What is the alternative that Israelis could support instead? Just ignore Hezbollah's attacks? Give up on returning to their homes and schools in northern Israel?
Wars aren't supposed to be even. By this logic, the Nazis were the victims of WWII, and the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War. And if Israel wants to be "better", it should just disable its air defenses to let Hezbollah "catch up".
If we're interested in an actual end to the violence, the focus should be on enforcing UNSC 1701. It's not like Israel can just ignore attacks against it.
Actually, wars are not supposed to be driven by "Dahiya doctrine" or "Rafah model" either, if we're talking about what wars are supposed to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine
And yeah, if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say. Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this. When Israel kills 1 child or more per every active combatant... then that was apparently violated.
Maybe explain how does killing 20 000+ children and counting help Israel? Or how burning/blowing up entire villages and cities in Lebanon and Gaza help them? They did this to hundreds of villages in 1947-48 and that created the whole problem they have now. Continuing the same strategy is supposed to solve it? Seems like Israel got inspired by the whole Nazi style "preventive security" thing.
Heinrich Himmler: "The best political weapon is the weapon of terror... we do not ask for their love; only for their fear." (looks like Himmler could have coauthored Dahiya doctrine and would be fond of it, if still alive by then)
You're also not supposed to initiate aggressive wars against your neighbors either, like Israel did against Syria, Iran, and many others in the past with its "pre-emptive" strikes.
If Israel wants to be better, maybe they should not intentionally murder 10s of thousands of children as a policy (20-300 allowed killed civilians per strike in a population where half of it is children).
You're listing a lot of standard anti-Israel talking points which aren't relevant to the thread. Setting aside all the tangents and returning to the topic at hand -
> if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say
You're not making an argument here. Again, do you think the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War, considering the 1:100 or so ratio there? How about when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, with an "infinitely bad" casualty ratio of 1:0? Does that make NATO infinitely evil?
> Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this.
The principle of proportionality has nothing to do with how many of their own civilians the military in question has lost.
Germany lost fewer civilians than Poland or the Soviet Union, so not really victims by that logic.
And while it's true that German civilian casualties were a couple orders of magnitude higher than American civilian casualties, the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison.
While not directly relevant to the Israel/Lebanon conflict, it's probably also worth drawing a distinction between casualties of war and state-sanctioned killing outside the scope of combat.
Germany killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.
The Allies tried and executed ten high-ranking Nazi officials, including six civilians.
By that measure, the ratio of civilian killings is at least a million to one.
> the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison
What's unfair about it? In both cases, one side suffered less civilian harm because there wasn't much fighting in its own territory.
I think the point stands that "Israel must be bad because it only lost 2 civilians" makes as little sense as "the Nazis must be good because they lost a lot more civilians than Western allies".
If a framework for trying to judge morality penalizes states for effectively protecting their own civilian population, then it's a very bad framework.
makes too much sense but of course they’ll move to Texas then and you’d again be labeled (like poor Maine here) as unfriendly to businesses and god knows what else
> Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would comply with the ceasefire. [3]
That's not really what the source says. There is no ceasefire agreement in force at all (only a basis for negotiations with Iran), let alone one that covers Hezbollah.
You're right that Netanyahu's statement contradicts Sharif's statement, which says that "the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies" agreed to the immediate ceasefire. It makes me wonder what was going on behind the scenes.
> Multiple diplomatic sources told CBS News that President Trump had been told that the ceasefire announced Thursday would apply to the Middle East region, and he agreed that included Lebanon. Mediators believed the ceasefire to include Lebanon, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that it did. Araghchi also said it was included.
> On the day of the ceasefire, a White House official told CBS News that Israel had also agreed with the terms of the deal that Pakistan had helped to broker.
> However, the U.S. position shifted following a phone call between Netanyahu and Mr. Trump. Two sources familiar with the matter told CBS News that the changing U.S. positions, and the disjointed remnant of the regime in Iran, are making the diplomacy highly complex.
> Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Wednesday that there was a "legitimate misunderstanding" about the terms of the ceasefire, but he placed blame on the Iranians for misunderstanding that it included their proxy forces in Lebanon.
It's great to see that Israel has veto power over US foreign policy.
In other words, negotiations are underway and Israel hasn't agreed to anything yet, but some people went ahead and declared peace in the Middle East anyway.
Like any other state, Israel has the ability to enter into its own agreements; no one can consent on its behalf and then inform it that it's part of a deal.
Extorting an international waterway is effectively just piracy (we just don't typically use the word for state actors). We could try to end this piracy through negotiations, but letting states use piracy as a bargaining chip doesn't set a good precedent.
US physically confirmed Iran's ownership of the strait. Now everybody should just get off their lawn. US spits on international laws and institutions so why should anybody respect them?
If we're saying that because everyone has broken a few international laws, now they don't matter at all, then why should Iran be the only one extorting international waters or waterways?
Should we start our own extortion program? There's no need to limit it to waters near us; we can credibly threaten ships anywhere on the planet. Of course other states could do the same, even landlocked ones...
You forget that USA has instituted a blockade of Cuba in February, before attacking Iran.
USA has intercepted the oil tankers headed to Cuba, causing a very serious fuel shortage there, which has created a lot of problems for the ordinary Cuban citizens.
It is USA who started practicing piracy in international waters and blocking the traffic of ships belonging to others.
Therefore now it is really shameless for USA to criticize Iran for doing against USA and its allies, during a war started by USA, the same thing that USA has already been doing, and unlike Iran, USA has started doing this completely unprovoked.
USA has already demonstrated in numerous occasions that they believe to have the right to break any international laws and treaties whenever they please. Therefore any other country also has the same right, whenever that is done against USA or its allies.
Invading a country unprovoked, launching missiles at schoolgirls is invasion, murder and warcrimes. We don't typically use the word murder for state actors, but letting them use this as a bargaining chip doesn't set a good precedent.
You keep saying unprovoked. How is attacking Israel with tens of thousands of rockets and drones (mostly by proxy) not a provocation? How many attacks do you expect Israel to tolerate before finally responding?
Article 51 applies to states, not continents, but sure some states might have a claim against the US. That doesn’t change anything about the Iran regime’s aggression.
But you brought it up. Nicaragua if we are following the laws of proportionality established by America and Israel in this invasion, Nicaragua alone has the right to level most of the unuted states, and to say nothing of the claims of other south american and middle eastern countries. So personally I'd rather not use the proxy argument unless one is comfortable with the idea of the USA having multiple nukes lobbed at it from all over the world.
Iran presently also isn't trying to Lebensraum "buffer zones" from other countries lands around itself.
Okay, let's imagine that Nicaragua has the right to nuke the US, setting aside the fact that their self-defense justification expired decades ago, and that someone else committing war crimes does not create any legal justification for other war crimes.
I'm still not sure what this has to do with Iranian aggression?
Israel and America are the ones who directly invaded Iran during "negotiations". If you want to get at proxies, then again as I said, I would support arming Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, etc with nukes and having them launch them at the USA. If not, then Israel and USA attacked first, Iran hasn't been directly attacking them during this time.
If we correct your argument so it's actually based on international law, it seems to boil down to "we have to ignore proxy warfare, otherwise Nicaragua might have historically (several decades ago) had a right to attack US military assets." That hardly seems like a reason to deny reality and ignore proxy warfare.
Sovereignity isn't infallible, and Israel has a very clear Article 51 argument due to Hezbollah's attacks.
As long as it's temporary (even if the end date isn't clear yet), it's an occupation, not an annexation. Occupations can certainly be legal if necessary for self-defense.
The actual solution would be to enforce UNSC 1701 and disarm Hezbollah. Until that finally happens, Israel has no choice but to respond to cross-border terrorist attacks.
That's not true, he's alive and was released to Gaza in a hostage-for-prisoner exchange.
> Their punishment? Literally nothing.
It's probably hard to win a case without the victim to testify. The video is something, but far too low-quality to prove who did what beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors can't ignore evidentiary standards and don't like to lose cases.
At least they were detained and investigated. Can you say the same of the individuals who paraded their rape victims around the streets of Gaza?
Apologies. I did conflate two instances of rape. There are so many, it's possible that I combined two - one where the victim had a ruptured bowel, lung damage, broken ribs, and a torn anus; and another that lead to a death.
That said, when Ben-Gvir says any action is justifiable, including rape, in defense of Israel and when the person who leaked the video gets arrested and when a poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute finds the majority of Israelis support not investigating claims of rape it's very difficult for me to be credulous towards the idea that these are just a couple bad apples.
Most Gazans don’t believe Hamas raped anyone. It’s disingenuous to claim they were celebrating rape. Can you please share any public, non-anonymous accounts from Oct 7th either rape victims or witnesses?
Conversely, Israeli politicians and protestors have explicitly agitate for the right to rape detainees.
I'm not sure what the point is of piling on different accusations. Only one has any evidence, but let's just imagine for the sake of argument that they're all true. Then Israel has at least several criminals, just like every other country on the planet.
Is the idea that it's okay to post misinformation about Israelis because Israelis are bad? If I can identify several Canadian criminals, then since we've established that Canadians are bad people, is it fine to post misinformation about other Canadians?
To reassert the lost context, here is the original claim and counter-claim:
>>> Maybe if Israel stopped violently expropriating Arab lands, and assaulting and raping Arabs without consequences. It’s really not that complicated.
>> This is nonsense and you know it.
It’s apparent from the copious evidence presented here (with which you do not engage) that the original claim was, in fact, not nonsense. A real counter-argument would show 1) that these events did not occur or 2) that there were consequences for the assailants.
> Then Israel has at least several criminals, just like every other country on the planet.
Irrelevant false balance on a literally global scale. May I use this example in the logic text I’ve been workshopping?
The nonsense is the application of impossible standards like "Israel should have zero criminals" or "Israel should have a successful conviction for every suspected crime, never mind evidentiary standards".
If someone wants to make a serious argument about a systematic problem in Israel, that requires data, not a few accusations. For example, at least 10 of 110 released hostages were reportedly sexually assaulted in Hamas captivity [1], and there were zero arrests for it.
If Gazan detainees in Israeli custody experienced SA at the same rate, that would be over a thousand cases of SA. The parent also broadened their search to include SA allegations against Israelis in the West Bank, so they would need to show ~300k cases just to argue equivalence.
If we were to accept all the parent's sources as reliable, that's 12 reported cases of SA. They're 0.004% of the way there.
> The nonsense is the application of impossible standards like "Israel should have zero criminals" or "Israel should have a successful conviction for every suspected crime, never mind evidentiary standards".
This is an aggressive misreading of OP. Many countries’ militaries are routinely criticized for the sexual assault perpetrated by their soldiers. When US soldiers do it in Okinawa, for example, they can and have been turned over to local authorities, and their actions are disavowed. [1] Criticism of this pattern of sexual assault in Okinawa is not a call for the military to uphold some “impossible standard.”
If you want to try again to generate a valid counter-argument to OP you need to research SA committed by IDF soldiers and demonstrate that it falls under either 1) or 2) above, or some other form of logical refutation. Presenting yet more data about Hamas is neither effective nor persuasive to that end.
The original claim was that terrorists might stop attacking Israel if it stopped "assaulting and raping Arabs without consequences". So which way are we to read it?
- Israel is being held to an impossible standard of zero crime, or a 100% conviction rate for suspected crimes.
- Or Israel is being accused of having a prolific, systematic problem, with no data to support the accusation.
> Israel is being accused of having a prolific, systematic problem,
This is indeed my assertion.
> no data to support the accusation.
Given that you video evidence of a rape along with the documented injuries of the survivor doesn’t meet your evidentiary standards, I doubt that anything would actually convince you, but it’s well documented that Israeli’s act with impunity against Palestinians in a number of contexts.
E.g.
“3% of the investigations (into settler violence) ended with a conviction”
That's just someone talking about their interpretation of Netanyahu's strategy. Individuals can have private thoughts, which others can speculate about. The actual aid deal involved at least three countries (Qatar, Israel and Gaza) and none of them tried to cover it up.
Do you think Israel should block aid funds for basic infrastructure and civil servants' salaries? If you think blocking such aid is bad, but allowing such aid is also somehow nefarious, then what do you expect Israel to do exactly?
Well, it's certainly not limited to bodies that were confirmed by officials in a hospital or morgue. A lot of the casualty reports were from a Google form, or later, a self-hosted form (https://sehatty.ps/moh-registration/public/add-order).
> Well, it's certainly not limited to bodies that were confirmed by officials in a hospital or morgue. A lot of the casualty reports were from a Google form, or later, a self-hosted form
Yes it is. Literally on that form "Not registered with the Palestinian Ministry of Health". This is a form to report missing people, the number of the dead are people identified by a doctor.
Though that number has stagnated because all the hospitals have been destroyed by Israel.
No, that's just saying that the form is for reporting casualties that are not already registered with the MoH.
Hamas' casualty numbers came from hospitals and morgues only in the first few months of war; that hasn't been the case for a long time. This isn't controversial - Hamas has been fairly open about incorporating "reliable media sources".
I think only Hamas knows the breakdown for their latest numbers, but earlier they used to acknowledge how many casualty reports were based on online form submissions. For example you can see some old data in Figure 11b here:
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/sites/default/files/pdf/...
Sorry, I'm not going to take seriously a report by an AIPAC funded institution from a guy who's basically spent all of Israel's genocide talking about how fake the Hamas numbers are.
Basically all his reports have one narrative "It's not that bad, and actually it is all terrorists that Israel has killed".
NGOs that have managed to get aid workers and doctors in (which, btw, are often killed by Israel) all say that the death toll is a massive undercount. [1]
There, of course, is a solution here. It's for Israel to let in aid works and stop killing them [2]
AP: "As Gaza’s hospital system collapsed in December and January, the ministry began relying on hard-to-verify “media reports” to register new deaths. Its March report included 531 individuals who were counted twice, and many deaths were self-reported by families, instead of health officials." https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-cas...
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