As per item 2: If the enemy was using them as hostages I sure as shit wouldn’t just bomb the building and kill everyone. I’d prefer to use special forces to go in on foot and secure the building with minimal casualties. And only when diplomacy fails.
The enemy was using them as shields because they didn’t think you’d be that fucking stupid to just bomb everyone; they assumed you had some empathy.
They’re not really engaging with you, just like Israel isn’t really interested in a dialogue about the situation. They just need you to think there’s a civil dialogue being had so that we don’t realize the need to stop them by force.
I’m neither pro-Israel nor pro-Hamas, but I believe the correct answer is “same as in every other war”.
In other words, the maximum rate of Gazan casualties you will accept depends on the maximum rate of Axis casualties you would have accepted in WW2. That might be zero or it might be fairly high.
What worm ate your brain and made you think that is the choice of sides here?? Fighting for Palestinian emancipation has nothing to do with being pro-Hamas you dingus.
Those are the two sides that are currently at war. They are both religiously motivated right-wing regimes, and I support neither one.
I’m also not fighting for Palestinian “emancipation”, for the same reason I’m not fighting to “emancipate” Istanbul from Turks or New York from Americans.
If Israel were ONLY attacking Hamas, you’d be correct.
The problem is they are insistant on attacking, bombing, killing, and displacing all of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza as well, because they have been at war with Palestine, not Hamas, for generations now.
Hamas is the government of Gaza even though Gazans are suffering thanks to Israel. Just as Hirohito was the leader of the Japanese even though they were suffering thanks to America.
In both cases, a government failed to protect its people.
I didn’t say it was acceptable. It is no more acceptable than civilian deaths in Germany, Japan, or Chechnya.
People are often more concerned about the rate of deaths because Gaza is relatively small. But if you really are counting how many and not the rate, then the vast majority of wars were worse than Gaza. The number of civilian deaths in Dresden alone is comparable to those in Gaza. Over 150,000 civilians have died in Iraq.
And as I said, some people find one civilian death to be unacceptable, others are willing to accept more than one. I’ve never met anyone who is willing to accept “any amount”.
Interesting that you keep saying ‘civilian death’ and not ‘child.’ Seems like we’re talking about two very different things.
Maybe so. But personally, I believe that all civilian deaths are equally tragic whether of a child, an old man, or a mother. In fact, I would object if someone said “X dead women is acceptable, but X dead children is unacceptable”, because personally I believe that whatever X you choose should be age-independent. YMMV
Rediculous. They are the same in every respect except where they want the seat of the new Islamic caliphate to be, after they’ve killed all the Jews.
Hamas can’t get its members to stop paying dues to ISIS, and vice versa, the leaders had to declare war against each other to let them know how super serious they are about poaching each others suicidal nutjobs.
The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.
Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm.
This was a deliberate strategy of divide-and-conquer by the Israeli government.
Hamas must be plucked from the root, condemned and thrown away!
It’ll never be enough, so long as a single living Palestinian still knows about the Nakba and claims a right of return. For Israelis, its not just about Hamas. The only solution to the Palestinian Question is a final one.
You’re right, Israel should not get a free pass for genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Hamas began twenty years into the occupation during the first Intifada, with the goal of ending the occupation. Collective punishment has been a deliberate Israeli tactic for decades with the Dahiya doctrine. Violence such as suicide bombings and rockets escalated in response to Israeli enforcement of the occupation and apartheid.
The 1988 Charter, which is certainly unreasonable in its fundamentalism with Sharia Law and is antisemitic, does not call for the extermination of all Jewish People. Hamas wants an end to Israel as an Apartheid State, not an extermination of all Israelis. Under Ahmed Yassin in the 1990’s, truces were offered in exchange for Israeli to withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank to the 1967 borders. The 2017 Revised charter explicitly accepts a Two-State Solution of the 1967 Borders. Check Article 7 and 13 of the 1988 Charter to see yourself, compare it to Article 20 and 24-26 in the revised charter.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
Forced expulsion of Palestinians has been central to Zionism since the 1880’s
There are a lot of factors of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, but your conflating of the two as justification or minimization of the Nakba doesn’t work; unless you somehow think all Arabs or Muslims are the same. But it’s pretty clear your racist towards Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims when your argument boils down to ‘they are violent primitives and deserve to die,’ just going straight to dehumanization and ignoring all material conditions of Apartheid
Iraqi-born Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, speaking of the wave of Iraqi Jewish migration to Israel, concludes that, even though Iraqi Jews were “victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict”, Iraqi Jews aren’t refugees, saying “nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted.” He restated that case in a review of Martin Gilbert’s book, In Ishmael’s House.
Yehuda Shenhav has criticized the analogy between Jewish emigration from Arab countries and the Palestinian exodus. He also says “The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation.” He has stated that “the campaign’s proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a ‘right of return’ on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of ‘lost’ assets.”
Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath has rejected the comparison, arguing that while there is a superficial similarity, the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are entirely different. Porath points out that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was the “fulfilment of a national dream”. He also argues that the achievement of this Zionist goal was only made possible through the endeavors of the Jewish Agency’s agents, teachers, and instructors working in various Arab countries since the 1930s. Porath contrasts this with the Palestinian Arabs’ flight of 1948 as completely different. He describes the outcome of the Palestinian’s flight as an “unwanted national calamity” that was accompanied by “unending personal tragedies”. The result was "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic.
Every arab country in the region was clensed of Jews.
Primarily a consequence of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the mass movement mainly transpired from 1948 to the early 1970s, with one final exodus of Iranian Jews occurring shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979–1980.
The civil war began the day after the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine on 29 November 1947 – which planned to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and the Special International Regime encompassing the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. At the end of a series of offensives that began April 1948, in which Zionist forces had conquered cities and territories in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state, Zionist leaders announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948
Hmm…
Israel had genocide commuted against it on the 7th of October.
The IDF is out of control. I don’t know if I’d call these acts “genocidal”, but its clear that Netanyahu’s war has turned inward on any Israeli resident who resists his dictatorial decree.
The going rate is 1:30 Israelis to Palestinians in revenge killing. For killing each Hamas militant they’re allowed to kill around 20 as collateral damage. 50% in Gaza are children so 10 kids per Hamas militant is okay according to the Israeli government.
They didn’t put the kids in with the terrorists, the terrorists did. They don’t get to dictate the terms of battle because it makes a small minority of westerners too sad to see any nuance or larger picture.
“They have to kill the children because there are terrorists next to them” is really not a moral defense for killing children. If anything, it makes it seem like the terrorists have a point.
“The terrorism came first” is also not a moral defense for killing children, sorry. I get that you really like the idea of killing people, but that doesn’t make it morally defensible.
They have always been content with letting children die, and with killing children. No pretzels. I have a consistent model. Happy to try and explain any distinction for you.
I never said anything about myself. Why are you making this about me?
You have repeatedly justified the killing of children. Suddenly calling them innocent victims doesn’t take back the fact that you think it’s acceptable for IDF troops to put a bullet in their brain. It just means that you’re okay with killing innocent victims.
Weird, because I would say the “very obvious” would be the people who are shooting them are the ones killing them. Which would be the IDF. Generally, shooting someone in the head has a good chance of killing them and try telling a jury that someone made you shoot that child in the head.
In other countries. So they ran to Palestine and started killing the people there. You’re not allowed to kill everyone and anyone you want, including innocents ams civilians, just because you were wronged by a completely different population of people once.
Wtf are you talking about? The earliest recorded history of the Levant is in Hebrew, written by Judites. The Ottoman Empire (far right pan Islamists) rounded them up, massacred them, took many as slaves, tortured them, and gave them negligeble rights for the last two thousand years, and it was other own Islamists back and back.
Israel is there now though, and it’s not going anywhere. It is a democracy with a legitimate government and Gaza is a failed state occupied by terrorists, sorry to break the reality of political science to you.
The last two thousand years? The Ottoman Empire was a refuge for Jewish people for a long time. It wasn’t just a neverending massacre or they wouldn’t have kept settling there from other places. It gave then some restrictions, but it did the same to Christians. And comparatively, they lived pretty good lives and thrived, especially compared to the oppression and massacred they faced elsewhere in Europe. It had the largest Jewish population by the end of the 16th century. They came from Russia, Prussia, ran from Spain because of the Spanish Inquisition, or Portugal, etc. It was way better than living under Christians for a long time. They would encourage each other to move there. It wasn’t until the 19th century that antisemitism started to ramp up there. And most scholars agree the attitude was imported from Christian Arabs, so it’s not just a Muslim thing. It sucks that it started to rise again then, but nationalism does that. It made it worse on both sides, since around that time Zionism started picking up steam, too, and they were buying land and kicking off the native tenants to make a country. Not to excuse the antisemitism, because obviously that is horrible, and there’s a long history of it happening all over the world. But the point is, so many immigrated there because of things like the Holocaust in Germany or the Russian pogroms, then started fighting completely unrelated people and kicking them off their land, like was done to them somewhere else. Same reason that even though I respect the struggle of slaves, I don’t approve of the colonial way Liberia was founded and the way the colonists treated the indigenous people.
Israel is barely a democracy. There are millions of people under their control who don’t get a vote. Their leader is stoking a war and nationalistic fervor to avoid corruption trials. They jail people for criticism, require military service, and have killed more journalists than any recent conflict. They’re an apartheid, settler colonial ethnostate that only exists because of racist and antisemitic Western interests. Gaza is not a failed state, because every attempt to become a state is stymied by Israel, the country that actually controls all their infrastructure, food, travel, sea, and air. Israel as a nation state could easily disappear and be replaced by an actual state with equal rights and equality for everyone in the area, without a single person being killed in the process, if the US and the Israeli people or government wished it. And that would be a good thing for both the Palestinians who could live free, and the Israelis who don’t want to have to worry about being threatened by actual attacks from rightfully pissed people all the time.
More, but I don’t think it gives them the right to genocide innocent people. And it can definitely still be improved, a lot. We should have a higher bar than that.
They require military service to build roads and bridges. Many, many places do it also. Seems like a lot of people criticize only Israel for this, like it’s only a problem when it’s Jewish people having a military.
You’re right, Gaza is not a failed state. It would have to have been a state to be a failed state. The correct terms for it are irredenta or unincorporated territory, a lawless shithole with stakeholders that don’t care ahout it (unless it is killing Jews). Literally the only concievable future for Gaza that isn’t a complete humanitarian catastrophe is going to look a lot like five to ten years of martial law. Gaza has zero capabilitynor capacity to rebuild itself and literally nobody else cares about it enough to do it for Gaza except the one country you would have a problem doing it. So your plan really is to condemn Gaza. If you wanted to save Gaza you’d be in Gaza pointing out who Hamas is and where they are hiding. See, even Gaza doesn’t care to save Gaza.
Israel doesn’t care about Gazans either. If they did, they wouldn’t be bombing every hospital and refugee camp and preventing aid from coming in. Nor would they be preventing them from making a state and having self-rule at every opportunity. Gaza is already condemned when Israel decided to reduce it all to rubble and make public statements about reducing the population from millions to a few thousands. Hamas is just an excuse to raze and then take the land. Without Hamas, you get something like the government in the West Bank, which hasn’t done anything to prevent Israel from taking more land, imprisoning and killing more Palestinians, and failed at every opportunity to get them their own state or a good quality of life, either, because they have no power against the US and Israel. It’s the same state of affairs but slower. So no, Hamas isn’t the cause of Gaza people suffering, it’s Israel.
The West Bank is slowly falling to Hamas and Iranian* corruption too. There are tunnels there now, Islamic State fighters, Islamic Jihad fighters, etc.,. etc. If Palestinians care about Palestinians, point them out and point out the tunnels, stop turning every public institution into instrumentalities of international terrorism, they’d still have their ports and hospitals, if not the direct consequences of their own actions. You think everyone is oblivious to the massive underground construction when they are busting out walls into the surgical wing to sink a new shaft? Please.
I agree. The history is irrelevant. Israel is there now. Those who stood to oppose it have been defeated politically and military and if they were at all led by legitimate, well intended non-genociral, non-criminals, they’d surrender, sue for peace. They literally don’t want peace, though.
They surrendered but then kept getting killed, getting their land taken, and forced into smaller and smaller spaces. Then in those spaces, they were imprisoned, starved, and oppressed and controlled. Human beings want a quality of life Israel won’t let them have. They’ve diplomatically and strategically geographically isolated them away from having a state, had walls built around them, had their food and trade and movement restricted. They get randomly shot or arrested. In the West Bank, they get their food and trees ripped up and their houses taken. You can’t ask a people to sit there and accept that. Even if they’ve been defeated militarily, human beings desire some innate dignity and quality of life. No group of human beings on Earth would accept how Israel has treated them for 70 years. It’s why some ghettos revolted in the Holocaust, or the French resistance existed in WW2. Palestinians want peace, but Israel wants an occupied people to sit there quietly while they get oppressed and slowly lose the rest of their land and are forced to emigrate away from their homes or die.
If you ask me, I would sacrifice every last one of them in order to eradicating hamas(Isis). Western civilization/values are worth more than the children killed in the hands of hamas(Isis).
I sincerely hope you aren’t a parent with that attitude about children.
Now I will direct this question back at you, What is the maximum number of children who need to die before hamas(Isis) surrender?
Zero. Israel should not kill one single child. If they can’t defeat Hamas without killing children, then maybe Hamas has a point.
That’s an interesting way to excuse virtually any war crime imaginable if Israel chooses to commit it. “It’s Hamas’ fault that Israel covered Gaza in anthrax spores, they’re the reason Israel did it.”
The right of civilians not to be arbitrarily deprived of life and the prohibitions against killing or maiming civilians are principles firmly enshrined in international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international jurisprudence. The prohibition of violence to civilians, including children, in particular murder, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture is a principle of customary international law, with universal applicability in all situations of armed conflict.
“They made us do it” is not a way around those laws.
All you’re saying is that, to you, it’s fine for the IDF to kill every single child in Gaza as long as someone has to pay the price for it in court later.
What is the maximum number of children who need to die before hamas(Isis) surrender?
“What is the maximum number of hostages police are allowed to kill before they negotiate with the bank robber?”
This isn’t a game where the IDF has to grind kids for XP before attacking a final boss, asshole. The answer is “as few as possible, ideally zero”, but the IDF has shown that they are either stupidly or maliciously indiscriminate in who they kill.
It’s a dumb question. Hamas puts the kids in harm’s way, Hamas and their loyal supporters. They love nothing more than their own kids dead from Israeli weapons, it’s the only way they will win this war, tricking well meaning people such as yourself.
800,000 people left Rafah safely. Blame Hamas for 0.006% of them being killed. What did Hamas do this time, tell them the evacuation was fake or hold them against their will?
More likely they just indoctrinated them over decades, convinced them it’s patriotic and holy to sit inside a room with terrorists to be used as fodder for Qatari and Iranian state media to try to drum of western support. At some point they realized this is more effective than suicide bombings.
This is quite literally how they see the world. Every child in Rafa is this child. Every adult is a terrorist cell leader. Every refugee is going to want revenge. Every survivor is going to join the next revolt.
Its the same logic American colonists used on First Nations people, as they carved their way westward. Its the logic Serbians used as they butchered their way through Bosnia. Its the logic American soldiers used in Hadditha and Kandahar. Children are just tiny future evil adults and killing them is right because they are incapable of doing anything but wrong.
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