Comment by elcritch

Country A attacks vastly more powerful neighbor. They have no defensive infrastructure (for civilians), no plans for minimizing civilian deaths, no hope of actually winning the war they started. There strategy is to fight in a dense urban environment among their own civilians while firing thousands of unguided rockets at their enemy, knowing the retaliation is going to be horrific with no way for them to stop it (other than surrendering, but they would rather all die).

Country B has possibly the best missile defense system in the world; mainly because their neighbors shoot unguided rockets into their city. They work to defend their citizens at all costs even with expensive missiles and a protracted military campaign. They design cutting edge laser missile defense to help them alleviate the burden of protecting their citizens. The only reason they do not have to completely annihilate their neighbor who's shooting rockets at them is because they are able to intercept most of them. If those rockets were actually landing and causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties their retaliation would have to be far more deadly.

People on the internet: "actually its the civilians from country A who need defenses"

What kind of argument is that? All civilians should be protected.

The defenses they need are against Hamas.

Nobody else comes close to Israel in protecting civilians in combat zones.

And let's take a critical eye to that data you linked. I'm having a hard time with the filters but we can see enough without: The fatalities are nearly 90% male. That implies that probably 80% are in some fashion combatants or combatant-adjacent.

And note that the death toll for the recent war includes all deaths. Natural causes, internal combat, rockets falling short (historically, ~25% of Gaza deaths, but probably not this time), combatants and civilians. As well as some that are fake.

And Hamas had the power to end the war at any time--return the hostages, the world would quickly have stopped Israel. Thus we can conclude that Hamas wanted the war despite what it did to their population.

Defensive weapons technology is how you get less conflict though.

When some idiot in the ME decides to shoot something at Israel, the character of the response demanded by the population depends heavily on whether any Israelis die or property is destroyed.

Israel didn't aggressively bomb Gaza till October 7 killed a lot of Israelis, even though they were regularly shooting down Hamas launched rockets with Iron Dome.

There is a practical gulf in political and diplomatic options depending on if an attack lands or does not, so much so that whether or not someone can shoot down incoming weaponry is a factor in some diplomatic decisions (I.e. Iran firing missiles at US bases in Qatar).

Life is not fair.

Palestinians patrons need to tell them they aren't going to win militarily against the Israeli's

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Israel invests in defending their civilians with technology like Iron Beam.

In contrast the Gazan government strategically uses humans shields [2, 3] and despite this the majority of Palestinians still support starting this war by attacking civilians on Oct 7th [1]. Defense technology doesn’t help if you don’t want it unfortunately.

Hamas also has hundreds of miles of tunnels which civilians aren’t allowed to use.

1: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/1000#:~:text=The%20Trump%20Pla... 2: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.... 3: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/01/hamas-officials-admi...

Lasers need a straight path through clean air. Israel is a favorable location because Tel Aviv gets 200 or so sunny days a year, but if there are clouds this won’t work or will have to fire at the last moment.

As for drones, they’ll fly lower to the ground to reduce the line of sight.

They have economic related riots starting as we speak so the progressive end result (a few riots down the line) might either be this or regime change

They haven't done so in decades. You think they'll start now?

Technical solutions can lead to diplomatic solutions as it changes the power dynamics.

Will it solve the "root cause"? Probably not, but that's because there's no single "root cause", but it still might lead to some diplomatic resolution.

Yup the reason being that Palestinian society is deeply propagandized and radicalized, and they need significant cultural changes to join the modern world

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The existence of Israel is not the root cause of this conflict though...?

For the downvotes https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2023-09/features/delusions-a...

> Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.

I'm not sure that's true, before Iron Dome, Israel would respond to many rockets from Gaza by firing mortars back at where the rocket was launched from, often the roof of an apartment building or similar, causing civilian casualties.

After Iron Dome, a lot of rockets were simply intercepted and ignored, because there was no longer political pressure from Israelis seeing rockets land in their villages and wanting to hit back.

I think you have it backwards. Israel tolerated something like ~30k rocket attacks from Gaza (between 2005-2023) before finally launching a major military campaign that sought to remove Hamas from power.

It would normally be absurd to expect a state with military superiority to tolerate ~30k rocket attacks from its weaker neighbor. That was only tenable because Israel's air defenses mitigated the bulk of the damage.

If Israel's air defenses and bunkers suddenly disappeared, Israel would be forced to respond far more aggressively to each terrorist attack.

'people shouldn't have locks on their doors, they discourage them from improving society'

'moving from wooden shingles allows society to be negligent when it comes to fire/forestry management and makes the world worse'

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> The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.

Collectivism will not save us. The day after we abolish markets, prices, and capitalism, there will be as many disagreements about resource allocation as there were the day before. Some of those disagreements will spiral into conflict.

Do you think Israeli civilians shouldn't be able to defend themselves from Hamas' rockets? If yes - why? If not - what exactly is it that you find so problematic with the parent post?

What you don't understand is the carnage in Gaza is self-inflicted. Hamas attacked knowing what would happen. And knowing that every dead Palestinian was a weapon to use against Israel in the propaganda war. Thus they did everything they could get away with to maximize dead Palestinians.

The hypocrisy is astounding. Even to this very day, how many Gazans have been slaughtered since the so called "ceasefire"? No one bats an eye.

The only similarity between Golden Dome and Iron Beam is in their branding. An orbital conventional launch platform shares almost nothing with a land-based small-arms directed-energy one.

It's Trump's version of Reagan's Star Wars - it's all bluster that we will not see any result of, and it will be quietly shelved by future governments.