naraburns nihil supernum
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kinoite's Strategic Plan: A Legal War and a Heartless Peace
Last week, I wrote a post about the Geneva Convention and Israel's obligations to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza.
This week, I'd like to present a strategic plan for the Israeli side of the conflict. My proposal is that Israel should† do everything possible to avoid getting into an extended occupation or police action. Instead, Israel should frame the current conflict as a war. It should use the laws of war and the rules of Westphalian diplomacy to force the Gaza into a two-state solution.
Part 1: The Strategic Landscape
I've talked to a number of people who see Hamas' tactics as not merely cruel, but pointlessly cruel. Those people argue that Hamas has no path to victory; Hamas' rockets will never win a military victory, and Hamas makes no diplomatic demands that could ever be reasonably met. So, the continued conflict accomplishes nothing of strategic value.
I agree that the attacks are cruel, but see a cold logic behind them; Hamas' best chance to destroy Israel is by preventing Israel from negotiating a two-state solution. And Hamas' best chance to prevent a two-state solution is an endless, simmering conflict.
Palestine is a Chinese finger trap; the more forcefully Israel acts, the more tightly the conflict will grip the country. The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require.
Freddie is basically correct. The Palestinians cannot remain stateless residents of an Israeli-controlled territory forever. Israel might be able to keep Palestine as a separate-but-not-sovereign territory for another generation or two. But, eventually, there will be mounting pressure to tear down the walls that separate Israel from Palestine. Free movement will, in turn, would lead to pressure to give the Palestinians full citizenship and voting rights.
If Israel extends full citizenship and voting rights to Palestinians then Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state.
The other possibility is an independent Palestine. If that happens, the pressure will mount in the other direction. A sovereign, successful Palestine might be able to press its land claims for a generation. Or two. But, eventually, land disputes become historical trivia rather than a live conflict and nations are pressured to accept peace.
Given the above, I think some amount of aggression served Hamas' goals. But the latest attacks were a massive overreach and a fatal strategic blunder.
Part 2: A Legal War
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.
Israel cannot win an occupation so, instead, it should win a war.
In the short-term, Israel could successfully occupy Gaza. Certainly, Israel could blockade the region, move in ground forces, hold territory, and attempt to impose law-and-order on the population. I don't believe Israel could eliminate fighting completely. There are too many insurgents and the region seems too hostile. Worse, in-as-far as Israel spends time occupying Gaza, Israel is bringing itself ever closer to a one-state solution by default.
In addition to this, occupation creates a number of obligations on Israel:
Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations (HR) states that a " territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised." [...]
When does the law of occupation start to apply?
The rules of international humanitarian law relevant to occupied territories become applicable whenever territory comes under the effective control of hostile foreign armed forces, even if the occupation meets no armed resistance and there is no fighting.
The question of " control " calls up at least two different interpretations. It could be taken to mean that a situation of occupation exists whenever a party to a conflict exercises some level of authority or control within foreign territory. So, for example, advancing troops could be considered bound by the law of occupation already during the invasion phase of hostilities. This is the approach suggested in the ICRC's Commentary to the Fourth Geneva Convention (1958). [...]
What are the most important principles governing occupation?
[...]
The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.
Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.
The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.
Cultural property must be respected.
[...]
[NB: I made some formatting changes and omitted a significant number of obligations]
Those obligations are quite large, especially in the context of Israel's fight against Hamas. If Israel occupies Gaza, then Israel becomes responsible for providing food, medical care, hygiene supplies and the like to the "fullest extent of the means available" to Israel. That obligation would continue to exist, even if Hamas tried to capture food, or destroy civilian infrastructure.
In addition to creating an affirmative burden to provide for the people of Gaza, an occupation limits Israel's use of force. During an occupation, the destruction of property is forbidden unless "absolutely required by military necessity." In effect, occupation turns a conflict from a classic war into the sort of law-and-order problem that countries face when dealing with domestic terrorism. This is an extremely bad position for Israel as they try to police a region where they'd intensely opposed by the civilian population.
So, rather than occupy, Israel should simply treat the conflict as a war. They might have the capability to move ground forces in Gaza. But they have no obligation to do so. And, as long as Israel's forces are not holding territory, then the conflict is a military siege of an enemy-occupied city. That has vastly different obligations.
Relevant is Article 70 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
[1] If the civilian population of any territory under the control of a Party to the conflict, other than occupied territory, is not adequately provided with the supplies mentioned in Article 69 , relief actions which are humanitarian and impartial in character and conducted without any adverse distinction shall be undertaken, subject to the agreement of the Parties concerned in such relief actions. [...]
[3] The Parties to the conflict and each High Contracting Party which allow the passage of relief consignments, equipment and personnel in accordance with paragraph 2:
(a) shall have the right to prescribe the technical arrangements, including search, under which such passage is permitted;
(b) may make such permission conditional on the distribution of this assistance being made under the local supervision of a Protecting Power;
Israel should exercise its rights under 70.3a and 70.3b. That is, they should let aid come into the country, but only after a search and some ofter technical arrangements and only if the aid is distributed under the supervision of a protecting power. Put another way, Article 70 gives Israel an obligation to allow aid into Gaza but also lays out how a country can conduct a siege of an opposing force.
The "Protecting Power" piece is interesting. In this context protecting power is a third party country, nominated by Israel and accepted by Hamas, that has permission from Hamas to enter Gaza and oversee the distribution of aid. The relevant part of the Geneva conventions is:
[2]. From the beginning of a situation referred to in Article 1 , each Party to the conflict shall without delay designate a Protecting Power for the purpose of applying the Conventions and this Protocol and shall, likewise without delay and for the same purpose, permit the activities of a Protecting Power which has been accepted by it as such after designation by the adverse Party.
[3]. If a Protecting Power has not been designated or accepted from the beginning of a situation referred to in Article 1 , the International Committee of the Red Cross, without prejudice to the right of any other impartial humanitarian organization to do likewise, shall offer its good offices to the Parties to the conflict with a view to the designation without delay of a Protecting Power to which the Parties to the conflict consent. For that purpose it may, ' inter alia ', ask each Party to provide it with a list of at least five States which that Party considers acceptable to act as Protecting Power on its behalf in relation to an adverse Party, and ask each adverse Party to provide a list of at least five States which it would accept as the Protecting Power of the first Party; these lists shall be communicated to the Committee within two weeks after the receipt of the request; it shall compare them and seek the agreement of any proposed State named on both lists.
[...]
The idea here is that Israel doesn't have an obligation to feed Hamas' fighters. Israel does have to feed civilians, but isn't expected to accept Hamas' word that civilian aid is going to civilians once it crosses into the territory controlled by Hamas. Israel is explicitly within its rights to ask that any aid be delivered to Gaza under the supervision of a protective party.
In Israel's position, I'd use my rights under 70.3.a to insist that aid shipments should only enter Gaza if they're accompanied by a military force that's large enough to reasonably defend the aid against bandits and thieves.
There are a few reasons to do this. The first is that the "protective party" clause would force other first-world nations to actually involve themselves in the conflict or admit that they don't particularly care. Next, Israel is being clear about Israel's obligations. Israel doesn't have to provide aid shipments. It simply has to allow food aid provided by other people.
Strategically, the goal of the siege is the same as the goal of any siege: Israel is pressing Hamas to surrender
With an occupation, all of the obligations fall on Israel. Hamas has little-to-no incentive to surrender during an occupation. Instead, they'd be incentivized to draw things out as long as possible, to better bleed Israel of funds and military forces. Any cease-fire during an occupation would work to Hamas' advantage.
With a siege, time would be on Israel's side. The longer a lawful siege continues, the longer first world nations (outside of Israel) are obliged to commit their forces to overseeing aid shipments. And, delays would serve to starve out Hamas' fighters.
Eventually, I think a siege would end with Hamas surrendering, if only via a claim that they no longer hold Gaza, or the conflict cooling enough that Israel is pushed by the international community to declare victory.
Part 3: A Heartless Peace
Part 3 of my suggestion is relatively simple. When Israel "wins" their siege of Gaza they should appoint a new government and do everything in their power to get out of the region as quickly as possible. From there, Israel should take the position that the newly-formed Gazan government holds sovereign control over Gaza.
From there, Israel should fall back to Westphalian Diplomacy. Questions like "Should Gaza and the West Bank count as a single country or two countries?" can be answered (by Israel at least) as "that is an internal matter for the government of Gaza."
Similarly, the newly-formed Gazan government might recognize Israel as a country, or not. Either way, Israel's reply could be "that is an internal matter for the government of Gaza." The newly-formed Gazan government might issue passports for its citizens, or not. Israel's reply could be "that is an internal matter for the government of Gaza," and so on.
I'm calling this "Heartless Peace" for two reasons.
The first is that, under the rules of international diplomacy, countries have very few obligations to one another. It's certainly kind and praiseworthy if one country sends aid to a starving neighbor. But, it's not required. It's generally good if countries issue visas so foreign nationals can cross their border for tourism or work. But this is not required. Israel would be within its rights to close its borders to Gazan residents, just as Mexico could decide not to issue tourist visas to Swedes.
In Israel's position, I'd close the borders to this newly-formed Gazan state, pending mutual recognition and a diplomatic process. This would mean that Gaza might have to import food and water via its ports and its land border with Egypt. That would certainly be inconvenient but, ultimately, not something that Israel is directly responsible for fixing.
The second reason I'm calling this a "Heartless Peace" is that I wouldn't expect it to last. Certainly, Israel should hope that this attempt at peace is the one that ends the long conflict with Palestine. And if that happens, Israel should be very happy. More likely, attacks would re-occur in a few years and Israel should be prepared.
If attacks happen, Israel should look to Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security
The rules of Westphalian diplomacy aren't particularly concerned with proportionality, as it applies to wars. Instead, the rule is that, when one nation attacks another, the second nation can go to war. So, if Israel is attacked by the newly-formed nation of Gaza, is should go back to the siege listed previously.
To some extent, this all might seem like legal-wordplay. The status quo is still that Gaza would periodically launch an attack on Israel, Israel would respond, destroy things, and eventually withdraw. I'm expecting basically that pattern to repeat, but with different labels.
My position is that these labels matter. If a country repeatedly bombs an occupied territory (or even civilian centers in its own territory!) to fight domestic terrorists, then that really is a human rights violation. The country that's killing occupied civilians seems to be in the wrong, even if the terrorists are also immoral. In contrast, if a country repeatedly attacks its neighbor, is bombed, and surrendered only to re-attack, then the country that's re-igniting the war seems to be in the wrong.
So, given the options available, I think Israel should step away from the status-quo where the Palestinian Territories are neither really occupied nor really sovereign in favor of a new status-quo where the Palestinian Territories are sovereign and operating under the relatively bright-line rules afforded by international diplomacy.
† I dislike the word "should" since it seems to smuggle in a lot of assumptions about goals. Within this post, an unspecified 'should' assumes that an actor has Israel's general interests in mind. These include the preservation of Israel as a majority-Jewish state, peace, and resolutions to diplomatic disputes that are as favorable to Israel as feasible.
…what if the “sovereign, successful Palestine” doesn’t materialize?
Your strategy doesn’t sound too different from the steelman for intervention in Afghanistan. Roll in, fuck up the Taliban, set up a functional government, roll out. There may have been something about hearts and minds in there, too. But instead, we exchanged munitions for 20 years and barely changed anything. If we’d skipped those 20 years, and didn’t even try to fill the power vacuum, would an agreeable Afghan government have materialized?
Say Israel kills every card-carrying Hamas member, and no one else. I don’t think that makes the problem go away. There will still be young, angry men looking to avenge their friends and family. There will also still be outside powers interested in pushing the infidels out of Jerusalem.
We are dozens of summits, treaties and agreements into defining a legal relationship between Israel and something resembling Palestine. The Oslo accords, in particular, govern the allowed level of Israeli force. That hasn’t stopped Israel from controlling the strip, and it hasn’t stopped Hamas from waging its campaign. Would another siege and another piece of paper be any different?
…what if the “sovereign, successful Palestine” doesn’t materialize?
Israel can guarantee a sovereign Palestine. A successful Palestine would be nice-to-have but not really a strategic requirement.
Say Israel kills every card-carrying Hamas member, and no one else. I don’t think that makes the problem go away. There will still be young, angry men looking to avenge their friends and family. There will also still be outside powers interested in pushing the infidels out of Jerusalem. [...] Would another siege and another piece of paper be any different?
I think I'm proposing two material changes.
The first is that, by withdrawing, Israel can close its borders with the now-sovereign Gaza. Israel would be within its rights to completely block the movement of people and goods between two countries. So, that would limit the extent to which Gazas residents have an opportunity to damage Israel. Israel has, until recently, not closed its borders.
The second material change is that I'm suggesting Israel treat the current conflict (and any future conflicts) like wars rather than police actions in an occupied territory. The rules for a war against a hostile state are much less restrictive than the rules for a police action in an occupied territory. Gaza might start another conflict, or a third. But realistically, a state can only lose so many wars before they run out people who are able and willing to continue a conflict.
Your strategy doesn’t sound too different from the steelman for intervention in Afghanistan. Roll in, fuck up the Taliban, set up a functional government, roll out. There may have been something about hearts and minds in there, too. But instead, we exchanged munitions for 20 years and barely changed anything. If we’d skipped those 20 years, and didn’t even try to fill the power vacuum, would an agreeable Afghan government have materialized?
I mean the difference is that, in the hypothetical provided, Israel expends roughly the same resources, gets attacked roughly the same amount, and uses roughly the same force in both scenarios, but they get significantly less international flak for one of them.
As opposed to the US Invasion of Afghanistan, where the option was between a costly invasion and occupation and a ton of international flak, and expending roughly nothing because Afghanistan wasn't exactly a threat (possibly some assassinations and drone strikes still happen in this scenario).
The rules of Westphalian diplomacy aren't particularly concerned with proportionality, as it applies to wars. Instead, the rule is that, when one nation attacks another, the second nation can go to war. So, if Israel is attacked by the newly-formed nation of Gaza, is should go back to the siege listed previously.
I am not sure if it works that way anymore. I am no expert but to me it seems that more and more nations use paramilitaries/PMCs/terrorist groups to conduct asymmetrical warfare with the whole purpose of keeping plausible deniability. What prevents new government of Gaza to claim that they regret terrorist attack conducted from their territory by underground terrorist group? Or even better, they can finance terrorist cells inside Israel or Syria or Lebanon or West Bank and do similar things. Now this is nothing new, for instance Pakistan does this all the time vis-à-vis India, Iran itself has parallel government structure tied to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with their own network of companies and terrorist cells and unique capability of wreaking havoc without necessarily being tied to the Government. The same goes for Russia and Wagner's adventures in Africa for instance.
I've been thinking that something like this would work as a solution for the Israelis. Once Gaza is an independent state, Israel can justifiably fortify their side of the border as much as they like. After all, their neighbour is aggressing them. Nobody can accuse them of apartheid (with regards to Gaza) since they have no obligation to allow foreign citizens to enter their territory at all. If the government of Gaza attacks them, they can justifiably use force to defend themselves. Egypt can take refugees without being accused of being complicit in Israeli ethnic cleansing of the strip.
I mean, it's not as if Gaza has any religious significance (like Jerusalem), strategic significance (like the Golan Heights) or economic significance (like Tel Aviv). An Israel without Gaza is an Israel with 2 millions fewer Arabs and nothing of value lost.
You realize that Israel left Gaza in 2005, right? The Palestinian Authority held elections in 2006, and Hamas won. Fatah did not accept the results, and they split to Hamas ruling the Gaza strip while Fatah rules Judea and Samaria (where they are allowed according to Oslo). Hamas did not declare an independent state, since that’s not what they’re after. Israel did fortify itself, and after rocket fire started from Gaza it was blockaded. There were roughly 0 voices saying Israel is justified in anything.
This is basically where we are now, 17 years later.
This is the situation since 2007. And the government of Gaza has just attacked them. Well, in fact it's been attacking them all along, but this time it was a much bigger attack than usual.
I think there is a lot of grey area between "two recognized countries are fighting a war" and "internal police action". There are civil wars, insurgencies, non-state actors operating out of failed states and all other sorts of corner cases. An occupation requires a hostile army, which I guess requires a state-like entity to which they are hostile. I don't think an army being in some territory where some fraction of the population would rather they were not (which is every army, everywhere) is probably not sufficient.
Also, if something is a human rights violation is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. It is not like the Hague will deploy paratroopers to stop any human rights violation happening within 24 hours.
Politically speaking, if by some miracle Gaza was a recognized independent state, do you think that the people currently protesting that explosion in a hospital parking lot which they assume IDF caused would switch their stance and say "well, I suppose article 51 gives Israel the right to nuke Gaza after being attacked"?
How are people still so naive about Islamic extremists? After ISIS, The Taliban, Al Qaeda, 9/11, all of the terrorist attacks in Europe, etc you still have people in the West who refuse to believe Islamic extremists (which includes Hamas) could commit atrocities and are bad faith actors in this conflict.
Take for example the 40 babies fiasco, where many people (especially on the Left) were talking about war propaganda and how dumb people were for believing that Hamas would do that. Islamic extremists absolutely would do that! These same people who on the same day shot up a whole music festival, murdered innocent children and took toddlers as hostages! But we are supposed to believe killing babies is too far? There is almost no amount of savagery by Islamic extremists that should shock anyone at this point, especially after ISIS, but here we are I guess.
Or take for another example this hospital explosion. It's looking like Israel didn't do it based on new intelligence, but maybe they did. At this point it still is unclear. But one thing I know for sure is that you should not take the word of Hamas seriously on who did it. This is an organization who has put weapons under hospitals and schools and is known to not give a shit if their actions led to Palestinian children's deaths. In fact, they often try to make that happen as a weapon in the information war against. So yes, they absolutely would blow up their own hospital to make Israel look bad, so you shouldn't take the word of Islamic extremists seriously on this issue. Yet you have journalists and politicians in the West taking them at their word on this atrocity. Ironically, these are often some of the same kinds of people who make fun of the Right for falling for fake news and Russian disinformation.
I'm truly at a loss for words here with this conflict. How is this possible? Is there anything that can wake people up to this issue after all these years or is this just something we have to live with?
"Would do it" doesn't equal "did do it". For example, Saddam's soldiers did all kinds of messed up stuff, but Nayrah's testimony about babies taken from incubators was still made up.
Of course. But many of these same people also instantly believed that Israel bombed the hospital and took Hamas's word for it. But what annoys me is that they act like Hamas would never do such a thing, which is of course ridiculous (at least in my opinion) based on their track record on the same day based on videos that they uploaded.
Come on, if a particular building is bombed in Gaza nowadays I wouldn't need anyone's word to think it 99% likely that Israel did it, because Israel is definitely bombing other buildings there in retalion for the Hamas attacks.
I wouldn't need anyone's word to think it 99% likely that Israel did it
Roughly one third of Palestinian casualties in any given Israel-Hamas conflict are caused by rockets fired from the Gaza strip that fail in some way such as misfiring, crashing, prematurely detonating, coming apart in midair, and so on and so forth. Might be time to update those priors.
You are correct, I was mistaken. The Iron Dome appears to only intercept rockets on terminal approach to a populated area in Israel, it does not intercept rockets over Gaza.
if a particular building is bombed in Gaza nowadays I wouldn't need anyone's word to think it 99% likely that Israel did it
Even if the Bayesian statistics bear this out (I'm not quite as confident as you, but it is probably more likely than not), the better question is whether or not it's sufficient confidence to run "Israel bombs hospital, killing 500" headlines. In this case, it seems like it probably shouldn't have been.
A particular building, yes. That particular building, no. This is a group who has put bombs under schools and hospitals in the past. Everything they say should be taken with a massive grain of salt. Israel too, but these people are already skeptical of Israel but believe something said by a literal Islamist organization that is undoubtedly a terrorist group.
There’s no ordinal scale of evil. A convicted murderer is not necessarily a rapist or even a jaywalker. Likewise, believing that Islamic terrorists are willing to commit atrocities in general does not imply that they committed any atrocity in particular.
Even if you are arguing from specificity, the offending parties were actively believing and spreading the (unlikely to be true) story that Israel just bombed a hospital full of innocents. Hamas being bad doesn't confirm they did the one bad thing. Hamas being bad does mean anyone of any respectability or intelligence would not spread Hamas propaganda without serious vetting of it. Yet, major left of center media outlets did.
They killed babies and children and then took some young kids as hostages that same day. They just didn't behead 40 in a nursery or whatever it was, but they essentially did the same thing that exact same day.
They released photos of dead babies (2 I believe). They went around a neighborhood door to door and killed anyone in the homes including children. They released photos of the hostages they took which included children.
I've seen plenty of photos of people who look like they were shot, so probably, yeah.
The nature of the activities beyond that I actually have very little insight -- there's no reason to trust anything released by either party other than stuff that looks like it would be beyond their (respective) capability to easily fake, and very little of what I've seen comes from anything close to a disinterested bystander.
No? I think that a claim circulating earlier that Hamas beheaded 40 babies was dubious. You know it’s possible to think that Hamas does bad things without uncritically accepting every claim that’s made by Hamas’s foes, right?
It looks like that story wasn't true or exaggerated. But considering the litany of atrocities they committed that same day and were proud of, acting like they wouldn't is ridiculous. There was a hyper focus on whether or not the babies were beheaded or not. It's like fine, they didn't behead the babies, they just did all these other things we know are true that are just as bad. People wanted to focus on that to cast doubt on the other things they did that day, which is absurd because they broadcasted it to the world. Whether or not they did it, that is a debate. What isn't up for debate is if they would kill children because they literally did it that same day and Islamists have done so for decades. And this is true regardless of what Israel did, didn't do, or will do in the future.
The people I've seen focusing most on the beheaded babies are the ones claiming that there were beheaded babies. I think it's fair to point out that we don't actually know that they actually beheaded babies.
Indeed. Credibility matters. You don't get to push fake nonsense and expect people to believe you afterwards.
It makes me think of some US political spat I can barely remember. I think some congressman made an incondiary claim that was proven false, then responded by saying something like "yeah but they would if they could". Like, no dude, you don't get credit here. You lied.
A soldier said on camera that many children had been killed and they even saw a beheaded child. The i24 (Israeli news channel) reporter repeated that, jumbled it up, others jumbled it up further, military didn’t comment until it had verified the situation. It now turns out that up to 40 kids were killed (expected given demographics of kibbutzim, high fertility rates among even modern orthodox Jewry, and total population), including babies, and that one young child was seemingly beheaded.
Far from some deliberate propaganda effort, that’s exactly how things are supposed to work, the military didn’t officially confirm until they had the information.
Me or the Israelis? Because from what I saw that wasn't reported by the IDF but instead by some random Israeli and the news picked up on it uncritically.
No released photographic evidence, but officials have told us they have seen the photos.
I assume out of respect for the dead they're not being released. If my child were beheaded I wouldn't want those photos out on the Internet, either. I wouldn't really care if it assuaged conspiracy theorists, people would just say they're AI-generated anyway.
Yeah, I can't tell for sure (because of censorship/fire damage) but it doesn't look like it. And I doubt they have a secret stash of even more shocking images.
To be clear, what happened was: “interested party A claims their enemies committed particularly heinous act, source: trust me bro” and now you’re calling people who would like better evidence conspiracy theorists? Weird inversion of burden of proof particularly on a site like this.
Replace this with any other culture war issue (and,for Americans, that's what it is) IQ, crime,gender medicine.
Let's say people are utterly credulous about the evidence from their side (including from non credible sources), then suddenly have isolated demands for rigor for any contradictory evidence, stake out absolute stances ("that never happens") and only partly walk them back after allowing the misinformation to fester as long as possible.
What conclusion would you draw?
I make an exception for Trudeau. There the explanation is that he just is a deeply unwise person who makes premature and dangerous comments to virtual signal (see the mass graves thing) A fool more than a self serving partisan for whom truth is secondary or is in such a bubble and compromised epistemic position that it functionally is.
Despite how ghastly the behavior of the underdog, people are eager to side with them because they believe that they are only the underdog because they are oppressed, and the oppressor is ultimately the one that's morally culpable for their behavior. If they were not oppressed, their natural state would be peaceful and humane.
This leads to a confabulation of sorts. The underdog is both given the benefit of the doubt about potential bad behavior and they are also absolved of responsibility when their behavior is undeniably bad.
This situation is also tailor-made for the sort of bad faith I'm describing because there's already a belief on the pro-"underdog" side (driven by an assumption that words determine reality) that "validating narratives" directly leads to harm. This is often strange and self-serving in US contexts (accepting the "detransitioner narrative" will in no way lead to trans "genocide", no matter what partisans say), but if there's any time it's likely to be true it's here.
When you have people like Nikki Haley saying "finish them" about an operation that must kill or displace a bunch of unarmed Palestinians to have any efficacy I can see why people utterly opposed to that want to run as much interference as possible.
"X never happens" when you know all you're doing is forcing your opponent to go do research is asinine in a domestic context but, insofar as you believe no one should die, you actually have an incentive to muddy the waters and blunt sympathy for Israel. The US is its benefactor after all and so it may really matter this time.
Hamas terrorists who carried out a surprise attack on October 7 were found to be under the influence of Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant that has been clandestinely produced in southern Europe and trafficked through Turkey to the consumer markets on the Arabian Peninsula, as reported by Nir Dvori of Channel 12.
The pills were recovered from the pockets of many terrorists who lost their lives on Israeli soil.
Captagon belongs to the amphetamine family and was initially developed to address attention disorders, narcolepsy, and depression. Despite its highly addictive nature and potential for inducing psychotic reactions, it continues to enjoy popularity in the Middle East due to its affordability and ease of manufacturing. In poorer countries, the drug can be purchased for a dollar or two, while in wealthier nations, it may cost up to 20 dollars per pill.
Its primary effects include arousing feelings of euphoria, reducing the need for sleep, suppressing appetite, and providing sustained energy.
According to medical professionals in Lebanon and Syria, Captagon is not only prevalent among fighters but is also frequently used by desperate civilians residing in conflict zones.
Once a source of revenue for ISIS members through drug smuggling, Captagon has now become a major source of income for Syria and is actively supported by Hezbollah.
Around two years ago, an investigation conducted by The New York Times revealed that individuals associated with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, including family members, had established a thriving industry for the production of Captagon.
When ISIS un-assed for the Sahel, they took Captagon with them. It has since made its way into pretty much every fight going on across the continent. I guess it's a step up from brown-brown but not by much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
orthoxerox
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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.
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…
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.
orthoxerox
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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.
A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
I think the tricky part here isn't defining whether Hamas is a government, but definining what "bearing responsibility" means. What does responsibility for the actions of your government look like?
Does it look like "If your government oppresses Palestinians you aren't allowed to safely go to a music festival?" Does it look like "If your government goes out and kills some civilians, your apartment building may be bombed at any time?" "If your government maintains troops overseas engaged in warfare against Muslims, better not work in an office in downtown Manhattan?"
Your definition of responsibility much moreso than any question of the anarchic state of international relations is going to decide whether most find your framework to actually resemble anything workable.
But anyway, the idea of international relations as anarchic is kind of a modern interposition, that would have been totally foreign to our cultural ancestors. It is fine to quote the Melian Dialogue but it must be remembered that it was a dialogue, a live controversy, that there were those who agreed and those who disagreed with the speaker.
The Romans were famously solicitous of only waging war when they felt it was just. Besides the many ritual niceties that must be observed before going to war:
The Romans wanted to make sure that they were fighting wars that were not driven by greed for gain, but were just. In fact they managed to make such claims for every single war of expansion they fought, and when they won, it confirmed their belief that they were in the right: after all, if the gods hadn’t supported them, they would have lost. But how were the Romans so sure that their wars were just before they saw divine support via victory? Part of the answer sounds strange to us; the other half, perhaps, does not. First, the Romans observed specific religious rituals to ensure divine favor, such as looking for omens in the entrails of sacrificed animals before declaring war. Through these omens they would know if the gods supported their proposed course of action. And if they had to account for a defeat, there were often explanations that the unfavorable omens had been ignored. For example, when the Romans lost the naval battle of Drepana in 249 BC it was clear why they had lost, at least in retrospect. It seems that when the admiral Publius Claudius Pulcher asked whether the sacred chickens on board the ship were eating their grain (even chicken antics could be an indicator of divine favor), he learned that on that particular morning they had refused their breakfast, a very bad sign. After trying to coax them into a few nibbles, Pulcher lost his temper and threw them into the sea, shouting “If they don't want to eat, then let them drink.” The Romans lost that naval battle, and Pulcher was tried for incompetence and impiety and fined a large sum by the court.
[T]he Romans were pretty sure they were the good guys even without these rituals telling them when to go to war. It helped that they believed their civilization and their political system were better than those of the peoples they invaded, and that they were doing these subject nations a favor. As the historian Livy wrote, “There was one nation in the world which would fight for the liberties of others at its own cost, with its own labor, and at its own danger. It was even ready to cross the sea to make sure there was no unjust rule anywhere and that everywhere justice, right, and law would prevail.” In his Republic, Cicero claims that the Romans got their empire almost by accident through helping out their allies. “Our people, through repeatedly defending their allies, have ended up as master of the world.” And in the Aeneid, the national epic of Rome’s rise written in the first century BC, it is made clear that Rome’s military expansion is actually its divine destiny: The god Jupiter proclaims, “On the Romans I impose no boundaries of time or place: I have granted them empire without end.” The epic hero Anchises says as much to his son. “You, Roman, remember to rule the nations with power --this will be your skill. Impose the custom of peace, spare the vanquished and defeat the proud.”
To my knowledge, and I'm open to seeing a counterexample!, there has never been a primary source written by/from the perspective of any ancient conqueror that did not find some tenuous (to our eyes) way of justifying their actions. William the Conqueror claimed that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to him, not Harold Godwinson. Alexander claimed he invaded Persia in retribution for Persian violence against the Greeks (Greeks his father had just conquered). Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Yes, we humans usually find it necessary to conceal our predatory designs beneath a banner of truth and justice. We are very good at conflating our material interests and partisan politics with "right".
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
Thirdly, any analysis where you conclude that the average person holds non-negligible responsibility for something like government of all things must explain what exactly the analyst thinks is okay to do to that person with said responsibility. Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
I've heard "Silence is Violence" enough to try on the horseshoe.
If your government freezes elections after coming to power, and you disagree strongly with the actions of that government, you:
Have the responsibility to resist
Must prepare for the consequences of their actions being ascribed to you
As an American white male, it's perhaps not fair that I'd be targeted by Muslim terror organizations for our government's actions in the Middle East. Especially since I've resisted this insofar as any voter who moonlights as a political speaker at social events. Nor is it fair that I face disparate amounts of interracial violence supposedly as a result of perceived structural racism. But because I didn't resist these things strongly enough, I do have to be prepared for those consequences.
This is not the same as saying it's just or even reasonable for those actions to be ascribed to you.
Yes - and I specifically state the opposite. This whole thread is about what's fair, what's not, and what is the reality of inter-group violence/resistance. For Israel and Palestine, these governments and pseudo-governments' subjects are considered a single group.
How many Americans despise foreign interference? How many whites aren't racist? My guess would be a plurality and a significant majority, respectively. Which proportion justifies violence against the group? How many Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map?
Those are a lot of question marks. I think the Palestinians should be doing more to vocalize against and sabotage the actions of their organized terrorist groups.
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war.
This is a recipe for far greater death and destruction than anyone would ever tolerate upon themselves, you included. Any such position should be heavily scrutinized far more than its reverse. I think it is immoral to the highest order to declare that simply because a government has legitimacy with its people that you can ignore civilian casualties or simply care less about them.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
You can disagree all you want, but you're conflating proportionality and protection of civilians who are not present on military objectives.
Protection of civilians comes in two main forms: civilians should not be harmed as long as they are not part of/adjacent to valid military objectives, and that disproportionate force should not be used against even valid military objectives. The first has always had the language that a legitimate military objective renders a do-not-target objective into a valid-for-targetting objective, not the other way around (i.e. putting human shields doesn't turn a previously-legitimate target illegitimate), and the second has always been about the scale of expected benefit and, implicitly and relevant to your argument, alternative forms available to achieve it. 'Discriminatory' weapons, in so much that they do exist, are only legally obliged because they allow a means to achieve an effect that makes the alternatives illegitimate. If the means didn't exist, the alternatives wouldn't be excessive to the alternatives.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
You're correct. I was speaking practically, as we've yet to see a case where a nuke was needed by this standard.
I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing
I agree, it's just not totally delegitimizing. Many countries don't even bother with elections, is that more or less legitimate than holding one free election, one time? How do you account for the strong legitimacy of monarchies for eons? Legitimacy is not about votes specifically, though in our modern context we often conflate the two.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory?
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
Because I disagree strongly
Truman agreed. Your opinion, and mine, is irrelevant. You can apply your interpretation of just war theory to your own use of nuclear weapons.
given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
Indifference and a willingness to tolerate almost anything in the name of survival is universal amongst humans.
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
The moral standards of bombardment and killing non-combatants were degraded with time in WW2. There were international treaties barring attacks against undefended non-military targets and people were to be given a chance to evacuate. This was not extended to air attacks, but not for a lack of trying. By and large, such things were considered unacceptable before the war, but people grew to desire revenge and were fine with sating it on the civilians of the enemy.
So appealing to the fact that people thought it was okay back then is pointless. There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Not a thing. Neither can a hand grenade.
The radius might be a bit bigger on a nuke, let me verify.
There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
I think there's a sense of relativism you're missing here. People in the past had good reasons for doing what they did. And they were still, in many cases, wrong or insane. Just like they had plenty of good reasons to use herbs to treat open wounds instead of soap, but that's still insane. So the wars of past societies can have a lot of thought, and many good reasons behind them ... and still be insane.
So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here.
What follows is a tangent on 'all of human history'.
I challenge you to elaborate a non-contrived standard of morality under which most people who lived before, like, the Enlightenment weren't moral monsters?
Under any conceivable egalitarian/utilitarian 'killing people is, like, bad' perspective, they're monsters because they supported ideologies/religions that killed a lot of people for reasons that obviously don't matter as much like 'whether you're protestant or catholic' or 'which ruler rules you'. Neighboring city-states could, in fact, declare peace or unify instead of killing and raiding each other (as they eventually did).
There are other standards! Maybe war is awesome or noble or glorious, and killing the weak is a moral duty to purify the human race of weakness. Even then, though, wars are a very poor way of conducting eugenics, because the strong and weak are fairly evenly distributed between neighboring countries and within armies the strong only die slightly less than the poor do. Also, a lot of the killing around before the Enlightenment was done in large part for obviously 'slave morality' reasons like 'my sect of Christianity better serves God and the immortal souls of the population than yours does'.
Again, it depends on your perspective, but there's just a lot of ways past-people are moral monsters. Stuff like 'it's totally legal to beat and rape your wife if you so desire', stuff like 'the German race are bloodthirsty animals who must be put down', whatever.
Now, to be clear, you can apply the same standards to our time. We're moral monsters too. We torture our young and old with technological confusions, we sell people drugs and fattening food, our smartest and most passionate devote themselves to maximizing the live-length mundane pleasures of the weak. Again, it'll depend on your perspective, but whether it's humans or AI that exist in 500 years, they'll have a lot of quite harsh criticisms of us.
But older people were monsters and we're right to strongly reject the ways in which they were. Just like there are views today that we should strongly reject - if only we knew what better views should replace them.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
They don't need to be moral monsters to be indifferent, but there was 100% a faction of the pro-bombing crowd which justified what they did on the basis of "better them than us" and "an eye for an eye", or even just "If it's your government, we'll kill you just the same" like Curtis LeMay. Arthur Harris is a good example, which choice quotes such as "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
Now, you may argue that Harris isn't out for blood just to see it run, but he's only doing it in retaliation. Regardless, this is precisely what there had been numerous treaties to address in the first place, and even during this time, there was continued debate over the ethics of bombing civilians and cities.
Moreover, the idea that we've lost touch with the reality of war is ludicrous, given that the idea of restrictions upon how war could be declared and conducted goes back millennia who would have been very familiar with war and what it could do.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
You've never heard of the popular system of "one man, one vote, one time"?
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people
Lately, I've found myself wondering quite a bit about the responsibility to overthrow illegitimate governments engaging in terrorism and war crimes. On one hand, there is a lot of hiding behind failed state governments and claiming "they don't represent us" or similar. On the other, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that random citizens are responsible for their government's actions -- are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]? I suppose one answer is yeschad.jpg with the caveat that doing so makes you a legitimate target for American ordnance too.
If the US were to pop off a few long-range rockets (Trident II or Minuteman III, naturally) at it's foe-of-the-month and the claim that the chain of command wasn't legitimate ("the Commander-in-Chief only won a minority of votes in the last election!"), I doubt anyone would believe cries of "collective punishment" to justify ignoring the attacks and not responding in-kind.
So while I'm not really happy with the idea, the concept that if you have failed (or even morally bad) governance you have not just the right, but the responsibility to establish something morally better with more popular sovereignty. But at the same time, that's not always easy (see the KGB and Gestapo).
It seems like a hard question about when (attempting to) overthrow an immoral government is morally obligatory: there seems a continuum between, say, your average Vietnam War protester, and Stauffenberg attempting a coup in Nazi Germany. It doesn't admit easy, morally clean answers.
are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]?
Generally speaking there is a hierarchy of legitimate targets based on the scale of conflict. In full civilizational struggles like a World War, even civilian populations become targets (not saying this is right or wrong, just seems to be the way of the world). The smaller the scale, the smaller the group of legitimate targets. Maybe just government employees, or military/police specifically. This is all controversial, of course, and hotly debated within any specific context.
I would say that American soldiers in a foreign country are legitimate targets of people who don't want US troops in their country. If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
What about situations where there is a recognized government that has made an agreement with the US to station US troops in the country? Even if that government is undemocratic, my gut reaction is that attacks on American troops would be illegitimate. (I'd separate out puppet states into a different category, though that line can be murky. E.g. South Vietnam. I guess it depends on how much the government relies on the presence of said troops to maintain its status as a government.)
If a legitimate government has invited troops in, the correct point of appeal is that government, not the person of the troops. If the government is not legitimate, or is a puppet of those troops, they may be legitimate targets.
Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence.
If the government has a monopoly on violence, that would remove the people's responsibility for its actions, because they have control over it.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
Hamas didn’t ‘attack a foreign country’, they walked in and started murdering people. Nobody has the right to do that, sovereign or not.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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Notes -
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.
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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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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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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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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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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Kinoite's Strategic Plan: A Legal War and a Heartless Peace
Last week, I wrote a post about the Geneva Convention and Israel's obligations to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza.
This week, I'd like to present a strategic plan for the Israeli side of the conflict. My proposal is that Israel should† do everything possible to avoid getting into an extended occupation or police action. Instead, Israel should frame the current conflict as a war. It should use the laws of war and the rules of Westphalian diplomacy to force the Gaza into a two-state solution.
Part 1: The Strategic Landscape
I've talked to a number of people who see Hamas' tactics as not merely cruel, but pointlessly cruel. Those people argue that Hamas has no path to victory; Hamas' rockets will never win a military victory, and Hamas makes no diplomatic demands that could ever be reasonably met. So, the continued conflict accomplishes nothing of strategic value.
I agree that the attacks are cruel, but see a cold logic behind them; Hamas' best chance to destroy Israel is by preventing Israel from negotiating a two-state solution. And Hamas' best chance to prevent a two-state solution is an endless, simmering conflict.
To use a passage from Freddie DeBoer:
Freddie is basically correct. The Palestinians cannot remain stateless residents of an Israeli-controlled territory forever. Israel might be able to keep Palestine as a separate-but-not-sovereign territory for another generation or two. But, eventually, there will be mounting pressure to tear down the walls that separate Israel from Palestine. Free movement will, in turn, would lead to pressure to give the Palestinians full citizenship and voting rights.
If Israel extends full citizenship and voting rights to Palestinians then Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state.
The other possibility is an independent Palestine. If that happens, the pressure will mount in the other direction. A sovereign, successful Palestine might be able to press its land claims for a generation. Or two. But, eventually, land disputes become historical trivia rather than a live conflict and nations are pressured to accept peace.
Given the above, I think some amount of aggression served Hamas' goals. But the latest attacks were a massive overreach and a fatal strategic blunder.
Part 2: A Legal War
Israel cannot win an occupation so, instead, it should win a war.
In the short-term, Israel could successfully occupy Gaza. Certainly, Israel could blockade the region, move in ground forces, hold territory, and attempt to impose law-and-order on the population. I don't believe Israel could eliminate fighting completely. There are too many insurgents and the region seems too hostile. Worse, in-as-far as Israel spends time occupying Gaza, Israel is bringing itself ever closer to a one-state solution by default.
In addition to this, occupation creates a number of obligations on Israel:
[NB: I made some formatting changes and omitted a significant number of obligations]
Those obligations are quite large, especially in the context of Israel's fight against Hamas. If Israel occupies Gaza, then Israel becomes responsible for providing food, medical care, hygiene supplies and the like to the "fullest extent of the means available" to Israel. That obligation would continue to exist, even if Hamas tried to capture food, or destroy civilian infrastructure.
In addition to creating an affirmative burden to provide for the people of Gaza, an occupation limits Israel's use of force. During an occupation, the destruction of property is forbidden unless "absolutely required by military necessity." In effect, occupation turns a conflict from a classic war into the sort of law-and-order problem that countries face when dealing with domestic terrorism. This is an extremely bad position for Israel as they try to police a region where they'd intensely opposed by the civilian population.
So, rather than occupy, Israel should simply treat the conflict as a war. They might have the capability to move ground forces in Gaza. But they have no obligation to do so. And, as long as Israel's forces are not holding territory, then the conflict is a military siege of an enemy-occupied city. That has vastly different obligations.
Relevant is Article 70 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
Israel should exercise its rights under 70.3a and 70.3b. That is, they should let aid come into the country, but only after a search and some ofter technical arrangements and only if the aid is distributed under the supervision of a protecting power. Put another way, Article 70 gives Israel an obligation to allow aid into Gaza but also lays out how a country can conduct a siege of an opposing force.
The "Protecting Power" piece is interesting. In this context protecting power is a third party country, nominated by Israel and accepted by Hamas, that has permission from Hamas to enter Gaza and oversee the distribution of aid. The relevant part of the Geneva conventions is:
The idea here is that Israel doesn't have an obligation to feed Hamas' fighters. Israel does have to feed civilians, but isn't expected to accept Hamas' word that civilian aid is going to civilians once it crosses into the territory controlled by Hamas. Israel is explicitly within its rights to ask that any aid be delivered to Gaza under the supervision of a protective party.
In Israel's position, I'd use my rights under 70.3.a to insist that aid shipments should only enter Gaza if they're accompanied by a military force that's large enough to reasonably defend the aid against bandits and thieves.
There are a few reasons to do this. The first is that the "protective party" clause would force other first-world nations to actually involve themselves in the conflict or admit that they don't particularly care. Next, Israel is being clear about Israel's obligations. Israel doesn't have to provide aid shipments. It simply has to allow food aid provided by other people.
Strategically, the goal of the siege is the same as the goal of any siege: Israel is pressing Hamas to surrender
With an occupation, all of the obligations fall on Israel. Hamas has little-to-no incentive to surrender during an occupation. Instead, they'd be incentivized to draw things out as long as possible, to better bleed Israel of funds and military forces. Any cease-fire during an occupation would work to Hamas' advantage.
With a siege, time would be on Israel's side. The longer a lawful siege continues, the longer first world nations (outside of Israel) are obliged to commit their forces to overseeing aid shipments. And, delays would serve to starve out Hamas' fighters.
Eventually, I think a siege would end with Hamas surrendering, if only via a claim that they no longer hold Gaza, or the conflict cooling enough that Israel is pushed by the international community to declare victory.
Part 3: A Heartless Peace
Part 3 of my suggestion is relatively simple. When Israel "wins" their siege of Gaza they should appoint a new government and do everything in their power to get out of the region as quickly as possible. From there, Israel should take the position that the newly-formed Gazan government holds sovereign control over Gaza.
From there, Israel should fall back to Westphalian Diplomacy. Questions like "Should Gaza and the West Bank count as a single country or two countries?" can be answered (by Israel at least) as "that is an internal matter for the government of Gaza."
Similarly, the newly-formed Gazan government might recognize Israel as a country, or not. Either way, Israel's reply could be "that is an internal matter for the government of Gaza." The newly-formed Gazan government might issue passports for its citizens, or not. Israel's reply could be "that is an internal matter for the government of Gaza," and so on.
I'm calling this "Heartless Peace" for two reasons.
The first is that, under the rules of international diplomacy, countries have very few obligations to one another. It's certainly kind and praiseworthy if one country sends aid to a starving neighbor. But, it's not required. It's generally good if countries issue visas so foreign nationals can cross their border for tourism or work. But this is not required. Israel would be within its rights to close its borders to Gazan residents, just as Mexico could decide not to issue tourist visas to Swedes.
In Israel's position, I'd close the borders to this newly-formed Gazan state, pending mutual recognition and a diplomatic process. This would mean that Gaza might have to import food and water via its ports and its land border with Egypt. That would certainly be inconvenient but, ultimately, not something that Israel is directly responsible for fixing.
The second reason I'm calling this a "Heartless Peace" is that I wouldn't expect it to last. Certainly, Israel should hope that this attempt at peace is the one that ends the long conflict with Palestine. And if that happens, Israel should be very happy. More likely, attacks would re-occur in a few years and Israel should be prepared.
If attacks happen, Israel should look to Article 51 of the UN Charter.
The rules of Westphalian diplomacy aren't particularly concerned with proportionality, as it applies to wars. Instead, the rule is that, when one nation attacks another, the second nation can go to war. So, if Israel is attacked by the newly-formed nation of Gaza, is should go back to the siege listed previously.
To some extent, this all might seem like legal-wordplay. The status quo is still that Gaza would periodically launch an attack on Israel, Israel would respond, destroy things, and eventually withdraw. I'm expecting basically that pattern to repeat, but with different labels.
My position is that these labels matter. If a country repeatedly bombs an occupied territory (or even civilian centers in its own territory!) to fight domestic terrorists, then that really is a human rights violation. The country that's killing occupied civilians seems to be in the wrong, even if the terrorists are also immoral. In contrast, if a country repeatedly attacks its neighbor, is bombed, and surrendered only to re-attack, then the country that's re-igniting the war seems to be in the wrong.
So, given the options available, I think Israel should step away from the status-quo where the Palestinian Territories are neither really occupied nor really sovereign in favor of a new status-quo where the Palestinian Territories are sovereign and operating under the relatively bright-line rules afforded by international diplomacy.
† I dislike the word "should" since it seems to smuggle in a lot of assumptions about goals. Within this post, an unspecified 'should' assumes that an actor has Israel's general interests in mind. These include the preservation of Israel as a majority-Jewish state, peace, and resolutions to diplomatic disputes that are as favorable to Israel as feasible.
…what if the “sovereign, successful Palestine” doesn’t materialize?
Your strategy doesn’t sound too different from the steelman for intervention in Afghanistan. Roll in, fuck up the Taliban, set up a functional government, roll out. There may have been something about hearts and minds in there, too. But instead, we exchanged munitions for 20 years and barely changed anything. If we’d skipped those 20 years, and didn’t even try to fill the power vacuum, would an agreeable Afghan government have materialized?
Say Israel kills every card-carrying Hamas member, and no one else. I don’t think that makes the problem go away. There will still be young, angry men looking to avenge their friends and family. There will also still be outside powers interested in pushing the infidels out of Jerusalem.
We are dozens of summits, treaties and agreements into defining a legal relationship between Israel and something resembling Palestine. The Oslo accords, in particular, govern the allowed level of Israeli force. That hasn’t stopped Israel from controlling the strip, and it hasn’t stopped Hamas from waging its campaign. Would another siege and another piece of paper be any different?
Israel can guarantee a sovereign Palestine. A successful Palestine would be nice-to-have but not really a strategic requirement.
I think I'm proposing two material changes.
The first is that, by withdrawing, Israel can close its borders with the now-sovereign Gaza. Israel would be within its rights to completely block the movement of people and goods between two countries. So, that would limit the extent to which Gazas residents have an opportunity to damage Israel. Israel has, until recently, not closed its borders.
The second material change is that I'm suggesting Israel treat the current conflict (and any future conflicts) like wars rather than police actions in an occupied territory. The rules for a war against a hostile state are much less restrictive than the rules for a police action in an occupied territory. Gaza might start another conflict, or a third. But realistically, a state can only lose so many wars before they run out people who are able and willing to continue a conflict.
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I mean the difference is that, in the hypothetical provided, Israel expends roughly the same resources, gets attacked roughly the same amount, and uses roughly the same force in both scenarios, but they get significantly less international flak for one of them.
As opposed to the US Invasion of Afghanistan, where the option was between a costly invasion and occupation and a ton of international flak, and expending roughly nothing because Afghanistan wasn't exactly a threat (possibly some assassinations and drone strikes still happen in this scenario).
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I am not sure if it works that way anymore. I am no expert but to me it seems that more and more nations use paramilitaries/PMCs/terrorist groups to conduct asymmetrical warfare with the whole purpose of keeping plausible deniability. What prevents new government of Gaza to claim that they regret terrorist attack conducted from their territory by underground terrorist group? Or even better, they can finance terrorist cells inside Israel or Syria or Lebanon or West Bank and do similar things. Now this is nothing new, for instance Pakistan does this all the time vis-à-vis India, Iran itself has parallel government structure tied to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with their own network of companies and terrorist cells and unique capability of wreaking havoc without necessarily being tied to the Government. The same goes for Russia and Wagner's adventures in Africa for instance.
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I've been thinking that something like this would work as a solution for the Israelis. Once Gaza is an independent state, Israel can justifiably fortify their side of the border as much as they like. After all, their neighbour is aggressing them. Nobody can accuse them of apartheid (with regards to Gaza) since they have no obligation to allow foreign citizens to enter their territory at all. If the government of Gaza attacks them, they can justifiably use force to defend themselves. Egypt can take refugees without being accused of being complicit in Israeli ethnic cleansing of the strip.
I mean, it's not as if Gaza has any religious significance (like Jerusalem), strategic significance (like the Golan Heights) or economic significance (like Tel Aviv). An Israel without Gaza is an Israel with 2 millions fewer Arabs and nothing of value lost.
You realize that Israel left Gaza in 2005, right? The Palestinian Authority held elections in 2006, and Hamas won. Fatah did not accept the results, and they split to Hamas ruling the Gaza strip while Fatah rules Judea and Samaria (where they are allowed according to Oslo). Hamas did not declare an independent state, since that’s not what they’re after. Israel did fortify itself, and after rocket fire started from Gaza it was blockaded. There were roughly 0 voices saying Israel is justified in anything.
This is basically where we are now, 17 years later.
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This is the situation since 2007. And the government of Gaza has just attacked them. Well, in fact it's been attacking them all along, but this time it was a much bigger attack than usual.
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You know the rockets are usually coming out of those Gaza borders, right?
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I think there is a lot of grey area between "two recognized countries are fighting a war" and "internal police action". There are civil wars, insurgencies, non-state actors operating out of failed states and all other sorts of corner cases. An occupation requires a hostile army, which I guess requires a state-like entity to which they are hostile. I don't think an army being in some territory where some fraction of the population would rather they were not (which is every army, everywhere) is probably not sufficient.
Also, if something is a human rights violation is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. It is not like the Hague will deploy paratroopers to stop any human rights violation happening within 24 hours.
Politically speaking, if by some miracle Gaza was a recognized independent state, do you think that the people currently protesting that explosion in a hospital parking lot which they assume IDF caused would switch their stance and say "well, I suppose article 51 gives Israel the right to nuke Gaza after being attacked"?
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How are people still so naive about Islamic extremists? After ISIS, The Taliban, Al Qaeda, 9/11, all of the terrorist attacks in Europe, etc you still have people in the West who refuse to believe Islamic extremists (which includes Hamas) could commit atrocities and are bad faith actors in this conflict.
Take for example the 40 babies fiasco, where many people (especially on the Left) were talking about war propaganda and how dumb people were for believing that Hamas would do that. Islamic extremists absolutely would do that! These same people who on the same day shot up a whole music festival, murdered innocent children and took toddlers as hostages! But we are supposed to believe killing babies is too far? There is almost no amount of savagery by Islamic extremists that should shock anyone at this point, especially after ISIS, but here we are I guess.
Or take for another example this hospital explosion. It's looking like Israel didn't do it based on new intelligence, but maybe they did. At this point it still is unclear. But one thing I know for sure is that you should not take the word of Hamas seriously on who did it. This is an organization who has put weapons under hospitals and schools and is known to not give a shit if their actions led to Palestinian children's deaths. In fact, they often try to make that happen as a weapon in the information war against. So yes, they absolutely would blow up their own hospital to make Israel look bad, so you shouldn't take the word of Islamic extremists seriously on this issue. Yet you have journalists and politicians in the West taking them at their word on this atrocity. Ironically, these are often some of the same kinds of people who make fun of the Right for falling for fake news and Russian disinformation.
I'm truly at a loss for words here with this conflict. How is this possible? Is there anything that can wake people up to this issue after all these years or is this just something we have to live with?
"Would do it" doesn't equal "did do it". For example, Saddam's soldiers did all kinds of messed up stuff, but Nayrah's testimony about babies taken from incubators was still made up.
Of course. But many of these same people also instantly believed that Israel bombed the hospital and took Hamas's word for it. But what annoys me is that they act like Hamas would never do such a thing, which is of course ridiculous (at least in my opinion) based on their track record on the same day based on videos that they uploaded.
"took Hamas's word for it"
Come on, if a particular building is bombed in Gaza nowadays I wouldn't need anyone's word to think it 99% likely that Israel did it, because Israel is definitely bombing other buildings there in retalion for the Hamas attacks.
Roughly one third of Palestinian casualties in any given Israel-Hamas conflict are caused by rockets fired from the Gaza strip that fail in some way such as misfiring, crashing, prematurely detonating, coming apart in midair, and so on and so forth. Might be time to update those priors.
is Iron Dome actually intercepting rockets over Gaza? Your source does not mention Iron Dome (what makes Israel even less involved)
You are correct, I was mistaken. The Iron Dome appears to only intercept rockets on terminal approach to a populated area in Israel, it does not intercept rockets over Gaza.
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Even if the Bayesian statistics bear this out (I'm not quite as confident as you, but it is probably more likely than not), the better question is whether or not it's sufficient confidence to run "Israel bombs hospital, killing 500" headlines. In this case, it seems like it probably shouldn't have been.
Why not?
The US was way less trigger happy then the IDF during the war on terror and we Kandahar'd the hell out of some hospitals.
It was sensational as hell though; can't argue with that.
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A particular building, yes. That particular building, no. This is a group who has put bombs under schools and hospitals in the past. Everything they say should be taken with a massive grain of salt. Israel too, but these people are already skeptical of Israel but believe something said by a literal Islamist organization that is undoubtedly a terrorist group.
Yes, because journalists and politicians did that immediately when it happened! Where do you think the casualty numbers and this news came from?
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And a lot of the same people saying Israel didn't do it were saying that Israel would be 100% justified in doing so the day before.
There's nothing contradictory in those two arguments. A lot of people generally think Israel is excessively soft in how it handles Hamas.
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False dichotomy, no?
There’s no ordinal scale of evil. A convicted murderer is not necessarily a rapist or even a jaywalker. Likewise, believing that Islamic terrorists are willing to commit atrocities in general does not imply that they committed any atrocity in particular.
Even if you are arguing from specificity, the offending parties were actively believing and spreading the (unlikely to be true) story that Israel just bombed a hospital full of innocents. Hamas being bad doesn't confirm they did the one bad thing. Hamas being bad does mean anyone of any respectability or intelligence would not spread Hamas propaganda without serious vetting of it. Yet, major left of center media outlets did.
You’re right; I overlooked the latter part of the comment.
Was there really no non-Hamas source providing firsthand reports on the hospital? If not…yeah, journalistic malpractice.
I still think “they absolutely would blow up their own hospital to make Israel look bad” is assuming the conclusion.
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They killed babies and children and then took some young kids as hostages that same day. They just didn't behead 40 in a nursery or whatever it was, but they essentially did the same thing that exact same day.
Did they though? How do we know? I have only heard any of this from the same people who were telling me that they'd beheaded forty babies.
They released photos of dead babies (2 I believe). They went around a neighborhood door to door and killed anyone in the homes including children. They released photos of the hostages they took which included children.
They released photos of two burnt objects of some kind -- maybe they were babies, maybe not. The rest (other than the hostages) -- how do you know?
What happened that day according to you? Was anyone killed?
I've seen plenty of photos of people who look like they were shot, so probably, yeah.
The nature of the activities beyond that I actually have very little insight -- there's no reason to trust anything released by either party other than stuff that looks like it would be beyond their (respective) capability to easily fake, and very little of what I've seen comes from anything close to a disinterested bystander.
Okay Alex
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Photos were released. And saying all 40 were be headed was a misquote of the original Story.
What photos? I have seen zero photos of beheaded babies.
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I know this is an old comment now, but I thought this link might contain some items of interest to you: https://themedialine.org/top-stories/evidence-on-display-at-israels-forensic-pathology-center-confirms-hamas-atrocities/
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As far as I am aware, there is still no evidence they beheaded any babies.
I said the same thing on an earlier thread and someone likened me to Alex Jones, lol.
No. You questioned whether any babies were killed. And then I called you Alex Jones.
No? Read the thread instead of making things up.
Et tu
@zeke5123, maybe you're thinking of your conversation with @jfk. (https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/150623?context=8#context) in which @jfk kinda sorta questions whether anyone was killed, and you called him Alex Jones rather than your conversation with @Tomato where he brought up a news article (https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/149971?context=8#context) and you said that it's Alex Jones-level denial.
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No? I think that a claim circulating earlier that Hamas beheaded 40 babies was dubious. You know it’s possible to think that Hamas does bad things without uncritically accepting every claim that’s made by Hamas’s foes, right?
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It looks like that story wasn't true or exaggerated. But considering the litany of atrocities they committed that same day and were proud of, acting like they wouldn't is ridiculous. There was a hyper focus on whether or not the babies were beheaded or not. It's like fine, they didn't behead the babies, they just did all these other things we know are true that are just as bad. People wanted to focus on that to cast doubt on the other things they did that day, which is absurd because they broadcasted it to the world. Whether or not they did it, that is a debate. What isn't up for debate is if they would kill children because they literally did it that same day and Islamists have done so for decades. And this is true regardless of what Israel did, didn't do, or will do in the future.
The people I've seen focusing most on the beheaded babies are the ones claiming that there were beheaded babies. I think it's fair to point out that we don't actually know that they actually beheaded babies.
Indeed. Credibility matters. You don't get to push fake nonsense and expect people to believe you afterwards.
It makes me think of some US political spat I can barely remember. I think some congressman made an incondiary claim that was proven false, then responded by saying something like "yeah but they would if they could". Like, no dude, you don't get credit here. You lied.
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Why make a doubtful unverified story the first example of atrocities you cite?
A soldier said on camera that many children had been killed and they even saw a beheaded child. The i24 (Israeli news channel) reporter repeated that, jumbled it up, others jumbled it up further, military didn’t comment until it had verified the situation. It now turns out that up to 40 kids were killed (expected given demographics of kibbutzim, high fertility rates among even modern orthodox Jewry, and total population), including babies, and that one young child was seemingly beheaded.
Far from some deliberate propaganda effort, that’s exactly how things are supposed to work, the military didn’t officially confirm until they had the information.
IMO, the military could have immediately "debunked" the 40 beheaded babies story, but let it run wild for awhile anyways for obvious reasons.
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Me or the Israelis? Because from what I saw that wasn't reported by the IDF but instead by some random Israeli and the news picked up on it uncritically.
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No released photographic evidence, but officials have told us they have seen the photos.
I assume out of respect for the dead they're not being released. If my child were beheaded I wouldn't want those photos out on the Internet, either. I wouldn't really care if it assuaged conspiracy theorists, people would just say they're AI-generated anyway.
I thought Biden said he saw them and then later "clarified" that he didn't.
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Photos of the babies have been released. But as far as I know, none was beheaded.
I've seen a photo of two babies burned black. But no beheaded ones.
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Yeah, I can't tell for sure (because of censorship/fire damage) but it doesn't look like it. And I doubt they have a secret stash of even more shocking images.
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Then why did they release photos of other dead babies on Twitter?
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To be clear, what happened was: “interested party A claims their enemies committed particularly heinous act, source: trust me bro” and now you’re calling people who would like better evidence conspiracy theorists? Weird inversion of burden of proof particularly on a site like this.
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Who said they're naive?
Replace this with any other culture war issue (and,for Americans, that's what it is) IQ, crime,gender medicine.
Let's say people are utterly credulous about the evidence from their side (including from non credible sources), then suddenly have isolated demands for rigor for any contradictory evidence, stake out absolute stances ("that never happens") and only partly walk them back after allowing the misinformation to fester as long as possible.
What conclusion would you draw?
I make an exception for Trudeau. There the explanation is that he just is a deeply unwise person who makes premature and dangerous comments to virtual signal (see the mass graves thing) A fool more than a self serving partisan for whom truth is secondary or is in such a bubble and compromised epistemic position that it functionally is.
Despite how ghastly the behavior of the underdog, people are eager to side with them because they believe that they are only the underdog because they are oppressed, and the oppressor is ultimately the one that's morally culpable for their behavior. If they were not oppressed, their natural state would be peaceful and humane.
This leads to a confabulation of sorts. The underdog is both given the benefit of the doubt about potential bad behavior and they are also absolved of responsibility when their behavior is undeniably bad.
This situation is also tailor-made for the sort of bad faith I'm describing because there's already a belief on the pro-"underdog" side (driven by an assumption that words determine reality) that "validating narratives" directly leads to harm. This is often strange and self-serving in US contexts (accepting the "detransitioner narrative" will in no way lead to trans "genocide", no matter what partisans say), but if there's any time it's likely to be true it's here.
When you have people like Nikki Haley saying "finish them" about an operation that must kill or displace a bunch of unarmed Palestinians to have any efficacy I can see why people utterly opposed to that want to run as much interference as possible.
"X never happens" when you know all you're doing is forcing your opponent to go do research is asinine in a domestic context but, insofar as you believe no one should die, you actually have an incentive to muddy the waters and blunt sympathy for Israel. The US is its benefactor after all and so it may really matter this time.
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I've seen many claims of Hamas militants being drug- or meth-fueled, along with some healthy skepticism of such. Based on what, exactly?
It's called Captagon
When ISIS un-assed for the Sahel, they took Captagon with them. It has since made its way into pretty much every fight going on across the continent. I guess it's a step up from brown-brown but not by much.
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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.
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.
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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Palestinian migrants were also major contributor to Lebanon civil war and its current state.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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'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? +?
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.
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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
I think the tricky part here isn't defining whether Hamas is a government, but definining what "bearing responsibility" means. What does responsibility for the actions of your government look like?
Does it look like "If your government oppresses Palestinians you aren't allowed to safely go to a music festival?" Does it look like "If your government goes out and kills some civilians, your apartment building may be bombed at any time?" "If your government maintains troops overseas engaged in warfare against Muslims, better not work in an office in downtown Manhattan?"
Your definition of responsibility much moreso than any question of the anarchic state of international relations is going to decide whether most find your framework to actually resemble anything workable.
But anyway, the idea of international relations as anarchic is kind of a modern interposition, that would have been totally foreign to our cultural ancestors. It is fine to quote the Melian Dialogue but it must be remembered that it was a dialogue, a live controversy, that there were those who agreed and those who disagreed with the speaker.
The Romans were famously solicitous of only waging war when they felt it was just. Besides the many ritual niceties that must be observed before going to war:
To my knowledge, and I'm open to seeing a counterexample!, there has never been a primary source written by/from the perspective of any ancient conqueror that did not find some tenuous (to our eyes) way of justifying their actions. William the Conqueror claimed that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to him, not Harold Godwinson. Alexander claimed he invaded Persia in retribution for Persian violence against the Greeks (Greeks his father had just conquered). Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Yes, we humans usually find it necessary to conceal our predatory designs beneath a banner of truth and justice. We are very good at conflating our material interests and partisan politics with "right".
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It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
Thirdly, any analysis where you conclude that the average person holds non-negligible responsibility for something like government of all things must explain what exactly the analyst thinks is okay to do to that person with said responsibility. Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
I've heard "Silence is Violence" enough to try on the horseshoe.
If your government freezes elections after coming to power, and you disagree strongly with the actions of that government, you:
As an American white male, it's perhaps not fair that I'd be targeted by Muslim terror organizations for our government's actions in the Middle East. Especially since I've resisted this insofar as any voter who moonlights as a political speaker at social events. Nor is it fair that I face disparate amounts of interracial violence supposedly as a result of perceived structural racism. But because I didn't resist these things strongly enough, I do have to be prepared for those consequences.
"I will apply your morality interpreted by me upon you for you-defined-by-me" is one of the most tribalistic things out there. Don't fall for it.
This is not the same as saying it's just or even reasonable for those actions to be ascribed to you.
Yes - and I specifically state the opposite. This whole thread is about what's fair, what's not, and what is the reality of inter-group violence/resistance. For Israel and Palestine, these governments and pseudo-governments' subjects are considered a single group.
How many Americans despise foreign interference? How many whites aren't racist? My guess would be a plurality and a significant majority, respectively. Which proportion justifies violence against the group? How many Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map?
Those are a lot of question marks. I think the Palestinians should be doing more to vocalize against and sabotage the actions of their organized terrorist groups.
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Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
This is a recipe for far greater death and destruction than anyone would ever tolerate upon themselves, you included. Any such position should be heavily scrutinized far more than its reverse. I think it is immoral to the highest order to declare that simply because a government has legitimacy with its people that you can ignore civilian casualties or simply care less about them.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
You can disagree all you want, but you're conflating proportionality and protection of civilians who are not present on military objectives.
Protection of civilians comes in two main forms: civilians should not be harmed as long as they are not part of/adjacent to valid military objectives, and that disproportionate force should not be used against even valid military objectives. The first has always had the language that a legitimate military objective renders a do-not-target objective into a valid-for-targetting objective, not the other way around (i.e. putting human shields doesn't turn a previously-legitimate target illegitimate), and the second has always been about the scale of expected benefit and, implicitly and relevant to your argument, alternative forms available to achieve it. 'Discriminatory' weapons, in so much that they do exist, are only legally obliged because they allow a means to achieve an effect that makes the alternatives illegitimate. If the means didn't exist, the alternatives wouldn't be excessive to the alternatives.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
You're correct. I was speaking practically, as we've yet to see a case where a nuke was needed by this standard.
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I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
I agree, it's just not totally delegitimizing. Many countries don't even bother with elections, is that more or less legitimate than holding one free election, one time? How do you account for the strong legitimacy of monarchies for eons? Legitimacy is not about votes specifically, though in our modern context we often conflate the two.
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
Truman agreed. Your opinion, and mine, is irrelevant. You can apply your interpretation of just war theory to your own use of nuclear weapons.
Not a thing. Neither can a hand grenade.
Indifference and a willingness to tolerate almost anything in the name of survival is universal amongst humans.
The moral standards of bombardment and killing non-combatants were degraded with time in WW2. There were international treaties barring attacks against undefended non-military targets and people were to be given a chance to evacuate. This was not extended to air attacks, but not for a lack of trying. By and large, such things were considered unacceptable before the war, but people grew to desire revenge and were fine with sating it on the civilians of the enemy.
So appealing to the fact that people thought it was okay back then is pointless. There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
The radius might be a bit bigger on a nuke, let me verify.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
I think there's a sense of relativism you're missing here. People in the past had good reasons for doing what they did. And they were still, in many cases, wrong or insane. Just like they had plenty of good reasons to use herbs to treat open wounds instead of soap, but that's still insane. So the wars of past societies can have a lot of thought, and many good reasons behind them ... and still be insane.
What follows is a tangent on 'all of human history'.
I challenge you to elaborate a non-contrived standard of morality under which most people who lived before, like, the Enlightenment weren't moral monsters?
Under any conceivable egalitarian/utilitarian 'killing people is, like, bad' perspective, they're monsters because they supported ideologies/religions that killed a lot of people for reasons that obviously don't matter as much like 'whether you're protestant or catholic' or 'which ruler rules you'. Neighboring city-states could, in fact, declare peace or unify instead of killing and raiding each other (as they eventually did).
There are other standards! Maybe war is awesome or noble or glorious, and killing the weak is a moral duty to purify the human race of weakness. Even then, though, wars are a very poor way of conducting eugenics, because the strong and weak are fairly evenly distributed between neighboring countries and within armies the strong only die slightly less than the poor do. Also, a lot of the killing around before the Enlightenment was done in large part for obviously 'slave morality' reasons like 'my sect of Christianity better serves God and the immortal souls of the population than yours does'.
Again, it depends on your perspective, but there's just a lot of ways past-people are moral monsters. Stuff like 'it's totally legal to beat and rape your wife if you so desire', stuff like 'the German race are bloodthirsty animals who must be put down', whatever.
Now, to be clear, you can apply the same standards to our time. We're moral monsters too. We torture our young and old with technological confusions, we sell people drugs and fattening food, our smartest and most passionate devote themselves to maximizing the live-length mundane pleasures of the weak. Again, it'll depend on your perspective, but whether it's humans or AI that exist in 500 years, they'll have a lot of quite harsh criticisms of us.
But older people were monsters and we're right to strongly reject the ways in which they were. Just like there are views today that we should strongly reject - if only we knew what better views should replace them.
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They don't need to be moral monsters to be indifferent, but there was 100% a faction of the pro-bombing crowd which justified what they did on the basis of "better them than us" and "an eye for an eye", or even just "If it's your government, we'll kill you just the same" like Curtis LeMay. Arthur Harris is a good example, which choice quotes such as "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
Now, you may argue that Harris isn't out for blood just to see it run, but he's only doing it in retaliation. Regardless, this is precisely what there had been numerous treaties to address in the first place, and even during this time, there was continued debate over the ethics of bombing civilians and cities.
Moreover, the idea that we've lost touch with the reality of war is ludicrous, given that the idea of restrictions upon how war could be declared and conducted goes back millennia who would have been very familiar with war and what it could do.
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You've never heard of the popular system of "one man, one vote, one time"?
That's not actually a requirement.
I have no idea what this is a reference to.
Sure. In practice, we have yet to see anyone make a weapon that is so colossal, dangerous, and widespread as to justify nuking a city.
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Lately, I've found myself wondering quite a bit about the responsibility to overthrow illegitimate governments engaging in terrorism and war crimes. On one hand, there is a lot of hiding behind failed state governments and claiming "they don't represent us" or similar. On the other, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that random citizens are responsible for their government's actions -- are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]? I suppose one answer is
yeschad.jpgwith the caveat that doing so makes you a legitimate target for American ordnance too.If the US were to pop off a few long-range rockets (Trident II or Minuteman III, naturally) at it's foe-of-the-month and the claim that the chain of command wasn't legitimate ("the Commander-in-Chief only won a minority of votes in the last election!"), I doubt anyone would believe cries of "collective punishment" to justify ignoring the attacks and not responding in-kind.
So while I'm not really happy with the idea, the concept that if you have failed (or even morally bad) governance you have not just the right, but the responsibility to establish something morally better with more popular sovereignty. But at the same time, that's not always easy (see the KGB and Gestapo).
It seems like a hard question about when (attempting to) overthrow an immoral government is morally obligatory: there seems a continuum between, say, your average Vietnam War protester, and Stauffenberg attempting a coup in Nazi Germany. It doesn't admit easy, morally clean answers.
Generally speaking there is a hierarchy of legitimate targets based on the scale of conflict. In full civilizational struggles like a World War, even civilian populations become targets (not saying this is right or wrong, just seems to be the way of the world). The smaller the scale, the smaller the group of legitimate targets. Maybe just government employees, or military/police specifically. This is all controversial, of course, and hotly debated within any specific context.
I would say that American soldiers in a foreign country are legitimate targets of people who don't want US troops in their country. If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
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I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
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Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
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I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
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What about situations where there is a recognized government that has made an agreement with the US to station US troops in the country? Even if that government is undemocratic, my gut reaction is that attacks on American troops would be illegitimate. (I'd separate out puppet states into a different category, though that line can be murky. E.g. South Vietnam. I guess it depends on how much the government relies on the presence of said troops to maintain its status as a government.)
If a legitimate government has invited troops in, the correct point of appeal is that government, not the person of the troops. If the government is not legitimate, or is a puppet of those troops, they may be legitimate targets.
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If the government has a monopoly on violence, that would remove the people's responsibility for its actions, because they have control over it.
At some point the people become the equivalent of draftees. You're permitted to kill the enemy's draftees.
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Hamas didn’t ‘attack a foreign country’, they walked in and started murdering people. Nobody has the right to do that, sovereign or not.
First prior: states are actors in anarchy, there is no "right" or "wrong".
The strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.
We may criticize, but without a more powerful state to enforce it, everything is permitted. This is descriptive, not normative.
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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?
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
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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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This is politics, unfortunately. But since the Hamas attack thousands of Haredim have volunteered to be drafted.
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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'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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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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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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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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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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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.
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.
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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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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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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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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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 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.
¿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 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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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.
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 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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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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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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