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.
I understand why people are afraid Israel will commit genocide. It'd be great for them if everyone in Gaza suddenly disappeared, and the war is perfect cover for them to make it happen. But there's no evidence that they're currently doing this. So far they've killed less than 1% of Gaza's population and are making efforts to prevent casualties. And yet, leftists are accusing Israel of genocide in present-tense, and Biden of facilitating genocide.
Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.
So, here's my question. Let's say this does escalate into genocide. Will it be a Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario?
I didn't believe Trump had any authoritarian tendencies until 1/6, and I know most Republicans still don't believe he does. I think that's in large part because of wolf-crying. It could happen again.
Ignorant question, I know. I'm asking it because I'm ignorant and I don't know the answer, but I'm sure there is one, and I want to know it.
Why doesn't Israel just move everyone in Gaza to the West Bank while they do their bombings, then move them back to Gaza when they've destroyed the Hamas bases? Is there not enough room in the West Bank?
Why doesn't Israel just move everyone in Gaza to the West Bank while they do their bombings, then move them back to Gaza when they've destroyed the Hamas bases? Is there not enough room in the West Bank?
Because these people might escape en-route and exercise their right of return by staying in whatever Israeli-occupied village or town they were ethnically cleansed from.
Israel's goal is unknown, but it's unlikely they're losing sleep over the deaths of Gazan civilians. And obviously figuring out which Gazans are civilians and which ones are Hamas fighters is not trivial.
The political goal of the war isn't to destroy hammas, it's to make effective Palestinian internal governance impossible. Moving them to the west bank defeats this purpose; in an ideal scenario for Israel all Palestinians just fuck off to egypt or lebanon or syria and stop being a hassle.
It's not so easy to move 2 million people 50+ km. There's physically enough room in the West Bank (it's much bigger than the Gaza strip), but they would still need tent cities or some other solution for them. Israel would also not like the Gaza population radicalizing the West Bank population (more than it already is) and increasing the population density, making terrorist attacks from there easier.
Law enforcement clashed with protesters calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war outside of the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee Wednesday night after authorities said the demonstration turned violent and lawmakers were evacuated from the building.
“Tonight 6 officers were treated for injuries – ranging from minor cuts to being pepper sprayed to being punched. One person has been arrested for assault on an officer. We appreciate our officers who kept these illegal & violent protesters back & protected everyone in the area,” US Capitol Police, who responded with DC Metropolitan Police, said in a statement on X.
...
Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, said in a statement Wednesday night that “hundreds of peaceful anti-war activists came to the DNC to call for an end to bombs and violence in order to save Palestinian and Israeli lives.”
“They were met with brutal assaults by the police,” Miller continued. “The Democrats need to decide: will they stand on the side of peace and justice, or will they continue to support war and genocide?”
Riot, attack cops, claim to be the victim. This pattern of conduct isn't remotely surprising to me at this point, but I am surprised that anyone other than fellow travelers is willing to treat these things like a both sides situation, where we can't really know who caused things to turn ugly.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
10mo ago·Edited 10mo ago
Osama Bin Laden's "Letter to America" outlining his justifications for the September 11 attack has been deleted from the Guardian's website.
This is in response to a new TikTok trend where people are posting their reactions to reading it for the first time and encouraging others to - usually with either an implication or an outright assertion that Bin Laden was right. A sample compilation of such videos can be seen here.
For those who want to refresh their memory of Bin Laden's manifesto (and IMO it's completely indefensible for the Guardian to have removed it), an archived version is here. He lists a litany of grievances against the crimes and perversions of the west (amusingly including Clinton's blowjob), but the first and most dominant one - and the one that I expect has led to this rekindled interest - is of course America's support for Israel. He describes the creation and continuation of Israel as "one of the greatest crimes". And of course he also claims that the jews control America's policies, media, and economy (while claiming at the same time that the killing of American civilians is justified because America is a democracy and therefore civilians are responsible for America's policies).
So there we have it. Hatred of Israel is leading young online leftists to endorse not only the terrorism by Hamas against Israel, but the terrorism of Bin Laden against America. I'm sure this will end well.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that all English-language media from Al Quada, Bin Laden, etc after around the mid-90s is propaganda aimed not at middle eastern Arabs and Muslims, but at Western leftists who can be persuaded to sympathize with aspects of their cause. There's no reason to believe that it has any relation to what actually drives middle eastern Muslims to join the cause. Any messaging aimed at them would be in Arabic and published in news sources and media channels that they actually read.
I believe their actual motivations, which drives their actual planners and recruits, are along the lines of what is described here. That's from 2002, the Iraq war advocacy has not aged terribly well, but I think the second section on the actual motivations of Islamic fundamentalists is still right on the nose. Short version is that they're mad that western secular values have permeated the world and their own societies and have proven to be far more successful than Islamic fundamentalist societies. As such, they're likely to continue opposing us no matter what we do regarding Israel.
Also, as screye describes below, it seems that letter was in fact written by a radicalized American. As such, the real story is less that maybe Osama had a point than that the class of people who make this type of video are so utterly ignorant that they are trivially manipulated into apologism for an ideology that would have their women locked in the home, only allowed out in Burqas, and their men murdered if they fail to convert to Islam and practice it their way.
Now here is the spicy part - Our dear Azzam is a radicalized son of California Liberals. Oh wait, it gets spicier. Not just any liberal, but a part-jewish descendent of ADL leadership. Say what you want about the jews, but if you want a wordcel, you hire a jew.
American intelligence officials allege that Gadahn inspired bin Laden's September 2007 video, in which bin Laden, among other things, made reference to the subprime mortgage crisis.
Al Qaeda hired a jew and he started writing about money & wall street. You can't make this shit up. Best piece of black comedy I have read all year.
( I have deliberately written it in a snarky tone. LMK if this breaks our rules)
I’ll come out and say it but I think Obl position is far more defensible than Hamas.
America did do a bunch of shit in the Middle East such as propping up Saudi Arabia which was basically a three way alliance between the religious leaders - Saudi Royal Family - US (guns and money). Lacking any direct means of gaining political control from those groups he was really only left with terrorism to shake things up. Hamas on the other hand just feels like a death cult that wants to see Jews killed. A political solution for Palistinians would have been found decades if they were had different beliefs.
I’m not going to say I agree with OBL beliefs but I do get somewhat close to a just war theory with him. Though I’ve come to a belief that on net the US/Saudi alliance was on net quite productive for all involved. The country is noticeably wealthier and more stable than others in the region. It seems to be that OBL chose the only conceivable military target to accomplish his political objectives.
I don't really see much distance between OBL and Hamas. They both seem to me to be primarily motivated by wanting to destroy Israel.
Like OBL throws in a bunch of other grievances too. He complains about the gays, and interest, and climate change, and nuking Japan. But if you read his letter and just objectively look for his one core issue? It's Israel. Same as Hamas, he just wants the Jews gone or (preferably) dead.
Osama's broader grievance-theme was about the loss of respectability/pride of the Arab-Islamic world than Israel per see, though there isn't much distance between them.
This ties to a broader theme in (generally Arab) Islamist thought which contrasts the golden age of the Islamic ascent (when the Arabs dominated the ancient empire of Persia, and then Islamists as a whole overthrew the (Eastern) Robman Empire, truly ancient and established major powers of the era), were broadly acknowledged as world-leaders in thought and technology (in large part from adopting/synthesizing/spreading the knowledge centers they conquered), and were the dominant military force that seemed to ever-advance on all fronts as the Christians feared them, but even the culture-shock of the crusaders were thrown back in a series of triumphs against the outsider... compared to the subjugation of the colonial eras, and then the present malais where the Arab identity isn't a thing of pride and admiration from afar, but with its vices of decadence, impovershment, corruption, and hypcrisy well known. There is a consistent thing of 'things were better when we were better,' with radical islaming groups functionally viewing/presenting themselves as radical reformists trying to correct a shamefully corruption.
I hate to oversimplify it as 'it's a pride thing,' but that's not far away from it. It's about self-respect as much as esteem in comparison to others... which is where Israel comes through, as the Jews were an unquestionable under-class, something that even the lowest Arab good-Islamic person was above, until Israel defeated the prides of the Arab world- some of the key leaders of the pan-Arabism when Arab identity-politics was at its height- repeatedly, decisively, and humiliatingly in multiple wars. If you read some of the diplomatic history from around the time of the foundation of Israel and some of the early wars, there are heavy and repeated themes and points where Arab states were acting out of pride and emotion, rather than reason/rationality/interests/strategy. Politiclaly, Yom Kippur War was more about proving the Israelis weren't invincible and restoring Egyptian self-respect than an actual campaign plan or changing the borders- hence why the Egyptians decisively lost the war, but were willing to accept the land-for-peace arrangement with Israel and the US not too long after.
Returning to OBL, Israel is the 'core issue' because Israel is evidence against pride, and the reminder of humiliation. Erasing Israel is about erasing shame, but the core/underlying issue is one of pride and self-respect which cannot make peace with what one views as properly inferior.
Or at least that's view, though the distinction may be irrelevant.
If there is anything even resembling a good point in Osama's essay, it will have to be re-litigated in the minds of the young. There is no way around this. You've [speaking to what I presume to be the modal reader here, not necessarily you specifically] done this yourself, you've gone through phases of reading, with the excitement of the forbidden and of "waking up", extremely contrarian takes on established history.
Dangerous times, obviously, if the kids decide to throw all their chips in with Team Osama. But my guess is this is a phase, like reading Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto and thinking at first "hmm, ok, I'm following the reasoning." The kids' enthusiasm will probably be tempered by their own meta-contrarians in due time. The circle of life.
I don’t know why people are retconning Western leftists’ view of 9/11 because among actual leftists (ie not center-left mainstream parties) sympathy with the inevitability of the terrorists’ cause (if not the specifics of the act) wasn’t uncommon immediately after 9/11.
It is unlikely this will happen, but if the dark cloud of Muslim terrorism has a silver lining one prays it is an internal review of US foreign policy, especially with regards to Israel. Yesterday's attacks are the chickens of America's callous abuse of others' human rights coming home to roost.
It was the first of at least four strikes involving multiple munitions on different sections of the sprawling complex between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Friday morning. Al-Shifa’s director, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, said in a phone interview that seven people had been killed and several others had been wounded.
Hours after the final blast, the Israeli military blamed unspecified Palestinian militants, saying a “misfired projectile” aimed at Israel Defense Forces troops deployed nearby had instead hit the hospital.
But at least three of the projectiles that struck it appear to have been Israeli munitions, according to pictures of weapons fragments collected and verified by The New York Times and analyzed by experts...
Israel’s assertion that Al-Shifa was actually hit by a Palestinian projectile echoed similar — and unresolved — claims and counterclaims following munitions that hit the courtyard of another Gaza hospital, Al-Ahli, nearly a month ago...
In addition to the weapons remnants, an analysis of video footage shows that three of the projectiles were fired into the hospital from the north and south, contrary to the western trajectory indicated on a map released by the I.D.F., which it said was based on radar detections. A review of satellite images showed there were I.D.F. positions north and south of the hospital early Friday.
The strikes analyzed by The Times did not appear to be targeting underground infrastructure. Two of the most severe strikes hit upper floors of the maternity ward.
It's honestly kind of depressing how much information, proof, etc Israel/IDF provides, and still cannot win trust. Of course it doesn't help when random mid-level Israeli bureaucrats tweet random posts of unverified bs that then gets debonnnked.
Like the Shifa Hospital situation the last few days. Images and videos of IDF bringing in supplies etc for patients in the hospital: "lies, they didn't actually do this!" "just for the video/photo-op!" etc. Of course, they ARE purposeful photo-ops that are trying to counter the anti-Israeli perspective.
And then anti-Israel people will post some link PROVING that Israel "lied" in the past, but then you read the link and it is IDF claiming responsibility for some error. "This is why IDF definitely did fire rockets at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza" etc etc. And of course then pictures come out and ... onto the next story!
It's the same as how US public comms is treated. Oh US DoD denies the casualty numbers claimed by a militia that just attacked a US base? "Lies!" "This means the casualty numbers are true!" When US DoD says, in the same manner, in the same channels, that they did something that can be seen as detrimental, like say they suffered some injuries, like US base got attacked - then what US is saying is of course true.
Everyone here probably knows this and has seen it play out. I'm just a little, idk, depressed and ranty about this.
(and I'm not ruling out that Israel does / can/ has lied about military actions, and god knows IDF has done their share of morally bad things in the past. But there just seems to be nothing israel can do to win over trust. But such is the tiktok PR battle we find ourselves in today.)
((IMO: US, Israel, and any faction that finds itself in a conflict and viewed as the more powerful "oppressor", should just keep silent and never say anything. Did Saudi announce things when fighting Houthis in Yemen? Or Assad when killing hundreds of thousands of people? I am no)
When confronted with clear evidence that Israel lied about something, your response is that it’s depressing that people still distrust Israel. What kind of rhetorical strategy is that?
This is why IDF definitely did fire rockets at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza" etc etc. And of course then pictures come out and ... onto the next story!
As the resident Al-Ahli Speculation Enjoyer this is funny to me, as I was warned by the mods about “single issue posting” when I provided two updates on the topic. The last major update was similar to the article above: the NYTimes and LeMonde came out with their conclusion that a major piece of evidence used by Israel was false, that the rocket came from a different direction than where Israel alleges. And that’s been the last major update because of a lack of evidence to discuss. Which is why Al-Shifa is important: if Israel is lying and is also proven culpable, then IMO it’s likely this is the case also for Al-Ahli. Maybe that is exactly why there are reporters on the grounds now at Al-Shifa.
It was the president of Israel who said they weren’t striking Al-Shifa, by the way. Not a “random mid-level bureaucrat”.
[On a side note, one of the camera video recordings obtained by the Times came from Saleh al-Jafarawi, who is a kind of Palestinian Sam Hyde. Maybe this is grounds for some people to doubt the findings.]
Entities that lie to build support for waging war lose trust and don't get the default assumption of honesty. Remember the US and Israeli governments and their diehards pushing claims that Saddam was feeding people into wood chippers, had WMDs and was trying to make nukes, the guy who claimed to be his bomb maker before congress, and the earlier nonsense from Desert Storm about pulling babies out of incubators? If you questioned any of this at the time, you were a terrorist sympathizer, America hater, Al-Qaeda lover, etc. Cue hundreds of thousands dead until years later people acknowledge these as lies.
Do you think people posting "Lies" are saying that because they remember, or even know, about these things you listed?
Not to say US / Israel / any other military are without blame for the lack of trust. I agree, US military has lied in the past, and the press/government/etc lied with it (possibly in other orders, like papers lied first, apparently, for the Spanish-American war). Not saying they are without sin.
But it does feel to me that the winningest move here is to not play at all (not fight). Failing that, don't say anything while playing and hopefully you win.
Do you think people posting "Lies" are saying that because they remember, or even know, about these things you listed?
Yes. When a person or group proves that they will say anything to manipulate you into doing what they want, the correct move is to always start from the assumption that they're lying.
Do you think people posting "Lies" are saying that because they remember, or even know, about these things you listed?
It was only twenty years ago. Plenty of people in the Pentagon, Israeli and US intelligence, etc who were involved in creating and spreading war propaganda lies in the 2000s would still be active members of those institutions and remember what was done then, and newer members would doubtless be taught about the Iraq War and the like as case studies to inform future propaganda efforts.
Which is fine, as long as it's consistently applied, which hasn't always been seen in this conflict despite plentiful examples on both sides and virtually all media.
I see such things as a result of motivated reasoning coupled with the impossibility of knowing where everything you have is. No military on this planet can know with 100% certainty where every missile being shot is aimed and know where all your enemies weapons and units are. Thus when making statements, the temptation will be to assume the best of your own and the worst of your enemies, and thus it would be to choose the one where they look good.
If there were at least four explosions and three of them were Israeli, it means that one or more could be from Hamas. Everyone could be telling part of the truth here.
Let’s start with the easy legal difference- the Saudi state, and indeed the whole country, is the personal property of the house of Saud, and they deserve to have it as their property because of their family history of guarding the ‘correct’ type of Islam. In a fascist state, the country is personified by the state which answers to no one and it is the state’s power which justifies this personification.
The Saudi model in western societies is similar to the Ancien Regime, Hapsburg empire, old Spain, etc. fascism in western societies is, well, Hitler and Mussolini. Interestingly, there are examples of Arab fascism- Saddam Hussein and Bashar Al Assad. You’ll notice that, while perhaps the level of oppression was similar between Iraq and Saudi Arabia in, say, 2000, the direction and amount were very different, with Saudi oppression aimed at religious conformity and Iraqi oppression aimed at ethnic distinctions which could provide a conflicting loyalty to the state.
Fascism (like communism) was a movement primarily in response to the dissolution of states where power lay in the hands of a hereditary elite, who would maintain that power by doing things for the commoners that they thought the commoners needed, while extracting wealth and making the commoners do things for them. Downtown Abbey is a good example of a show that celebrates the old world order, with the hereditary rich living in mansions and being served on; taking their cut from the farmers, while justifying their position by arguing that they create jobs, help those in need and organize feasts (where they themselves expect to get applauded by the commoners). Saudi Arabia is pretty much like this, with their system of patronage depending on clan relationships.
The actual cause for the social changes that led to the rise of communism and fascism was the Second Agricultural Revolution, which pushed very many people out of the farming life, which in turn enabled the Industrial Revolution. These technical revolutions led to urbanization and capitalism, both of which were much more brutal than today, causing much unhappiness and therefor revolutionary spirit. The elites that ran these countries were seen as doing such a bad job that very many people wanted something different.
Communism in theory sought to abolish the elites, instead of replacing them, by means of radical democracy & shared property. Although in practice this could not work for various reasons and so communist regimes inevitably just descended into authoritarianism, based on power games rather than hereditary power. In that sense, the statement that 'true communism has never been tried' is true, although true communism can't actually be tried and inevitably seems to devolve into what it was intended to fight against.
Fascism sought to replace the hereditary elite with a technocratic elite that would seek to improve society by aligning people towards a societal improvement, rather than their selfish desires. Hence the bundle of sticks, the fasces. All people in the nation united for a common purpose. Unlike communism, it rejects the idea of radical equality, so it accepts wealth differences and differences in hierarchy, but only in so far as to help achieve the common goal. The fascist capital owner may own a big factory, but is not supposed to hoard wealth, have an excessive lifestyle or take advantage of others. Fascism rejects democracy, as it considers the common man to be stupid. It doesn't really answer the question of how the right goal and right leadership is selected. In practice, the autocratic nature of the leadership and lack of goals within the ideology itself, tends to lead to fascism being easily combined with other extremist ideologies, like Hitler's racial beliefs.
This lack of inherent goals within the fascist model tends to lead to a lot of confusion about what fascism actually is, which why it is so easy to claim that something is fascist, as there is no pure fascism. It's always fascism plus some other ideology or some other goal, that is not inherent to fascism itself.
"If you don't know the difference between fascism and theocratic absolute monarchy you have nothing worthwhile to contribute on the topic and should just be ignored" is the correct reply.
Fascism and Absolute totalitarian monarchies have their means and ends flipped, fascism is an extreme form of nationalism and uses authoritarianism to inculcate nationalism amongst its subjects; absolute totalitarian monarchies aim to preserve rule by fiat of the king/emperor and use nationalism to achieve their authoriarianism.
Confusing the two with each other is like believing wet streets cause rain, and someone who thinks that way is not to be trusted on much other stuff either.
What is the practical purpose of distinguishing between "inflicting nationalism to inflict authoritarianism" and "inflicting authoritarianism to inflict nationalism" for the purposes of living there? Either way, the inhabitants get both.
Words have meanings, and the way fascism was being used here was in a negative perjorative sense, that doesn't apply to "absolute totalitarian monarchism" if only because that's too big of a mouthful for the average man and is also too much of a fargroup for westerners in a way that "fascism" is not. Using words incorrectly is a slur treadmill and a bad thing, and deserves to be called out and ridiculed.
But if you ask about the difference for someone living there:
Fascism is a one party society, Monarchism is a zero party society. This obviously influences how much personal political power you can get if you start out with none but are determined to make something of yourself.
In fascism your loyalty is to the country, in monarchy your loyalty is to the royal family. The "country" needs not even be a well defined thing beyond a necessary legal fiction for the modern world, indeed "Saudi Arabia" is named after the House of Saud, the family which rules it.
Fascism glorifies its state and ruler as being better than others, there is no such thing in monarchy: you are a subject of your monarch, therefore you must serve him, even though other monarchs may well be better.
In fascism, power comes through seizing it (or rising up the ranks of the party), in monarchism power (generally) comes through being born into it.
Monarchy tends to be more internally stable (as long as the ruling king does his duty and properly nominates and grooms a heir before he dies), because there are fewer people who can legitimately claim power and thus cause internal strife, fascism is vulnerable to coups in the leadership by any strong enough random who thinks he can serve the country better than the current leader, this leads to civil strife and suffering for the whole population.
Fascism is very atheistic as it raises the state above everything, a totalitarian theocratic monarchy is obviously very religious (it's literally in the name). But still Fascism is probably fine with your religion as long as you don't make it interfere with state business, totalitarian theocratic monarchies would not be happy with you being a member of the wrong religion.
Fascism is more egalitarian on a personal level than absolute monarchy, as long as you glorify the state and are a citizen everything is well and good, in monarchy there are more divisions with some people being elevated higher than others (titles of nobility).
Fascism is generally like a planned economy, it's corporatism done on a state level (the state run like e.g. Apple), Monarchy doesn't have much to say about how the economy is best run.
etc. etc.
These are massive differences between fascism and totalitarian state monarchy, even the last one on its own is a huge difference to the life of the average person (akin to the difference between a capitalistic/communist society). The inhabitants do get both nationalism and authoritarianism and a bunch of other similar things, but their lives under the two systems are very different on a day to day basis.
And if you're going to use this to say that fascism sounds better than totalitarian theocratic monarchy for an average citizen then fine, you can make that argument but that still doesn't make it OK to say totalitarian theocratic monarchies are "fascism", no different to how getting punched in the face is better than getting your leg cut off, but saying someone got punched in the face when they got their leg cut off is comepletely wrong, and using it as hyperbole (bacause society has memetic antibodies against punching in the face but not legs getting cut off) is straight up wrong and deserves to be called out, mocked and ridiculed for being next level stupid.
Btw, Saudi Arabia is actually a pretty nice place to live these days if you are in any ways economically productive, I have cousins (including female ones) who went to live there for ~8 years or so, made a lot of money due to low tax while having a nice comfortable life due to modern day amenities that would be much more expensive to replicate in the west, then came back and used the saved money to straight up buy a house.
Because a bunch of European countries blame themselves when Muslims don't like them or don't integrate or kills hundreds of their fellow citizens in terrorist attacks.
Those European countries don’t have an army to fight or territory to conquer. The one time there really was a state that openly aligned itself with Islamist terrorism in the West a multinational coalition of Western powers invaded and occupied it for 20 years.
Will Al-Shifa be the turning point, one way or another? Or will nothing change? If the IDF takes the hospital, and there are tunnels there, will anyone change their tune, or will it be "Well, the IDF was telling the truth this one time, but they still shouldn't have killed babies"? If there are no tunnels, will Israel back off and end their campaign in shame (their own and the US intelligence community's), or will they try to brazen it out and assume no real net change in total hatred for them? If Hamas blows the tunnels and collapses the area to avoid giving Israel evidence, will anyone accept that it wasn't an Israeli bomb?
Or am I overestimating the importance of this one battle and the massive accompanying news coverage?
Al-Shifa being a military installation has been "priced in" for some time. Very little will change if Israeli claims turn out to be correct.
Frankly, finding tunnels isn't enough. If the IDF doesn't have dozens of geolocated photos showing Hamas munitions stockpiles trending on Twitter by 7:30AM EST, Israel is toast. The dying Palestinian babies are trending right now.
The tunnels have been known about for decades. It’s not news. So whether or not there’s something significant under that particular spot, nobody who’s following this region doesn’t know about the tunnels. So those who see this as self defense will continue to do so, and those who see it as provocation will continue.
Whether they find a torture chamber/military base combo pack, or they turn the stone over and all it says is "Peace on Earth;" I predict that IDF will claim the former while Hamas will claim the latter, no one supporting either side will care regardless.
Israel has already been caught faking evidence on official channels, repeatedly and blatantly. No one who supported Israel beforehand cared, nor should they. IDF forces will claim there were military installations under the hospital, they will fake it as aggressively as they need to. The people who want to believe the IDF will believe the IDF; and if they are presented with clear and convincing evidence that the IDF is lying they will say it doesn't matter.
Hamas' track record of honesty is...are we even going to try to address that point? No one who feels that the deaths of [x] number of innocent civilians isn't worth it is going to change their mind, regardless of what they find under there. Nothing they find under there will justify the murder of babies to get it, so therefore they probably won't find it anyway. It's a kind of ethos argumentation: any group bloodthirsty enough to kill children to achieve their military objective is untrustworthy enough to lie about why they killed the children.
It's the law of merited impossibility all the way around. One side says: it's worth killing those kids to get at that military installation, so there must be a military installation there. The other says, it's not worth killing those kids to get at any military installation, so there can't be a military installation there.
The Iranian Tehran Times released an alleged recording of the ADL freaking out about the generational divide in Israel support, as well as Iranian influence in anti-Israel advocacy groups. I do not recommend reading the article because it’s literally Iranian propaganda, but the audio recording is on their page here if you scroll down. Do you think this is legitimate or AI-generated? There’s nothing that struck me as obviously wrong with Greenblatt’s voice. It would be a weird thing to fake, because Iran shouldn’t want to promote the idea that they are behind Western anti-Israel advocacy.
If it’s legitimate, it’s insightful in four ways. The ADL does not believe that support for Israel is Left-Right but instead young-old. The ADL believes that some anti-Zionist organizations are taking their talking points from Iran (eg using the term “Zionist entities”). Iran has access to important meetings of ADL members. And lastly, the ADL has access to the inner circle memorandums of anti-Zionist groups.
Given the source I'm suspicious. Even more so it's weird to me how he goes on and on about "Iranian propaganda" in true "omg Russian bots!" fashion as if the Iranian deep state has arms in every American university and anti-Zionists need Iran of all places to tell them Israel is a violent apartheid state. Given the source, again, it seems very complimentary to Iran. On the other hand, if it's a fake it's good in its organic American dialog - no awkwardness or weird translations here.
But assuming it's true. The the thing that jumps out to me is the line: "The number of young people who think Hamas's massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high".
To me this indicates he drinks his own kool-aid. One of the more annoying things about Israel apologists and Zionists to me is how they constantly attack this weird strawman of anyone that disagrees with them is pro-Hamas. How they repeat Hamas Hamas Hamas like it's a brain virus. It's hilarious to think it's a relatively recent post 2006 phenomenon in Israel-Palestine. The way some people speak it's as if Hamas Hamas Hamas was the singular bad force ruining everything and if it weren't for these ultra-monsters, well shucks, good ol boy Israel wouldn't have to act so bad.
I always assumed it's a talking points memo for public propaganda. It's clearly from the "when did you stop beating your wife" school of distraction & attack. Focus on Hamas and mention it as much as possible. No one wants to defend them, and any talk about them is not talking about all the people Israel is killing while creating a constant negative mental association. Anyway, I have literally never seen this mythical Western pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas "liberal".
Here we see Greenblatt privately believing this psycho BS that the only way anyone could be anti-Zionist is that they are totally fans of Hamas and pro-massacre of civilians. It would never occur to a principled person to notice Zionism's evil actions without being crypto Islamic theocrats. Absurd and wildly detached from the mind of your average Zionist critical secular university aged student. The Zionist equivalent of believing all Trump supporters are literal Nazis.
Even more so it's weird to me how he goes on and on about "Iranian propaganda" in true "omg Russian bots!" fashion as if the Iranian deep state has arms in every American university and anti-Zionists need Iran of all places to tell them Israel is a violent apartheid state
Wasn’t greenblatt a true believer in the Russia narratives? Not surprising he reaches for a similar toolkit.
In general in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?
48% of those 18-24 said Hamas. Of course siding with Hamas more than Israel doesn't necessarily mean approving of Hamas or of the attack. However there is a question about the attack:
Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?
51% of 18-24 year olds (and 48% 25-34, and 24% overall) said it can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians. That said, I am suspicious of these poll results and wonder if they might be because of the specific wording of "can be justified", if some interpreted it as meaning "someone could theoretically make an argument trying to justify it" rather than "I personally think it was just".
It's a bit of a stretch, especially because it corresponds to the general lower level of support for Israel among the young. But some of the other results also call it into question. The prior question had a lower percentage siding with Hamas over Israel. 54% of the same age group (45% overall) answered "Should law firms hire or refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas and the attacks on Israeli civilians?" with refuse to hire, indicating at least 5% who would support blacklisting themselves. (It's pretty striking how support for free-speech in younger generations is so low that support for blacklisting rises even as support for Israel falls.) Or I guess some people might interpret "support" as people donating money to Hamas or something. 62% of those 18-24 say the "attacks on Jews" were genocidal.
I don't know if there's a poll asking about support for the attack with better wording. Best I could find with a quick search was this one which didn't make Hamas/Israel support a binary choice:
22% of college students say they sympathize with Hamas and 26% with the Israeli government
And this one which asks about the attack but again in a potentially ambiguous way, and just college students again:
The poll finds 86% of college students saying they’re aware of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And of that share, 67% describe the attack as an act of terrorism by Hamas, versus 12% who see it as a justified act of resistance by Hamas. Another 21% describe it as something else other than an act of terrorism or resistance.
I think the role of framing is being underestimated here, and in general. On one hand, sure, Hamas brutally killed over a thousand civilians who presumably were largely innocent beyond whatever guilt they inherit through general support and acceptance of benefits of their country; against the standard of normal morality that most people would claim to subscribe to if asked in a non-charged setting, this was surely unjustified. On the other hand, we are constantly being asked by our authorities to consider it justified that Israel has retaliated by doing the same against Palestinian civilians. You can either try to come up with some additional principle to break the symmetry in favour of Israel's stance (Killing civilians is better when it is done by well-uniformed military members acting professionally than when it is done by shabby guys on pickups? The calculus of retaliation should have a cutoff date somewhere in 2020 so the Israelis can claim to have been attacked first?), or consider both the action and the response justified as many of those 18-24 year olds probably do, or consider neither the action nor the response justified.
At first sight, of course, why not do the last? - but my intuition tells me that this option bumps up against a particular American instinct, captured by the frequently-heard "well, do you have a better idea?" or perhaps even the adjacent "person saying it can't be done should stop bothering person who is actually doing it". Once you have identified something as a problem, whatever countermeasure remains after you have eliminated all the impossible ones must be good, because the alternative would be to shrug and say that nothing can be done which is something for debbie downers, lazy people and those lacking the requisite moral certitude. (I'm reminded of The Quiet American, an early British novel built around calling out the same trait, which at the time hit enough of a nerve that they spitefully made a movie adaptation that inverted its punchline)
On the other hand, we are constantly being asked by our authorities to consider it justified that Israel has retaliated by doing the same against Palestinian civilians.
Are you seriously claiming that the IDF are filming themselves as they go around slaughtering civilians, which is what Hamas did?
Israel was attacked by Hamas, who run the polity of Gaza. Such actions often lead to an unfortunate state called "war". When Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Habor, the casualties were only a factor of two higher than in the Hamas attack. (Of course, these attacks differ in other ways, the victims of Pearl Habor were overwhelmingly military, and Imperial Japan had odds of winning which were orders of magnitude better than Hamas, though still not that high overall.)
While I am sure that today's Guardian would have stories without end on the plight the Japanese civilians would suffer during a war with the US and the power of forgiveness, I do not think that it was morally wrong for the US to enter that war. (This does not extend to morale bombings and the nukes -- especially the second one, though.)
In wars, civilians are often killed as a side effect. This is bad, but totally different from going around and beheading people.
Of course, the question if regime change is the strategically best solution for Israel or the world is debatable.
Why was it morally wrong to drop the second nuke, when Japan still appeared to have no intention of surrendering at the time and even went through a failed coup to prevent a surrender after the second one was dropped?
Are you seriously claiming that the IDF are filming themselves as they go around slaughtering civilians, which is what Hamas did?
No, but I consider the main bad thing to be the part where you slaughter civilians, rather than the one where you try to farm internet points for it.
Israel was attacked by Hamas, who run the polity of Gaza. Such actions often lead to an unfortunate state called "war". When Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Habor, the casualties were only a factor of two higher than in the Hamas attack. (Of course, these attacks differ in other ways, the victims of Pearl Habor were overwhelmingly military, and Imperial Japan had odds of winning which were orders of magnitude better than Hamas, though still not that high overall.)
That's you doing the "calculus of retaliation should have a cutoff date" thing. Rather than ignoring everything that happened before the Hamas attack this time, we could set the arbitrary cutoff date to be December 26th, 2008 instead, and write the same story flipped starting with "Gaza was attacked by the Israeli government, who run the polity of Israel". If we do not set arbitrary cutoffs, surely the story begins in 1948, when IL was formed as a result of an ethnically cleansing invasion of the remains of Mandatory Palestine.
In wars, civilians are often killed as a side effect. This is bad, but totally different from going around and beheading people.
Sorry, but I do not share this perception that killing civilians by bombing them from afar is somehow better or more tasteful, especially considering that I want to correct for a lifetime of consuming propaganda commissioned by the people who have a monopoly on bombing-civilians-from-afar capabilities to make it appear more tasteful.
(I should make clear that I don't think I'm an anti-IL dogmatic; at this point I would consider "recognise that the International Community does not have the collective moral will or executive power to stop them outright and therefore give IL special dispensation to exterminate their uppity charges once and for all" to be a perfectly acceptable course of action to minimise expected total future suffering.)
On the other hand, we are constantly being asked by our authorities to consider it justified that Israel has retaliated by doing the same against Palestinian civilians
Isn't "killing civilians as part of collateral damage from attacking military targets" very much not "doing the same" as "killing civilians by attacking them intentionally"? Using this as an additional principle seems much more obviously legitimate than the ones you mention, and is what I actually see advocated in public discourse. I'm not accusing you of arguing in bad faith, but does "Killing civilians is better when it is done by well-uniformed military members" not seem like an obvious strawman to you?
Once you have identified something as a problem, whatever countermeasure remains after you have eliminated all the impossible ones must be good, because the alternative would be to shrug and say that nothing can be done
Saying that "nothing can be done" is a part of the ideas implied in "well, do you have a better idea?" There have certainly been a sizable fraction of the population calling for a ceasefire. On the other hand, there are of course those in support of continuing the military operation, who would presumably think this to be the least bad of all options, even with civilian casualties and all. And in that case, the Americans stepping aside and "doing nothing" to stop Israel is exactly what is desired -- it's their conflict, let them have at it.
consider both the action and the response justified as many of those 18-24 year olds probably do
I honestly haven't seen anyone support the right of both Hamas and the IDF to hit their respective populations in this way. Rather,
or consider neither the action nor the response justified.
from what I've seen, this seems to be the most common opinion from the people who want a ceasefire. They don't condone Hamas (the "this is what decolonization looks like" people still appear to only be a fringe minority), but they also can't stand the images of civilian casualties from Israeli attacks.
The alt-right and wignat claim that groups like the ADL are huge hypocrites that support diversity in Western countries but ethno nationalism in Israel is obviously true. It an't even be debated in my opinion. Before they could just call the people pointing this out Nazis (because they were), but now people are seeing Israel for what it actually is and the new people calling it out can't just be dismissed as Nazis so they are being exposed for the hypocrites they are. You can't call all the black people, Muslims, SJWs, LGBTQ+ groups, etc. Nazis when they were on your side the past 8 years fighting white nationalism and Trump or whatever they were up to. Then when they have an apartheid state that kills children and has an open air prison for Palestinians (not saying that's what I believe, but left wing activists do) then the Holocaust sympathy dries up real quick. They know they are in a tough place and this is probably what they have stopped messing with Musk publicly.
You're cherry picking that from their site. I could find a bunch of other posts on there from them that paint them as rabid Zionists. The ADL are huge hypocrites after all. Posts like this are just so they can't be pinned down and people can go see they made this post (that nobody read and wasn't intended to be read). But let's be honest, they have spent a million times as much money and effort attacking Musk these past few years publicly than they ever have in their entire history for Israel. This is also a left/wing Jew/Israel culture war battle. They don't like Netenyahu or Likud. But make no mistake, if you go criticizing Israel publicly and aggressively, the ADL will come for you to smear your character no matter how good your points are and how good your intentions are.
No. Rather, I intentionally looked to see what their position was an an extremely well-known recent controversy specifically about ethnic nationalism in Israel.
But let's be honest, they have spent a million times as much money and effort attacking Musk these past few years publicly than they ever have in their entire history for Israel. This is also a left/wing Jew/Israel culture war battle. They don't like Netenyahu or Likud. But make no mistake, if you go criticizing Israel publicly and aggressively, the ADL will come for you to smear your character no matter how good your points are and how good your intentions are.
I have no doubt that they are assholes, but what does any of that have to do with their views on ethnic nationalism?
And lastly, the ADL has access to the inner circle memorandums of anti-Zionist groups.
This doesn’t seem surprising, given that lots of anti-Zionist groups have crossover support from other very work groups which support the ADL in other contexts.
The ADL does not believe that support for Israel is Left-Right but instead young-old.
This is at least partly true, and given the ADL’s day job of ‘call republicans Nazis’, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t believe it.
Iran has access to important meetings of ADL members.
For a modern intelligence service, this would probably be trivially easy- activists are unlikely to guard their computers like government officials. And Iran has very good reasons to keep an eye on major foreign policy advocacy groups(which the ADL is) in their politically unstable-yet-gridlocked archenemy.
because Iran shouldn’t want to promote the idea that they are behind Western anti-Israel advocacy.
Why not? There are millions of Western young people, as you say, who are now openly very anti-Israel and pro-Palestine. Many of these, however, may still either dislike Iran (eg. because of the Hijab protests) or have no opinion of it.
A core goal of Iranian support for Palestinians is for their own propaganda purposes in the regional geopolitical conflict and with the global Ummah, often as a kind of counter to the Saudi message that they’re the guardians of the two holy cities. Extending that audience to Western leftists would be a big win, so attaching themselves publicly to the pro-Palestinian cause in front of them is a good thing in their eyes.
The more people in the West sympathize with Iran, think Iran is ‘actually doing some good things’ or whatever, the more pressure to lift sanctions etc, at least in this logic.
In response, US has done a handful (3-5?) retaliatory strikes on those militias' positions. Apparently one of the strikes hit some IRGC commanders/troops. I also read that apparently Biden opted for lesser attacks, to prevent escalation.
On the Lebanese-Israel border, IDF continues to trade attacks with Hezbollah. Both sides have sustained casualties, though Hezbollah apparently has more (they publish photos of "martyrs" they died, on twitter at least).
However, it seems like the speeches by the Hezbollah leader has not been very inflammatory. Their once-expected entry into the war with Israel still hasn't come, despite these border skirmishes. Maybe the US presence in the area, with two carrier groups and other assets, is actually a real deterrent here? It definitely feels like Hezbollah has to say they are with Hamas against Israel/US, but won't actually put themselves on the line, perhaps rationally in this case. Would Hezbollah leadership be forced to do more or risk losing control of its troops? I read a theory that the Hamas operation on Oct. 7 was mostly lead by younger commanders, without the support of the higher up, older leadership. Could Hezbollah run into this situation as well?
What do you guys think the possibility of this Israel-Gaza situation exploding to include Hezbollah formally? What about US-Iran?
My take:
US-Iran will continue as currently, though honestly US forward positions in Eastern Syria and Iraq are not sustainable in my opinion. They should either be heavily reinforced, or withdrawn, as the bases there are mostly unable to adequately return fire or defend themselves IMO.
Hezbollah will probably keep doing what they are doing, unless something really breaks. Some Hamas leader just recently said that Hezbollah would enter the war with Israel if Hamas is completely destroyed, saying it's a "red line". Though I distinctly remember Hezbollah saying Israel invading Gaza was a red line as well that couldn't be crossed. But then again...
The US killed the single most important official to Iranian geopolitical strategy besides Khamenei (more important than him from a strategic perspective) and Iran attacked a US base after warning the US to move troops out of the way (essentially with American permission).
The irony is that the reason Iran is reluctant to get involved, and the reason they were reluctant to attempt a bigger retaliatory move after the Soleimani assassination, is because they're winning. Sure, they could tell their allies to press harder against US forces in Syria and Iraq, but nothing makes Americans angrier than American soldiers being killed. And the thing is that (and I'm interested in @Dean's view on this) a small number of US forces holed up in bases in Syria and Iraq doesn't threaten most Iranian interests in the region. They still increasingly control most of Iraq, Assad is relatively firmly in power in Syria. It's an insult to them, perhaps, they may consider it offensive, but the Americans aren't going to end shiite control of Iraq or overthrow Assad with their current presence.
The one thing Iran wants to avoid is a major escalation that might draw a large American force in on the side of Saudi Arabia against the Houthis, against Iraqi shiites, against Hezbollah and/or against Assad, which is the only thing that might threaten the shiite crescent plan and the extremely successful arming and training of Iraqi shiite militias and the Houthis.
The irony is that the reason Iran is reluctant to get involved, and the reason they were reluctant to attempt a bigger retaliatory move after the Soleimani assassination, is because they're winning. Sure, they could tell their allies to press harder against US forces in Syria and Iraq, but nothing makes Americans angrier than American soldiers being killed. And the thing is that (and I'm interested in @Dean's view on this) a small number of US forces holed up in bases in Syria and Iraq doesn't threaten most Iranian interests in the region. They still increasingly control most of Iraq, Assad is relatively firmly in power in Syria. It's an insult to them, perhaps, they may consider it offensive, but the Americans aren't going to end shiite control of Iraq or overthrow Assad with their current presence.
Well, since asked... I suppose my view on your assessment is that it depends on if one thinks Iran was actually uninvolved/unaware of the October attack.
If Iran was unaware/uninvolved, then it's not an illogical position. The conflict is an unexpected opportunity for Iran's foes to weaken themselves militarily/politically, disrupt the alignment against Iran by more regional actors, provide new opportunities, etc. etc.
But, as the laconics say, 'If.'
My personal view is that what we're seeing is a failed effort to start a broader conflagration, since being walked back and limited for damage control. An analogy might be the Russian-sponsored NovaRussia uprising in eastern Ukraine that consolidated around the 'separatist republics'- a 'success' on one hand in achieve an operational victory, but a failure for an intention for a much broader result that didn't materialize, leaving the instigating party a 'good hand' for a context they didn't actually want to be in, because they were aiming for something substantially different.
Very non-laconic thoughts below.
From my viewpoint watching various regional actors, the initial post-attack propaganda narratives, and so on, Hamas's goal wasn't isolated to a Gaza-specific event to be resolved with a hostage standoff, but to try to be the instigating event of a wider intifada with broad regional support from Iran's proxy groups. Key goals likely included a broader consolidation of Gaza support into breaking the barrier, instigating a West Bank uprising that would paralyze the 80% of the IDF there, and major external support from Iranian proxies- especially in Lebanon and Syria- to conduct major rocket attacks and limited ground incursions to surround and further paralyze the IDF. This would have only been possible in coordination with Iran, and in turn Iran would have attempted to use the regional chaos to try and expel the remaining U.S. presence from south-eastern Syria and from Iraq, removing US influence from a region where the US presence prevents consolidation of Iranian influence (via US-aligned partners in Syria, and the political impacts of both US presence and critical US funding in the Iraqi government which can and has been used to play off the Iranian-aligned actors). In an 'Iran was involved' perspective, Iran would be relying on its proxies rather than direct involvement, adhering to the principle of plausible deniability.
The 'issue' is that the Hamas attack did not instigate a wider intifada, and the Iranians were confronted that their denials wouldn't be considered plausible by actors who mattered most if the rest of their influence network actually joined in force. Hence the anti-climatic climbdown by Hezbollah from was being built up as a natural call to arms, the token-level support by groups like the Houthis in Yemen that even the Saudis have shot down without meaningful propaganda criticism, and how the Hamas strategy has resorted to increasingly blatant appeals for truce by steadily increasing the number of hostages it would turn over for relief.
The Hamas failure to spark a wider intifada, which has been a real concern in regional security circles over the last few years, can probably be attributed to a few various factors. A lack of coordination outside of the Iranian network meaning other Palestinian groups weren't ready to join in immediately, the shock value of their atrocity-propaganda having a detering rather than galvanizing effect as actual local groups distanced themselves due to the immeninet Israeli retaliation rather than join in, the effectiveness of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank to prevent anyone from mobilizing a force that would make them seem like participants., what have you. In fact, even the Gaza public support has seemed to be... well, acceptance is not the same as endorsement, but the Hamas ability to defend in Gaza has been surprisingly underwhelming, which would be characteristic of a force that thought it would be receiving a lot more support than it actually is. Gaza is not Kyiv in 2022, where the citizenry was mixing molotovs in the streets to fight the invaders. An urban area held by truly hostile local populace is a notoriously rough fight, and one that hasn't manifested in the fighting so far, but was probably expected given the parallels to the Israeli incursion into Lebananon against Hezbollah awhile ago, where Israeli ran into exceptional difficulty on the ground.
Which leads to what I think is the most relevant point- and the one that matters from the Iranian perspective- which was a misjudgement of regional views and perceptions. Plenty of people around and abroad were happy to cheer for Hamas, but no one wanted to join in fighting alongside Hamas- and as it became very quickly clear that the other people weren't joining in, the Iranian-aligned networks could either join in in the Israeli background, or back out.
By and large, they've backed out, even at the cost of regional prestige/leader-of-the-resistance standing. No one has taken more than a token involvement in the Israeli front. The more relevant activity increase has been entirely geographically/politically separate, which is the anti-US attacks in the Syria-Iraq zone. This is relevant for the Iranians- the US presence in Iraq particularly significantly limits Iran's ability to consolidate it's advantages by giving a counter-balance option to local politicians- and it serves a number of purposes in the strategic competition, but the most relevant is trying to re-establish leverage (you need to negotiate, lest we escalate- which is to say, the same position before October) rather than actively trying to overwhelm, which- to me- seemed to be the goal of the opening October efforts.
This is all based on a paradigm and a viewpoint I fully acknowledge others might not share, and that's fine. But from that paradigm comes a significant distinction as to why Iran is doing what it is doing at the level it is- whether this is a situation Iran found itself in that it doesn't need to do anything because escalation could tip the apple cart that it already enjoys, or whether this is a situation Iran found itself in because it tried to turn over the apple cart, but failed, and is now trying to present that it wasn't trying to do that (but could still yet do so if pressed, so better not press it).
To turn back to the start, to the question of if Iran is 'winning' and the analogy of the NovaRussia uprising- this is where I'd make a point that operational successes are not the same as strategic wins, and that sometimes the consequences of a partial success have different, less foreseen, implications. The Ukrainian NovaRussia uprising was a 'win' for Russia in that it successfully inserted itself into Ukrainian politics in a way that froze western integration and allowed Russia to play a key diplomatic role even as it was a de facto belligerant. But the NovaRussia efforts are also what functionally froze the NordStream pipeline project to Germany, cutting off a major economic-influence vector before it could be manifested, and thus greatly reducing influence that would have mattered much more down the line, when the early Russian strategy in Ukraine centered around pressing Germany to accept it and thus undercut a European pillar of support. Had NordStream been activated years earlier, it may well have worked, even as the years of warfare over NovaRussia empowered the Ukrainian army and national identity to resist the Russian invasion.
Iran is probably not going to have as much of a blowback, but then again no one would have predicted the Ukraine War's consequences for the Russians in the first few months of NovaRussia either. What does seem clear to me is that while Iran has likely achieved a short/medium-term disruption of Israeli-Saudi normalization due to the sacrifice of Hamas/Gaza, they do have some key elements of power being undercut as well. For one, the paradigm I reflect- the one where Iran has been deterred from maximal proxy usage- is a fundamental failure of one of the key points of proxy warfare, the 'plausible deniability.' If you wouldn't use a plausible-deniable proxy for fear of retaliation, it's no longer plausibly-deniable, and you're just returning to conventional deterrence. For another, Hamas and the Gaza Strip were most relevant to the Iranian posture as a force-in-being- the idea that Israel was surrounded on three fronts by forces that could at any time launch an uprising, and as a consequence Israel was in a weak position and needed to make concessions that Iran could take credit for leading. Except the West Bank didn't rise up, which changes expectations of what it might do going forward, and whatever happens to Gaza after this war, it's probably not going to be a serious contender for a mass popular uprising either. When the Israeli-Palestinian conflict returned, the anti-Israeli palestinians had to shoot the Palestinians to keep them from running away from the Israelis. Bar Hamas somehow remaining in power- and it seems very unlikely that will be the result of the Gaza war- whoever remains left is much, much less likely to be willing to be a quasi-Iranian proxy after seeing what the Iranian axis did for Hamas.
Is it a 'good' position to be in? Kind of. Is it a 'better' position than they had before the Hamas attack? Questionable.
But all this derives from some first-order assumptions of the nature of the conflict, which I suspect you and I diverge on.
That Iran was aware of the Hamas intent to launch the general premise of the 7 Oct attack and provided technical and additional forms of help to assist with the planning.
What do you guys think the possibility of this Israel-Gaza situation exploding to include Hezbollah formally? What about US-Iran?
If it was going to, it already would have exploded. As it is, if they join now, it will be anti-climatic.
Some of the allegations from the regional shuttle diplomacy that went around the region in October is that they were basically deterred by direct threats to Hezbollah and Iran that if they joined in the war, they would be considered direct belligerants and to have been in on in the initial 7 Oct attacked as a direct act of war by the Iranian government, whose relations with Hezbollah are much stronger than Hamas. Further, other actors indicated that if Hezbollah got involved it would be a non-trivial risk of civil war in Lebanon, such as with the French making a considerable arms 'gift' to the governmental forces that would likely operate against Hezbollah in such a scenario.
As is, while some Iranian proxy groups are trying limited support- the Houthis have tried to lob some things from all the way down in Yemen- it's pretty marginal, and not a particularly regionally-supported affair. (The Saudis reportedly have shot down some Houthi stuff.) Hezbollah could try and get involved for its own reasons, but it'd be largely anti-climatic, and after the very visibile period of letting Hamas fight on its own, and at this point I don't think anyone really believes Hezbollah cares that much about Hamas per see.
As for US-Iran, Iran has long been trying to leverage it's various proxy political and military forces in Iraq and Syria to drive the US out. They appear to have decided now's the time to escalate, hence the counter-strikes.
If it was going to, it already would have exploded. As it is, if they join now, it will be anti-climatic.
I would be inclined to agree. However, the situation along the Israel-Lebanese border is now such that it would have certainly resulted in a full-fledged war by Israel against Hezbollah, at least at the scale of the 2006 war, if Israel weren't preoccupied with Gaza. Hezbollah doesn't want a full war, but they're relying on the fact that Israel wants a full war even less in order to get away with more attacks than they could in other circumstances. Israel won't tolerate this state indefinitely, and it could still escalate to a full-scale war if either side miscalculates.
I agree to a good degree, and even would argue Hezbollah is trying to calibrate the pressure precisely to distract Israel from focusing on Hamas, but states can very much downplay some casus belli factors when they don't want to engage a particular front.
Further, other actors indicated that if Hezbollah got involved it would be a non-trivial risk of civil war in Lebanon, such as with the French making a considerable arms 'gift' to the governmental forces that would likely operate against Hezbollah in such a scenario.
It seems like there’s a non-trivial risk that a second Lebanese civil war with Hezbollah fighting Israel directly ends with the Shiites getting ethnically cleansed from Lebanon.
Twice in the last week, I’ve gotten company emails about security in the face of protests. The advice is not surprising: subscribe to company alerts. Report harassment to security. Do not talk to protestors or try to get past a barricade.
I have naturally seen no signs of any protests at our quiet, suburban office. Presumably the same message was broadcast to employees in, say, Boston. But that’s the only story I could find about an actual protest targeting my industry. I’m left wondering—if this response is due to caution from the higher-ups, do they perceive more of a threat? Or are they playing into a narrative where the rank and file assume there will be a threat?
This is pre-emptive risk management and generally good security governance.
Protests can spring out of the air with little warning, so they are educating staff before they arrive at work one day and come across protestors blocking the entry of their facility. It may never happen, but if it does they are minimising the risk to their staff (and also possible compensation claims for not doing everything they reasonably can to provide a safe workspace)
Large organisations often have security advisors (either internal or consulting on retainer) that serve as early warning for this kind of thing.
Edit:
If you ever find yourself confronting protestors, that advice is pretty good. Don't engage or talk to them; a career protestor has likely been arrested before and has little reputation to lose, unlike yourself. They can do all sorts of dirty tricks like spit on you and then have their friends record your reaction for a nice little propaganda video to go up on Twitter/Youtube. Talking to protestors without media training and authorisation from the organisation can embarrass the company and lead to consequences for you. Basically any interaction in a situation like that would possibly be recorded, (edited in the worst possible way) and signal boosted on social media. The play book for issue motivated groups has been refined and shared since the 60's.
In the worst case, just turn around and go home. Email your boss that you couldn't make it to work due to the protest. They will be happy for you to work from home or even just take the day off. Chances are you'd find an email directing you to do this anyway if you checked your inbox.
Chances are you'd find an email directing you to do this anyway if you checked your inbox.
I have some friends in defense, and often they can't access their email on personal devices. For some, quite literally the pre-pandemic policy was that nothing work-related left the building. That has changed somewhat, but expecting folks to check email before coming to the office isn't universally possible even today.
In those cases there would be some other method of communication available which would be used, such as sms to personal devices.
Defense departments in western countries are usually very good with their security risk management, so I can't see them having no way of warning staff outside of work.
In finance during Occupy (before my time) banks apparently told workers not to wear corporate merch in public for fear people would be harassed or attacked. I don’t know if there were ever gangs of anarchists going around beating up bankers with Citigroup backpacks in 2011, but it seems funny now.
I knew some folks that worked in Big Oil, and around that time similar guidance appeared there to stop advertising corporate logos due to worries about climate activists. I don't know of any particular incidents, but the same sort of cautious guidance.
While Collin and tarrant counties may not be hotspots for left wing mass protests, it’s reasonable for defense contractors to expect some level of protest at their facilities during a war, and it seems reasonable to have a company wide email about it.
If I want to help the ordinary Gazans caught in the middle of the airstrikes, but really didn't want to provide any military aid to Hamas, what would be a good charitable organisation to donate to?
Here are some charities dedicated to providing medical supplies and treatment:
One of the main Gazan hospitals, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, is ran by the Episcopalian church in Jerusalem, and it looks like you can email the Episcopalians to specify that you wish to donate towards providing medical aid for Gazans rather than a general donation that might go to religious services and the like: https://j-diocese.org/wordpress/healthcare-3/
An anti-war and anti-occupation Israeli I am acquainted with recommended Medical Aid for Palestinians and said they're running a lot of relief work: https://www.map.org.uk/
I think this is basically impossible given the priorities and practices of Hamas.
Anything of value will be traded, repurposed, or melted down for weapons. Pipes will become rockets. Food will be stockpiled in bunkers while civilians starve. Medicine will be traded to various unscrupulous parties. Hamas is in control of whatever you send to Gaza and Hamas does not share your concern for ordinary Gazans.
I’d think your best bet might be Christian charitable organizations that were already operating inside of Gaza prior to the conflict. The hospital that famously had something happen to it a few weeks ago (not interested in litigating what happened or by whom) is run by the Anglicans, for example.
IDF. The sooner and thorougher they finish eradicating Hamas, the sooner the Palestinians life will start improving.
Edit: Not a satire or sarcasm. Hamas has entagled all military and civilian spaces so that enormous civilian casualties are unavoidable, hamas has made the life of any palestinian in the gaza strip hell, hamas made the coexisting of Israel and Hamas impossible (how israel helped creating hamas is matter for another time), the best way to save palestinians is to help Hamas lose.
I second this. Until Hamas is eradicated there is nothing you can do to not indirectly aid Hamas. Even if you could e.g. give money to a charity to provide food with a 100% guarantee the money would be used on bread and cheese instead of weapons this would still free up money for Hamas to move from providing food for the civilians to weapons instead.
For an example consider a situation where Hamas spends $10 million a year on food and $10 million a year on weapons, where Gaza needs $20 million of food a year (the other $10 million of food comes from current charity). If you donate $1 million to charity so that Gaza is getting $11 million of food from charity Hamas now only needs to spend $9 million to sort of feed its population, which has just freed up an extra $1 million for them to use on weapons instead of food.
The net result of your charitable donation is that the Gazans get the same amount of food they were getting before but Hamas has more money to spend on rockets.
I understand this is a toy example with numbers pulled out of thin air, but as far as I can tell, Hamas spends nothing on feeding civilians and leaves that as a problem for others to solve. And then steals the aid when it comes in.
Not facetious. There are no organizations there which are independent and which can guard their resources and supplies from Hamas. So whatever you send - Hamas will have dibs on it. And there is absolutely nothing in the way Hamas has acted so far that indicates that they will put the wellbeing of the civilians that they use as human shields instead of that of their members.
There may be organizations that are honest and will help but they will be working with the displaced civilians in Egypt, not with the ones in the cross fire.
There are no organizations there which are independent and which can guard their resources and supplies from Hamas. So whatever you send - Hamas will have dibs on it.
Again, as with other discussions, I think it is important to remember that Hamas is the local government. Any goal that starts with "help Palestinians, but not Hamas" is going to be very difficult, on par with a 1943 mission to "help Germans, but not Nazis" or an 1864 plan to "help Southerners, not the Confederacy". While it's possible to thread the needle to some extent, the damage being done to the Nazi and Confederate institutions and civilians with blockades and economic warfare were part of plans being used by the putative good guys, not an accidental bug that we just needed the Red Cross to workaround. Trying to break those blockades and deliver food supplies to enemy civilians has pretty obvious inherent problems associated with it.
If someone just wants to see Hamas win, OK, I guess that's a stance. But really, the "help Palestinians, but not Hamas" position is not just trivially good.
I appreciate that my question was not one with an obvious and straightforward answer, and it's a problem any time you want to assist the populace suffering under a corrupt and despotic regime (even if the populace should have known better than to vote said regime into power).
But all that being said, I feel like there were more constructive responses to the question available than "give your money to the IDF so they can have an easier time bombing Gaza into the stone age lol lol lmao". I think it should have been abundantly obvious that when I say I'm looking for an organisation to which to direct charitable donations, that precludes the armed forces (unless they're involved in peacekeeping, which the IDF obviously are not).
I was mildly tempted to respond with "donate to the IDF" myself, but for better or worse I restrained myself since I could clearly see that that wasn't in the spirit of what you sought, even if I think it's true.
I suppose it depends on how much risk you're willing to take that supplies bought with your money will be misused, barring something particularly specific like a charity that hands out tampons, I suspect that it's going to get yoinked, and in that specific example, intentionally. (Russian conscripts were given tampons and pads by their families when bandages were in short supply, but sadly a material made for soaking up blood isn't very good at staunching a bleed)
Keep in mind that even benign items can be seized and sold on the market for money, and I doubt Hamas has many qualms in that regard. Besides, the IDF isn't particularly funding constrained, at least within the range of any potential donations you might make, unless you're a billionaire I suppose.
Not /u/Lizzardspawn, but that's basically what it boils down to. Until the IDF restores something like a 21st century notion of civilized order, helping Palestinians is nearly impossible.
Sorry for the leading question but am I the only one naive enough to ask "Why don't the israeli troops just walk into the al-Shifa hospital?"? Where I live, if the national army wanted to take over the closest hospital I am confident they could do it in like 5 minutes by walking in through the front door.
If the answer is as I suspect, "the Israeli troops can't walk into the hospital because the hospital is being defended with guns," then why doesn't that fact appear in your average news story like this one? I know this sounds like a post from a person who really cares about Israel and is always going on about media bias against that country, so I just want to add a disclaimer saying that my position on Israel is that I'm just a normal American non-Jew who doesn't really know or care very much about it.
But honestly, to go back to my opening question, what the heck is going on at the hospital? Why can't they just take it over?
Basically Hamas knows Israel won't bomb the hospital, which seems to be the largest hospital in that area. And thus, they base operations there with impunity.
Why wouldn't they just blow it up while they have an excuse to? Netanyahu was talking about how he's dealing with Amalek all over again, do you know what was commanded to do to them?
Is your model that Israel is trying to kill as many people as possible? The world would look different if that were the case. There would be a lot more dead people.
The bar for blowing hospital and it not being a war crime is quite high. Not impossible and Hamas has made sure to make Israel life easier by doing their best to make any civilian infrastructure legitimate military target, but still it is a big deal.
The bar for blowing hospital and it not being a war crime is quite high.
The bar is extremely low, as low as 'is it being used as a military position.'
War crime law is not that legitimate military targets (military positions, command posts, munition stores) are made ineligible by the presence of protected classes (i.e. hospitals), but rather than protected classes are made eligible by the presence of legitimate military targets. There are no protected classes of military sites where someone can fire at you, but you can't fire back.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties. There are no convention requirements to take military casualties in the process of storming military objectives in order to minimize civilian casualties.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties.
Do you have a source for this? Because if this is true, then I've seen such misinformation repeated all the time:
Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life... which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.
What you cited covers the point in conjunction with the same conventions covering valid military objectives and the revocation of protected sites if they are turned into valid military objectives.
Destroying something so that it no longer contributes to casualties on your forces is a concrete and direct military advantage. This goes back to what a valid military target is, and the conventions are very clear that protected targets are NOT protected if they are converted into valid military targets, even if there are still civilian casualties. As such, there is not requirement for there to be no civilian casualties, or for the belligerant to accept casualties in order to avoid civilian casualities. The onus is on the other belligerent to not place military objectives amongst civilians / to move civilians away from military objectives, not on the 'attacking' beligerant to not engage valid military objectives.
As the collateral damage of any civilians is not a binary disqualifier, proportionality doesn't work as a 'prohibit any attack on a valid military objective that may cause casualties' either-or binary. The porportionality is in the excess to the miltiary advantage... but since the military advantage is judged by the attacker, not the defender, and the anticipated value is often trivial to justify in close-range engagements on force-protection grounds and limiting enemy ability to continue offering mearningful resistance, proportionality would be a functionally dead letter if it was solely a binary (which- by its own working- it isn't).
Rather, proportionality comes into play when something would have no concrete or direct miltiary objective- which is usually when a target is so far away / inconsequential it means nothing for your military force survivial if the target is hit or not- or if you have alternatives that have different effects on the civilians in the course of the legitimate strike. In the face of valid military objective where concrete and direct military is already anticipated, and thus engaging is not prohibited, the proportionality distinction will only apply if you have alternatives with smaller loss of incidental loss- which would then render the overkill-casualties excessive in relations to the military advantage anticipated, because you could get the military advantage anticipated by using a smaller effect and thus the 'extra' deaths are unnecessary.
Thanks! I’ve seen a lot of misinformation around how proportionality actually means that if the ratio of civilians to enemy combatants is high enough, then it’s automatically a war crime. I can see where they come from, as the wording is rather vague, but upon reading the article further:
Australia, Canada and New Zealand have stated that the term “military advantage” includes the security of the attacking forces.
the expression “concrete and direct” military advantage was used in order to indicate that the advantage must be “substantial and relatively close, and that advantages which are hardly perceptible and those which would only appear in the long term should be disregarded”.
Numerous States have pointed out that those responsible for planning, deciding upon or executing attacks necessarily have to reach their decisions on the basis of their assessment of the information from all sources which is available to them at the relevant time.
It’s not clear to me how much of a consensus this is outside of Australia, Canada, and NZ, but the air strikes by Israel most certainly 1) provide immediate and perceptible advantages to 2) the security of its attacking forces, at least 3) as far as the IDF is aware of, unless there’s any evidence that they have engaged in air strikes despite knowing full well that there were no Hamas military assets at the target location.
So there’s indeed a strong case to be made that regardless of civilian casualties, the IDF has not committed war crimes in this particular air strike campaign. Not that anyone already calling it “genocide” would care to change their minds, of course.
It’s not clear to me how much of a consensus this is outside of Australia, Canada, and NZ,
Basically every military that has fought an insurgency or an urban conflict in the last century, or otherwise had to fight a conflict where a house is a battle position, has adopted the force protection argument that some civilian casualties are acceptable. This goes from Russia to the Philippines to Sri Lanka and India to Iran and Saudi Arabia to Colombia and every NATO member.
This is usually the point where I remind an audience that war is hell, and that the laws of wars are about limiting, not preventing, civilian casualties. The conventions on how to wage war 'right' are as much about protecting every single life as a fire break is about stopping forest fires. The effects are good for the greater whole, but the part of the forest within the forest break is fully expected to burn.
So there’s indeed a strong case to be made that regardless of civilian casualties, the IDF has not committed war crimes in this particular air strike campaign. Not that anyone already calling it “genocide” would care to change their minds, of course.
This is generally correct. There will be some specific cases that people will focus on, but these can depend on having insight into the belligerent perspectives, as well as other 'the law isn't what you thought the law was' contexts. For perspectives, nothing in the conventions requires a belligerent to reveal their Intelligence- and thus sources and methods- for why they chose a target, so there are often targets that are legitimate but which may not appear to be when prioritized... and this in turn doesn't even include cases of flawed/wrong intelligence, where the a belligerent can legitimately believe there is a valid target somewhere one isn't. It doesn't become a war crime retroactively if one is duped by a denial/deception campaign. Meanwhile, some things that may seem obviously off-limits are actually covered in other areas of the convention. We had a good example in the first thread, when someone did an actuall review of the convention requirements for delivering aid to civilians- in short, while delivering aid to civilians must be allowed, it doesn't have to be allowed by any given organization to any given organization. Rather, a belligerent must allow a mutually acceptable intermediary to deliver it, so that the there can be some sort of guarantee that the aid goes to civilians and not the beseiged belligerent. As a consequence of that, for example, bombing the border crossings early on is not, from a rules-of-law perspective, 'preventing aid from getting to civilians,' which is forbidden, it is 'preventing resupply to a belligerent,' which is permitted.
Rather than quibbling on legal dynamics few know and fewer actually care about, the better argument against genocide-claimers is the point that, just by the numbers, if the Israelis are trying to genocide the Gaza Strip population... they are doing a really, really poor job at it by even the most pro-Palestinian numbers.
If the goal of the Israeli government and military was to genocide the Palestinian population, we would expect to see massively higher Palestinian casualty rates so far. Like, orders-of-magnitude higher. We'd also have seen considerably different targeting decisions of types of targets- with far more about irrevocably destroying essential infrastructure beyond repair or leveling apartment blocks without organizing evacuations- if they were in a 'just kill them all before anyone can stop us' dynamic.
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Notes -
I understand why people are afraid Israel will commit genocide. It'd be great for them if everyone in Gaza suddenly disappeared, and the war is perfect cover for them to make it happen. But there's no evidence that they're currently doing this. So far they've killed less than 1% of Gaza's population and are making efforts to prevent casualties. And yet, leftists are accusing Israel of genocide in present-tense, and Biden of facilitating genocide.
Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.
So, here's my question. Let's say this does escalate into genocide. Will it be a Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario?
I didn't believe Trump had any authoritarian tendencies until 1/6, and I know most Republicans still don't believe he does. I think that's in large part because of wolf-crying. It could happen again.
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Ignorant question, I know. I'm asking it because I'm ignorant and I don't know the answer, but I'm sure there is one, and I want to know it.
Why doesn't Israel just move everyone in Gaza to the West Bank while they do their bombings, then move them back to Gaza when they've destroyed the Hamas bases? Is there not enough room in the West Bank?
Because these people might escape en-route and exercise their right of return by staying in whatever Israeli-occupied village or town they were ethnically cleansed from.
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Israel's goal is unknown, but it's unlikely they're losing sleep over the deaths of Gazan civilians. And obviously figuring out which Gazans are civilians and which ones are Hamas fighters is not trivial.
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The political goal of the war isn't to destroy hammas, it's to make effective Palestinian internal governance impossible. Moving them to the west bank defeats this purpose; in an ideal scenario for Israel all Palestinians just fuck off to egypt or lebanon or syria and stop being a hassle.
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It's not so easy to move 2 million people 50+ km. There's physically enough room in the West Bank (it's much bigger than the Gaza strip), but they would still need tent cities or some other solution for them. Israel would also not like the Gaza population radicalizing the West Bank population (more than it already is) and increasing the population density, making terrorist attacks from there easier.
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There's no way from Gaza to Judea and Samaria without passing through Israel.
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Top House Democrats evacuated from DNC headquarters as police clash with protesters calling for Gaza ceasefire
...
Riot, attack cops, claim to be the victim. This pattern of conduct isn't remotely surprising to me at this point, but I am surprised that anyone other than fellow travelers is willing to treat these things like a both sides situation, where we can't really know who caused things to turn ugly.
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Osama Bin Laden's "Letter to America" outlining his justifications for the September 11 attack has been deleted from the Guardian's website.
This is in response to a new TikTok trend where people are posting their reactions to reading it for the first time and encouraging others to - usually with either an implication or an outright assertion that Bin Laden was right. A sample compilation of such videos can be seen here.
For those who want to refresh their memory of Bin Laden's manifesto (and IMO it's completely indefensible for the Guardian to have removed it), an archived version is here. He lists a litany of grievances against the crimes and perversions of the west (amusingly including Clinton's blowjob), but the first and most dominant one - and the one that I expect has led to this rekindled interest - is of course America's support for Israel. He describes the creation and continuation of Israel as "one of the greatest crimes". And of course he also claims that the jews control America's policies, media, and economy (while claiming at the same time that the killing of American civilians is justified because America is a democracy and therefore civilians are responsible for America's policies).
So there we have it. Hatred of Israel is leading young online leftists to endorse not only the terrorism by Hamas against Israel, but the terrorism of Bin Laden against America. I'm sure this will end well.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that all English-language media from Al Quada, Bin Laden, etc after around the mid-90s is propaganda aimed not at middle eastern Arabs and Muslims, but at Western leftists who can be persuaded to sympathize with aspects of their cause. There's no reason to believe that it has any relation to what actually drives middle eastern Muslims to join the cause. Any messaging aimed at them would be in Arabic and published in news sources and media channels that they actually read.
I believe their actual motivations, which drives their actual planners and recruits, are along the lines of what is described here. That's from 2002, the Iraq war advocacy has not aged terribly well, but I think the second section on the actual motivations of Islamic fundamentalists is still right on the nose. Short version is that they're mad that western secular values have permeated the world and their own societies and have proven to be far more successful than Islamic fundamentalist societies. As such, they're likely to continue opposing us no matter what we do regarding Israel.
Also, as screye describes below, it seems that letter was in fact written by a radicalized American. As such, the real story is less that maybe Osama had a point than that the class of people who make this type of video are so utterly ignorant that they are trivially manipulated into apologism for an ideology that would have their women locked in the home, only allowed out in Burqas, and their men murdered if they fail to convert to Islam and practice it their way.
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Not sure how true it is, but the "letter to america" was likely written by Al Qaeda's head propagandist and Osama's advisor - "Azzam the American" https://twitter.com/IsmailRoyer/status/1725353618675474837
Now here is the spicy part - Our dear Azzam is a radicalized son of California Liberals. Oh wait, it gets spicier. Not just any liberal, but a part-jewish descendent of ADL leadership. Say what you want about the jews, but if you want a wordcel, you hire a jew.
Al Qaeda hired a jew and he started writing about money & wall street. You can't make this shit up. Best piece of black comedy I have read all year.
( I have deliberately written it in a snarky tone. LMK if this breaks our rules)
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I’ll come out and say it but I think Obl position is far more defensible than Hamas.
America did do a bunch of shit in the Middle East such as propping up Saudi Arabia which was basically a three way alliance between the religious leaders - Saudi Royal Family - US (guns and money). Lacking any direct means of gaining political control from those groups he was really only left with terrorism to shake things up. Hamas on the other hand just feels like a death cult that wants to see Jews killed. A political solution for Palistinians would have been found decades if they were had different beliefs.
I’m not going to say I agree with OBL beliefs but I do get somewhat close to a just war theory with him. Though I’ve come to a belief that on net the US/Saudi alliance was on net quite productive for all involved. The country is noticeably wealthier and more stable than others in the region. It seems to be that OBL chose the only conceivable military target to accomplish his political objectives.
I don't really see much distance between OBL and Hamas. They both seem to me to be primarily motivated by wanting to destroy Israel.
Like OBL throws in a bunch of other grievances too. He complains about the gays, and interest, and climate change, and nuking Japan. But if you read his letter and just objectively look for his one core issue? It's Israel. Same as Hamas, he just wants the Jews gone or (preferably) dead.
Osama's broader grievance-theme was about the loss of respectability/pride of the Arab-Islamic world than Israel per see, though there isn't much distance between them.
This ties to a broader theme in (generally Arab) Islamist thought which contrasts the golden age of the Islamic ascent (when the Arabs dominated the ancient empire of Persia, and then Islamists as a whole overthrew the (Eastern) Robman Empire, truly ancient and established major powers of the era), were broadly acknowledged as world-leaders in thought and technology (in large part from adopting/synthesizing/spreading the knowledge centers they conquered), and were the dominant military force that seemed to ever-advance on all fronts as the Christians feared them, but even the culture-shock of the crusaders were thrown back in a series of triumphs against the outsider... compared to the subjugation of the colonial eras, and then the present malais where the Arab identity isn't a thing of pride and admiration from afar, but with its vices of decadence, impovershment, corruption, and hypcrisy well known. There is a consistent thing of 'things were better when we were better,' with radical islaming groups functionally viewing/presenting themselves as radical reformists trying to correct a shamefully corruption.
I hate to oversimplify it as 'it's a pride thing,' but that's not far away from it. It's about self-respect as much as esteem in comparison to others... which is where Israel comes through, as the Jews were an unquestionable under-class, something that even the lowest Arab good-Islamic person was above, until Israel defeated the prides of the Arab world- some of the key leaders of the pan-Arabism when Arab identity-politics was at its height- repeatedly, decisively, and humiliatingly in multiple wars. If you read some of the diplomatic history from around the time of the foundation of Israel and some of the early wars, there are heavy and repeated themes and points where Arab states were acting out of pride and emotion, rather than reason/rationality/interests/strategy. Politiclaly, Yom Kippur War was more about proving the Israelis weren't invincible and restoring Egyptian self-respect than an actual campaign plan or changing the borders- hence why the Egyptians decisively lost the war, but were willing to accept the land-for-peace arrangement with Israel and the US not too long after.
Returning to OBL, Israel is the 'core issue' because Israel is evidence against pride, and the reminder of humiliation. Erasing Israel is about erasing shame, but the core/underlying issue is one of pride and self-respect which cannot make peace with what one views as properly inferior.
Or at least that's view, though the distinction may be irrelevant.
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The second link goes mistakenly also to the Guardian.
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If there is anything even resembling a good point in Osama's essay, it will have to be re-litigated in the minds of the young. There is no way around this. You've [speaking to what I presume to be the modal reader here, not necessarily you specifically] done this yourself, you've gone through phases of reading, with the excitement of the forbidden and of "waking up", extremely contrarian takes on established history.
Dangerous times, obviously, if the kids decide to throw all their chips in with Team Osama. But my guess is this is a phase, like reading Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto and thinking at first "hmm, ok, I'm following the reasoning." The kids' enthusiasm will probably be tempered by their own meta-contrarians in due time. The circle of life.
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I don’t know why people are retconning Western leftists’ view of 9/11 because among actual leftists (ie not center-left mainstream parties) sympathy with the inevitability of the terrorists’ cause (if not the specifics of the act) wasn’t uncommon immediately after 9/11.
The Guardian, September 12th, 2001
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Heads up, your second link also leads to the guardians removed content.
Whoops. Fixed!
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Israel struck the Al-Shifa hospital and then lied about the source being misfired Palestinian munitions. The IDF even provided a trajectory map of the projectiles which they claimed to be based on radar detections:
It's honestly kind of depressing how much information, proof, etc Israel/IDF provides, and still cannot win trust. Of course it doesn't help when random mid-level Israeli bureaucrats tweet random posts of unverified bs that then gets debonnnked.
Like the Shifa Hospital situation the last few days. Images and videos of IDF bringing in supplies etc for patients in the hospital: "lies, they didn't actually do this!" "just for the video/photo-op!" etc. Of course, they ARE purposeful photo-ops that are trying to counter the anti-Israeli perspective.
And then anti-Israel people will post some link PROVING that Israel "lied" in the past, but then you read the link and it is IDF claiming responsibility for some error. "This is why IDF definitely did fire rockets at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza" etc etc. And of course then pictures come out and ... onto the next story!
It's the same as how US public comms is treated. Oh US DoD denies the casualty numbers claimed by a militia that just attacked a US base? "Lies!" "This means the casualty numbers are true!" When US DoD says, in the same manner, in the same channels, that they did something that can be seen as detrimental, like say they suffered some injuries, like US base got attacked - then what US is saying is of course true.
Everyone here probably knows this and has seen it play out. I'm just a little, idk, depressed and ranty about this.
(and I'm not ruling out that Israel does / can/ has lied about military actions, and god knows IDF has done their share of morally bad things in the past. But there just seems to be nothing israel can do to win over trust. But such is the tiktok PR battle we find ourselves in today.)
((IMO: US, Israel, and any faction that finds itself in a conflict and viewed as the more powerful "oppressor", should just keep silent and never say anything. Did Saudi announce things when fighting Houthis in Yemen? Or Assad when killing hundreds of thousands of people? I am no)
When confronted with clear evidence that Israel lied about something, your response is that it’s depressing that people still distrust Israel. What kind of rhetorical strategy is that?
As the resident Al-Ahli Speculation Enjoyer this is funny to me, as I was warned by the mods about “single issue posting” when I provided two updates on the topic. The last major update was similar to the article above: the NYTimes and LeMonde came out with their conclusion that a major piece of evidence used by Israel was false, that the rocket came from a different direction than where Israel alleges. And that’s been the last major update because of a lack of evidence to discuss. Which is why Al-Shifa is important: if Israel is lying and is also proven culpable, then IMO it’s likely this is the case also for Al-Ahli. Maybe that is exactly why there are reporters on the grounds now at Al-Shifa.
It was the president of Israel who said they weren’t striking Al-Shifa, by the way. Not a “random mid-level bureaucrat”.
[On a side note, one of the camera video recordings obtained by the Times came from Saleh al-Jafarawi, who is a kind of Palestinian Sam Hyde. Maybe this is grounds for some people to doubt the findings.]
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Entities that lie to build support for waging war lose trust and don't get the default assumption of honesty. Remember the US and Israeli governments and their diehards pushing claims that Saddam was feeding people into wood chippers, had WMDs and was trying to make nukes, the guy who claimed to be his bomb maker before congress, and the earlier nonsense from Desert Storm about pulling babies out of incubators? If you questioned any of this at the time, you were a terrorist sympathizer, America hater, Al-Qaeda lover, etc. Cue hundreds of thousands dead until years later people acknowledge these as lies.
Do you think people posting "Lies" are saying that because they remember, or even know, about these things you listed?
Not to say US / Israel / any other military are without blame for the lack of trust. I agree, US military has lied in the past, and the press/government/etc lied with it (possibly in other orders, like papers lied first, apparently, for the Spanish-American war). Not saying they are without sin.
But it does feel to me that the winningest move here is to not play at all (not fight). Failing that, don't say anything while playing and hopefully you win.
Yes. When a person or group proves that they will say anything to manipulate you into doing what they want, the correct move is to always start from the assumption that they're lying.
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It was only twenty years ago. Plenty of people in the Pentagon, Israeli and US intelligence, etc who were involved in creating and spreading war propaganda lies in the 2000s would still be active members of those institutions and remember what was done then, and newer members would doubtless be taught about the Iraq War and the like as case studies to inform future propaganda efforts.
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Which is fine, as long as it's consistently applied, which hasn't always been seen in this conflict despite plentiful examples on both sides and virtually all media.
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I see such things as a result of motivated reasoning coupled with the impossibility of knowing where everything you have is. No military on this planet can know with 100% certainty where every missile being shot is aimed and know where all your enemies weapons and units are. Thus when making statements, the temptation will be to assume the best of your own and the worst of your enemies, and thus it would be to choose the one where they look good.
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If there were at least four explosions and three of them were Israeli, it means that one or more could be from Hamas. Everyone could be telling part of the truth here.
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Saudi Arabia is not fascist, it’s a theocratic absolute monarchy.
For some, the easy retort here is "what's the difference?"
Let’s start with the easy legal difference- the Saudi state, and indeed the whole country, is the personal property of the house of Saud, and they deserve to have it as their property because of their family history of guarding the ‘correct’ type of Islam. In a fascist state, the country is personified by the state which answers to no one and it is the state’s power which justifies this personification.
The Saudi model in western societies is similar to the Ancien Regime, Hapsburg empire, old Spain, etc. fascism in western societies is, well, Hitler and Mussolini. Interestingly, there are examples of Arab fascism- Saddam Hussein and Bashar Al Assad. You’ll notice that, while perhaps the level of oppression was similar between Iraq and Saudi Arabia in, say, 2000, the direction and amount were very different, with Saudi oppression aimed at religious conformity and Iraqi oppression aimed at ethnic distinctions which could provide a conflicting loyalty to the state.
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Yes, ignorance makes for easy retorts.
Fascism (like communism) was a movement primarily in response to the dissolution of states where power lay in the hands of a hereditary elite, who would maintain that power by doing things for the commoners that they thought the commoners needed, while extracting wealth and making the commoners do things for them. Downtown Abbey is a good example of a show that celebrates the old world order, with the hereditary rich living in mansions and being served on; taking their cut from the farmers, while justifying their position by arguing that they create jobs, help those in need and organize feasts (where they themselves expect to get applauded by the commoners). Saudi Arabia is pretty much like this, with their system of patronage depending on clan relationships.
The actual cause for the social changes that led to the rise of communism and fascism was the Second Agricultural Revolution, which pushed very many people out of the farming life, which in turn enabled the Industrial Revolution. These technical revolutions led to urbanization and capitalism, both of which were much more brutal than today, causing much unhappiness and therefor revolutionary spirit. The elites that ran these countries were seen as doing such a bad job that very many people wanted something different.
Communism in theory sought to abolish the elites, instead of replacing them, by means of radical democracy & shared property. Although in practice this could not work for various reasons and so communist regimes inevitably just descended into authoritarianism, based on power games rather than hereditary power. In that sense, the statement that 'true communism has never been tried' is true, although true communism can't actually be tried and inevitably seems to devolve into what it was intended to fight against.
Fascism sought to replace the hereditary elite with a technocratic elite that would seek to improve society by aligning people towards a societal improvement, rather than their selfish desires. Hence the bundle of sticks, the fasces. All people in the nation united for a common purpose. Unlike communism, it rejects the idea of radical equality, so it accepts wealth differences and differences in hierarchy, but only in so far as to help achieve the common goal. The fascist capital owner may own a big factory, but is not supposed to hoard wealth, have an excessive lifestyle or take advantage of others. Fascism rejects democracy, as it considers the common man to be stupid. It doesn't really answer the question of how the right goal and right leadership is selected. In practice, the autocratic nature of the leadership and lack of goals within the ideology itself, tends to lead to fascism being easily combined with other extremist ideologies, like Hitler's racial beliefs.
This lack of inherent goals within the fascist model tends to lead to a lot of confusion about what fascism actually is, which why it is so easy to claim that something is fascist, as there is no pure fascism. It's always fascism plus some other ideology or some other goal, that is not inherent to fascism itself.
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"If you don't know the difference between fascism and theocratic absolute monarchy you have nothing worthwhile to contribute on the topic and should just be ignored" is the correct reply.
What is the difference that's meaningful to the poster who conflates them?
Don’t waste your time defending the idiotic utterances of this troll. He is not on your side.
Which one?
"jewdefender"
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Fascism and Absolute totalitarian monarchies have their means and ends flipped, fascism is an extreme form of nationalism and uses authoritarianism to inculcate nationalism amongst its subjects; absolute totalitarian monarchies aim to preserve rule by fiat of the king/emperor and use nationalism to achieve their authoriarianism.
Confusing the two with each other is like believing wet streets cause rain, and someone who thinks that way is not to be trusted on much other stuff either.
What is the practical purpose of distinguishing between "inflicting nationalism to inflict authoritarianism" and "inflicting authoritarianism to inflict nationalism" for the purposes of living there? Either way, the inhabitants get both.
Words have meanings, and the way fascism was being used here was in a negative perjorative sense, that doesn't apply to "absolute totalitarian monarchism" if only because that's too big of a mouthful for the average man and is also too much of a fargroup for westerners in a way that "fascism" is not. Using words incorrectly is a slur treadmill and a bad thing, and deserves to be called out and ridiculed.
But if you ask about the difference for someone living there:
Fascism is a one party society, Monarchism is a zero party society. This obviously influences how much personal political power you can get if you start out with none but are determined to make something of yourself.
In fascism your loyalty is to the country, in monarchy your loyalty is to the royal family. The "country" needs not even be a well defined thing beyond a necessary legal fiction for the modern world, indeed "Saudi Arabia" is named after the House of Saud, the family which rules it.
Fascism glorifies its state and ruler as being better than others, there is no such thing in monarchy: you are a subject of your monarch, therefore you must serve him, even though other monarchs may well be better.
In fascism, power comes through seizing it (or rising up the ranks of the party), in monarchism power (generally) comes through being born into it.
Monarchy tends to be more internally stable (as long as the ruling king does his duty and properly nominates and grooms a heir before he dies), because there are fewer people who can legitimately claim power and thus cause internal strife, fascism is vulnerable to coups in the leadership by any strong enough random who thinks he can serve the country better than the current leader, this leads to civil strife and suffering for the whole population.
Fascism is very atheistic as it raises the state above everything, a totalitarian theocratic monarchy is obviously very religious (it's literally in the name). But still Fascism is probably fine with your religion as long as you don't make it interfere with state business, totalitarian theocratic monarchies would not be happy with you being a member of the wrong religion.
Fascism is more egalitarian on a personal level than absolute monarchy, as long as you glorify the state and are a citizen everything is well and good, in monarchy there are more divisions with some people being elevated higher than others (titles of nobility).
Fascism is generally like a planned economy, it's corporatism done on a state level (the state run like e.g. Apple), Monarchy doesn't have much to say about how the economy is best run.
etc. etc.
These are massive differences between fascism and totalitarian state monarchy, even the last one on its own is a huge difference to the life of the average person (akin to the difference between a capitalistic/communist society). The inhabitants do get both nationalism and authoritarianism and a bunch of other similar things, but their lives under the two systems are very different on a day to day basis.
And if you're going to use this to say that fascism sounds better than totalitarian theocratic monarchy for an average citizen then fine, you can make that argument but that still doesn't make it OK to say totalitarian theocratic monarchies are "fascism", no different to how getting punched in the face is better than getting your leg cut off, but saying someone got punched in the face when they got their leg cut off is comepletely wrong, and using it as hyperbole (bacause society has memetic antibodies against punching in the face but not legs getting cut off) is straight up wrong and deserves to be called out, mocked and ridiculed for being next level stupid.
Btw, Saudi Arabia is actually a pretty nice place to live these days if you are in any ways economically productive, I have cousins (including female ones) who went to live there for ~8 years or so, made a lot of money due to low tax while having a nice comfortable life due to modern day amenities that would be much more expensive to replicate in the west, then came back and used the saved money to straight up buy a house.
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I don't think this is true - many European countries would simply not retaliate at all if left to their own devices.
The last time they retaliated we got two world wars.
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Notably, Hamas wasn’t leaving Israel to its own devices, and nobody had any reasonable expectation that they would.
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Because a bunch of European countries blame themselves when Muslims don't like them or don't integrate or kills hundreds of their fellow citizens in terrorist attacks.
Those European countries don’t have an army to fight or territory to conquer. The one time there really was a state that openly aligned itself with Islamist terrorism in the West a multinational coalition of Western powers invaded and occupied it for 20 years.
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I disagree. Getting invaded and genocided has a way of focusing the mind.
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Will Al-Shifa be the turning point, one way or another? Or will nothing change? If the IDF takes the hospital, and there are tunnels there, will anyone change their tune, or will it be "Well, the IDF was telling the truth this one time, but they still shouldn't have killed babies"? If there are no tunnels, will Israel back off and end their campaign in shame (their own and the US intelligence community's), or will they try to brazen it out and assume no real net change in total hatred for them? If Hamas blows the tunnels and collapses the area to avoid giving Israel evidence, will anyone accept that it wasn't an Israeli bomb?
Or am I overestimating the importance of this one battle and the massive accompanying news coverage?
Al-Shifa being a military installation has been "priced in" for some time. Very little will change if Israeli claims turn out to be correct.
Frankly, finding tunnels isn't enough. If the IDF doesn't have dozens of geolocated photos showing Hamas munitions stockpiles trending on Twitter by 7:30AM EST, Israel is toast. The dying Palestinian babies are trending right now.
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The tunnels have been known about for decades. It’s not news. So whether or not there’s something significant under that particular spot, nobody who’s following this region doesn’t know about the tunnels. So those who see this as self defense will continue to do so, and those who see it as provocation will continue.
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Whether they find a torture chamber/military base combo pack, or they turn the stone over and all it says is "Peace on Earth;" I predict that IDF will claim the former while Hamas will claim the latter, no one supporting either side will care regardless.
Israel has already been caught faking evidence on official channels, repeatedly and blatantly. No one who supported Israel beforehand cared, nor should they. IDF forces will claim there were military installations under the hospital, they will fake it as aggressively as they need to. The people who want to believe the IDF will believe the IDF; and if they are presented with clear and convincing evidence that the IDF is lying they will say it doesn't matter.
Hamas' track record of honesty is...are we even going to try to address that point? No one who feels that the deaths of [x] number of innocent civilians isn't worth it is going to change their mind, regardless of what they find under there. Nothing they find under there will justify the murder of babies to get it, so therefore they probably won't find it anyway. It's a kind of ethos argumentation: any group bloodthirsty enough to kill children to achieve their military objective is untrustworthy enough to lie about why they killed the children.
It's the law of merited impossibility all the way around. One side says: it's worth killing those kids to get at that military installation, so there must be a military installation there. The other says, it's not worth killing those kids to get at any military installation, so there can't be a military installation there.
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That is evidence in itself.
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The Iranian Tehran Times released an alleged recording of the ADL freaking out about the generational divide in Israel support, as well as Iranian influence in anti-Israel advocacy groups. I do not recommend reading the article because it’s literally Iranian propaganda, but the audio recording is on their page here if you scroll down. Do you think this is legitimate or AI-generated? There’s nothing that struck me as obviously wrong with Greenblatt’s voice. It would be a weird thing to fake, because Iran shouldn’t want to promote the idea that they are behind Western anti-Israel advocacy.
If it’s legitimate, it’s insightful in four ways. The ADL does not believe that support for Israel is Left-Right but instead young-old. The ADL believes that some anti-Zionist organizations are taking their talking points from Iran (eg using the term “Zionist entities”). Iran has access to important meetings of ADL members. And lastly, the ADL has access to the inner circle memorandums of anti-Zionist groups.
Given the source I'm suspicious. Even more so it's weird to me how he goes on and on about "Iranian propaganda" in true "omg Russian bots!" fashion as if the Iranian deep state has arms in every American university and anti-Zionists need Iran of all places to tell them Israel is a violent apartheid state. Given the source, again, it seems very complimentary to Iran. On the other hand, if it's a fake it's good in its organic American dialog - no awkwardness or weird translations here.
But assuming it's true. The the thing that jumps out to me is the line: "The number of young people who think Hamas's massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high".
To me this indicates he drinks his own kool-aid. One of the more annoying things about Israel apologists and Zionists to me is how they constantly attack this weird strawman of anyone that disagrees with them is pro-Hamas. How they repeat Hamas Hamas Hamas like it's a brain virus. It's hilarious to think it's a relatively recent post 2006 phenomenon in Israel-Palestine. The way some people speak it's as if Hamas Hamas Hamas was the singular bad force ruining everything and if it weren't for these ultra-monsters, well shucks, good ol boy Israel wouldn't have to act so bad.
I always assumed it's a talking points memo for public propaganda. It's clearly from the "when did you stop beating your wife" school of distraction & attack. Focus on Hamas and mention it as much as possible. No one wants to defend them, and any talk about them is not talking about all the people Israel is killing while creating a constant negative mental association. Anyway, I have literally never seen this mythical Western pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas "liberal".
Here we see Greenblatt privately believing this psycho BS that the only way anyone could be anti-Zionist is that they are totally fans of Hamas and pro-massacre of civilians. It would never occur to a principled person to notice Zionism's evil actions without being crypto Islamic theocrats. Absurd and wildly detached from the mind of your average Zionist critical secular university aged student. The Zionist equivalent of believing all Trump supporters are literal Nazis.
Wasn’t greenblatt a true believer in the Russia narratives? Not surprising he reaches for a similar toolkit.
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He might be thinking of polls like this Harvard-Harris poll:
48% of those 18-24 said Hamas. Of course siding with Hamas more than Israel doesn't necessarily mean approving of Hamas or of the attack. However there is a question about the attack:
51% of 18-24 year olds (and 48% 25-34, and 24% overall) said it can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians. That said, I am suspicious of these poll results and wonder if they might be because of the specific wording of "can be justified", if some interpreted it as meaning "someone could theoretically make an argument trying to justify it" rather than "I personally think it was just".
It's a bit of a stretch, especially because it corresponds to the general lower level of support for Israel among the young. But some of the other results also call it into question. The prior question had a lower percentage siding with Hamas over Israel. 54% of the same age group (45% overall) answered "Should law firms hire or refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas and the attacks on Israeli civilians?" with refuse to hire, indicating at least 5% who would support blacklisting themselves. (It's pretty striking how support for free-speech in younger generations is so low that support for blacklisting rises even as support for Israel falls.) Or I guess some people might interpret "support" as people donating money to Hamas or something. 62% of those 18-24 say the "attacks on Jews" were genocidal.
I don't know if there's a poll asking about support for the attack with better wording. Best I could find with a quick search was this one which didn't make Hamas/Israel support a binary choice:
And this one which asks about the attack but again in a potentially ambiguous way, and just college students again:
I think the role of framing is being underestimated here, and in general. On one hand, sure, Hamas brutally killed over a thousand civilians who presumably were largely innocent beyond whatever guilt they inherit through general support and acceptance of benefits of their country; against the standard of normal morality that most people would claim to subscribe to if asked in a non-charged setting, this was surely unjustified. On the other hand, we are constantly being asked by our authorities to consider it justified that Israel has retaliated by doing the same against Palestinian civilians. You can either try to come up with some additional principle to break the symmetry in favour of Israel's stance (Killing civilians is better when it is done by well-uniformed military members acting professionally than when it is done by shabby guys on pickups? The calculus of retaliation should have a cutoff date somewhere in 2020 so the Israelis can claim to have been attacked first?), or consider both the action and the response justified as many of those 18-24 year olds probably do, or consider neither the action nor the response justified.
At first sight, of course, why not do the last? - but my intuition tells me that this option bumps up against a particular American instinct, captured by the frequently-heard "well, do you have a better idea?" or perhaps even the adjacent "person saying it can't be done should stop bothering person who is actually doing it". Once you have identified something as a problem, whatever countermeasure remains after you have eliminated all the impossible ones must be good, because the alternative would be to shrug and say that nothing can be done which is something for debbie downers, lazy people and those lacking the requisite moral certitude. (I'm reminded of The Quiet American, an early British novel built around calling out the same trait, which at the time hit enough of a nerve that they spitefully made a movie adaptation that inverted its punchline)
Are you seriously claiming that the IDF are filming themselves as they go around slaughtering civilians, which is what Hamas did?
Israel was attacked by Hamas, who run the polity of Gaza. Such actions often lead to an unfortunate state called "war". When Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Habor, the casualties were only a factor of two higher than in the Hamas attack. (Of course, these attacks differ in other ways, the victims of Pearl Habor were overwhelmingly military, and Imperial Japan had odds of winning which were orders of magnitude better than Hamas, though still not that high overall.)
While I am sure that today's Guardian would have stories without end on the plight the Japanese civilians would suffer during a war with the US and the power of forgiveness, I do not think that it was morally wrong for the US to enter that war. (This does not extend to morale bombings and the nukes -- especially the second one, though.)
In wars, civilians are often killed as a side effect. This is bad, but totally different from going around and beheading people.
Of course, the question if regime change is the strategically best solution for Israel or the world is debatable.
Why was it morally wrong to drop the second nuke, when Japan still appeared to have no intention of surrendering at the time and even went through a failed coup to prevent a surrender after the second one was dropped?
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No, but I consider the main bad thing to be the part where you slaughter civilians, rather than the one where you try to farm internet points for it.
That's you doing the "calculus of retaliation should have a cutoff date" thing. Rather than ignoring everything that happened before the Hamas attack this time, we could set the arbitrary cutoff date to be December 26th, 2008 instead, and write the same story flipped starting with "Gaza was attacked by the Israeli government, who run the polity of Israel". If we do not set arbitrary cutoffs, surely the story begins in 1948, when IL was formed as a result of an ethnically cleansing invasion of the remains of Mandatory Palestine.
Sorry, but I do not share this perception that killing civilians by bombing them from afar is somehow better or more tasteful, especially considering that I want to correct for a lifetime of consuming propaganda commissioned by the people who have a monopoly on bombing-civilians-from-afar capabilities to make it appear more tasteful.
(I should make clear that I don't think I'm an anti-IL dogmatic; at this point I would consider "recognise that the International Community does not have the collective moral will or executive power to stop them outright and therefore give IL special dispensation to exterminate their uppity charges once and for all" to be a perfectly acceptable course of action to minimise expected total future suffering.)
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Isn't "killing civilians as part of collateral damage from attacking military targets" very much not "doing the same" as "killing civilians by attacking them intentionally"? Using this as an additional principle seems much more obviously legitimate than the ones you mention, and is what I actually see advocated in public discourse. I'm not accusing you of arguing in bad faith, but does "Killing civilians is better when it is done by well-uniformed military members" not seem like an obvious strawman to you?
Saying that "nothing can be done" is a part of the ideas implied in "well, do you have a better idea?" There have certainly been a sizable fraction of the population calling for a ceasefire. On the other hand, there are of course those in support of continuing the military operation, who would presumably think this to be the least bad of all options, even with civilian casualties and all. And in that case, the Americans stepping aside and "doing nothing" to stop Israel is exactly what is desired -- it's their conflict, let them have at it.
I honestly haven't seen anyone support the right of both Hamas and the IDF to hit their respective populations in this way. Rather,
from what I've seen, this seems to be the most common opinion from the people who want a ceasefire. They don't condone Hamas (the "this is what decolonization looks like" people still appear to only be a fringe minority), but they also can't stand the images of civilian casualties from Israeli attacks.
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The alt-right and wignat claim that groups like the ADL are huge hypocrites that support diversity in Western countries but ethno nationalism in Israel is obviously true. It an't even be debated in my opinion. Before they could just call the people pointing this out Nazis (because they were), but now people are seeing Israel for what it actually is and the new people calling it out can't just be dismissed as Nazis so they are being exposed for the hypocrites they are. You can't call all the black people, Muslims, SJWs, LGBTQ+ groups, etc. Nazis when they were on your side the past 8 years fighting white nationalism and Trump or whatever they were up to. Then when they have an apartheid state that kills children and has an open air prison for Palestinians (not saying that's what I believe, but left wing activists do) then the Holocaust sympathy dries up real quick. They know they are in a tough place and this is probably what they have stopped messing with Musk publicly.
The ADL opposed the 2018 nation-state law, which means that they oppose ethnic nationalism in Israel.
You're cherry picking that from their site. I could find a bunch of other posts on there from them that paint them as rabid Zionists. The ADL are huge hypocrites after all. Posts like this are just so they can't be pinned down and people can go see they made this post (that nobody read and wasn't intended to be read). But let's be honest, they have spent a million times as much money and effort attacking Musk these past few years publicly than they ever have in their entire history for Israel. This is also a left/wing Jew/Israel culture war battle. They don't like Netenyahu or Likud. But make no mistake, if you go criticizing Israel publicly and aggressively, the ADL will come for you to smear your character no matter how good your points are and how good your intentions are.
No. Rather, I intentionally looked to see what their position was an an extremely well-known recent controversy specifically about ethnic nationalism in Israel.
I have no doubt that they are assholes, but what does any of that have to do with their views on ethnic nationalism?
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This doesn’t seem surprising, given that lots of anti-Zionist groups have crossover support from other very work groups which support the ADL in other contexts.
This is at least partly true, and given the ADL’s day job of ‘call republicans Nazis’, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t believe it.
For a modern intelligence service, this would probably be trivially easy- activists are unlikely to guard their computers like government officials. And Iran has very good reasons to keep an eye on major foreign policy advocacy groups(which the ADL is) in their politically unstable-yet-gridlocked archenemy.
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Why not? There are millions of Western young people, as you say, who are now openly very anti-Israel and pro-Palestine. Many of these, however, may still either dislike Iran (eg. because of the Hijab protests) or have no opinion of it.
A core goal of Iranian support for Palestinians is for their own propaganda purposes in the regional geopolitical conflict and with the global Ummah, often as a kind of counter to the Saudi message that they’re the guardians of the two holy cities. Extending that audience to Western leftists would be a big win, so attaching themselves publicly to the pro-Palestinian cause in front of them is a good thing in their eyes.
The more people in the West sympathize with Iran, think Iran is ‘actually doing some good things’ or whatever, the more pressure to lift sanctions etc, at least in this logic.
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Speaking of, whatever came of the various audio logs the IDF claim to have intercepted? Was there ever any good analysis done on those?
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Iran-backed militias keep striking US positions in Syria, Iraq, etc. By various counts up to 40-70+ times in the last 2-3 weeks. Another recently one I just saw - US denied the high casualties claimed by the possible assailants
In response, US has done a handful (3-5?) retaliatory strikes on those militias' positions. Apparently one of the strikes hit some IRGC commanders/troops. I also read that apparently Biden opted for lesser attacks, to prevent escalation.
Oh and US might unfreeze $10billion worth of funds to Iran? For some reason? Were the six billion dollars going to Iran through Qatar actually delivered, or held up?
On the Lebanese-Israel border, IDF continues to trade attacks with Hezbollah. Both sides have sustained casualties, though Hezbollah apparently has more (they publish photos of "martyrs" they died, on twitter at least).
However, it seems like the speeches by the Hezbollah leader has not been very inflammatory. Their once-expected entry into the war with Israel still hasn't come, despite these border skirmishes. Maybe the US presence in the area, with two carrier groups and other assets, is actually a real deterrent here? It definitely feels like Hezbollah has to say they are with Hamas against Israel/US, but won't actually put themselves on the line, perhaps rationally in this case. Would Hezbollah leadership be forced to do more or risk losing control of its troops? I read a theory that the Hamas operation on Oct. 7 was mostly lead by younger commanders, without the support of the higher up, older leadership. Could Hezbollah run into this situation as well?
What do you guys think the possibility of this Israel-Gaza situation exploding to include Hezbollah formally? What about US-Iran?
My take:
US-Iran will continue as currently, though honestly US forward positions in Eastern Syria and Iraq are not sustainable in my opinion. They should either be heavily reinforced, or withdrawn, as the bases there are mostly unable to adequately return fire or defend themselves IMO.
Hezbollah will probably keep doing what they are doing, unless something really breaks. Some Hamas leader just recently said that Hezbollah would enter the war with Israel if Hamas is completely destroyed, saying it's a "red line". Though I distinctly remember Hezbollah saying Israel invading Gaza was a red line as well that couldn't be crossed. But then again...
The US killed the single most important official to Iranian geopolitical strategy besides Khamenei (more important than him from a strategic perspective) and Iran attacked a US base after warning the US to move troops out of the way (essentially with American permission).
The irony is that the reason Iran is reluctant to get involved, and the reason they were reluctant to attempt a bigger retaliatory move after the Soleimani assassination, is because they're winning. Sure, they could tell their allies to press harder against US forces in Syria and Iraq, but nothing makes Americans angrier than American soldiers being killed. And the thing is that (and I'm interested in @Dean's view on this) a small number of US forces holed up in bases in Syria and Iraq doesn't threaten most Iranian interests in the region. They still increasingly control most of Iraq, Assad is relatively firmly in power in Syria. It's an insult to them, perhaps, they may consider it offensive, but the Americans aren't going to end shiite control of Iraq or overthrow Assad with their current presence.
The one thing Iran wants to avoid is a major escalation that might draw a large American force in on the side of Saudi Arabia against the Houthis, against Iraqi shiites, against Hezbollah and/or against Assad, which is the only thing that might threaten the shiite crescent plan and the extremely successful arming and training of Iraqi shiite militias and the Houthis.
Well, since asked... I suppose my view on your assessment is that it depends on if one thinks Iran was actually uninvolved/unaware of the October attack.
If Iran was unaware/uninvolved, then it's not an illogical position. The conflict is an unexpected opportunity for Iran's foes to weaken themselves militarily/politically, disrupt the alignment against Iran by more regional actors, provide new opportunities, etc. etc.
But, as the laconics say, 'If.'
My personal view is that what we're seeing is a failed effort to start a broader conflagration, since being walked back and limited for damage control. An analogy might be the Russian-sponsored NovaRussia uprising in eastern Ukraine that consolidated around the 'separatist republics'- a 'success' on one hand in achieve an operational victory, but a failure for an intention for a much broader result that didn't materialize, leaving the instigating party a 'good hand' for a context they didn't actually want to be in, because they were aiming for something substantially different.
Very non-laconic thoughts below.
From my viewpoint watching various regional actors, the initial post-attack propaganda narratives, and so on, Hamas's goal wasn't isolated to a Gaza-specific event to be resolved with a hostage standoff, but to try to be the instigating event of a wider intifada with broad regional support from Iran's proxy groups. Key goals likely included a broader consolidation of Gaza support into breaking the barrier, instigating a West Bank uprising that would paralyze the 80% of the IDF there, and major external support from Iranian proxies- especially in Lebanon and Syria- to conduct major rocket attacks and limited ground incursions to surround and further paralyze the IDF. This would have only been possible in coordination with Iran, and in turn Iran would have attempted to use the regional chaos to try and expel the remaining U.S. presence from south-eastern Syria and from Iraq, removing US influence from a region where the US presence prevents consolidation of Iranian influence (via US-aligned partners in Syria, and the political impacts of both US presence and critical US funding in the Iraqi government which can and has been used to play off the Iranian-aligned actors). In an 'Iran was involved' perspective, Iran would be relying on its proxies rather than direct involvement, adhering to the principle of plausible deniability.
The 'issue' is that the Hamas attack did not instigate a wider intifada, and the Iranians were confronted that their denials wouldn't be considered plausible by actors who mattered most if the rest of their influence network actually joined in force. Hence the anti-climatic climbdown by Hezbollah from was being built up as a natural call to arms, the token-level support by groups like the Houthis in Yemen that even the Saudis have shot down without meaningful propaganda criticism, and how the Hamas strategy has resorted to increasingly blatant appeals for truce by steadily increasing the number of hostages it would turn over for relief.
The Hamas failure to spark a wider intifada, which has been a real concern in regional security circles over the last few years, can probably be attributed to a few various factors. A lack of coordination outside of the Iranian network meaning other Palestinian groups weren't ready to join in immediately, the shock value of their atrocity-propaganda having a detering rather than galvanizing effect as actual local groups distanced themselves due to the immeninet Israeli retaliation rather than join in, the effectiveness of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank to prevent anyone from mobilizing a force that would make them seem like participants., what have you. In fact, even the Gaza public support has seemed to be... well, acceptance is not the same as endorsement, but the Hamas ability to defend in Gaza has been surprisingly underwhelming, which would be characteristic of a force that thought it would be receiving a lot more support than it actually is. Gaza is not Kyiv in 2022, where the citizenry was mixing molotovs in the streets to fight the invaders. An urban area held by truly hostile local populace is a notoriously rough fight, and one that hasn't manifested in the fighting so far, but was probably expected given the parallels to the Israeli incursion into Lebananon against Hezbollah awhile ago, where Israeli ran into exceptional difficulty on the ground.
Which leads to what I think is the most relevant point- and the one that matters from the Iranian perspective- which was a misjudgement of regional views and perceptions. Plenty of people around and abroad were happy to cheer for Hamas, but no one wanted to join in fighting alongside Hamas- and as it became very quickly clear that the other people weren't joining in, the Iranian-aligned networks could either join in in the Israeli background, or back out.
By and large, they've backed out, even at the cost of regional prestige/leader-of-the-resistance standing. No one has taken more than a token involvement in the Israeli front. The more relevant activity increase has been entirely geographically/politically separate, which is the anti-US attacks in the Syria-Iraq zone. This is relevant for the Iranians- the US presence in Iraq particularly significantly limits Iran's ability to consolidate it's advantages by giving a counter-balance option to local politicians- and it serves a number of purposes in the strategic competition, but the most relevant is trying to re-establish leverage (you need to negotiate, lest we escalate- which is to say, the same position before October) rather than actively trying to overwhelm, which- to me- seemed to be the goal of the opening October efforts.
This is all based on a paradigm and a viewpoint I fully acknowledge others might not share, and that's fine. But from that paradigm comes a significant distinction as to why Iran is doing what it is doing at the level it is- whether this is a situation Iran found itself in that it doesn't need to do anything because escalation could tip the apple cart that it already enjoys, or whether this is a situation Iran found itself in because it tried to turn over the apple cart, but failed, and is now trying to present that it wasn't trying to do that (but could still yet do so if pressed, so better not press it).
To turn back to the start, to the question of if Iran is 'winning' and the analogy of the NovaRussia uprising- this is where I'd make a point that operational successes are not the same as strategic wins, and that sometimes the consequences of a partial success have different, less foreseen, implications. The Ukrainian NovaRussia uprising was a 'win' for Russia in that it successfully inserted itself into Ukrainian politics in a way that froze western integration and allowed Russia to play a key diplomatic role even as it was a de facto belligerant. But the NovaRussia efforts are also what functionally froze the NordStream pipeline project to Germany, cutting off a major economic-influence vector before it could be manifested, and thus greatly reducing influence that would have mattered much more down the line, when the early Russian strategy in Ukraine centered around pressing Germany to accept it and thus undercut a European pillar of support. Had NordStream been activated years earlier, it may well have worked, even as the years of warfare over NovaRussia empowered the Ukrainian army and national identity to resist the Russian invasion.
Iran is probably not going to have as much of a blowback, but then again no one would have predicted the Ukraine War's consequences for the Russians in the first few months of NovaRussia either. What does seem clear to me is that while Iran has likely achieved a short/medium-term disruption of Israeli-Saudi normalization due to the sacrifice of Hamas/Gaza, they do have some key elements of power being undercut as well. For one, the paradigm I reflect- the one where Iran has been deterred from maximal proxy usage- is a fundamental failure of one of the key points of proxy warfare, the 'plausible deniability.' If you wouldn't use a plausible-deniable proxy for fear of retaliation, it's no longer plausibly-deniable, and you're just returning to conventional deterrence. For another, Hamas and the Gaza Strip were most relevant to the Iranian posture as a force-in-being- the idea that Israel was surrounded on three fronts by forces that could at any time launch an uprising, and as a consequence Israel was in a weak position and needed to make concessions that Iran could take credit for leading. Except the West Bank didn't rise up, which changes expectations of what it might do going forward, and whatever happens to Gaza after this war, it's probably not going to be a serious contender for a mass popular uprising either. When the Israeli-Palestinian conflict returned, the anti-Israeli palestinians had to shoot the Palestinians to keep them from running away from the Israelis. Bar Hamas somehow remaining in power- and it seems very unlikely that will be the result of the Gaza war- whoever remains left is much, much less likely to be willing to be a quasi-Iranian proxy after seeing what the Iranian axis did for Hamas.
Is it a 'good' position to be in? Kind of. Is it a 'better' position than they had before the Hamas attack? Questionable.
But all this derives from some first-order assumptions of the nature of the conflict, which I suspect you and I diverge on.
Hope that answers the question.
Wat are your assumptions?
That Iran was aware of the Hamas intent to launch the general premise of the 7 Oct attack and provided technical and additional forms of help to assist with the planning.
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If it was going to, it already would have exploded. As it is, if they join now, it will be anti-climatic.
Some of the allegations from the regional shuttle diplomacy that went around the region in October is that they were basically deterred by direct threats to Hezbollah and Iran that if they joined in the war, they would be considered direct belligerants and to have been in on in the initial 7 Oct attacked as a direct act of war by the Iranian government, whose relations with Hezbollah are much stronger than Hamas. Further, other actors indicated that if Hezbollah got involved it would be a non-trivial risk of civil war in Lebanon, such as with the French making a considerable arms 'gift' to the governmental forces that would likely operate against Hezbollah in such a scenario.
As is, while some Iranian proxy groups are trying limited support- the Houthis have tried to lob some things from all the way down in Yemen- it's pretty marginal, and not a particularly regionally-supported affair. (The Saudis reportedly have shot down some Houthi stuff.) Hezbollah could try and get involved for its own reasons, but it'd be largely anti-climatic, and after the very visibile period of letting Hamas fight on its own, and at this point I don't think anyone really believes Hezbollah cares that much about Hamas per see.
As for US-Iran, Iran has long been trying to leverage it's various proxy political and military forces in Iraq and Syria to drive the US out. They appear to have decided now's the time to escalate, hence the counter-strikes.
I would be inclined to agree. However, the situation along the Israel-Lebanese border is now such that it would have certainly resulted in a full-fledged war by Israel against Hezbollah, at least at the scale of the 2006 war, if Israel weren't preoccupied with Gaza. Hezbollah doesn't want a full war, but they're relying on the fact that Israel wants a full war even less in order to get away with more attacks than they could in other circumstances. Israel won't tolerate this state indefinitely, and it could still escalate to a full-scale war if either side miscalculates.
I agree to a good degree, and even would argue Hezbollah is trying to calibrate the pressure precisely to distract Israel from focusing on Hamas, but states can very much downplay some casus belli factors when they don't want to engage a particular front.
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It seems like there’s a non-trivial risk that a second Lebanese civil war with Hezbollah fighting Israel directly ends with the Shiites getting ethnically cleansed from Lebanon.
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Twice in the last week, I’ve gotten company emails about security in the face of protests. The advice is not surprising: subscribe to company alerts. Report harassment to security. Do not talk to protestors or try to get past a barricade.
I have naturally seen no signs of any protests at our quiet, suburban office. Presumably the same message was broadcast to employees in, say, Boston. But that’s the only story I could find about an actual protest targeting my industry. I’m left wondering—if this response is due to caution from the higher-ups, do they perceive more of a threat? Or are they playing into a narrative where the rank and file assume there will be a threat?
This is pre-emptive risk management and generally good security governance.
Protests can spring out of the air with little warning, so they are educating staff before they arrive at work one day and come across protestors blocking the entry of their facility. It may never happen, but if it does they are minimising the risk to their staff (and also possible compensation claims for not doing everything they reasonably can to provide a safe workspace)
Large organisations often have security advisors (either internal or consulting on retainer) that serve as early warning for this kind of thing.
Edit: If you ever find yourself confronting protestors, that advice is pretty good. Don't engage or talk to them; a career protestor has likely been arrested before and has little reputation to lose, unlike yourself. They can do all sorts of dirty tricks like spit on you and then have their friends record your reaction for a nice little propaganda video to go up on Twitter/Youtube. Talking to protestors without media training and authorisation from the organisation can embarrass the company and lead to consequences for you. Basically any interaction in a situation like that would possibly be recorded, (edited in the worst possible way) and signal boosted on social media. The play book for issue motivated groups has been refined and shared since the 60's.
In the worst case, just turn around and go home. Email your boss that you couldn't make it to work due to the protest. They will be happy for you to work from home or even just take the day off. Chances are you'd find an email directing you to do this anyway if you checked your inbox.
I have some friends in defense, and often they can't access their email on personal devices. For some, quite literally the pre-pandemic policy was that nothing work-related left the building. That has changed somewhat, but expecting folks to check email before coming to the office isn't universally possible even today.
In those cases there would be some other method of communication available which would be used, such as sms to personal devices.
Defense departments in western countries are usually very good with their security risk management, so I can't see them having no way of warning staff outside of work.
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In finance during Occupy (before my time) banks apparently told workers not to wear corporate merch in public for fear people would be harassed or attacked. I don’t know if there were ever gangs of anarchists going around beating up bankers with Citigroup backpacks in 2011, but it seems funny now.
I knew some folks that worked in Big Oil, and around that time similar guidance appeared there to stop advertising corporate logos due to worries about climate activists. I don't know of any particular incidents, but the same sort of cautious guidance.
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There were not. My coworkers and I would pass by Zucotti park a lot to get lunch looking very bankery and it was all quite peaceful.
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Don’t you work in the defense industry?
While Collin and tarrant counties may not be hotspots for left wing mass protests, it’s reasonable for defense contractors to expect some level of protest at their facilities during a war, and it seems reasonable to have a company wide email about it.
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It’s likely a request from their insurance company, a request sent out in response to rising claim payouts.
Bigwigs ignore politics, but listen to insurance underwriters.
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If I want to help the ordinary Gazans caught in the middle of the airstrikes, but really didn't want to provide any military aid to Hamas, what would be a good charitable organisation to donate to?
Non-facetious answers only, please.
Here are some charities dedicated to providing medical supplies and treatment:
One of the main Gazan hospitals, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, is ran by the Episcopalian church in Jerusalem, and it looks like you can email the Episcopalians to specify that you wish to donate towards providing medical aid for Gazans rather than a general donation that might go to religious services and the like: https://j-diocese.org/wordpress/healthcare-3/
An anti-war and anti-occupation Israeli I am acquainted with recommended Medical Aid for Palestinians and said they're running a lot of relief work: https://www.map.org.uk/
Doctors Without Borders is also providing aid, is helping out the hospital mentioned above, and while they were forced to pull most of their staff out of Gaza, they are preparing to go back in: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/our-response-israel-gaza-war
Thank you very much.
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I think this is basically impossible given the priorities and practices of Hamas.
Anything of value will be traded, repurposed, or melted down for weapons. Pipes will become rockets. Food will be stockpiled in bunkers while civilians starve. Medicine will be traded to various unscrupulous parties. Hamas is in control of whatever you send to Gaza and Hamas does not share your concern for ordinary Gazans.
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I don't think there is one. As far as I can tell the situation is logistics-constrained rather than funding-constrained.
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I’d think your best bet might be Christian charitable organizations that were already operating inside of Gaza prior to the conflict. The hospital that famously had something happen to it a few weeks ago (not interested in litigating what happened or by whom) is run by the Anglicans, for example.
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IDF. The sooner and thorougher they finish eradicating Hamas, the sooner the Palestinians life will start improving.
Edit: Not a satire or sarcasm. Hamas has entagled all military and civilian spaces so that enormous civilian casualties are unavoidable, hamas has made the life of any palestinian in the gaza strip hell, hamas made the coexisting of Israel and Hamas impossible (how israel helped creating hamas is matter for another time), the best way to save palestinians is to help Hamas lose.
I second this. Until Hamas is eradicated there is nothing you can do to not indirectly aid Hamas. Even if you could e.g. give money to a charity to provide food with a 100% guarantee the money would be used on bread and cheese instead of weapons this would still free up money for Hamas to move from providing food for the civilians to weapons instead.
For an example consider a situation where Hamas spends $10 million a year on food and $10 million a year on weapons, where Gaza needs $20 million of food a year (the other $10 million of food comes from current charity). If you donate $1 million to charity so that Gaza is getting $11 million of food from charity Hamas now only needs to spend $9 million to sort of feed its population, which has just freed up an extra $1 million for them to use on weapons instead of food.
The net result of your charitable donation is that the Gazans get the same amount of food they were getting before but Hamas has more money to spend on rockets.
I understand this is a toy example with numbers pulled out of thin air, but as far as I can tell, Hamas spends nothing on feeding civilians and leaves that as a problem for others to solve. And then steals the aid when it comes in.
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Is that "because of the bombs" or "because Hamas uses hospitals as human shields for military bases"?
The lack of anesthesia would presumably be because of neither but rather the total blockade that Israel has imposed.
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Not looking for a facetious answer, thank you.
Not facetious. There are no organizations there which are independent and which can guard their resources and supplies from Hamas. So whatever you send - Hamas will have dibs on it. And there is absolutely nothing in the way Hamas has acted so far that indicates that they will put the wellbeing of the civilians that they use as human shields instead of that of their members.
There may be organizations that are honest and will help but they will be working with the displaced civilians in Egypt, not with the ones in the cross fire.
Again, as with other discussions, I think it is important to remember that Hamas is the local government. Any goal that starts with "help Palestinians, but not Hamas" is going to be very difficult, on par with a 1943 mission to "help Germans, but not Nazis" or an 1864 plan to "help Southerners, not the Confederacy". While it's possible to thread the needle to some extent, the damage being done to the Nazi and Confederate institutions and civilians with blockades and economic warfare were part of plans being used by the putative good guys, not an accidental bug that we just needed the Red Cross to workaround. Trying to break those blockades and deliver food supplies to enemy civilians has pretty obvious inherent problems associated with it.
If someone just wants to see Hamas win, OK, I guess that's a stance. But really, the "help Palestinians, but not Hamas" position is not just trivially good.
I appreciate that my question was not one with an obvious and straightforward answer, and it's a problem any time you want to assist the populace suffering under a corrupt and despotic regime (even if the populace should have known better than to vote said regime into power).
But all that being said, I feel like there were more constructive responses to the question available than "give your money to the IDF so they can have an easier time bombing Gaza into the stone age lol lol lmao". I think it should have been abundantly obvious that when I say I'm looking for an organisation to which to direct charitable donations, that precludes the armed forces (unless they're involved in peacekeeping, which the IDF obviously are not).
I was mildly tempted to respond with "donate to the IDF" myself, but for better or worse I restrained myself since I could clearly see that that wasn't in the spirit of what you sought, even if I think it's true.
I suppose it depends on how much risk you're willing to take that supplies bought with your money will be misused, barring something particularly specific like a charity that hands out tampons, I suspect that it's going to get yoinked, and in that specific example, intentionally. (Russian conscripts were given tampons and pads by their families when bandages were in short supply, but sadly a material made for soaking up blood isn't very good at staunching a bleed)
Keep in mind that even benign items can be seized and sold on the market for money, and I doubt Hamas has many qualms in that regard. Besides, the IDF isn't particularly funding constrained, at least within the range of any potential donations you might make, unless you're a billionaire I suppose.
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If you had said that to start with, I'd have had no objection.
Not /u/Lizzardspawn, but that's basically what it boils down to. Until the IDF restores something like a 21st century notion of civilized order, helping Palestinians is nearly impossible.
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Sorry for the leading question but am I the only one naive enough to ask "Why don't the israeli troops just walk into the al-Shifa hospital?"? Where I live, if the national army wanted to take over the closest hospital I am confident they could do it in like 5 minutes by walking in through the front door.
If the answer is as I suspect, "the Israeli troops can't walk into the hospital because the hospital is being defended with guns," then why doesn't that fact appear in your average news story like this one? I know this sounds like a post from a person who really cares about Israel and is always going on about media bias against that country, so I just want to add a disclaimer saying that my position on Israel is that I'm just a normal American non-Jew who doesn't really know or care very much about it.
But honestly, to go back to my opening question, what the heck is going on at the hospital? Why can't they just take it over?
It's highly likely Hamas has some significant operations based out of Al-Shifa Hospital.
If you read the history from 2008-9 and 2014 wars, every outlet from NYT to WaPo, organizations from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, have reported on Hamas militants being in the hospital, hamas leaders seen there, Hamas spokespeople talking to media there (using a fake backdrop of destroyed buildings), and Hamas using the hospital for torture and imprisonment (Amnesty).
Basically Hamas knows Israel won't bomb the hospital, which seems to be the largest hospital in that area. And thus, they base operations there with impunity.
In 2007, Hamas and Fatah fought in/near that hospital, though at much smaller scale (apparently only one wounded from each faction).
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Why wouldn't they just blow it up while they have an excuse to? Netanyahu was talking about how he's dealing with Amalek all over again, do you know what was commanded to do to them?
Could it be that they don’t want to slaughter that many innocents?
Seems unlikely.
You’ll have elaborate. While I’m sure the IDF has limited regard for Palestinians, “limited” is not zero.
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Is your model that Israel is trying to kill as many people as possible? The world would look different if that were the case. There would be a lot more dead people.
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Indeed, who doesn't?
https://rdrama.net/post/204796/in-which-the-god-of-israel
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The bar for blowing hospital and it not being a war crime is quite high. Not impossible and Hamas has made sure to make Israel life easier by doing their best to make any civilian infrastructure legitimate military target, but still it is a big deal.
The bar is extremely low, as low as 'is it being used as a military position.'
War crime law is not that legitimate military targets (military positions, command posts, munition stores) are made ineligible by the presence of protected classes (i.e. hospitals), but rather than protected classes are made eligible by the presence of legitimate military targets. There are no protected classes of military sites where someone can fire at you, but you can't fire back.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties. There are no convention requirements to take military casualties in the process of storming military objectives in order to minimize civilian casualties.
Do you have a source for this? Because if this is true, then I've seen such misinformation repeated all the time:
What you cited covers the point in conjunction with the same conventions covering valid military objectives and the revocation of protected sites if they are turned into valid military objectives.
Destroying something so that it no longer contributes to casualties on your forces is a concrete and direct military advantage. This goes back to what a valid military target is, and the conventions are very clear that protected targets are NOT protected if they are converted into valid military targets, even if there are still civilian casualties. As such, there is not requirement for there to be no civilian casualties, or for the belligerant to accept casualties in order to avoid civilian casualities. The onus is on the other belligerent to not place military objectives amongst civilians / to move civilians away from military objectives, not on the 'attacking' beligerant to not engage valid military objectives.
As the collateral damage of any civilians is not a binary disqualifier, proportionality doesn't work as a 'prohibit any attack on a valid military objective that may cause casualties' either-or binary. The porportionality is in the excess to the miltiary advantage... but since the military advantage is judged by the attacker, not the defender, and the anticipated value is often trivial to justify in close-range engagements on force-protection grounds and limiting enemy ability to continue offering mearningful resistance, proportionality would be a functionally dead letter if it was solely a binary (which- by its own working- it isn't).
Rather, proportionality comes into play when something would have no concrete or direct miltiary objective- which is usually when a target is so far away / inconsequential it means nothing for your military force survivial if the target is hit or not- or if you have alternatives that have different effects on the civilians in the course of the legitimate strike. In the face of valid military objective where concrete and direct military is already anticipated, and thus engaging is not prohibited, the proportionality distinction will only apply if you have alternatives with smaller loss of incidental loss- which would then render the overkill-casualties excessive in relations to the military advantage anticipated, because you could get the military advantage anticipated by using a smaller effect and thus the 'extra' deaths are unnecessary.
Thanks! I’ve seen a lot of misinformation around how proportionality actually means that if the ratio of civilians to enemy combatants is high enough, then it’s automatically a war crime. I can see where they come from, as the wording is rather vague, but upon reading the article further:
It’s not clear to me how much of a consensus this is outside of Australia, Canada, and NZ, but the air strikes by Israel most certainly 1) provide immediate and perceptible advantages to 2) the security of its attacking forces, at least 3) as far as the IDF is aware of, unless there’s any evidence that they have engaged in air strikes despite knowing full well that there were no Hamas military assets at the target location.
So there’s indeed a strong case to be made that regardless of civilian casualties, the IDF has not committed war crimes in this particular air strike campaign. Not that anyone already calling it “genocide” would care to change their minds, of course.
Basically every military that has fought an insurgency or an urban conflict in the last century, or otherwise had to fight a conflict where a house is a battle position, has adopted the force protection argument that some civilian casualties are acceptable. This goes from Russia to the Philippines to Sri Lanka and India to Iran and Saudi Arabia to Colombia and every NATO member.
This is usually the point where I remind an audience that war is hell, and that the laws of wars are about limiting, not preventing, civilian casualties. The conventions on how to wage war 'right' are as much about protecting every single life as a fire break is about stopping forest fires. The effects are good for the greater whole, but the part of the forest within the forest break is fully expected to burn.
This is generally correct. There will be some specific cases that people will focus on, but these can depend on having insight into the belligerent perspectives, as well as other 'the law isn't what you thought the law was' contexts. For perspectives, nothing in the conventions requires a belligerent to reveal their Intelligence- and thus sources and methods- for why they chose a target, so there are often targets that are legitimate but which may not appear to be when prioritized... and this in turn doesn't even include cases of flawed/wrong intelligence, where the a belligerent can legitimately believe there is a valid target somewhere one isn't. It doesn't become a war crime retroactively if one is duped by a denial/deception campaign. Meanwhile, some things that may seem obviously off-limits are actually covered in other areas of the convention. We had a good example in the first thread, when someone did an actuall review of the convention requirements for delivering aid to civilians- in short, while delivering aid to civilians must be allowed, it doesn't have to be allowed by any given organization to any given organization. Rather, a belligerent must allow a mutually acceptable intermediary to deliver it, so that the there can be some sort of guarantee that the aid goes to civilians and not the beseiged belligerent. As a consequence of that, for example, bombing the border crossings early on is not, from a rules-of-law perspective, 'preventing aid from getting to civilians,' which is forbidden, it is 'preventing resupply to a belligerent,' which is permitted.
Rather than quibbling on legal dynamics few know and fewer actually care about, the better argument against genocide-claimers is the point that, just by the numbers, if the Israelis are trying to genocide the Gaza Strip population... they are doing a really, really poor job at it by even the most pro-Palestinian numbers.
To take just two stores from Al Jazeera, which has a definite anti-Israeli slant in the conflict to date- on 13 November, Al Jazeera reported on the (Hamas-controlled) Gaza Public Health Ministry's claim that 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict so far. This is, of course, what the Americans know as a McBigNumber. 11,000 in a month an a half- that's a lot, right?
But nearly a week early, Al Jazeera reported on an Israeli government claim to have conducted more than 12,000 strikes... as of 1 November, nearly 2 weeks before the Hamas death claim. If we accept both claims as true- and both Hamas and Al Jazeera have an even greater incentives to greatly inflate the death claims than the Israeli government does- this is less than a 1-death-per-bomb ratio... in one of the most densly populated urbanized war zones in modern history, when Israeli ability to level entire apartment blocks is incredibly well established.
If the goal of the Israeli government and military was to genocide the Palestinian population, we would expect to see massively higher Palestinian casualty rates so far. Like, orders-of-magnitude higher. We'd also have seen considerably different targeting decisions of types of targets- with far more about irrevocably destroying essential infrastructure beyond repair or leveling apartment blocks without organizing evacuations- if they were in a 'just kill them all before anyone can stop us' dynamic.
Instead, this is where we also remind you that Hamas's militant wing has had an estimated strength in the 30,000 to 40,000 range even before the conflict. Total Palestinian death could triple or even quadruple from the first month, and it would be mathematically possible- though incredibly implausible- for nearly every single one of those casualties to not only be a Hamas member, but a part of Hamas's military component. (And it's not like the military component members are the only legitimate target under the conventions either.)
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