Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Valmy]

Of course none of the countries in the Middle East will do shit to help the Palestinians. But for whatever reason the Netherlands must have pressure put on them.

[Razgovory]

Hams is setting up road block to keep people from evacuating the northern part of the strip.

[Josquius]

Of course none of the countries in the Middle East will do shit to help the Palestinians. But for whatever reason the Netherlands must have pressure put on them.

I don't understand what you mean here.

[Zoupa]

Over 6 THOUSAND rockets have been sent from Gaza to Israel in the last week. I've seen videos including live feeds of dudes without uniforms of course, setting up the launchers in a house's yard, in the street, from rooftops etc.

Of course not all the folks in Gaza support Hamas and civilian deaths of children is terrible. I'm not sure what some of these peaceniks want Israel to do exactly, though.

Those launchers are going to be hit.

[Savonarola]

Of course none of the countries in the Middle East will do shit to help the Palestinians. But for whatever reason the Netherlands must have pressure put on them.

I think the Netherlands are afraid of the schools being attacked (Hamas has called for today to be a "Day of Rage" against the Americans and Zionists) not that they're permanently shutting down the Jewish schools.

[Valmy]

Of course none of the countries in the Middle East will do shit to help the Palestinians. But for whatever reason the Netherlands must have pressure put on them.

I think the Netherlands are afraid of the schools being attacked (Hamas has called for today to be a "Day of Rage" against the Americans and Zionists) not that they're permanently shutting down the Jewish schools.

Yes I know. I just meant European countries are really feeling pressure over this. Berlin and Paris shutting down protests. The Netherlands taking action to protect their Jewish citizens. As if these are the countries who could or should do something about this crisis.

[Josephus]

When I was a young man serving in Iraq, I deployed as part of an infantry battalion tasked with clearing out a notoriously bad neighborhood in the south of Baghdad. My duties often led me to be inside the battalion's Tactical Operations Center, and on many occasions I was there when some shit went down. This talk about minimizing civilian casualties reminds me of such an occasion.

One time I was present, we had live drone feed of an AQI mortar site manned by several men appearing to prepare it for firing, ammunition and all. They were taking their sweet time getting their weapon ready, which gave our mortar crews plenty of time to target them. As soon as our battalion commander gave the order, our mortars could fire and everyone there would become toothpaste.

Apparently, the drone operators/spotters also identified a woman and a child on site. This caused some hesitation from our battalion commander, but as soon as it appeared that the enemy mortar was going to fire, he gave the order for our mortars to destroy the mortar site. It was destroyed and I remember hearing that the drone spotter confirmed everyone killed.

Some days later, our mortar crewmen responsible for destroying that mortar site and killing everyone present were ordered to see the battalion chaplain. The chaplain asked everyone there if they had any regret whatsoever. No one said they did.

I think about that period of my life often, and current events and this discussion brought this specific episode to mind so I felt like sharing. There are no easy answers to this. I suspect many of today's people on the ground in Israel and Gaza, be they combatants or not, may come to develop similar memories as mine.

thanks for sharing this story.

[Valmy]

Over 6 THOUSAND rockets have been sent from Gaza to Israel in the last week. I've seen videos including live feeds of dudes without uniforms of course, setting up the launchers in a house's yard, in the street, from rooftops etc.

Of course not all the folks in Gaza support Hamas and civilian deaths of children is terrible. I'm not sure what some of these peaceniks want Israel to do exactly, though.

Those launchers are going to be hit.

Well it is not that exactly. What the peaceniks, well the reasonable ones, claim is that decades of horrendous Israeli policies at the hands of Netanyahu and his far right allies have led to this situation. I think we all agree that killing civilians is bad and what Israel is going to do is bad. But yes it is hard to see in this specific situation how Israel could de-escalate at this juncture. And compounding the problem is that Palestine really has no friends to help them deal with the humanitarian aspects of this situation.

And I certainly have lots of sympathy for the poor fuckers caught in the Gaza strip. Most of them are young and have no responsibility for the shit situation they were born into. However, as an American it is hard not to remember that time we put considerable effort into trying to establish democratically elected governments of Palestine we could maybe work out a deal with in 2005 and 2006 and Gaza took the opportunity to freely and fairly elect Hamas fully indicating the majority of Palestinians living in Gaza had zero interest in peace and only believed in a delusional struggle for victory they could never win. Now who knows how realistic it was that we were going to help the Palestinians and work out a deal even if they elected some moderate peace party to power but that felt like the last chance Palestine was ever going to get help from us. But it was clear that a peace deal with Israel had no popular mandate in Gaza, at least at that time.

Though I have believed that the second Yitzhak Rabin's body hit the ground, any real hope for Palestine died with him. Obviously I didn't think that at the time, but I think events afterwards have demonstrated this. Yigal Amir: most successful terrorist since Gavrilo Princip.

[grumbler]

It highlights the unreality of the Byers kind of critique.  The rules speak of feasibility; obviously it is not feasible to simultaneously stage and carry out an enormous military incursion in a dense urban area while simultaneously arranging for either evacuation or relief for over 1 million civilians mixed in indiscriminately with un-uniformed fighters. The IDF is just following the Alice in Wonderland logic by making this obviously equally infeasible request that half the population immediately self relocate to the other half of the Strip.

The bottom line is that what the OSC and her fellow really are complaining about is war.  I have some sympathy for that view - war is bad.  But Israel's decision to wage war is hardly unreasonable under these circumstances and international law permits them to do so.

The danger in casually throwing around allegations of international law violations is that if such violations do occur in the future - which very well may happen - the credibility of the complainants will have already been damaged.

It also highlights the degree to which you guys are going to look the other way when an atrocity is about to be committed because Israel is a special case.  The Israelis know that population has nowhere to go because it was Israel that created those conditions.  Now Israel gets a pass because it gives 24 hours for about a million people to leave and they have nowhere to go?

I predict that the next thing that will happen is Israel will claim that those who did not vacate can be considered as supporters of Hamas and therefore valid targets of war and you guys will simply say, "Yep, that Byers guy is smart and all, wrote the book, but doesn't really know how the real world works."
 

It's impossible for me to tell whether the closing strawman argument is worse than the fact that you obviously have not read the post to which you are responding.

[grumbler]

FWIW all the B-29 guys they interviewed said they had grave misgivings about what they did, and that it had haunted them for their entire lives. All of the B-29 crews were officers, and in the WW2 military that almost universally meant they were from a more educated pool of men than the enlisted ranks. These guys were flying at 5000' which is incredibly low altitude, and they all knew those bombs weren't hitting the Imperial Japanese Army, they knew what those incendiary devices were doing and who they were doing it to, and many reported that when they would come in behind a long line of B-29s that had laid down prior incendiary bombs you could smell the odor of cooking flesh as you passed over--multiple of these guys made that same comment.

Purely as an aside, and not negating your point at all, but

The air crew of a B-29 generally included eleven people. Each occupation had a different MOS ("military operating specialty"), and required special training. The Airplane Commander, Pilot, Navigator and Bombardier were generally officers. The Flight Engineer, Radio Operator, and the Gunners were generally enlisted men.  The Radarman was initially an enlisted man but was later an officer.  The following is a list of the crew members, with the MOS indicated in square brackets.

Airplane Commander [1093]
Pilot (or Co-Pilot) [1092]
Navigator [1034]
Bombardier [1035]
Flight Engineer [737]
Radioman (or Radio Operator) [2756]
Radarman (or Radar Observer) [0142]
Central Fire Control (or CFC Gunner) [580]
Right Gunner [611]
Left Gunner [611]
Tail Gunner [611]

So, four or five of the eleven-man crew were commissioned.

[Savonarola]

Yes I know. I just meant European countries are really feeling pressure over this. Berlin and Paris shutting down protests. The Netherlands taking action to protect their Jewish citizens. As if these are the countries who could or should do something about this crisis.

My mistake, I misunderstood what you meant.

It's hard for me to fathom how little concern how little concern Hamas has for its own people.  The "Day of Rage" can only make things worse for the Palestinians living in Europe; it justifies the perception that they are of the enemy within.  If something does happen today it's going to make the western countries even less willing to accept Palestinian refugees. 

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

It's hard for me to fathom how little concern how little concern Hamas has for its own people.  The "Day of Rage" can only make things worse for the Palestinians living in Europe; it justifies the perception that they are of the enemy within.  If something does happen today it's going to make the western countries even less willing to accept Palestinian refugees. 

It seems to me Hamas wants Palestinians abroad to be "the enemy within".  Since the latter understandably have no interest in this, the play by the former seems to be to whip up the ample xenophobic elements in the West to force the latter to become that enemy out of rage and desperation.  I don't think it's going to work; it will just make life even more unpleasant for a bunch of minority communities.

[Jacob]

Do we have proof that Israel is willfully killing civilians? If Hamas is not keeping to the same rules, i.e. they hide among civilians, then Israel has a binary choice: do not fight Hamas, or accept causing excessive civilian casualties. I don't see a third way.

I don't think we do. I think the discussion is in anticipation of the potential blood bath in Gaza.

Israel's challenge is to destroy Hamas as thoroughly as possible, without incurring undue and excessive civilian casualties. I have no doubt that that is their plan, though I expect that there may be some individually driven atrocities. There's also the question of what constitues "undue and excessive civilian casualties", where people will have different points of view.

To me the biggest question right now is how much death and suffering the civilian population in Gaza will have visited upon it.

[Jacob]

Hams is setting up road block to keep people from evacuating the northern part of the strip.

Absolute evil.

[Valmy]

Hams is setting up road block to keep people from evacuating the northern part of the strip.

If it were anybody but Hamas I would take this with a grain of salt and suspect this might be propaganda by their enemies.

But it is Hamas. Of course they are doing that. Why would we even suspect otherwise?