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Comment by cherry_tree | Hacker News Reader

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/just/preemptive.shtml#:~:te...

> One ethical expert (Michael Walzer) has put forward some conditions that he thinks must be satisfied to justify a pre-emptive strike:

>an obvious intention to do injury

>active preparations that turn that intention into a positive danger

>a situation in which the risk of defeat will be greatly increased if the fight is delayed

Is there evidence of these three important points to justify this attack as “preemptive”?

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> An obvious intention to do injury

https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-general-says-tehran-aims-...

"Iran general says Tehran aims to wipe Israel off the ‘global political map’", that's consistent with other leaders and the regime ideology since the very start

“We warn them [Zionists] that if a new war breaks out, it will result in their termination,”

and there are no shortage of such quotes, and even concrete plans (for example by using Hamas and Hezbollah), one attempt of which we have witnessed in 2023

https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/hamas-strategy-to-destr...

> active preparations that turn that intention into a positive danger

>a situation in which the risk of defeat will be greatly increased if the fight is delayed

We know independently that Iran has been enriching massive amounts of uranium to degrees of purity only suitable for nuclear weapons. See last announcement by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

According to Israel there have been other advancements in the nuclear program which might lead them to a nuclear bomb

Ethics are utterly irrelevant in geopolitical affairs. When nation states face existential threats they'll do whatever it takes to survive. They might invent some ethical justification after the fact for public consumption.

And I don't mean this as a particular criticism of Israel. Most other countries do the same sort of thing when necessary.

Is Israel facing an existential threat or Netanyahu?

They are the same thing.

That's only because we're throwing away the hard fought prize humanity earned at the cost of two world wars and millions of lives: the system of international laws and the UN.

Nah. The UN is a cute little debating society but it never had any meaningful capacity to enforce international treaties on it's own. Relations between sovereign states have always been fundamentally anarchic, and always will be.

The current system might be bad, but some sort of world government run by the UN would be far worse.

On the contrary, the US has become England: A state of the art cutting edge industrial society and empire turned into a smug entitlement driven immoral turd that is far beyond useless for everyone outside and most inside of it. This will inevitably trigger a global effort to disconnect and help foster the downfall. It will be expensive for everyone involved.

Also wise to remember, there are now so many quiet parts you can't say out loud that pretty much everyone who knows anything no longer participates in online conversation.

We don't make things in the West anymore so our dialog has no constructive purpose. You don't care what I think, say or who I am but those with nefarious intend are the ones paying close attention to everyone.

The destructive people are outperforming the rest of us and it can only end in one way. It has always ended the same way.

I'm not sure the UN provides a real alternative to that though.

> the US has become England: A state of the art cutting edge industrial society and empire turned into a smug entitlement driven immoral turd that is far beyond useless for everyone outside and most inside of it.

Oh don't worry, Trump and his cronies are working hard to make the US not cutting edge at anything anymore.

1. Arming and organizing proxies to attack Israel for years is much more than just intention to do injury, it is actual. Those proxies continue attack on Israel (the latest missile launch at Israel was this week). How many missiles does a country have to eat before clause 1 if fulfilled? Any country besides Israel that number would be 1. In additional Iran does not recognise Israel's right to exist as a country and explicitly calls for Israel's destruction.

2. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-857003

3. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-857003

You can only pretend Houthis are making ballistic missiles in their caves and arent directly supplied and fed targeting data by Iran to sink ships crossing red sea for so long.

Which of the three points are you suggesting “Iran supplies arms to the houthis in Yemen” satisfies in the above criteria to justify the preemptive attack in Tehran?

It seems like it doesn't justify a preemptive attack, but rather a counter attack. Israel is responding to missile attacks from Yemen by attacking the manufacturers in Iran

And those missile attacks were in response to Israel's unrelenting and brutal genocide in Gaza, so the 'preemptive' term is still nonsense.

Why is Israel in Gaza? Oh yeh, because Hamas invaded Israel on Oct 7 2023 and killed 1,200 people. To put that death toll in perspective, it would be like a Mexican Cartel invading the US and killing 41,000 people. For China it would be 174,000 people.

And why, pray tell, was Hamas the only organization wielding some semblance of power in Gaza in 2023?

because usa forced elections to palestine assembly in 2006 despite objections of israel and pa government (which was afraid that hamas that will win).

when hamas won, usa was horrified by outcome and "sponsored" PA security forces to get rid of hamas in gaza, but hamas prevailed and killed everybody who were against (throwing from buildings, dragging behind bikes) it or tortured them into submission

Because Hamas gleefully kills anyone who opposes them.

'Put it in perspective'

https://visualizingpalestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/...

Put in in perspective https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rocket_Attacks_fired_at...

Israel is in Gaza because they have funded and supported Hamas, in the hope they would use those funds to invade them, giving them pretext for a genocide.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” - Benjamin Netanyahu [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjam...

It's an unverified quote which Netanyahu denied saying. In any case, Israel never funded Hamas as many claim; they allowed aid from Qatar which is pretty different.

I'll add that Israel allowed aid from Qatar after pressure from west and headlines in mass media that hundreds of thousands are going to starve in gaza if israel won't allow money from qatar.

the underlaying issues was that after PA tried to depose Hamas in Gaza and failed, it stopped paying salaries to everybody so Gaza was broke

It is quite clear that ever since Yassar Arafat walked away from a deal with Israel during Clinton’s Presidency Israel has deliberately made Gaza and most of the West Bank a giant prison. Over the last 50 years far more Palestinians have been killed by Israel than Israelis killed by Palestinians. Palestinians have no navy, air force, tanks, or helicopters. The power differential between the two sides is vastly in Israel’s favor.

Arafat walked away because the ‘peace’ plan didn’t produce a viable state – West Bank was divided up in smaller enclaves

An Israeli they killed then own Prime Minister because he was willing to make peace

In my assessment, the assasination of Rabin is one the most successful assassinations in history, in terms of achieving the objectives of the assasin.

Yup, but consider how much death and injury that action has caused

Why?

Israel has had plenty of votes since then to elect another Prime Minister who would push for peace.

Why is this considered a success of one assassin instead of a failure of a broad democratic electorate to push for peaceful resolution?

In fact, the protests against Netenyahu and young people refusing to serve the IDF shows that Israel was trying to push for peace internally.

Then Hamas decided to attack a music festival of teenagers and young adults who want a free palestine. They spent over a year planning this operation all to kill a bunch of Israeli's who didn't exactly disagree with their cause.

If Hamas hadn't attacked, Bibi might already be in prison. You know, I'm not convinced Hamas wants peace any more than Bibi does.

multiple rounds of negotiations happened after rabin death. camp david in 2000 for example which resulted in second intifada. taba. etc. negotiations continued till 2013 or so.

even Netanyahu, which was elected after Rabin death signed follow up agreements to Oslo as result of which Israel handed over Hebron and additional areas in west bank to PA.

It wasn't failure of "broad democratic electorate to push for peaceful resolution" but violence of second intifada and non-compliance of PA with oslo accords from very beginning: http://israelvisit.co.il/BehindTheNews/WhitePaper.htm

That’s link is a highly polarised view of what happened

I’m not claiming it was a good deal. I’m claiming that since he walked away from the deal Israel has decided that it will slowly consume all of the West Bank and make living there and in Gaza a hell for Palestinians. It’s a slow genocide. Though now in Gaza it’s been sped up.

It was in fact a fantastic deal the Palestinians were fools to reject it.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-actual-proposal-...

If you look at the rest of the maps https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/maps-from-the-2000-camp...

You’ll see the one you posted was unrepresentative of what was actually on the table and what the Israeli’s would agree too wouldn’t deliver a viable state and it was divided up by Israeli roads and other security apparatus

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-the-israeli-offe...

Then 100x those figures and you find the proportion that Israel killed in Gaza versus its population, significantly women and children, for perspective.

> because Hamas invaded Israel

And why did they do that? It's like gang warfare, never ending. It started long before Hamas and we've all lost track of why so finger pointing only makes it worse.

[flagged]

> And why did they do that?

Because in 2023 Saudi Arabia, one of Iran’s most powerful enemies in the region, was expressing willingness to normalize relations with Israel. So Iran orchestrated attacks via its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, in order to torpedo the normalization process. (People forget that Hamas wasn’t the only one attacking Israel in October 2023—beginning October 8th Hezbollah began firing rockets and artillery into northern Israel, forcing over 90,000 Israelis to flee for safety.)

Israeli and american intelligence agree that Iran was not aware of the October 7th attack. Hamas did that by themselves. In hindsight we also know that Israel thoroughly infiltrated the Iranian forces, so if they had known, Israel would have known in advance as well.

And yet Israel itself calls it a preemptive attack.

Would you think the same if, for example, Russia started attacking manufacturers in the EU that supply weapons to Ukraine?

If Russia had the capability to do so without facing an extreme counter attack you better believe they'd blow the shit out of weapon manufacturers.

The problem for Russia is that such an attack would bring in all of NATO which they likely can't defend against. And either way would result in massive damage to nearly everything in Russia.

OTOH, Israel can attack Iran and as shown in the past[1], Iran will roll over and only send a weak-ass slow drone attack as a response.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Iranian_strikes_o...

I wasn't asking about capabilities. I asked the user if he believed Russia has the right to attack EU countries providing weapons to Ukraine, possibly causing civilian deaths, just as he thinks Israel had the right to do so in regards to Iran.

This question is difficult to answer because it's unclear what you mean by "right" in this context. The moral high ground? Russia doesn't have that now, nor has it ever had it throughout its history of military expansionism.

Well, by "right" I meant the same thing the user I was replying to said Israel had when attacking Iran.

There is no “right” in geo politics. Might has made right throughout history.

I think this is lost on many people. There's no authority overseeing sovereign nations, no real law or consequence to law-breaking even if there was one. There's only allies, treaties, pacts between nations, military might, and the consequences of aggression that keep the peace. Russia would be bombing all the supply lines of weapons flowing into Ukraine if the consequences weren't so high. There's certainly no law that is preventing them from doing so, only the consequences of their actions.

I doubt that “many people” are ignorant of the fact that there are no real supranational authorities that can stop wars. But it seems that some people gloss over the fact that these discussions aren’t about stopping nations from waging war, as if the UN (let alone a comment section) could do that. For some reason which goes beyond smug “might makes right” apparent-truisms, even mighty nations justify their wars. Perhaps especially to their own citizens. Which in turn means that discourse on what is “moral” might matter a tiny bit.

> Russia would be bombing all the supply lines of weapons flowing into Ukraine if the consequences weren't so high. There's certainly no law that is preventing them from doing so, only the consequences of their actions.

Remember when Russia invaded Ukraine and people in the comments threw their hands up and said the strong take what they can? No, me neither.

Reality is that any sovereign country has the right to do whatever they want.

Russia HAS attacked and sabotaged arms storage facilities in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_... is one such example.

Arms supply to the terrorist groups and states(russia) is enough to justify limited hit against Iran.

you forget that in mass media not reported that every (other) day for past couple of months there are ballistic missiles launched towards Israel

Are you referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Iran%E2%80%93Israel_con... ? Or can you provide more information about Iran attacking Israel everyday in 2025?

(Not to say that a few months means this conflict has ended, genuinely curious what the media I’ve seen has under/mis/not-reported)

Houthis attack Israel with ballistic missiles which are supplied to them by Iran for this purpose.

In past couple of months it happens almost every (other) day. Sometime a couple times a day.

The only time it was on news when Israel failed to intercept missile and it fell in vicinity of Ben Gurion airport.

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