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Notes -
A Gazan hospital has been hit, allegedly by a missile, allegedly by an Israeli missile: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/least-500-victims-israeli-air-strike-hospital-gaza-health-ministry-2023-10-17/
Here is why this seems incredibly unlikely to me:
Israel gains nothing from this.
Israel loses a lot from this.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. whatever amalgamation of actors here are opposing Israel have demonstrated that they are willing to strike their own people.
Hamas etc. gain a lot from this (politically).
The narrative around this is already forming and I suspect that we will never be free of knowing that Israel for sure bombed a hospital (maybe they did).
This will be a major inflection point in this war. Causalities are approaching 1000 people (started at 500, now at 800)
Edit: here’s also why I’m so suspicious of this. If it’s true that Israel bombed this hospital, it basically evaporates any amount of good will I had for them. The 10/7 Hamas attacks were terrible. This is just as bad. Pull our aircraft carriers back, no aid, nothing. Still send in some bad hombres to get our citizens out, but other than that Israel is on its own, and I don’t want to hear any ridiculous moralizing from any us politician ever again.
Edit2: There are allegedly demonstrations happening in several countries now. Extremely dynamic news environment. Nobody knows wtf is going on. Israel is starting to get their narrative together about the cause of this, but it's way too late for them to get ahold of it.
Edit3: allegedly a video of both the initial rocket launch, as well as the explosion: https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1714379242983846126
This matches up with the very first video of the rocket hitting the hospital, and answers why the guy filming was filming (because there were a bunch of rockets going overhead)
Israel's ambassador to UK just invoked firebombing of Dresden as a justification, that makes me think they would absolutely blow up a hospital.
It's interesting reading A.Vorobey (old rationalist blogger, Soviet-Israeli Google SWE, epistemic minor league, math, poetry, puns, very much the same Jewish Rationalist stock our community ultimately descends from, except with biological children) these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified (he's not very connected to its more virile, younger side). Here he is from October 13, independently making the comparison to Dresden:
I suppose that with all those qualifiers about density and scum all it will be no great shame indeed if a hospital or two is vaporized. Or, indeed, if any other necessary price is paid. After all,
We can't have that, can we?
I really appreciated watching him reach his limit of rationality. Seeing his old Ukrainian school bombed by Russian troops affected him emotionally, but he still held on and stuck to "here's what Ukrainian sources say, here's what Russian sources say, here's what I can reasonably discard, here's what's left and that why I on balance support Ukraine". But Hamas has struck (literally) too close to home, so Anatoly switched to "I am an Israeli Jew, of course I support IDF in their heroic struggle against Palestinian terrorism", no rationalization or evaluating if the CTO brings two sides closer to a peaceful resolution needed.
I appreciate this looks like a neat story, but FWIW that's not how it looks from my perspective. I was firmly and openly on Ukraine's side from the beginning (before my school was bombed), I'm even more obviously on Israel's side, but I do try to avoid descending into propaganda on both. In particular, I don't think I affirmed any factual claims favoring "my side" if I didn't feel they were strongly supported by rational standards. This actually didn't work out very well for me so far with Hamas, as the reality turned out to have been worse than I'd assumed, three or four times. E.g. I felt it was very likely that beheaded babies were a throwaway rumor that caught fire and blew up massively for obvious reasons, but after a few days more solid (if not ironclad) support for some beheaded babies appeared (I do not want to go evaluate this more closely).
The degree of emotional involvement is very different, to be sure.
I think the following passage irked me the most (I don't know if you still blog in English, translation mine):
You have to make this comparison at some point. The moral weight of collateral damage might be low, but it's not zero. Sooner or later you have to stop and look at the result:
Drawing moral equivalence in the first example can't be justified, but I don't think that everyone who says "both sides resort to what is effectively terrorism to achieve their goals" in the second example is vile scum, on the contrary, someone who defends the outcome as necessary and inevitable is.
Of course, the real result (both the expected and the actual) will be somewhere between these two.
Haven't blogged in English in years.
If the passage was irksome, it's done its job.
I understand your point. I think it's wrong in a profound way, and I really ought to write a big post about it, but so far it's been eluding me. I also should have phrased the paragraph you quoted a bit better, to sharpen why I think there's no moral equivalence in the specific case we're discussing.
The two outcomes you drew up are how we usually thought about it with individual terrorist attacks coming out of Gaza (or out of the West Bank during the 2nd Intifada for that matter). Downgrade the numbers, say from a thousand innocent people to 5-50. E.g. a suicide terrorist blows up a bus in Tel Aviv in 2001, or a particularly lucky rocket out of Gaza kills a few people in Sderot. In response, the army rounds up some Hamas/Fatah higher-ups, and/or a surgical strike is made, some Hamas VP is blown up, some innocent people die too. If we make too many strikes and kill too many innocent people, the world wags its finger at us for a non-proportionate response. Things quiet down until the next incident.
It's different now, but not everyone's caught on to how it's different. Plenty of people still want to see it as the same thing - perhaps a particularly lucky terrorist attack, more than 1000 victims, wow - so we may be "allowed" to punish Hamas more severely, but surely not to the tune of e.g. 10k civilian victims or more, that's entirely non-proportionate. That's your "second example".
The reason it's different is not (just) that 1300 is a really big number, there's a difference in kind. The logic of attack-response works relatively well for a terrorist attack, which is what, fundamentally? A way of shocking the state/public with violence to get them to agree to something we want, to get them to feel that their way of doing things doesn't grant them the safety they think it does. Possibly also to blackmail them into doing something by threatening hostages. A terrorist attack is finite in scope by design. The terrorists choose the target and kill people to make a flashy point. Oct 7 was different. >2k Hamas militants poured out of Gaza and just started indiscriminately massacring everyone in Israel they could get to (besides some hostages). It wasn't finite in scope. If the army got to them 2 hours later than it did, maybe we'd have 1600 victims and not 1300; some more hours later we'd have 3000 victims, and there's no upper bound due to the Hamas itself. The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them. Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
This is felt very keenly by basically everyone here in Israel. And with a war, the rationale behind a comparison of "they killed 1300, we killed whatever" evaporates. That's not how wars work. Discussing "a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident" sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a "response". It's like if you said in 1941, well, the Japanese killed 2.5k American people at Pearl Harbor, and now the countries are at war. But the US should watch it, because once the no. of the civilian victims in Japan rises too much above 2.5k, maybe 25k or more, that's no longer "proportionate" to the Pearl Harbor attack. The analogy is not great because in PH most deaths were military, but you get what I'm saying, right? This whole line of thinking is absurd. Now it doesn't mean that it makes no sense to discuss civilian victims during the war. There're laws of war, and there's an idea of a disproportionate harm to civilians - but the lack of proportionality here is with respect to the military objectives, not the initial PH incident. You can still discuss whether Hiroshima/Nagasaki were necessary or too cruel etc. if you want, but comparing them to the PH deaths is just bizarrely nonsensical.
That's where we are, except it's worse, because Oct 7 was an indiscriminate massacre way more evil than PH, and we have every reason to believe Hamas wants and aches to do more of those whenever it gets a chance. So we're at war to destroy Hamas, and we do get to be judged by how we treat civilians when Hamas uses them as shields, and if, for example, we were to level a city block w/o warning to take out a single Hamas terrorist and 10k civilians with him, that'd be a pretty clear violation of laws of war and a very evil thing to do. So I'm not giving us carte blanche with respect to civilians and I'm not arguing to just flatten Gaza and kill everyone, and we'd never do it, obviously. But comparisons to the initial massacre in terms of no. of victims just completely miss the point of what's going on.
Maybe it's more obvious when you live in Israel close to Hamas that an attack that is only about getting a higher kill count before you are inevitably killed is something someone would actually plan an execute, but I can't stop thinking that there were additional reasons behind it, just like 9/11 wasn't just about crashing as many airplanes as possible into as many Americans as possible.
I wrote about it elsewhere in the thread, but my working hypothesis is that it's about disrupting the growing learned helplessness of the Palestinians. "You can't do anything against Israel, it can and will bulldoze your olive or orange trees with impunity if you so much as look askance at its settlements, let alone try to fight against them. I guess the only option is to keep my head down and color inside the lines." And then Hamas goes and shows that Israel is not invincible at all, that you can literally bathe in the blood of the innocents if you try hard enough, that like that heron-strangling frog, you should never give up.
There's a comment by @Kinoite in this thread that explains my position better than I could myself. It's a war that also isn't one against a state that also isn't one, depending on what's more convenient. A special military operation, if you want.
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