status quo returns to where it was (which they were largely fine with).
My understanding is Kushner is managing the $2 billion (and collecting fees on it) but was not given the $2 billion.
Isn't that a fun trick of wordplay? It would be fair to say "Alice gave her car to Bob" if Bob is working the Valet Parking dropoff, but leave out that bit of context and suddenly the still-technically-accurate statement becomes grossly misleading. Bob is probably getting a nice tip for a nice car, but in the end he's not getting a nice car.
Most of the reporting I've seen on Kushner has been clear about the distinction, but not all...
Eh, giving kusher 2 bn to manage so he can collect fees is like giving him like $20 million each year while his expenses will be minimal (he could literally stick it in an index fund and laugh all the way to the bank), not as blatant as giving him 2 bn, but still giving him a substantial amount.
I basically see this as bribery with extra steps.
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With my little amount of knowledge, I'd say that MBS wants to steer the narrative in a particular way, and that he does indeed expect theocratic fiat to just work even in an age of social media.
I would further expect theocratic fiat to work better on the segment of the Saudi population which deeply cares about Israel/Palestine, moreso than the segment which doesn’t.
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/biden-says-netanyahu-agrees-to-allow-continued-flow-of-humanitarian-aid-to-gaza/
Israel bent the knee, unsurprisingly. The siege is all but broken. There are also reports floating around that the US is pressuring Israel to delay the invasion. The Israelis basically tried a genteel version of ethnic cleansing by enticing Egypt to take them in, apparently with the blessing of EU+US. But it flopped and the Egyptians told the Europeans that the refugees would be allowed to stream into Europe the first possible moment. Given the explosive politics re: mass migration in Europe, I suspect the Europeans got cold feet and backed off.
So we're seeing two different versions of reality playing out. Israeli statements continue to be incredibly hawkish and all-but-confirming an invasion. Meanwhile the US is undercutting and undermining those efforts by either reversing or delaying Israeli decisions. If Israel will not be able to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip - which it transparently wants to do - then I don't see how they are not walking straight into a trap here.
You can’t really get away with what Israel wants in the 21st century in this context. Too many Muslims care too much about this particular conflict, and there are two billion of them now. Occupying without either indoctrinating, killing or driving out the 2 million locals will accomplish nothing.
The only high casualty thing that could have ‘worked’ (not really) is if Israel had carpet bombed Gaza and killed maybe 100,000 of them in the first day after the Hamas attacks, then it could have been rolled into some general numbness and slipped under the radar. The longer you wait, the more time the NGO and media apparatus has to prepare the narrative. Presidencies are kind of similar, hence the importance of getting whatever you want done ASAP before institutions respond to your methods.
The only outcome for Israel and Gaza is the continued locking up of the Palestinians indefinitely. The Arabs don’t want them, and neither does anyone else. As @orthoxerox says, they’ll fortify the Gaza border to make a ground invasion much more difficult, then call it a day.
Invading Gaza without ethnically cleansing the local population is strategically idiotic. Israel doesn’t have the resources to go full Xinjiang yet, it might be feasible with AI and modern tech in general but would be an extraordinary expense and lead to a permanent stream of bad PR with the Muslim world because unlike Xinjiang they’d have to let international observers and media in.
and what can they possibly do? Americans are vastly outnumbered by Chinese, Hindus, etc. Americans have always been outnumbered, yet this does not stop it from throwing its weight around. This is similar Taleb's argument on Twitter, which is that upsetting these Muslims is a potential 'Black Swan' event; I disagree. It's only a tiny percentage of Muslims , mostly in the Middle East, that are going to take up arms.
I mean, Israel has had to fight wars against multiple neighbours simultaneously on repeated occasions. It's not that outlandish to imagine it happening again.
And yeah, they won all those wars. But they only need to lose once.
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I'd argue it's a favorable ethnic ratio, not resources, that Israel lacks to go full Xinjiang.
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I've heard before that Egypt and Jordan don't want Palestinians, but do we know why? Is it the raw number of immigrants or the fact that their Palestinian? I don't get it.
Letting radicalized refugee populations into your country is destabilizing and dangerous generally. In particular, the Arab states near Israel are not particularly stable, vulnerable to Islamist appeals, and have a history of sneakily collaborating with Israel under the table while denouncing them in public that would not endear them to their new Palestinian residents. Most of all, they remember the fairly disastrous war that previous generations of Palestinian refugees waged on the Jordanian state.
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Letting Palestinian refugees in would in effect abet whatever Israeli aims there are to drive Arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza. I'm not sure the Egyptian or Jordanian regime would want to be seen as doing something like that.
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While the main reasons for the direct neighbors were already mentioned (Muslim Brotherhood, civil war, attacks on Israel which invite reprisals), for the bigger well established, oil-rich Muslim countries further away from Israel, one reason might be that they see the Gazans as a welcome thorn in Israels side. You would think that the Iranian or Qatari leadership, if they really cared about that Palestinians being subjected to "war crimes", the first thing they would do would be to open their borders to refugees. Instead, they sponsor Hamas.
Just so, they don't hate Israel because they support Palestine. They support Palestine because they hate Israel.
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Palestinian migrants were also major contributor to Lebanon civil war and its current state.
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Both. It'd be a massive humanitarian crisis just by raw numbers, but every country anywhere near that area knows of Jordan's past principled commitment to generosity and absolutely doesn't want to be them.
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Hamas is an offshoot of the people the current Egyptian government overthrew a couple years back. Last time Jordan let in a significant number of Palestinians, it led to a civil war.
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Muslims wouldn't hate Israel any more if Israel genocided the Palestinians, and the memory of a massacre in the past likely wouldn't keep the hatred in the forefront of their minds the way the occasional flare-ups do. The problem is Israel would lose the support of the west (and quite possibly many of their own people) if they did that.
If the history of Israel teaches us anything, it's that these Abrahamic religions don't hold a grudge about genocide and ethnic cleansing!
Most people are scope insensitive. If Hitler killed only half as many Jews, do you think he would be any more popular with the survivors?
If Israel killed 5000 Gazans instead of the 500 Hamas claimed they killed in that one instance, do you suppose that ten times as many Muslims would protest?
Like The_Nybbler said, Western response is one constraint on genocide. Another is that violence begets violence. If Israel turned Gaza into a parking lot, that would technically solve their Hamas problem. It would also change how the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians would feel about them and the prospect of peaceful coexistence. They might even face violent opposition from the liberal Jewish population. Unless they are willing to go full Macbeth and just murder their way into some totalitarian theocracy, they would be in a worse spot than where they started out.
I actually think the numbers do matter. If Israel kills, directly or indirectly, 50,000 Gazans it is way different than 5,000. People start to know people individually affected. International reaction is different. Refugee pressures increase proportionally. Unrest spreads and worsens in the West Bank. Iran starts to feel more tempted to get involved directly. Hezbollah, who for now seems to be totally disinterested in getting pulled into another massive war and getting Beirut leveled again, starts to feel pressure to actually do something.
Scope isn’t the only thing that matters and is often fallible (i.e. doesn’t solely determine responses or determine them absolutely). But it sure as hell does matter all the same.
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How does this work? Cannot Europeans simply deny the refugees passage on grounds that Egypt is already a safe country for them?
…Is what I wanted to say, but it seems that, even irrespective of European squeamishness, the law does not stipulate that refugees can be turned down on these grounds.
Pretty neat.
that is untrue, for start EU has setup internal enforcement of that
and ignoring this kind of international treaties reduces seriousness of given country demands to others to also follow them (or similar)
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I do not believe that any law is ontologically binding, and European countries have displayed general willingness to abide by the international law (which they've pioneered in codifying). So it is in fact important what the law says.
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The Europeans could do a wide range of things, both inside and outside the ambit of international law. Pakistan is expelling nearly 2 million Afghan immigrants. However, there is no will to use force to keep large waves of immigrants outside of Europe - that has been rendered so morally-unconscionable in their view that just about any justification to ignore the problem or refrain from action will be accepted.
Polish border guards routinely used force (in ways considered illegal by some) and were kicking migrants back to Belarus. Curiously, it was one of things where Brussels was not really complaining (despite hating PiS).
Google for example "push back Poland migrants"
I stand corrected, but would suggest that Poland, Denmark, and Hungary, are very much the exceptions that prove the rule (e.g. Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Greece, UK, etc.)
I agree, though Greece pushed back in 2020. After
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Greek%E2%80%93Turkish_border_crisis
Oh, and Poland also granted massive number of visa (see also bribery scandal) if someone wants to complain. And avoids economical migrants from Africa mostly by being poor.
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So? The goal is to boil the frog, not to have it jump out of the pot.
That is a different issue/topic. But claim that none is willing to use violence is simply false.
(and to discuss this one, specifying whose goal would be needed for start)
The statement that the European political establishment is not willing to use enough force top stop mass-immigration is correct. The fact that some European countries are willing to use some force to make the immigration slightly less massive does not change that.
remains definitely untrue
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Also, Greeks used force and pushbacks with at least implicit support from EU during the Greek-Turkish border crisis of 2020 (which has been memoryholed pretty efficiently due to Covid restrictions starting at the same time.)
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This is a self-imposed constraint no? The US and Canada made a deal that prevents refugees cherrypicking one or the other. I guess people can accuse the CanUS of violating international law in that regard, but nobody cares as far as I can tell.
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What Europe will eventually do is find some offshore country to use as a prison for migrants, but there will probably be another few years of huge flows, terror attacks etc before that happens.
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Even if it weren't the law, once a refugee is on your soil it's practically impossible to return them anywhere without the consent of another country. If someone shows up on the shores of Sicily with no papers and no other country wants them what can you even do? You can't stick them on a piece of driftwood and kick them back into the ocean.
Indefinite jail or send them back to be some one else's problem.
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I'm not sure that Israel wants or would prefer 'genteel' ethnic cleansing, even ignoring the US and EU reactions to such a thing. Some of the individual settler-groups, sure, but from the IDF's perspective it's kinda a white elephant. And as bad as the issue of the Gazan Strip is today, at least the IDF wasn't considering a war with Egypt every time a few hitch-hikers get kidnapped.
Of course, on the flip side, I don't think Egypt wants to handle just the civilians who want to leave the Strip, or just the civilians for only a few months, and is willing to threaten to mass ship them to the EU even if Israel could credibly commit, and Israel can't credibly commit. So it doesn't really matter.
On the gripping hand, there were a lot of options on the table that involved ground forces (or prolonged active bombing campaigns), without permanently taking the Gaza Strip, but I'm not sure the delays -- especially in when combined with unsearch humanitarian aid -- are compatible with them. Maybe Biden's just trying to buy time before those more energetic efforts start, either to try to line up some Muslim custodian government or for hostage negotiation or both, but a lot of stuff coming from the White House right now seem like they're just pivoting really hard to the Squad alignment.
Which... boots on the ground in the Gazan Strip seems like a recipe for years of bloodbaths, so maybe that just works out? But there's a limit to the model of war as politics by other means. Trivially, 'just barrier down Hamas and lob a bomb in there when you spot someone with a big hat' was the pre-2023 Likud philosophy, and it doesn't seem like there's some obvious way to prevent a re-occurrence of 10/7 or some similar category of catastrophe. Yes, obviously the intel failures and work permit program and some imports will be getting a lot of scrutiny, but that's a really fancy way of saying 'try again harder' that isn't likely to be perfect for forty years.
And even if you can persuade Netanyahu to make the 'right' decision today, there's little or no reason to suspect that he'll be in charge forever: the opposing coalition is in a double-digit lead right now, and not especially dovish right now. If you persuade them without persuading the people voting for them, they'll just get replaced in turn. And if you could persuade the broader populace, you wouldn't need to set up a game of musical chairs for the political leadership.
What stuff? The SoS dissent memo? +?
SoS dissent memo? I tried various searches but couldn't figure out what you're referring to.
I think referring to this, unless I misunderstood. It's been claimed to have 400+ signatories, but I don't know if a draft has been made publicly available or how much I trust those numbers.
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I have no idea what extent, if any, the State dissent memo has any real meaning, or even if the claimed numbers are genuine.
Providing aid and funding to Hamas without credible commitments against military use or for searches by a third party to limit weapons smuggling is what I'd consider failing to bring table stakes. The public emphasis on antisemitism and Islamophobia wouldn't be nutty if it came from Red Tribers, but for the same reason that All Lives Matters were unacceptable slogans for two years straight, it's a very specific sort of message to have on an official account. (EDIT: the message has now turned into just Islamophobia). More generally, there's been no serious (and arguably no) Sister Souljah moment in response to the Squad and especially Tliab, even as they've gotten pretty brazen.
This was the Sister Souljah moment, I'd say.
Also, I would guess that this widely reported attack probably served as the motivator for the official White House condemnation of Islamophobia.
That's fair, but despite the objections of a lot of soccons, I don't think AOC is in the White House.
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Yeah, a lot of this has been pretty mask off from the left, and it seems like the mask off part is just how little control the ‘moderates’/‘adults in the room’/establishment whatever you want to call it has over the activist class.
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Having a heavily-mined no-man's land on your side of the border fence? There's a strip that is tens to a hundred meters wide already, make it 500m everywhere, dig anti-vehicle ditches, build electric fences, saturate the ground with landmines, turn the only remaining border crossing into a fortress.
Points for thinking about it, but I'm skeptical on both the political and pragmatic side.
Israel isn't a signatory to the Ottowa Treaty, but large deployments of landmines near a civilian area would be a long-lasting cause celebre even before some teenager became an example, and their use in the past at the West Bank / Golan Heights in much more conventional military contexts had previously been a matter of a lot of international fuckery. There are also just pretty high upper limits to the utility of landmines in an open environment where your sappers would be near-constantly observed. Electric fences are so simultaneously useless (defeated by gloves!) and politically controversial that they've been a goto slur for electronic monitoring.
A lot of the remainder of your suggests are just things already present, but harder, in ways that may not be possible. Israel hadn't closed all but one border crossing, but the number of crossings dropped dramatically from 2005-2011, culminating in the closure of the Karni crossing, while the remaining handful had been heavily fortified. Of the three major remaining ones, Rafah is in Egyptian territory and Kerem Shalom is politically necessary as part of relationships with Egypt. There's already some use of anti-vehicle ditches and other terrain.
10/7 seems like it depended on overwhelming observation, surveillance, and quick-response features so fast and so heavily that the IDF response took hours; I'm not seeing how 500m would have changed much of it.
And, yes, as 2fara points out, you need to block of not just the tactics from 10/7, but the whole class of any successful attack of this scale.
Put millions of mines behind your barrier wall. So only people who breached it are going to explode.
Do not put random mines in Gaza or on fields.
Just dump massive amounts of them?
I think you’re overestimating the efficiency of land mines. They aren’t just dump-and-forget. See this manual for some of the complexities involved. Note in particular figure 2-2: possible effects of minefields. Disrupt the enemy, slow him down, turn him towards a different angle of approach…or maybe, maybe stop his advance. All of these are only considered effective when combined with integrated fires. In other words, if you give the enemy a passive obstacle, he will circumvent it.
Getting enough mines to cover the border is achievable. At which point irregular forces of terrorists just…start tossing explosives in that direction. Sending dogs or prisoners out to find—or make—a path. They don’t even have to exploit any gaps, just waste Israeli time and money repairing and replacing static obstacles.
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Yes, having a sterile (buffer) zone between two fence lines with clear signage is the way to go here. There would not be children wandering in. Intruders would have to deliberately defeat the outer fence before wandering into the mine field.
Edit: A big vulnerability is tunneling. A captive motivated population with a lot of time on their hands can dig more tunnels. There are vibration sensors for this, but deploying them along the entire border would be a very expensive prospect.
Ignorant question: how expensive? Vibration sensors range from like @$0.50 for "cheap vibration-triggered switch for your kid's Arduino project" to @$1000+ for "high-frequency accelerometer for your industrial turbine", but I have no idea where in that range (or beyond it?) a tunneling detector would fall ... nor how many such detectors they'd need per linear distance.
You really want a digital seismometer network. Google cache indicates that digital seismometers used to be advertised on Amazon for $8999 each. Which is a steal for defense technology, but the real engineering costs probably come from setting up the network and the analysis software to detect tunnelling without triggering on nearby trucks or nearby uses of bunker-busting munitions.
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You're honest in your ignorance, but I am too. I don't have a cost per kilometer (200km?) vs depth of tunnel detection analysis. I just know that tunnel detection vs video motion analysis, vs drone/para-glider detection across the entire Gaza border needs to be calculated, put into a brief, and given to cabinet. They'll run those numbers against whatever the ethnic cleansing numbers are and eventually make a decision.
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there would be, but at that point it blame would be far more clearly on people that forced them.
(see also Iranian approach to demining: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53791/during-the-iran-iraq-war-did-the-iranians-use-small-children-to-trip-land-mines )
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I have a strong suspicion that the Americans and Europeans would happily help foot the bill in exchange for closing off various Israeli revenge options.
The real question is how the to deal with the tunnels themselves once detected. If you're going the landmine route, I've heard unironic advocacy for digging a moat around gaza from the Mediterranean. Not particularly well thought advocacy, probably, but unironic, with the premise of 'if tunnel detected, flood it.'
I would actually stick with a dual fence sterile zone without mines, supported by CCTV, vibration sensors and a (QRF) response force . Largely for pragmatic maintenance reasons.
A moat could be defeated given time (and planning). It would potentially prevent the use of heavy vehicles, but would otherwise be useless against tunneling, or even ground based assault with bridging (planned ahead of time).
Most modern security theory revolves around risk management and the concept that breaches are unavoidable. It is more about detecting and responding to the breach, and where possible, mitigating the damage.
With an open checkbook, it could be done. Israeli defense force would have to commit.
Edit: As for counter tunneling, there are many ways to respond as long as the tunnel can be detected early enough. which is likely with a large enough sterile zone to accommodate fly over LIDAR (which is problematic in urban areas). Tunneling is slow, so detection is a larger issue than response. Again, vibration sensors are expensive.
Wait, isn’t that more or less how it already worked?
Oh. Well, I guess they kept the idea.
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The issue is that that’s preparing for a war that already happened, not whatever they might come up with with Iran’s help in the future.
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As an aside, how many people using this phrase have actually read the eponymous book? I picked the practice from the Wiki (the Wiki, the original one), but I haven't read anything by Niven other than the first few Ringworld novels. This reminds me of people that use "clay" when discussing about territorial claims without realizing it comes from polandball comics.
I dunno how common it is to use the phrase without being familiar with the book. At least in my case, I read the first two, though I haven't gotten around to Outies.
The phrase was important enough in the story to be the title and a central conceit of the second book, but the Moties series never had the cultural niche of Ringworld, even among scifi fans. While the phrase itself ended up in the Jargon File (and without a lot of the important context), it's kinda important to the series and the phrase's early use among hackers that it be not just the third item in a list, but that it also represent something unexpected or breaking from a false belief of only two options.
The Mote In God's Eye is much weaker as a character story, but I'd argue it's better as speculative fiction than Known Space series. And I say that not just as a specific critique of genetic luck or the Fruit of Life stuff.
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