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Putting the debate of who started what aside, does someone starting a war justify war crimes against them?
- who started what
- specific conditions to end things
- who agrees to what
All of these are distractions. The core issues are, are there war crimes being committed or not? Is the population of Gaza starving or not? If so, is Israel actively contributing or deliberately causing the situation or not?
EDIT: this is a good example of how collective punishment is being justified, to blame the population of Gaza for the actions (or inaction) of Hamas. "Well, if they just do X, then they wouldn't have to starve".
Takes two to tango. Hamas started the war. Israel has continued it way past where it made sense. (No later than after Sinwar was killed.)
Please, the roots of this conflict go back millenia. Nothing done in the last hundred years have helped it. And the Palestinian people keep getting fucked by outside powers using them for their own ends, whether it be the Arab countries invading Israel or Iran having their sock puppets invite bombs. But it's a bit silly to imagine that if we poofed Israel and turned Israel & Palestine into a democracy that we wouldn't, within like two minutes, start seeing missiles flying.
And that’s worse than the current situation how exactly?
In fact, it would be objectively better because there would be justice: no apartheid, no occupation, no tiered citizenship, and no blockade.
Uh, look at the civil wars in Sudan, Ethiopia and Burma.
> it would be objectively better because there would be justice: no apartheid, no occupation, no tiered citizenship, and no blockade
What? Why do you think changing borders on paper has any effect on how the people actually on the ground feel about and treat each other?
We're not half a decade out from our withdrawal from Afghanistan and we're back to the notion that remote powers drawing lines on a map somehow dictatates reality in the Middle East?
Second, are you seriously saying that people’s feelings have nothing to do with injustices waged upon them by force?
And just to add one thing - the theoretical worsening of a situation in response to ending injustice never justifies the maintaining of said injustice. You can argue this point all you want, but it will never be true.
"Poof[ing] Israel and turned Israel & Palestine into a democracy" literally is.
> are you seriously saying that people’s feelings have nothing to do with injustices waged upon them by force?
Nope.
> the theoretical worsening of a situation in response to ending injustice never justifies the maintaining of said injustice
I'm not talking about justification. Famine is unjustified. The war is unjustified.
I'm saying Y would be worse than X. That is true. It doesn't justify X. But it does make Y stupid.
> Hamas started the war. Israel has continued it way past where it made sense.
Are you aware that Egypt holds 16,000 to 20,000 people under administrative detention. A similar number is found in Japan. I can't find numbers for Australia, but I think it's number is also over 10,000. The highest number that I could find for Israel is 3000.
For what it's worth, a guy I'm friendly with (not a friend per se, but we've exchanged phone numbers and talk on the phone) had his son in administrative detention for several weeks. Probably more than a month. There was no "plan" to let him go, the police released him when it was deemed that the circumstances of his arrest did not merit further procedure.
Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile."
But you knew this: it just didn't suit whatever defense of Israel you were trying to make.
In any case, at least in Israel, the vast, vast majority of those under administrative detention are held for violent acts such as throwing stones, molotov cocktails, etc. There are a few cases in which the authorities have not stated reason, I know this, but that number is in the single digits. Administrative detention is not a violation of Article 9.
I'm not excusing it, I'm putting it in perspective. For what it's worth, I personally am against the whole idea of administrative detention in any country. If a government body detains someone, the reason should be clear and transparent before the arresting officer punches out of his shift.
And your equivalence of administrative detention to the taking of babies hostage and murdering them and their mothers in captivity only reinforces the notion that those who oppose the state of Israel are generally unreasonable and lack the morals which form the basis of a stable, productive Western society.
Actually, the vast majority of hostages israel holds, have done nothing at all. Just like the hostages hamas holds.
This is easily demonstrated: show the list of israeli detainees and the fair trials they had to determine if they were, in fact, guilty of the accusations israel unconvincingly levels. Otherwise, if you take the IDF's word for it that their hostage taking is righteous, intellectual honesty requires that you also take hamas' word for it when they say the same thing. Notably, israel kidnapped, raped, and tortured hostages first.
Also, israel has willfully or indiscriminately killed way more babies and mothers than hamas. Surely you view an innocent civilian life as equally valuable regardless of religion, skin color, or national origin? Surely your emotional outrage won't evaporate when the victims are Palestinian?
Your reply to my post does not seem to address anything it said (or indeed, anything of substance), but it is noted that you, 1 person out of billions, disagree very, very strongly with both international and scholarly consensus, which I merely repeated, and which are each individually more authoritative than your opinion. Thank you for your invaluable contribution and have a nice day!
I did no such thing - I just joined the thread, go lick a battery and calm down.
But seriously, this tactic of hysterically conflating replies in a long, tedious reply to create a straw-man which then becomes the topic is taught to propagandists and zealots the world over.
Source: my govt taught it to me.
And it's been over forty years since I've last licked a 9V! The sensation and taste were exactly as I remembered.
I bet most IDF personnel would think that. You really need to disclose this sorta thing before you accuse other people of lacking moral fabric or international perspective.
I would have an honest discussion on-grounds with you about this, because it seems like we're in agreement that the detention is bad. But your (quoted) conclusion is hysterically disproportionate, and does not reflect any opinion you are qualified to tender. Furthermore, the parent is right; you know exactly what I am referring to, admit it is an issue, then pretend that we're the dumb ones when we demand accountability. It is a bad-faith tactic that you are deliberately employing to deflect valid criticism of Israel. So instead of stimulating discussion I will just tell you this, expedite some shit slinging and let you react however you like.
Most of us here are willing to put things in perspective. I'll show some vulnerability, I'm a US citizen. Abu Ghraib turns my stomach, the 1953 coup and the SAVAK files make me appalled. But I also know those aren't the scariest skeletons in the closet, so do you. Neither of us probably want to talk about the lingering consequences of apartheid, or the fact that the US has knowingly supported no fewer than three genocides in the past century (Bangladesh, Rwanda, now Gaza). They're horrible, world-defining revelations. Which is why we both have to look past the phenomena, which tells us they are justifiable, to interact directly with the geist, the actual truth.
As Americans and Israelis, we are partners whether we like it or not. We have the benefit of hindsight (both countries individually!), to admit that empire politics are worthless. 21st century colonialism is pointless. It is a waste of human life, and for what? To subvert a free market economy we're both ultimately at the whims of? If Israel wants to play the long game, my wholly empathetic opinion is that they need international credibility. There is still a road for the Israeli state to persist with international - perhaps even Arab - support. The first step on that road starts by unseating a president who only demands war and resists his corruption charges. Supporting this war is literally killing Israel as a functioning nation, which sickens me, as an American. I'm still advocating for an expedient and fair trial for those prisoners because someone has to care about Israel even if Netenyahu won't.
Not really. Hamas should unilaterally return the hostages. They're not getting any negotiating points by keeping them.
But Israel prosecuting the war as it has is permanently debilitating its long-term security and economic prospects. (Its zenith was probably after its Iranian bombing campaign. Tel Aviv should have withdrawn then and fallen back to targeted bombings of Hamas leadership.)
If the economic prospects are being debilitated, it is only because people are actually believing in the narrative that Hamas has hoped they’d be manipulated into believing, through a sustained campaign of disruptive rioting and propaganda - all while trying to not talk about the decades-long rocket attacks, the murder/rape of October 7, etc. But it’s silly for the world to fall for this narrative when it is clear who the aggressors are. Only one of these parties fundamentally believes in genocide of the other party - and that’s Hamas, per their own statements about their goals.
As for the long-term security - this I am not clear on. Why do you think Israel’s security has been reduced? I think it will be very hard for Hamas to regroup quickly to the extent that it has been built up previously (especially thanks to Qatar’s help). But if left alone rather than stamped out, I think eventually they will build up strength and in 20 years we’ll have the next October 7. I think Israel’s only choice is to put a definitive end to Islamic terrorism.
If they don't destroy Hamas now, then a war will happen again in another 10 years. At which point 10s of thousands of palestinians will needlessly die, again. The only resolution to all of this, will happen when Hamas is completely disarmed and out of power.
You can criticize how Israel goes about achieving that goal. But that goal is the only one that gets to a real, permanent peace.
1) As long as Israel treats Palestinians the way they current do, there will always be another Hamas. That or completely remove Palestinians from the area, which seems to be the current goal. So no, completely destroying hamas is not the only way to get to a real permanent peace.
2) How Israel is going about things is the exact issue at hand. You can't just hand wave it away.
3) Let's say for the sake of argument destroying Hamas IS the only way to achieve long lasting peace, how much death and destruction does it justify? 10% of the population? 20%? 50%?. So again just because it's an armed conflict, doesn't mean anything goes.
Eh, Trump's peace deal isn't great for Palestinians. But it gives them peace and a path to more peace in the future, and paths where considering options for resistance other than terrorism may flourish.
> Let's say for the sake of argument destroying Hamas IS the only way to achieve long lasting peace, how much death and destruction does it justify? 10% of the population?
Yikes. Based on precedent, I don't think countries have typically put an upper bound on this figure. I think a better question might be what's the upper bound on civilian deaths that should not be required to be exceeded if Hamas has to be routed out by force.
There are occasional attempts at shooting rockets from west bank. Rocket workshop was found two week ago in Ramallah [1]. The only reason that we don't see 20,000 rockets from west bank like from gaza, it's presence of Israeli army and security services there.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932025_Palestinia...
“Paths other than terrorism” doesn’t mean non violence. It October 7th had been limited to military bases, the hostages IDF soldiers, this would be a very different conflict.
Oh, they'd absolutely be at war. But I don't think they'd have the freedom to collectively punish as they do now. There would also be a credible argument for Hamas remaining in power, possibly armed, after the peace.
The same thing happened when Hamas attacked an IDF post and captured a soldier, Gilad Shalit. There were multiple invasions by Israel, including "Cast Lead" which was described by the UN Fact Finding Mission as "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."
Black South Africans weren't de facto surrendering in a militarised conflict.
The ANC resorted to small-scale terrorism [1]. (It didn't work.) If the ANC had launched an October 7th scale attack, not only would it have derailed the international pressure that ended Apartheid, but in the likely ensuing civil war, yes, one side would have probably been forced to unconditionally surrender.
The practical options on the table are war and peace. If you're losing this badly, you take peace. Then you litigate over war crimes, et cetera. Gaza has no seat at the table because there is currently nobody to take the seat, that's what peace gives them. (I'd be shocked if Gazans, in a plebescite, rejected this deal. The only people who win by continuing this are Hamas and Likud.)
Let’s stick to the facts instead of coming up with conclusions out of thin air.
And your understanding is wrong: the ANC gained freedom for South Africans because of its decision to resort to violence. Mandela and the ANC did not make this decision lightly, but it was a decision of last resort. The same applies to other African independence movements.
> Gaza has no seat at the table because there is currently nobody to take the seat, that's what peace gives them.
They have no seat at the table because: a) they saw what a “seat” resulted in (Oslo and then limbo) and b) the response to their democratically gained “seat” was a coup by Fatah backed by the US and Israel.
This is a genuinely ambiguous question--I respect your position. What we can agree to is there were no large-scale terrorist attacks leading up to the negotations that ended Apartheid. (The Boipatong massacre almost did, and that was forty something casualties.)
> the response to their democratically gained “seat” was a coup by Fatah backed by the US and Israel
This is entirely accurate. It's also a fact that Hamas proceeded to never hold an election again. (Which isn't grounds for ignoring them. October 7th is.)
Hamas can't credibly represent Gaza. It continues to call for the destruction of Israel. It's shown a complete lack of concern for its own civilians. And it has no evidence of a popular mandate.
Gazans need a seat at the table. They can only get that through peace.
Sure. Destroying Hamas doesn't require starving children. Let food in. Keep targeting Hamas.
The only way forward is negotiation.
One, lots of ideas have been destroyed by violence across history. When a nation with an oral tradition of history is exterminated, their ideas quite literally die with them.
Two, it's not a given that Palestinians will be terrorists. Eliminating Hamas gives room for other, better ideas around resistance to rise.
What might those be? What other types of resistance hasn't already been tried and failed there?
Literally everything other than terrorism!
You can fight a resistance without killing kids at a concert. Remember the videos of Ukraine treating its POWs well? Imagine if Hamas had restricted its targets to military assets, released all non-active duty hostages, and then released videos of them being served tea and hummus while Israeli planes pounded above. How different would the narrative be?
When Gilad Shalit was taken hostage Operation Summer Rains followed. That was one soldier. You really think if Hamas took hundreds of soldiers hostage, they wouldn't go bomb Gaza?
Well they could accept that Israel is always going to exist and that the Palestinians should instead have an actual government that is focused on helping the palestinian people as opposed to launching failed attacks that will only cause 10s of thousands of palestinians to die.
If you want a good template, look at Egypt and Jordan. Countries that were previously at war with Israel and made peace and eventually became thriving allies of Israel.
The Egypt/Jordan model, where you accept whatever the current borders are, has worked out quite well for them in comparison to the groups that won't accept this.
Once that happens, well you can look at some of the stuff that was in the Trump plan, where the surrounding Arab states would help setup a coalition government and would invest significant amounts of money into rebuilding Gaza.
Nor would it stop us from boycotting Israel and calling out their genocide.
Yeah thats basically how thing will end up. Because if they dont get rid of Hamas now, they will end up in another war and end up killing 10s of thousands of more Palestinians later. Thats just what would happen.
I mean, people are saying Israel is doing a genocide now right? If thats the case, why wouldn't they just do a genicide again if another October 7th happened? Obviously thats what they would do.
> Nor would it stop us
You don't have to stop doing anything. Just realize that they have a modern military that they are going to continue to use to kill their enemy until that enemy has surrendered or been destroyed. Thats the only way this ends.
The only question is how many people have to die and how much of gaza has to be flattened in order to achieve that outcome. Boycotts aren't going to stop anything. Nor will condemnation. The only thing that would come close is serious military action, but well would you look at that, every major of enemy of Israel is now destroyed, from Syria to Hezbollah to Iran. Military action seems rather unlikely now, given how successful Israel was in obliterating every enemy it has in the area.
So, the people of palestine are left with choice. Accept peace, or watch as Israel keeps killing people until Hamas is gone for good.
> rotting in the Hague jail.
Even if this fantasy land future did come to past, trials don't bring back the dead. If Israel has to kill another 50 thousand people to get rid of Hamas (because a peace deal with rejected), well those 50k genocide victims are still dead. The world's not turning on a dime here. Nobody is coming to save palestine. Boycotts don't stop bombs.
I agree with the last part of this sentiment: boycotts and weapons-sale bans won't stop Israel.
But they will decrease its wealth and power in the long term. That should be something Tel Aviv seeks to avoid. Eliminating Hamas should not require inducing a famine.
If I may ask something about a similar event, how do you think the Rússia vs Ukraine war will end?
Thats much different from a conflict over a tiny area, where one side can quite literally bomb every single building in a matter of weeks.
As for how Ukraine vs Russia ends, well probably there will be a continued grinding down of both sides, continued increasing costs, while the borders don't change at all. And then when Russia wants to stop throwing money and lives into a metaphorical pit, there will be some sort of ceasefire/peace deal where Russia gets to keep all the land it took but the fighting stops. Ukraine isn't going to kick out Russia back to its original borders, and Russia isn't going to have some sudden breakthrough where it takes over Kiev. Its sad that Russia will get to keep its gains, but in war there are few good endings and most bad compromises.
But fortunately, Russia simply doesn't have the capability to flatten its enemy on a timeline measured in weeks, and is just stuck in a slog thats going nowhere.
If things had gone differently at the start of the war with Russia's blizkrieg having succeeded well we'd be having a different conversation now about much worse compromises that would have to be made, but fortunately that didn't end up happening.
This was has been initiated by Israel invading Palestine.
You can't compare the death of people who are willing to release 1027 terrorists to get back just one solider to the death of people who are taught from kindergarten to kill and die for Allah. [1] Nobody criticizes Britain because it killed more Nazi civilians that the Nazis killed British civilians. Back then we understood that war is between good and evil, and we didn't take the side of evil.
The bombing of Dresden has absolutely been condemned. British area bombing was contemporaneously criticised by America. It's why we flew our bombers in the day, despite that meaning more of them got shot down--so they could see what they'd hit.
I think in the next millennia, as the objective historians review the last century, they will write that the civilian towns were fire bombed in ww2 to gain military advantage and nobody cared about the innocent, just like how we talk about how Caesar becoming an emperor without getting lost in the daily politics and blindness of the day.
Edit: Added “in ww2” for clarity.
Doesn't your example suggest the opposite? You're arguing for reductivism. The reductive view on WW2 would almost certainly skip over the bombing of Dresden and even the Holodomor, because those didn't have long-term strategic effects.
Also, Caesar was never an emperor. And plenty of people love to obsess about the daily politics of the late Republic.
Regarding Ceaser, I meant emperor in the modern sense not that he held the bundle of sticks during war time. The dude practically took over a republic from within using political games and bribery, assassinations and all kinds of stuff, but the gist of it is that, he wasn’t elected democratically by popular vote or anything, he took an army and pass the Rubicon and if you didn’t vote for him you could die in mysterious ways, and some people loved him because he handed out free grains (who cares), in the end, in ww2 innocent civilians, kids, elderly were killed by millions of tons of high explosives on purpose, and my conscience is just not okay with it.
Is a questionable statement, many of the joint US|UK WWII bombings were carried out at night, in the Japanese theatre the Tokyo bombing by the US was carried out at night time as were most (IIRC) of the 71 bombings of other Japanese cities (not including Nagasaki and Hiroshima).
The atomic bombings in Japan were carried out in daylight, accompanied by photography aircraft, with radio calls to proceed based on low cloud cover - the primary objective in the bomb | not bomb on the day decision was visibility to record the effect of the new weapons.
Such as the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
You're claiming the nuking of Japan is not criticized?
Hamas releasing hostages will not end the genocide. Look at how the last ceasefire was intentionally broken by Israel.
Do you think that Israel, with the most advanced intelligence agency in the world, capable of planting bombs in pagers just in case for when they need them, did not know about the october 7 attack beforehand ??
Yes. Quite easily. We missed 9/11. And nobody can still find Al Houthi.
And finding a simple person that could be anywhere is also an incomparable situation.
You're really hanging your hat on the competence of American intelligence in the Middle East for this one?
You’re trying really hard to change reality.
You had a heavily fortified military DMZ between the massive surveillance and military state of Israel and Hamas flying in with kites, bulldozers, and motorcycles. I hope it was merely a massive failure due to arrogance and misallocation of resources, because a plausible alternative is sadly realistic and believable.
And the 9/11 terrorists used planes.
Unless there were literally zero unusual bulldozer and hang-glider citings ever made in Gaza, it shouldn't take that much imagination to see how the three thousandth one gets put to the side.
The war had to be fought hard, because at the very least it was required to distract from the absolute mess the IDF was in when it started.