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.
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 -
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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