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Comment by unyttigfjelltol | Hacker News Reader

The best summary I've heard for "right" and "wrong" here was an invitation to imagine a hypothetical where one set of combatants or the other laid down their arms, what would be the outcome?

If Israel did so, Hamas would rampage and slaughter the people of Israel just as they did Oct. 7.

If Hamas did so, on Oct. 6 they would have lived in peace. If they did so now, the civilians of Gaza would live in peace, and Israel probably would downgrade its activities even against the Hamas organization specifically.

This indeed is the key issue in every war, which by its very nature is a failure of both politics and of "justice" of the bewigged variety. There is no "justice" in war, only the right to self defense which Israel alone reasonably claims here. I tend to be sympathetic to international institutions like the ICC, but this demonstrates it's either corrupt or impractical or both.

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> If Hamas did so, on Oct. 6 they would have lived in peace.

Peace in the sense of no actual violence, perhaps. But, from everything I’ve read, the actual conditions imposed on Gaza by Israel prior to October 7 seem barely tolerable by those at the receiving end. As far as I can tell, the West Bank has merely been peaceful-ish.

> If they did so now, the civilians of Gaza would live in peace

There are ~2.4 million people in Gaza, total land area of 141 square miles, no usable water or electricity (does anyone actual believe that, if Israel turned the water and electricity supplies back on right now, that anything would actually work?) and nowhere near enough food. Reports suggest that over half of the housing stock has been destroyed. There wasn’t a whole lot of economic activity before the war.

What would happen if Hamas disarmed itself tomorrow? Or disappeared outright? I don’t think Gaza would magically be okay.

Those are the hard problems, and they're problems that historically came from the Palestinians refusing to accept that the Jewish state has a right to exist, and refusing to accept that Jewish people have a right to live in large numbers in Palestine.[1] It's ironic and cynical to hear the "apartheid" claim with reference to Israel, because the nation exists to combat apartheid practiced against Jews, in a region dominated by governments that are aligned to an official religion that isn't Judaism. The plight of Gazans is a tragedy, and one which the Palestinians arrived at by refusing for generations to honestly and unequivocally embrace a peaceful coexistence with the Jewish people in Palestine.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Conference_of_1946%E2...

> If Hamas did so, on Oct. 6 they would have lived in peace. If they did so now, the civilians of Gaza would live in peace, and Israel probably would downgrade its activities even against the Hamas organization specifically.

That is a fabrication that goes boldly against everything we know. If Hamas layed down their arms, the Gaza population would still live in an open-air prison, with no access to anything that Israel doesn't want them to have. It's very likely that Israeli settlers would start stealing their land like they do in the West Bank, with help from the IDF and enthusiastic support from the Israeli government.

It's telling that Netanyahu and most others in the Israeli government, and the general Israeli public, have been explicit and consistent for at least a decade: they see no future for Gaza and the West Bank different from the present. A two-state solution is unacceptable to them, and an integration of such a large Arab population into a single Israeli state would undermine the Jewish character of Israel. So, if the Palestinians put down their arms, they'll continue to live as a stateless people, without the right to leave the territory except at the whims of a country they have no say in. Basically, they'll live as prisoners, as will their children, and their children's children.

I don't think there's a reasonable way to look at this situation and come away thinking that more Gazan civilians will be alive if Hamas continues fighting.

This was not what was being discussed. The question was not about this war in particular. It was about all Gazans (or Palestinians in general) laying down all arms or other resistance to the Israeli occupation. The poster before was ridiculously claiming that Israel would end its oppression of Palestinians if they only submitted, and I was responding to that.

Even still, I do not agree at all that if Hamas stops fighting, Israel would immediately stop hostilities. I think they have proven very clearly, through words and actions, that they are seeking to break the spirit of Palestinians (or at least of Gazans), and to punish them for October 7th. If Hamas surrendered, Israel would just claim that they didn't, that it's either a ruse or that only a handful of the terrorists have surrendered and they need to continue the killing until they can confirm.

My argument doesn't depend on the premise of Israel ending hostilities if Hamas surrenders. I don't think they will. The argument is simply that Hamas's continued hostilities will increase Gazan civilian casualties, which is difficult to argue against.

It's not if Israel continues its killing campaign. At best, I could agree that Hamas surrendering would not increase casualties, but I doubt it would decrease them in any way.

I don't think that's a very defensible argument, but if you really believe that our premises are probably too far apart for it to be productive to keep talking about it. I don't think that Israeli attacks on Hamas installations are proportionate, but I don't think it's a mainstream bit of analysis that they're completely decoupled from Hamas itself.

Again, I would say, the Rule of Lord Farquaad applies.

You could look at West Bank and arrive at a conclusion that laying down arms did not end the occupation, not the colonisation. Neither the different rules for Palestininas and Israelis.

And? Ending the occupation isn't on the table, at least not by Hamas force of arms. Militarily, the conflict has been catastrophic for them. Every day they delay surrender, more civilians will die. Strictly through a military lens, they should end combat immediately.

The alternative argument seems to be that Hamas should sacrifice Gazan civilians to make a moral point. There's a scene in Shrek about that kind of logic.

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