How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?

[Carolus]

It is also interesting to see the Gaza War in the context of military history.

As per last numbers I have seen, there have been ca. 25.000 casualties in Gaza (as per Hamas) and part of that are ca. 4000 to 5000 combatants (as per IDF).

Any military operation in dense urban terrain, if conducted by a Western military, shows a ratio of 1:8 and 1:12 of killed combatants to killed civilians (when it is a non-western military, it can be anything between 1:10 to 1:100).

Obviously the number of civilian deaths in Gaza will rise as more dead people are found and identified (the current numbers are just a floor, likely), but at the moment, even without the hundreds if not several thousands of Hamas combatants which have been taken prisoner, we are looking at a ratio of 1:4 or 1:5, far less than what past urban warfare would make us expect. And as mentioned, the ratio only improves for the IDF if one includes the prisoners.

In light of that it seems hard to understate how efficient and effective the IDF campaign in Gaza is. It might very well become a role-model urban warfare campaign for the ages if the numbers stay roughly at this ratio.

There is basically no military which ever managed to achieve something similar and be so careful around civilians.

Of course, ssingular suspicious actions by the IDF still need to be investigated and should be, if necessary, condemned and persecuted.

But the civilian death toll needs to be at least twice as high to become average as per past military campaigns in dense urban terrain (where warcrimes surely happened but which were still considered generally "clean" acts of war), and the death toll of Palestinians would have be greater by a multitude to be considered an extraordinary event.

Of course, the international stage still should pay close attention to what happens and ultimately it all depends on what Israel will do once they demilitarized the majority or all of Hamas in Gaza.

One important step will be a purge of the humanitarian aid organisations in Gaza which seem to deeply infiltrated by or completely beholden to Hamas and help the terrorists eagerly with their social media campaign. If the IDF would start taking the reigns over dispersing humanitarian aid in Gaza, more of it might actually reach the civilians who need them. 

To reduce the humanitarian crisis, I think Israel should try to let civilians temporarily cross the border to Israel after a careful check by border control. They are already evacuating wounded Gaza inhabitants to Israeli hospitals and obviously there will be security concerns that Hamas will send suicide bombers and baby trolleys with bombs in between the refugees, as is normal for them. It will be a hard balancing act for the Israeli security apparatus, but might bring more civilians away from the clutches of the Hamas administration and their allied international organsiations. Palestinians have really given scathing interviews about their life under Hamas as soon as they felt safe enough to do so, so I hope their liberation continues quickly without any of the well-meant but misleading internationally demanded ceasefires by that useless dumpsterfire that is the UN which is dominated by countries where the Israeli flag is regularly burned in the streets by angry mobs.

Edited December 29, 2023 by Carolus

[Chudacabra]

19 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

Well no, it doesn't. Occupied territories do not count as part of a country.

That would be like counting Iraq and Afghanistan as the 51st and 52nd states of the US while OEF and OIF were underway.

There isn't really another parallel to the West Bank. Is there another region that is being actively colonized by an occupying power? Maybe Western Sahara? The US never attempted to settle its citizens en masse in the countries it invaded. What country is the West Bank part of exactly then? It's not Palestine. Israel has unilaterally adopted a one-state solution that is extremely unjust for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants. The West Bank and Gaza lack many features of a sovereign country and those aspects are unilaterally exercised by Israel. If Gaza was part of a sovereign state, the Israeli blockade of the enclave would be considered a clear act of war.

Bezalel Smotrich has been quite open about his intention to formally annex the West Bank as well. Netanyahu has never wanted peace or a two-state solution and just boasted about being proud of obstructing that option. The considerable and continuing expansion of settlements and Israeli control of the West Bank has seriously undermined any prospect of a viable nation existing there.

Has Hamas wanted peace? It's hard to say. They have indicated a willingness to accept the 1967 borders and expressed interest in forming a unity government with Fatah. Would they have actually followed through if they were included in negotiations? Maybe, maybe not. We'll never know. There is a tendency to cast Hamas as some sort of nihilistic, Salafist movement like ISIS, but it is a nationalist movement with clear political goals dedicated to the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. 

Fatah has largely kept up their end of the bargain and what happened? Things just got worse and worse. Violent and non-violent means didn't do a thing to improve the situation.

I have found Tareq Baconi to be the most insightful writer on the history of Hamas:  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-tareq-baconi.html

19 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

 

The right of all nations for self determination has been recognized for over a century now: this includes the formation of a Jewish nation state, and its rights to determine who it offers citizenship to.

Why is the same right not afforded to Palestinians and why is there an assumption that the safety of Jewish Israelis is predicated on the oppression of Palestinians? Israel should have a vested interest in ensuring Palestinians have access to a prosperous and free future. Instead, Netanyahu's successive governments have deliberately undermined the Palestinian Authority in part by supporting Hamas to divide and delegitimize the Palestinians and effectively pursued a policy of economic de-development in Gaza and in the West Bank to a lesser extent. You have what is essentially a giant open air prison with virtually no economic opportunity and people act surprised when something bad happens (leaving aside the abundantly clear evidence that Hamas was preparing for an attack that was ignored by flagrantly incompetent intelligence officers). It was never sustainable.

Again, Israel is a state to promote the interests of a particular ethno-religious group with many institutions of a secular democracy within its 1967 borders. I think raises two questions: is this a worthwhile trade-off when compared to a secular democracy for all its citizens within the area where it exercises sovereignty? Even if the answer is yes, to me this is a question worth asking and answering honestly. And, could its political structure be arranged in a way that maintains the character of a Jewish state within the 1967 borders and provides for a dramatically better life for the Palestinians? Here, the answer is unquestionably yes.

19 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

People who are neither citizens nor residents of a country are typically not afforded the same rights as citizens of said country, that is true... and it's not discrimination. There's almost 200 countries in the world, and virtually all of them "discriminates" against non-citizens by refusing to grant them "equal" rights to their own citizens.

Are there other countries that exercise sovereignty over neighbouring regions through permanent military occupation coupled with the mass settlement of civilians or through a blockade? That's the difference. The West Bank and Gaza are de-facto part of Israel. 82% of the West Bank is under some form of Israeli control with some limited self-governance in the other 18%. How is that not effectively part of Israel?

19 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

And there is at least as much grounds to lay blame on the Palestinians for embarking on a war of extermination against the Jews in 1947 and fleeing after that failed as there is to claim that the Jews intentionally ethnically cleansed them in 1948.

What exactly was the Palestinian "war of extermination" against the Jews in 1948? They barely had any sort of organized paramilitary force and really only the Jordanians had any sort of remotely competent military among the Arab countries. The disorganized Arab armies did attempt to stop the establishment of the State of Israel, but it was not a Palestinian-led war. With British support to varying degrees, the Israelis were better equipped (still scrappy by today's standards), better led and better organized force than the Arab armies (largely belonging to newly established countries), which is why they won.

The establishment of Israel as a Jewish state happened and it's not going to be reversed. Israel has arguably not faced an existential threat since the early 1970s, although its nuclear status would have likely protected it against any truly existential threat during the Yom Kippur War. It's a nuclear power with a massive conventional military. It will keep existing and doing whatever its current corrupt leadership wants to do in the West Bank and Gaza, but this approach never really worked except for settlers and opportunistic right-wing politicians, and it backfired spectacularly on October 7th.

It boggles my mind that Netanyahu and Smotrich, who supported Hamas as a means of dividing and discrediting the Palestinians, are still in office and trusted to make decisions. Netanyahu is obviously prolonging the war to save his own skin, which is quite possibly the most vile display of self-interest I have ever seen.

19 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

I agree, they likely never will. It would be a wholly unprecedented thing to do (millions of Germans, Poles, Finns and many others who were expelled in massive population "transfers" after WW2 were never granted any such recompense).

The concept of Israeli compensation also ignores the fact that just as many Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were without a shadow of a doubt forcibly expelled to Israel from the countries they'd lived in for thousands of years after 1948. The compensation those 700,000 Jews and their descendants should be eligible for is virtually never afforded any attention, certainly not by anyone espousing the rights of Palestinians to receive compensation.

The difference is that the Palestinians still live on that land. They were just pushed into a tiny corner of it in Gaza and to a lesser extent in the West Bank, along with the Palestinians who live in Israel proper. Israel is obviously willing to spend tens upon tens of billions of dollars destroying Gaza, an enclave with a GDP per capita that is approximately 60 times lower than Israel. The key problem is that there has never been any meaningful negotiation on the subject and sometimes situations without precedent will require solutions without precedent. Certainly it would be a lot better if Israel had helped Palestinians become a prosperous nation. People with a viable future and a job don't tend to resort to terrorism. This to me is the fundamental problem, as Israeli politics have shifted further and further to the right, it has largely lost the ability to imagine or articulate anything beyond a worsened status quo.

19 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

 

I would refer to the above point re the right to national self determination. It's a fundamental human right for a nation to determine how it's ruled, by whom, and who it offers citizenship to.

Canada is not a stellar example for what Israel should aspire to be. Native Americans in Canada weren't even afforded unconditional right to vote until 1960. Israel, for all its many faults against Arab citizens and despite being a brand new nation state born under exceedingly turbulent conditions, recognized the right of its Arab citizens to vote in its very first elections.

Sort of. Israel extended the right to vote to Arabs living in the pre-1967 borders in the first elections, but they were under martial law until 1966 and did not enjoy the same rights to land ownership as Israeli Jews (and still don't). Again, no contention that non-Jewish citizens of Israel within its 1967 borders do enjoy comparable rights in theory to Jewish citizens of Israel, although informal and formal forms of discrimination and segregation are widespread. My point is that Palestinians under Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza lack any such rights and live in a sort of perpetual limbo with little hope for the future. 

It's obviously an imperfect example, but at least Canada has begun to accept that it was founded on the dispossession and attempted destruction of its First Nations. For the most part, Israel society has done no such thing and in fact goes so far to actively penalize any memorialization of the Nakba. Some supporters of Israel even claim that the Palestinians don't even exist. It's an especially strange belief when you consider that Jews under Ottoman rule for example were Palestinians, as well as being Ottomans. Nations are imagined communities, time to get to imagining them differently.

[Probus]

You are all missing the elephant in the room.  With groups like Hamas in power within the Palestinians, there will be no peace until Israel no longer exists. I'm not sure if Hezbollah also has this view, but if the Palestinians want real peace they have to get rid of terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.  I think (at least before Oct 7th) that Israel would be happy integrating with peaceful Palestinians.

[Anthony P.]

30 minutes ago, Chudacabra said:

The US never attempted to settle its citizens en masse in the countries it invaded. What country is the West Bank part of exactly then? It's not Palestine. Israel has unilaterally adopted a one-state solution that is extremely unjust for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants. The West Bank and Gaza lack many features of a sovereign country and those aspects are unilaterally exercised by Israel. If Gaza was part of a sovereign state, the Israeli blockade of the enclave would be considered a clear act of war.

The settlements are illegal, few would disagree about that. But they don't equal an effective annexation of the West Bank. More accurately, especially nationalistic right wing governments "simply" aren't respecting the PA as a fellow state whose territory they ought to feel obligated to respect.

Nuances to be sure, but there's a distinction to be made between occupying and annexing parts of a neighbouring state versus tolerating, accepting and to varying degrees supporting a kind of bizarre "grass roots movement" occupying stateless lands.

 

Quote

Why is the same right not afforded to Palestinians and why is there an assumption that the safety of Jewish Israelis is predicated on the oppression of Palestinians? Israel should have a vested interest in ensuring Palestinians have access to a prosperous and free future.

No state derives democratic legitimacy from prioritizing the welfare, rights and development of foreigners over their own citizens. That may be crass, but it's how every state on the planet works. If the safety of Israeli citizens (I do not believe that e.g. Iron Dome analyses the path of incoming rockets to gauge whether or not they will impact Arab neighbourhoods and therefore ignore intercepting them) comes at the expense of Palestinians by e.g. constructing border walls to prevent suicide bombers... well, that's more on the Palestinians than it is on the Israelis. To paraphrase you: the safety or rights of Palestinians aren't predicated on murdering Israeli commuters or shoppers.

I fully agree with you that increased Palestinian living standards would be mutually beneficial. But there's no direct, immediate and linear correlation between Palestinian economic development and a decrease in attacks. Just like Palestinians can be assumed to be influenced to violence by Israeli oversteps, Isreali citizens can only be assumed to vote increasingly right wing by Palestinian attacks.

It would be easier for the Palestinian leadership to frankly start behaving than it would be for a majority of the Israeli voters to arrive at some zen like objectivity and indefference to the violence committed against them by the other side.

 

Quote

Again, Israel is a state to promote the interests of a particular ethno-religious group with many institutions of a secular democracy within its 1967 borders. I think raises two questions: is this a worthwhile trade-off when compared to a secular democracy for all its citizens within the area where it exercises sovereignty? Even if the answer is yes, to me this is a question worth asking and answering honestly. And, could its political structure be arranged in a way that maintains the character of a Jewish state within the 1967 borders and provides for a dramatically better life for the Palestinians? Here, the answer is unquestionably yes.

Isreal is a secular democracy. It favours an ethno-religious group as its nation state, but it doesn't derive its legislation from religion, or demands that Jews be religious to be counted as such.

The other point is that again, the Palestinians simply are not Israeli citizens. Israel not accomodating non citizens who live outside its borders does not constitute discrimination.

I don't agree that there's any reason to assume that Israel reverting to its 1967 borders. The Palestinians were plenty violent and antagonistic against them before 1967, and the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 has really demonstrated that ceding territory to the questionable idea that is the Palestinian attempt at achieving statehood brings neither peace nor safety.

 

Quote

What exactly was the Palestinian "war of extermination" against the Jews in 1948? They barely had any sort of organized paramilitary force and really only the Jordanians had any sort of remotely competent military among the Arab countries. The disorganized Arab armies did attempt to stop the establishment of the State of Israel, but it was not a Palestinian-led war. With British support to varying degrees, the Israelis were better equipped (still scrappy by today's standards), better led and better organized force than the Arab armies (largely belonging to newly established countries), which is why they won.

Neither did the Jews, but you accuse them of intentional ethnic cleansing before they'd even proclaimed a state.

More to the point though, the Palestinians (better put, the Arab majority) had exercised horrific levels of violence towards the Jews in the region for centuries as a matter of routine by the end of the Great War, which they "developed" to extreme levels of violence following the Balfour declaration and the realisation that the Jews might one day achieve equal rights. Arab violence towards Jews follwing the Great War and 1947 can only realistically be viewed as having a genocidal aim. And "war of extermination" is a verbatim quote of what the Arab League threatened in 1947.

 

Quote

Certainly it would be a lot better if Israel had helped Palestinians become a prosperous nation. People with a viable future and a job don't tend to resort to terrorism. This to me is the fundamental problem, as Israeli politics have shifted further and further to the right, it has largely lost the ability to imagine or articulate anything beyond a worsened status quo.

It is difficult and dangerous to save a drowning man; it is yet more difficult and dangerous to save a man who is actively attempting to murder you.

Many educated people with promising futures have resorted to terrorism. Terrorism shouldn't be equated with crimes of desperation like theft. Palestinian "liberation" organisations were extremely violent even towards non Israelis already on day one of Palestinian identity: attempting to topple the Jordanian state when it wasn't sufficiently violent towards Israel, effectively destroying Lebanon because... I don't know, I guess too many non Muslims had the gall to live there?

The point is that the Palestinians were  resorting to such incredible levels of violence when Netanyahu was battling zits on his face rather than fairly reasonable Palestinian demands, to the point that fellow Arabs violently evicted them more than once to save their own states.

 

[Anthony P.]

41 minutes ago, Probus said:

You are all missing the elephant in the room.  With groups like Hamas in power within the Palestinians, there will be no peace until Israel no longer exists. I'm not sure if Hezbollah also has this view, but if the Palestinians want real peace they have to get rid of terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.  I think (at least before Oct 7th) that Israel would be happy integrating with peaceful Palestinians.

Considering that Hezbollah enthusiastically submitted Lebanon, a neutral third state, to a virtual Holocaust simply for democractically granting the Christian majority a majority share of political power, I don't think there's much reason to doubt what fate they have in mind for the state which is their primary enemy.

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, Carolus said:

It is also interesting to see the Gaza War in the context of military history.

As per last numbers I have seen, there have been ca. 25.000 casualties in Gaza (as per Hamas) and part of that are ca. 4000 to 5000 combatants (as per IDF).

Any military operation in dense urban terrain, if conducted by a Western military, shows a ratio of 1:8 and 1:12 of killed combatants to killed civilians (when it is a non-western military, it can be anything between 1:10 to 1:100).

Obviously the number of civilian deaths in Gaza will rise as more dead people are found and identified (the current numbers are just a floor, likely), but at the moment, even without the hundreds if not several thousands of Hamas combatants which have been taken prisoner, we are looking at a ratio of 1:4 or 1:5, far less than what past urban warfare would make us expect. And as mentioned, the ratio only improves for the IDF if one includes the prisoners.

In light of that it seems hard to understate how efficient and effective the IDF campaign in Gaza is. It might very well become a role-model urban warfare campaign for the ages if the numbers stay roughly at this ratio.

There is basically no military which ever managed to achieve something similar and be so careful around civilians.

Of course, ssingular suspicious actions by the IDF still need to be investigated and should be, if necessary, condemned and persecuted.

But the civilian death toll needs to be at least twice as high to become average as per past military campaigns in dense urban terrain (where warcrimes surely happened but which were still considered generally "clean" acts of war), and the death toll of Palestinians would have be greater by a multitude to be considered an extraordinary event.

Of course, the international stage still should pay close attention to what happens and ultimately it all depends on what Israel will do once they demilitarized the majority or all of Hamas in Gaza.

One important step will be a purge of the humanitarian aid organisations in Gaza which seem to deeply infiltrated by or completely beholden to Hamas and help the terrorists eagerly with their social media campaign. If the IDF would start taking the reigns over dispersing humanitarian aid in Gaza, more of it might actually reach the civilians who need them. 

To reduce the humanitarian crisis, I think Israel should try to let civilians temporarily cross the border to Israel after a careful check by border control. They are already evacuating wounded Gaza inhabitants to Israeli hospitals and obviously there will be security concerns that Hamas will send suicide bombers and baby trolleys with bombs in between the refugees, as is normal for them. It will be a hard balancing act for the Israeli security apparatus, but might bring more civilians away from the clutches of the Hamas administration and their allied international organsiations. Palestinians have really given scathing interviews about their life under Hamas as soon as they felt safe enough to do so, so I hope their liberation continues quickly without any of the well-meant but misleading internationally demanded ceasefires by that useless dumpsterfire that is the UN which is dominated by countries where the Israeli flag is regularly burned in the streets by angry mobs.

What?! A cursory review of modern urban battles shows nowhere near the numbers you are tossing around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016–2017)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1994–1995)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Huế

At 1:5 Gaza is running a far more indiscriminate operation than any of these fights (the freakin Battle of Hue no less).

Hell, horror shows like Stalingrad were not anywhere near the ratios you are tossing around:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Stalingrad. That is approx 40k civilian dead to nearly 2 million military dead.

Leningrad - a hellish siege of a city filled with civilians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad

The German Army waged that one at about 3:1 and if you count the Russian combatants it goes to nearly 1:1

In fact the only modern battle that comes close to the IDF ratios is this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol

Which puts them in the same camp as the Russian Army - world renown for waging humanitarian warfare.

For a western modern military a 1:5 ratio of combatant to civilian deaths is an unmitigated disaster!

You have got one thing right…this will serve as a “role model” in the history books.  Right along side the Fall of Carthage.

[Carolus]

19 hours ago, The_Capt said:

What?! A cursory review of modern urban battles shows nowhere near the numbers you are tossing around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016–2017)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1994–1995)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Huế

At 1:5 Gaza is running a far more indiscriminate operation than any of these fights (the freakin Battle of Hue no less).

Hell, horror shows like Stalingrad were not anywhere near the ratios you are tossing around:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Stalingrad. That is approx 40k civilian dead to nearly 2 million military dead.

Leningrad - a hellish siege of a city filled with civilians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad

The German Army waged that one at about 3:1 and if you count the Russian combatants it goes to nearly 1:1

In fact the only modern battle that comes close to the IDF ratios is this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol

Which puts them in the same camp as the Russian Army - world renown for waging humanitarian warfare.

For a western modern military a 1:5 ratio of combatant to civilian deaths is an unmitigated disaster!

You have got one thing right…this will serve as a “role model” in the history books.  Right along side the Fall of Carthage.

Huh, I was indeed lead astray - after careful re-checking, the source I read combined displaced civilians with civilian casualties. That's how it achieved a far higher ratio - because a large number of civilians simply try to flee from the combat or leave the area when the urban structures were destroyed.

My apologies about that and thanks for the correction. 

[The_Capt]

1 minute ago, Carolus said:

Huh, I was indeed lead astray - after careful re-checking, the source I read combined displaced civilians with civilian casualties. That's how it achieved a far higher ratio - because a large number of civilians simply try to flee from the combat or leave the area when the urban structures were destroyed.

My apologies about that and thanks for the correction. 

On that I will grant you full points.  IDPs and refugees can number in the millions - just as we are seeing in Gaza.  What is unfortunate is that the casualties caused by those displacements are factored out - starvation and disease etc.

Unfortunately the IDF and Israel do not seem to be doing better than anyone else on this front either.

We can argue legalities all day, but there is a point when this whole thing smacks of revenge against those who do not deserve it.  All those Hamas fighters deserve to die, straight up.  Anyone directly supporting them is also fair game.  But mass destruction with intent to make uninhabitable, and widespread obvious non-combatant killing is not what a modern western military is supposed to be about.

They are making up all sorts of stuff about "AI-enabled targeting"...this is horsesh#t in my opinion.  Right now the US has the most advanced complex targeting enterprise on the planet and I do not think they could sustain up to 200 righteous strikes per day in a complex human and urban environment.  The IDF, despite pushing this line, do not have a corp of magic wizards able to cleanly target at that rate in this environment.  No one does.  They are the same boat we all were over the last 20 years.  What has changed are the error-bars and ROEs.    

[kohlenklau]

 

[Bulletpoint]

On 12/27/2023 at 3:57 AM, The_Capt said:

Journalism is not even really a profession anymore, with standards and norms.  It has become millions of megaphones all projecting the world as they see it.

I would say it depends heavily on the news outlet. The internet has made it much easier for anybody to set up shop and pretend to be a journalist, but that's not the same as actually being a journalist. It's often near impossible for the average media user to tell the difference though.

[Bulletpoint]

https://www.reuters.com/world/south-africa-seeks-international-court-justice-genocide-order-against-israel-2023-12-29/

 

[MHW]

The New York Times ran a piece about what went wrong with the IDF response on October 7th. The article doesn't reveal any surprises, but it does confirm the early picture and and add detail.

Here is a non-paywall gift link: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/world/middleeast/israeli-military-hamas-failures.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J00.nIkS.Ht8N0K3C2OiF&smid=url-share

This quote sums up the situation:

Quote

“As far as I recall, there was no such plan,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible.”

That might be the most damming point, but it is not news. The particulars about what happened are more telling. Take the case of Maglan, a deep reconnaissance unit. Its soldiers got their information from a civilian monitoring the news, social media, and chats:

Quote

With communication out of Re’im disrupted and military leaders in Tel Aviv struggling to understand the scope of the attack, Maglan turned to an unlikely source for information: Refael Hayun, a 40-year-old who lived with his parents in Netivot, about five miles from Gaza.

Mr. Hayun watched Hamas videos of the attack in real time on social media and relayed information to Maglan’s officers. He began fielding WhatsApp messages from people trying to save their children, friends and themselves.

Other key points:

• The Israeli government intended that civilian volunteer units would protect kibbutzim and small towns near the Gaza border, holding off attackers until IDF soldiers arrived. These units were underequipped and undertrained, and many were unable to retrieve weapons from armories after the coordinators who held the keys to armories were killed.
• The quick-response force is commandos, maybe a company or two, intended to act quickly against small bands of hostage-takers.
• The IDF main force along the Gaza border was 3 infantry battalions and a tank battalion. About half of the soldiers were away on leave because of the holidays.
• Forces were much reduced from their recent strength. One infantry battalion was withdrawn after the completion of the border wall; two commando companies were moved to the West Bank just days before the attack.
• Units in the area started pulling their leadership back from leave, early that morning, because of unsettling indications that Hamas was about to do something, but those units let their personnel stay in bed.
• A base at Re’im hosted the Gaza Division's headquarters, and the headquarters for the brigades covering the northern and southern areas. Hamas attacked the base, and the entire IDF command structure for the area went off the air, fighting to survive.
• An early assessment held that there 200 terrorists had stormed into Israel, when the real number was more like 2,000.
• Soldiers underestimated the need for firepower and headed south with light weapons and limited ammunition. The article notes, a few times, that Israelis were outgunned. There doesn't seem to have been any kind of sustainment effort, of course, and tank crews ran out of ammunition.
• The Israeli system relies on mobilizing reservists. That takes time. A reserve major is quoted as saying that his unit planned and rehearsed for deployments with 24 hours' notice.
• Much of the Israeli response was ad hoc, with soldiers coordinating on social media, through messaging apps and phone calls, and by watching the news. (This type of emergent, self-organized response would be celebrated in some circles but not, I suppose, for a major military force.)
• Hamas terrorists took up blocking positions on the highways east of the border towns, halting IDF reinforcements.

 

Edited December 30, 2023 by MHW
Added one more point

[Chudacabra]

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

The settlements are illegal, few would disagree about that. But they don't equal an effective annexation of the West Bank. More accurately, especially nationalistic right wing governments "simply" aren't respecting the PA as a fellow state whose territory they ought to feel obligated to respect.

Nuances to be sure, but there's a distinction to be made between occupying and annexing parts of a neighbouring state versus tolerating, accepting and to varying degrees supporting a kind of bizarre "grass roots movement" occupying stateless lands.

Why not? There are 700,000 Israeli citizens living there permanently and Palestinian controlled-areas are incredibly fragmented by Israeli military control. Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.

This is remarkably similar to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. They are areas with limited self-governance and few features of a nation-state beyond that. Control over borders and external affairs is a basic marker of a sovereign nation-state.

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

No state derives democratic legitimacy from prioritizing the welfare, rights and development of foreigners over their own citizens. That may be crass, but it's how every state on the planet works. If the safety of Israeli citizens (I do not believe that e.g. Iron Dome analyses the path of incoming rockets to gauge whether or not they will impact Arab neighbourhoods and therefore ignore intercepting them) comes at the expense of Palestinians by e.g. constructing border walls to prevent suicide bombers... well, that's more on the Palestinians than it is on the Israelis. To paraphrase you: the safety or rights of Palestinians aren't predicated on murdering Israeli commuters or shoppers.

Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on the basis that security could be maintained without a political solution. Plainly, this backfired spectacularly. The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats. No one felt the same way about "Free South Africa" unless they supported apartheid. Equally, the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's son can use the phrase "From the River to the Sea" without any sanction while Israel also exercises sovereignty from the river to the sea, but no way can a Palestinian say such thing.

Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

I fully agree with you that increased Palestinian living standards would be mutually beneficial. But there's no direct, immediate and linear correlation between Palestinian economic development and a decrease in attacks. Just like Palestinians can be assumed to be influenced to violence by Israeli oversteps, Isreali citizens can only be assumed to vote increasingly right wing by Palestinian attacks.

It would be easier for the Palestinian leadership to frankly start behaving than it would be for a majority of the Israeli voters to arrive at some zen like objectivity and indefference to the violence committed against them by the other side.

But the inverse is untrue? Palestinians are supposed to sit quietly and take any violence directed against them without reacting? The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

 

Isreal is a secular democracy. It favours an ethno-religious group as its nation state, but it doesn't derive its legislation from religion, or demands that Jews be religious to be counted as such.

The other point is that again, the Palestinians simply are not Israeli citizens. Israel not accomodating non citizens who live outside its borders does not constitute discrimination.

Where are Israel's borders then? It controls the external borders of both the West Bank and Gaza. What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?

If Israel was just a secular democracy for everyone living within its borders, then the West Bank and Gaza would be part of it and the people who live there would be citizens instead of subjects under Israeli sovereignty. It is a one-state solution that happens to be quite miserable for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants.

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

I don't agree that there's any reason to assume that Israel reverting to its 1967 borders. The Palestinians were plenty violent and antagonistic against them before 1967, and the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 has really demonstrated that ceding territory to the questionable idea that is the Palestinian attempt at achieving statehood brings neither peace nor safety.

I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance? There may have been some armed groups, but the PLO isn't founded until 1964. There are no meaningful attacks on Israel during this time. Why isn't Israel depicted and antagonistic and violent when it joined France and Britain to attack the nationalist government of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal (a perfectly reasonable thing to belong to the people of Egypt)? 

What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen. 

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

 

Neither did the Jews, but you accuse them of intentional ethnic cleansing before they'd even proclaimed a state.

More to the point though, the Palestinians (better put, the Arab majority) had exercised horrific levels of violence towards the Jews in the region for centuries as a matter of routine by the end of the Great War, which they "developed" to extreme levels of violence following the Balfour declaration and the realisation that the Jews might one day achieve equal rights. Arab violence towards Jews follwing the Great War and 1947 can only realistically be viewed as having a genocidal aim. And "war of extermination" is a verbatim quote of what the Arab League threatened in 1947.

Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.

Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.

In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF, such as when they killed an elderly woman and her daughter when they were trying to use the toilet and shot seven more people sheltering in a Gazan Church on December 16.

There's this bizarre sense that the Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic and care about nothing else, so that if the country subjecting them to military occupation or blockade was Christian or Muslim, they would be content to just continue being oppressed. Would they cheer if Christians bulldozed their olive groves and destroyed their communities? Of course not. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto didn't hate and resist the Germans because they were German, it was because the Germans were trying to kill them all.

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

 

It is difficult and dangerous to save a drowning man; it is yet more difficult and dangerous to save a man who is actively attempting to murder you.

Many educated people with promising futures have resorted to terrorism. Terrorism shouldn't be equated with crimes of desperation like theft. Palestinian "liberation" organisations were extremely violent even towards non Israelis already on day one of Palestinian identity: attempting to topple the Jordanian state when it wasn't sufficiently violent towards Israel, effectively destroying Lebanon because... I don't know, I guess too many non Muslims had the gall to live there?

The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born. No one ascribes collective responsibility to the Israelis for someone like Baruch Goldstein. The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.

Both Palestinians and Israelis have committed horrible acts, but the overwhelming balance of power tilts in Israel's favour. It's a bizarre logic at play for the Palestinians, unless you meet some unspecified expectations, we'll keep occupying you and expanding settlements on your land. But even if you do hold up your end of the bargain, the same thing will happen anyways! 

20 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

The point is that the Palestinians were  resorting to such incredible levels of violence when Netanyahu was battling zits on his face rather than fairly reasonable Palestinian demands, to the point that fellow Arabs violently evicted them more than once to save their own states.

 

They did? There are 2.1 million Palestinians in Jordan as one example. The Palestinians have enjoyed varying levels of support from Arab countries, and sometimes have simply been ignored, exploited for political gain, or forgotten. While some groups of Palestinians, namely the PLO, have been expelled from Arab countries, there's been no wholesale expulsion of them as being some sort of inherently violent barbarians. Again, they're normal people who want to live normal lives with the understandable desire to have a sovereign state instead of a permanent occupation.

[Probus]

So in your opinion @Chudacabra, what is the long term peaceful solution to the Palestinian/Israeli situation?  How do you end the violence (on all levels)?

[Chudacabra]

23 minutes ago, Probus said:

So in your opinion @Chudacabra, what is the long term peaceful solution to the Palestinian/Israeli situation?  How do you end the violence (on all levels)?

I think there are three viable options: one secular state, two fully sovereign states, or two federated states (https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr). I think any of them would be a drastic improvement on the status quo. I think the Land for All proposal is very interesting as a compromise between one secular state and two fully sovereign states.

[Carolus]

47 minutes ago, Chudacabra said:

I think there are three viable options: one secular state, two fully sovereign states, or two federated states (https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr). I think any of them would be a drastic improvement on the status quo. I think the Land for All proposal is very interesting as a compromise between one secular state and two fully sovereign states.

The problem of any these proposed solutions is that whenever the Palestinians authorities were offered a state of their own, which happened several times in the past, they rejected it or started a war in response, because these solutions inhernetly involve accepting the existence of Israel. And that is simply unacceptable to them.

Sure, the innocent Palestinian who didn't film himself happily engaging in sexual abuse of bleeding hostages or mutilation of Israeli corpses might feel different, but he cannot express that desire politically, apparently, because there has been no movement to represent him. And why is that?

Why did up to 70% of Gaza citizens approve of the 7th October massacre even when the survey included "in view of the IDF response afterwards"? 

Surely not because a violent martyr cult has been deeply embedded in them via muppet shows that tells kindergarten children how righteous it is to kill the descendants of "pig-monkeys" aka Jews? 

Even the Fatah, which is the moderate political representation of the stateless Palestinians, has Al-Husseini enshrined as a folk hero. 

For a successful politicial solution Israel needs to do some serious self-reflection and soul searching for what happened in its history, how the Zionist movement achieved the original UN decision, and all that followed.

But if someone wants to transform the stateless Palestinians into a society that would accept a secular state bound by international law of any kind, which means acknowledging that Israelis are actually going away and not get stoned to death and then film themselves dancing on their corpses (like they immediatly did with some of the released Palestinian prisoners which they accused of being spies for Israel and publicly executed - in the West Bank, not in Gaza), I honestly wouldn't even know where to start.

Some of the Palestinian prisoners which were released last month were accused of being spies for Israel and a mob immediately publicly stoned them and had children dance on their corpses while filming with iphones and making music. And that was not in Gaza, but in the Westbank - where either Israel or the moderate Palestinian administration apparently rules.

Forget about whether that is representative - rather think how these people can be part of whatever a long-term peaceful solution looks like. I don't see it yet. Western political thinking simply has big problems dealing with extreme attitudes in general.

Edited December 30, 2023 by Carolus

[Artkin]

On 12/29/2023 at 3:09 PM, The_Capt said:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Stalingrad. That is approx 40k civilian dead to nearly 2 million military dead

2 million dead? I wouldn't trust this source. There were probably 200k dead in the city itself during the fighting tops. 2 million probably refers to the number of killed and captured on both sides from the start and end of Blau up to Manstein's counterattack.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Artkin said:

2 million dead? I wouldn't trust this source. There were probably 200k dead in the city itself during the fighting tops. 2 million probably refers to the number of killed and captured on both sides from the start and end of Blau up to Manstein's counterattack.

Encyclopedia Britannica?  Well if we can’t trust them I am not sure who we can trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/battle-stalingrad-left-incomprehensible-19-million-dead-194783

Even at 200k in the city itself, that is 5:1 combatants against noted civilian losses.  If Gaza is standing at 1:5 it is a pretty brutal action by historical standards.  I mean it is no Nanjing but this is not a clean fight by any stretch. 

[Chudacabra]

17 hours ago, Carolus said:

The problem of any these proposed solutions is that whenever the Palestinians authorities were offered a state of their own, which happened several times in the past, they rejected it or started a war in response, because these solutions inhernetly involve accepting the existence of Israel. And that is simply unacceptable to them.

Would you care to list those occasions? As in, when were the Palestinians offered a sovereign state with no Israeli roads bisecting their country or control over their airspace and frontiers? It'll be really hard because it never happened.

The Palestinian expectation of a state in the West Bank and Gaza is itself a massive compromise accepting a state on 22% of the land of historic Palestine. Would Israel accept Egyptian control over its borders? Nope!

It's so bizarre to me, because you have an immensely powerful country occupying and settling a neighbouring region and the reaction is that the oppressed people in that region have no acceptable political position except for submission. Oppressed people will fight back. Of anyone, Jewish people should know that people really don't like being ghettoized and oppressed.

17 hours ago, Carolus said:

Sure, the innocent Palestinian who didn't film himself happily engaging in sexual abuse of bleeding hostages or mutilation of Israeli corpses might feel different, but he cannot express that desire politically, apparently, because there has been no movement to represent him. And why is that?

I don't even really know what this means. Of course, some terrible things happened on October 7th. Others atrocities, such as the beheaded babies or the baby baked in an oven, are completely fictitious, just like the babies thrown out of incubators story was used to justify the first Iraq War. Meanwhile babies did actually die in incubators in the Al-Shifa hospital and no one cared. Most people killed on October 7th were likely shot, others were killed in the crossfire and others were accidentally killed by the IDF. There seems to be this fetishization of extreme violence, as if people's deaths count more if there's some element of spectacular and personal cruelty to them. I don't doubt that some people did die that way, but I also don't doubt that a far larger number of Palestinians have died in utterly unspeakable ways in the weeks that followed. 

17 hours ago, Carolus said:

Why did up to 70% of Gaza citizens approve of the 7th October massacre even when the survey included "in view of the IDF response afterwards"? 

Surely not because a violent martyr cult has been deeply embedded in them via muppet shows that tells kindergarten children how righteous it is to kill the descendants of "pig-monkeys" aka Jews? 

Look, of course, there is dehumanization and demonization on both sides, but it's absolutely absurd to simply ignore that the same thing happens on the Israeli side as well. There's literally an Israeli Telegram channel of Israelis mocking Palestinian suffering and deaths. It is a political situation that breeds dehumanization of the other side.

And the scale of violence being unleashed on Gaza is simply barbaric. It is indiscriminate collective punishment.

17 hours ago, Carolus said:

Even the Fatah, which is the moderate political representation of the stateless Palestinians, has Al-Husseini enshrined as a folk hero. 

For a successful politicial solution Israel needs to do some serious self-reflection and soul searching for what happened in its history, how the Zionist movement achieved the original UN decision, and all that followed.

But if someone wants to transform the stateless Palestinians into a society that would accept a secular state bound by international law of any kind, which means acknowledging that Israelis are actually going away and not get stoned to death and then film themselves dancing on their corpses (like they immediatly did with some of the released Palestinian prisoners which they accused of being spies for Israel and publicly executed - in the West Bank, not in Gaza), I honestly wouldn't even know where to start.

If someone wants to transform the nuclear power with a massive conventional military lavishly subsidized by American taxpayers into a country that feels it is not acceptable to kill 11,000 children in pursuit of unclear military objectives, then be my guest. The First Oslo Accord was a mutual recognition of Israel and Palestine, so at least some Palestinians have recognized Israel's right to exist since the early 1990s. Hamas has signaled it would be willing to accept the 1967 borders, but since there have been no meaningful negotiations for decades, it's purely speculative if they would actually follow through. But again, the logic here is very odd: Israel will continue an illegal occupation and continue illegally building settlements until the Palestinians do what exactly?

Israel couldn't care less about international law. It has flagrantly committed war crime after war crime in Gaza. Al-Shifa hospital was just a vile display of deliberately destroying a medical facility to show off a room and a toilet. The destruction of an impoverished enclave's entire medical system is unjustifiable. The mass settlement of civilians on territory occupied by a military is also a war crime.

17 hours ago, Carolus said:

Some of the Palestinian prisoners which were released last month were accused of being spies for Israel and a mob immediately publicly stoned them and had children dance on their corpses while filming with iphones and making music. And that was not in Gaza, but in the Westbank - where either Israel or the moderate Palestinian administration apparently rules.

Again, there's extremism on both sides that manifests itself in horrible ways, but Israel is the overwhelming power in the conflict. That's the difference. What else but vile cruelty and dehumanization of the other could justify things like Israeli soldiers shooting a disabled Palestinian man for the crime of carrying lollipops? Reports of Israeli bulldozers burying people alive at the Kamal Adwan Hospital are simply horrifying. And the list goes on and on and on. What possible military or security goal is being served here?

17 hours ago, Carolus said:

Forget about whether that is representative - rather think how these people can be part of whatever a long-term peaceful solution looks like. I don't see it yet. Western political thinking simply has big problems dealing with extreme attitudes in general.

Western political thinking can be extremist and people are so blinded by ideology that they can't even see it. What was the American invasion of Iraq but an extremist movement launched by fundamentalists? The Jewish fundamentalists in Netanyahu's government, like Smotrich and Ben-Givr, are no different than Islamic fundamentalists (the bad kind, the ones that buy lots of American and British weapons are fine).

Literally today, Smotrich said “To have security, we must control the territory. In order to control the territory militarily for a long time, we need a civilian presence.” They're planning to resettle Israelis in Gaza, it's like pouring fuel on the fire.

[Anthony P.]

23 hours ago, Chudacabra said:

Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.

On the one hand you say that acts committed by individual Palestinians do not represent official Palestinian policy... but when an individual Israeli says something batsh*t crazy, you describe it as an established fact. Those are two wildly disparate standards.

Yes, most of the West Bank is occupied. That's frankly just to be expected when the state you claim to run either can not or will not exercise sufficient control over the territory you make claim to from being used for frequent terrorist attacks across the border.

 

Quote

The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats.

At no point can the Palestinians honestly be said to have ever attempted anything other than violence.

The Oslo accords constituted a very brief period of diplomacy and limited non-violence... on the behalf of the PLO alone. All other attempts as "diplomacy" have involved clearly unreasonable demands in respect to the unique Palestinian "right to return", which effectively translate into "disestablish the state of Israel".

 

Quote

Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.

Considering that the PA officially supports the October 7th pogrom... no, they do not reject armed "struggle": the Israeli occupation of the West Bank simply renders them unable to effectively embark on acts of violence.

I agree that Isreali right wing governments go to great lengths to undermine Palestinian policy in most respects. But again, the Palestinians aren't mindless pawns, they have agency and as such, they bear the responsibility for what they do. Israeli policy in Gaza after the October 7th pogrom is clearly heavily influenced by the brutality displayed by Hamas, but that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their actions.

 

Quote

The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.

Disproportionate losses of civilian life doesn't delegitimize military operations. Plenty of Iraqi civilians were killed by Coalition bombing during the Gulf War compared to not a single American, British or French civilian dead. The Blitz didn't kill nearly as many Brits as the combined bomber offensive against Germany did. Japanese bombing killed very few American civilians, which can hardly be said for American bombings of the Home Islands, etc., etc.

The major difference in Gaza is that not even the Nazis refused to protect their civilian population in an effort to intentionally drive up their civilian deaths to discredit their enemies. Hamas does exactly that.

 

Quote

What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?

What other country has neighbouring lands which completely lack an internationally recognised state, which objectively fails to achieve the basic tenents of being an actual state such as exercising control of the territory you make claim to (read Gaza)?

Checkpoints which are objectively necessary to prevent non stop terrorist attacks against civilians aren't delegitimized by virtue of being deemed "demeaning".

 

Quote

I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance?

... what? Few settlements in Israel were safe from fedayeen massacres, especially during the 1950s.

 

Quote

What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen.

I'm not sure what international treaty or the like stipulates that states are obliged to maintain open borders with their neighbours. Physically restricting the means to cross the border into your country from "states" which routinely use that to murder your citizens is not unreasonable.

And Gaza is pretty obviously Hamas' attempt at statehood.

 

Quote

Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.

If you're not going to take the debate more seriously than simply "deleting" inconvenient historical facts, I think I'll bow out.

Pogroms were not the least unusual in the Muslim world at any point in history (until they finally just expelled all their Jews to Israel). Yes, the antisemitic violence in Eastern Europe was part of the reason why Zionism envisioned a Jewish homeland in Palestine (the several thousands of years of continuous Jewish history and presence there likely also played a significant role, to say the least).

Widespread Muslim violence and antisemitism, which ramped up enormously the moment they caught wind of the notion that Jews should not be second class citizens without political representation (I'm assuming that's what you refer to when you bring up the Palestinian/Muslim "religious tolerance"), is also the reason why most Zionists soon realised that nicely asking to be treated as fellow human beings wouldn't be enough to compel the Muslims to respect that wish.

 

Quote

Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours.

That is a blatant post fact construction. There were at least half a dozen major branches of Zionism from the very outset, only a few of which envisioned a sovereign Jewish state. What the "Palestinians" (all residents of Palestine were referred to as Palestinians pre 1947) took issue with was the very notion that a sizeable Jewish presence in Palestine should ever be realised, as they feared losing their very concrete privileged states compared to the Jews, much like American Southernes opposed equal rights for African Americans.

 

Quote

During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.

That is a very, very dirty distortion of history. You are intentionally twisting the statistics to make it out to be a "both sides" or possibly even a "but the Jews were worse" kind of thing, and you completely omit the cause of the event.

The Arab dead were virtually entirely at the hands of the British Army and Mandate police force, who killed mainly Arab rioters and militants to protect Jewish civilians, but mostly because the Arabs had turned on the British and to restore order. Extremely few Arabs were killed by the Jews during the revolt, and those few were mainly in self defence when the Arabs sought to destroy Jewish communities (there are still towns even in Israel itself which are nearly completely devoid of Jews, though they had contained strong and thriving Jewish communities for centuries if not millenia before the 20th century).

Jewish violence towards the Arabs didn't start in earnest until the 1940s, when they had realised that the Arabs only intended to escalate their openly genocidal violence once the British left.

 

Quote

In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF

... you might want to type "Christians Gaza Hamas" into Google if you honestly believe that.

 

Quote

The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born.

I clearly referred to Black September, when the Palestinians attempted to topple the entire Jordanian state in direct concert with a Syrian invasion. That wasn't exactly a minor, unknown incident.

 

Quote

The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.

So are the ones I've met. So are most ordinary Russians today, most people who lived in Nazi Germany, etc. Almost all ordinary people are quite nice and don't actively harbour any particular ill will toward their neighbour.

That doesn't mean that their states (or in the case of Palestine, the political organisations which can most realistically be described as ruling them) shouldn't be resisted or fought if they act outrageously and violently.

 

 

Edit: Oh well, I wish you and all others who partake in/subject yourself to this thread a very happy New Years Eve! May 2024 be less of a misery than this year turned out to be!

Edited December 31, 2023 by Anthony P.

[Probus]

2 hours ago, Chudacabra said:

Most people killed on October 7th were likely shot, others were killed in the crossfire and others were accidentally killed by the IDF.

I'm sorry @Chudacabra. I was following you until you made this statement. You obviously didn't see any of the videos. This statement undermines the credibility of your arguments somewhat. 

October 7th was a nightmare not a crossfire or accident. 

Edited December 31, 2023 by Probus
Shortened

[The_Capt]

22 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

Disproportionate losses of civilian life doesn't delegitimize military operations. Plenty of Iraqi civilians were killed by Coalition bombing during the Gulf War compared to not a single American, British or French civilian dead. The Blitz didn't kill nearly as many Brits as the combined bomber offensive against Germany did. Japanese bombing killed very few American civilians, which can hardly be said for American bombings of the Home Islands, etc., etc.

You do see your own inconsistencies, right?  You call out another poster for being reductionist and oversimplifying, yet you do exactly the same thing if it supports your own position.  This paragraph right here is such a collection of gross oversimplification and inconsistencies that is beggars imagination.

You are comparing pre-1949 war to post.  Total wars to limited military interventions.  These are no where near in the same context or even legal frameworks.  It is like you are referencing history as a large single data point instead of a vast collection of different ones.

Disproportionate civilian casualties do not automatically de-legitimize warfare.  Even the LOAC (which everyone one the pro-Israel side appears all to ready to simply ignore) allows for collateral damage.  A disproportionate number of unlawful civilian casualties - beyond military necessity or as a direct result of policies that increase human suffering or death in an enemy population can de-legitimize a party within conflict incredibly fast.  

“Hamas committed atrocity ergo we can toss out LOAC” is not only immoral it is also incredibly shortsighted - as I have pointed out on numerous occasions.  Yet some cling onto their WW2 history books like they are gospel on how wars ought to be fought.  We created the LOAC because of those wars…in spite of them.  The fire bombings, Rape of Nanjing, nuclear holocausts, Jewish holocaust and various horrors of every shape and kind.  These are why we decided what was “legitimate” in the first place after 1949.

The calculus of “this many beheaded Jewish babies equals that many Palestinian babies” is perverse.  The answer is “none of them”.  Just because Hamas went illegal does not justify in any way shape or form, Israel doing the same thing.  By this sort of logic and tossing out the rules, one could make a coherent case that 9/11 was justified on the part of Islam for all those disproportionate civilian casualties in the Gulf War.

I can only go by what I can see and right now the IDF do not look or smell righteous.  They look and smell out of control.  Which makes them morally equal to Hamas.  How is that going to make anything better?

I do agree that this entire thread is growing tiresome and we simply are not going to agree.  But let’s be frank and let me ask the real question.  How much of this is western biased and good old fashion racism against Arabs for all the trouble and pain we have gone through in that region?  We were well programmed to hate Arabs in Hollywood and not so subtle machinations of western Christianity over the last 20 years.  And now that something looking a lot like ethnic cleansing of a pseudo Arab state (or whatever) is happening people are tying narratives in knots trying to somehow justify Israel’s actions….because you are really ok with that?
 

Edited January 1 by The_Capt

[kohlenklau]

Maybe moving forward we all just post battle reports, technical info, and strategy reports. 

 

 Stay away from posting personal court room testimony or whatever you'd call it.

Just an idea.

Or lock it 

Edited January 1 by kohlenklau

[Probus]

1 hour ago, kohlenklau said:

Maybe moving forward we all just post battle reports, technical info, and strategy reports. 

 

 Stay away from posting personal court room testimony or whatever you'd call it.

Just an idea.

Or lock it 

Yes. You are absolutely right!

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/after-u-s-navy-helicopters-sink-houthi-boats-are-strikes-next

The Houthis are finally taking some fire.  We are not just knocking down their missiles. This combat may be more appropriate in a game like Harpoon, but this is also happening:

It also looks like the UK is getting ready to attack the Houthis

 

[kohlenklau]

I have been out of the navy a long time and didn't know the exact model of that SEAHAWK helicopter nor what exactly was the squadron designation. It is an MH-60R and HSM is the current navy abbreviation for Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron. (HSM-77) "Saberhawks" is a United States Navy helicopter squadron based at Naval Air Facility, Atsugi, Japan. 

I guess somebody has some "kill markings" on the nose now?