Israel-Gaza war

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It'll significantly help Bibi (R-Israel), like most things Hamas does.

That has usually always been the case, but this is such an horrific failure of state security policies (especially as what has been happening has been a long-established fear as a possibility) that it might not work out that way this time. Though that's strictly a matter for the longer-term.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Fucking behave yourself.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well, all Netanyahu's recent dicking around probably hasn't helped here has it?

In the obvious sense, no (this has clearly been planned for a very long time), but in an 'eye off the ball' sense, quite possible: what has happened/is still happening has been a known nightmare scenario for some time but, even leaving aside intelligence failings, it's striking how everything seems to have been out of place for a fast response.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Palestinians have the right to fight and resist apartheid state Israël, in fact they should, and everyone who does is a freedom fighter. They have my support. The oppression needs to end, and no one is interested in peace & diplomacy from the international community.

It's a series of deliberate massacres of civilians. No one has a right to do that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A massacre is a massacre is a massacre and so on, but people should note that a lot of the villages that bore the brunt of this are Kibbutzim and the like.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It would be useful if this thread did not turn into a classic internet thread about ~The Conflict~ and be rendered as completely unreadable to non-psychopaths as something important and awful has happened and there are people who might wish to follow updates and to discuss things. Plenty of other places online where you can all defecate for attention.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is what happens when the people are oppressed to the point that they have no hope left: They go on a murderous rampage. They don't have anything left to lose.

Israel set itself up for this to happen.

Not what happened. Hamas are not a bunch of kids armed with rocks and a few ancient Kalashnikovs who went stir-crazy and did a dreadful thing in a spontaneous explosion, but a well funded, well armed and highly organized paramilitary force who spent months (and quite plausibly years) planning an operation aimed at mass murder and mass kidnap (all of which was to, and did, take place on internationally recognized Israeli territory), which they were able to pull off with hideous success due to a catastrophic failure of Israeli state security policies. It is important to tell the truth about things like this.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

While I understand that a lot of people find it more comfortable to discuss the wider historical issues and contemporary political context, the issue at hand here is a series of deliberate massacres of civilians that have also featured widespread hostage-taking and (yes, this is also undeniably true) sexual assault by a well-armed paramilitary organization. It seems fairly clear that the most appropriate comparison to a recent event would not be anything that has happened in ~The Conflict~ of late, but the massacres at Bucha and some other towns in Ukraine last year, though the massacre at the music festival also has obvious echoes of the attacks in Paris in 2015. I will also add that amongst the victims were Bedouin Arabs (I think the latest figure is somewhere near forty at least) and Nepali and Thai citizens (I had initially written 'workers' here, but the Nepali citizens appear to have been students staying at a kibbutz). What I'm trying to say, of course, is that the concepts of 'taste' and 'decency' do occasionally have a value and it would be for the best if discussion here at least make a few vague nods in that direction. Equally it is obviously not appropriate to post lurid revenge fantasies, no matter how angry you might feel.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

We'll have a better idea of exactly what went wrong in the future - probably the relatively near future - but what's clear enough is that this wasn't just an intelligence failure: had an intelligence failure occurred and the border been defended in the way it usually had been and had the sort of rapid response that everybody assumed would occur happened (and honestly that is the biggest mystery: even with everything out of place it should still not have taken nearly half a day to reach the area), then things would have been significantly less catastrophic. It is better to term it a total failure of security (or 'state security') policy.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's the possibility they deliberately let it happen in order to benefit from a rally around the flag effect, and get a casus belli to get rid of Gaza civilians/Hamas, increase antipathy to the Palestinian cause etc.

Zelenskyy became very popular after Ukraine got attacked because of the rally around the flag effect. There were domestic issues in Israel. It might be that Netanyahu wanted to benefit as well from that.

That isn't how things work in Israel as a rule: people do rally round the flag, and probably to an even greater extent than normal, but it really is to the flag, to the State and to the idea of the State rather than to the government of the day. If the latter is seen to have failed, people often get very angry with it even as they rally to the flag. Many examples of this historically, and some pretty unambiguous signs now, though I won't predict how that develops further.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Polling prior to the war breaking out suggested an election would result in a victory for the Kahol Lavan party of Benny Gantz, which by Israeli standards is "maybe-just-barely-left-of-center" -- although, yes, even in 2013 its positions would've scanned as "moderate right-of-center" -- but which has been led by a council of former generals.

Gantz, of course, always runs with a definite attempt at a 'oooh remembers Labor as it used to be?' vibe, and it turns out that where this gets placed in terms of 'Left' and 'Right' is very variable as the meanings of those words are even more conditional and slippery than in most countries.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's horrific either way.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If true, it would make the Israeli misuse of the wrong footage even harder to rationalise. By lying, they have made it harder to argue their own case.

The people who run the twitter account have a long history of the sort of egregious incompetence that ought to get someone running the social media account of a medium-sized business sacked, let alone the government of a sovereign state.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I would assume that one issue with the media shitshow is that the awful incident happened at night. It has always been the case that solid facts about bombings and the like really only emerge during the hours of daylight, when you can actually see what has happened clearly, and that does also include casualty figures. As this is not in any way secret, and was a known issue during the Second World War no less, this is the very opposite of an excuse.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But you should want things to be as it appears they are as it means the number of dead will be vastly fewer (even if, all the same, distressingly high).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The "second war of independence" framing is absolutely insane. I have to believe the Israeli mainstream is at least not fully on board with it, especially given how pissed the families of the hostages are.

There's a certain type of politician who, once placed under a significant amount of pressure, cannot help but respond by wheeling out inane and inappropriate clichés like something from a badly-produced greatest hits album.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1719406520557814207

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A somewhat unexpected last minute absurdity: the Spanish and Belgian Prime Ministers are, for some reason, having a press conference at the Rafah border crossing where all of this seems to be taking place.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Latest reports are that the thirteen Israeli hostages are now in the hands of the Red Cross and are being taken to the border crossing. Meanwhile, the Thai government has confirmed that twelve Thai hostages have been released and that their officials are on their way to pick them up: further details seem a little sketchy.