The death toll in Gaza has climbed to at least 20,000 Palestinians. At least 1 in 200 people living in Gaza are now dead. 1 in 4 remaining Palestinians in Gaza are starving to death. I just can not comprehend this amount of violence and death in such a small area in such a short time. This is at a scale unheard of in any other modern conflict. So many entire families have been murdered due to indiscriminate bombings, all funded, supported, and enabled by Biden and the US.
I can not fathom how there is still any support for the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government. It shocks me that anyone can believe a single word from Israeli officials when they keep claiming that they are taking all precautions to avoid killing civilians when the evidence that they are lying through their teeth is so obvious.
- Israel’s military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in recent history, experts say
In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.
This all just blows my mind and makes me so goddamn angry to think about. If this were a just world, then Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership would be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
We are a week removed from the IDF going forward and openly admitting to their soldiers having made a mistake and acting against both standard protocol and direct orders. As inexcusable as the conduct of the soldiers responsible for this is, the transparent and honest manner in which this incident was communicated to the public is exemplary. You are right that this does raise uncomfortable questions over how normal this kind of conduct of IDF soldiers is though.
The actual root of the problem is that the UN came up with a flawed two-state plan for Palestine in 1947, one that Israel agreed with and the Arab nations didn’t, prompting them to fight a war over it. Which they lost, against a tiny isolated nation under a weapons embargo that literally had to salvage tanks from scrap yards as the attacking Arabs were using the latest gear. Then they tried a few times more, losing again every time and in between, various Palestinian groups have tried again and again to do their worst. Each time, they lose, each time, Palestinians lose territory and power as Israel gets stronger with each military victory, because that’s how wars have always worked. Arab nations also occupied Palestinian territory for decades, oppressing Palestinians there worse than Israel ever did, but that tends to get glossed over these days.
When Israel does actually make concessions, like when they pulled all settlers out of Gaza, invited tens of thousands of Palestinians to work for several times the wages they would get in Palestinian territories, they get thanked with more violence in return, showing the Israeli public that extending the hand does nothing to calm this conflict down, so with each terrorist attack, they shift further to the right politically, electing politicians who promise strength and keeping Palestinians at bay instead of compromising. That’s how you get injustices like indefinite detention of Palestinians. Cause and effect.
Do you even know that Israel was working on finalizing a deal for the Palestinians to get access to gas fields on the coast of Gaza, which would have given them energy independence and a huge influx in cash? Talks were ongoing until literally the day of the terrorist attack, but now it’ll never happen.
i mean this is just cringe apologia for Israel, respectfully. “benevolently” stopping your settler colonialism in one part of the Palestinian state you don’t want to exist and almost immediately transitioning into an ongoing permanent blockade of said part of that state after you do is not actual benevolence or a “concession” in any meaningful sense of the word–that should be the baseline expected of Israel. you’re also completely ignoring, in saying this, the much more impactful apartheid under which Palestinians live and the encroachment of settlers in the West Bank that Israel aids, abets, and funds, and has for decades. in pretty much any other circumstance what Israel is doing to Palestine would be widely accepted as a casus belli for war. the implication underlying everything you’re saying here is that the root of the conflict is all Palestinian, but that’s demonstrably incorrect and actively revisionist to a point where i don’t think you’d get most Zionists to agree to it.
I wonder what happened in between those two things. Have you ever looked up what the blockade was actually blocking?
If that’s a casus belli, then so is October 7. Now what?
i think it is a moral imperative (or at least, unambiguously morally justifiable in all cases) to wage armed struggle against a country doing apartheid like Israel, so it’s basically irrelevant for my purposes that Israel’s justification for the blockade is “these people waged armed struggle against me”–the oxygen of that armed struggle as it currently exists is the apartheid. if anything it just demonstrates that Israel’s government so devalues Palestinian life (as is also being demonstrated by their cavalier attitude toward murdering civilians) that it’d rather continue the oppression that’s led many Palestinians to jihadism in the first place than ever reconsider whether that approach will lead to stability in the region and long-term peace
So unguided rockets vaguely aimed at cities, suicide bombers (including the use of children and mentally impaired people as suicide bombers), random stabbings, random shootings are “armed struggle” now? The mere fact that they are using children, old and handicapped people as suicide bombers, including in this current conflict, shows that if there’s one side not valuing Palestinian life at all, it’s Palestinian leadership.
Oh, and it’s also statements like these:
https://www.memri.org/reports/hamas-leader-ismail-haniyeh-we-need-blood-women-children-and-elderly-gaza-–-so-it-awakens
How on Earth do you deal with this kind of political leadership? It’s not just Hamas, that’s how all sorts of groups and Palestinian governments have fought for many decades. How do you achieve “long-term piece” in this kind of situation? Like I said, any kind of concession gets answered with violence and any past peace deal, including the last one that would have resulted in 95% of the West Bank in Palestinian hands, gets rejected by one side and one side only. The current settler problem wouldn’t even exist had Arafat not walked away from the Camp David summit after saying no to every proposal. He lived out his days as a billionaire though, so I guess we know why he did it. I guess he feared for this power and wealth, just like Hamas’ leadership with their billions. Gotta keep that conflict going so that aid comes in that they can then steal from the people right out in the open while delusional idealists - no offense - meander on about high-level concepts like apartheid and oppression, blind to the actual reality.
well yes, definitionally, that’s how armed struggle is manifesting in Palestine currently. there’s nothing you or i can do about that.
but that’s a little besides the point, which is that i think you at most selectively take issue with morally depraved military actions. almost everything you’re charging Hamas with has an established and equally immoral analogue in Israel’s strategy toward Palestine to this point. it’s conspicuous to me, for example, that you do not seem to comparably weigh Israel damaging or destroying 70% of Gaza City with Hamas’s unguided rocket attacks–especially given that both have led to large numbers of civilian deaths? like, do you think that 70% of Gaza City harbored Hamas militants, or, alternatively that it was militarily necessary to do that sort of damage even though it was inevitable large numbers of civilians would be caught in the crossfire? that seems like the only way for this to not boil down to vibes of who’s “good” and “bad”
and mind you, i have no issue with saying that Hamas is a depraved terrorist group who should never be in power and that it’s very, very bad for the region that they are now the primary credible opposition to Israel in Palestine. if i had my way, they would be unilaterally eradicated in favor of Fatah who at least seem willing to work toward a peaceful resolution. but i don’t have a magic wand, and Hamas does not exist in a vacuum. the Israeli state is directly complicit in making them that primary credible opposition, both through its military strategy and through selectively looking the other way when money and weapons are funneled through back-channels to the group. even Israeli outlets admit to this sort of arrangement under Netanyahu.
I honestly don’t know, but I can guess why they are doing it that way. I read one report that in one suburb of Gaza City, almost half of all buildings were rigged with explosives by Hamas. In another place, there were traps using speakers that played children’s cries, in yet another location, Hamas used an old man as a suicide bomber. How do you fight in such an environment? Israel is choosing a cautious approach using air power and tanks, which limits the risk to their own soldiers - and successfully so, given the low death toll on their side we’ve seen. I totally get that they are prioritizing that over protecting civilians that have been taught from the crib to kill all Jews. Should they instead choose a riskier approach that might endanger their own people? I think every nation would prioritize their soldiers over civilians from the opposing side. It’s still awful, there’s no way around it, but seriously, what choice do they have? It’s just terrible options and those in charge in Israel have to pick the least terrible one.
Fatah has a “martyr’s fund” worth hundreds of millions that they use to pay out to the families of those who die in the fight against Israel, including members of Hamas. They paid millions to the families of terrorists who died during the October 7 attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority_Martyrs_Fund
Abbas literally has a PhD in Holocaust denial. Fatah are really no good options either and on top of that, they have zero credibility among Palestinians due to how ineffective and corrupt their government is.
They also did it, because they thought they could pacify the group, make them interested in governing and enriching themselves instead of waging war. It seemed to have worked for a long time, as evidenced by billions siphoned off into in off-shore accounts, but hindsight is 20/20. The thing is though, there was significant international pressure against Israel to allow these funds into Gaza, including from foreign governments and humanitarian groups, many of which are now using the fact that the Israeli government permitted the transfer of these funds against it or are even frequently distorting it into “Israel funded Hamas” or “Israel created Hamas”.
Like I said, there are only terrible options. This seemed like the least terrible one at the time and since there are no magic wands, there are rarely ideal solutions.
respectfully: if you yourself have to begin an answer to these questions with “I honestly don’t know,” and then go on to talk about how Israel might be prioritizing its own soldiers over civilian life because even the civilians “have been taught from the crib to kill all Jews,” perhaps you can understand how some of us would conclude that Israel might not care very much about Palestinian civilians and consider them both acceptable collateral damage or actual military targets based on the sheer number of them they’ve killed to this point
I think we should all do that, including you.
I didn’t make that part up:
https://unwatch.org/un-teachers-call-to-murder-jews-reveals-new-report/
Seriously read this, including the full report. It explains so much about this conflict.
They care less about Palestinian civilians than they do about their own soldiers, but they care enough about them to invest massive amounts of resources into warning them, into getting aid to them and into getting them out of the parts of the strip that are most dangerous to them. That’s more than can be said about anyone else in this conflict. Is it perfect? Hell no, but nothing in this world is and nobody in their right mind would expect them to be perfect.
We don’t even know how many have died. Seriously, we have zero clue, only made-up numbers from Hamas - who also don’t differentiate between civilian and military deaths, by the way - and rough estimates from everyone else. All we know for certain is that thousands have died. That’s it. It took Israel weeks to come up with the total death toll on their side after the October 7 massacres and that’s in a much more controlled environment, yet everyone immediately accepts whatever the “Gaza Health Ministry” under full Hamas control pumps out. I’ve lost count of how many have sent me articles from BBC, Reuters, NYT and whoever saying that they reported on the numbers and I should take them seriously and yet every single time, these articles cite the same Hamas organization or someone who cites them.
Again, this is a terrible war and thousands have dying in it, but it’s not just a war of bullets and bombs, but also one of information being used a weapon, including misinformation, like completely nonsensical comparisons that I debunked earlier. So many educated, well-meaning people appear to lose all sight of reason, anything resembling critical thinking skills in this and for what? Do any of these people really think that it actually helps Palestinians?