One side is trying to minimise civilian causalities, and is failing to completely achieve that.
The other side is trying to maximise civilian causalities, and is failing to completely achieve that.
I'll let you choose which you think has the moral high ground. Use the up vote button if you think minimisation is good, and down vote if you think maximisation is good.
You can only say that America was the morally superior party in WW2 if in your mind Nazis = Germany.
At that time, for purposes of the war, that was true, as the Nazis controlled Germany, just like Hamas now controls Gaza. That’s not to say innocent people aren’t sadly dying, but that’s the case in any war.
By the same token then you must agree that all Israelis are responsible for the horrific conditions that have prevailed in Gaza for decades, as well as the settler violence in the west bank, and apartheid.
Which is obviously not true. To say otherwise and treat Israelis or Jews as a monolithic block is one of the classic anti-semitic tropes. So why is it different when it's the Palestinians?
I did not say Palestinians were a monolithic block or that civilians deserve to die. I am saying that if you want to analyze which side of a war that you support, it does kind of reduce down to the governments in power (or the non-state actor you are fighting). Whether you believe the US-Afghan war was just, or the US-Vietnam war, or the Russian-Ukraine war, or US vs Germany in WW2, or Israel vs Gaza, reduces down to what you believe about the respective governments and their actions at that time, not based on the average man on the street and does not require one to assume that all citizens support their government or anything really about the average citizen.
What's remarkable are polls that show Gazaoui's support of Hamas. Each time it goes bellow 30%, somehow Israel kill some people (90% triggered by Hamas attacks, but last time it was march and protests, which muddy the narrative, especially when a nurse get sniped), and Hamas get over 60% support.
And what's funny is that Hamas is the richest in the area. Hamas received more money in the Gaza strip, directly from the Qatar and under the supervision of the Israeli army than all NGO working in both Palestines. They still managed to have less popular support than Fatah. With 30 millions a month.
well, the case has been made many times by historians that e.g. the english/american army went too far during the dresden bombings. So even when dealing with the literal nazis, things are not actually morally black and white in terms of unnecessary force of war against civillians. And palestine certainly isn't nazi germany, I think that's a bad faith comparison.
I'd describe it as Hamas trying to get around the IDF so they can kill or kidnap old people, women and children. The IDF is trying to get around old people, women and children so the they can kill Hamas.
> Remember: one side is minimising, the other side is maximising civilian deaths.
One side is tactically maximizing civilian deaths in its manner of immediate combat, the other side is strategically maximizing civilian deaths, by its long-term management of the broader conflict (longer, in fact, that the immediate opposing party has existed; in fact, the strategically maximizing party was instrumental in bringing its immediate opposing party into existence as part of the strategy of maximizing long-term civilian harm and preventing peace.)
> One side is trying to minimise civilian causalities
Israel has been ethnically cleansing the Palestinians since 1948. They most definitely are not minimizing civilian casualties. They're maximizing them within the parameters that their US backing will allow.
Especially given the Israeli government's historical role in both initially fostering the development of Hamas and more recently continuing to work to strengthen it as a means of dividing Palestinians and having a less sympathetic enemy to, particularly, secular Western nations than the less-Islamist, more-secular-Arab-nationalist PLO and later Fatah and the Palestinian Authority to serve as a pretext to avoid pressure to make peace and accept the existence of a Palestinian state. [0]
Nothing is "generous", at best it is extremely cynical PR gestures, to be seen as generous by people who only pay attention during the fighting, and not to the broader context in which Israel has spent literal decades deliberately engineering conditions to assure a continued excuse for it.
Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.
According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
All wars Israel has been involved in were started by its enemies. You can start an argument about settlements and there is some merit to that. But no honest discussion can be started from your position.
If Israel didn't try to minimize civilian casualties, this would look very different. To say otherwise is not only cynical PR, it is actively malicious. Towards Israeli and Palestinians both.
That's completely incorrect. Every war has been the result of Israel invading Palestine in 1948 and ethnically cleansing the land. There's a reason Right of Return is the big issue here. Nakba is where the conversation about Israel's aggression needs to start:
Would you have been against granting Israeli work permits to Palestinians or allowing funding to to enter Gaza?
I read the article you shared and other than the unconfirmed paraphrasing of Netanyahu at the 2019 meeting, the actual policies come across as something that would work to improve relations. Work permits, more freedom, "turning a blind eye" to sustained rocket attacks.
You have no idea why they did it. Of course, neither do I. But I suspect they had good reason.
Rockets also continue to be fired daily from civilian areas of Gaza into Israel. When the rockets stop — whether because Hamas surrenders, runs out of weapons, or otherwise — I’ll be more inclined to think a bombing is presumptively unnecessary.
Most of these posts are from bots (at least on Reddit). There is a propaganda war going on in cyberspace and Israel is trying to not lose it.
Too bad, because every time I hear that countries name I think of screaming Palestinian children with limbs ripped off and then some guy in a fancy suit saying “of course we try to minimise civilian casualties, but under the law of war bla bla bla “.
And you can kinda see how they can never win that.
The number of people who unquestioningly believe Israel's propaganda is genuinely concerning.
We have people referring to the kindness of a military that dropped more bombs in a week than were dropped the first year of the Iraq war.
A military that openly targets children, journalists, and medical personnel.
The unquestioning acceptance that every target struck is a Hamas militant/base.
The leaders of Israel openly referring to all palestinians as non-human animals and invoking bible verses that openly call for their genocide.
The generosity of the IDF was made plain when one of the hostages revealed that they shelled their own villages, killing both Israeli hostages and Hamas indiscriminately.
I would absolutely expect my house to be bombed if my government was building bombs in the homes nearby. Heck in pretty much every other war, you could expect to be bombed in you worked in a factory building the bombs.
On the other hand, I would not have voted for them in the first place.
I also love my family, so when a military tells me to evacuate a city, I would be getting out of there no matter what.
There's this video from a woman reporter in Gaza taking a video, and casually a rocket flies out from behind her. Either from her building directly, and if not the launch site must have been very close by. She turns around, say "oh that happens all the time", and goes on, as if nothing happened. I can't find the video of the Palestinian reporter actually laughing it off, but there's these videos:
Obviously if this happens, you leave the area and don't come back. And if you don't leave, you don't complain about a rocket coming back.
And of course, no explanation from anyone for the effects on the other side. Because everyone is saying "Israel stops most of these rockets and less people die there". And because of that, Israel should just tolerate this. People in Israel should just accept they live under constant rocket fire. THAT, is apparently not worth disturbing comfortable apartments of people in Gaza ...
How anyone can even suggest Gazans have any kind of moral high ground when they're not doing anything about this, how they expect to go about their lives undisturbed while their apartments are being used to kill people ...
This is «politics» in terms of game theory, it is «news» in terms of occasion, and can claim some right to be here for its share of intellectual interest in the dynamics involved.
you know what would be a more interesting discussion? how russia and iran are using any army of bots and people behind the screen to sway public opinion; our actual democracy has been errroding for years and noone wants to talk about it.
Except we actually «talk about it» very frequently: we are well aware of the presence of informational warfare also after the articles so frequently published about it.
The other side is trying to maximise civilian causalities, and is failing to completely achieve that.
I'll let you choose which you think has the moral high ground. Use the up vote button if you think minimisation is good, and down vote if you think maximisation is good.