Israel-Gaza war

[GeneralMacArthur]

Wasn't it the Gaza Health Ministry that claimed Israel bombed that hospital and killed 500 people?  And then it turned out the hospital was perfectly fine.  It's still there today.  IIRC they also (along with the UNRWA, Doctors Without Borders, Red Crescent, etc.) insisted the hospital Israel did besiege was purely civilian and had never been used by combatants.  You know, the one that had a huge tunnel complex underneath it and video footage on the security tapes of doctors helping Hamas fighters escort captive Jews into the building.

My biggest problem with the Gaza Health Ministry number is that they don't distinguish between Hamas fighters and civilian casualties.  They'll say, 25,000 have been killed.  And then people will run around and act like that's 25,000 civilians.  For all we know it could be 10,000 combatants and 15,000 civilians.  Hamas surely knows this information, but they don't release it.

The one number they do release is "67% of casualties are women or children." I was curious about this because I wanted to get just the number of women.  My theory was that if 40% of the casualties are women and 60% are men, and the general population is an even male/female split, then we could say 80% civilian casualties (half women) plus 20% combatant casualties (all men) gives us the 40/60 split and a rough sense of the combatant/civilian split.  But I can't find any source that says just the women killed.  Does anyone know if this exists?

I mean my guess is that we're seeing about a 5:1 civilian:military casualty ratio right now.  But there's no way to really know.  At any rate, Hamas is of course to blame for a high rate of civilian death since it is their strategy to use civilians as human shields and civilian buildings for military operations (both egregious violations of the Geneva convention).

[GeneralMacArthur]

Once again, it is purely thanks to Hamas's violation of the Geneva convention, committing a horrendous war crime by intentionally putting civilians in harm's way, that there are so many civilian deaths.  It is not Israel's fault.  Israel would ideally like to have zero civilian casualties if that was possible.  But it's not possible, entirely thanks to Hamas.

Israel must choose between the two goals of (A) destroying Hamas, and (B) avoiding any civilian casualties.  Up until 10/7, they were going with option B.  Hamas and the world have made it clear that Israel will receive nothing but punishment in return for that decision.  So they've now switched to option A.

If you blame Israel and have no smoke for Hamas, that says an awful lot about you.  Either you're so ignorant that you simply don't understand the basics of the conflict as I've described them above, you're so anti-Semitic that you think Israeli war crimes count but Hamas's are actually fine and dandy and justified, or you're so easily taken in by social media propaganda that you think Israel is intentionally murdering civilians and committing various other horrible crimes that they're not actually committing.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The most viral post on Twitter yesterday was a tweet by a podcaster from London who shared a video of some tiny little cartridges that said "Mine Fuse" on them and said he heard from "his local sources" that the IDF was intentionally planting these in schools disguised as food, and that children were opening them and getting blown up.

Literally none of any of this makes any sense.  It's absurd if you think about it for five seconds.  Every aspect of it is a ridiculous, obvious lie.  Yet it got shared tens of thousands of times and went red-hot viral.

This is the kind of thing that's poisoning people's brains.  They see this stuff and think Israel is a bunch of monsters.  Even if they don't fully buy into each individual example, there's tremendous volume of this kind of BS, so that just the sheer deluge creates the impression of "where there's smoke there's fire".

When I see things happen like, those "Genocide Joe" protesters who interrupted Biden's speech yesterday, this is what I think of.  Because you have to realize that those people probably got radicalized by this kind of thing.  They saw a fake news tweet that said Israel is intentionally slaughtering schoolchildren by hiding bombs disguised as food, believed it uncritically, then believed that Joe Biden is supporting this, and that's the worldview that led them to go disrupt Biden's speech.  You can't reason with people like this because their worldview is fundamentally fake, their brains are just broken and incapable of critical thought.  This is what social media is doing to us.

[GeneralMacArthur]

"The occupied" are not being "framed" as terrorists.  They are terrorists.  They are committing acts of terror right now as we speak by launching rockets into Israel, not as part of any military objective, but merely as part of a campaign to maim or kill as many innocent Israeli civilians as possible.  10/7 was an act of terror.  The two intifadas were full-on campaigns of terror.  Various bombings and killings committed enthusiastically and to great applause by the Palestinian fighters trivially meet the widely-accepted definitions of acts of terror.

The standard that leftists apply to this makes no sense.  So if someone merely considers their own cause to be just, then their acts of terror can not be labeled as such?  This exact same thinking could be used to argue that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack.  It makes sense that this is the thinking though given that this exact same thought process has been used by leftists time and time again over the last decade to justify domestic violence ranging from highway/airport blockades to property destruction, looting, arson, even the murders at CHAZ.  We committed these violent crimes for what we believed to be a good cause therefore everyone is obligated to respect them and no one is permitted to call them what they so obviously are.

Terrorism is terrorism.  You may say that it is terrorism in service of a good cause -- the French Resistance, Irgun, and Sons of Liberty are all celebrated by mainstream parties of their respective countries today -- but what you can not do is try and recraft a definition simply to avoid having to apply it to a group you celebrate.  Hamas committed an act of terrorism by wantonly slaughtering 1200 innocent Jews -- almost all civilians -- on October 7, 2023, followed by the kidnapping, rape, torture, and in many cases delayed murder of about 300 more.  If you think that was justified in the name of the liberation of Palestine from the "oppressors" then have the balls to say so.  Own it.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You guys need to decide.  Either (A) Hamas is the duly-elected authentic representative government of Gaza and can, as a state actor, declare war on the State of Israel on behalf of the Palestinians of Gaza, or (B) Hamas is a group of terrorist thugs who hold the weak, pitiable, helpless Palestinians of Gaza captive against their will, and thus the Palestinians are not responsible in any way whatsoever for the actions of their elected government.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If Palestinians deserve to be bombed and starved to death for the crimes of Hamas then what should happen to Americans for the crimes of Bush or Israelis for the crimes of Netanyahu?

It seems Hamas are already applying that logic - and it's not working out for them because Israel can kill far more effectively than they can.

After George W. Bush declared war on Iraq on behalf of America, I think if Saddam Hussein had had the capability to strike military targets on American soil he would have been perfectly entitled to do so.  Like if he had bombed JBLM I wouldn't be crying about how those poor soldiers and the civilian contractors who work on base, and the civilians who work at the Taco Bell off-post who got blown up as collateral damage, none of them deserve this because they didn't vote for Bush.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The internationally recognized Fatah led Palestinian Authority isn't a terror state. You are confusing it with Hamas

The PA is internationally recognised as funding anti-Israeli terrorists to the tune of US$300M per annum.

Their logo is based on the Third Reich.

I doubt if anyone believed this, but just in case, it's not true.  The eagle is a symbol of pan-Arabism based on Saladin's double-headed eagle, in particular this eagle carving (likely originally double-headed) in the Citadel of Saladin in Cairo (which, incidentally, I have visited, although the once double-headed eagle didn't catch my eye):






What's ironic, of course, is that despite the eagle being a symbol of pan-Arabism, the modern Palestinian cause is emblematic of the failure of that movement.  As we all know, fifty years ago the Gaza Strip was part of Egypt, during a time when Egypt was part of the United Arab Republic.  And the West Bank was part of Jordan, which was half of the Arab Federation.  Both the UAR and the AF aspired to become pan-Arab empires.  Now not only do those states no longer exist, but Egypt and Jordan respectively want nothing to do with the regions of Israel they once controlled, regions which have now transitioned to Palestinian nationalism, and the dream of creating an independent state completely distinct from Egypt and Jordan and with zero aspiration towards joining any sort of grand pan-Arab state.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Can we please get away from these massive debates that occupy the entire thread with huge walls of text?  This is the only thread allowed on this forum about the biggest conflict in the world, the main thing that everyone has been talking about for four months now, and it's just a couple guys talking to Vosem in the form of massive, massive, massive walls of text that absolutely zero other people read.

[GeneralMacArthur]

To try and get things back on track, we have this NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Hamas confirmed that it had responded to the proposal, saying it had dealt with the framework “positively,” though it reaffirmed earlier demands, including for a permanent cease-fire, reconstruction of Gaza, a lifting the blockade, and the release of Palestinian prisoners. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has already objected to some of these demands.

Hamas did not lay out its specific response, though its Al Aqsa TV reported that the militant group had offered amendments to the framework related to the issues of a cease-fire, reconstruction, lifting the blockade, evacuating wounded people and the return of displaced people to their homes and providing them with shelter.

An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Israel was dissatisfied with Hamas’s response. Hamas, the official said, wants a deal only if it ensures its continued control of Gaza and ends the war — both conditions rejected by Israel.

Blinken has been trying to get Hamas to accept the Qatar/Egypt ceasefire proposal, where Hamas exchanges the hostages for some Israeli POWs in exchange for a ceasefire lasting about a month.

Hamas responded "positively", but also "reaffirmed earlier demands", which are all their totally unacceptable demands.  So in other words, they said "yes we'd like a ceasefire, but only if we get absolutely everything we want, period."  That's not a real offer.  So it sounds to me like the ceasefire deal is going nowhere.

There's a fundamental difference between a ceasefire and peace.  A ceasefire is a temporary pause in fighting.  The purpose of the ceasefire is to try and create space for negotiation of a permanent peace without destruction continuing in the meantime.

Typically the losing side is the one that is willing to make concessions to get a ceasefire, since the losing side is the one that wants peace.  The winning side is typically motivated to continue advancing so they can improve their negotiating position.  We saw this in World War 1 -- post-revolution Russia and Germany negotiated a cease-fire so they could have peace talks, Trotsky was unwilling to accept the Kaiser's demands for peace, so Germany resumed hostilities and advanced further into Russia, at which point the Bolsheviks agreed to another ceasefire and this time surrendered even more than Germany had originally asked for in order to achieve peace.

Yet here we have Hamas making extraordinary and unreasonable demands in order for them to agree to a ceasefire with Israel, the side that is clearly, unambiguously, overwhelmingly winning this war.  The ordinary thing would be for Hamas to agree to release the hostages in exchange for Israel agreeing to put a pause on bombing Hamas to oblivion.  Instead Hamas is demanding that Israel return thousands of POWs in exchange for Hamas granting the concession of no longer being ravaged by Israel.  How does that make any sense?

And of course Hamas's demands are ludicrously unreasonable.  They want to remain in control of Gaza, and they want Israel to pay to rebuild Gaza.  In other words, they want war reparations from Israel, for a war they started and lost!  And that's even before we get to their attempts to use their strong negotiating position (lol) to end the blockades that started long before the war and were intended to avoid Hamas getting the resources to build heavy weapons.  It's like if during the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had demanded that France not only pay to rebuild Germany, but also pay to re-arm Germany.

What's happening here is that people who want a cease-fire are getting played for fools.  Hamas doesn't want a cease-fire.  What they want is a permanent peace treaty where Israel agrees to release every Hamas fighter from their prisons and pay Hamas billions of dollars to build new tunnels and buy new weapons.  Unless they achieve that pipe dream, they are not going to stop fighting Israel, so Israel is not going to stop fighting them.  There is no such thing as a unilateral cease-fire, that is just called a surrender.  Hamas has to agree to a cease-fire, Israel can't do it on their own.  Since the only cease-fire Hamas is willing to agree to is one that entails an Israeli surrender, it's just never going to happen.  So for heaven's sake you can stop badgering every politician and celebrity to demand a cease-fire from Israel.  It's Hamas you should be yelling at!

[GeneralMacArthur]

Can we please get away from these massive debates that occupy the entire thread with huge walls of text?  This is the only thread allowed on this forum about the biggest conflict in the world, the main thing that everyone has been talking about for four months now, and it's just a couple guys talking to Vosem in the form of massive, massive, massive walls of text that absolutely zero other people read.

When the Tara Reade crap (an infinitesimally tiny issue compared to this) was going on, you had text walls just as huge. What kind of person comes on a forum like this and complains about long, sometimes well thought out posts about a very complicated and dire geopolitical matter? The same type of person who throws a tantrum over sign language interpreters in the corner of his screen, I guess.

90% of this thread is just abstract policy arguments about the conflict.  Only 10% of it, at this point, is about the actual events unfolding in the Israel-Gaza war.  There should be a separate thread for these two entirely separate topics.  If I want to follow how things are actually going in Gaza, whether that's the advancements of the IDF or the diplomatic progress (or lack thereof) towards getting Hamas to agree to end the conflict, there should be a place on this forum where I can do that.

Also I don't know why you're always so intolerably rude to me and always launch these ad-hominem attacks out of nowhere.  I have no idea who you are but you're always like this on this thread.  Absolutely none of my post was directed at you in any way, yet here you are still trying your hardest to start a fight by lying about posts I wrote four(!) years ago.  Can I live?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Israel's status as a Jewish state wouldn't be under question following the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza if done right. It's not about numbers. The Druze minority in Israel largely respects the state institutions; this is true regardless of the size of the Druze population of Israel.

The fundamental issue is that a large number of Arabs living in the area do not respect the existence of Israel or recognize the state institutions. For example the Arab population of Jerusalem is eligible for Israeli citizenship but most have declined because they want to instead be part of a hypothetical state of Palestine.  

I know this is an unpleasant reality but the Jews are simply never going to believe this.  The fundamental promise of the State of Israel is that the Jews will provide for themselves, and will never again place themselves at the mercy of others.  This is because throughout history, those "others" -- even others who professed to be friends or at least protectors of the Jews, would inevitably betray them and abandon them to die the instant said friendship became inconvenient.

The last thing the Jews of Israel are going to do is allow themselves to be permanently at the mercy of an Arab majority -- the same Arabs who have spent the last century trying repeatedly to exterminate them, teaching their children that Jews are lower than rats or cockroaches, and offering both financial rewards and the promise of eternal prosperity to anyone who kills a Jew.

Yes, it may be the case that (at least for some time) the Arabs are willing to get along with the Jews and co-exist in a democratic harmony.  But Jews have been in such a situation before and it has always ended with betrayal and murder.  Even in some other Arab countries prior to the founding of Israel, they were able to live in relative peace, only to be violently robbed and expelled in 1948-1952.

If the western world dreams of an Israeli state where a Jewish minority lives in harmony with an Arab majority, I'm sorry but not getting this is the price the western world must pay for millennia of betrayal, degradation and murder of the Jews.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Has anyone ever done a poll of how many Arabs would take Israeli citizenship if offered?  If that's actually true that most Palestinians don't even want to return then it's even more aggravating that Arafat torpedoed the 2000 peace talks over this issue even after Israel offered to let 100,000 Palestinians return.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I would like to hear proposals for how people would like to see this conflict end.  Based on what appears to be Hamas's current negotiating position that they won't "grant" Israel a ceasefire, they will only accept a permanent peace treaty where Hamas stays in power and Israel funds them.

A) Israel accepts Hamas's demands and the war ends (presumably Hamas spends a few years re-arming, on Israel's credit card, and then attacks again in Biden's second term).

B) Israel rejects Hamas's demands and continues bombing Gaza to smithereens, presumably with some hope of eventually eliminating Hamas, rescuing the hostages, and occupying/rebuilding Gaza under Israel's terms.

C) Israel doesn't accept Hamas's demands, but they do unilaterally end the war and abandon the hostages to torture and death, leaving Gaza under Hamas's control.

D) The international community intervenes to end the war by forming an anti-Hamas coalition that occupies Gaza without Israeli involvement.

E) The international community sanctions, and even possibly takes military action, against Israel to force them to abandon the hostages.

I can't think of any other options?

[GeneralMacArthur]

I would like to hear proposals for how people would like to see this conflict end.  Based on what appears to be Hamas's current negotiating position that they won't "grant" Israel a ceasefire, they will only accept a permanent peace treaty where Hamas stays in power and Israel funds them.

A) Israel accepts Hamas's demands and the war ends (presumably Hamas spends a few years re-arming, on Israel's credit card, and then attacks again in Biden's second term).

B) Israel rejects Hamas's demands and continues bombing Gaza to smithereens, presumably with some hope of eventually eliminating Hamas, rescuing the hostages, and occupying/rebuilding Gaza under Israel's terms.

C) Israel doesn't accept Hamas's demands, but they do unilaterally end the war and abandon the hostages to torture and death, leaving Gaza under Hamas's control.

D) The international community intervenes to end the war by forming an anti-Hamas coalition that occupies Gaza without Israeli involvement.

E) The international community sanctions, and even possibly takes military action, against Israel to force them to abandon the hostages.

I can't think of any other options?

D would obviously be ideal and should have happened on October 8th, but many of the countries most sympathetic to Israel were obviously war-weary. Otherwise, B is the only option that has a chance of happening and won't result in a global war.

This is exactly my opinion as well.

As long as the international community cares what happens in Israel/Palestine, Hamas is everyone's problem, not just Israel's.  Yet they rely on Israel to destroy Hamas and sit in the peanut gallery criticizing Israel for not being quick and clean enough about it.

[GeneralMacArthur]

What was the option that got you banned?

The "option that got me banned" is completely moot now since the entire point was to avoid the catastrophic war that has now unfolded in the three months since.  That idea was for the Gazan civilians to be resettled outside of Gaza, leaving only Hamas in the Strip itself, to battle Israel on a battlefield free of civilians.  Since the Gazan civilians instead remained in Gaza, we now have widespread devastation to the civilian population who are forced (by Hamas) to live in a warzone.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Rafah is in Gaza, why should Egypt have any say in whether or not Israel is allowed to attack it?  Egypt has made overwhelmingly clear over the last few decades that they want to build as big a wall as possible between the modern Arab Republic of Egypt and their former client state / occupied territory.  They want nothing to do with the many Egyptian now-emigrants who lived in Gaza in 1948 or who migrated there during the subsequent decades where it was Egyptian territory.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I remember 20 years ago when people said it was going to be impossible to defeat al-Qaeda because every time you killed some terrorist jackass, all his friends and family and children would decide to join al-Qaeda.  The old "each bomb kills one bad guy and creates three more" trope.  But guess what?  After the invasion of Afghanistan, we did defeat al-Qaeda's ground forces.  Then they went into hiding and tried to conduct operations against us via proxy terror cells in Iraq, Jordan and Pakistan, and we killed all of those too.  We killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  Then we killed Osama bin Laden.  By the time we killed Ayman al-Zawahiri hardly anyone cared anymore because al-Qaeda had long since ceased to be relevant.

The unfortunate thing is that these movements survive no by virtue of any organic phenomenon but because of committed state support.

The Taliban continues to exist and rule Afghanistan not because "for everyone Taliban fighter America kills, three more take its place" but because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Pakistan backs the Taliban, trains and arms its fighters, and allows them to seek refuge inside its borders.  America is unwilling to declare war on Pakistan, so it is impossible to fully eradicate the Taliban.  The Taliban survives because it's backed by Pakistan.  al-Qaeda wasn't backed by anyone so they're totally vanquished.

ISIS was born out of the chaos of the Syrian Civil War.  The United States would dearly love to do exactly what we did in Iraq -- depose the Ba'ath party, kill Assad, and install a new regime that has nominally acceptable relations with the West -- or at least, do what we did in Libya and allow the opposition forces to form a new government.  But we can't do that because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Russia backs the Assad regime.  With that said, we haven't seen any evidence of "kill one ISIS member, create three more."  We drove ISIS out of Mosul, out of Raqqa, out of Eastern Syria, and today ISIS has virtually no territory, no forces, and no real ability to project power in the Middle East.  There hasn't been any indication that any family, friends or descendants of the people we killed in Iraq/Syria are itching to rebuild ISIS.  It's just over.  Assad survives because he's backed by Russia.  ISIS isn't backed by anyone so they're totally vanquished.

So what does this mean for Palestine?  It means it's entirely possible for Israel to defeat Hamas on the battlefield, and if that were the sole challenge, Hamas could cease to exist within a couple years and be forgotten within a generation.  I don't buy for a second the notion that for every bomb Israel drops, one Hamas fighter dies and three more are born.  I don't buy the notion that Israel's war against Hamas will breed so much civilian resentment that it makes a new Hamas inevitable.  al-Qaeda was defeated in Iraq, Jordan and Afghanistan, ISIS was defeated in Iraq and Syria, and Hamas can be defeated in Gaza.

The question is, to what extent are major power players willing to stake their own militaries on Hamas.  Is there a Russia-equivalent who's willing to say "if you get close to truly threatening Hamas, we will intervene militarily"?  Is there a Pakistan-equivalent who's willing to say "we will protect, train, and arm Hamas, and you'll have to declare war on us to stop it"?  So far I haven't seen it.  None of Iran, Qatar, or Egypt have shown a willingness to directly intervene to rescue Hamas.  And I think this is because of 10/7 -- the attack was so brutal that it drew the attention of the entire world and it made it impossible for those power players to covertly prop up Hamas without facing massive widespread condemnation and consequences.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The rescue of two hostages feels like it could really end up being a pivotal event that marks the beginning of the end for this war.

Hamas is cornered.  They're hemmed in inside Gaza, and Israel's already wiped them out of the border areas, Gaza City, Khan Younis, and now they're trapped in Rafah with nowhere left to go.  Where do you take the hostages now?  Once Israel defeats Hamas in Rafah there will be nowhere left to hide.

They can't flee back into Khan Younis or Gaza City because Israel is already systematically sweeping those cities and demolishing the tunnels and infrastructure.  They can't flee across the border because Egypt is guarding it.  It's impossible to escape by air or sea without getting blown up by Israel.  Hiding inside hospitals, refugee camps, and civilian houses isn't working anymore; with a smaller and smaller area to work with it's just going to get easier and easier for Israel to figure out where they're hiding and kill them.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Between the heroic rescue of two hostages from “off limits” Rafah and Israel apparently buying a super bowl commercial last night, the Hamas supporters are melting down all over the internet today. Sad to see.

Oh yeah, Twitter has been totally unhinged.  Lots of people firing on all cylinders against anyone who dares to tweet about the Superbowl (especially Biden) -- hope you had fun watching sportsball while Israel carpet-bombed millions of children in their ghoulish genocidal zionist massacre homicidal war crime.  Rafah is the last Hamas stronghold, the fall of Rafah will mean the end of Hamas.  We're in a last, desperate moment here.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If you are Israel, every single soldier must behave in a manner 100% ethical and mistake-free 100% of the time or else the entire war is wicked and unjustified.

If you are Hamas, any unethical act, or even intentional (not mistaken or unavoidable) infliction of cruelty and harm upon civilians is justified and good because it's fighting against Israel, who as already mentioned, are indefensibly wicked.

When we say "ethical and mistake-free" we are not referring to the typical rules of war, wherein the usage human shields and civilian population areas for military purposes incurs responsibility for harm/death upon the defending party, not the attacker, but rather wholly new rules of war that we invented specifically to apply solely to Israel, and will change on the fly  to match with whatever Israel just did.

BTW even if Israel somehow manages to follow our made-up rules we will simply lie about what Israel did, or totally make things up, or post pics/videos from Syria and say they're from Gaza, etc.

Long live the glorious struggle of Hamas the Palestinians against the disgusting, vile, wretched Jews Zionists!

[GeneralMacArthur]

There are Tiktok videos showing Israeli soldiers gleefully blowing up mosques. Are you suggesting they are being fabricated?

Yes, I've seen that video of the one idiot soldier.  Is there any evidence that this is the official policy of the IDF?  Is there any evidence that what the soldier says in the video ("I'm going to blow up the mosque because they wouldn't let me say prayers in it") is the actual reason for the mosque being blown up as opposed to him just being a jackass or trying to joke around with his buddies?  Typically a random grunt flipping the switch on a demolition would not be the same guy who made the strategic decision to authorize the demolition, and would not have had any input on the actual reason for doing said demolition.

As far as I can tell literally the only thing we know about this incident is a TikTok video from some random grunt dicking around and making some stupid claim to impress his buddies.  This is exactly what I'm talking about.  We're asked to judge the entire Israeli war effort based on the dumbest TikTok videos posted by individual knucklehead soldiers.  I mean imagine how bad other wars would've been if every soldier was equipped with a camera they used to broadcast their day-to-day soldiering to the world.

You know that scene in Saving Private Ryan where the Germans run out of the bunker, try to surrender, and the American GIs say "what?  I don't speak German" and gun them down while laughing?  Imagine if they were videotaping that for their TikTok to try and get likes from their buddies, and then Al Jazeera reposted it and 100,000,000 people worldwide saw it and people started acting like it was reflective of the entire American war effort.  Saying vague things like "Americans are gunning down surrendering Germans, not taking any prisoners, it's a war crime, they are engaging in anti-German genocide" -- implying this is the official policy of the entire American army, rather than just two soldiers being idiots.  That would basically be the equivalent of how we're still talking about the "IDF soldier shoots three guys waving the white flag" story.  Is it official IDF policy to shoot anyone waving the white flag?  Or was this just one soldier being an idiot?  If the latter, is there literally any reason to talk about this incident other than to try and imply that it's reflective of the entire IDF?

I hate to break it to you but in every army throughout the world across the course of history, there have always been idiot soldiers.  Having a handful of idiots in your army does not make your entire army unethical or your war unjustified.  It does not make their actions reflective of military or state policy -- even if they can give that appearance by using TikTok to broadcast their dumbest moments to billions of people around the world, getting 100x as many likes/views/reposts as your official army press conferences.


P.S. and by the way -- needless to say -- if Hamas guys had TikTok and were going down in their tunnels abusing and raping their prisoners and posting it up on TikTok, this war would look very different.  Thank heavens we don't have to see Hamas in their lowest moments broadcast all across the world.  We got a little taste of that on 10/7 and it was one of the most vile things in human history.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Man GMac, that's certainly one helluva way to brush aside the fact the IDF had blown up a masjid

"Oh, soldiers throughout history have done bad sh!t, therefore we shouldn't care about another instance of it happening again"

The IDF blowing up a mosque (or masjid) as a standalone isn't automatically a bad thing.  In an ordinary war, a building like a mosque would be considered off-limits.  This isn't an ordinary war, because Hamas has decided that nothing is off-limits.

Was the mosque being used as a base by Hamas fighters?  A weapons cache?  The entrance to a tunnel complex?  If so, whether it's swarming with fighters or infested with booby traps, I'd rather it just get obliterated from afar than have IDF soldiers put their lives at risk raiding it.  You can say it's worth it to spill IDF blood to try and protect some plaster, bricks and alabaster that have sociocultural significance to the civilians of the country Israel's at war at.  But certainly you can understand why the IDF wouldn't agree.

So with that in mind the only evidence we have that this was some bad act is a claim made by an IDF fighter in a viral TikTok video.  But I'm extremely skeptical of this because (A) that guy isn't the one making the decisions, (B) it's a TikTok video of some dude showing off for his friends, so he could be joking/lying, and (C) that rationale makes no sense -- even if Israel was gonna blow up a mosque because "we weren't allowed to say prayers in it", how/when would such an event occur, what, an IDF soldier went to a mosque in the Gaza Strip during wartime and tried to say a Jewish prayer and the imam told him he wasn't allowed to?

So if you grant that the dude is probably not actually telling the truth about why the mosque is being destroyed, then the video becomes meaningless.  It's just some jackass making a dumb joke on TikTok.

But even if he is telling the truth about why the mosque is being destroyed, you would still have to prove that this is part of a widespread campaign by the IDF, as opposed to just a one-off war crime, a decision made by a couple middle-ranking men with power, of the sort that are sadly common in all war environments.  Otherwise it's just analogous to the Saving Private Ryan example I gave.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I wouldn't judge the IDF just by the behavior of a few personnel or a squad. But it's evident that there's a real and impossible-to-hide campaign to destroy what the people of Gaza value, to make it unfriendly and unsafe, that includes mass-scale permission for the worst abuses to go unchecked. And those abuses include targetting things that are seen as belonging to "the enemy".

I simply do not agree that it's "evident" or "impossible-to-hide" that there is a campaign to destroy what the people of Gaza value.  Gaza is an incredibly small area -- the entire Gaza Strip is only 1/4 the size of Los Angeles.  Gaza City itself is significantly smaller than the island of Manhattan.  Imagine trying to fight a war in Manhattan while being asked not to destroy anything of value to the people of Manhattan -- a war where your enemy is intentionally hiding inside civilian buildings, churches, museums, libraries, and other culturally significant buildings.  It would be virtually impossible to avoid the destruction of things that "the people of Manhattan value", even if you did care.  Which I don't think Israel really does.  I don't think Israel is intentionally destroying everything the Gazans value, but I don't think they care much either.  If Hamas is hiding inside a mosque, and Israel decides they want to blow it up to kill the Hamas guys, they're not gonna care much whether the mosque was an important community hub or whatever.  Sure you can say that's bad, but that's very different from the intentional campaign of cultural erasure that you've alleged.

A-OK to blow up a mosque, apparently...who cares? They could be mass raping thousands of Gazan woman in their homes every day and it wouldn't matter, because of October 7th...which really was them for the first time in a long time that the humanitarian abuses the Israelis did and still do against Palestinians were done in large scale on Israelis for many years.

Needless to say, if IDF soldiers were mass-raping thousands of Gazan women in their homes every day not only would I not support that but I would probably switch sides, since that would be a horror even beyond what Hamas committed (and that's saying something).  But realistically at that point I would probably be demanding an American-led intervention to put an end to the wanton cruelty.

Of course, the IDF has not done anything remotely close to this hypothetical "Rape of Nanking" scenario you describe, nor will it.

Up to 70-75% of what's there in Gaza is now demolished. And for what?

The only who are capable of the kinds of acts many people in the Hamas networks dream of doing, is in fact the Israeli government and its supporters among the electorate, who want a powerless serf population and all the best pickings of land for themselves.

For what?  To eliminate Hamas.  That has been Israel's goal from the beginning.  It was clear within minutes of 10/7 being reported that this would be Israel's goal.  Israel has never wavered in their commitment to naming this as their war objective.  Every peace deal they've offered thus far has been some variation of "we get back the hostages, and Hamas no longer controls the Gaza Strip."  It's unambiguous that these are their objectives, and it's also pretty clear that most of the demolition has been in service of pursuing and destroying Hamas.

The Hamas network dreams of driving the Jews "into the sea" and "purifying" Israel of Jewish filth.  In practice this entails killing all the Jews and conquering the sovereign state of Israel.  I don't think even the most committed extremist (Itamar Ben-Gvir) in the Israeli government has fantasies approaching that level of horror.  In contrast, this is the goal of your average Hamas member.

Yes, there are plenty of Israelis who would like the Arabs out of the Gaza Strip permanently.  Reasons for this have been discussed elsewhere, but is 75 years of constant terrorism, violence, hatred and war not enough of an explanation?  This is a very different desire from the genocidal mass-killing fantasies that you ascribe to Israelis when you say "the kinds of acts many people in the Hamas networks dream of doing".

[GeneralMacArthur]

"Minor" means anyone under the age of 18.  Killing a 16-year-old soldier who's been given a gun by Hamas and ordered to shoot the IDF is fundamentally different from killing a 6-year-old.  Categorizing the former as "killing children" is nothing more than a manipulative emotional appeal.

[GeneralMacArthur]

For me, personally, any deal where Hamas remains in power in Gaza is unacceptable, and I would consider it immoral to accept such a deal.  For the Jews, such a deal inevitably means more death and suffering.  For the Palestinians, such a deal makes a future repeat of the conflict inevitable as Hamas will undoubtedly seek to reignite it by all means at their disposal.  Furthermore, taking the Palestinians into consideration, a Hamas-controlled Gaza means the continuation of sanctions, closed borders and Israeli suppression of their state (as is necessary to prevent Hamas from becoming too powerful) and also makes a two-state solution impossible.

If you are pro-Israel, you should be demanding Hamas surrender and leave power.  If you are pro-Palestine, you should also be demanding Hamas surrender and leave power.  Not only because it's a necessary condition to secure the ceasefire you supposedly want, but also because it's vital for the future humanitarian and state interests of the Arabs currently living in the Gaza Strip.