Metahive wrote:This whole human shields excuse is weird. So Hamas supposedly uses human shields to protect their rocket launchers and yet it's been proven time and again that Israel doesn't give a damn about killing those human shields. Don't get me started on "they're doing it for propaganda" because it's been more than known that any major player doesn't give a damn about dead Palestinians as well.
So, what's the use? If you believe Israel that this is why Palestinians die in droves whenever they decide to unleash the Krypteia of course.
The Israelis crying "human shields" every time they miss is bullshit.
That said... Metahive, first question:
Do you have
any idea how many civilians could be killed using modern artillery and airstrikes if someone actually set out to kill as many civilians as possible? What a deliberate slaughter with modern weapons would look like? We wouldn't be talking about dozens or hundreds of dead, we'd be talking about thousands.
If the Israelis are trying to adopt a strategy of terrorizing the Gazan Palestinians by slaughter and retaliation against innocents, they are so incompetent at slaughter that it defies belief.
...
Second question, well, I'll have to explain it.
On the other hand, the laws of war
do mandate that the belligerent parties take reasonable steps to make sure civilians, including the civilians on their own side, do not get caught in the crossfire. So I would wonder: what does Hamas do when it knows that an armed force under its control is realistically likely to get targeted, does it take reasonable steps to move civilians out of the area?
It would be use of human shields if they moved civilians
into the area deliberately, and I'm quite prepared to believe Hamas doesn't do that. But under the customary laws of war they should not just refrain from bringing people in. They should be warning away everyone they can.
Of course, that this reduces the propaganda value if the Israelis decide to fire a missile at a Hamas rocket launch site, miss, and blow up the building next door. Disciplined armed forces are supposed to accept that, because it's part of the laws of war.
The question is:
Hamas, which has full control on the ground, can presumably evacuate any part of the Gaza Strip it pleases, at least temporarily. So,
do they take reasonable precautions to evacuate the areas around their own military sites?
...
If Hamas wishes to wage war against Israel to protect their own people*, very well. No just person would deny them the right to protect their people. But if that is their intention they should
act like it. Which includes recognizing that if they shoot at Israel, the Israelis will shoot back, that some of those shots will miss, and that civilians should be moved out of the line of fire.
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*Though how the war in Gaza helps the people of Gaza I do not know; Hamas's strategy strikes me as very bad at protecting the Gazans, although very good at ensuring the Gazans hate Israel enough to keep supporting Hamas.
Edi wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Elfdart, for the sake of proving that you actually comprehend the issue rather than having just latched onto a narrative that lets you feel warm anticolonialist fuzzies, would you mind explaining exactly what you think the Israelis should have done with respect to the Gaza strip, starting in 2005 or so?
Is there some course of action by which they could have avoided being used for target practice by random Palestinians who have now taken to chucking explosives at nuclear power plants? If so, what?
Conversely, perhaps you could speculate on what course of action the Palestinians might have taken starting in 2005 that would have resulted in the Gaza Strip not being under a brutal blockade and regularly scheduled air strikes by the Israelis.
Now there's a false dilemma if I've ever seen one. All the more blatant due to how the events leading to the present shitty state of affairs started in late 1995 when Jewish terrorist Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, paving the way for the election of Netanyahoo. Who then after his election in 1996 proceeded to immediately destroy and dismantle all possible avenues toward a peaceful settlement in favor increased oppression of Palestinians and expanded settlements in both Gaza and the West Bank (especially). After the hardline policies failed to work for ten years, Israel decided to then withdraw from Gaza in favor of concentrating its colonial policies on the West Bank, and almost ten years later we can see just how successful that has been in resolving the issues in the region.
And then some smarmy goat-molesting asshole comes around and asks "Is there something that could have been done starting in 2005 to prevent this?" and expects everyone to ignore the previous ten years of history that had been building up to that moment.
Well, at some point
someone has to start ignoring the history, unless we assume that the war is supposed to go on forever. In which case we can hardly blame people on either side for perpetuating it, because we've absolved them of responsibility.
Here is how I see it.
The Palestinians (including Hamas) are responsible for everything they decide to do. The Israelis are responsible for everything they decide to do. They are all adults capable of making their own decisions, even if those actions are obviously wrong and vicious in the eyes of anyone who looks at the big picture.
So either
everyone is responsible for (their share of) the status quo, or no one is.
For example, Israel is clearly responsible for the colonialism in the West Bank, for the poverty it drives the Palestinians into. They build settlements, they build fences, they destroy Palestinian infrastructure and cut off paths by which Palestinians might trade and interact.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Hamas is clearly responsible for the fact that Hamas keeps shooting rockets at whatever bits of Israel are in missile range of Gaza. No one makes them light those fuses. No one holds guns to Hamas's heads and says "fire rockets at Israel and perpetuate this cycle of violence by doing a completely unnecessary thing that has literally zero ability to improve the lot of your people in any way."
Now, we can say "well, they're militant assholes who rose to power after the peace process broke down, what do you expect?" Which is basically what you're saying. And I
agree! Thing is, militant assholes are still militant assholes. Who get up in the morning every day and decide to
keep being militant assholes.
Are Hamas (and the Palestinians at large) somehow a bunch of children, who don't understand the consequences of their own actions? Are they too ignorant to grasp that fighting a war against someone with bigger guns results in suffering? Does Hamas not
know that if it wages intifada then the Israelis will wage conventional war right back against whatever targets present themselves?
No, they are not. They are in no way childish or inferior. They are fully capable of understanding their actions and making rational decisions to pursue their own interests. Hamas should be expected to understand perfectly well what it is doing, and should not be absolved of responsibility for provocative actions that escalate the conflict. Israel shouldn't
either... but Israel isn't the one that kicked off this round of the conflict.
Newsflash, fuckwit: By 2005 there was nothing that could have been done to ameliorate the current political situation. That window of opportunity existed in 1995-1998 (and by 1998 it was pretty fucking tenuous) and was ruthlessly sabotaged, smashed, postponed and ignored by Israel. During that time period Hamas was a fringe group that only got attention when they conducted bombings and they were not supported by the majority of Palestinians. Yet despite this and attempts by Fatah to broker peace and marginalize them, Netanyahoo used every single incident as an excuse to destroy all progress in the settlement treaties, to restart negotiations from zero in order to make offers he knew were unacceptable in light of what had been previously agreed. Until things got to the point where the Palestinian population gradually decided to say fuck it to the whole process and switched support to Hamas.
If relatively peaceful negotiations punctuated by outbursts of extremist violence (including stuff like a Jewish terrorist gunning down 29 civilians during a prayer service, ref. Baruch Goldstein) didn't get them anything, then why not try to get better results through actions they would have been accused anyway?
Thing is, the attempt to get better results through force has obviously failed, and is obviously not going to achieve results any time soon, and both these facts are clear for anyone with an IQ higher than a pile of wet concrete.
At this point, the only understandable motivation for continued support of Hamas is pride. I can understand and sympathize with national pride. But pride does
not excuse Hamas from responsibility for ignoring military realities, provoking a conflict it cannot prosecute to victory, calling on others to widen this conflict, and giving the Israelis
even more reason to keep doing exactly what they are doing.
This is like when Georgia decided to start shelling Russian-held towns in South Ossetia and got their heads handed to them. The Russians conducted themselves brutally, but
so did the Georgians, and it was the Georgians who decided that the status quo was unacceptable and started a war in hopes of improving things.
Now, which kind of political organization would you rather negotiate with: A more or less secular and comparatively moderate faction motivated by a desire to stay in power and get limited independence (which is all that was really on the table) or a deeply religious faction whose core teachings include that your mere existence is an affront to the universe? Netanyahoo was offered the former, which he actively spurned and denigrated until he and his successors found the opposing side replaced by the latter.
Here's a question: How do you reverse that situation and by what means? If you can't, how do you resolve the issue short of genocide?
Am I supposed to be figuring this out from the Israeli side of the line? Because in their shoes, even knowing it'd get turned into another poor man's missile base, I'd be pulling out of the West Bank. If the conflict stabilizes along territorial frontiers, and if the Palestinians continue to wage aggressive campaigns against Israel to the best of their abilities, eventually strategic exhaustion will set in and they'll decide they love their future more than they hate their past.
Would it work? I don't know, but it's the best I can come up with on short notice.
From the Palestinian side? Well, the first step is to
stop firing missiles into southern Israel, because that at least gives me a prayer of convincing the Israelis that it's safe and sane to seek peace with a Palestinian state. As long as I keep firing missiles at them, I can never know peace... and the current situation is hurting me a lot more than it hurts them.
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