Hamas has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers(1). That's about 6% to 8% of the entire adult Gazan male population. It's impossible to have that many soldiers without widespread support. Maybe not a majority. But certainly a significant minority.
Like it or not, a significant percentage of the adult Gazan population are responsible for Hamas because they're actively fighting for Hamas or directly supporting them. Pointing out that those people are accountable, and can choose a different future, is not genocidal language. It's stating the facts of the situation.
Germany also faced the same choice after WW2. They chose to eradicate Nazism, which is a big part of why Germany is the successful country it is today.
> It's impossible to have that many soldiers without widespread support. Maybe not a majority. But certainly a significant minority.
Israel wanted Hamas to rule Gaza though and supported it financially while working against moderate Palestinians:
> Netanyahu said: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas, ... This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
This means that this attacks of Hamas by Israel is unlikely to lead to a better situation post war, because Netanyahu's position is to always have a reason why the Palestinians should not have freedom.
It is more likely that things just get worse for the Palestinians after this war.
> If Israel did nothing other than kill the ~40,000 Hamas soldiers, along with destroying military and economic infrastructure, they'll easily buy themselves another 10 years of relative safety. At which point they can do it all over again.
Oh, okay. You are fine with just repeatedly bombing a captive population. It takes all kinds I guess.
> I already linked you this survey that showed that Hamas doesn't have widespread support
You're survey shows frustration with ineffective governance. There are lots of governments out there that people are frustrated with, yet still support.
> Oh, okay. You are fine with just repeatedly bombing a captive population. It takes all kinds I guess.
I'm not fine with it. But that doesn't change the fact that from Israeli's point of view, it is a better option than doing nothing. Allowing Hamas to conduct another massacre in the future is unacceptable. It's also unacceptable to allow Hamas to continue to rain down missiles on Israel - they're still launching them into Israel every single day.
So, let's for a moment assume that Israel is successful in eradicating all of Hamas. Unlikely, but for the sake of the argument let's assume that it works.
Then, two days later they kick a bunch of Palestinians out of their homes and bulldoze it, hand the land to a bunch of settlers.
> Then, two days later they kick a bunch of Palestinians out of their homes and bulldoze it, hand the land to a bunch of settlers.
There aren't settlers in Gaza. There are in West Bank, and in the West Bank those settlers do in fact illegally and immorally force West Bank Palestinians from their land. On occasion settlers also murder them. But in Gaza the Israeli government forced all the Jews in Gaza to leave when Israel deoccupied Gaza in 2005.
> What's to stop a new Hamas to rise again?
Like it or not, Israel can easily get another 10 years or so of relative safely even if Hamas rises again simply by blockading Gaza after a successful military operation to exterminate Hamas. Which is a better outcome for Israel than the status quo, where Hamas will likely conduct another massacre of Israeli's in the near future. Not to mention, continue to launch rockets into Israel.
I didn't say the settlement was in Gaza. These things are not as disconnected as you seem to believe.
> There are in West Bank, and in the West Bank those settlers do in fact illegally and immorally force West Bank Palestinians from their land.
And what is exactly being done about this?
> On occasion settlers also murder them.
And what is being done about that?
> But in Gaza the Israeli government forced all the Jews in Gaza to leave when Israel deoccupied Gaza in 2005.
They not only forced them to leave: they also demolished the buildings they left behind.
> Like it or not, Israel can easily get another 10 years or so of relative safely even if Hamas rises again simply by blockading Gaza after a successful military operation to exterminate Hamas.
10 years is nothing and again, this is the sort of thinking that keeps on fueling this conflict: you don't need a solution for 10 years, you need one that actually works. And killing large numbers of people rarely solves problems. If anything history should have taught us that.
> Which is a better outcome for Israel than the status quo, where Hamas will likely conduct another massacre of Israeli's in the near future.
They just might: now what could Israel possibly do to stop that from happening? If the answer is 'nothing' then it's really just a matter of time.
Rabin had the right idea: de-escalate and normalize. All this ego and religion driven talk of supremacy, god given rights and violence has to stop. Realize that Hamas or its future replacement will use what happens today as their most successful recruiting drive ever. The #1 goal should be to stop that recruiting drive, not to deal with Hamas in the present in strictly military terms. But for that to happen Israel would need to address some of its own faults. Fat chance of that happening in the current situation though and so I've already more or less accepted that this conflict will last for another century or so.
Less than was being done before, now that Hamas has slaughtered over 1000 Israeli civilians, taking attention away from Israeli crimes in the West Bank. In fact, it appears that settler extremists have used this as cover to step up their crimes, murdering a bunch of West Bank Palestinians in the past few weeks.
I hope you can see how people might see this situation as a lesson that the West Bank approach of encroachment and murder _is_ in fact the correct approach, and letting Gazan's form a state was a mistake that lead to the slaughter of over 1000 Jews.
> They not only forced them to leave: they also demolished the buildings they left behind.
What is your point? Settlers were demolishing and dismantling buildings _they_ had built and owned. If anything, Israel tried to at least hand over many greenhouses intact. But Gazan's looted many of the intact ones after the handover. This is all well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaz...
> 10 years is nothing and again, this is the sort of thinking that keeps on fueling this conflict: you don't need a solution for 10 years, you need one that actually works. And killing large numbers of people rarely solves problems. If anything history should have taught us that.
10 years is a lot better than 3 years. And if Israel makes a concerted effort to destroy Hamas now, and keeps Gaza from redeveloping, the next attack by the next Hamas is likely to kill a lot less people. That's a win for Israel.
> Rabin had the right idea: de-escalate and normalize.
Much safer to attempt that after Hamas is utterly crushed. After all Israel just tried the de-escalate and normalize approach over the past few years. Hamas used that deescalation to plan and prepare for their recent attack. They've even bragged about the fact that they deceptively did that, duping Israel into thinking Hamas was focusing on their economy: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-dup...
The tens of thousands of Hamas members who planned and carried out the recent massacre are monsters. Simple as that. They need to be thoroughly wiped out.
The sort of people who rape and murder on a huge scale in cold blood are not the sort of people who are worth negotiating with. Diplomacy has its limits. Negotiating with the Nazi's proved to be a mistake. Negotiating with Hamas is no different.
You need to get out of the mindset that there is a 'win' to be had here. The only thing that can be achieved is for either side to lose less, winning would require turning back the clock. More massacre is just going to prolong the conflict and ultimately will make it worse, possibly much worse.
> The tens of thousands of Hamas members who planned and carried out the recent massacre are monsters. Simple as that. They need to be thoroughly wiped out.
This is how you spell 'genocide'. To be able to solve this Israel will need to make some concessions that may well be impossible for the hard liners within Israel to accept and likewise the various Arab countries that back Hamas will have to accept that Israel - regardless of the the various historical mistakes - is there to stay.
But neither side is willing to do that and so you can look forward to a lot more blood spilled. The illusion that by perpetrating more violence this can be solved is utterly depressing.
Ok, that's just silly. The legal definition of genocide(1) is actions, like violence, with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The types of groups that are protected are intentionally limited. There are lots of types of groups that are clearly not protected in the legal definition of genocide.
Hamas are a group of genocidal terrorists who are both a political party - not a protected group - and a military force - also not a protected group. Hamas's founding charter called for the extermination of Jews, a protected religious group. The idea that you can't destroy a group of genocidal terrorists is ludicrous, no different to how we don't call it genocide when criminal gangs get rounded up and arrested regardless of how many gang members are involved.
It wasn't genocide when 5 million German soldiers were killed in WW2. The Nazis aren't a protected group, and it was a good thing that the Nazis were destroyed as a group. Hamas is no different.
It’s a dictatorial regime. Just like Iran. The amount of soldiers as % of population is totally irrelevant when people are forced into it.
You are putting the blame of the situation on the civilians. That is the problem. Do you think they chose to live in such a place? Did you read on how Hamas came into power and who helped them?
That was after the allied powers realized their mistake in exacting retribution on Germany after WWI. The desire to take a future away from Germans directly led to the rise in Nazism. Ironically enough that's the same reason Hamas has widespread support. It's easier to sacrifice everything when you have nothing.
Maybe we should learn the lessons of WWII, and allow Palestinians a future. Otherwise it is genocidal language.
Israel and only Israel is reponsible for what it's doing to Gaza. So if it will chose genocide, it will have to live with that PR nightmare for a long time. It may lose alies, and life without alies may not be so good.
> That is genocidal language where you are holding civilians accountable.
The entire situation is deeply regrettable and it's hard to find any heroes here, but I feel like we forget our own history so easily.
The United States, within living memory, conducted a firebombing campaign of Dresden, which had limited military value, killing over 25,000. We interned over 100,000 of our own citizens of Japanese ancestry. We conducted a firebombing campaign of Tokyo, killing around 100,000 civilians and leaving over a million homeless.
And of course we dropped two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing mostly civilians and causing deep scarring both psychological and physiological for the survivors.
The reality is that these rules of war are more like guidelines. There is no one to enforce them if you win. When a nation feels existentially threatened, the gloves tend to come off.
I don't seek to excuse anything, what is happening is a tragedy and as a matter of public policy there needs to be more diplomatic costs associated with unnecessary loss of civilian life. But there are not many countries that truly occupy a moral high ground in this regard.
Basically that what matters are international norms rather than international laws, and while Israel is plainly breaking international laws, it's less clear that they're breaking international norms.
That's a somewhat fair thing to point out, but it's also a bit thick to think that what people find so objectionable about Israel's retaliation is that it breaks international law or norms or any other such standard.
It's about the basic morality of its imposition of collective punishment on the population of Gaza, while of course its population rages incandescently on the collective punishment Hamas sought to inflict on them, and stuff like that.
Collective punishment is rarely a moral answer.
Luckily, in this thread, we seem to have no people who are deranged enough to approve of Hamas's attack. But we do have people deranged enough to approve of Israel's response and who want everyone to think that when a Palestinian is killed, it's either a lie, or just tough, just collateral damage, but that when an Israeli is killed, it justifies the killing and further dispossession of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians in recompense.
I entirely agree, and I feel moreover that it's the moral obligation of the United States to use our substantial foreign policy influence with Israel to compel a more humane treatment of Palestinians.
Nevertheless when people point out that this is a "genocide" or that Israel is committing "war crimes" I wonder what point is actually being made. If it wasn't against international law, would that make it ok to collectively punish Palestine? I certainly don't think it would.
At some level it just feels like weaponization of language, or at the very least like lazy thinking. One party is breaking laws, and breaking laws is bad, so that party is bad. But that logic would've applied to the USA in WWII, so as far as I'm concerned it's not at all elucidating.
People can make an argument that it is a genocide, and there is a reasonable defense that it is not. If, based on the facts, it doesn't seem to you like a genocide, then that's fine, but it's not like there is no rational basis for those assertions.
With war crimes, I recall there being some specific evidence thereof, potentially from the UN. It was brought up during PMQs in Ireland, I think.
> But that logic would've applied to the USA in WWII, so as far as I'm concerned it's not at all elucidating.
I think most of us:
a) Do not think this should prevent us from calling a spade a spade;
b) In any event, can see quite a few differences between the two situations, such as the relative power disparity between the 2 sides in the middle east, the fact that Germany had taken over or was engaged in active hostilities with...most of Europe, etc.
Maybe the US was wrong to bomb Dresden; maybe it was a war crime, and maybe it could have won the war without doing that, and without dropping atomic bombs. But that doesn't mean we have to hesitate before calling out similar crimes in the future just because we live in the US.
It’s not a maybe. By current international law, the US government is guilty of war crimes. It is most definitely guilty of genocide against Japan with the wanton and unnecessary killing of Japanese civilians that can only be seen as a stark retaliation and collective punishment for the preventable events of Pearl Harbor.
That’s how the law is written. There is no maybe about it.
However, the fact that people are largely sympathetic to the US implies that maybe the law is a little too harsh, and does not provide any caveats for situational violence.
International law today is a perfect ideal. It’s like a criminal code that bans murder, but doesn’t include any leeway for self defense or reduced sentences for manslaughter. Only perfect people can hold to its standards and no one is perfect.
> In any event, can see quite a few differences between the two situations, such as the relative power disparity between the 2 sides in the middle east, the fact that Germany had taken over or was engaged in active hostilities with...most of Europe, etc.
But this is exactly my point. The moral imperative was clear in WWII, but the same pejoratives ("war crimes", etc) would equally apply.
These terms are at best uninteresting and at worst distracting, which is what I'd originally intended to highlight with the quote referring to "genocidal language".
We can be against those past misdeeds and against these current misdeeds as well. Please don't divert attention to other examples right now, because this current one is ongoing and we can appeal to our representatives to do something about the future, even if we seem helpless right now.
>The United States, within living memory, conducted a firebombing campaign of Dresden, which had limited military value, killing over 25,000. We interned over 100,000 of our own citizens of Japanese ancestry. We conducted a firebombing campaign of Tokyo, killing around 100,000 civilians and leaving over a million homeless.
The United States was the most powerful country by far at the time. Israel is tiny in comparison; it can't afford to just disregard public opinion and make enemies with all its neighbours, because the US won't be able to protect it forever.
“Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.”
Einstein in his letter to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, Nov. 25, 1929, AEA (Albert Einstein Archives) 33-411.
He's not alone in this sentiment. Other prominent Jews like Hannah Arendt were anti-Zionist too.
As are many present day Jews both inside and outside of Israel. And not all of those are of the same plumage either, there are moderate anti-Zionist Jews as well as Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews. It's all pretty confusing, from what I understand it has to do with different opinions on how the state of Israel came into being for the latter.
That has no bearing on what I said. Israel exists due to this goal to establish a Jewish homeland. This is where we are.
Einstein's vision was not followed and his fame as a Nobel prize winner doesn't automatically mean he had the best answer.
If only everyone were kind-hearted and well-meaning and acted in good faith and etc, then maybe we wouldn't need religion or government. That, however, is not the world we live in and being too "nice" can mean you just enable the bad behavior of people less nice than you.
> The entire situation is deeply regrettable and it's hard to find any heroes here, but I feel like we forget our own history so easily.
What exactly is your point? Are you saying that genocide can happen, have happened and so nothing here is a big deal. I would prefer to stand against genocidal language and call it out. I would prefer to avoid a moral nihilism stance personally -- maybe something better like "Never Again": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again
> Anyway, if Gazan citizens learn the lessons of their mistakes, they still have a future.
That is genocidal language where you are holding civilians accountable.
The Gazan population does not favor Hamas according to polling prior to October 7th: https://twitter.com/ForeignAffairs/status/171800792755696451...
Hamas was also boosted by Netanyahu in part to prevent a two-state solution and diminish moderate Palestinian leadership: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...