Comment by edanm
2 years ago
I think we mostly agree on this, and there's a reason the mantra "Hamas=ISIS" was so common.
Two points we disagree on:
> The difference between a Hamas militant and a civilian is simply whether they are currently holding their AK-47.
That's true in terms of what they seem like visually (which is maybe what you meant). Not true in the sense that most Gazans are not members of Hamas.
That does make it a lot harder to know who is Hamas and who isn't, but it's still possible (maybe) to effectively take out Hamas by capturing/killing all the known leaders, anyone who is actively holding hostages, anyone in tunnels, etc. I don't think Israel would need to kill literally every Hamas militant, nor should it.
> The more civilians are killed the more angry young men are drawn to the cause. Short of flattening the whole area and killing everyone I don't see an end.
I hope you're wrong, for everyone's sake.
But it really is true that the US killed a lot of Germans and Japanese, and now the Germans and Japanese are allies. It's not automatic that everyone will turn to violence. Also, if there is no organizational structure around it, then "angry young men that turned to violence" don't actually have anything to do with their anger.
> That's true in terms of what they seem like visually (which is maybe what you meant). Not true in the sense that most Gazans are not members of Hamas.
Yes, sorry I didn't mean to imply that everyone is Gaza is a member of Hamas. That's clearly not true. But visually they are indistinguishable, or could very easily become so.
That said, I do suspect that these organisations are much more fluid than the binary distinction we're prone to make in the west.
I was thinking about what the process was after the second world war by which people normalised relations with the German people. Unfortunately my amateur conclusion was that we just created new enemies to redirect the anger.