Israel-Gaza war

[GeneralMacArthur]

One thing I would like to add.

Let me present the following axioms that I would guess most anti-Israel liberals would agree with:

1) Hamas is an evil organization, and their elimination would be a great good for the world

2) What Hamas did on October 7 was so egregiously evil that it makes their destruction a matter of immediate urgency

3) The only way to destroy Hamas is via military action

4) Israel has been genocidal, or at least indiscriminate and brutal, in their treatment of the Palestinians over the course of this conflict, in a way that is completely unnecessary and avoidable

5) Israel's conduct is so abhorrent that in the great value tradeoff, it is better for them to end operations (allowing Hamas to continue to exist) than to continue operations (committing more atrocities)

#3 is wrong.

Hamas can never be destroyed militarily since it is as much an ideology as a militant group.

The only way to destroy Hamas is for the people to reject it.

Instead, Israel is driving people right into Hamas's arms.

No, Hamas is a terrorist group that was created 35 years ago during the First Intafada.  What is its ideology that can't be destroyed?  "We hate the Jews, let's use military force to kill them all"?  That's been the ideology of the Arabs in the Levant region since before the founding of Israel.  It predates Hamas by millenia.

Actually the power and popularity of that ideology has waned substantially since the days of the Camp David Accords, which shows that it can be defeated.  But an ideology alone isn't enough to kill people -- you need an organized, well-funded, well-armed, well-trained violent group with the means to act on that ideology.  Which is what Hamas is.

Take that away and you just have a bunch of dudes full of hatred but without the means to rape women, kill men, torture the elderly, and kidnap children that Hamas has.

[GeneralMacArthur]

At the Camp David summit, Israel offered loads of financial compensation to the Palestinians in exchange for abandoning the right-of-return demand.  Arafat rejected this.  I think Israel would be more than willing to pay pretty much any amount of money to secure peace.  What they're not willing to do is to hand over tons of money to the Palestinians as some sort of speculative operation to try and make things good enough that Palestinians will subsequently decide to accept peace.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Look you guys really can not just post tons and tons of tweets and expect anyone to read your posts. Not only do they take up an enormous amount of space (and also make the page jump all over while they're loading, which is annoying), but they're a very frustrating form of conversation because you can spend five seconds dumping a tweet and then expect someone else to spend five minutes responding to it, so when you just post tons and tons of tweets it amounts to little more than a lazy gish gallop.  Except it's a less effective gish gallop since unlike in the sorts of live conversations Duane Gish participated in, you don't have a captive audience on Atlas since anyone can just scroll past your massive wall of tweet embeds.



The thing about all these Tweets from red-upside-down-triangle Twitter and various Palestinian activists is that more often than not when you dig into them, the story is either completely fabricated (I've seen an enormous number of pictures/videos from Syria captioned with "look what the IDF is doing") or absurdly twisted to the point where it can fairly be called a lie since the misrepresentation is being intentionally done to prop up a narrative or make a point that it does not actually support.

There's this concept called "integrity" where when you lie over and over and over and over again, you not only lose the right to have someone assume you're telling the truth, but eventually you also lose the right to demand that someone even invest time proving that what you're saying is a lie.

But even if every single Tweet you posted were true, these are isolated incidents of bad behavior by individual IDF forces that do not, in aggregate, spell out a campaign of genocide.  You could find similar anecdotes at a similar volume from pretty much any military conflict, especially modern ones where phones and cameras are ubiquitous.  The higher-level aggregation of everything that's happening is what actually matters -- and this is what was covered in The Impartial Spectator's post.

After all this is essentially the exact same thing Russia has been doing for the last two years to try and discredit the Ukrainian army and degrade its support among Americans: post a nonstop stream of content highlighting bad behavior by individual Ukrainians, often making liberal use of exaggeration, misrepresentation or outright fabrication.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Israel is an incredibly racist society, despite the PR. Polls have shown over 50% of Israelis think Black Jews are a negative for their country.

Why would "Quds News Network" -- which, again, is literally just Hamas -- know anything about a funeral that happened in Israel?

Better question.  Why is Horus getting Quds News Network as part of his daily news diet, and what impact is this having on his brain?  You know you really have to go out of your way to find this content since QNN is banned from TikTok and Facebook (it was also banned from Twitter for years).

[GeneralMacArthur]

Israel is an incredibly racist society, despite the PR. Polls have shown over 50% of Israelis think Black Jews are a negative for their country.

Why would "Quds News Network" -- which, again, is literally just Hamas -- know anything about a funeral that happened in Israel?

Better question.  Why is Horus getting Quds News Network as part of his daily news diet, and what impact is this having on his brain?  You know you really have to go out of your way to find this content since QNN is banned from TikTok and Facebook (it was also banned from Twitter for years).

I'm not getting Quds network in my feed. I followed one of the links MBD put up and the "Free Palestine" page shared it. The text says no one showed up to his event and the building was empty. Are you disputing the words of this young man's family?

Just like the "journalists" at Quds News Network, from whom you are sourcing this anecdote, I don't live in Israel, so I have no way of actually knowing one way or another what happened at one random dude's funeral.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Drawing a direct analogy between the Holocaust and Israel's conduct of the war on Hamas goes beyond the simple trivialization of terms like "genocide" or "war crime" or "crime against humanity", which is bad enough, and steps directly into trivializing the Holocaust itself by playing into the notion that either

A) The Holocaust wasn't uniquely bad, because Israel is doing something equivalently bad as we speak

or

B) The Jews have no right to cry about the Holocaust, because we are now seeing that given the chance they would do something equally awful to their enemies once they're in a position of power

both of these tropes get extensive, and I mean extensive, mileage in Arabic and particularly Palestinian culture, and are key to the mindset of anti-semitism that leads to justification of the mass extermination of Jews.

Now we all know that I despise the pseudoacademic practice of twisting terms to mean something broader than, and different from, what a typical person would expect that term to mean based on the common understanding of the English language.

However, in this case I feel like it's widely understood that the umbrella of "Holocaust Denial" typically includes not just denial that the Holocaust happened at all, it also includes denial of the scope, scale, or seriousness of the Holocaust, trying to downplay its unique horror and unique place in the history of the world and Jewish culture by saying something along the lines of "the Jews are just drama queens, what they suffered was no greater than what dozens of other cultures have suffered, but they milk it for all it's worth as part of their campaign to achieve power."

Holocaust Denial isn't some hypothetical.  It's a position that's been espoused by, at least off the top of my head, the Iranian and Syrian regimes.  This happened just last week:

In a video of a speech by Assad translated and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Monday, Assad can be seen telling a listening crowd that “there is no evidence that six million Jews were killed” during the Holocaust.

“True, there were concentration camps, but what shows you that this is a politicized issue, not a humanitarian one and not a real one, is that we talk about these six million, but why don’t we talk about the 26 million Soviets who were killed in that war? Are the six million more precious?”

source

[GeneralMacArthur]

Again, I will keep saying this, if Israel actually wanted to commit genocide against the Palestinians they would have just obliterated the entire Gaza Strip.  They would also probably have used 10/7 as a pretext to invade the West Bank (claiming Hamas was there as well) and do likewise, and they would also have rounded up and exterminated the Arabs who are currently Israeli citizens.

They haven't done anything close to any of this.  There has been zero action against Arab Israelis, there has been no significant military activity in the West Bank, and the war has now dragged on for nearly three months with Palestinian casualties only numbering in the 10-20,000 range -- and we have no idea what the military:civilian ratio is there, since the Gaza Health Ministry (Hamas) just claims that everyone who died was a civilian.

[GeneralMacArthur]

OK so is anything actually happening in Gaza or is this thread just a race war thread now?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Holy s--t guys you know you don't have to quote the entire damn conversation in every reply.

This thread continues to be utterly unreadable and laughably off-topic.

[GeneralMacArthur]

There's a video out today of four Hamas kidnapping/rape victims -- all girls 18-19 years old -- tied up at a Hamas compound with blood all over their mutilated faces and a thousand-mile stare in their eyes.

The video is from early in their captivity.  It was sent by Hamas to the parents of the girls as a taunt: "this is what we are doing to your daughters -- hope this video makes you suffer more, Jew"

God only knows the condition of these girls several months later, if they're even still alive.

It's absolutely disgusting and appalling.  It's horrifying to look at it.  If you are a decent person, it makes you burn with anger.  If you are some sort of sick, twisted, sadistic freak, you write some post excusing it or saying they deserved it.  Two types of people.



Just as a reminder, this is what Israel is fighting against, and the entire reason this war started in the first place.

Israel's terms for a cease fire begin and end with Hamas returning the Jewish girls they kidnapped and want to keep as sex slaves.  Hamas doesn't want to do this.  We know this because Joe Biden helped negotiate a cease fire last month and it ended because Hamas refused to give back any more hostages.  Specifically they kept a lot of the young women hostage, presumably because they enjoy raping them.

Hamas could end this war in five minutes if they want to.  But they don't want to.  For one thing, they'd rather let their little country continue to get pulverized than give up their kidnapped sex slaves.  For another, they have an apocalyptic worldview where they believe it's their destiny to die in battle with the Jews and achieve martyrdom.  There are also a few idiots who think they can actually beat Israel on the battlefield.

But the main reason they don't want to end the war is that as long as they keep using civilians as human shields, forcing Israel to kill those civilians to continue fighting the war, public support for Israel will continue to decline.  Every dead civilian is a huge success in Hamas's ledger, which is why their entire strategy is based on maximizing the amount of Palestinian civilians who die, and then propagandizing that fact to the fullest extent.

In other words, they are counting on you, dear reader, to forget everything I wrote above, and simply turn your brain off when you see some dead civilian with the label "Israel did this."



Hamas is loathsome, rotten, evil to its core, and every single one of them deserves death.

Yet there are some people who have their heads so screwed up by propaganda on social media that they can look at that video -- which I will not post here -- of Hamas's brutalized, tortured rape victims, and they'll still come away thinking they're supporting the good guys.

It's terrible that this war must continue, since Hamas refuses to surrender or even release the hostages.  But at least more of them are killed every day, which is something to celebrate for all the decent people in the world (a group that we now know is much smaller than previously assumed).

[GeneralMacArthur]

I wonder what those four girls would think if they knew that 7,000 miles away, on the opposite side of the planet, American progressives in Seattle barricaded the highway for an entire day to demand that Israel give up its attempts to rescue them and abandon them to their horrifying fate?

Do you think the sick, twisted, evil monsters in Hamas show them videos of the pro-Hamas protests in the West to taunt them in between rape sessions?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Both sides

the crimes Hamas did to Israelis on October 7th looks trivial compared to the long suffering of Palestinians

The IDF attacking Hamas for doing things is sort of like a pot calling the kettle black

Oh no!  Meanwhile, Israel

Cool can you show me the video Israeli soldiers took of the four Arab girls they kidnapped, tortured and raped, which they then proudly sent to the parents of those girls as a "look what we're doing to your daughters and you can't do a thing about it" taunt?

Both-sides-ism is just a mental smoke-and-mirrors technique to try and avoid acknowledging the evil we are witnessing here.



One side (the side you supposedly nominally oppose) is pure evil.
The other side (the side you devote an enormous amount of energy to opposing and undermining) is trying to put an end to that evil.

The evil side is committing the war crime of using human shields, and committing the war crime of conducting military operations from civilian population centers.

These are war crimes because they force Israel to hurt civilians if they want to make any progress at all towards rescuing these girls and ending Hamas.  This is not me saying this, this is not my definition, this is what's explicitly written in the Geneva Convention.

Hamas does this intentionally because they want Israel to hurt and kill Palestinian civilians so they can then turn around and point to those civilian deaths and say "see, Israel is the bad guys" and suckers in the West will believe them.

When you posting things like

Israel killed thousands of Palestinian girls.

as an argument against Israel, rather than an argument against Hamas,
you are rewarding Hamas for being evil.
You are rewarding Hamas for committing these war crimes.
You are rewarding Hamas for intentionally putting their own civilians in harm's way.
You, useful idiot, are making yourself a pawn in Hamas's strategy to intentionally -- and illegally -- inflict death and misery on the Palestinians they govern.

[GeneralMacArthur]

That's effectively gaslighting.

Israel is killing 'thousands of children' in its attacks. That's not something that really anyone disputes. Bombs are actively launched, actively land and actively kill. Decisions made that restrict aid, supplies etc are active decisions.

It would be more honest to accept this fact and then moralise/justify it than effectively blame the victims. Or shame those who are aghast at what is happening by suggesting they don't have agency in their anger or empathy.

Look at this number.

Palestinians make up >95% of the casualties

Israelis make up <5% of the casualties

How many more Palestinians lie dead under the rubble is unknown.

Meanwhile, we have people in this thread screaming non-stop about Israeli casualties while ignoring Palestinian casualties.

Nobody here likes Hamas, but what Israel is doing is 19 times worse than what Hamas did.

Rarely (if ever) have you talked about tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel this year alone.

You know what's gaslighting?  Trying to pretend that defenders of Israel are ignoring the thousands of Palestinians who have been killed, or pretending they don't exist.  When literally in my post that you quoted I wrote about this.

Yes it's bad that tens of thousands of Palestinians have died.  But that is not Israel's fault -- it is Hamas's fault!  If Hamas had never attacked Israel, this war would never have happened at all.  And even once the war had started, Hamas could have fought it according to the Geneva Conventions, but instead they used human shields and operated from civilian areas -- which is a deliberate strategy to maximize civilian casualties!

which is why it's a war crime, but curiously (not that curiously actually) the only war crime that you have absolutely no problem with.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The fundamental difference of opinion here is this.

We both agree that thousands of Palestinians dying is bad.



My proposal to solve this problem is as follows:

A) Hamas surrenders and dissolves itself as an organization, which would end the war

or, barring that,

B) Hamas returns their kidnapped Jewish sex slaves (including underage girls, for those of you who had smoke for the Epstein thing) and return to the cease-fire that Biden helped broker, which would also end the war

or, barring that,

C) Hamas continues to fight this losing war, but does so in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, rather than continuing to use Palestinian children as human shields and launching rockets from orphanages, which would dramatically reduce civilian casualties as the war continues



It seems like your proposal to solve this problem is as follows:

A) Israel surrenders to Hamas, calls off the war, and allows them to keep their hostages forever, and those girls will just have to deal with a life as torture/sex slaves for Hamas militants where they wake up every day praying that today Hamas will accidentally torture them to death so they can be released from this suffering.
In 2-3 years Hamas will do the exact same thing again and that time the Jews will just have to say "think you sir, may I have another" since in your worldview, they're not allowed to attack Hamas so long as Hamas uses human shields.


Please let me know if I got any part of that wrong.
If you have some way Israel can defeat Hamas without hurting their human shields, please say so.
If you have some way Israel can get the hostages back without defeating Hamas, please say so.
If you have some way Israel can defend themselves against an undefeated Hamas so this cycle doesn't repeat, please say so.

I don't think you have any answers to any of the above, which means that what I've written is in fact an accurate assessment of your position, whether you want to admit it or not.

Or, more accurately, you've not even been willing to mentally acknowledge that this is what you're fighting for -- to accept that this is realistically what will happen if you are successful in getting what you claim to want.

I am now anticipating endless attempts to rationalize an evil position with whataboutism after whataboutism......

[GeneralMacArthur]

By the by, there is an option (B) if you want to support Palestine without letting Israel continue the war -- and it's one I proposed 17 pages ago in a post that nobody bothered to reply to:

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=566181.msg9332449#msg9332449

Namely, having America, or even better a Western coalition, or even better the Arab League, take over the conflict from Israel -- destroy Hamas and rebuild Gaza on your own damn terms if you think you can do it better than Israel.

If you are advocating for Israel to pull out of Gaza without any coinciding proposal for the destruction of Hamas, then you are advocating for the continued existence of Hamas.  You may not like to admit it to yourself but that is what you are fighting for.

And since Hamas has already proudly boasted that they will repeat the 10/7 attacks as soon as possible, and there's no reason to believe they are lying, you are also advocating for a repeat of those attacks -- because the sole option to stop this from happening has been presented to you, but you forcefully reject it.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Here is my plans for a final peace settlement (I am a Palestinian American)

1. Israel withdraws from 97% of West Bank (Ehud Olmert's 2008 Annapolis plan)

2. Highway connects West Bank and Gaza Strip

3. Jerusalem remains the undivided and fully controlled by Israel

4. Palestine government buildings operate in East Jerusalem

5. Arab residents in East Jerusalem allowed both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship

6. Palestine becomes the custodian of Al Aqsa Mosque (currently Jordanian government)

7. "Right of Return" is dropped except for the original survivors of the 1947 Nakba

8. A limited number of Palestinian refugees globally will be allowed to settle in West Bank. The rest are given citizenship of their home nations.

9. Hamas is banned as a political party. Any party that promotes violence is banned, similar to Israeli laws

10. Palestine will control its water and power

11. Israeli will be allowed to control airspace over Palestine. In exchange, the airport in Gaza City is reopened and a new airport built in West Bank

12. Israel will be allowed a limited military presence on Jordan border

Thoughts?

Congrats on crafting a proposal both Horus and I are fine with.  That’s a genuinely impressive achievement!

Yes I agree I would see this as a tremendous development towards world peace if this were to happen, and I think most Israelis would be fine with this; however, the Palestinians would never accept it.

One thing I see as a sticking point is simply that a central Palestinian government would not have the strength necessary to actually suppress violent organizations in practice.  Therefore such violent organizations would continue to proliferate and launch attacks on Israel.  Frankly I don't even see how a unified, independent Palestine would get Hamas out of Gaza.  Therefore they would have to endure whatever the ramifications were for failing clause 9 of the treaty, which would likely include Israeli military operations inside Palestine to fight those violent groups.  And things would spiral out of control from there.

Maybe it could succeed if a UN peacekeeping operation was permanently stationed in Palestine to help with enforcement of clause 9, at least for the first few decades?

[GeneralMacArthur]

I am once again asking you guys to stop quoting absolutely massive threads when writing your replies.  It is making this topic 100% unreadable.  Just directly quote the parts you are responding to.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Israel is indiscriminately bombing the Palestinians.

No they are not, and this is an absurd thing to believe to be true if you think about it for even five seconds.

I know Biden used that term a month ago but the State Department walked it back a couple hours later.

Israel is also restricting aid (food, water, medicine) from reaching Gaza.

All the aid going into Gaza is being seized immediately upon arrival by Hamas and used to fuel the war effort.  Most of it isn't even reaching civilians.  Btw, this is another clear and blatant war crime that you don't care about.

Want the Gazans to get supplies?  Kill Hamas.  This isn't a new development either.  Do we need to repost the videos of Hamas terrorists proudly bragging to reporters about their technique of breaking up water pipes to use segments for rockets?  Another thing you couldn't care less about.

[GeneralMacArthur]

All the aid going into Gaza is being seized immediately upon arrival by Hamas and used to fuel the war effort.  Most of it isn't even reaching civilians.  Btw, this is another clear and blatant war crime that you don't care about.

Want the Gazans to get supplies?  Kill Hamas.  This isn't a new development either.  Do we need to repost the videos of Hamas terrorists proudly bragging to reporters about their technique of breaking up water pipes to use segments for rockets?  Another thing you couldn't care less about.

You are just blatantly repeating Israel's talking point.

Is Hamas going to turn broccoli into rockets?

Hamas steals all manner of humanitarian supplies, including those that can not directly be used to make weapons, because
A) They want to make sure they themselves are fully provisioned and want for nothing
B) They can sell surplus supplies for a profit
C) Having the power to distribute or withhold supplies to civilians gives them a means of control

c'mon man, this isn't a new tactic.  For one thing it's been done plenty of times before -- for instance, this is how Hamas's predecessors in Somalia made out like bandits with UN aid to the devastated failed state, which led the United States to launch Operation Restore Hope to try and prevent aid from falling into Islamist militia hands, and later the UN sent thousands of troops to assist as well.  The situation in Gaza is much more dire than that in Somalia, but I don't see anyone from the United States, much less the United Nations, advocating for a similar operation.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Israel is indiscriminately bombing the Palestinians.

No they are not, and this is an absurd thing to believe to be true if you think about it for even five seconds.

This is satellite footage from late October, early in the campaign.

www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/27/gaza-before-and-after-satellite-images-show-destruction-after-israeli-airstrikes

Unless you can demonstrate to me that there were no legitimate Hamas targets in the places being bombed, I will not agree with you that this is "indiscriminate."  Words have meaning.  Israel is choosing to drop bombs on targets where they believe they will weaken or kill Hamas.  That is, they are discriminative in their bombing.  I have seen zero evidence of Israel consistently and intentionally destroying targets that they have no reason to believe Hamas is using.

But were there civilian targets alongside those Hamas targets?  Undoubtedly, since that has been Hamas's strategy from the beginning.  And if you are upset that those civilians lost their lives and their homes, then you should be absolutely seething with rage at Hamas for trying to use those civilians as human shields and their homes as an illegal-under-international-law base of military operations.  Because if Hamas hadn't done that, guess what?  Israel wouldn't have had to drop those bombs to defeat Hamas.

[GeneralMacArthur]

US intel

www.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html

'Dumb' bombs in heavily populated areas are indiscriminate.

As The Red Cross defines;

https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/indiscriminate-attacks

'an attack by bombardment, by any means or method which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects;

an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the tangible and direct military advantage anticipated.'

First of all, the article you linked does not use the term "indiscriminate" to describe these bombs.  This is commentary that you have provided yourself to support your claim that Israel is "indiscriminately bombing Palestinians."

Here is what the article actually says.

A US official told CNN that the US believes that the Israeli military is using the dumb bombs in conjunction with a tactic called “dive bombing,” or dropping a bomb while diving steeply in a fighter jet, which the official said makes the bombs more precise because it gets it closer to its target. The official said the US believes that an unguided munition dropped via dive-bombing is similarly precise to a guided munition.

But Garlasco said the Israelis “should want to use the most precise weapon that they possibly can in such a densely populated area.” With an unguided munition, “there are so many variables to take into account that could lead to an incredibly different accuracy from one moment to the next,” Garlasco added.  The US has deliberately phased out its own use of unguided munitions over the last decade, he noted.

Following the publication of the article, IDF spokesperson Nir Dinar provided further comment.

“The IDF strikes military targets of the Hamas terrorist organization, based on high-quality intelligence and the operational necessity, while using high-quality munitions that are operated by skilled pilots and advanced systems, which continuously assess and verify that the strikes are directed at military targets. The type of munitions used in each strike is determined according to the characteristics of the target, the operational need, and the effort to mitigate harm to civilians, which the terrorist organization uses as a human shields,” Dinar said.

Critical to note here that Israel is actually using a tactic designed to maximize the accuracy of their bombs.  If they were truly indiscriminately bombing, or "carpet bombing", why would they bother?

Again, there is no actual evidence to suggest that Israel is intentionally targeting and killing Palestinian civilians.  There is only insinuation driven by a refusal to believe anything Israel says, while simultaneously granting an unlimited degree of credence to anything Hamas puts out.  This alone is indicative, to me, of a strong favorable bias towards Hamas.


Secondly, that Red Cross definition surely doesn't apply in cases where the military and civilian objects are being intentionally linked together by the enemy with intent to use the civilian objects as human shields.  Otherwise you would never be allowed to attack anyone.  And if that is in fact how they are defining it, then their definition is of an act that I don't find any problem with.

[GeneralMacArthur]

One thing I would like to add, on a more meta level:


Palestinian sympathizers love to play these word games where they try and create the loosest possible definition of a "bad thing", and then take the most extreme possible interpretation of what Israel is doing, so that they can bridge the gap and say "Israel is doing the bad thing"; and then they immediately turn around and pretend like Israel is meeting the worst, most extreme and dastardly interpretation of that term, rather than the extremely loose definition they're actually applying.

Here's the difference between me and others in this thread.  I don't play these word games.  I don't spend all my time trying to twist what my opponents are doing until they meet some possible definition of a thought-terminating buzzword.  For one thing, I don't have to, since the crimes Hamas is committing are clearly and unambiguously meeting the definitions of terms like "rape" or "terrorism" or "human shields" or "war crimes" in a way that requires no terminological gamesmanship.  But for another, I am dealing with things as they are actually happening, and the simple facts of what Israel and Hamas are doing.

If you want to play some game where you try and twist things around so you can say "Israel is doing thing X", and then play with loosening and manipulation of word definitions to try and say "thing X meets the definition Y of word W", and then turn around and say "word W is [according to definition Z which is different from Y] a really awful and evil thing therefore Israel is awful and evil", you know, have fun with it.  I'm sticking to "Israel is doing thing X, what is thing X, what do I think of thing X" without all these extra layers of manipulation and obfuscation that serve no purpose other than to play pretend lawyer and construct an argument out of wholecloth when the facts are not on your side.

[GeneralMacArthur]

We have Israeli government officials openly talking about reducing the Gaza Strip population to 250k in the post-war world, dude would it kill you to admit their behavior through this conflict has been awful?

During the Iraq War we had Republican politicians competing with each other to see who could say the most deplorable things about Muslims.  Tom Tancredo advocated for bombing Mecca!  No I'm not using the quotes of random Israeli politicians as my method for determining whether or not Israel's actions are justifiable.  Even if it was Bibi himself saying this stuff I wouldn't care because his rhetoric has little bearing on what the IDF is actually doing.  When it becomes an actual policy, then I'll start to care.

(and yes I know many of these "random politicians" are in the Israeli cabinet, also don't really care since again, this is just rhetoric and not actual policy).

[GeneralMacArthur]

Alright dude, I'm done talking to a brick wall.  Total waste of effort...

[GeneralMacArthur]

Here's the difference between me and others in this thread.  

The main difference between you and others in this thread is you are looking for an intelligent conversation or debate.

You don't ride people like a stolen bike.

You correctly predicted Israel wants to move the vast majority of Palestinians out the southern border and got banned for it under the guise of 'genocide'.

It was like someone on a forum predicting in 1938 that the Germans would invade Poland and Ukraine and build concentration camps for the extermination of the Jewish people.

Predicting the ugly truth of humanity is not a crime.

I categorically reject any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany.

Given my desire to avoid being re-banned I am not willing to discuss any Israeli proposals or plans that may or may not be literally exactly what I said they were going to do, right down to the exact location and strategy vis-a-vis Sinai.