That's true, but it doesn't nearly go far enough. If Gazans surrendered, they would not only have peace, but if they let foreigners rule over them, rewrite their laws, and build their institutions, they would achieve a level of prosperity that would've been unthinkable before. — Chisholm

Uh, just where do you think people of Gaza have been living after 1967? Did they live under the same laws as Israelis? No. Have they had the same rights as Jewish Israelis? No.

They have been living under foreign rule that has rewritten the laws (from Egyptian or Jordanese law).

Wouldn't they be actually on the same spot as they were earlier, if they surrendered?

If Gazans surrendered
— Chisholm

Like the French in June 1942 — FreeEmotion

Like Germany and Japan in 1945.

Israel is a first-world country in a third-world area.

Ideally, the situation would be for Israel to have advanced weapons and use them to hold off attacks from their technologically backward neighbors. That's what the Iron Dome is meant to do. "Launch all the rockets you want, and we'll just sit here and shoot them down." Hamas says, "Alright, then. Rockets don't work? We'll just charge in and slaughter as many of you as we can."

What is Israel supposed to do?

Yes, people will die. Children will be orphaned. Children will die. Many people will be maimed, crippled, impoverished, and immiserated. Homes and shops will burn. It's going to be horrible, and I think the Israelis know this. But still: what are they supposed to do? Just sit there and take it? Thus encouraging a second strike? No. They have to hit back, and it has to hurt.

What makes this difficult is the fact that Israel is overwhelmingly more powerful than Hamas. This makes the situation difficult for anyone with a conscience. It makes the situation especially difficult for Western leftists, who see everything through a prism of oppressed/oppressor logic. If the first question you ask is always, "Which person is the cop and which person is George Floyd?" then your moral prism will be skewed.

surrendering to an oppressive regime is the same as an agressor surrendering in defeat? Or what point exactly are you trying to make? That Palestinians should just give up in the face of decades of injustice?

↪neomac
So it seems. Yet I think the question is how Israel defends itself. Is there a legitimate question about using excessive force? I think there is. Is it when 10 000 Palestinian civilians killed? Or 50 000? Or 100 000 out of 2,2 million? Would over 100 000 dead be excessive? Already Israel has made more strikes than the US did in one year in the war in Afghanistan. — ssu

Excessive wrt what? Excessiveness in the law of war is not assessed wrt the number of casualties but wrt militarly efficacy. IDF has targeted, and killed, Hamas commanders and gunmen, as well as destroyed weapons warehouses, command and control centers, tunnels and numerous other assets that enable the terror organization to function. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/08/06/laurie-blank-follow-up-on-gaza-proportionality-and-the-law-of-war/

The oppression of religious and ethnic minorities across MENA and Central Asia is very much a mixed bag and also shifts based on the politics and alliance needs of the day. It's a bit like Reformation Europe, where Catholics and Lutherans would fight these incredibly bitter contests, but then agree to beat up on the Anabaptists it Calvinists together.

Or perhaps it's even more like how, through Luther's day, Pope Leo X was urging the European monarchs to put aside their differences to beat back the Turks, who were rampaging through the Balkans and smashing their heads against the bulwark of Austria, and yet during the following inter-Christian religious wars, alliance with the Ottomans was not out of the question. Same deal with the Fourth Crusade turning on Constantinople, the supposed beneficiary of the early eastern Crusades.

And the fraught political-religious situation across those regions doesn't look to be getting especially better.

Of course, every time a commentator says something like "well Islam in the region just needs something like the Reformation," I sort of slap my head because that time was not one of some sort of nice transition towards tolerance. It was full of wars that killed a significantly higher proportion of their nation's populations than both World Wars combined, and the wars raged for centuries.

Reformation — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m sure they mean Enlightenment :wink:.

It makes the situation especially difficult for Western leftists, who see everything through a prism of oppressed/oppressor logic. — Pneumenon

It all reveals the moral hypocrisy of leftists. They spend all their time complaining about the evils of a hetero-normative patriarchy in the west, but seem to care little about it running rampant in Islamic states. While they spend all their efforts defending anti-Semitic violence, their concern for the rights of women and LGBTQ's is conspicuously absent.

France or Germany or Japan?

Which one will it be? Can you foretell the future?

Even if it means another Dresden or Hiroshima, it will be worth it, but not for me.

I have a difference of opinion here.

But still: what are they supposed to do? Just sit there and take it? Thus encouraging a second strike? No. They have to hit back, and it has to hurt. — Pneumenon

Remember this works both ways. It is not called a cycle of violence for nothing, it has that name for a reason. If they are all human, then, they will hit back when hit.

I hope you are wrong. I hope against hope for a immediate and permanent ceasefire, and the repair of Gaza and its infrastructure. Too bad about the people, right?. I do not care if they return to peaceful oppression, at least it is peaceful.

If you say, knowing human beings, hitting back when hit, then, assuming there are human beings on both sides, then the probability of escalation is high. I wish I could hold them back, but I can't. Based on what happened before, it looks likely.

The most difficult part is believing human beings could act this way? Which ones? Find out.

Yes Benkei yes, have you not heard of Gandhi?

This whole thing can be summarized as follows: if you walk up to someone and slap them do they have to turn the other cheek?

I say yes. Jesus did that, and that is what the Christian in the video said.

Overall I agree with your analysis. But I do wonder if the Netanyahu government in particular bears some culpability for this situation, in that the distraction caused by their political maneuverings arguably resulted in the degradation of Israeli survellience and intelligence in the southern region that excacerbated the consequences of the attack. There was a report about a week ago that the Hamas guerillas who committed the slaughter were surprised by the poor defenses they encountered when they crossed the border, saying that Israel seemed completely unprepared.

This morning the news was that the IDF has 'advised' that the main hospital in Gaza 'should be evacuated'. It's full of dreadfully injured and burned patients, and the facility is already under massive stress. It would be an enormous challenge to re-locate those patients even in ideal circumstances, let alone on the back of jeeps across the rubble-strewn streets of a war zone. So while I'm in agreement with Israel's right to defend its borders and also agree that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, not a legitimate government (remembering they took over Gaza through a military coup and that the destruction of Israel is in their founding documents), I think like many others I'm uneasy - actually, no, not uneasy, but appalled - at the price being extracted from the Palestinian populace in pursuit of its aims.

Here's a link to an OP in the SMH by a Sydney writer, who is Jewish, expressing similar concerns:

I am outraged and sickened by the atrocities Hamas perpetrated on October 7, by the rapes and abductions and the wanton slaughter of babies, children, the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women. I am also outraged – shocked to the core in fact – by the failure of some on the left to condemn these abominations.

But as a Jew I cannot stay silent in the face of the horrors now being inflicted on the people of Gaza by a lawless Israeli prime minister largely responsible for the disaster that has befallen his country. — David Leser, Stop annihilating innocent Palestinians in my Jewish name

I don't want to get drawn into a 'who's side are you on' debate, although I think Hamas' responsibility for triggering these horrors should never be overlooked or downplayed even while acknowledging that there is plenty of blame to go around.

if you walk up to someone and slap them do they have to turn the other cheek?

I say yes. — FreeEmotion

Which is why it's the dirt the meek inherit, not the earth.

Maybe, just maybe, if the West stops interfering in all these countries enough stability will arise for them to actually make social progress? Just an idea. But even more simply, the fact that living conditions in some of these countries is horrible for some people due to discrimination isn't exactly a justification to treat all of them like shit, now is it? So there's no hypocrisy; it's entirely consistent. What's not consistent is not according human rights to people because they don't respect human rights. Not if we consider human rights something fundamental and inalienable.

:up:

Israel is a first-world country in a third-world area. — Pneumenon

Whenever I read statements like this, I wonder which are the concepts of 'first world' and 'third world', respectively. Apart from being a notion created by Western civilisation after WWII to label nations in different boxes and causing, in the long run, negative prejudices sorrowfully.

If we continue to use those concepts, the problem will remain, because the sense of your argument is backing up Israel's genocide because it is a 'developed' nation in a 'backward' territory. A territory which was occupied illegally in the first place.

If you check the politics, level of corruption and their system of representatives, Israel is far from being a nation of the 'first world', as you labelled it. Israel is consistently rated low in the Global Peace Index, ranking 134th out of 163 nations for peacefulness in 2022. Marriage and divorce are under the jurisdiction of the religious courts: Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and Christian. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Israel a "flawed democracy" in 2022. A flawed democracy is a nation where elections are fair and free and basic civil liberties are honoured but may have issues (e.g. media freedom infringement and minor suppression of political opposition and critics). This is how Netanyahu literally works.

According to this data... do you really consider Israel as a first-world country?

John Mearsheimer recently gave this talk at the Centre for Independent Studies in Brisbane, Australia.

As usual he delivers a straightforward, realist analysis of the situation in Ukraine and Israel, and provides some wider context. This is part 1 of that talk. Part 2 is yet to come out.



Timestamps:

0:00 - 21:05 Russia-Ukraine War
21:05 - 37:18 Israel-Gaza War

But this is false. Not every action taken against a justified cause is immoral, much less punishable — Leontiskos

By definition anyone resisting a just cause is acting unjustly. It's kind of like the following decision tree:



So we see here it's not the opponents cause that gives rise to a justification to use violence but it arises from how the opponent pursues that just cause.

There's some room for weighing what is and isn't proportional given the cause of course. The greater the good we're pursuing, the more intense violence we would likely accept. As an example, I think the moral intuition that we are allowed to use more violence to protect our lives then to protect our things, seems reasonably.

Easy to be straightforward if you just ignore the parts of the story that don't neatly fit the narrative. Like the fact that the two-state solution was repeatedly rebuffed by Palestinian and Arab representatives as well. Or how the interests of Saudi Arabia and Iran also shape the conflict.



What do we do if noone has a just cause though?

It seems to me that, looking at the broad strokes, no "side" can really claim to have had a just cause. Individuals, certainly, but not those who ended up steering the larger situation.

Obviously we can condemn both sides for their respective unjust actions. But do we act beyond that? Should we revert to consequentialism in a situation where we cannot resolve the "just cause conflict"? Or should we ignore consequences and adopt complete neutrality?

From the article you posted:

Proportionality as a principle is a manifestation of the law of war’s delicate balance between the military imperative of defeating the enemy as quickly as possible and the humanitarian imperative of mitigating suffering during war as much as possible. Parties to a conflict must not only refrain from attacking civilians and civilian objects deliberately, but they must also make extensive efforts to minimize the incidental harm from their attacks on lawful military targets.

Now how do you do that? Well, here's one example what US armed forces did before capturing an Iraqi city held by insurgents in Operation Phantom Fury:

Most of Fallujah's civilian population fled the city before the battle, which greatly reduced the potential for noncombatant casualties. U.S. military officials estimated that 70–90% of the 300,000 civilians in the city fled before the attack, leaving 30,000 to 90,000 civilians still in the city.

Less than one thousand civilians were killed then in Fallujah (800 according to the Red Cross/Crescent). Meaning if there were only 30000 left in the city, roughly three people of every one hundred civilians died in the battle at worst. That would be to Gaza's size 58 000 killed, if or when the civilians cannot get out from the fighting. Assuming the IDF would show similar restraint as the US did in Fallujah.

And you might say Israel has done the same thing here by telling the people to leave Gaza City and seek refuge in the south. Now it seems that Gaza has been cut and the focus is on Gaza City. Sounds OK, but then not giving minimal humanitarian aid to over two million people is one troubling issue. Then comes the question what to do to the southern part. How Israel will conduct the war when it comes to the southern part of the Gaza strip is the real breaker here. Civilians supposed to have gone there(in 48 hours), yet it has also has been bombed. How to clear that, what to do there, is where you can easily get into tens of thousands of killed. The battle of Berlin cost the deaths of 125 000. The real questions here are the "then what?", what you do after you have gone through the small strip of land.

If the human toll will become huge, the propaganda spinmeisters will have a lot of work (on both sides) and will try to make it disputed. However you cannot make tens of thousands killed somehow be living, hence history will have a somewhat exact figure.

I see what you're saying. The source I read was a Pakistani who was giving a broad history of Islam since 1900. He said that Iran is a beacon for Shiites everywhere because there are elements of Shiite practice that are deeply offensive to Sunnis. Where the two groups are living in the same area, Shiites have to hide or squash their practices. This is a burden that Shiites have to carry. Iran is a symbol of emancipation from it.

The same author did say that conflict between the two comes and goes, and that it's not the same conflict over time. It's usually a symptom of tension that's arisen for other reasons.

To continue, the real issue here is what Israel really will do afterwards, if it wants to wipe out Hamas altogether. Again the lessons learned from the US experience in Iraq (in Fallujah) tells how crucial this is:

The transition from combat operations to restoration of essential services and humanitarian assistance was envisioned to be spatial not time based. In other words while fighting was continuing in some areas of the city, where possible MNF and Iraqi forces would be rebuilding pump houses and electrical substations in an area not far away, and in other location within the city military forces would also be providing humanitarian relief supplies to the remaining Fallujah residents.

In practice, this conditions-based conflict termination process worked rather well, but it did suffer from some significant challenges.

In Fallujah the US did have the Iraqi government to help here (and whose performance wasn't stellar), but who has Bibi? So what to do with the human animals from the evil city?

Perhaps the US will come to mop around and clean the place or something...

First vs third world = difference in level of technology

Yep, it does create a cycle of violence. But the cycle continues precisely because both parties are left with no choice. You can't step in and say, "Break the cycle by allowing the other guy to hit you and get away with it!" That just ain't gonna work.

First vs third world = difference in level of technology — Pneumenon

These days we talk about core countries and developing ones. We talk about regional influence versus global influence.

I don't really care what the current jargon is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You prefer the 1950s jargon. :up:

I prefer masturbating over semantics so I can score a point and ignore what's actually under discussion.

I prefer masturbating over semantics so I can score a point and ignore what's actually under discussion. — Pneumenon

That's weird.

Yep, it does create a cycle of violence. But the cycle continues precisely because both parties are left with no choice. You can't step in and say, "Break the cycle by allowing the other guy to hit you and get away with it!" That just ain't gonna work. — Pneumenon

But nobody is saying "let the other guy hit you", we're saying stop human rights abuses, stop the occupation and illegal settlement. That has nothing to do with a cycle but everything to do with ensuring Palestinians can live in human decency. I have no problem with a just and proportionate response against a terrorist attack but I don't see why in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, there's still an occupation, settlers with support from the IDF feel free to kill Palestinians and other human rights abuses continue.