Israeli-Hamas war

[billy rubin]

remember that hospital that had a bomb hit in the parking lot  full of civilians? the israelis initially took credit on twitter, then deleted their internet post, then posted and then deleted misinformation of their own regarding the attack. i had thought that the conclusion that it was a misfired islamic jihad missile was well supported. hereis a tik tok video disputing it.

https://www.tiktok.com/@ghadighali/video/7292363261230550274?_r=1&_t=8gv8Ngw4DGB

this is tik tok, so beware. theres lots of misinformation on tiktok.

tldr: skip to 4:30 for a specific discussion of the missile attack.

[billy rubin]

i have a question that i have been trying to answer in my own mind.

if a murderer has taken refuge in an occupied public school, at what point does it become morally acceptable to bomb the entire school in order to kill the murderer?

what is the acceptable kill ratio?

[Tank]

i have a question that i have been trying to answer in my own mind.

if a murderer has taken refuge in an occupied public school, at what point does it become morally acceptable to bomb the entire school in order to kill the murderer?

what is the acceptable kill ratio?

What if the murderer and their family have been killing your family for generations and have a stated aim of killing your whole family whatever it takes and however long it takes? What if your family had been running from murderers like him for centuries? What if the murder had just decapitated half you grand children, raped your wife, mother and grandmother and laughed in your face while they did it. What is the friends of the murder had kidnapped your cousin and paraded her naked in the street spitting on her and then dragged her of and held her hostage? At what point do you not give a fuck whoever you have to kill to kill him?

That's the state the Israelis are in now. At the end of the day this is not a rational exchange. It's a last straw situation for them. And anyway all the kids in the school are relatives of the murder so he shouldn't have hidden there in the first place.

I'm not justifying, just offering an explaination.

[billy rubin]

you make valid points. they cannot be set aside or disputed.

but in the words of the prophet, hosea 8:7

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

in my opinion, the problem that the israelis find themselves in today is one of their own making. i make no excuses for the brutality of the hamas.

but where did the hamas come from? from the prison of gaza, where israel has begrudgingly provided minimal daily calories for the population, and calculated it in that way for years? from the west bank, which israel is annexing in defiance of international law?

from the IDF bullets that kill palestinian schoolchildren sitting at their desks in gaza classrooms? from the thousands of children blown to bits or burned alive and lying in hospital beds in gaza right now, with no anaesthetics available for their surguries and skin grafts?

from the 150 women a day giving birth to their babies in gaza, with no access to medical care because the hospitals are too busy ferrying the wounded and dying?

there are no moral superiorities in this conflict. but the palestinians suffer disproportionally and they have nothing to lose.

may i emphasize this? they have nothing to lose.

egypt, syria, and jordan did their best to kill off the jews that the first world foisted upon them after the second world war. but why werent the european jewish refugees given a homeland in gloucestershire? or provence? or nebraska? or poland, where the death camps were? why was it the innocent palestinians who were forced to pay the debts of the european genocide with their homes, farms, and lives?

did anybody ask the palestinians for their opinion?

since 1948 israel his killed ten palestinians for every dead israeli. they steal palestinian farms, murder palestinian civilians, bulldoze palestinian communities. they have done this from the start, when the isaeli supreme court ruled that the palestinians should have their lands returned.

except the IDF razed the palestinian villages before they could come back.

there is enough blame in this conflict to go around the world. but the killing, the murders, and the theft of homelands is vastly more on the part of the state of israel. there are plenty of israelis who see the final solution to the palestinian problem in just those terms.

the israelis have squandered any sympathy they used to have from me.

i have a solution, but the isarelis would refuse it. and the west would not support it, because the realpolitik is that an ascendant israel is a major tool in the great game. not a player, just a tool.

there are 500,000 israeli settlers in the occupied west bank. i say take every last one of them out, and give them the entire gaza strip to live in and rebuild as they choose. the problem of the gaza strip will disappear overnight.

take all the surviving palestinians out of gaza and relocate them to the west bank for their own state. the palestinians will finally have a homeland again, and the pressure to drive the isaelis into the sea will deflate.

the israelis will lose the biblical states of judea and samaria, but 500,000 of them will be given a space currently holding 2.3 million arabs.

the palestinians will lose gaza, but most of them have no roots there and settled in gaza after the naqquba anyway. they will no longer have access to the sea, but israel has always prevented that with their gunboats anyway.

jerusalem has some 750,000 inhabitants. make it an international protectorate, with the capital of both israel and palestine in separate districts, similar to the vatican in rome.

i dont care who is mostly to blame for this mess. my morality is 100 percent focused on the only metric i see value in, which is pain and suffering. unless there is a solution to this problem, this will continue until it eventually sparks a regional, if not world war.

nothing i have suggested will come to pass, but i guarentee that israel is not going to find peace by killing more palestinians.

[Tank]

I could not have written that better myself.

What I would add is British culpability in the issue from the start. This gives an insight into the early situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

Apparently post war the Jews were offered land in Europe but didn't feel safe there so went and lived in Palestine instead based on Zionist ideals. They were also offered land in Africa which was looked at but turned down.

And I agree that the sides are way too ingrained now for anything but slaughter for at least the next 25 years, probably more.

When this round of barbarism is over the best we can hope for is that Israel hasn't resorted to throwing nukes to defend itself from Iran.

[Asmodean]

i have a question that i have been trying to answer in my own mind.

if a murderer has taken refuge in an occupied public school, at what point does it become morally acceptable to bomb the entire school in order to kill the murderer?

what is the acceptable kill ratio?

Potentially, "any."

The international law has a provision or two to that regard, as do rules of engagement in a conventional war. However, they are booth moot if one or more warring parties simply do not care. The international community has very selective and very politically-laden jurisdiction when it comes to enforcing its "laws." At its extreme, it comes down to the individual commander trying to achieve certain objectives and his associated cost-benefit analysis. Again, at its extreme, that could be the birth of genocide.

Removed from quite such extremes, how far should a nation go in ensuring safety for its own citizens? Are there circumstances in which a nation should be willing to sacrifice a number of its own citizens to safeguard the citizens of another? What would those circumstances be if there are any? What would be an acceptable ratio of own citizens dead to another nation's citizens saved? How does that nation justify such a course of action to the very people it is there to safeguard?

I can think of military alliances as an example of that very system working, but struggle to find any good scenarios where the involved parties are on opposing sides of a war.

[Tank]

How could the Palestinians win this war? They could throw down their arms and give up their hostages, pick up white flags and walk out of Gaza into Israel.Every man, woman and child. What could Israel do faced with 2 million+ people? Kill them? Let them die? It won't happen but Ghandi and Mandela did similar things. Show the tyrant to be a tyrant.

[Tom62]

I think that if the Palestinians would lay down their weapons there will be peace.
If Israel would lay down their weapons there will be genocide.

[Asmodean]

Yeah... They want their caliphate.

Or rather, it's the people who do want it who are currently in the position to dictate such matters.

Palestine had several chances to become a nation - they blew each and every one for broadly similar reasons. Well, them chicks will be a-roostin' until... Pretty much yes, until Israel turns the whole place into a sheet of glass.

Peaceful protest might have worked for them, but in the world we live in, as opposed to the world we imagine as could-and-might-have-been, there seems to be little room for progress that way.

To answer the question, yes, if people started crossing the Israeli borders without proper invitation, I suspect that huge numbers would die - to bullets, dehydration and any number of related causes. Israel would probably deploy its pretty competent and very sizable for their population military machine to bolster the border guard, and the military would do what militaries do.

At least, that's what I consider likely from the jaded hights of stark realism. Nobody is laying down their arms - they'll have to be pried from their cold, dead fingers. Probably for many generations.

[Tank]

I think that if the Palestinians would lay down their weapons there will be peace.
If Israel would lay down their weapons there will be genocide.

I think you could well be right.

[billy rubin]

well, i have read the hamas manifesto that tank posted, and frankly it seems completely justifiable to me. i dont see any mention of a regional caliphate, of the type isis and al quaeda tried to impose.

what i see is hamas rejecting the imposition of a state of israel upon ordinary residents of palestine, a last blow of the dying imperialist west upon a subject colony, performed to assuage their collective guilt over their persecution of the jews by forcing some other persecuted people to pay the price.

the hamas manifesto is strident in tone, but i cannot find fault with anything they say. israel is a state created by an illegitimate process of post war imperialism, and its victims cannot be blamed for objecting.

but none of this matters. unless there is a sea change and israel disappears or the palestinians do, nothing is going to change unless there is a world war.

i dont see any international consensus on changing the status quo unless the world sees israel as more of a threat than a useful tool. even then israel will not go quietly. nor will the palestinians.

one of these days someone will slip the palestinians enough plutonium to build a dirty bomb, and then the pin ball will take off on a completely new trajectory.

[Icarus]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btVFgqkgkzw

A long video about whether the Jews stole the Palestinian territory..........or not.
These arguments are subject to further investigation.

[The Magic Pudding..]

what i see is hamas rejecting the imposition of a state of israel upon ordinary residents of palestine, a last blow of the dying imperialist west upon a subject colony, performed to assuage their collective guilt over their persecution of the jews by forcing some other persecuted people to pay the price.

I could understand "the dying imperialist west" having sympathy for Jews, but why guilt?
Post WW2 those with the whip hand hadn't conducted the holocaust, they'd ended it.

[Asmodean]

Why..? I think the simplest explanation is that Hamas construct their message out of their ass, which necessitates it being full of exactly what you would expect.

If it reads like propaganda, it probably is.

[billy rubin]

what i see is hamas rejecting the imposition of a state of israel upon ordinary residents of palestine, a last blow of the dying imperialist west upon a subject colony, performed to assuage their collective guilt over their persecution of the jews by forcing some other persecuted people to pay the price.

I could understand "the dying imperialist west" having sympathy for Jews, but why guilt?
Post WW2 those with the whip hand hadn't conducted the holocaust, they'd ended it.

centuries of european and asian persecution by everybody led to tbe holocaust being possible.