Comment by tovej
16 hours ago
How can you claim this with a straight face, when Israel has slaughtered Palestinians like cattle every chance they have. And when they're not killing them with direct violence, they are robbing them of basic necessities and human dignity.
And how can you claim October 7th wasn't an act if war? The main thrust of the attacks were targeting military installations. Much more than Israeli actions in Gaza before or since, which have clearly been done in service of genocide since Israel was created.
The Palestinian genocide has not been a regular war, it has been an absolute extermination campaign that is still ongoing.
"The main thrust targeted military installations"— of 1,139 confirmed dead, 828 were civilians. That's 72%. They also massacred 364 people at a music festival, which Hamas later described as a "coincidence" because they "may have thought" ravers were soldiers "resting". That's the defence you're endorsing.
Nobody serious disputes that Gaza's suffering is real or that Israel's conduct warrants scrutiny. But "genocide since Israel was created" is doing a lot of work for you; the ICJ found Palestinian rights were "plausibly" at risk, not that 1948 was a genocide.
Words mean things. Overreaching doesn't help the people you're claiming to defend, it just makes it easier for the other side to dismiss everything else you say.
A reminder: Israel counts Hamas soldiers as military targets, even when they are out of uniform and in civilian life.
If we apply the civilized world's standards of war then yes, Israelis who are also off-duty soldiers or reservists don't count as military targets.
If we apply Israel's standards, however, they are.
Are Gazans not allowed to apply the same standards to their adversaries that their adversaries openly apply to them? Would you be this courteous, in their position?
Of the 378 people killed at and around Nova, 16 were off-duty soldiers attending the rave and 4 were killed fighting [1]. That's 20 out of 378 ... so about 5%.
So even by the standard you're proposing, Hamas massacred around 358 people who wouldn't qualify as military targets under anyone's rules of engagement. Including theirs, apparently, since Hamas's own explanation was that they "may have thought" the ravers were soldiers "resting"; i.e. they didn't know and killed them anyway.
The argument you've constructed requires Hamas to have been applying a targeting framework. The evidence is that they found a large crowd of Israelis and opened fire.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-okayed-nova-music-festival...
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A wonderful quote that demonstrates how Israel applies different standards to itself: even its active duty combatants are painted as helpless innocents!
“Nimrod Cohen was abducted from Tank 3”
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hjzgyg9txg
Israel has to apply that standard because Hamas operates without uniforms unlike IDF. So yeah, Gazans shouldn't apply the same standard because unlike them Israeli military operates in uniforms so it's easy to distinguish between them and civilians. That Gazans do the opposite is on them.
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So the best you can say about Israel’s conduct over the course of the past 2.5 years is that it “warrants scrutiny”?
And if you want to play the number of victims game, even pre Oct 7 one side has always had it significantly worse than the other. After all, one side is a sovereign state that has a technologically advanced military, an air force, a navy, and air defense systems.
Remarkable. You've managed to read a comment that cited the ICJ, called out Israel's non-compliance with binding provisional measures, and explicitly said there's "plenty to condemn"; and concluded the position is that Israeli conduct merely "warrants scrutiny."
This isn't a conversation, it's not even engagement: that's just not reading.
On asymmetry: you've accidentally made the case for holding Israel to a higher standard. A nuclear-capable state with F-35s, Iron Dome and a $3.8bn annual US military subsidy [1] bears more responsibility for its choices than a militia in a blockaded strip of land; not less. That's what asymmetry actually means.
What it doesn't mean is that a music festival full of civilians somehow doesn't count. But nice try.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12587
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[flagged]
For onlookers: the final paragraph is in Swedish. It calls me a far-right nationalist and racist. Draw your own conclusions about how that fits the pattern of this exchange.
On substance: 72% of October 7th victims were civilians by Israel's own social security data [1]. tovej's argument that this was primarily a military operation depends on not counting them.
The Hannibal directive is a separate and legitimate concern. It has nothing to do with whether Hamas targeted civilians — it addresses what Israel did in response.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social...
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