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Comment by lambdato | Hacker News Reader

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I said as much in response to another (rightly) dead post:

Human shield tactics are basically as old as permanent settlements, because forcing your enemy past their own ethical limits has always been a tactic of occasional effectiveness. Its basically how insurgencies work against technologically and numerically superior opponents, and this has been true for millennia.

And for just as long, there have been military and political leaders describing it as cowardly or unsporting. But again, the state of the art of military tactics is a catalog of what works, not what's ethical. The practice of war itself is, by and large, unethical. If it didn't work, they wouldn't keep doing it. Speaking entirely for myself, I don't ever want to be in the mental state to say "its ok for the SWAT team to shoot through the hostages; its their fault for going to a bank that could be robbed in the first place".

Absolutely, the party that provoked the war in the first place is in the wrong for the attack that provoked it. But that doesn't give the side prosecuting the war carte blanche to respond as brutally as they please.

It's weird that you are trying to say without saying that Hamas provoked the war he's talk about. Israel has been at war with Palestine continuously since it was founded.

I think its inarguable that Hamas instigated the conflict that flared up on October 7 (I think its fair to call it a war, just to put it in the same bucket as other high-level conflicts in the region, and in contrast with the lower level conflict that's defined everyday life in Palestine/Judea since at least 1948). Whether or not that instigation was justified, and whether or not Israel was justified in its response, are more complicated questions I don't want to address here. I'm not super interested in having that latter discussion here, since it will primarily trigger an upvote/downvote cycle, without adding to the discussion about urban warfare.

I am only highlighting that deriding Hamas' current tactics as a cynical new low is pointedly ahistoric (even in the context of Palestine/Judea), and that its sort of hypocritical to only criticize the side using human shields, and not the side shooting at/through the human shields.

There's a not entirely dissimilar event in history: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Germany kept a bunch of Jews locked in the (at the time) world's biggest open-air prison, and built a wall around it, and shot everyone who came close to the wall. The Jews started smuggling weapons into the prison, and when the Germans came to collect them for murdering, they murdered a whole lot of Germans instead. No doubt if Germany hadn't been totally defeated by the Allies shortly after, if they'd won the war and gotten to write history, they would have called it an unprecedented and unprovoked terrorist attack.

but it's a wall built and patrolled by the opponent that is preventing the population from leaving the combat zone

PSYOP's are the most powerful and most used weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

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