Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Razgovory]

I thought Israel was supposed to be Fascist, not democratic.

[crazy canuck]

I thought Israel was supposed to be Fascist, not democratic.

Then you obviously haven't been reading what professor Byers has to say, since his thesis is based on the fact that Israel is a democratic state.

[Razgovory]

The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/hamas-pop-intersectionality-leftism-israel/675625/

The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?

In corners of academia and social-justice activism where the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed are never in doubt, many people failed that test. In response to a fellow progressive who argued that targeting civilians is always wrong, the Yale professor Zareena Grewal replied: "Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard." (She has since locked her X account.) Chicago's Black Lives Matter chapter posted a picture of a paraglider, referencing the gunmen who descended on civilians at a music festival near the Gaza border from the air. (The chapter said in a statement that "we aren't proud" of the post, which was later deleted.) Harvard student groups posted a letter stating that its signatories "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence." (Several of the named groups have since withdrawn their endorsement.)

The New York branch of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a rally where protesters chanted "resistance is justified when people are occupied" and one participant displayed a swastika. These actions prompted criticism by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps the DSA's most prominent figure, and the resignation of members including the comedian Sarah Silverman. In a statement, the New York City Democratic Socialists regretted the "confusion" that its rhetoric had caused, but added: "We are also concerned that some have chosen to focus on a rally while ignoring the root causes of violence in the region, the far-right Netanyahu government's escalating human rights violations and explicitly genocidal rhetoric, and the dehumanization of the Palestinian people."

In the United Kingdom, where I live, a journalist for the hard-left outlet Novara, Rivkah Brown, tweeted that "the struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn't apologise for it." (She has since deleted the post, saying she responded "too quickly and in a moment of heightened emotion.") Ellie Gomersall, the president of the National Union of Students in Scotland, apologized for reposting content justifying Hamas's actions. Two days earlier, Gomersall had accused the British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer of being "complicit in the deaths of ... trans people" for saying that "a woman is a female adult." Got that? A politician with an essentialist view of womanhood is complicit in the deaths of innocents, but a terrorist indiscriminately murdering people at a music festival must be understood in context.

In the fevered world of social media, progressive activists have often sought to discredit hateful statements and unjust policies by describing them as "violence," even "genocide." This tendency seems grotesque if the same activists are not prepared to criticize Hamas, a group whose founding charter is explicitly genocidal: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees."

Many of those making inflammatory statements come from what's sometimes known as the "intersectional left." This tendency is strongly influenced by the academic disciplines of queer theory and critical race theory, and by the postcolonial idea of the "subaltern," or marginalized class. Like woke, intersectionality has become a boo-word for the right—but unlike woke, it is a label that some activists proudly embrace, particularly academics and young feminists.

I will go to my grave defending the original conception of intersectionality, a legal doctrine advanced by the American critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. She made the useful observation that civil-rights legislation has usually treated protected characteristics such as sex and race as discrete, when in fact they are often interlinked. One of her examples was a St. Louis car plant that, for many years, hired white women and Black men but never Black women. Even after management stopped discriminating, Black women always ranked low on the seniority list and therefore were especially vulnerable to layoffs. Yet how could they sue when they were not subject to racism or sexism per se, but an intersection of the two?

However, Crenshaw herself has expressed surprise at how the meaning of intersectionality has changed through its invocation in pop culture. "This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content," she told Vox in 2019. In escaping from the academy into the mainstream, intersectionality morphed into both a crude tallying of oppression points and an assumption that social-justice struggles fit neatly together—with all of the marginalized people on one side and the powerful on the other.

That's how you end up with Queers for Palestine when being queer in Palestine is difficult and dangerous. (In 2016, a Hamas commander was executed after being accused of theft and gay sex.) It's also how you end up with candidates for Labour Party leadership signing a pledge that insists there "is no material conflict between trans rights and women's rights," even when—as in the eligibility rules for women's sports—some wins for one group plainly come at the expense of the other. The pop version of intersectionality cannot deal with the complexity of real human life, where we can all be, in Jean-Paul Sartre's phrase, "half-victims, half-accomplices, like everyone else." In fact, you can support the Palestinian cause without excusing acts of terrorism committed by Hamas. You can question Israel's military response without excusing acts of terrorism committed by Hamas. In fact, maintaining the principle that targeting civilians is wrong gives you the moral authority to criticize any Israeli response that creates a humanitarian crisis.

Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu government's decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza. The simplistic logic of pop intersectionality cannot reconcile this, and the subject caused schisms within the left long before Saturday's attacks. In 2017, Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers of the Women's March, told The Nation that Zionism and feminism were incompatible: "It just doesn't make any sense for someone to say, 'Is there room for people who support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?' There can't be in feminism." In January 2018, several pro-Palestinian groups boycotted a Women's March because it featured the actor Scarlett Johansson, who once made an ad for an Israeli company that has a factory in the West Bank. On the other side, Jewish groups condemned three of the Women's March organizers, including Sarsour, for associating with the openly anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

The leftist belief in the righteousness of "punching up," a derivation of standpoint theory, is also important here. Again, this idea has mutated from the reasonable observation that different groups have different knowledge based on their experience—I have never experienced being pulled over by a traffic cop as a Black man, and that limits my understanding of the police—to the idea that different rules apply to you depending on your social position. When an oppressed group uses violence against the oppressor, that is justified "resistance." Many of us accept a mild version of this proposition: The British suffragettes turned to window smashing and bombing after deciding that letter writing and marches were useless, and history now remembers them as heroines. But somehow, in the case of the incursion from Gaza into Israel, the idea of "punching up" was extended to the murder of children. I simply cannot comprehend how any self-proclaimed feminist can watch footage of armed militants manhandling a woman whose pants are soaked with what looks like blood and decide that she has the power in that situation—and deserves her fate.

The sheer number of apologies and climbdowns that followed the initial wave of inflammatory posts suggests that some of their authors issued knee-jerk statements of solidarity before they understood exactly what they were endorsing. As the full extent of the weekend's barbarity becomes clear, some on the intersectional left are—to their small credit—revising their initial reactions. But others are doubling down. Confronted with real violence by genocidal terrorists, they failed the test.

[crazy canuck]

Yes, it is entirely possible to condemn the slaughter carried out by HAMAS and be concerned for the well-being of Palestinian civilians

Who do you think he's taking a different position.  Has there been anybody here who has said that the attack by HAMAS was in anyway justified?

[Admiral Yi]

I accept your apologies now.

What would you like me to apologize for?

[viper37]

I mentioned this guy's BBC appearance earlier, but here is an article covering it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67140250

My take is this guy should be considered a "Hamas asset", dude was straight lying his ass off:

Zaher Kuhail, a British-Palestinian civil engineering consultant and university professor who was nearby at the time, told the BBC that what he had witnessed was "beyond imagination".

"I [saw] two rockets coming from an F-16 or an F-35 [fighter jet], shelling these people and killing them ruthlessly, without any mercy," he said.

This Hamas plant is in Gaza now, but we can assume he is going back to Britain at some point.

Yes, another witness, inside the hospital, said he heard the distinctive whine of 2 missiles and then the roof collapsed.

Le Parisien reports from credible sources that one missile hit the parking and the hospital had been mostly evacuated before the strike.  There's between 10 and 50 victims at most and the Islamic Djihad missile malfunction is the most credible thesis.

Hamas is attempting to inflame other Arab countries into declaring holy war against Israel.  So far, it's successful in provoking riots at least.  And its narrative is proving popular, no matter the facts.

Netanyahu really fucked up this one.  He really managed to rally all the Arabs against him by essentially doing nothing against the Hamas and again targeting the wrong enemy.  It seems a constant in Israel history since the beginning of Hamas.

[grumbler]

Professor Byers as now written an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail

(snip)
The second clearly violated rule is the prohibition on forcible transfers within or from an occupied territory, for instance, from Gaza City to southern Gaza. An alleged violation of this rule is the basis of the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year.

Israeli lawyers will point out that there is an exception to the rule, namely that transfers may occur "if the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand." But even then, the transferring power "shall ensure, to the greatest practicable extent, that proper accommodation is provided to receive the protected persons, that the removals are effected in satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, safety and nutrition, and that members of the same family are not separated."

Clearly, those responsibilities are not being fulfilled in southern Gaza today.

Still catching up on the discussion, but I am flabbergasted that an "expert" on international humanitarian law would so blatantly mis-state the law and what is happening.

International humanitarian law prohibits the mass movement of occupied people by the occupying power:

Article 49 (relevant portion)
Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.

GCIV
Note that this is a prohibition of action by an "Occupying Power."

Israel is not forcibly transferring anyone in Gaza.  I don't know why the professor would think that they are.

Further, Israel is not an occupying power.   Hague Convention 4 is still the defining document in occupation law, and state that

Art. 42.

Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.

The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.

Hague 4

For Israel in Gaza, this occupied territory is non-existent, so Israel cannot be violation this element of the rules of armed conflict.
 
While I agree with the prof on the collective punishment issue, this clearly is not an "expert" on which we should rely for authoritative statements about the situation in Gaza.

[Threviel]

Byers may be an expert, but he is first and foremost a political activist with a leftist agenda. He is not to be taken seriously at all and it's not worth the effort to debunk him.

[garbon]

In a propaganda war, the side that has no concern for truth or credibility always has a short-term tactical advantage over the side that cares more about its credibility and reputation for accuracy and will represent only what it thinks it can plausibly verify.

The message OUR EMEMY IS KILLERZ is always going to drown out the message of let's withhold judgment till the facts are known.

Certainly it's a feature of the operational landscape - as is the influence of anti-semitism - that factors into the options available. Perhaps Israel is doing the best possible it can under the circumstances, or maybe there's room for improvement.

This feels like a strange line of discussion. Lies your enemy has spread whip up a frenzy on social media and traditional media loves to eat from that trough...well you should have better social media game.

OK...

[The Brain]

In a propaganda war, the side that has no concern for truth or credibility always has a short-term tactical advantage over the side that cares more about its credibility and reputation for accuracy and will represent only what it thinks it can plausibly verify.

The message OUR EMEMY IS KILLERZ is always going to drown out the message of let's withhold judgment till the facts are known.

Certainly it's a feature of the operational landscape - as is the influence of anti-semitism - that factors into the options available. Perhaps Israel is doing the best possible it can under the circumstances, or maybe there's room for improvement.

This feels like a strange line of discussion. Lies your enemy has spread whip up a frenzy on social media and traditional media loves to eat from that trough...well you should have better social media game.

OK...

I wrote something, but then I realized that I don't know exactly what you mean. What exactly do you mean?

[Admiral Yi]

It sounds to me like he's assigning some liability to Israel for the Arab's streets response to the fake Gaza hospital news.

[garbon]

It sounds to me like he's assigning some liability to Israel for the Arab's streets response to the fake Gaza hospital news.

That's what it feels like Jacob is doing, yes.

[The Brain]

Your enemies will always try to hurt you. The only thing you control directly is your own actions.

[garbon]

Your enemies will always try to hurt you. The only thing you control directly is your own actions.

To be clear, I don't think that first sentence of mine. I should have maybe put scare quotes on it.

[Admiral Yi]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THV_OuzC9jM

Ret US Gen talks about evidence of hospital hit.