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This whole Israel-Palestine issue has made it even more clear than ever that politicians and many of the "elites" have literally no critical thinking skills or the ability to reason out one or two steps into the future. First there is the "Cease Fire People". It's understandable that people are upset seeing what is going on in Gaza with women and children, but what do they think a cease fire will accomplish? It is literally just kicking the can down the road again. Do they think Hamas will be more reasonable and someone people can negotiate with? If not, you are literally just allowing them to regroup and commit another terrorist attack that could destabilize the Middle East again in a few years. It's really that simple. If you want peace in the region, Hamas cannot be allowed to be in charge in Gaza. And if you asked the Egyptian government, they'd probably tell you the same thing since they just had their own issues wit the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then you have the people who think there will be peace if the Palestinians get their own state. Throwing out for a minute whether or not the Palestinians will attack Israel, the real question is how quickly they will start attacking each other an a civil war. We already know there was a Fatah–Hamas conflict recently, and why would they not fight each other again in a civil war that could very possibly be even worse than what's going on in Gaza? Looking at the neighboring countries, it's not exactly a place known for political stability.
I understand people seeing things on television that makes them sad and they just want it to stop. That's understandable. But has anyone in the State Department revolting against the Biden Administration for their stance on Israel given any reasonable plan for what comes next after a cease fire with Hamas? And I say this as someone who is not a Zionist or a huge fan of Israel.
Westerners just don't seem to be able to understand Muslim extremists. Hamas fighters are literally Islamists that can't be reasoned with. This should be obvious by now to everyone on planet earth after Al Qaeda and ISIS, but apparently some people still haven't learned this obvious fact. I don't know if it's because Westerners don't think that people could actually sincerely believe in their religion like that so they must be ACTUALLY motivated by something else (wrong, as their writings tell us), or their belief that inside everyone is a Westerner waiting to come out who supports gay marriage and diversity, a combination of this, or something else entirely. But if these people think that a cease fire with Hamas will lead to a long standing peace then they are delusional.
I apologize if this comes off as straw-man-y but if your argument is functionally "Hamas is so evil they should not be allowed to continue to exist so it's fine when Israel kills thousands of innocents to stop them" then your argument is missing a few steps! Someone put this more pithily than me on Twitter but if Israel killed my whole family, who have nothing to do with Hamas, in pursuit of killing some Hamas member my first response would be to start Hamas 2. Do you imagine that a lasting peace is going to be achieved by killing thousands of innocents to get rid of Hamas?
I suspect a majority of the people who are calling for a ceasefire agree you that Hamas is evil. I've seen lots of people make points about how Hamas oppresses Palestinians in Gaza. How they haven't allowed elections in almost 20 years. Those people just disagree that Hamas is "murdering thousands of innocent people to stop them" evil.
I don't think most people think a present ceasefire will lead to long standing peace, I think they are much more focused on the immediate goal of preventing the deaths of thousands (tens of thousands?) of innocent civilians.
Do you think this is the first time in military history that there was collateral damage? Do you think that conquered people always resist?
Also do you think it is good strategy to basically encourage human shields (provided side A arranges it so that if Party B attacks A, then B will cause collateral damage and be prevented from the collateral damage)? It seems like a really bad idea.
No, but nor do I think collateral damage is always permissible.
What does Palestinians "not resist[ing]" even look like in this context? They are penned in Gaza with nowhere to go. Regularly assailed by air from Israel with little ability to resist or retaliate. How much resistance could they cease doing?
What has been the actual effect of Israel's killing of human shields on Hamas' willingness to use human shields? Has it actually decreased? Has killing human shields been an effective deterrent in preventing Hamas' use of them? Or has it just killed a thousands of innocent people?
It’s been highly effective in getting people like Biden calling for a cease fire that heavily benefits Hamas.
Resisting is talking about after the war; not during.
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They have built 300 miles of tunnels under Gaza for this exact war. Not resisting may have been not preparing for war.
Plus they have had random rocket launches for a long time. Which might be more of a threat to Israel since the Iron dome as a solution is expensive. They can’t trade unlimited missiles without going bankrupt against Gaza.
The US provides Iron Dome funding on demand so it may as well be unlimited from Israel's perspective.
The next wave of voters are anti-Israel. And there may be limits on this so for geopolitical games I don’t think Israel can count on that.
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While using civilians as human shields is certainly morally dubious, continuing to use them after your opponent calls your bluff and it makes no further difference is even worse.
So my sympathies for Hamas, negative as they were, can only go one way.
Can you provide a falsifiable definition of what a "human shield" is? I've never seen one. What is the objective scientific difference between a legitimate tragic human shield and an aggressor killing a civilian without mercy ostensibly to get at a "valid" target, and just invoking the phrase "human shield" to abrogate moral consequences for their actions? How many people or what methods are used when one shifts from the other?
If a bomb is dropped and kills 10 people to get at one that operated much of his guerilla field planning from home is that human shields? 100? 2? If a cop shoots through a hostage to kill a fugitive killer is that a human shields (blameless and free from personal responsibility for their actions)? What if it's a drugee and not a killer?
It's all about intent and capabilities. When a guerilla force has an entire city to operate in, yet insists on placing weapon caches inside a hospital, that's certainly one. Or someone holding a gun to a hostage's head.
I really don't see anything particularly difficult about it. Is the enemy relying on your unwillingness to kill neutral third parties (or even their civilian supporters) to deter you from offing them? That's a human shield, not that cases like having the Pentagon in DC, because nobody does that to stop them getting literally nuked.
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I am not sympathetic to Hamas. I do not think Hamas deserves any sympathy. I do think the innocent Palestinians who Hamas is using as human shields deserve sympathy.
This contradicts your earlier statement that, under similar circumstances, you would take similar actions.
I take this to mean that you find it understandable and morally acceptable to engage in the actions Hamas has engaged in, as revenge for unjust acts that have affected them.
Fair enough, I have a little sympathy for Hamas. But I recognize that they are evil in both their actions against Israelis and Palestinians alike and want to see them defeated.
I actually find that the Israeli government has done many things that I'd consider to be evil as well - using Palestinians as human shields (as in literally tying children to military vehicles), deploying white phosphorous in civilian areas, sexual abuse of Palestinian women... That said I'm not a particularly big fan of Hamas, so I want to see both of them defeated.
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It’s pretty easy to imagine when you look at some historical examples, eg. pacification of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in WWII, which in fact resulted in not only lasting peace, but in fact strong alliance with the former adversary who killed hundreds of thousands of innocents using the same tactics used by Israel today.
This is a great point, and one I've never thought about. I was about to push back on the possibility of Palestinian culture being able to recover from something like this, but is it really that much of a departure from Imperial Japan's levels of hatred/propensity to commit atrocities?
I suppose one challenge is even if you pacify Palestine, you still have hotbeds of radical Islam outside of it (nationally, geographically) to support the ideology. Germany could be encircled, Japan is an Island, but you can't put a palm over the entirety of the middle east and west Africa at the same time.
Yeah, I don’t really want to argue for high likelihood of this scenario in Palestinian context, just that it doesn’t seem at all impossible considering the plentiful historical examples.
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Part of the reason we have lasting peace with those countries is the vast amount of economic resources we spent to help build those countries back up after the war. Do you think that's going to happen here? After Israel's war with Hamas is over are they going to deliver a bunch of resources to Gaza and the West Bank to help the development of a peaceful Palestinian state? I am skeptical!
Israel provided jobs to gazans before this. West bank is noticeably wealthier / HDI / whatever your metric is comparee to Gaza. I think Gaza would economically grow it fully embraced Israeli economic partnership
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If they thought that this was a viable possibility? Maybe. I think that the hatred is a bit more entrenched than it was in Japan/Germany.
I mean, it's hard to imagine that they won't use resources to try to destroy Israel. When given a choice they have show that that is exactly what they will do.
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If Hamas formally surrendered and then allowed Israel occupation the aid would flow in. Same terms as Japan or Germany accepted - unconditional surrender.
I am not convinced. What was the situation in Gaza pre-Israeli withdrawal?
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You could give Hamas all of the aid we gave to Israel and they would waste it trying to kill Israelis instead of building up their country.
Sure, I agree. I think Hamas is evil. But I don't think that's true of Palestinians in general. Same as the Nazi Germany government or the imperial Japanese government.
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That's not really my argument. My argument is if they do a cease fire with Hamas, we will literally just be here in 5-10 years from now at best. They knew what the response to this would be and they did it anyway. These are people who put weapons under schools and hospitals and dares people to blow them up. We may get Hamas 2.0 after this, but if we do a cease fire and Hamas stays in power, we 100% get Hamas 1.0 in power no matter what.
What will a cease fire even accomplish? Allow these people to move to safety? Move where? Hamas uses them as human shields and will embed themselves in the population. And there's nowhere safe to move them because nobody wants these people. Egypt, Europe, America, and other Arabs don't want them.
Have any of these cease fire people proposed any plan for how we won't be here again very soon? Possibly in just a few weeks. Can Hamas even be trusted with a cease fire? We know they will commit terrorist attacks as soon as possible and take advantage of any kindness offered to them.
How is Israel's current strategy going to prevent us from being back here in 10-15 years? Say Israel kills every member of Hamas, not just in Gaza, but the entire world. What is the plan for after that? Do we go back to the pre-2005 occupation of Gaza by Israel? The same one the preceded Hamas' rise to power? Does Israel go back to treating Gaza like an open air prison? Will whatever group that fills the power vacuum left by Hamas be friendlier with Israel?
It will prevent the deaths of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent civilians, many of them children? That is enough of a goal for a lot of people!
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No, you're the one incapable of critical thinking or looking at consequences a few moves ahead right now. Hamas didn't do this in spite of the Israeli response, they did it to provoke the Israeli response. Hamas' end game was exactly this scenario: torpedo the Israeli-Arab rapprochement created by the Abraham Accords for another generation, so that the can gets kicked down the road another 50 years.
The reaction of much of the global public, especially the Muslim population, to the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is not something that Israel is in a position to change. Braying like a jackass that the human terrain isn't acting rationally to your standards is as useless as politicians who complain about the voters.
The ground invasion is what Hamas wanted from the start, it's a trap. It's sad to me that so many people are so brain poisoned from watching too many Hollywood action films that they see a trap and say "Well a real hero goes in anyway and figures out a way."
No, I addressed this. Yes, their response was to kill as many civilians as possible in Israel to start a conflict, not caring at all how it negatively affects the people they supposedly govern since they don't care about governing or civilians. This is because they are Islamists and religious extremists who can't be reasoned with, which is why they all have to die if any peace is possible. Any cease fire gives them exactly what they want. The only possible way they they "win" is because Israel isn't allowed to finish the job because of Western leftists crying about a cease fire that kicks the can down the road 5-10 years. They need to all be killed so their gambit fails and they realize if they pull this shit again they all die and their city will be destroyed. This would also be true if a secular Palestinian government was in power and Israel disappeared off the map.
The "trap" is to stop now and slowly turn the West against Israel while allowing Hamas to stay in power. This is what Hamas actually wants, not to be eradicated off this earth permanently.
This isn't really a good way of putting it. Hamas and the citizens of Gaza actually do read the international news and some of them even speak hebrew - which means that they understand what it means when Netanyahu holds up funny little maps that show Palestine not existing at all. Israel is very explicitly an ethnonationalist country that exists for the sake of the jewish people, and that has some very obvious connotations when they present maps which show Israel completely swallowing up Palestine!
Why should Hamas care about what happens to their population when doing nothing and accepting the status quo proposed by the Israelis means that they're all gone anyway? The Israelis are right there in the public eye letting them know that accepting a diplomatic solution means either their extermination or their permanent expulsion from the lands they've lived in for thousands of years. What's their motive to just give in and accept a slow death?
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Having dealt with Islamic extremists in person before, this is just not true. They aren't brainless automatons. They have a specific belief system, and can be negotiated and reasoned with. Ironically Israel proves this all the time when they negotiate with them. Just like everyone else they are subject to peer pressure, fear, and everything else. They are not intractable problem. Though they are a difficult one.
One of the biggest mistakes people tend to make is not understanding that.
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Al Qaeda thought they were setting a trap for the West with 9/11. Now, Bin Laden and his contemporary lieutenants are dead and Al Qaeda is scattered and broken, fighting over scraps in sub-Saharan Africa, and the West is mostly annoyed that it had to spend the time and money to do that to them.
Sometimes, it really does work out that the 'hero' goes in anyway and figures things out just fine. Provided the Biden administration doesn't knuckle under to its Left flank and start applying real pressure to get Israel to stop, Hamas is going to be crushed in the ground invasion and Israel will re-occupy the Gaza Strip, probably eventually handing over (Non-democratic) control to the PA.
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-takeover-anniversary-explainer-10711b53a73638f46f2eb534b15b1a63
And yet...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_terrorism_in_Europe
This list seems to have entries running all the way up to 2021.
Did you know that Osama Bin Laden, no bullshit, was a big Asimov fan? And that one way to translate "The Foundation" into Arabic is "Al-Qaeda?"
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Al Qaeda lost, but the idiotic heroism here also lost. Aside from the economic and human costs, we spent two decades with our energies focused on fighting illiterate goat herders and incels instead of countering the actual threats to a US-led world order.
A tiny portion of our energies, maybe. It's not like these things are mutually exclusive.
Of course, a huge part of that was that the American people didn't really care, at the end of the day, once Bin Laden was dead. Israelis will care about what happens in the Gaza Strip.
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the human terrain does act rationally, historically, when smalltime warlords make contact with the empire. fight and everyone dies, or submit and live. "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." and the palestinians are not the neutral melians.
if they're astute enough to make moves for the reasons you suggest that's worse, they have no excuse to not know they have no realpolitik win condition. they kill a few jews and get bombed in response, some win. their dream scenario of a land push victory that kills a lot of jews ends with every nuke israel has and 100 million dead arabs.
the greater their intelligence as actors then the necessarily more irrationally-driven-by-jew-hate. you can't beat israel. if as a people they were actually smart they'd start cutting their sleeping leaders' throats. but they don't. supposing israel has some hand in supplying and motivating their own quasi-insurgency is also farcical, i see no reason to doubt israel would take final peace without further bloodshed, and i am left, especially if they possess the faculties you give them, with seeing people of such hate they would rather murder jews than live in a functioning state.
blowback risks? nah. the cause of blowback isn't brutality, it's not enough brutality. there's not a 21st century solution to peace in the middle east. it could be decades, but israel is eventually going to stop listening to outside complaining and start responding to terrorism with wildly disproportionate force. when their neighbors know a single guy sneaking into a house will result in a dozen sorties per dead kid and there isn't a power in the world who can get israel to stop, then there will be peace.
right, the point: pleading for israel to stop almost assuredly causes more deaths, not less.
Why are all your previous posts properly capitalized and this one written in ironic all-lowercase? I find this such an annoying way of typing that I couldn't even read your post all the way through.
idiosyncrasy
I've actually grown tired of it, but I've been dealing with some monster writer's block lately and was hoping the "looser" nocaps would help get the ball rolling again.
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There is a realpolitik solution though, which is to redraw borders and separate IL and PA into two contiguous viable states. Even if this will not assuage Palestinian seething, a clear international border would be a lot easier for IL to defend and a lot harder for PA to violate than the current situation where IL is the warden and PA is the inmate in a cramped open-air prison but for the sake of appearances they have to pretend it is not quite so, and also IL wants to seize half of PA's cell to extend his break room. The problem with this solution was that it would probably entail some territorial concessions from IL, and also shut down their real agenda which is to gradually seize any remaining worthwhile PA-held land and squeeze them out or provoke them into self-destructing. This is a hard sell as long as IL knows that it enjoys unconditional support from the Western world when push comes to shove, and in that light the PA strategy of provoking IL into visible atrocities now seems as good as any (as it seems like one of the moves that have better chance to compromise the unconditional support).
Toothless "pleading" for IL to stop might indeed just result in continuation of the status quo and many more violent deaths over the next century (but taken to its extreme, this argument might just as well be fielded for something like "fine, I guess we can let them literally genocide all that is left of PA, it's clear that we can't stop it anyway and the sooner they all die the fewer future people will be born to cause more deaths"), but "pleading" that is backed with "...or we may lose our next election to Ilhan Omar/the AfD/??? and then you will truly be on your own" may bring about the two-state solution.
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