Israel - Hamas War VI

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Does removing Hamas justify any and all military expenditures by Israel?

It justifies appropriate uses of military force according to the laws of armed conflict that furthers the strategic goals Israel has set forth.

[Varysblackfyre321]

6 minutes ago, Ran said:

It justifies appropriate uses of military force according to the laws of armed conflict that furthers the strategic goals Israel has set forth.

Is that appropriateness on strictly on what is militarily effective in the removal of hamas in gaza(at least for the moment?)

 

[kissdbyfire]

The question then is, is what is happening in Gaza now an “appropriate use of military force according to the laws of armed conflict”? I don’t think it is, I think it’s excessive use of force (disproportionate). Also, it feels to me that if this is within the “laws of armed conflict”, then perhaps it shouldn’t be. And while I’m no expert, I have read/listened to several people who are and who have very different opinions on this. 

Edited October 29, 2023 by kissdbyfire

[Gorn]

2 hours ago, Altherion said:

If the one and only thing on the other side was retaliation, then yes, the choice would be easy. However, in reality, this is a variant of the trolley problem: one can let the trolley roll (leave the hostages where they are) or one can redirect it onto another set of people (release thousands of terrorists who will then almost surely go on to kill more people and take more hostages). There is no answer that everyone agrees to even to the original trolley problem, never mind the variant where you don't know how much harm acting causes.

Except that this is not a hypothetical trolley problem, but something that already happened twelve years ago, and the direct effects of that action can be observed. Terrorists that were released the last time went on to commit more acts of terrorism, hundreds died instead of one person, the terrorist organization that was rewarded for taking hostages took more hostages.

And none of this should have been a surprise or unexpected. Someone who was convicted in court for 26 life sentences (again, not a hypothetical situation) wasn't going to start gardening and collecting figurines after being released.

[GrimTuesday]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

It justifies appropriate uses of military force according to the laws of armed conflict that furthers the strategic goals Israel has set forth.

Israel is already committing war crimes, they exceeded the "law of Armed Conflict" on day one with their utilization of collective punishment. Hamas cannot be defeated with bombs, the only option is peace and reconciliation.

Edited October 29, 2023 by GrimTuesday

[Craving Peaches]

18 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

The question then is, is what is happening in Gaza now an “appropriate use of military force according to the laws of armed conflict”?

I doubt it. UN says it's not, Human Rights groups say it's not, even Israel's allies are urging them to respect international law (which they obviously wouldn't have to do if Israel was respecting international law), ICC is investigating. Multiple people have said the response is disproportionate and so on.

But even if it is within the 'rules of war', that doesn't affect the fact that the enforced suffering of innocent civilians is an affront to common moral standards. Which brings us back to the ridiculous 'not technically a war crime' argument, which just totally misses the point.

Edited October 29, 2023 by Craving Peaches

[fionwe1987]

6 minutes ago, Gorn said:

Except that this is not a hypothetical trolley problem, but something that already happened twelve years ago, and the direct effects of that action can be observed. Terrorists that were released the last time went on to commit more acts of terrorism, hundreds died instead of one person, the terrorist organization that was rewarded for taking hostages took more hostages.

And none of this should have been a surprise or unexpected. Someone who was convicted in court for 26 life sentences (again, not a hypothetical situation) wasn't going to start gardening and collecting figurines after being released.

You're right if you release terrorists and do nothing else, you're likely to get more terrorism.

But released terrorists causing violence isn't the only balancing act you need to think about. Escalating violence also breeds more violence. It makes today's children tomorrow's terrorists.

So you have to ask that second question too. Am I, in the name of safety, seeding further instability and risk?

I've seen no evidence the "go in right now and destroy them all" crowd has done any kind of reckoning about this cost of their preferred response. 

[Ran]

 

4 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

But even if it is within the 'rules of war', that doesn't affect the fact that the enforced suffering of civilians is an affront to common moral standards.

I agree. Hamas has a lot to answer for.

 

 

[kissdbyfire]

2 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

I doubt it. UN says it's not, Human Rights groups say it's not, even Israel's allies are urging them to respect international law (which they obviously wouldn't have to do if Israel was respecting international law), ICC is investigating. Multiple people have said the response is disproportionate and so on.

You know, I was listening to a podcast earlier today and they had Sacha Deshmukh on for a chat. He is the Chief Executive of Amnesty International UK, and he was talking about the level of threat to doctors, health care workers and other aid providers from several different organisations in Gaza right now as being as bad as any of them had ever seen anywhere. Doesn’t this also points to a disproportionate response? So many aid workers and journalists killed, on top of all the civilians. 

2 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

But even if it is within the 'rules of war', that doesn't affect the fact that the enforced suffering of civilians is an affront to common moral standards. Which brings us back to the ridiculous 'not technically a war crime' argument, which just totally misses the point.

Yes, I agree. It’s the insanity of doing the same thing over, and over, and over again and expecting a different result. Be brutal, show you can piss further and you have a bigger cock. Rinse. Repeat.

[Craving Peaches]

10 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

I agree. Hamas has a lot to answer for.

 

 

No one is disputing this. For some reason people seem find it very hard to accept it is not okay for Israel to kill civilians either. If you care about innocent lives, then attacks on civilians should be condemned no matter who the attacker is. Which is why I was sadly surprised when people who rightly condemned Hamas for their atrocities, then brushed off the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians as just a consequence of war or unfortunate collateral damage.

[Ran]

8 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Doesn’t this also points to a disproportionate response? So many aid workers and journalists killed, on top of all the civilians. 

When you hear stories from people who used to work for NGOs and media in Gaza, is it really a surprise? Many admit that militants were rife, that they were using schools and hospitals and offices to launch attacks or store munitions, and that many outlets chose to keep quiet until after they left Gaza because of a fear of reprisal. So many aid workers are being killed because Hamas militants are attacking from refugee camps, too.

8 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Be brutal, show you can piss further and you have a bigger cock. Rinse. Repeat.

It's not about that for the IDF. They have been given tasks that include dismantling Hamas and its ability to continue attacking Israel (which it is still doing!) and they are carrying out that task under the extremely challenging circumstances of an entrenched enemy surrounding itself with human shields.

ETA:

Quote

attacks on civilians should be condemned no matter who the attacker is

Yes.

Attacks on lawful military targets, OTOH...

Edited October 29, 2023 by Ran

[Zorral]

4 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Yes, I agree. It’s the insanity of doing the same thing over, and over, and over again and expecting a different result. Be brutal, show you can piss further and you have a bigger cock. Rinse. Repeat.

They already knew it early in the game of Europe ridding itself of their "Jewish problem" after WWII, by dumping it on the Arab.

Utterly coincidentally I am watching the BBC early 1990s adaptation of Nagaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn Mysteries.  In the third episode, "The Nursing Home Murder," the plot driver is the issue of Palestine.  I haven't heard "Palestine" invoked in dialog so often ever.  One of the UK Governments principal executors of their Palestine solution, and now the consequences, which is now called the Palestine Problem, is murdered.  Alleyn has to find out who and why.

[Craving Peaches]

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

Attacks on lawful military targets, OTOH..

So the whole of Gaza is a 'lawful military target' then?

[Bael's Bastard]

29 minutes ago, GrimTuesday said:

Israel is already committing war crimes, they exceeded the "law of Armed Conflict" on day one with their utilization of collective punishment. Hamas cannot be defeated with bombs, the only option is peace and reconciliation.

Substitute Hamas with Nazis and you might begin to understand how absolute full of shit it is to say this to Jews.

[kissdbyfire]

15 minutes ago, Ran said:

It's not about that for the IDF.

I was referring to Bibi & his allies in government, I didn’t mean the IDF and I should have made that clear. 

Edited October 29, 2023 by kissdbyfire

[kissdbyfire]

Can we all at least agree that it is possible to feel sadness and outrage and heartbreak for ALL innocent lives lost? That feeling sadness for all the innocent Israeli lives lost and feeling sadness for all the innocent Palestinian lives lost are not mutually exclusive? Sigh. 

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, fionwe1987 said:

Something must be done. It must be done to prove that you're not a pushover. That such past actions have proved no such thing, and haven't acted as any kind of deterrent, is to be ignored. 

Perpetuate the cycle of violence. Maintain the image of toughness. Solve nothing. Rinse. Repeat.

It drives me crazy. Pacifism is always derided as irrealistic, but history shows that it can achieve incredible successes. It's not always the solution - deterrence is a thing, and you do need to show resoluteness is the face of aggression. But measured responses are essential to move toward permanent resolutions to conflicts.
I was glad to learn Mossad will go after the masterminds. I think that's an approach that could have been pushed to show resoluteness (we will find you, and you will pay), while at the same time demanding the immediate release of the hostages - possibly the surrender of military equipment (you should try, even if you don't expect anything). Some bombings were inevitable to silence the rockets, but an incremental escalation if demands were not met seems only logical. The leaflets would make sense if Palestinians had communication channels with the IDF - the opposite of what is being done.
This was a brutal response, not a measured one. And like most brutal responses, it only created additional problems on top of the ones that couldn't be avoided. Starting from the fact that installing another administration after Hamas will now have to be done with a traumatized civilian population in a devastated area.
An interim administration by a coalition of states is a good idea. As to how to remove Hamas in the first place, I would have explored longer evacuation delays over intensive bombing to begin with. That would have involved controling the population movements by coordinating with international agencies, so yes, that's work. If Hamas has really fortified some areas, flatten those, but always incrementally - civilians should have enough time to flee a zone. Proceed from there, possibly establish a perimeter for the interim administration - ideally, eventually protected by a UN peacekeeper force.
In a nutshell, probably getting somewhere pretty close to where we are now, but over a much longer period of time, with far fewer civilian casualties, with a genuine chance of having obtained the release of at least some of the hostages, and with much better chances of actually building something out of the rubble.
As to eliminating Hamas fighters... Well, that's a problem anyway, right? The bombing may have caught some Hamas installations and cells by surprise, but has this brutal bombing campaign prevented Hamas from simply dissolving into the civilian population? What is the long-term plan to topple Hamas now?
The one strategic value I could see to this brutality would be if the IDF sought to target weapons caches before they could be moved. But if they dropped that many bombs for that, it would mean it was mostly guesswork, and they probably don't even know if they were reasonably successful. And that many bombs can't have been just to get rid of rocket launchings either.
What I fail to see are the benefits of immediate action, that is to say whether there were strategic objectives that could only be achieved by reaching this scale of destruction immediately, and whether they were worth a slaughter - costing the moral high ground. The arguments defending the operation tend to focus on its moral legitimacy. Fair enough, but this doesn't absolve it from judgments of efficiency. What could possibly justify that much loss of life?
Or let's put it differently. How did Hamas grow so powerful that the IDF desperately needed some element of surprise to strike back? And if the intelligence was that bad to begin with, how did they identify hundreds of sites in days?
I think the arguments given here fail to justify the brutality of the operation. I'm not sure such brutality should be justified, but I really don't remember any arguments that really tried. Indifference to Palestinian deaths on the Israeli side has been taken as a given rather than as a crime. There is no will to hold Israel to a higher standard.

[TrueMetis]

1 hour ago, kissdbyfire said:

The question then is, is what is happening in Gaza now an “appropriate use of military force according to the laws of armed conflict”? I don’t think it is, I think it’s excessive use of force (disproportionate). Also, it feels to me that if this is within the “laws of armed conflict”, then perhaps it shouldn’t be. And while I’m no expert, I have read/listened to several people who are and who have very different opinions on this. 

While the laws of war are pretty complex and endlessly debatable, in this case it's pretty clear cut. Want to get into the weeds? It's actually debatable whether Israel had the right to self defence in this case at all, because that right is typically afforded when talking about defending against another nation state, rules are different when it's occupier and occupee.

33 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

Substitute Hamas with Nazis and you might begin to understand how absolute full of shit it is to say this to Jews.

Okay, but Hamas isn't the Nazis. They're not a fully independent nation with a powerful army, navy, and air force. They're a terrorist group operating in one of the worlds largest open air prisons that has no alternatives because Israel has worked very hard to prevent other alternatives.

ETA: Also like, once the Nazis where beaten Billions of dollars were poured into rebuilding Germany and making sure it could become a successful independent state once again, which seems pretty peace and reconciliation to me, but idk.

Edited October 29, 2023 by TrueMetis

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

39 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yes.

Attacks on lawful military targets, OTOH...

One can't help but get the impression that if Israel called the entirey of Gaza a "lawful military target," you would be here defending them murdering each and every civilian to the last child. I would love for you to prove me wrong here. 

[GrimTuesday]

45 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

Substitute Hamas with Nazis and you might begin to understand how absolute full of shit it is to say this to Jews.

Pretty laughable that the person who is defending ethnic cleansing is accusing others of being Nazis. The fascist, genocidal Israeli state has more in common with Nazi Germany than Hamas does. You're neck deep in Hasbara propaganda, and it's pretty fucking pathetic.

28 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Also like, once the Nazis where beaten Billions of dollars were poured into rebuilding Germany and making sure it could become a successful independent state once again, which seems pretty peace and reconciliation to me, but idk.

Except for all the Nazis that were left in positions of power in West Germany. Of course, I guess if you consider the formation of West Germany a good thing, it kind of undermines the idea that there is no way to proceed with Hamas figures in a governing capacity as part of a peace process.