Comment by YZF
2 years ago
Hagari was not speaking about massacring civilians. He was talking about damage to Hamas/military targets. He did say that Israel is biased towards more damage vs. accuracy.
This is very propaganda. I've been following the conflict pretty closely and I speak Hebrew. The parent is correct, there is and was no order to massacre civilians.
It's probably safe to say that protecting Palestinian civilians is not Israel's main priority, but there's a big difference between that and painting a picture of Israel trying to massacre as many civilians as possible.
Is that meant to be exculpatory? If you say that you're attacking military targets that are (allegedly) embedded within civilian infrastructure and that you're focused on damage rather than accuracy, you are telling me that you intend to massacre civilians.
I think there's a difference in emphasis and intent. We're painting pictures here. So one picture we're painting is "kill as many civilians a possible with no other military objective" and the other picture we're painting is "go after military targets even at some cost to civilians (and the question of that cost)". The reality is that in every way, every military in the world, executes the second picture. The variable being what is a reasonable threshold for the given military objective. The accusations against Israel intentionally try to place it in the first picture.
If the critics were clear about their issue being how Israel measures proportionality with respect to every single target they go after, and they were able to support their case comparing to other similar military campaigns, and there was a very clear outcome of that comparison, I think that's very fair and I'd even be able to get behind it. But that's not what the critics are doing.
If you’re not going to be satisfied with anything short of Netanyahu on tape saying “our intent is to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible”verbatim, then we can just end this conversation now. Even the US would probably be forced to meaningfully withdraw support if Israel fully took the mask off (though as I’ve shown, many high ranking ministers and IDF members have come shockingly close).
What you hear instead are thinly-veiled justifications. Oh, we had to bomb those hospitals because there were tunnels there. So sorry about the civilian deaths at a refugee camp, but we just wanted to get that one commander.
Let’s be real here. Israel shut off food, water, medicine and electricity to Gaza. They’ve damaged over 2/3 of the buildings there [1]. As of a month ago, they’d dropped almost 2x the amount of explosives the US delivered to Hiroshima [2].
These are not the actions of a country “going after military targets even at some cost to civilians”. Israel is doing exactly what Hagari said: inflicting maximum damage.
[1] https://x.com/tksshawa/status/1732447886237974898
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/9/israel-att...
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> go after military targets even at some cost to civilians (and the question of that cost)
I feel the "question of that cost" is where the differences in opinion lie.
For example, if Israel considered the civilians of Gaza as Israel citizens of equal importance to all other Israeli citizens, you'd expect them to consider that cost to be much higher, and it would force them to maneuver much more carefully in their military operations in order to minimize it. Yes, it would make it a lot harder for them to fight and make headway against Hamas as well if they did.
Some people hold the belief that this is how Israel should treat civilians, no lesser than they'd treat their own.
I think another contentious issue, is around the outcome of the war, and what it means for those civilians as well. Is the idea to force the One-State solution, but not as a binational state with equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity or religion, but instead as a state with dominant Jewish identity? The impression to this question can change your opinion of the civilian casualties, are they an unfortunate price to pay towards their liberation from Hamas, and their incorporation into a more just, equal, fair, democracy, where they can live a better life? Or is it actually towards their further oppression by Israel?
Or if it is to force a Two-State solution, again, what would it mean of those civilians, would the Palestinian state be forced to harsh conditions as part of treaties if they lose the war, which would hurt those civilians further, etc.
It's complicated, but I do think most of it is about this "cost of civilian casualties", and what worth you attribute to it, and what worth you attribute to the end in order to justify the means.
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Things are much clearer, you are just cherry picking what to respond and defend. Then you build your case against isreal critics. One example of things you ignored replying to the GP comment is this. This is a plain war crime
> Israeli defense Minister Yoav Gallant: "I have ordered a complete siege on Gaza: no electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly."
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Right. So the Israeli government hands out weapons to settlers [1], the IDF is bombing as they do, treating people as they do [2], on Israeli TV they openly admit that the goal of destroying civilian infrastructure is to make Gaza "unlivable] [3], the IDF proudly poses for pictures as they do it [4] -- yet you split hairs and call it "very propaganda"? Wow.
That's like saying the Nazis just wanted Jews "gone", gassing them wasn't a priority.
Here is a German phrase you must learn:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam
People murder -- to not mince words, some people act and think like Nazis, as Yeshayahu Leibowitz so very correctly pointed out -- and they know they'll get away with it. There are rarely "explicit explicit" orders, the general atmosphere, the words and deeds you saw others get away with, is enough.
[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231024-security-minister...
[2] https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17327731468585127...
[3] https://twitter.com/NimerSultany/status/1731736295666282707
[4] https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17330661183302657...
This is the definition of cherry picking, and is not done in good faith.
I can tell from your links which side of the fence they're coming from. If we take the Ukraine-Russia war I'm sure I can find 4 links from either side to tell whatever story I want to tell. But I'll engage anyways:
- [1] Weapons are distributed to civilians/cities/settlements all over Israel as a response to 3000 heavily armed Palestinians murdering (and worse) civilians. Clearly a matter of self defense against an enemy who have shown they have the means and the will to do what they've done. Itamar Ben Gvir is a right wing minister who is definitely leveraging the Oct 7th attack to his agenda. In the US everyone can get a weapon. Just the presence of these weapons, at least according to Americans, is not a problem. I'd rather Oct 7th didn't happen and we wouldn't see more weapons since inevitably these weapons are going to be used for bad things, just like in the US.
- [2] The video shows men, in fighting age, from the active combat area in North Gaza where civilians were ordered to evacuate a long time ago. They are in their underwear so they can not blow themselves up, a common Hamas tactic. They are loaded on trucks and they will be interrogated. Likely many or all of them are combatants. We've seen videos from Hamas of their combatants in civilian clothing who turn from a combatant to a civilian in a second. This is all there is to it. There is no support for the other claims made in the tweet. I'm sure they're treated much better than the way Hamas is treating the Israelis they're holding and much better than the US treated Al Qaeda or ISIS fighters. Because the combatants aren't fighting by the rules of law, e.g. they're not in uniform, they don't get the protection of the Geneva convention as war prisoners.
- [3] This is just a random panel on TV. The talking head there is saying maybe the intent is to prevent Hamas from ruling, maybe the intent is to saw chaos, or maybe the intent is for Palestinians not to go back to Northern Gaza at all. Not sure what "they openly admit on Israeli TV" means here. Who is "they" what is "Israeli TV". This is a random person on a random channel, not a policy maker. It's very common in a war to go after the symbols of the enemy's regime as part of trying to force them to surrender.
- [4] I am not familiar with this story. Israel is and has been blowing up tunnels with explosives. Israel also blows up buildings that can be used as enemy cover. I can't say anything about this specific incident, do you have more references? Do we know this isn't fake news? Not from Gaza? Not this conflict? Not the place the Tweet says it is?
There are tactical reasons for Israel to attack buildings. There are tunnel entrances in many buildings. There are booby traps. They're used as cover by the enemy. One thing that's interesting to note is that the footage from where the prisoners were taken seems to show buildings still standing. The camera pans around and gives us views up the streets where buildings are also still standing.
All that said I'm sure there's some element of retribution, deterrence, and trying to break the will of the enemy and get them to surrender, in the massive scale of destruction. It's also a show of force to others who might contemplate attacking Israel (like Hezbollah). Wars are ugly.
I reject any comparison to WW-II Germany. These is insulting and offensive to the victims. If you want to make comparisons look at the Hamas.
Your argument fundamentally boils down to, "oops". I think we can apply a little more critical thinking than that. Most military folk know better than to say the quiet part out loud.