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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31466 thread views

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.

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Would someone be willing to spell out for me the likely consequences of Israel taking the nuclear option? I am not condoning this but I am curious about it and find very little serious discussion about it. What I mean by "nuclear option" isn't the use of nuclear weapons, not necessarily. What I mean is the IDF literally turning all or at least the northern half of Gaza into rubble without any semblance of discretionary targeting. What would the fallout be? Would the US withdraw all support and could Israel survive the ensuing revenge from arab countries? Are groups within the Israeli government seriously considering options like this?

I'd break this into 3 different scenarios:

  1. Israel uses an actual nuclear weapon
  2. Israel uses conventional bombs and openly abandons any attempts at targeting.
  3. Israel uses conventional bombs. Lots of conventional bombs. Gaza burns to the ground. Israel makes reasonable attempts at PR.

Scenario #1 would be unthinkable. As @Stefferi says, "tak[ing] the nuclear genie out of the bottle" is a huge deal.

Scenario #2 would be very bad, but probably survivable for Israel. The problem with thinking about this scenario is that an Israel that openly abandons any attempt at targeting is making some very strange PR decisions. If Israel is openly admitting that they're trying to kill civilians en-mass, would they still be trying to maintain normal diplomatic relations with the US?

Israel would likely face a lot of sanctions. I don't think the issue would be the act itself. Lots of countries have killed lots of people, to minimal consequence in the international stage. But, countries have to maintain the pretense of caring about civilian life. Removing that pretense is -- like firing a nuclear weapon -- a dangerous first step.

That said, I don't think this would lead to a war, simply because I don't think any of Israel's neighbors have the ability to fight Israel and win. Given that, I don't think Israel's neighbors would be motivated enough to pick a fight that they'd lose.

Scenario #3 would generate some nasty headlines, but I don't know if it would actually change geopolitics. The issue comes down to the modern version of "Fog of War;" the news outlets that oppose Israel would publish anti-Israel stories. But Israel's opponents have been accusing Israel of genocide for decades, so I don't know that they've left themselves room to increase the intensity of their rhetoric.

Even setting journalistic dishonesty aside, I'm imagining a friend trying to convince me to change my opinion of Israel based on the new bombing campaign. I'd like to think that I'm following the conflict more closely than other people. But I couldn't tell you how many bombs Israel launches in a day. So, if my friend told me that Israel launched 1,000 bombs into Palestine is that a lot? Maybe they'd frame the situation as Israel launching 100x as many bombs as they did last week. But, again, is that a lot?

Scope insensitivity is very much a thing. I can understand the tragedy of an individual death. I could see photos of an elementary school getting bombed and feel more tragic. But, once we get past ~40 victims, the statistics just start to feel like numbers. The 2011 Tohoku Earthquake resulted in 18,000 people dead, but is that better or worse than the 2023 Earthquake in Turkey?

Similarly, the New York Times can put a photo of a bombed building on a their front page and imply that it's a bombed hospital, and that's sad. But could they present a bombed region in a notably more sympathetic way?

Israel uses conventional bombs and openly abandons any attempts at targeting.

I would observe that the easiest way to present this would be "Sorry, our budget for JDAM kits has run out. We're switching to dumb bombs, and we have to drop them from high altitude (inaccurately, in larger numbers) because Hamas probably has MANPADs." Comparatively few these days seem complain about Russia's use of unguided munitions.

Comparatively few these days seem complain about Russia's use of unguided munitions.

Because English language people who complain loudly about Russia have far less accurate complaints about ‘genocide of Ukrainians’ than that.

Comparatively few these days seem complain about Russia's use of unguided munitions.

Well, if someone wants to complain about Russia they have better targets.

Only because the set of people who oppose Israel also tend to support Russia for the most part.

I don’t know how western states will react. My gut says “they’ll probably do nothing”, but I’m not sure. History shows that the world at large is actually very tolerant of atrocities, especially if they happen fast enough. It’s not like they can be undone after the fact anyway.

In the case of other terror orgs, I think it will substantially lower the violence against Israel. The arab orgs are much weaker than the IDF, and so far relied on Israeli good will to survive, basically. If they’ll think that Israel might cleanse them, they won’t be as trigger happy.

No telling what other Arab states will do. They don’t seem to actually care about the Palestinians, but they do have to keep up appearances.

Israel could probably kill half or more of Gaza’s population while making it look like an accident which everyone can react to by saying ‘we strongly condemn civilian casualties’.

Israel could probably kill half or more of Gaza’s population

1 000 000? Nope, that would not work as "accident"

It's widely believed that the war in Iraq caused a similar number of deaths, and nobody ever really cared.

Not even the Lancet got to a cool million.

The difference being that 95%+ of that figure was Iraqis killing other Iraqis without American involvement (besides setting the dominoes falling in dismantling Saddam's government)

It would have been another story if American forces had killed a million Iraqis themselves

What do you think the death toll of a total siege(no water electricity or food, no one comes in or out) while Gaza’s being bombed to rubble will be in the end?

such theoretical and not happening event? Depends on how long water and foot is interdicted and what exactly by "bombed to rubble" is meant.

Interdiction until Israel conquers the place completely, with it being bombed to rubble like the Russian army is doing to parts of Ukraine. I'm guessing north of a million Gazans die in that scenario.

With that assumptions, I would expect more than 1 000 000 dead.

Half the population of the Strip?

Germany and Japan at the end of WWII got the "conquers the place completely, with it being bombed to rubble" treatment, and that had a million or so deaths a piece, but the denominator in each case was 70 or 80 million.

More comments

IDF literally using nuclear weapons would be a huge deal, much huger than just levelling it through conventional means (which would be a huge deal as well). Nuclear weapons have been mystified completely out of proportion, but this mystification has probably also been a thing that's been preventing their use in, say, Ukraine; no-one wants to be the one who "takes the nuclear genie out of the bottle", partly because dispelling the mystification might make them less scary and partly because of diplomatic consequences. If the genie is taken out of the bottle, the treshold for further use would be lowered by necessity.

Nuclear weapons have been mystified completely out of proportion

Indeed, people forget that not all nuclear weapons are strategic in scope; tactical nukes exist, and only simplify the kind of destruction that conventional weapons achieve. And anyway it's not like large campaigns of conventional bombings can't achieve the kind of destruction we associate with strategic nuclear weapons too, as Dresden and Tokyo can attest. But I guess it's good that we still kept that genie in the bottle, there's no reason to make large scale destruction easier, it's already too easy.

During the early months of the Ukrainian War I got nuclear anxiety and assuaged it by reading a fair deal about modern nukes, and one thing that surprised me was that even the strategic nuclear weapons were tinier than I assumed. People are used to talking about "megatons" when talking about nukes, but even the biggest nuke in the current Russian nuclear arsenal is "only" 800 kilotons, with most being much smaller; they'd cause a huge amount of damage, to be sure, but compared to magazines using Tsar Bomba - a bomb that was only built and exploded once for flaunting purposes over 50 years ago - as their typical nuke for "What would happen if..." demonstrations, serves to show that the popular idea of nuclear weapons is hugely overblown.

I would guess that if Israel dropped a nuke on Gaza, it would create enough nuclear panic throughout the entire Israel - which is right next to Gaza, that's the whole point of this conflict - to create some major local reprecussions solely through that effect.

If Israel gave notice and said "Everyone out of northern Gaza because we are going to destroy it in two days" and Biden didn't object I think Israel would be fine. Because of scope insensitivity people are about as bothered by 100 birds being killed as by 100,000 of them dying. I think something similar is true with how the world feels about Palestinians. (As I expect AI to soon be able to uncover all of our identities matching what we write here to text under our own names, please note I'm not claiming that any of this is a good thing.)

If AI does that, then how fucked I am depends on how much my writing style has changed over the years, and I certainly have no way of knowing.

The AI will have data on how peoples' writing styles change over time, and so will almost certainly be able to figure out your real identity.

"Hey, local instance of some hijacked LLM, rewrite the following post in the style of Barack Obama..."

In that case..

I'll be fine as long as it's only available to the government and maybe a select few corporations. I've done nothing illegal, but I have done things that are cancellable, and I don't need my neighbors or middle management to know about them.

I suggest eliminating the objectionable content. I'm not an expert, but I've heard it is better to rewrite the posts rather than just delete them.

You're assuming I'm the one hosting all of my own content, and that's a crazy assumption.

I was thinking of stuff on places like Reddit or here.

Yeah, you're new. I've been posting online since 2003. I was in the second grade and just discovered Neopets..

Yeah, it’s actually probably possible now, we just need the relevant actors to get the compute cost of processing the entirety of the internet down to an affordable amount.

It would be a catastrophic blunder. We've seen the Muslim world's reaction to the fake hospital attack. What would be the reaction to a very real invasion with 100x the scale?

I'm not a foreign policy expert but a pair of catastrophic outcomes come to mind.

  1. A coalition of neighboring Arab countries declares war on Israel, as you predict. All progress towards normalizing relations with Muslim countries in the last fifty years resets, and the atrocity is remembered for hundreds of years. The US likely stands on the sidelines for the war.
  2. The Arab citizenry of Israel instantly radicalizes. All Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem instantly radicalize. Whereas once Israel had terrorists living behind a wall in a containment zone, now they have terrorists dispersed in their population and ready to act as fifth columnists in the invasion. Unless Israel is willing to genocide those people too, which would spark a civil war, terror attacks ramp up dramatically.

It seems like a very bad idea to yours truly.

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