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Notes -
Why Not Simply: Gaza, some more.
As I understand it,
It seems that one way to defuse Hamas' tactic of using a civilian populace as an all-purpose shield and moral justification is to separate Hamas-ans from Gazans, prevent the Gazan class from providing aid to Hamas, prevent the Gazan class from attacking Israel, and then avoid mistreating the Gazan class. In other words, stop-the-world filtration:
(Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now)
I don't understand why Israel isn't doing this, and prefers to do horrific things to civilians and take the international consequences on the chin. Is it just because it's reinventing concentration/filtration camps, and not even Israel can handle the international blowback of that tactic at that scale? Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical? Is the needed bandwidth of processing humans not doable within Israeli manpower constraints? Do they simply not care that much? Do Gazans prefer to live freely in the current war zone that much more than food, board, and light prison regimentation? Is "after combat operations end" too fuzzy of a line to trust? Is there no trust in being released after internment, or good conditions during?
As far as I can tell this is exactly what Israel is trying to do with the whole "We're going to flatten northern Gaze, so everyone who lives there should grab whatever they can carry and walk south" strategy.
Gaza is dense and Israel is small. I don't think there's physically enough room to sequester the Gazans in isolated reservations. That strategy worked for the Americans with the Indians, but America is huge and full of open space. The most effective tool of separation is a hundred miles of empty land, populated by nothing but rodents and without so much as a shed to hide behind.
If Israel had their own equivalent of Utah in which to banish their problematic religious nuts, they wouldn't have this problem.
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