Comment by ajross
1 year ago
> All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their campaign. And then?
It remains a mess, but less of a mess? Look, it's all bad guys running the show in that hell hole of a desert. There are no trusted entities anywhere able to run a government that isn't somewhere between actively antagonistic and actively genocidal toward half the local population.
Nonetheless a status quo with less shooting and death is better than a status quo with more. Hamas killed fewer people than Israel did/is, so... yeah, I guess. An occasional October 7th is a better choice than levelling Gaza is. Incrementally. But none of this is going to get better, likely within our lifetimes.
> Hamas killed fewer people than Israel did/is
That's an understatement, Hamas killed less than 1,000 civilians, Israel killed 20,000+
Hamas directly and intentionally targeted civilians. Israel is doing what it can to limit civilian casualties while destroying Hamas. Hamas is making that very difficult by blending in with the population, putting command centers under major hospitals and so on.
> Hamas is making that very difficult by blending in with the population, putting command centers under major hospitals and so on.
If there's a command center under a hospital, then you don't bomb the hospital. The fact that your enemy is using "human shields" doesn't mean that it's justified to bomb and kill everyone, including the shields. Now every relative and friend of the innocent people you killed has a reason to pick up a gun against you.
Obviously this puts you at a disadvantage. Instead of bombing targets on a screen from the comfort of an air-conditioned office in Tel Aviv, you'll have to send special forces in on the ground and probably take a lot of casualties. But you demonstrate to the civilians that you're not just killing them indiscriminately.
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> Israel is doing what it can to limit civilian casualties while destroying Hamas.
You should really read the parent article at the top of the page. It doesn't support this statement and the court ruling was created from a mountain of evidence.
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Not picking a side or trying to punish anyone, I'm just highlighting that the difference in the number of victims is quite significant. It would be quite a different situation if Israel had killed only sightly more Palestinian civilians than Hamas' did in their attack. Actually, I suspect that this ICJ order would not have occurred, and that there wouldn't be such widespread accusations of genocide.
I think you are reading mmuch more into that reply than is warranted.
It’s simple fact more people have now died due to Israel’s actions.
That doesn’t mean they necessarily need to be punished for it. The international community doesn’t really need to.
If this is anything like the other 10 times Israel did one of their “Let’s provision some extra terrorists” exercises, they’ve already guaranteed that they’ll deal with two or three more decades of the palestinian population hating their guts.
I march with left-leaning American Jews. Exactly zero of them are called genocidal colonizers by anyone, let alone left-leaning American progressives.
Since you are asserting the existence of something here, are you able to provide an example?
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All Palestinians deaths are civilians by your measures.
> An occasional October 7th is a better choice than levelling Gaza is
Better for who? For Hamas yes, killing Israelis with impunity would be a boost. But for Israel - I don't know of any democracy that can keep going with an 'occasional' October 7th. A country can't sustain that without collapsing at some point. Think about 9-11 but with 80k killed instead of 3000, and around 10000 kidnapped. And the entity responsible is just around the corner and gonna keep doing it on occasion. Those are the proportions. How many of these would the U.S be able to endure before its economy and society collapsed?
Then we'll deal with that "at some point" I guess? Again, Israel is a bad guy too. It's all bad guys. All options suck. So pick the one with less death and just shuffle along until some unknown event in the far future acts to break the stalemate and produce a peaceful region (or, more realistically, acts to break the equilibrium and we get a genuine demographic disaster that returns the area to a "single ethnicity" state, which sucks even more, but may be unavoidable).
Tough love: Israel can't expect to continue to act as it has in the decades since the fall of the PA. It ultimately depends on international support and that support will eventually run out, c.f. the linked article. It won't happen soon, or all at once, but it will happen and there needs to be a plan for regional coexistence, and as you'd surely agree there really isn't one beyond an imagined (and largely impossible) total military victory.