There are Street View photos that look like they were taken from someone driving down one of the side streets so you can pretty much walk on it. You can see apartment buildings, local shops, people going about their day... It’s heart-wrenching to contrast that life with the current aerial view, with nothing but rubble and destruction.
Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.
The buildings were levelled with bulldozers for the most part after the civilians left during combat operations against the tunnel infrastructure and any remaining combatants. Not sure what the "surgical strikes" comment is about. Are you asking why weren't open spaces destroyed or attacked?
> How does bulldozing a family home have any affect on a tunnel?
The tunnel entrances and exits are tremendously hard to find. Some of them were located in private residences.
But Israel has an oil & gas industry. They have equipment that can look underneath a quiet city. If tunnel elimination were truly the goal, temporarily displacing the population while clearing operations took place should have been sufficient. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels. It just hides their entrances.
That's kind of what they did. Just in the most heavy-handed indiscriminate way imaginable. But the booby-traps are cleared, and they did use teleoperated robots to do that
There isn't any requirement at all to preserve civilian infrastructure being used to military purposes by the other side. If you are using it to hide a tunnel and booby trap it, the enemy can and in every case destroy it rather than risk their own troops.
Take a look see of what's happening to peoples houses in Ukraine.
And if the structure isn't actually being used for military purposes they just have to say "oopsie"? It makes sense for occasional houses that are being used for military purposes to be destroyed, but destroying all houses simply due to suspicion seems like too much.
Personally I haven’t. I know my office is gone. I know the hotel I used to stay in (always fun to wake up seeing a gunboat a couple of miles off shore pointing at you out the window) has gone.
My colleagues have seen these tunnels. At least ore 2023. Israel has denied them entry since then.
Collective punishment like launching rockets at civilian cities indiscriminately? Collective punishment like kidnapping civilians from music festivals?
Because I can say that both sides are deplorable and wrong? In fact, I can even say they're both deplorable and wrong in uneven amounts, but that both meet the bar of "deplorable and wrong."
You think you have to choose a side between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel? You think you need to send one of them money?
Israel is the great betrayal. In 1948 it was supposed to become a secular country based on European values not a Jewish theocracy. It is dragging us down and for what?
It seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives, like some kind of deranged Clippy. Talk about loss of perspective.
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
I will add as a comment—because I can no longer edit the post—that it’s also bonkers how much the upvotes and downvotes are fluctuating on this. I couldn’t care less about the points, but the threshold for a downvote is higher than an upvote so it does show a certain tendency, and it’s disgusting that such a large part of this community values nitpicking of words over empathy and human lives.
Not that that was in question. HN is, after all, in too large a part a reflection of the greedy US tech industry. It has shown time and again that it’s selfishly OK with human exploitation and supremely susceptible to being manipulated by the right amount of technicality while simultaneously arrogantly believing it is immune to being influenced.
Some days I’m truly ashamed of this community and find myself incapable of defending it against the mockery and contempt it receives from the rest of the internet.
> seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives
The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions [1]. That requires killing with industrial efficiency, something that made it categorically unique from the "wipe out the village" warfare that goes back to, probably, before civilisation. (Chimpanzees do it. To my knowledge, they're the only other species that annihilates versus merely fighting off enemies.)
At lower kill volumes, even in the tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands, the line between conventional warfare done conservatively, conventional warfare done brutally and a process that, if left unhindered, will reach a million-man death toll.
(Then you have the ambiguity, one which does not apply in Gaza, introduced by displacement also being included in genocide and it starts to intersect pretty much perfectly with war.)
If we want these words to keep having meaning, we have to nitpick around their use. Otherwise, overinclusivity will consume them.
Nitpick all you want, but at some point you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place, and whether it's time for the international community to step in. Those approaches aren't mutually exclusive.
> you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place
Because there are lots of wars burning all over the planet. We tried to carve an exception into international law, after WWII, about it being permissible to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state if they're doing genocide. So this is a real debate that should be had. The problem is by practically every definition, there are at least a handful of active genocides happening in multiple theaters around the world.
The abhorrence of genocide is one that needs to be refreshed with action if we're to restore the norm that it's not okay. But to do that, you have to set the new threshold.
I'm not a genocide scholar, so may be way off the mark here, but imagine a language that only has a few 100 native speakers left. There's one person who really hates them, writes in his diary about how he longs for that culture to cease, and then he murders the only remaining historian or language teacher of that group. Is that attempted genocide? A little bit?
My point isn't "yeah it is" because I don't know, but I'm very certain that I'm still closer to whatever the heart of it is, than sheer "kill volume". We already have a word for massacres and mass murder, and genocide usually comes hand in hand with those and many other crimes, but it's not those crimes.
> The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions
So if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide? Seems like a very obtuse understanding of the word, which is also defined in the wiki you linked.
> if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide?
Nobody said that. OP asked why this is being debated. That's why. It's not clear what generally constitutes a genocide in a way that is separate from warfare in general. (Gaza and Ukraine are simpler, to me, because Russia and Israel explicitly message genocidal intent in a way New Delhi, Beijing and Washington do not.)
I did not. I lamented (it was not a question) that we’re nitpicking (it’s not a debate) the definition, especially when the person in question suggested an alternative which is not defined.
I do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed. If one of those people were in front of you crying for their home and life and asked for your compassion and help in fleeing the genocide, would you turn to them and say “ackchyually, someone on Hacker News said this is merely an ethnic cleansing, you’re on your own”?
> do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed
No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
> No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
Right. So what I’m saying is let’s have some empathy and compassion for other people. Let’s focus on how horrible it is and what we can do, the same way we would hope others would do for us if we were the ones in that situation.
It's incredibly ambiguous. There are very few sets of people who agree on the list of ongoing genocides, much less historic ones. The only places where there is even a semblance of agreement is in Europe and urban America, and that's largely due to deferral to our institutions.
> There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing
I agree. That doesn't mean it's beyond discussion or debate. I think it's a genocide. I also think that term has been mangled, particularly online, to the point that it's virtually meaningless. (One of the problems with the term is it's grammatically odd. A homicide is a completed murder. Attempted murder is different. A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation. But we give the ongoing project the same grammar as, in other cases, an act.)
An alternative to levelling entire cities to the ground to find tunnels, would be to stop the expanding of the settlers, stop the apartheid within Israel, stop the blockade and starving on Gaza, and try to actually foster peace instead of constant conflict, pain and misery in order to retain power.
This is despicable, inhumane. It is generational trauma that started with the Nazis, now propagated to the poor souls around the new western colony of Israel.
I don't quite understand your argument here. In your first pin I'm struggling to find a single building that isn't leveled, or at least severely damaged. Even buildings far away from the city center in the boonies are leveled.
You can also see a lot of buildings demolished on the Egyptian side too.
In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.
Yeah, this is not what happened here. You can look up Israeli articles from the time that described that nothing was going on for weeks on end other than demolitions. Basically no fighting. You get Israeli politicians repeating beforehand that Rafah will get leveled.
They wanted to level the city, they did. That's all. There was some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah, but nothing that would justify this. And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them, yet they managed to murder more than a thousand of people.
They are saying that this is genocidal destruction. In a war sometimes civilian infrastructure is hit as collateral. But here, all infrastructure is destroyed and it's clear this wasn't done by 1 or 2 errant bombs but rather because of direct targeting. It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.
Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
> and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position. Everything gets pounded, even forests and tree lines. It’s more like Verdun than anything that happened in Gaza.
The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
Systematic destruction of urban areas is sadly what modern urban combat operations look like.
When an enemy digs in and choose to fight and die in an urban area, this is how war plays out.
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't "actually" exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
It can be (and is imho) true that both Russia and Israel have broadcasted genocidal intent with the consequences being war crimes and still not look identical
It seems like the state of Ukraine frontline cities is due to intense artillery fire and air bombingn whereas gaza cities states seem to be more of systematic bulldozing of entire areas which would erase the marks of actual bombings and make the scale harder to assess
"Russia is claiming it as theirs for the last four years and has largely rebuilt it" is not really counter-evidence to destruction during the fighting
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."
You can find lots of videos of Russia firing thermobaric weapons into populated areas - you will find none fired by Israel into Gaza. And I don't think that's because IL doesn't have them.
Red herring, my argument was not "everything IL army did was good", it was "RU army's behavior is so much worse, how can you even question that?". IL obviously was at the very least "not very concerned" about civilian population; but I don't think there's established evidence that they were actively trying to kill civilian population, just for the sake of it, with no military advantage. Whereas, e.g. "human safari" is a well documented thing in the Russian army.
I think your distinction is a valid one, Israel has some war crimes going on whereas russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime festival but you are fighting an uphill battle because trying to make distinctions in levels of evil is generally frowned upon because to many people it looks like justification. The reason is because most people can't imagine any other value to making distinctions in evil. I personally can but each time you are going to do it, you should be prepared to defend why, in fact, making those distinctions is useful while being clear that the purpose is not justification of evil acts. It's a thin line to walk on.
(i can't edit apparently): why the downvotes? Serious question I don't understand, is there anything I said above false? The parent comment is questioning whether RU cruelty in Ukraine is anything close to what IL did - and the answer is yes, it's actually much worse, especially when you factor in that it's completely unprovoked.
There is no way it’s worse. To be comparable the Russians would have to have flattened Kyiv and most other cities which is extremely far from reality. The cities being flattened are all in the frontline as there is no way to take a city by force without basically destroying every building.
> The cities being flattened are all in the frontline as there is no way to take a city by force without basically destroying every building.
It's exactly the same in Gaza! You basically justified Israel's actions here... Check the distance between Gaza City & Israel border, vs distance beetween Bakhmut & Russia's border. Tell me which one is farther away - I'll wait
Entire Gaza is frontline. It's 365 square kilometers - a lot smaller than UKR frontline. It's barely the size of Mariupol (which according to UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report [1] had 90% of high-rise buildings destroyed or heavily damaged; and 60% of private houses. But if you know anything about former communist countries - in cities like Mariupol, most people lived in high-rise buildings). Now, bear in mind that according to the discussion we have here, a lot of people seem to believe that Mariupol got off easily and the destruction it suffered doesn't even compare to destruction in Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Vuhledar etc
He also promotes transphobia. Chomsky was friends with Epstein and acquaintance of Steve Bannon. I don’t think that discredits his entire body of work, but I think we should stop promoting him when there are sources that are less problematic.
You are mixing Chomsky (the subreddit) up with Norm (the book author). Norm was friends with Chomsky but not Epstein or Bannon. I'm unaware of him having transphobic views.
Norman Finkelstein's treatment of sources is dubious at best , dishonest at worst, and he is not very good at defending his position when challenged on them
At least that was my takeaway after watching his debate with Destiny (the streamer) and Benny Morris (the historian):
I would caution against uncritical consumption of Finkelstein's work. He is a bit unhinged, and limited in what content he can analyse as he can't read Arabic or Hebrew.
A war requires at least two militaries. This is what happens when a well armed military engages a mostly unarmed civilian society unable to mount significant opposition.
There were a lot of arms used over the border on October 7th, more confiscated on video and being used on video against the IDF, and the constant stream of unguided rockets being shot at civilians year after year. Rockets are weapons.
Hamas describes its fighters as their “military wing”. They engage in military training exercises and wear uniforms (when not fighting). That’s a military.
While it may be dumb, gross, and a hate crime against their civilians: war was the exact and predicted outcome of the attacks Hamas launched. They made statements to that effect, kicking off a regional war was central to the plan on October the 7th.
This is actually codified in international law IIRC - a nation that's subject to some kind of apartheid occupation has literally unlimited rights to resist its occupiers.
According to International Humanitarian Law:
Targeting, killing, or kidnapping civilians is strictly prohibited and constitutes a war crime, regardless of the legality of the underlying cause.
Torture, hostage-taking, and executions of captured individuals are strictly forbidden under all circumstances.
All of which are actions that were done by Hamas and Gazans who invaded on Oct 7th.
A lot of which was recorded on video, by Hamas and Gazans.
While Hamas does have a right of armed struggle against the occupation, the taking of hostages and the killing of civilians are not permissible forms of resistance.
That said, it is almost impossible to imagine that the Israeli response would have been something lesser than the current genocide attempt if Hamas had just taken POWs during the October 7 attack. Bibi would have arguably been even more humiliated if Hamas had been acting with restraint, so the impulse for revenge would be even greater.
It is almost impossible to imagine Israel would even look at the direction of Gaza had they just taken the statehood offers presented to them in 1947, 2000, 2001, or 2008, instead of repeatedly choosing terrorizing civilians over gasp compromising.
"Before the October 7, 2023 attacks, the total size of Hamas’s military wing (the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades) was estimated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence agencies to be between 25,000 and 30,000 fighters, with some intelligence assessments placing the upper limit as high as 40,000.
This army was organized into five regional brigades and 24 battalions."
"Hamas's military force prior to October 7, 2023, was roughly 3 to 4.5 times larger than the United States military when measured as a percentage of their respective total populations."
Anyway, IDF as ≈170k active duty personnel and 465k reservists[1].
Literally a different order of magnitude.
Add to it the vast different of resources, access to an air force and nuclear weapons and it become even more clearer that there is no comparison possible.
(And comparing personnel count to the USA is laughable as it is vastly different military type. Both a fighter jet pilot and a foot soldier count as one personnel, but it's neither the same force projection nor the same investment of civilians working for the war machine).
You don't need to compare the military forces. You can compare the casualties on both sides or, for a different perspective, you might count the civilians killed inside their own territories (you might count the West Bank if you really want accurate numbers).
Forced displacement is also considered a war crime and, considering what is happening in Gaza and at the West Bank, it would qualify as genocide as well.
The way the IDF fought in Rafah and other areas is leading with bulldozers that can take RPGs, IEDs, mines etc. to clear way for troops behind. That's how the tunnel and other guerrilla advantages are neutralized.
So yes, the destruction is absolutely purposeful, its purpose is to take away the advantage of the tunnels and guerrilla tactics, and enable excavations for tunnel access and detection.
The sequence was something like this (AI assisted):
Early May 2024, the IDF issued extensive, phased evacuation orders. This prompted an estimated 1 million to 1.4 million civilians—many of whom had previously fled to Rafah from other parts of Gaza—to evacuate to designated zones like Al-Mawasi.
Once ground troops secured these largely emptied areas, the IDF Combat Engineering Corps moved in. Objective satellite damage assessments show a massive spike in structural destruction in Rafah beginning in the summer of 2024, directly correlating with the ground invasion.
Satellite imagery confirms that ground forces used controlled explosive demolitions and heavy earth-moving equipment, including armored D9 bulldozers, to systematically clear residential blocks, agricultural land, and infrastructure.
This mechanical destruction was particularly concentrated along the Philadelphi Corridor (the Gaza-Egypt border) and in eastern Rafah. The military objective of these block-by-block clearing operations was to uncover and destroy cross-border smuggling tunnels and to establish a widened, flattened security perimeter where structures previously stood.
In summary, while aerial bombardment occurred prior to and during the invasion, you are correct that the wholesale, block-by-block leveling of Rafah was heavily driven by engineering operations using bulldozers and controlled demolitions after the majority of the civilian population had evacuated the targeted areas.
there are videos of bulldozer in the West Bank eradicating secular olive trees from Palestinian farmland. There is no Hamas in West Bank, no tunnels, no fighters.
Wouldn’t it actually be much more efficient to just destroy all the food infrastructure and just have everyone die from hunger instead of destroying all the houses?
They just use bulldozers to flatten whatever the bombs don't. They can drive a bulldozer pretty precisely, especially when they don't care who's in front of it or under it.
Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).
Worth noting that Corrie was killed 23 years ago during a different phase of the conflict and under a previous government. (In which Netanyahu served as minister of finance.)
Interesting claim. Where did you hear that? The IDF is pretty infamous for crushing people alive with these bulldozers, and also for denying search & rescue access to find civilians buried in the wreckage (and also for just killing said SAR and hiding the bodies and lying about it*).
Interesting. Despite the images of Mosul (e.g. on the NYTimes) being presumably selected to show the areas with largest impacts, the destruction is in patches and you can see many houses still standing. In Rafah, every single house has been razed to the ground.
I did look at them and the destruction in both was horrific. I'm not saying that the conflicts are in anyway comparable, but both include fairly comprehensive destruction of civilian areas.
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel.
A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
The Israel stock market is up about 100% since October 7.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
The flip side of your statement is that more nations than before decided to recognize a Palestine state and that it seems for the first time in decades US support for Israel is waning.
Israel is military and economically strong. It’s also a small country in a difficult region that needs trade partners and international connections, probably more so in a future full of climate change.
Since October 7 Israel has signed major missile defense and military tech export deals with various European countries including just recently Greece which is also part of a special military alliance with Israel and Cyprus.
Also in general, the less reliant Israel is on foreign powers, especially the US, the better for Israel. The waning support in the US is a good thing, there are various domestic Israeli political reasons why this was bad.
To the extent that this international isolation exists and is growing it is a good thing.
I admire your optimism for the future. I cannot share it despite living in peace, stability and a region much les affected by planetary changes than others.
There are millions of humans in Israel, Jews and Arabs and others who have a great life. Israelis, including the Israeli Arabs, are generally very happy.
The neuroticism around Gaza is mostly a western phenomenon, Arabs themselves understand and respect what Israel is doing in Gaza and why.
It’s easy for non-Western people to understand that when you invade a country and rape and murder 1000+ people the response is exactly what happened.
> Arabs themselves understand and respect what Israel is doing in Gaza and why.
Any sources that aren’t just anecdotes? I’d love to see some details about “Arabs” understanding and respecting the atrocities in Gaza, because many news organizations including English available ones like Al-Jazeera don’t seem to.
I hear that myth repeated sometimes but never with any evidence. Like a masterful propagandist, "monideas" has a talent for making claims that are hard to believe but also hard to prove wrong.
If you traveled to Jerusalem and spent 5 minutes there you would see Arabs and Jews get along just fine. Gazans are living in tents surrounded by ruins but Arabs and Jews in Israel itself, at least in Jerusalem, still have warm relations.
Eh, those are short term gains. Popular opinion has shifted away from Israel since they've increased their attacks and basically no longer hide the fact they want to eradicate Palestinians wherever they may be. They can't throw antisemitism rhetoric anymore because people have caught on to their victim syndrome. What they're doing is the same thing the US has been doing for decades, creating terrorists by oppressing entire generations and it will end the same way, eventually, when a critical mass opposes their regime or until they elect someone as dumb as the US did and throws all pretenses out the window. They either succeed in their genocide or all they're doing is motivating people who will one day have an impact.
This is predicated on a theory of human psychology and sociology which is just simply wrong.
The notion of a “cycle of violence” really just applies within a given society and it only applies to inter-clan blood feuds which don’t really exist in modern societies, you ironically only really see this in Arab societies and in Africa.
The basic idea behind what you’re saying is that people are basically good and oppression or deprivation makes them do bad things. This is simply not an accurate model of human psychology.
> The basic idea behind what you’re saying is that people are basically good and oppression or deprivation makes them do bad things. This is simply not an accurate model of human psychology.
Have you heard of survival? Personal, cultural, geographic. People will do anything if you push them hard enough or deprive them of alternatives.
This is really not true, this only applies if you deprive them of basic sustenance like bread and water.
If you deprive them of the conditions for economic advancement, then they will be discontented but they still won’t do “anything” in the way you’re thinking.
I think he was talking about a political war. Now we have on HN's home page a link pointing to someone using the term holocaust against Israel/Jews, which is quite perverse if you know history.
There've been many holocausts throughout history - after the WW2 one, people started studying them more closely and came up with the more scientific term "genocide", which means the same thing. Nothing in the definition says that one couldn't be perpetuated by a group that happens to be Jewish.
Comparing Israel to the Nazis and the treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust has been a standard piece of rhetoric for many decades before October 7, it’s not new at all. October 7 was just the natural expression of such hatred, just killing as many Israelis as possible in as brutal a fashion as possible.
Basically the kind of rhetoric and hatred you’re describing is not a result of October 7, October 7 is precisely the ultimate expression of it.
We’re basically just taking about the human capacity and tendency towards evil. This is just a fact of life to be dealt with, there is no solution to it.
If there’s no nuclear weapons program then periodically bombing these nuclear sites shouldn’t be a problem. They’re just empty bases built deep underground for fun.
> The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
So did Netanyahu. His far-right policies require an eternal enemy to distract the people and blame for everything going wrong. The October 7 attack definitely didn't hurt his position in national politics.
I don't have a strong position on this but seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act.
I mean come on... Hamas were seen practising flying hang gliders around the strip and one of the most paranoid states in the world didn't think that merited some investigation?
And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
> seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act
Regardless of the facts in this specific event, you can make much the same argument about many of the major 21st century terror attacks - there were multiple warnings leading up to 9/11, and the FBI and CIA had eyes on several of the perpetrators before the attacks. They didn't "choose not to act" in so much as institutional disfunction prevented the dots from being connected or any preemptive action being taken, but from the outside it looks pretty much the same.
Bibi had the advance knowledge and let it happen because he’s fine with collateral damage even if it’s his own countrymen. A few dead Jews are nothing to him if it means More Land To King Over.
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
Well the official story IIRC is the border was more lightly manned than normal (and with more reservists than normal) because it was a national holiday.
But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
Because if that is stupidity then yes, it is very stupid
I'm confused about your opening line. First you say the terrorists won, then you continue to elaborate how the terrorists are losing. So they won but now they are losing again?
There are several factors involved as I see it - a lot of money from Qatar flowing to make sure Israel is always shown as the aggressor, anti-semmitism is still prevalent, most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East anyway, people don't understand what living 10km from people who want to kill you looks and, and war is horrible and it's always easier to side with the people who seem to be the underdog.
There's not much of a fissure in Ireland, the consensus there is pro Palestine. They see parallels between how Israel is treating the Palestinians and how the UK treated Ireland. Generally they don't view the bigger country next door trying to take over a smaller country favourably, and that's even without the mention of the word genocide which certainly doesn't help Israel's case.
I take a harsher stance: that we should expect division to be sewn among us by our adversaries, and harden ourselves accordingly through open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate (rather than flame wars, especially in popular contexts like tv and social media).
I find it strange that the antidotes to a lot of the bad stuff going on today is basic enlightement stuff: cultivating a citizenry who value evidence-based worldview, education and rule of law. Yet it feels like that is increasingly slipping from our fingers.
The "bad stuff going on today" that you call is the opposite of enlightenment - citizenry based on emotions, tribal and racial affiliations, and rule of strength. There are countries and media that actively promote such a world, since it's easy to get rich and powerful in circumstances like these.
> open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
The problem is the inexorable logic of war - fighting everyone everywhere all the time - has led to the war expanding until it collides with an enemy that is actually comparable to Israel, i.e. Iran. And that war has now expanded to include the world's supply of oil.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
It's hard to blame Iran when they literally weren't doing anything until we attacked them. You don't blame a child for punching back against the school bully - unless you're also a bully.
I don't think Iran are entirely blameless given their sponsorship of Hezbollah and participation in the Yemeni (and previously Lebanese!) civil wars. They've been maintaining a sort of sub-threshold threat in the area for a long time. Which was why, yes, it was an incredibly bad idea for US/Israeli attacks to escalate that.
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
"The sad thing" is that 100k+ humans were brutally killed and the lives of 2 million others were destroyed. The second sad thing is that Germany will never learn. Also, I'd suggest you look up the definition of the word "terrorist".
Hamas's Health Ministry was destroyed in April 2024 and the official numbers stopped increasing at that time because the people who published the numbers were dead, but we continue citing then because they are the lowest numbers that it's possible to justify and of course we want Israel to look as good as possible. If you would extrapolate that rate of killing through to the present, it's about 500,000 deaths.
You are quoting Wikipedia which quotes an article by the Guardian that the IDF had identified ~9000 Hamas/PIJ casualties by name. It is a logical fallacy to then assume the remainder are not part of Hamas/PIJ. Further, identifying adversary combatant deaths by name is an extraordinary high standard for warfare and is applied to no other conflict on earth.
Oh boy, more disinformation and "we do this better than any other military" bullshit.
First, the article cite multiple estimations by different source.
Second, there is no logical fallacy, you on the other hand are trying to frame that unidentified body (by Israel) could be majority of combatants, disregarding that nothing prove this and that lot of them are women and children.
Third, you are only quoting IDF number and no other third party, this only quoting the perpetrator to defend its body count
I'm a little confused by this one, because if you hit the "Show historical imagery" button, and go back through the prior years, I don't really see much or anything of a playground there.
Not only should we be critical of how Israel wages this war, but we should also recognize the role of Hamas. Deliberate killing of non-combatants, civilian abductions, unguided rocket and mortar fire, use of human shields, perfidy and disguise, all war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
But the West does acknowledge it, almost exclusively. Any criticism of Israel's war crimes are followed by "But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?" and "Do you condemn Hamas and the attack they conducted in Oct 7"? Mainstream media only shows Hamas actions, and only recently started highlighting Israel's war crimes due to increased souring of their reputation among audiences. Hamas actions also shouldn't be taken in isolation, the atrocities of October 7 didn't happen in a vacuum, but as a reaction to a conflict that has been happening for almost 80 years that is overwhelmingly one sided.
> But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?
I've started to think this worry about a particular nation's right to exist is really a great rhetorical trick: nobody is particularly upset the nation of east Germany ceased to exist, and you don't hear Erdogan opposing Kurdish independence with "Doesn't the Turkie have a right to exist?"
There is a basic human right of self determination, but if you think what follows is that you should get your own nation then look at how the soviet policies of providing exactly that worked out. They even created a the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east!
Pin-pointing Hamas and Oct 7 is pretty much a logical trap, because Netanyahu and Hamas had been symbiotic -- which put them in the very same ballpark. Both enjoyed their own external threats, and, through that, established strong political influence.
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
This is one those arguments that has a strong version that is wrong and a weaker version that is true but then it's up to you to assess responsibility and blame
I won't post the answer here but I'd suggest anyone to ask you favorite llm (Opus for me) the following prompt:
Assess the statement that Nethanhyu has been working to prop up Hamas or with Hamas in some sort of "my best ennemy" scheme
I am not going to start copy/pasting llm output here no.
I am just reminding everyone that assessing those kinds of claims with a good llm is a good way to fend off the craziness of some comments while learning more about the new information they just told you about
that's non-sense. Symbiotic is a horrible way to put it. You and I may not be supporters of any of them but to call a terror organization with a clear charter of destroying Israel and killing all jews symbiotic with Nethanyhu is just succumbing to a narrative someone is feeding you.
these kind of messages show us how good propaganda and brain washing is.
Netanyahu literally created them because their alternative was getting too peaceful and if Gaza was peaceful they wouldn't have a justification to keep destroying it. This is well-known info.
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
You forgot the extensive tunnel infrastructure dug under all these civilian areas. The fighting in civilian clothing. Weapon caches and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings. Booby trapping civilian structures to kill soldiers that attempt to search/enter them. Mining roads in civilian areas to inflict damage on invading forces.
None of Israel's critics is able to suggest some significantly different strategy that would allow Israel to after Hamas. So the discussion inevitably ends up (with said critics) at Hamas had a right to commit these crimes, because they are the oppressed/occupied, and Israel has no right to defend itself by going after and defeating Hamas while minimizing its casualties like any other western army would do and has done (see Mosul or many other examples).
> You forgot the extensive tunnel infrastructure dug under all these civilian areas. The fighting in civilian clothing. Weapon caches and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings. Booby trapping civilian structures to kill soldiers that attempt to search/enter them. Mining roads in civilian areas to inflict damage on invading forces.
Sounds a lot like how the colonists fought much of the revolutionary war here in America where I am from.
But that aside, how "honorably" would you fight back if your homeland were occupied and turned into an apartheid state and you were treated as a second-class citizen effectively living in an open air prison while armed settlers came in and claimed many of your neighbor's homes, possibly killing them in the process?
A new Haaretz investigstion found that on October 7 Hamas offered to release the hostages. Israel said no. That's because Israel needs the hostages to be hostages as a casus belli.
Also Russians have just bombed a Dobrobut hospital in Kyiv. One of many war crimes happening every day. We also need to be talking about that conflict as well.
The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations nor is it an ally to most of NATO countries. The gripe many of us have with Israel's actions is that we enable them directly by providing money, weapons and manpower. No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes, whereas just recently we started seeing some manner of blowback to Israel's.
But considerably less than before the war and the EU are making efforts to decouple themselves, it's just not a switch that could be turned off, certainly not in the same way that support for Israel could be or could have been in the past decades.
This war's blood is on your hands. It could have been stopped in January 2022, it could have been stopped several months later. There were other occasions, every time you torpedoed whatever efforts there were. In all cases you pursued your "geopolitical" goals, which is to dismember Russia, take its territory and resources, and do to its people things way worse than what you (yes, you) did to them in the 90-s.
As for the war crimes, "for some reason" you don't tell about the ukranian ones, which are plenty.
As you are - of course - not concerned with their homicidal nationalistic anti Russisn propaganda, which gives further "motivation" to these crimes.
It should be noted that Hamas exists because of the occupation and atrocities that Israel has been committing for decades and decades. All war is atrocious, the actions of terrorists are disgusting, BUT you cannot discuss the actions of Hamas in a vacuum and forget why they even formed in the first place and continue to carry out their actions.
It seems like a reasonable take. But when we look at any oppressed group, getting murdered at the hands of their oppressors, there often is no negotiation through peaceful means.
History shows us that the threat of violence or violence becomes a necessary point of leverage to bring about change.
American schools have washed the story of the civil rights movement, but MLK only had success because of Malcolm X.
There’s many other historical instances of this. Whether it’s the Indian Independence movement in the 1940s fighting from British rule, the 1500s-1800s of native Americans resisting our ancestors colonialization, our own American revolution, and even labor movements like the battle of Blair mountain in the 1920s.
We like to propagandize American history where non-violence was productive, but violence has always been an unfortunately necessary tool when it comes to changing oppression.
Also, who exactly "loses justification": just the individual perpetrators or their whole collective? I hope you wouldn't say that every black slave lost their right for freedom after Nat Turner's gang killed civilians? [0]
if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.
> 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.)
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
They have won. The goal is keeping Netanyahu in power and ethic cleansing.
Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) has repeatedly called for the "voluntary emigration" or forced removal of Gazan residents and urged the permanent resettlement of Israelis inside the Gaza Strip.
They don't want to completely destroy Gaza. In the aftermath, they would be held accountable for destroying Gaza, plus they'd have no guinea pigs for the surveillance and military tech. All the big Israeli surveillance firms test their products on Gaza first, it's the most surveilled place in the world.
But they also don't want it to get too big or powerful. Israel calls it "mowing the lawn"[1]. You want to have grass on the lawn, but not too much, so you periodically cut off the excess grass.
Hamas used dozens of tunnels beneath homes in Rafah to smuggle weapons across the Egyptian border. The area was demolished to prevent Hamas operatives from using those tunnels again. Civilians were evacuated beforehand.
It's sad that so much of this conversation has devolved into technicalities of whether this is a genocide.
You can't look at this, at reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, at Israel's own government officials' statements, and not, at minimum, believe that brutal war crimes were committed on a massive basis here. Whether it's "Holocaust level" or "genocide" is a red herring. It needs universal condemnation, it needs to stop, and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
It did stop. When the hostages were freed and Hamas gave up. Which they could have done at any point. Or you know, they could not have started the war too.
Israeli here. Maybe I can give some helpful context.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this - any “support” for Palestinians is seen as a very far-left idea after Oct 7. There are still many here who oppose the extent of the war - I see regular demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for peace. I will note that there seems to be fairly universal agreement that _something_ needed to be done after Oct 7. If you want to understand the Israeli perspective (doesn’t seem like most commenters do, but I’m not writing this for them), you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
But anyways, don’t take my word for anything, pay attention to our upcoming elections. We will see how big the tents are then.
Wishing for peace, for saner voices to rise, and for an end to this cycle of violence.
If we have to look at how October 7 shaped Israeli culture, we also have to look at how all of the dates leading up to October 6 shaped Palestinian culture. How many people were killed in the West Bank on October 6 - does that register, anywhere?
Can you try to free your brain from political bullshit for a moment and think which kind of a person can come up with a plan to kill civilians not in the heat of battle, but with premediation and purpose? And in which kind of society this idea could have a wide enough support to be implemented.
Someone who has no ability to accurately target because the other side destroyed it?
What should one do in war if they only have improvised rockets available, and surrendering will guarantee your extermination? You'd throw them in the general direction of the enemy, right? And the enemy knows this and will not put civilians in range of the rockets - unless they plan to use them as human shields. It is the same reason the German trenches were not full of clockmakers.
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
> Can you try to free your brain from political bullshit for a moment and think which kind of a person can come up with a plan to kill civilians not in the heat of battle, but with premediation and purpose?
But that is what settlers movement and Israel army were doing for decades?
For me (France), it's not October 7, it's the 9 previous months. From January 1st, French TV was showing about 1,000 rockets per month sent onto residential Israeli quarters. Sure beautiful pictures of the counter-missiles destroying them in flight, but I remember thinking:
"How long can Israel counter 30 rockets a day? What's the cost?"
"How is not each of them (7,000 in total) a war crime by Palestinians?"
"Sure it's not Palestinians it's Hamas, but the last time there was an election, they've elected Hamas, so what do you do?"
"Seriously, how is this not 7,000 counts of war crimes? Why is Israel not reacting? Why is Israel militiae into Gaza to catch the authors?"
Where are you getting this numbers from, I am unable to find anything close to 1000 rockets throughout 2023? In May between 1000 and 2000 shells and rockets were fired in response to the Israelian operation Shield and Arrow resulting in two deaths and ten injuries.
I support Israel, but not wholeheartedly. I understand how Nakba was a matter of survival of your people. But why is this still going on today? Why is Israel continuing to expand settlements? Can you not understand how Palestinians must feel to constantly live in fear of being pushed out of their own homes? This is what gives me heartache. Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
The position you’re describing is essentially the modern left position in Israeli politics. Again, we’ll see in the upcoming election, but not everyone here supports the current goings on in the West Bank. The “Palestinian situation” is a major question in Israeli politics, both wrt Gaza and the wb.
One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
Israel rejects the two-state solution. They seem to be aggressively pursing a one-state solution, incorporating all of former Palestine (and perhaps beyond) into Israel. Obviously this doesn't include taking in the people living there, giving them Israeli citizenship. People will be killed or expelled. All while Israel continually claims to be the victim "look at what those people trying to stop us stealing their land did to us now."
So this situation is a bit like when the Nazis invaded Poland and then said, we have to destroy Poland because if we don't, they'll kill all our Nazi soldiers.
Isn't the humane solution to move the troops back out, instead? Of course the aggressors in a war will never do so, they will only press forward.
> Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
"shortly after". Let's just forget for a moment that Israel made that happen, intentionally. What happened during that "shortly", was there a food blockade?
It was an automated system that immediately responded within 60s to rockets sent from Gaza. Shoot one rocket from Gaza, get the building destroyed within 60 seconds. Also, the first rocket is a war crime (indiscriminate attack), the second is a military target.
You can't just say "Israel bombed Gaza" and play the victim, omitting information.
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
America didn't do things like this after 9/11, we tried to build democracies in a naive way, failed, and got a lot of people killed unnecessarily. Iraq was completely unjustified and based on fabrications.
But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.
A lot of the stories that came out of Abu Ghraib sure sound like they have very strong parallels to what is happening today. At the level of "poorly trained reservists trying to do something difficult without sufficient oversight and getting frustrated and turning to torture" it sounds very similar.
And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).
Abu Ghraib was a scandal, some people got punished, probably not all of the right ones.
When it came out that Israel was systematically sodomizing detainees with nightsticks, they had protestors come out in favor of the guards. It's still ongoing, all charges have been dropped. Nobody is scandalized by it.
That's a very flat take. That ignores the fact that the doctor that saw the prisoner reported it for investigation or that the military had chose to prosecute it, also you don't mention this was one case, not "systematic"
Even ignoring the fact that protests do not imply popular support, there is no comparison as 9/11 did not include widespread sexual violence and ongoing hostage rape was still going on at the time this happened.
So even if this seemed terrible to most Israelis, it was hard to find someone who will publicly defend a rapist from rape in jail
Sure if you ignore the UN Commission of Inquiry report from March 2025 that concluded sexual and gender-based violence was used systematically against Palestinian detainees.
Except Israel calls all criticism against it biased or anti semitic. Even a bad programmer can spot another bad programmer, sharing the trait doesn't mean you're not qualified to call it out in others.
I don't know, an example, Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese spreading nazi era conspiracy theories about Jews controlling political systems.
And that's from a human rights body, and from its representative to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
The reaction of Americans to Abu Ghraib and the reaction of Israelis to the - larger scale - torture of Palestinian prisoners, is miles apart. It's also why there was always an end in sight to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet there isn't for Gaza until it has not a single Palestinian left.
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recovers and in subsequent years grows above its pre-invasion value. Far from being "destroyed", Iraq is now doing better than ever.
How many people died in Iraq? The country is completely broken. Look what's happening in the latest Iran war.
Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
That was 2023: Iraq hosted the 25th Arabian Gulf Cup, and won the tournament.
I think if you're going to claim that something bad happened to Iraq post-2023, attributing that to the 2003 US invasion is a little dubious. Iraq was also in bad shape before the US invaded! It's a mistake to assume that if any foreign power has had any level of involvement, every bad thing that subsequently happens is therefore the fault of the foreign power.
>The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
Another possibility is that viral news stories are not always a good way to get a representative picture of how life has changed for civilians on the ground.
>Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
If Israel had genocidal intent -- in the sense of attempting extermination of Palestine's civilian population -- what fraction of Palestine's civilian population would you expect to be dead by now?
Once you've got that fraction in your head, try prompting your favorite LLM with something like the following:
"Please estimate the fraction of Iraq's population which died due to the 2003 US invasion, and the fraction of Gaza's population which died due to the 2023 Israeli invasion. Please provide an estimated breakdown of deaths based on whether they were due to invader military activity, destruction of civilian infrastructure, internal conflict, or other causes."
(you won't be able to paste the reply here due to HN rules against AI-generated content)
Another interesting prompt template: "Give me a sense of how civilian deaths happened in [Iraq/Gaza] due to [US/Israeli] military activity. Tell me a few representative vignettes which show various typical ways in which this occurred."
Interesting how you think Iraqs invasion of Iran was justified but not Kuwait. Or did you forget who started the Iran/Iraq war and deleted your comment out of embarrassment?
I didn't claim that Iraq's invasion of Iran was justified.
But I notice that you don't seem upset with the idea that Iran would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Iran (including direct attacks on civilian targets, not just dual-use infrastructure!), yet you do see upset that the US would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Kuwait. That seems like the sort of double standard I was talking about.
I deleted my comment because I thought it would be fairly tedious to litigate this. I agree the US has done some dubious things, but I don't think they are a distinctively bad actor relative to other players in the region. I'm also not sure you are telling the truth, e.g. I haven't been able to find a source for your claim that the US targeted hospitals during the Gulf War.
No but the way you wrote it you seemed to be okay with US supporting Iraqs invasion of Iran but totally against it when it came to Kuwait. So your opinion and morality is not consistent. I can say that Both wars were bad and unnecessary and that Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I can also say that the current Iran regime should not be in power or even exist. But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor, even compared to their enemies, who are only their enemies because of US meddling in the region. I hope you can straighten out your moral compass at some point.
More distortions on your part. (I notice you said nothing about the hospital point.) The US supported Iraq when Iran's counterattack was going too well, to prevent Iraq from being conquered by Iran, a regime you yourself say "should not be in power".
>Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I don't think this is intrinsically bad. The US also supported Stalin during WW2. Our rapprochement with China helped lift millions out of poverty. Were those mistakes?
>But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
This is some serious mental gymnastics to blame the US for a rebellion motivated in part by anti-Americanism. By your own logic, maybe the US is actually in the wrong for not giving the Shah even more support in order to crush the rebels.
If anti-Americanism caused a rebellion that you acknowledge as destructive, why do you lend support to anti-Americanism as an ideology?
You've created a catch-22 where the US can be the bad guy even if it supports a leader that's better than the plausible alternative for the country in question. What if the USSR had turned Iran into another satellite like in Eastern Europe? Ask the Poles how they feel about life under the Soviets.
I think these questions are simply not as obvious as you're making them out to be.
>The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor
We haven't initiated a war of conquest since the late 1800s. Even being a superpower after WW2, our territory actually shrunk when we gave the Philippines their independence "for free".
How many historic great powers can you name which were so restrained when it comes to territorial conquest? Considering the great powers during WW2: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, British Empire, French Empire, Italian Empire, USSR, PRC, USA. Who among those is the angel that you would've liked to see crowned global leader?
The world has generally become a much better place while the US has been hegemonic:
Iraq was in a bad state because of the previous war where US intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure like power, industry, hospitals and such. They wanted to create a failed state. This was after supporting Saddam in the Iran war and selling him chemical weapon precursors while knowing what he would use them for.
That ended in a million dead over bi-partisan 20 years of war. Without 9/11 including massive hostage taking, rape or mass murder with torture in people homes.
The other main difference is that 9/11 ended within a few days, the hostage part of 7/10 made it an ongoing disaster for years in Israel.
The actual violent civilian caused by coalition forces are estimated to be around 15,000 in Iraq and 10,000 in Afghanistan - over a period of 20y and populations around 25x that of Gaza.
Everyone knows that Israel essentially went on a rampage of revenge, which you basically seem to agree with given your explanation for the destruction (i.e. not military necessity while protecting civilian lives).
Hamas offered the hostages to end the war within the first week or so, Israel refused, as they did many times later. They also got many warnings about the attack, even from Hamas. It was always about the destruction of Gaza, the situation is manufactured.
Native Americans overwhelmingly died from Smallpox that was accidentally brought over by Europeans. There is no credible evidence that the transmission was malicious.
In return, Native Americans accidentally gave the Europeans Syphilis. Fair trade? Probably not, although the all-time death totals aren’t as incomparable as you might think.
Yes, the 4% of the Palestinian population they've killed is definitely not a form of expression. Like somehow killing only matters if you talk about how fun it is first.
For the record that's greater than the % of Bosniaks killed in the Bosnia genocide.
4% isn’t much in the grand scheme of things and again, yes you have to be able to prove the intent. Pretty basic legal principle. It could be 85% and that wouldn’t by itself prove genocide.
Do you guys even bother being minimally informed before commenting? Like, Wikipedia is right there…
You (and the contributors to that particular article) seem to not know the difference between war crimes (which Israel has probably committed) and genocide, which is much more onerous to prove. What you should be doing is looking at how genocide is defined generally and at how genocide cases have been prosecuted historically. Only by changing the goalposts of how genocide is defined can you attempt to construe what’s happening in gaza as genocide, which is what that article (which presupposes that what is happening in gaza is genocide by its title, obliterating any notion of objectivity) does throughout.
Put simply, if you use any legally accepted definition of genocide (as a matter of the historical record) then what is happening in gaza doesn’t even come close. And of course the legally accepted definition is ultimately all that matters. That’s very different from whether laymen think it’s genocide because what’s happening hurts their feelings.
Sorry, can you point me to the part where an Israeli military or political leader has expressed the view that all or some Palestinians should be murdered because they are Palestinians?
I missed that part when I looked, and for that I apologise.
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
While I vehemently disagree with the IDFs handling and it's hard to deny the genocidal effort, let's not forget Americans reacted very similarly after 9/11. People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
> People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.
Revenge and collective punishment may be natural human reactions to a terror attack but that doesn't make them justified. Especially when those in charge anticipated the attack and deliberately exploited it.
The only requirement to join the world's leading association of genocide scholars is paying a $30 membership fee. No expertise required. This makes it trivial to manipulate the association for propaganda purposes. Its declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was approved by less than 20% of its members. The remaining 80% were never even asked or never voted on it. An acquaintance of mine has been a member since 2013 and is a real scholar with genuine expertise on the Rwandan Genocide. She was not made aware that this resolution was being proposed and learned of its adoption in the press.
They’re not all actually decreasing in population, they are increasing via mass migration, legal and illegal. That is how the elite strata of Western European societies and the Anglo sphere countries (US, Canada, Australia) are dealing with this.
In Japan, Korea, China, Hungary, etc they are indeed decreasing.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that a society where the marriage rates are so low is stable though. For some definition of stability yes, but usually we also mean healthy when we say stable.
I don't think appealing to how good a country is at breeding is a valid counter to its genocidal tendencies. That's probably the strangest argument I've ever seen.
Well we’ve already established that the use of the term genocide is nonsense, I’m arguing something different. In this case that the type of defective thinking displayed in the idea you need to be a member of some institution to apply your intellect is in part responsible for the fact every other developed society is dying, it has to do with agency and libido (the psychological sense of the term).
50k civilians dead out of a population of 2.2M. The population of Gaza has increased since the war began. That’s not a genocide insofar as the word means anything.
If it was a genocide you would expect basically 90% of the population of Gaza to be dead. Israel controls the water supply and the food into Gaza, they could just poison the food and water, dropping bombs isn’t even necessary.
I don’t know how to make it more simple than that.
"Destroying all the buildings" is already a genocide on its own. In the Genocide Convention this would fall under "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part".
“in part” this would only require 1 building to be destroyed to satisfy this definition, in fact any sort of action taken at all during war or any sort of inter ethnic conflict would satisfy this definition.
That makes this definition useless, just to be clear.
If the “in part” refers to the physical destruction of the people itself rather than the potential nexus between the act and the physical destruction of the people, then clearly this doesn’t meet the definition because Israel didn’t destroy the buildings in order to bring about the physical destruction of the Gazans. The buildings were not destroyed in some round about way to kill the Gazans.
Does this help you sleep? Rationalization is a coping mechanism.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k" and destroying everyones home. Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
Israelis generally do learn about the Nakba in school. But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII. We don’t see it in the way you describe. For us it was a matter of the survival of our people.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
> I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict.
Hang on though, isn't it Palestine who keeps accepting peace deals and then Israel keeps rejecting them and dropping a few more missiles? Do they not teach you that part? E.g. on October 7 Hamas released 3 Israeli hostages. Israel shot them dead, so Hamas didn't release any more.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck.
Calling it "bad luck" is extremely charitable. To international observers the problems with Zionism were already obvious as early as 1919:
For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [0]
If that’s the question, it truly is hopeless. Because whoever you think started it, they don’t see it that way. So there can be no shared understanding, ever. It’s just circular blame across centuries.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
The Germans thought the Jews started a war against the Germans, but now we know that's not true. There is an answer even if one side pretends it is not the answer.
This is perhaps one of the most obviously immutable conflicts that at the same time, everyone thinks there is some simple solution to. Usually thinly veiled, "it will be over when my side wins".
> But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII.
The problem is that the historical timeline doesn't match up. Zionism started way earlier, and tried to found a "Jewish homeland" in 1820 in New York, and in 1903 in Uganda, and there are literally dozens of other examples throughout history. Even if we look solely at modern-day Israel, it dates back all the way to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The first settler violence started decades before the Holocaust ever begun.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing.
How do you propose Zionists could've established an ethnically Jewish country on land already occupied by Palestinians without ethnic cleansing? Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
> Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
Jews have been doing that for hundreds of years. By 1922 when the British did a census of Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Only after the Arab revolt the British started severely restricting Jewish immigration, including shutting the doors for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
There was enough room in Palestine for everyone. It had a lot of empty space. It still has a lot of empty space. You can go on Google satellite and look around how much empty space there is in both Israel and the West Bank (more than half empty).
Most of Israel’s major population centers were built on empty land that Jews paid for and bought legally - and many of its biggest cities were founded in the 19th century, long before the Balfour declaration.
It was never about space. It was about Arab hatred of the Idea of a Jewish presence and country in Israel, even alongside an Arab one.
How can you simultaneously decide you do not need to care about the lives of a group of people on the basis of a difference of ethnicity as you prioritize the formation of an ethnic state, and simultaneously refuse the premise that the formation of that state is to blame for ethnic strife? Your first and last paragraphs cannot be reconciled.
I do wonder, isn’t there a sense the Palestinians face the survival of their people today?
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
An ethnostate generally is a bad, illiberal idea, but concerning Israel, the ideas that are good in terms of ideology would have been, and possibly still would be, worse in practice.
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
What is modern are states like we have now. Passports didn't exist before WW1 for example. The idea that people can't freely move across land and imaginary lines we call borders is a modern idea.
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
> Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
At this stage I just feel nihilism/defeatism towards the Middle East. In 500 years they’ll still be killing each other with all sides genuinely believing in their righteousness and that it’s all the other sides fault
I’m a bit more optimistic about wars where there isn’t a strong religious aspect on both sides. Can still be bloody (WW1/2) but doesn’t have the same dynamics that make me so pessimistic about the Middle East
> I just feel nihilism/defeatism towards the Middle East. In 500 years they’ll still be killing each other with all sides genuinely believing in their righteousness
Phrasing it as something that happens over there is disingenuous when it resource extraction and foreign interference that directly contributed to political unrest and radicalization and war. It is the CIA that poured literal millions in funding extremists groups. It is western troops and bombs and that landed on their soil again and again.
It's not something that simply happens over there, war is not some unforgivable trait related to tanned foreign people who believe in islam. Our governments have their hand in this cookie jar.
The middle east is an outdated term referring to a conflict zone that the West itself created.
We don't have to bring peace to the region, but for god's sake can we stop funding the eviler side in every conflict? The USA spends more money blowing up schools of brown people than it does on keeping its own schools running.
I have been watching the atrocities that Israel have been committing since 1987 and there is simply zero argument any supporter of the regime can make to change my mind that they are evil, by every definition of the word.
There is no justification for their actions. There is no justification for the greater Israel project they are pushing. There is no justification for them to be taking a leadership role in the global security technology industry. The whole thing is just absolutely Fkd and I find any person trying to contort the argument in a way to justify this shit to be evil themselves.
The fact that this comment is being upvoted as much as down shows me that evil exists here too.
Have you considered that it's bad to kill Jews and that Jews deserve a homeland? Israel is building a great project there - a Jewish homeland - while Arabs are trying to destroy it.
Never mind that it's also a Palestinian homeland and Muslim homeland. Those ones don't count because uh, we said so.
It is absolutely fascinating to see how people are justifying a genocide right before your eyes in this comment thread.
From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.
It's no secret that people get blinded by their own belief and faith. They forget how to see, how to smell, how to taste, and how to hear. They get trapped in a virtual world inside their own minds -- a gigantic Matrix, but without sophisticated machinery.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
I don't think its just religious faith and belief, but also like how much people want to believe that the society they are part of, and that provides for their every day life, is a moral, just, and necessary one. And how much that puts on the blinders to questioning things. Israel is simply labeled a "like minded country".. at this point sounds a lot like "we have certain things in common, Jeffery" to me..
This. It's just so much more compelling to follow these discussions as they happen, compared to reading a historical correspondence or something. Of course I'd much prefer if there weren't genocides taking place at all.
It's sad that most world leaders do nothing to combat such genocide. There are so few sanctions against the state, or specific people, of Israel. Foreign forums are very much still open for business to them.
Send all collaborators to the international criminal court. (In the US, especially congress critters and members of the executive branch.)
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
> Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
Who's this "we" who dealt with the SA apartheid state?
The international pressure on SA did absolutely nothing to change their mind (I'm old enough to have seen PW Botha's Rubicon speech live on TV). The NP (political party in charge) was slowly and carefully convinced to push out the hardliners.
The people left, like FW De Clerk, actually did the dismantling - unbanned the ANC, released Mandfela from prison, switched to allowing black voters, etc.
The rest of the world's pressure had absolutely no effect on the leadership. Change only came when leadership started changing.
Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).
Epstein is thought to have been working for Mossad. If that's true, they probably have copies of all the video tapes (which we know were made) of all the stuff rich people did on Epstein island. This theory would single-handedly explain why almost everyone in the Epstein files supports Israel so strongly.
Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell in particular) are widely believed to have operated as a massive Mossad blackmail operation, collecting (and creating) blackmail material against western politicians and influential individuals to ensure their support for Israel.
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
and it seems pretty likely that's exactly what was happening.
The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say
Didn't he have ties to basically all powerful people? Is there something special about his Israel ties that are different to his Bill Gates ties?
I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:
Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.
Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed. This is why Hamas changed policies to only give up hostages through 3rd parties. They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored. [1]
So for starters, the US could have pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas to return the hostages.
As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times). The US could have at a minimum threaten to withhold aide. In fact, there are laws on the books that a country such as Israel committing war crimes is ineligible for aide.
Finally, the UN should have deployed peace keepers to gaza specifically to stop the genocide.
Actions could have been taken, but they weren't because our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money as to turn a complete blind eye to it's misdeeds.
Hamas was willing to return hostages if israel freed all thousands of Palestinians prisoners, including those captured in Israel while committing the Oct 7 massacre.
And that is exactly what sinwar wanted to achieve in every one of his wars, just like when in 2014 Israel traded 1 captured Israeli soldier for 1000 Palestinians prisoners.
So basically Hamas wanted israel to surrender, accept Hamas terms, and ignore Oct 7.
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
That would result in the USA going to war against the UN. There is a reason the UN only takes action when the security council agrees. Countries on the security council can plausibly use their military might to prevent any UN action, so to prevent the senseless deaths of peacekeepers, they are given a verbal veto instead.
Make it make sense. The question is what should have happened. You say I answered what should have happened. But you also say "that's not how the answer was phrased".
How is my "should have" happened not a direct answer to the question?
This is where you notice that the world is more complicated than social media posts.
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
Then you notice world energy markets are going to be effected by a massive conflict etc.
If the UN went into Gaza, got attacked by Iran, then had to respond, next minute they're attacking a close Russian ally, and maybe even China might have to get involved in that.
What would've been good is if October 7 didn't happen, and that goes for both sides.
Iran would WELCOME UN peace keepers in gaza, are you kidding? Hell, I think even Hamas would welcome their presence. UN peace keepers would mean the likes of UNRA could operate once again in Gaza to deliver aid. It would also mean that Israel would have to stop it's aggression.
> Iran is helping Russia
lol, no, other way around. Though the Russia hasn't really been involved with Iran since Ukraine started. It's actually China that's the biggest Iranian trade partner.
The only party that'd be upset over UN peace keepers in Gaza is Israel.
I don't think what you're saying is actually right, if peacekeepers came in, it would (likely) mean a freezing of the current borders / situation, and isn't that what most people say justified October 7, "the theft of land"?
> Lie. It was a deal to get complete immunity for a massacre. Also, 'Civilian' per Hamas is anyone over 60. 'Let Hamas murder and keep nearly all hostages' was not in Israel's playbook.
You are making stuff up. Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card. And the fact still remains that they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
> Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the agreement and change the terms. That was all public. It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
> Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
Two wrongs don't make a right and yes, it's relevant when the IDF explodes clearly marked aid vehicles rendering aid. There's no reason to do that.
> Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
Does that really matter? The question wasn't "how effective will this be" it's "What world leaders should have done". That's what world leaders should have done.
> I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
These are weaker lobbies because of US laws. The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens (in behest of Israel). No other nation has that sort of organizations in the US. The closet you can find is things like the weirdo Shen Yun cult.
This allowed them to spend $60M in a democrat primary. You won't find that sort of direct spending from Qatar or the Saudis (barring the clear bribe in the Jet. They aren't exactly giving away jets to every primary run).
>Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card
'Israel to withdraw and grant all other Hamas demands' is a 'get out free' card.
> they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
These hostages _escaped_ and were shot in error. Not 'tried to return'. Note that there was a week's ceasefire a month earlier and Hamas could have returned everyone then if they cared to.
>Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the terms.
You mean all of 'Hamas's terms'. Right. The Israeli government had very different terms as the final deal (very different from what Hamas demanded) shows. The Israeli gov insisted on controlling the Egyptian border, Gaza demilitarization, etc.
>It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
Of course. They wanted the hostages out ASAP, and could only pressure the Israeli government (obviously Hamas wouldn't care for the families).
>Two wrongs don't make a right
Right, but there's such a thing as hypocrisy. One could make a 'genocidal' case against the country who started a war by bombing a schoolhouse and spoke of 'destroying an entire civilization' (it would still be wrong though). But they're a little too strong, and it's easier to pick on Israel.
>That's what world leaders should have done.
Most world leaders want to be reelected (or not be overthrown if they're dictators). Sending out troops to die in a foreign land for an arguably hopeless cause is not very helpful to that end. They're likely aware of the history of military involvement in the Middle East.
>The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens
Qatar etc. gets around it by donating billions to US universities or using organizations like ISNA. Everyone seems to have found a way.
Isn't it interesting how Israel always seems to do bad things in error. Have they ever improved their processes to stop doing things in error? Nope. In fact it seems they just continue doing more and more very bad things in error.
Remember they know exactly who everyone is and where everyone is at all times. Gaza is the most thoroughly surveilled place on earth.
What a bizarre claim and outright lie. They kept them locked up and starving. They could’ve just dropped them off near the border with Israel or Egypt, or handed them over to the Red Cross (which wasn’t even allowed to visit and check on the hostages).
Essentially your point is that Hamas protected the hostages from the IDF by not returning them and keeping them underground in chains in near starvation conditions.
This is abject insanity and it’s a good representation of what is going on in the minds of most of humanity.
Are they wrong? On October 7, Hamas released three hostages. Israel shot and killed the hostages, so Hamas said they won't release any more hostages without some kind of security deal. That sounds a lot like protecting them to me.
These are the types of conflicts over basic values and senses of right and wrong for which distinct countries with borders and militaries exist. Basically I don’t think discussions like this are fruitful. Historically these types of cross cultural exchanges were very rare, now they’re very common because of the internet.
You provided a list of reasons why you feel like teenagers at a music festival should be murdered, right?
Like my personal sentiment is, war is senseless, and both sides are wrong in some way or another. But yeah, I don't think children should be murdered period, so I'm not going to try and give a list of reasons why it's OK, because there isn't one.
Anyone committing war crimes should be punished for it, period.
My original question was simply, what should have been done differently "by the world leaders"?
How many teenagers were killed by Hamas? And are there independent sources that verify this?
Also, is Oct 7 enough justification to shoot 335 bullets at 6 year old Hind Rajab?
Your questions reek of bias by trying to centre everything to Oct 7, as though history began there. If you really cared about children, you'd have referenced the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel before Oct 7.
If you had to guess, what do you think they might do? I feel like questions like this are in bad faith. Think about it for a minute, and try to come up with some things that they might do.
1) Ultimately, money means more to foreign nations than what happens with internal affairs of their trading partners
2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.
Do not forget that world leaders are heads of sovereign states that are in charge of their self defense. Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies, need to make public statements that are not hypocritical about what they would do for self defense. This is why both U.S. administrations support Israel's actions
> Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies
Sure, but are we going to ignore about the US having to rely on its "helpless" allies to provide staging points and cannon fodder for its illegal imperialistic wars? How much of a superpower would it be without its overseas bases?
Ah yeah, one side starved and bombarded civilians for years, cut off their water and food. But only the side that unleashed a day of savage terrorism is the "barbaric" one.
Funny how plenty of people still think if someone defends the barbarism of Hamas (which I'm not doing), this person should be lynched, but if another person defends the barbarism of the Netanyahu regime, it's fine, because (insert justifications here)... What the fuck's the difference?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, don't you think? That "day of savage terrorism" flowed the other way every single day both before and after 7/10/2023.
You're wrong on so many counts here but it seems obvious you're not in a place to listen to reason. Your confirmation bias has to be very strong to think you know better that the majority of neutral genocide experts.
cities do not get systematically flattened with bulldozers in urban warfare, you only completely wipe out cities when you don't want any the civilians to come back.
You just described all cities in Israel, only they've been hyper-militarized since Nakba, the ethnic cleansing on Palestine in 1948. Israel has mandatory conscription and most of its inhabitants serve or have served in the IDF.
I was not aware that every city in Israel has an extensive military tunnel network. Is that the case?
If Hamas were to take one of those tunnel cities and Israel were doing guerrilla warfare from them I wouldn't blame Hamas for bulldozing.
Israel does have mandatory conscription. They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian. While in the military they're all fair targets, and if they're not serving, and at a music festival, they're not.
Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
> They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian.
When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian". When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
>Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
And Hamas is permitted, as per the rules of war, to target that military infrastructure. If Israel has co-located it with civilian buildings, and attacks miss their targets, then too-bad for Israel.
>When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian".
This is very arguable for the West Bank settlers, but the Israeli civilians that were targeted by October 7 are not settlers and are in very solid Israeli land from a conflict 80 years prior. Arguing that all civilians in Israel proper are valid targets makes you no better than Smotrich and Ben-gvir, and you are essentially advocating for the genocide of Israelis.
Which is your right to do, I guess, but that's certainly not going to convince the (nuclear armed, remember) Israelis to moderate and compromise, or actually bring about justice for Palestinians.
> When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
Military uniforms are for the protection of civilians. If you forgo them, then your civilians will receive more harm. Israel is responsible for their actions and many war crimes, but Hamas is responsible for theirs.
Zionists are not civilians, they're literally living on stolen land. It doesn't matter that they've been stealing it for 80 years, it's not their land and the relatives of the people they murdered have every right to defend themselves and get their land back, by any means necessary.
If that's the way you want the conflict to be sorted, which is a genocide competition, then Israel will win that competition. I assume you don't want that?
"You're on stolen land and you've done it this time with the genocide, Israel, now you have to dissolve yourself and migrate back to Poland, Brooklyn and Iraq" is not a realistic ultimatum to deliver to a nuclear armed state established precisely because it's citizens experienced centuries of persecution living as scattered minorities.
Israel under Netanyahu has done plenty to criticise but I would actually like to see an Israel/Palestine deal not the West following both sides into radicalisation.
Ethnic cleansing, then. But this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - very typical of Israel supporters: they debate you on the letter instead of acknowledging that what we see here is horrendous.
Then they suggest that this is justified because Israel is a jewish ethnostate.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers or data, but that's just false. At least 60,0000 innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza, and Israel is to blame for this.
Hamas starting it is besides the point. We are capable of holding two different ideas in our heads: that what Hamas did to kick this off was reprehensible, and that what Israel has done since then has been horrifying.
I would personally argue that what Israel has done is far worse than what Hamas did, but it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with that. Israel has gone far far far beyond your notion of "fighting back".
> should work to destroy Hamas who are responsible for turning Gaza into such a hellhole.
Israel seems to be doing a good job of that on their own. And had been even prior to the current conflict.
So all Jews who had to leave their lands, from Morocco to Pakistan, left of their own free will and emigrated to Israel? None were driven out? Are you saying they can return to their former homes then?
If Hamas supporters argue that what they did on Oct 07 is payback for "Naqba" (or whatever historical injustice dujour they fancy), then the question becomes: why can't Israel retaliate?
What about the Jews who lived in Saudi Arabia before Mohammed came along? What about the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza (the three biggest tribes)?
Such weak whataboutism as well. I know so many pro-Palestine people personally and people I follow online that also speak out about Sudan, Iran, other ME countries.
Heck, I know so many Muslims critical of Muslim majority nations.
That's absurd. History didn't start on October 7th. All of this is downstream from Nakba and the Balfour Declaration. Zionism was by its very definition genocidal.
This result is exactly what the anti-Israel coalition wanted. They bet Bibi would go nuts and burn up the remaining global goodwill that Israel had, leaving them isolated.
It doesn't seem to have that many negative consequences for Israel though, and Oct 7 gave them enough justification for what they're doing in Gaza that they can get away with it internationally, and it has likely also limited the backlash they're getting for the escalating settlements in the West Bank.
The Zionists invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed over 750,000 people off their land. That is the war they started, Hamas are just the relatives of the people Israel murdered fighting the occupying invaders. Thankfully they opened the world's eyes to Israel's crimes and now it's a dead man walking. Israel will not last another generation.
From how I understand the history, in 1948, the attacking Arab armies from neighboring countries told the local Arabs (Palestinians) to leave the war zone to be safe. But when Israel won the war, those Arabs could not return.
> Sure, buildings were demolished, is that unusual in a war zone?
I'm going to assume good faith in your framing, rather than intentional minimization. Suffice it to say, more has happened than "buildings were demolished", and those more things are the subject of the article. Like, for example, an entire city systemically flattened with every single civilian inhabitant killed or exiled on their own land.
To answer your question in that context: yes, that is unusual in war these days, because it is tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
What belief is being expressed in your comments? That if someone wins a military conflict, any action they took is justified? That seems like either moral relativism or ahistorical, blind patriotism. The Soviets also won that war -- does that mean they were justified in their constellations of gulags?
If anything, the more apt historical comparison is to the Czechoslovakian and Polish partisans who wanted nothing less than to harry the Germans on (or within) their borders before the war. The British and French ambassadors (i.e. Qatar, etc) took great pains to try and convince the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments to restrain their partisans from attacking German people or positions, since they suspected Germany would use any and all provocation, no matter how small, as a casus belli. Anyone who's read a bit of WW2 history also knows how often the German government attempted to engineer exactly these kinds of events to justify their aggression.
It sounds straight out of the Likud playbook, doesn't it? But in what universe does an attack that kills 1000 people, a good number of them active duty soldiers, justify killing and maiming over 100,000 civilians and leveling hundreds of thousands of buildings? If the shoe were on the other foot, this implies Hamas also has the moral imperative to do just the same to Israel. That's moral relativism for you.
Perhaps Europe had a better understanding of this topic when they instituted the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian law after the war than we do today, 100 years out, trying to now claim none of it actually matters and the means justify the ends.
I don’t use TikTok, but I’ll chip in and cite the United Nations [1], the International Association of Genocide Scholars [2], Physicians for Human Rights-Israel [3], Amnesty International [4], Human Rights Watch [5], and Doctors Without Borders [6] to get started.
While the genocide case brought against Israel hasn't concluded as of now, to say there's no reason to believe this is genocide is incorrect.
If you’d like to share some sources (rather than only telling others to), maybe we can compare.
What, succinctly, is your point? You first claimed that this was not a genocide, then posted a link to a list of other genocides. Are you saying that none of the genocides in your list happened? Or that they are miscategorized?
My point is that wikis are not reliable sources no matter how many sources they link to. You'd have to check all the other sources to verify their veracity and that only gets harder the more sources are linked.
Lazy dismissal ,but then again, you don't really have a leg to stand on to defend your point.
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
was always a lurker so never had an account. I just think it's important to counter Israel's misinformation campaign :) very telling you think those words have lost their meaning though. I don't think we need further discussion
Sentiments like that are an excuse. You could have said something very similar about the IRA in Ireland before its independence from the UK, or the ANC in South Africa during apartheid. You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression. If it was you, is that really what you’d do?
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
There have been attacks on Israel long before there was "oppression" of Palestine. You're just making a circular argument, you can say the same thing to justify what Israel is doing. I think saying Hamas is justified is actually grotesque, they also starve the people of Palestine, sell of children and women into sex slavery, intentionally put civilians in just as much harms way. How is doing that justified as a reaction to Israel exactly?
They aren't a Robin Hood like resistance. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
That’s an awful false equivalence. We’re not talking about people being arrested by their own government with, presumably, probable cause. We’re talking about people - innocent civilians, including children - being murdered just for existing.
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
https://www.google.com/maps/place/31%C2%B016'58.6%22N+34%C2%...
There was internet connectivity at least before the widespread destruction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Palestine#Ga...
For a great example of this, look at this pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZcMbdFcx87PrqoYNA
And here's a pin of where the farms were spared https://maps.app.goo.gl/iZbbTH4iH27FCz4s9
The tunnel entrances and exits are tremendously hard to find. Some of them were located in private residences.
But Israel has an oil & gas industry. They have equipment that can look underneath a quiet city. If tunnel elimination were truly the goal, temporarily displacing the population while clearing operations took place should have been sufficient. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels. It just hides their entrances.
Robots. These things can be cleared. Particularly if the population isn't there.
Not if the trigger is based on detecting body heat. And you can't really clear more than the ground floor either, we don't have bipedal robots yet.
Take a look see of what's happening to peoples houses in Ukraine.
My colleagues have seen these tunnels. At least ore 2023. Israel has denied them entry since then.
"We're no worse than Hamas!" is an interesting argument.
You think you have to choose a side between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel? You think you need to send one of them money?
Israel is the great betrayal. In 1948 it was supposed to become a secular country based on European values not a Jewish theocracy. It is dragging us down and for what?
[1] https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
Not that that was in question. HN is, after all, in too large a part a reflection of the greedy US tech industry. It has shown time and again that it’s selfishly OK with human exploitation and supremely susceptible to being manipulated by the right amount of technicality while simultaneously arrogantly believing it is immune to being influenced.
Some days I’m truly ashamed of this community and find myself incapable of defending it against the mockery and contempt it receives from the rest of the internet.
The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions [1]. That requires killing with industrial efficiency, something that made it categorically unique from the "wipe out the village" warfare that goes back to, probably, before civilisation. (Chimpanzees do it. To my knowledge, they're the only other species that annihilates versus merely fighting off enemies.)
At lower kill volumes, even in the tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands, the line between conventional warfare done conservatively, conventional warfare done brutally and a process that, if left unhindered, will reach a million-man death toll.
(Then you have the ambiguity, one which does not apply in Gaza, introduced by displacement also being included in genocide and it starts to intersect pretty much perfectly with war.)
If we want these words to keep having meaning, we have to nitpick around their use. Otherwise, overinclusivity will consume them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
Because there are lots of wars burning all over the planet. We tried to carve an exception into international law, after WWII, about it being permissible to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state if they're doing genocide. So this is a real debate that should be had. The problem is by practically every definition, there are at least a handful of active genocides happening in multiple theaters around the world.
The abhorrence of genocide is one that needs to be refreshed with action if we're to restore the norm that it's not okay. But to do that, you have to set the new threshold.
I'm not a genocide scholar, so may be way off the mark here, but imagine a language that only has a few 100 native speakers left. There's one person who really hates them, writes in his diary about how he longs for that culture to cease, and then he murders the only remaining historian or language teacher of that group. Is that attempted genocide? A little bit?
My point isn't "yeah it is" because I don't know, but I'm very certain that I'm still closer to whatever the heart of it is, than sheer "kill volume". We already have a word for massacres and mass murder, and genocide usually comes hand in hand with those and many other crimes, but it's not those crimes.
So if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide? Seems like a very obtuse understanding of the word, which is also defined in the wiki you linked.
Nobody said that. OP asked why this is being debated. That's why. It's not clear what generally constitutes a genocide in a way that is separate from warfare in general. (Gaza and Ukraine are simpler, to me, because Russia and Israel explicitly message genocidal intent in a way New Delhi, Beijing and Washington do not.)
I did not. I lamented (it was not a question) that we’re nitpicking (it’s not a debate) the definition, especially when the person in question suggested an alternative which is not defined.
I do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed. If one of those people were in front of you crying for their home and life and asked for your compassion and help in fleeing the genocide, would you turn to them and say “ackchyually, someone on Hacker News said this is merely an ethnic cleansing, you’re on your own”?
No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
> would you turn to them and say “ackchyually
What is this.
Right. So what I’m saying is let’s have some empathy and compassion for other people. Let’s focus on how horrible it is and what we can do, the same way we would hope others would do for us if we were the ones in that situation.
It's incredibly ambiguous. There are very few sets of people who agree on the list of ongoing genocides, much less historic ones. The only places where there is even a semblance of agreement is in Europe and urban America, and that's largely due to deferral to our institutions.
> There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing
I agree. That doesn't mean it's beyond discussion or debate. I think it's a genocide. I also think that term has been mangled, particularly online, to the point that it's virtually meaningless. (One of the problems with the term is it's grammatically odd. A homicide is a completed murder. Attempted murder is different. A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation. But we give the ongoing project the same grammar as, in other cases, an act.)
This is despicable, inhumane. It is generational trauma that started with the Nazis, now propagated to the poor souls around the new western colony of Israel.
In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
Urban warfare is brutal, especially when one side systematically digs in and uses IEDs and booby traps in civilian buildings.
They wanted to level the city, they did. That's all. There was some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah, but nothing that would justify this. And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them, yet they managed to murder more than a thousand of people.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
It does not.
> and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position. Everything gets pounded, even forests and tree lines. It’s more like Verdun than anything that happened in Gaza.
Systematic destruction of urban areas is sadly what modern urban combat operations look like.
When an enemy digs in and choose to fight and die in an urban area, this is how war plays out.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/10/28/how-russias-invas...
WAR IS HELL
In absolutely does [1].
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't "actually" exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ySLyCjNnrI
It seems like the state of Ukraine frontline cities is due to intense artillery fire and air bombingn whereas gaza cities states seem to be more of systematic bulldozing of entire areas which would erase the marks of actual bombings and make the scale harder to assess
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/5/24/satellite-...
And that just from the start of war.
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
You can find lots of videos of Russia firing thermobaric weapons into populated areas - you will find none fired by Israel into Gaza. And I don't think that's because IL doesn't have them.
It's exactly the same in Gaza! You basically justified Israel's actions here... Check the distance between Gaza City & Israel border, vs distance beetween Bakhmut & Russia's border. Tell me which one is farther away - I'll wait
[1]https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie...
Please check Norman Finkelstein's latest book namely Gaza's Gravediggers on this matter [1].
He also has a very telling and chilling interview recently on Palestine and Gaza [2].
[1] Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places [book].
[2] Norman Finkelstein Reveals Shocking Discoveries While Researching History of Israel’s Gaza Obsession [video]:
https://youtu.be/Jmv2h1WYnNo
https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/uyqjn2/norman_fink...
At least that was my takeaway after watching his debate with Destiny (the streamer) and Benny Morris (the historian):
You be the judge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X_KdkoGxSs&list=PLrAXtmErZg...
Also Tucker Carlson? Seriously?
Hamas describes its fighters as their “military wing”. They engage in military training exercises and wear uniforms (when not fighting). That’s a military.
While it may be dumb, gross, and a hate crime against their civilians: war was the exact and predicted outcome of the attacks Hamas launched. They made statements to that effect, kicking off a regional war was central to the plan on October the 7th.
While I don't condone violence, it's a legitimate way to defend against occupation.
According to International Humanitarian Law: Targeting, killing, or kidnapping civilians is strictly prohibited and constitutes a war crime, regardless of the legality of the underlying cause. Torture, hostage-taking, and executions of captured individuals are strictly forbidden under all circumstances.
All of which are actions that were done by Hamas and Gazans who invaded on Oct 7th. A lot of which was recorded on video, by Hamas and Gazans.
That said, it is almost impossible to imagine that the Israeli response would have been something lesser than the current genocide attempt if Hamas had just taken POWs during the October 7 attack. Bibi would have arguably been even more humiliated if Hamas had been acting with restraint, so the impulse for revenge would be even greater.
It is almost impossible to imagine Israel would even look at the direction of Gaza had they just taken the statehood offers presented to them in 1947, 2000, 2001, or 2008, instead of repeatedly choosing terrorizing civilians over gasp compromising.
"Hamas's military force prior to October 7, 2023, was roughly 3 to 4.5 times larger than the United States military when measured as a percentage of their respective total populations."
Anyway, IDF as ≈170k active duty personnel and 465k reservists[1]. Literally a different order of magnitude. Add to it the vast different of resources, access to an air force and nuclear weapons and it become even more clearer that there is no comparison possible.
(And comparing personnel count to the USA is laughable as it is vastly different military type. Both a fighter jet pilot and a foot soldier count as one personnel, but it's neither the same force projection nor the same investment of civilians working for the war machine).
1: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/10/14/idf-explai...
Forced displacement is also considered a war crime and, considering what is happening in Gaza and at the West Bank, it would qualify as genocide as well.
The way the IDF fought in Rafah and other areas is leading with bulldozers that can take RPGs, IEDs, mines etc. to clear way for troops behind. That's how the tunnel and other guerrilla advantages are neutralized.
So yes, the destruction is absolutely purposeful, its purpose is to take away the advantage of the tunnels and guerrilla tactics, and enable excavations for tunnel access and detection.
The sequence was something like this (AI assisted):
Early May 2024, the IDF issued extensive, phased evacuation orders. This prompted an estimated 1 million to 1.4 million civilians—many of whom had previously fled to Rafah from other parts of Gaza—to evacuate to designated zones like Al-Mawasi.
Once ground troops secured these largely emptied areas, the IDF Combat Engineering Corps moved in. Objective satellite damage assessments show a massive spike in structural destruction in Rafah beginning in the summer of 2024, directly correlating with the ground invasion.
Satellite imagery confirms that ground forces used controlled explosive demolitions and heavy earth-moving equipment, including armored D9 bulldozers, to systematically clear residential blocks, agricultural land, and infrastructure.
This mechanical destruction was particularly concentrated along the Philadelphi Corridor (the Gaza-Egypt border) and in eastern Rafah. The military objective of these block-by-block clearing operations was to uncover and destroy cross-border smuggling tunnels and to establish a widened, flattened security perimeter where structures previously stood.
In summary, while aerial bombardment occurred prior to and during the invasion, you are correct that the wholesale, block-by-block leveling of Rafah was heavily driven by engineering operations using bulldozers and controlled demolitions after the majority of the civilian population had evacuated the targeted areas.
"Evacuating" a million people who will not be allowed to return is "ethnic cleansing".
Farmers were killed, even in different part of Palestine.
Killing farmers have nothing to do with the definition of genocide.
Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9
I suggest that you learn more about the Nakba, friend. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
Been watching it for years. A great stain on history, with weapons paid for and built by Americans, not to mention a complicit media.
* surprise, it was in Rafah, the city formerly located in the wasteland from the article we're discussing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/middle-east/2016/11/01/battl...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mosul-satellite_n_596d34a3e4b...
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel. A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
The flip side of your statement is that more nations than before decided to recognize a Palestine state and that it seems for the first time in decades US support for Israel is waning.
Israel is military and economically strong. It’s also a small country in a difficult region that needs trade partners and international connections, probably more so in a future full of climate change.
Also in general, the less reliant Israel is on foreign powers, especially the US, the better for Israel. The waning support in the US is a good thing, there are various domestic Israeli political reasons why this was bad.
To the extent that this international isolation exists and is growing it is a good thing.
The neuroticism around Gaza is mostly a western phenomenon, Arabs themselves understand and respect what Israel is doing in Gaza and why.
It’s easy for non-Western people to understand that when you invade a country and rape and murder 1000+ people the response is exactly what happened.
Any sources that aren’t just anecdotes? I’d love to see some details about “Arabs” understanding and respecting the atrocities in Gaza, because many news organizations including English available ones like Al-Jazeera don’t seem to.
sounds like the terrorists did indeed win
The notion of a “cycle of violence” really just applies within a given society and it only applies to inter-clan blood feuds which don’t really exist in modern societies, you ironically only really see this in Arab societies and in Africa.
The basic idea behind what you’re saying is that people are basically good and oppression or deprivation makes them do bad things. This is simply not an accurate model of human psychology.
Have you heard of survival? Personal, cultural, geographic. People will do anything if you push them hard enough or deprive them of alternatives.
If you deprive them of the conditions for economic advancement, then they will be discontented but they still won’t do “anything” in the way you’re thinking.
Beyond that they won’t really do anything at all.
Basically the kind of rhetoric and hatred you’re describing is not a result of October 7, October 7 is precisely the ultimate expression of it.
We’re basically just taking about the human capacity and tendency towards evil. This is just a fact of life to be dealt with, there is no solution to it.
What happened to Gaza on that day?
Is that the same program that was compeletly damages last year?
So did Netanyahu. His far-right policies require an eternal enemy to distract the people and blame for everything going wrong. The October 7 attack definitely didn't hurt his position in national politics.
I mean come on... Hamas were seen practising flying hang gliders around the strip and one of the most paranoid states in the world didn't think that merited some investigation?
And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
Regardless of the facts in this specific event, you can make much the same argument about many of the major 21st century terror attacks - there were multiple warnings leading up to 9/11, and the FBI and CIA had eyes on several of the perpetrators before the attacks. They didn't "choose not to act" in so much as institutional disfunction prevented the dots from being connected or any preemptive action being taken, but from the outside it looks pretty much the same.
I'm open minded, could see it either way
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
It's a bit too 4D chess for my liking but would also explain some things that otherwise don't add up
Is wrong. It is kind of you to show you don't know what you are talking about.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
Because if that is stupidity then yes, it is very stupid
In your own words, what is the issue in the Middle East?
Yes it is, and some countries have become very good at doing that
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
That's what the sad thing is?
> A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Interesting interpretation.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-lebanese-civil-war-in-... (article is rather more favourable to them than I would be, but it describes the basic history)
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
No a single estimation are near your number : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Civ...
Most are about 80 to 90% civilian killed.
First, the article cite multiple estimations by different source.
Second, there is no logical fallacy, you on the other hand are trying to frame that unidentified body (by Israel) could be majority of combatants, disregarding that nothing prove this and that lot of them are women and children.
Third, you are only quoting IDF number and no other third party, this only quoting the perpetrator to defend its body count
surely the one creating such destructions and deaths no?
https://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649... - then click "show historical imagery" next to the search box.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
I've started to think this worry about a particular nation's right to exist is really a great rhetorical trick: nobody is particularly upset the nation of east Germany ceased to exist, and you don't hear Erdogan opposing Kurdish independence with "Doesn't the Turkie have a right to exist?"
There is a basic human right of self determination, but if you think what follows is that you should get your own nation then look at how the soviet policies of providing exactly that worked out. They even created a the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east!
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
I won't post the answer here but I'd suggest anyone to ask you favorite llm (Opus for me) the following prompt:
Assess the statement that Nethanhyu has been working to prop up Hamas or with Hamas in some sort of "my best ennemy" scheme
these kind of messages show us how good propaganda and brain washing is.
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
Here's a scholarly peer reviewed paper from the Science of Remote Sensing documenting the farm destruction: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266601722... Scroll down to see the photos.
Even right wing news, such as Fox has covered this: https://www.foxnews.com/world/before-after-images-show-devas...
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
None of Israel's critics is able to suggest some significantly different strategy that would allow Israel to after Hamas. So the discussion inevitably ends up (with said critics) at Hamas had a right to commit these crimes, because they are the oppressed/occupied, and Israel has no right to defend itself by going after and defeating Hamas while minimizing its casualties like any other western army would do and has done (see Mosul or many other examples).
Sounds a lot like how the colonists fought much of the revolutionary war here in America where I am from.
But that aside, how "honorably" would you fight back if your homeland were occupied and turned into an apartheid state and you were treated as a second-class citizen effectively living in an open air prison while armed settlers came in and claimed many of your neighbor's homes, possibly killing them in the process?
The ALLEGED offer was to release hostages under 18 and over 50 IN EXCHANGE of stopping the ground incursions and changes to Al-aqsa mosk access
Was it a reasonable offer ? Should they have accepted it ? I don't care, I just care that you get your (alleged) facts right.
Incorrect.
The west still buys Russian gas. Half of Russian gas exports go there.
https://energyandcleanair.org/august-2026-monthly-analysis-o...
> No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes
The US doesn’t condemn Russian aggression, and try get the current administration to say that Russia invaded or is committing war crimes.
Despite a lot of posturing, and a fair amount of presumably sincere effort, billions continue to flow.
For one thing, there isn't a major, bi-partisan, pro-Russian-war-crime lobby with a controlling interest currently sitting in government.
As for the war crimes, "for some reason" you don't tell about the ukranian ones, which are plenty. As you are - of course - not concerned with their homicidal nationalistic anti Russisn propaganda, which gives further "motivation" to these crimes.
Think about how the PLO was a KGB linked terrorist organizations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106419296113226300
It seems like a reasonable take. But when we look at any oppressed group, getting murdered at the hands of their oppressors, there often is no negotiation through peaceful means.
History shows us that the threat of violence or violence becomes a necessary point of leverage to bring about change.
American schools have washed the story of the civil rights movement, but MLK only had success because of Malcolm X.
There’s many other historical instances of this. Whether it’s the Indian Independence movement in the 1940s fighting from British rule, the 1500s-1800s of native Americans resisting our ancestors colonialization, our own American revolution, and even labor movements like the battle of Blair mountain in the 1920s.
We like to propagandize American history where non-violence was productive, but violence has always been an unfortunately necessary tool when it comes to changing oppression.
I said don't murder civilians
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner#Rebellion
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.)
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
The world is aware of the answer to that one.
I wouldn't call them an invention of Israel, but they were allowed/encouraged to flourish.
Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) has repeatedly called for the "voluntary emigration" or forced removal of Gazan residents and urged the permanent resettlement of Israelis inside the Gaza Strip.
But they also don't want it to get too big or powerful. Israel calls it "mowing the lawn"[1]. You want to have grass on the lawn, but not too much, so you periodically cut off the excess grass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
You can't look at this, at reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, at Israel's own government officials' statements, and not, at minimum, believe that brutal war crimes were committed on a massive basis here. Whether it's "Holocaust level" or "genocide" is a red herring. It needs universal condemnation, it needs to stop, and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
The ICC is trying to do that, but is being impeded by the US.
It did stop. When the hostages were freed and Hamas gave up. Which they could have done at any point. Or you know, they could not have started the war too.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this - any “support” for Palestinians is seen as a very far-left idea after Oct 7. There are still many here who oppose the extent of the war - I see regular demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for peace. I will note that there seems to be fairly universal agreement that _something_ needed to be done after Oct 7. If you want to understand the Israeli perspective (doesn’t seem like most commenters do, but I’m not writing this for them), you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
But anyways, don’t take my word for anything, pay attention to our upcoming elections. We will see how big the tents are then.
Wishing for peace, for saner voices to rise, and for an end to this cycle of violence.
What should one do in war if they only have improvised rockets available, and surrendering will guarantee your extermination? You'd throw them in the general direction of the enemy, right? And the enemy knows this and will not put civilians in range of the rockets - unless they plan to use them as human shields. It is the same reason the German trenches were not full of clockmakers.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
But that is what settlers movement and Israel army were doing for decades?
"How long can Israel counter 30 rockets a day? What's the cost?"
"How is not each of them (7,000 in total) a war crime by Palestinians?"
"Sure it's not Palestinians it's Hamas, but the last time there was an election, they've elected Hamas, so what do you do?"
"Seriously, how is this not 7,000 counts of war crimes? Why is Israel not reacting? Why is Israel militiae into Gaza to catch the authors?"
Turns out the limit is 7,001 attacks.
One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
"Palestinian right of return" was a perfectly normal political position, but you don't hear much about it these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
Isn't the humane solution to move the troops back out, instead? Of course the aggressors in a war will never do so, they will only press forward.
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
The answer is in the post you replied to.
>> Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel
It was an automated system that immediately responded within 60s to rockets sent from Gaza. Shoot one rocket from Gaza, get the building destroyed within 60 seconds. Also, the first rocket is a war crime (indiscriminate attack), the second is a military target.
You can't just say "Israel bombed Gaza" and play the victim, omitting information.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
Counterpoint, a more passive turn of phrase is more fitting: How Israeli society was shaped around oct 7.
The event doesn't shape society by itself, political and media response/interest shape the society.
But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.
And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).
When it came out that Israel was systematically sodomizing detainees with nightsticks, they had protestors come out in favor of the guards. It's still ongoing, all charges have been dropped. Nobody is scandalized by it.
Even ignoring the fact that protests do not imply popular support, there is no comparison as 9/11 did not include widespread sexual violence and ongoing hostage rape was still going on at the time this happened.
So even if this seemed terrible to most Israelis, it was hard to find someone who will publicly defend a rapist from rape in jail
And that's from a human rights body, and from its representative to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index?t...
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recovers and in subsequent years grows above its pre-invasion value. Far from being "destroyed", Iraq is now doing better than ever.
For Palestine, the dip is about 3x larger.
Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
"Iraqis celebrate their comeback with soccer tournament after decades of isolation"
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/football/iraq-gulf-cup-comeba...
That was 2023: Iraq hosted the 25th Arabian Gulf Cup, and won the tournament.
I think if you're going to claim that something bad happened to Iraq post-2023, attributing that to the 2003 US invasion is a little dubious. Iraq was also in bad shape before the US invaded! It's a mistake to assume that if any foreign power has had any level of involvement, every bad thing that subsequently happens is therefore the fault of the foreign power.
https://i.imgflip.com/a6ptj6.jpg
>The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
Another possibility is that viral news stories are not always a good way to get a representative picture of how life has changed for civilians on the ground.
>Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
If Israel had genocidal intent -- in the sense of attempting extermination of Palestine's civilian population -- what fraction of Palestine's civilian population would you expect to be dead by now?
Once you've got that fraction in your head, try prompting your favorite LLM with something like the following:
"Please estimate the fraction of Iraq's population which died due to the 2003 US invasion, and the fraction of Gaza's population which died due to the 2023 Israeli invasion. Please provide an estimated breakdown of deaths based on whether they were due to invader military activity, destruction of civilian infrastructure, internal conflict, or other causes."
(you won't be able to paste the reply here due to HN rules against AI-generated content)
Another interesting prompt template: "Give me a sense of how civilian deaths happened in [Iraq/Gaza] due to [US/Israeli] military activity. Tell me a few representative vignettes which show various typical ways in which this occurred."
Interesting how you think Iraqs invasion of Iran was justified but not Kuwait. Or did you forget who started the Iran/Iraq war and deleted your comment out of embarrassment?
But I notice that you don't seem upset with the idea that Iran would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Iran (including direct attacks on civilian targets, not just dual-use infrastructure!), yet you do see upset that the US would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Kuwait. That seems like the sort of double standard I was talking about.
I deleted my comment because I thought it would be fairly tedious to litigate this. I agree the US has done some dubious things, but I don't think they are a distinctively bad actor relative to other players in the region. I'm also not sure you are telling the truth, e.g. I haven't been able to find a source for your claim that the US targeted hospitals during the Gulf War.
I can also say that the current Iran regime should not be in power or even exist. But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor, even compared to their enemies, who are only their enemies because of US meddling in the region. I hope you can straighten out your moral compass at some point.
More distortions on your part. (I notice you said nothing about the hospital point.) The US supported Iraq when Iran's counterattack was going too well, to prevent Iraq from being conquered by Iran, a regime you yourself say "should not be in power".
>Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I don't think this is intrinsically bad. The US also supported Stalin during WW2. Our rapprochement with China helped lift millions out of poverty. Were those mistakes?
>But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
This is some serious mental gymnastics to blame the US for a rebellion motivated in part by anti-Americanism. By your own logic, maybe the US is actually in the wrong for not giving the Shah even more support in order to crush the rebels.
If anti-Americanism caused a rebellion that you acknowledge as destructive, why do you lend support to anti-Americanism as an ideology?
You've created a catch-22 where the US can be the bad guy even if it supports a leader that's better than the plausible alternative for the country in question. What if the USSR had turned Iran into another satellite like in Eastern Europe? Ask the Poles how they feel about life under the Soviets.
I think these questions are simply not as obvious as you're making them out to be.
>The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor
We haven't initiated a war of conquest since the late 1800s. Even being a superpower after WW2, our territory actually shrunk when we gave the Philippines their independence "for free".
How many historic great powers can you name which were so restrained when it comes to territorial conquest? Considering the great powers during WW2: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, British Empire, French Empire, Italian Empire, USSR, PRC, USA. Who among those is the angel that you would've liked to see crowned global leader?
The world has generally become a much better place while the US has been hegemonic:
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/The...
Admittedly, this was before social media but back then you didn't get 50% support for gassing anybody.
The other main difference is that 9/11 ended within a few days, the hostage part of 7/10 made it an ongoing disaster for years in Israel.
Everyone knows that Israel essentially went on a rampage of revenge, which you basically seem to agree with given your explanation for the destruction (i.e. not military necessity while protecting civilian lives).
In return, Native Americans accidentally gave the Europeans Syphilis. Fair trade? Probably not, although the all-time death totals aren’t as incomparable as you might think.
not comparable, how do you GIVE someone (that is probably raping you) syphilis?
First Nations
> Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception.
What do they call it in the US? Manifest Destiny?
Yes, the 4% of the Palestinian population they've killed is definitely not a form of expression. Like somehow killing only matters if you talk about how fun it is first.
For the record that's greater than the % of Bosniaks killed in the Bosnia genocide.
Do you guys even bother being minimally informed before commenting? Like, Wikipedia is right there…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the_G...
Put simply, if you use any legally accepted definition of genocide (as a matter of the historical record) then what is happening in gaza doesn’t even come close. And of course the legally accepted definition is ultimately all that matters. That’s very different from whether laymen think it’s genocide because what’s happening hurts their feelings.
Since you like wikipedia here's a list of organizations that say its a genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human...
The legal definition, which is not just "kill all the peoples" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
Also current legal proceedings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#Legal_proceeding...
Is wikipedia is Hamas now?
I missed that part when I looked, and for that I apologise.
Keep moving the goalpost I guess
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.
Or is there some other perspective, other than what Israelis can be observed as doing? I assume what I've seen is what Israel is like.
It is outside their zone of interest.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047
This article is from a few days after that, but I remember that there were confirmations already during the day.
“The world's leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
In Japan, Korea, China, Hungary, etc they are indeed decreasing.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that a society where the marriage rates are so low is stable though. For some definition of stability yes, but usually we also mean healthy when we say stable.
If it was a genocide you would expect basically 90% of the population of Gaza to be dead. Israel controls the water supply and the food into Gaza, they could just poison the food and water, dropping bombs isn’t even necessary.
I don’t know how to make it more simple than that.
That makes this definition useless, just to be clear.
If the “in part” refers to the physical destruction of the people itself rather than the potential nexus between the act and the physical destruction of the people, then clearly this doesn’t meet the definition because Israel didn’t destroy the buildings in order to bring about the physical destruction of the Gazans. The buildings were not destroyed in some round about way to kill the Gazans.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k" and destroying everyones home. Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
This "lawyer" mentality is so dumb.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
Hang on though, isn't it Palestine who keeps accepting peace deals and then Israel keeps rejecting them and dropping a few more missiles? Do they not teach you that part? E.g. on October 7 Hamas released 3 Israeli hostages. Israel shot them dead, so Hamas didn't release any more.
Calling it "bad luck" is extremely charitable. To international observers the problems with Zionism were already obvious as early as 1919:
For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [0]
[0] https://britainpalestineproject.org/recommendations-of-the-k...
As is true in every war.
The question is who started it.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
This is perhaps one of the most obviously immutable conflicts that at the same time, everyone thinks there is some simple solution to. Usually thinly veiled, "it will be over when my side wins".
The problem is that the historical timeline doesn't match up. Zionism started way earlier, and tried to found a "Jewish homeland" in 1820 in New York, and in 1903 in Uganda, and there are literally dozens of other examples throughout history. Even if we look solely at modern-day Israel, it dates back all the way to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The first settler violence started decades before the Holocaust ever begun.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing.
How do you propose Zionists could've established an ethnically Jewish country on land already occupied by Palestinians without ethnic cleansing? Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
Jews have been doing that for hundreds of years. By 1922 when the British did a census of Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Only after the Arab revolt the British started severely restricting Jewish immigration, including shutting the doors for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
There was enough room in Palestine for everyone. It had a lot of empty space. It still has a lot of empty space. You can go on Google satellite and look around how much empty space there is in both Israel and the West Bank (more than half empty).
Most of Israel’s major population centers were built on empty land that Jews paid for and bought legally - and many of its biggest cities were founded in the 19th century, long before the Balfour declaration.
It was never about space. It was about Arab hatred of the Idea of a Jewish presence and country in Israel, even alongside an Arab one.
That’s not what reparations are, that’s ethnic cleansing.
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
EDIT: how is anyone downvoting thos. Who thinks it's a good idea?
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
You have it backwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
They do not share Western social values.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
What's the point of a democracy if it acts against it's people like the UK does?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
Phrasing it as something that happens over there is disingenuous when it resource extraction and foreign interference that directly contributed to political unrest and radicalization and war. It is the CIA that poured literal millions in funding extremists groups. It is western troops and bombs and that landed on their soil again and again.
It's not something that simply happens over there, war is not some unforgivable trait related to tanned foreign people who believe in islam. Our governments have their hand in this cookie jar.
The middle east is an outdated term referring to a conflict zone that the West itself created.
See why I’m not optimistic?
There is no justification for their actions. There is no justification for the greater Israel project they are pushing. There is no justification for them to be taking a leadership role in the global security technology industry. The whole thing is just absolutely Fkd and I find any person trying to contort the argument in a way to justify this shit to be evil themselves.
The fact that this comment is being upvoted as much as down shows me that evil exists here too.
Never mind that it's also a Palestinian homeland and Muslim homeland. Those ones don't count because uh, we said so.
From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
(EDIT: grammar check)
https://x.com/MacaesBruno/status/2017251152900079675
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
Who's this "we" who dealt with the SA apartheid state?
The international pressure on SA did absolutely nothing to change their mind (I'm old enough to have seen PW Botha's Rubicon speech live on TV). The NP (political party in charge) was slowly and carefully convinced to push out the hardliners.
The people left, like FW De Clerk, actually did the dismantling - unbanned the ANC, released Mandfela from prison, switched to allowing black voters, etc.
The rest of the world's pressure had absolutely no effect on the leadership. Change only came when leadership started changing.
See this for more background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiations_to_end_apartheid_...
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say
I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:
Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.
Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed. This is why Hamas changed policies to only give up hostages through 3rd parties. They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored. [1]
So for starters, the US could have pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas to return the hostages.
As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times). The US could have at a minimum threaten to withhold aide. In fact, there are laws on the books that a country such as Israel committing war crimes is ineligible for aide.
Finally, the UN should have deployed peace keepers to gaza specifically to stop the genocide.
Actions could have been taken, but they weren't because our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money as to turn a complete blind eye to it's misdeeds.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-09-...
Hamas was willing to return hostages if israel freed all thousands of Palestinians prisoners, including those captured in Israel while committing the Oct 7 massacre.
And that is exactly what sinwar wanted to achieve in every one of his wars, just like when in 2014 Israel traded 1 captured Israeli soldier for 1000 Palestinians prisoners.
So basically Hamas wanted israel to surrender, accept Hamas terms, and ignore Oct 7.
UN has no such power. I am still amazed how people do not get this.
Members need to vote for such things to happen. It wouldn't, not in this climate.
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
How is my "should have" happened not a direct answer to the question?
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
Then you notice world energy markets are going to be effected by a massive conflict etc.
If the UN went into Gaza, got attacked by Iran, then had to respond, next minute they're attacking a close Russian ally, and maybe even China might have to get involved in that.
What would've been good is if October 7 didn't happen, and that goes for both sides.
> Iran is helping Russia
lol, no, other way around. Though the Russia hasn't really been involved with Iran since Ukraine started. It's actually China that's the biggest Iranian trade partner.
The only party that'd be upset over UN peace keepers in Gaza is Israel.
You are making stuff up. Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card. And the fact still remains that they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
> Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the agreement and change the terms. That was all public. It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
> Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
Two wrongs don't make a right and yes, it's relevant when the IDF explodes clearly marked aid vehicles rendering aid. There's no reason to do that.
> Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
Does that really matter? The question wasn't "how effective will this be" it's "What world leaders should have done". That's what world leaders should have done.
> I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
These are weaker lobbies because of US laws. The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens (in behest of Israel). No other nation has that sort of organizations in the US. The closet you can find is things like the weirdo Shen Yun cult.
This allowed them to spend $60M in a democrat primary. You won't find that sort of direct spending from Qatar or the Saudis (barring the clear bribe in the Jet. They aren't exactly giving away jets to every primary run).
'Israel to withdraw and grant all other Hamas demands' is a 'get out free' card.
> they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
These hostages _escaped_ and were shot in error. Not 'tried to return'. Note that there was a week's ceasefire a month earlier and Hamas could have returned everyone then if they cared to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Gaza_war_ceasefire
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/world/israel-hostages-cam...
>Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the terms.
You mean all of 'Hamas's terms'. Right. The Israeli government had very different terms as the final deal (very different from what Hamas demanded) shows. The Israeli gov insisted on controlling the Egyptian border, Gaza demilitarization, etc.
>It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
Of course. They wanted the hostages out ASAP, and could only pressure the Israeli government (obviously Hamas wouldn't care for the families).
>Two wrongs don't make a right
Right, but there's such a thing as hypocrisy. One could make a 'genocidal' case against the country who started a war by bombing a schoolhouse and spoke of 'destroying an entire civilization' (it would still be wrong though). But they're a little too strong, and it's easier to pick on Israel.
>That's what world leaders should have done.
Most world leaders want to be reelected (or not be overthrown if they're dictators). Sending out troops to die in a foreign land for an arguably hopeless cause is not very helpful to that end. They're likely aware of the history of military involvement in the Middle East.
>The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens
Qatar etc. gets around it by donating billions to US universities or using organizations like ISNA. Everyone seems to have found a way.
Remember they know exactly who everyone is and where everyone is at all times. Gaza is the most thoroughly surveilled place on earth.
What a bizarre claim and outright lie. They kept them locked up and starving. They could’ve just dropped them off near the border with Israel or Egypt, or handed them over to the Red Cross (which wasn’t even allowed to visit and check on the hostages).
And yes this is true but the reason you couldn’t comprehend his point is because his point is insane.
This is abject insanity and it’s a good representation of what is going on in the minds of most of humanity.
The peaceful route didn't work. Only idiots will think continuing with the status quo will result in anything different.
You can't just continue to 'mow the lawn' where children are killed and kidnapped, put into Israeli prisons, and expect no blowback.
You can't just shoot people in the knees while protesting peacefully, and then expect no blowback
You can't just rape Palestinian prisoners (most of whom have been arrested under no charges), and expect no blowback.
You can't just install bombs in pagers, and set it off amongst civilians, which resulted in children being injured or killed, and expect no blowback.
Sorry buddy, but your days of gaslighting is over.
Like my personal sentiment is, war is senseless, and both sides are wrong in some way or another. But yeah, I don't think children should be murdered period, so I'm not going to try and give a list of reasons why it's OK, because there isn't one.
Anyone committing war crimes should be punished for it, period.
My original question was simply, what should have been done differently "by the world leaders"?
Also, is Oct 7 enough justification to shoot 335 bullets at 6 year old Hind Rajab?
Your questions reek of bias by trying to centre everything to Oct 7, as though history began there. If you really cared about children, you'd have referenced the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel before Oct 7.
2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.
Please try posting more constructive content than unconvincing, blanket denials. It doesn't make for good discussion.
Sure, but are we going to ignore about the US having to rely on its "helpless" allies to provide staging points and cannon fodder for its illegal imperialistic wars? How much of a superpower would it be without its overseas bases?
https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-alphabet/
Funny how plenty of people still think if someone defends the barbarism of Hamas (which I'm not doing), this person should be lynched, but if another person defends the barbarism of the Netanyahu regime, it's fine, because (insert justifications here)... What the fuck's the difference?
This has the tone of "a few minutes of action": https://www.espn.co.uk/college-sports/story/_/id/15997412/br...
I would like to know how would anyone give a positive spin to genocide and civilian displacement
Same reason blatantly anti Nazi sources have a higher chance of staying up compared to pro nazi sources. I'll let you process that one.
Clearly not? Sometime like 2% of gazans have been killed. IDF could kill many many more if it wanted.
What would you respond?
If Hamas were to take one of those tunnel cities and Israel were doing guerrilla warfare from them I wouldn't blame Hamas for bulldozing.
Israel does have mandatory conscription. They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian. While in the military they're all fair targets, and if they're not serving, and at a music festival, they're not.
> They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian.
When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian". When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
And Hamas is permitted, as per the rules of war, to target that military infrastructure. If Israel has co-located it with civilian buildings, and attacks miss their targets, then too-bad for Israel.
>When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian".
This is very arguable for the West Bank settlers, but the Israeli civilians that were targeted by October 7 are not settlers and are in very solid Israeli land from a conflict 80 years prior. Arguing that all civilians in Israel proper are valid targets makes you no better than Smotrich and Ben-gvir, and you are essentially advocating for the genocide of Israelis.
Which is your right to do, I guess, but that's certainly not going to convince the (nuclear armed, remember) Israelis to moderate and compromise, or actually bring about justice for Palestinians.
> When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
Military uniforms are for the protection of civilians. If you forgo them, then your civilians will receive more harm. Israel is responsible for their actions and many war crimes, but Hamas is responsible for theirs.
Israel under Netanyahu has done plenty to criticise but I would actually like to see an Israel/Palestine deal not the West following both sides into radicalisation.
Then they suggest that this is justified because Israel is a jewish ethnostate.
Hamas starting it is besides the point. We are capable of holding two different ideas in our heads: that what Hamas did to kick this off was reprehensible, and that what Israel has done since then has been horrifying.
I would personally argue that what Israel has done is far worse than what Hamas did, but it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with that. Israel has gone far far far beyond your notion of "fighting back".
> should work to destroy Hamas who are responsible for turning Gaza into such a hellhole.
Israel seems to be doing a good job of that on their own. And had been even prior to the current conflict.
They don't live there anymore, they're displaced.
If Hamas supporters argue that what they did on Oct 07 is payback for "Naqba" (or whatever historical injustice dujour they fancy), then the question becomes: why can't Israel retaliate?
No, I totally agree. I think for the October 7th attack, all of Gaza had to be razed. How will those terrorists learn otherwise?
Unironiclly, I think the US can be called one, too, at this point.
And this people has the dare of accusing other people of being propagandized.
It's not Genocide...
...because UN is corrupt...
...and numbers are from Khamassss,,,,
...and whatabout whatabout whatabout Iran Sudan....
...you hate us coz we're Jewssss....
Heck, I know so many Muslims critical of Muslim majority nations.
This result is exactly what the anti-Israel coalition wanted. They bet Bibi would go nuts and burn up the remaining global goodwill that Israel had, leaving them isolated.
I'm going to assume good faith in your framing, rather than intentional minimization. Suffice it to say, more has happened than "buildings were demolished", and those more things are the subject of the article. Like, for example, an entire city systemically flattened with every single civilian inhabitant killed or exiled on their own land.
To answer your question in that context: yes, that is unusual in war these days, because it is tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
If anything, the more apt historical comparison is to the Czechoslovakian and Polish partisans who wanted nothing less than to harry the Germans on (or within) their borders before the war. The British and French ambassadors (i.e. Qatar, etc) took great pains to try and convince the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments to restrain their partisans from attacking German people or positions, since they suspected Germany would use any and all provocation, no matter how small, as a casus belli. Anyone who's read a bit of WW2 history also knows how often the German government attempted to engineer exactly these kinds of events to justify their aggression.
It sounds straight out of the Likud playbook, doesn't it? But in what universe does an attack that kills 1000 people, a good number of them active duty soldiers, justify killing and maiming over 100,000 civilians and leveling hundreds of thousands of buildings? If the shoe were on the other foot, this implies Hamas also has the moral imperative to do just the same to Israel. That's moral relativism for you.
Perhaps Europe had a better understanding of this topic when they instituted the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian law after the war than we do today, 100 years out, trying to now claim none of it actually matters and the means justify the ends.
I glad you are not AI!
While the genocide case brought against Israel hasn't concluded as of now, to say there's no reason to believe this is genocide is incorrect.
If you’d like to share some sources (rather than only telling others to), maybe we can compare.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
[2] https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS...
[3] https://www.phr.org.il/en/genocide-in-gaza-eng/
[4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...
[5] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-exterminat...
[6] https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/our-response-is...
would you say the same?
https://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Genocides,_Cultural_Genoc...
Does that make this link twice as truthful as the one you sent?
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
They aren't a Robin Hood like resistance. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
When you get arrested, do you fight back and resist?
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/google-maps-...