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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> f you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly

Most war is unjustified. Violent resistance is almost never unjustified if one lacks access to elections.

But violent resistance that targets civilians robs itself and its cause of justice until that rot is removed and regretted. It's not only morally wrong. It's strategically stupid. Terrorist tactics do not work–they radicalize the enemy and unfavorably polarize the alliance space.

Remember the videos Ukraine circulated of sharing tea with Russian POWs? Imagine if Hamas had only targeted military outposts and then shared images like that one from its bunkers under Gaza City?

A cause can be fundamentally justified but still piss away its advantages with poor strategy. At the end of the day, Hamas has acted in Iran's interests. Not the Palestinians'. (Same with Hezbollah. Same with the Houthis, though to a marginally lesser degree.)

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What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?

> What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?

Prioritize a cease fire. If you can’t target you probably can’t run much of a modern economy either. Which raises the question of what you’re actually fighting for.

Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group? Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany.

> Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group

But it doesn’t. It hardens resolve on the other side that you are actually monsters. It’s the same reason “strategic” air bombing campaigns like the London Blitz, designed to wear down a population, systematically fail.

> Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany

German Jews weren’t systematically targeting German civilians in attacks. If they had been, it would have probably backfired. (They didn’t have a military to “strike” the Nazis in any conventional sense. The Poles in Warsaw did. Guess what they, too, didn’t do.)

I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse. If I were occupied and facing extinction, I’d probably lash out. What I’m saying is I hope I’d stop and realize, not necessarily that it’s wrong and mis-targeted, but that it’s ineffective and likely counterproductive.

Aim at military targets. People can tell when you’re trying and missing versus conducting a terror campaign. And degrading the adversary’s military will save more of your lives than pissing off its civilians.

There is no evidence that if Hamas stops attacking Israel, Israel would stop attacking Hamas.

In fact the predecessor to Hamas - the PLO - did stop attacking Israel and tried hard to negotiate instead. Do you know what Israel did in response?

That's right, Israel deposed the PLO and put Hamas in power instead.

> There is no evidence that if Hamas stops attacking Israel, Israel would stop attacking Hamas

I never said to stop attacking. I said not to target civilians.

Forward looking, for Hamas to credibly swear off civilian violence, it would have to hold its leaders who ordered those attacks who remain accountable. I don’t see that. I do, however, see such an action pretty aggressively shifting attitudes in Europe and Asia, potentially also America, potentially even in Israel given they’re in an election where Netanyahu is on the back foot.

> Israel deposed the PLO and put Hamas in power instead

This was a concerted effort between Israel, America and Iran. (Hamas is pretty decently modeled as an Iranian occupying force. This analogy extends to Hezbollah.)

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