Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA, said that the indiscriminate nature of these attacks makes him consider these attacks to be a form of terrorism:
Volker Türk, the UN commission for human rights "explained that international law prohibits the use of booby-trapped items used in daily life, and 'it is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians.'"
These takes are problematic because it's clear to most observers that the attacks were, by the standards set by ground combat in Fallujah, NATO air operations in Kunar Province, or operations against ISIL in Inherent Resolve, the pager/radio attacks were drastically more discriminating, and caused a tiny fraction of the noncombatant casualties. This, of course, is also a distorted standard capturing only NATO/aligned combat operations; the picture gets much worse if you pull in Gulf State military operations, Azerbaijan, or Russia/Ukraine.
(Turk's booby-trap argument is challenging for two additional reasons; the first is that the encrypted pagers and ICOM radios we're discussing are military command & control equipment, not items used "in daily life" in the sense contemplated by the booby trap convention, and further the definition of a booby trap in that convention involves a device triggered when random people approach it, not one detonated at a specific instruction by the party that placed it. The history of the booby trap convention is tied up in the human cost of unwinding booby traps after conflicts have wound down, which is not a problem the pagers posed.)
I'm concerned that people attempting (reasonably!) to communicate disapproval for IDF operations generally are damaging their credibility by trying to fold the pager/radio attack into their message. To me, the pager/radio attack is damning for an entirely different reason: with proper seriousness and resourcing, it's clear that Israel was able to incapacitate a near-peer military adversary with vastly lower noncombatant cost than what they've managed in Gaza.
I think the bit that this misses is that the root of all the problems we've seen over the last few decades is that Israel keeps doing their settlement thing. In spite of decades of pretty much the entire rest of the world – including the US – saying they should not be doing that.
I don't approve of Hezbollah or Hamas; but if you strip away the violence and Islamic extremism and all of that then the uncomfortable reality is ... they're not wrong in their core objections. Israel has consistently maintained that no, actually, the core problem is that Hezbollah and Hamas exist, and once we get rid of these people all the problems will be gone. It's certainly true that these organisations have become part of the problem, but they're not at the root of it.
"We will keep our bad faith settlement policy, and if you behave like a good boy to our satisfaction long enough then maybe perhaps we will consider granting you rights" doesn't really work. All these gun-toting "don't tread on me" 2nd amendment absolutionists people full-on supporting Israel wouldn't accept that either. Israel must resolve the settlement issue first, and THEN we can dismantle the violent extremist groups (which will take time and won't happen overnight – there will be a "Real Hamas" splinter group just as there was a "Real IRA"). This is the only way peace can happen.
This is why I think you can't really compare it to operations against ISIL or Taliban, whom have a far less legitimate complaints. This is also why "IDF is the most moral army in the world" that I have seen some people say, and what you're kind of echoing here, is completely besides the point. I don't know if it's true and I don't really care. This conflict would be non-existent on the scale that it exists today if not for the settlement policy, which is 100% in Israel's control.
So --- and I think this is take that pisses off both sides of this conflict --- I really don't think moral struggles or the definition of "terrorism" is at all illuminating in this conflict. Both sides deploy the term to discredit the other; in neither case does it matter.
Two important things to understand about Hezbollah are that is the dominant military power in Lebanon, and that is directly supplied, enabled, and controlled by the IRGC QF. Hezbollah is in a plausible sense a military occupier of the state of Lebanon; as an illustration of that fact, look at its full mobilization in support of the Syria/Iran axis during the Syrian Civil War (a Hezbollah conflict that went largely unreported in the west, but caused integer multiples more civilian casualties than anything we've seen reported in the last 12 months).
This is an open conflict between two military peers. Over the last year, Hezbollah has fired on average dozens of rockets every day, at a cadence sufficient to evacuate much of Northern Israel to hotel rooms and temporary housing. My point isn't that you should respect Hezbollah less for doing so, or that it is therefore a terrorist organization. Rather: Hezbollah is a world-tier military force (by many accounts the most effective in the Syrian wars) that has opened a front on a neighboring country.
These are two warring armies. "Deserve", as William Munny would say, has nothing to do with it. If it helps, Israel has been coasting on arguments that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization for years, and I'm no more interested in those arguments.
> I really don't think moral struggles or the definition of "terrorism" is at all illuminating in this conflict
Yes, I fully agree. To be blunt, it's boring semantic wank.
No one is here is an angel. Everyone has serious legitimate grievances and no one is smelling of roses. This should be obvious to anyone who isn't a hyper-partisan.
But that doesn't mean we can't say all of this could have been avoided if Israel hadn't continued their settlement policy with no hint or perspective or any compromise. Remember the constitutional changes and protests over them? That was mostly over the the far-right wanting to expand the settlement policy even further. Even before Oct 7 several government ministers seemed to support the outright ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza. Fun people.
This is not just "fanning the flames", it's the root of the conflict. That was really my main point; I don't think you can just talk about number of civilian casualties without also recognizing that Israel's policies are the fuel on which the entire thing burns. That is: at its core it's a conflict of Israel's choosing. Without it you might have the small terror group or lone nutjob, but nothing like we see today.
It doesn't help that Israel gets a huge amount of military support, to the point where it can just do anything without significant cost in lives or material. Look at the casualty ratios – "military peers" is rather a stretch IMHO.
It just doesn't mean anything. I disagree with you about Hezbollah's motives, but that's besides the point. No country in the world could ignore militarily what Hezbollah has done over the last year. To call the missile attacks an act of war would be to understate dramatically the campaign they've undertaken. You can believe Hezbollah's motives were pure and their campaign fully justified. Israel was still going to shoot back; after almost a full year of large scale rocket attacks, it was starting to look weird that they hadn't already. Hezbollah presumably just expected them to shoot back less effectively.
> No country in the world could ignore militarily what Hezbollah has done over the last year.
Only Israel reacts to terrorism with a genocidal rampage. No other country behaves like this. And it only behaves like this because it has been enabled by their allies, and the international community, who consistently let their crimes go unpunished, including but not limited to their settlement policy.
On the flip side, no colonized people in the world (except maybe Tibet) would ignore what Israel has done over the last decades. Decades of colonial occupation usually results in resistance and that resistance usually includes terrorism.
Israel’s behavior is not normal, by any measure, Hezbollah or Hamas’ behavior on the other hand is consistent with resistance group of colonized peoples.
Once again: Hezbollah occupies Lebanon. It is not a resistance movement. A majority of Lebanese (which is not majority Shia) loathes it. It's primary military engagements over the last decade --- even after including the casualties it incurred by opening a front with Israel over the last year --- have been in Syria, where it has been gleefully (and I use that word advisedly; look up the details, they've been making videos --- Madaya; Homs; Idlib) murdering children and civilians. You give the game away a bit when you equate Hezbollah with Hamas. They are radically different organizations. Both are terrible, but they are terrible in their own distinct ways.
I understand why people have a problem with Israel. It makes a lot of sense. But you cannot simply assume any declared military enemy of Israel is a resistance organization. We went through this with Ansar Allah in Yemen, which is literally a racialist fascist dictatorship representing single-digit percentages of the population, also managed by the IRGC QF, and also killing civilians by the tens of thousands.
In no way does Hezbollah "occupy" Lebanon. It is drawn entirely from Lebanese society. Truly a bizarre thing to keep repeating so stridently! Its also absurd to deny the literal origins of the group, as a militia that was attempting to defend southern Lebanon from an actual occupation? This isn't hidden, there are shelves of books in english on the origins of Hezbollah? The first sentence of the second paragraph of the wikipedia article on them, just to show what level of consensus there is, states the fact of its origins as a response to an Israeli invasion, and its source for this is....wait for it....the BBC.
Hey! I'm glad to see you. Hezbollah was a Khomeinist response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. If you want to argue that Israel bears some responsibility for the destabilization of Lebanon, I won't argue. But it was trained and guided by the IRGC from its inception; the modern incarnation of Hezbollah is directed by the IRGC Quds Force. If you want to argue that the two organizations (QF and Hezbollah) are separable, you have two simple fact patterns to contend with:
* Hezbollah fully mobilized to engage, on behalf of the Syrian Baathists, during the Syrian civil war. By some accounts Hezbollah was the most effective fighting force in the entire conflict. There was no clear ideological reason Hezbollah should have committed itself and other Lebanese militia to that conflict; it did so because Iran and the Baathist leadership of Syria are aligned politically. It's striking, reviewing the entire history of Hezbollah's military conflict, that the Syrian theater accounts for a plurality of all military casualties ever taken by Hezbollah. I'd like to understand your explanation for Hezbollah taking over 2,000 infantry casualties in Syria that excludes the IRGC directing them to do so.
* The Mossad pager attack struck Iran's foreign envoy to Lebanon (that's reported in the story we're commenting on) and dozens of Iranian Quds Force operatives in the Bekaa valley. I'm curious what your explanation of those casualties would be, apart from the obvious and widely reported suggestion that Hezbollah under Nasrallah was an instrument of the QF.
The claim that Hezbollah is directed by and is in essence an instrument of the Quds Force fits into a context of Iran's strategy of engaging militarily through a network of proxies --- the claim I'm making is one Iran itself makes. Iran's proxies include not just Hezbollah but Kata'ib Hezbollah in Iraq, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza --- Hamas being noteworthy because they had a falling out with the IRGC because they supported the Sunni insurgency in Syria.
It's wild to me, as a westerner, that on the leaderboard of "most salient military conflicts in the Middle East", Israel/Palestine ranks at best #3, behind the Saudi/Persian rivalry (which claimed hundreds of thousands of noncombatant lives in Yemen) and the Sunni/Alawite conflict in Syria (which claimed hundreds of thousands of noncombatant lives in Syria).
Hezbollah was a Khomeinist response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
This "response" being armed resistance to that invasion, specifically. Eventually not only forcing the latter's withdrawal, but handing it a decisive strategic defeat (from which it is still licking its wounds). As a neat little side bonus, the US was forced to leave with its tail between its legs as well.
Which makes it not only a you-know-what movement - but (by the end of that conflict at least) a very successful one at that.
Are you going to respond to my point about the "occupy" "fact" or...not? Plenty of resistance groups are trained by other state (and non-state) powers who have an interest in their success? Vietnam comes to mind! I don't know, maybe you would, but I'd be pretty shocked if you described the North Vietnamese army as "occupying" ....North Vietnam. Similar dynamics apply across pretty much any ideological axis you could name. The level of support that a resistance group gets for a militia which I haven't seen you deny (yet!) is made up entirely of Lebanese people does not somehow negate that that force is indigenous to its location/state/region/etc and is operating from a motivation to repel a state that had already actually occupied Lebanon for 20 years during a previous invasion. None of what Hezbollah did in Syria negates its origins or in anyway makes it an "occupier" of its own land. This is the point I made in my reply, nothing that I'm seeing in yours in anyway addresses that, if you think it does, please, feel free to explain it to me.
To the extent that it is the dominant military power in Lebanon and it is directed by a foreign power, while enjoying something like 8% public support outside the Shia minority in Lebanon, I do feel comfortable referring to it as an occupying power. The Syria thing is not a small deal.
I feel like if I have a stake in any part of these cursed threads, it's the notion that just because you oppose Israel --- a deeply problematic state, I agree with you preemptively --- doesn't make you justifiable. You saw the same thing with people talking up Ansar Allah when they were deterring shipping in the Red Sea. Literally a minoritarian racialist supremacist group!
To the extent that it is the dominant military power in Lebanon and it is directed by a foreign power, while enjoying something like 8% public support outside the Shia minority in Lebanon, I do feel comfortable referring to it as an occupying power.
Except that extent is tempered greatly by Hezbollah's broader social and political significance (providing government services in some areas, and being a leading party in the previous ruling coalition). Also, if we go by its standing in the polls, its support clocks in at 18.56 percent, and its broader coalition block came in with an additional 20 percent (which has quite a different ring from the "8 percent outside of the Shia majority" figure you were touting).
Point being - it's not simply a proxy of Iran, and (since the definition of a "military occupier", going by Wikipedia, explicitly requires a foreign power as a referent) that's where the assertion "Hezbollah occupies Lebanon" starts to lose structural coherence.
1) There hasn't been an official census in Lebanon in nearly a century[1], precisely because such statistics would upset a fragile balance of power between competing minority groups. So I'm not sure where you are getting the 8% public support outside the Shia minority line but if you have access to census data that literally the entire rest of the world, including and most prominently the Lebanese, do not have, perhaps you should share it! Not that that matters because even if you were correct about the support levels, given that Hezbollah is a genuine Lebanese political movement, made up entirely of Lebanese people, it cannot, ipso facto be an "occupying power". There are a number of different words to describe when an indigenous minority rules over an indigenous majority but "occupier" is not one of them, and the political function that that word performs in your argument is the reason I think maybe your doubling down on it, substance free.
2) I did not at any point say that the actions of Hezbollah in Syria are "a small deal". The actions of Hezbollah in Syria however, while truly heinous, have zero to do with whether or not it is accurate to call Hezbollah an "occupying power". You often try to draw in extraneous aspects to a particular point in these threads which are salacious or horrifying and seem to believe that these buttress your argument without ever actually illuminating the link, I feel like this is a perfect example of that. Maybe we're talking past one another, I don't know, but as I said, nothing that Hezbollah did in Syria in anyway makes it an occupying power in Lebanon.
3) I have never, here or at any time in any of these threads, held to some kind of childlike mentality that simply by virtue of "oppos[ing] Israel...makes you justifiable."
4) Plenty of resistance groups engage in ugly tactics or are either authoritarian from the beginning or become so over time. None of that makes those groups somehow an "occupier", or negates that they are resisting a real oppressor. Which, again, is my entire reason for jumping in this thread.
5) If your only reason to jump in these threads is to perform some kind of intellectual policing action, scolding and sneering at your interlocutors, presuming that their motivation is a kind of shallow reflexive opposition to Israel, I think maybe you lose the ability to claim that you are attempting to preserve an environment for "curiosity". I have tangled with you probably half a dozen times or more over this last year, not once have I felt you are in anyway "curious" or seeking to understand. Just the opposite. Do you think I support any and all opposition to Israel, simply because....it is opposition to Israel? You would be quite wrong stranger! I have prayed at more synagogues, just in Chicago, then you have probably, probably, set foot in in your entire life. I was a zionist for many years. None of this really needs to be said, and given you are unwilling to defend your own statements, commenting that you are "not going to litigate your politics" and that you "blame message boards" for other people "misunderstanding" your statements, I kind of feel like its a charity and gesture you are unwilling to extend yourself and do not deserve! But again, its worth putting out there, so at least other people can see it.
EDIT: Just to respond directly to a point you raised in your initial reply which I missed on first read, the amount of casualties that Hezbollah sustained in Syria, again, does not make it an occupying power of Lebanon, I can't think of a single reason why that would somehow make them occupiers. As to why they did that, I would assume for the guns! The guns and other military support that they receive from Iran overwhelmingly passes through Syria and had the Assad regime fallen that would have been a pretty bad day for Hezbollah! Seems like a powerful reason. The idea that the relationship to Iran can be reduced to one of puppet and puppeteer by gesturing at the number of Iranians killed or wounded in the pager attack is a strange one.
I'm sorry but my lived experience of this thread is that you're the one who jumped in. I'm happy you did so, but maybe we just leave this at "we disagree and our premises are too far apart for it to make sense to litigate".
My contention is that Hezbollah is a literal arm of the IRGC Quds Force, integrated into Iranian military command and control, operating in Iran's regional strategic interests, to the point of dragging Lebanon into another regional war for no apparent benefit to Lebanon itself; it is further the most powerful military organization in Lebanon and largely outside the reach of internal law in Lebanon. Ergo: I would say that Hezbollah is evidence of Iranian occupation of Lebanon.
If you want to dispute the definitions I'm using, that's fine; it's just about the most boring thing we could possible argue about. What I strongly object to is the notion that Hezbollah under Nasrallah has functioned as a "resistance movement", as has been claimed elsewhere on this thread. Ask a Sunni in Homs what they think about that claim.
You seem to have adopted a very convenient definition of “resistance movement”. In almost all colonial warfare throughout history, the colonized received international support. Sometimes this was just weapons and aid, sometimes these were international volunteer bridges, and sometimes whole armies of a supporting nation. For example, in Rhodesian bush war, not only were the main Zimbabwe resistance groups armed and supplied by China and the Soviet Union, but they also had fighters and armed groups coming from Mozambique, ANC (South Africa) and Zambia.
During the Gaza genocide Hezbollah has been one of only two international groups who have fought with the Palestinian resistance (the other being the Huthis). Not even Iran has fought to help Palestine (they merely sent a nominal amount of missiles for reasons other than the liberation of Palestine). The ANC, and Mozambique fighters surely were armed and supplied by e.g. the Soviet Union, who probably event gave them intelligence, military advice, etc. But at no point were they a vessel or otherwise integrated into any military unit of the Soviet Union. And they fought the Rhodesian Government on ideological grounds and in solidarity with their colonized partners on the continent, but also of self preservation as e.g. the Mozambique resistance probably saw an independent Rhodesian Government would be a thread to their own liberation.
To claim e.g. that the ANC were evidence of a Soviet occupation in Africa would be very ahistorical (and I don’t thing anybody would do that), but still (and I haven’t checked, so I may be wrong) it wouldn’t surprise me that many contemporary apologists of African apartheid did just that.
Was Hezbollah an active ideological adversary of Israel, a participant in the conflict between Israel and Hamas/PIJ? Absolutely. Does that mean it participated in what Iran calls "resistance" to the state of Israel? Absolutely. Is that Hezbollah's core function? Absolutely not. Hezbollah is a service branch of the Iranian military. In every conflict Hezbollah has fought with Israel, it has incurred fewer losses and contested less territory than it did in Syria.
Empirically, Hezbollah's function is to serve Iran's regional strategic interests. When those interests align against Israel, as they so often do, Hezbollah "resists" Israel. When they involve killing Lebanese Sunni political adversaries, they do otherwise. When they involve projecting Iranian military power in other foreign conflicts, that's what they do.
I walk down the street, and someone sitting down the side of the road asks for some spare change. I give them a couple bucks and keep walking. Am I a philanthropist? Maybe in that moment? But I am in reality a software developer.
If you want to argue that Hezbollah is both a resistance movement and a foreign military occupier of Lebanon, we might find a place to agree. But, obviously, us agreeing isn't important. I'm comfortable with what this thread says about our respective positions!
With that line of reasoning you could claim that the American Indian Movement is a foreign occupying power within the USA, as they receive support from and serve the strategic interests of other indigenous liberation movements around the Americas (including Nicaragua and Bolivia); Or you could flip the script and claim that the Nicaraguan Contras were a US backed foreign occupying power in Nicaragua.
That is simply not what a foreign occupying power means. Let’s take the contras for example. They weren’t just mindless drones of the US empire, they had their own strategic interest which happened to align with US interest in the region. Would they have been active without US backing, for sure, they just wouldn’t have been so successful (and therefore not as brutal).
The Contras main interest were to reinstate the pre-revolution powerstructure, and to make sure no wealth and land redistribution occurred, they adopted whichever strategy they saw fit, including a heavy anti-communism in order to secure US backing.
This feels like an argument about definitions. Substitute whatever term you prefer. Though: I don't find it plausible that the American aboriginal rights movement is directed by foreign powers.
I don't care about the moralizing in either direction. I don't care that Israel believes Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, I don't care that Hezbollah believes Israel is an illegitimate occupier. I don't care if Hezbollah felt justified in indiscriminately lobbing rockets at northern Israel. I don't care because it doesn't matter. They struck, Israel responded; they are near-peer military adversaries, and they are at war.
This to me just illustrates the futility of advocating for a "right to fight back" or a "right to resist". There is no such thing as a right to military strikes without counterattacks. Wouldn't it be wild if there were? If some adjudicator could just decide, you're in the right, they're in the wrong, you can fire thousands of rockets, they just have to sit there and take it? In reality, however, if you launch a large scale military offensive at a capable adversary, you're going to get hit back.
> There is no such thing as a right to military strikes without counterattacks.
I'm not "moralizing" I'm citing the UN, and nobody is saying that ^
Israel is a colonist apartheid. It doesn't have a right to occupy Palestine and Palestine does have the right to fight back.
It's not that Palestine can bomb and Israel can't, it's that Israel must dissolve. Israel has neither the right to bomb nor the right to exist. Palestine shouldn't use violence to make Israel dissolve but they have the right to.
Israel's policies may change (do note that a distinction is being drawn here between Israeli Arabs, who enjoy Israeli citizenship, freedom of movement, voting rights, Knesset membership, etc and Palestinians, who do not). The state of Israel is not going to dissolve, because there are no plausible pressures that can be brought to bear to make that happen.
Post WW2 history does not treat kindly the kinds of atrocities currently being committed by Israel. I don’t know of any state which actually survived being a perpetrator of a genocide (at least not as a continuation of a functioning state). Khmer Cambodia did not, Rwanda did not. The closest is probably Serbia (but they were merely complicit of a genocide committed Republika Srpska which now only exists as a part of Bosnia-Herzegovina) or Indonesia (which survived as a dictatorship before transforming to Democracy in a revolution 15 years after the East-Timor genocidal rampage; a revolution largely caused by the genocidal behavior).
If Israel is going to follow the pattern of perpetrators of modern genocide it will either voluntarily change, be invaded and forced to change, or hang on as a dictatorship for a couple of decades and change in a revolution. In any case an Israel as we know it would have to be a historic first if it would persist as this pseudo democratic apartheid state as we know it today for the next two decades. In other words—looking at history—chances are very much in favor of Israel dissolving.
I don't know what any of this is supposed to mean. This kind of rhetoric is what jams up curious discussions about what's happening in the region; Syria and Yemen host actual genocidaires --- in Syria's case, of Palestinians in refugee camps --- and have killed civilians in the last 20 years greater multiples than the IDF has in its entire history. But somehow, Israelis notice, it's only Israel that needs to worry about what history will say about it. Your list of comparable states is wild.
You need to find a rhetorical device for calling out Israel's war crimes in west Asia that doesn't involve attempting to line Israel, and only Israel, up alongside the Rwandan Interahamwe. I think reasonable people who you stand a chance of persuading recoil from these kinds of analogies, and they're right to do so.
My point was originally that history does indeed have examples of apartheid states dissolving, contradicting your prediction that Israel wouldn’t dissolve. My point was simply to prove you wrong by citing historic examples.
My point was never to compare Israel to Rwanda (which I never did) but rather, since you weren’t convinced by the original statement, to further my case by citing other genocidal rampages which did in fact lead directly to the downfall of the perpetrating state. Your point about Syria might be on par with that as it is hardly a functioning state, although I would argue that their atrocities against Palestinian refugees don’t come anywhere close to the one currently ongoing by Israel, nor other cases of post WW2 genocides.
The Syrian state ran out of ordinary munitions during the civil war, but so desired to ethnically cleanse Sunni Palestinian refugee camps that they improvised by packing metal oil drums with high explosives, nails, scrap, and bearings, and then dropping them from helicopters onto the camps. There's video footage. Soldiers in the helicopters have to light fuses on them by hand, like 1920s silent film villains. They adopted a tactic of dropping a barrel bomb, waiting 10 minutes for responders to come help the wounded, and then dropping another one on them; they apparently called it a "double tap". They did this deliberately, exclusively targeting civilians.
And, of course, they did this in addition to deploying Sarin gas. Have you ever read the New Yorker story about the Baathist Sarin attacks on Halabja? If not, can I ask that you go read it (it's on archive.is; steel yourself) and then come back and tell me how you think the IDF stacks up regionally?
By the way: these are the people Hezbollah engaged its largest ever military mobilization to support. In Madaya, they deliberately blockaded food supplies into the suburb for months; people ate their pets, and then grass. Then they starved to death. Hezbollah leaders set up food displays with fresh proteins and produce and filmed joke videos.
If you can find a genocide in post WW2 history that didn’t result in the failure of the perpetrators state, that only refutes the absolute strongest version of my claim. However that doesn’t refute my general claim that Genocidal states do in fact tend to dissolve over the following decades, and that history has examples of apartheid states—even heavily armed ones—dissolving into a single state democracy of all its people.
Looking at history the pattern is pretty clear, even though it is not absolute (nothing in history is).
Assuming it is genocidal. You classic genocide is rounding up people and killing them all, eg the Nazis on the jews. Israel's approach has been to let the Gazans get on with things with their population growing from 1.1m in 2000 to 2.04m in 2024 then being attacked and and killing 0.04m fighting back to get their hostages. If they are doing a genocide I'm not sure they are doing it right.
However if the goal is to create conditions favorable to what they coldly refer to as "voluntary population transfer", i.e. ethnic cleansing very much in the classical definition -- they they're doing a masterful job indeed:
Apartheid - more complicated. Many people dispute this. I think it's plausible to make a case that there is an apartheid in the West Bank, though it's not completely obvious (mostly because the people there don't want to be under Israeli rule, they want their own government).
> It's not that Palestine can bomb and Israel can't, it's that Israel must dissolve. Israel has neither the right to bomb nor the right to exist. Palestine shouldn't use violence to make Israel dissolve but they have the right to.
Israel should dissolve, and...? What's the next part of the sentence for what happens to the 9 million Israelis? What's the next step for people who are second, third and foruth-generation Israelis and have only known Israel as their home?
What's the implication of deciding that a state recognized worldwide and part of the UN must dissolve? What about the other dozens of states since then, must they also dissolve?
> It is not a colonist by any standard definition.
Yes they are. It's true that before the British Mandate of Palestine the population of Syria Palaestina was 3-11% Jewish (Mizrahi Jews) but most of the Jewish population of Israel is not indigenous to that region of the world (like how the Ashkenazi Jews are from Europe and Eastern Russia).
> Apartheid - more complicated.
It isn't, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch recognize it is Apartheid. As do Ireland and South Africa (countries who have both been victim to Colonist Apartheid violence).
Israel does not allow free passage between Gaza and the West Bank, that in itself is a war crime. Israel literally has a two tiered society, Israeli Arabs do not have the Right To Return like Jewish Israelis do. 50% of Arab Israelis are under the poverty line because of wage discrimination and other factors https://adva.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SocialReport2016... . Israel was even caught practicing eugenics on the beta Israelis.
> Israel should dissolve, and...? What's the next part of the sentence for what happens to the 9 million Israelis?
What are you filling in the blank with...? Nobody is asking for them to be deported. I mean obviously people like Yaakov Fauci would have to give back the houses they literally stole but a "1 state solution" does not require the deportation/killing of the Israelis. Elsewhere in this thread I linked the Oslo Accords, I suggest you read about them, peace is possible.
> It's true that before the British Mandate of Palestine the population of Syria Palaestina was 3-11% Jewish (Mizrahi Jews) but most of the Jewish population of Israel is not indigenous to that region of the world (like how the Ashkenazi Jews are from Europe and Eastern Russia).
Firstly, Jews are originally indigenous to that part of the world, they were ethnically cleansed from that area by Rome. This is not even disputed.
Of course Palestinians are also indigenous to the land! Many of them more recently.
And of course, multiple generations have Israelis have now been born and lived their entire lives in that land.
But none of this really matters. The standard colonial pattern is of a country sending its population to colonize a new land. That is just emphatically not what happened. Israel was largely founded by refugees who were fleeing persecution, or by Jews ethnically cleansed from their homes. That is just not what most people are thinking of when thinking of colonialism.
Hence the standard outcome that happens in colonies is that the people leave and return to the land they are "from", which is just irrelevant here, because the children of refugees have nowhere else to "return" to.
> It isn't, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch recognize it is Apartheid. As do Ireland and South Africa (countries who have both been victim to Colonist Apartheid violence).
Yes, and many groups disagree with this, including the US and EU iirc. Human Rights Watch in particular is a very problematic organization that has a lot of complaints against it of being biased against Israel.
That said, I'm pretty sure that what I said is consistent with what they say in their report - there's a plausible case for apartheid in the Occupied Territories. They think it has now crossed the line to being legally apartheid, others disagree. This is relevant for the OT but not the rest of Israel.
Israel has a lot of discrimination and other issues with its Israeli Arab population, but it's almost entirely not legal discrimination.
> Israel literally has a two tiered society, Israeli Arabs do not have the Right To Return like Jewish Israelis do.
That is actually a very untrue example. Right of Return is a right of citizenship, the fact that some people have a right of return and others don't is not a discrimination against existing citizens.
I don't have the right to become a British citizen, that doesn't mean Britain is discrimination against me. It is just doing what every state does - defining who its citizens are via some metric, usually by being born to parents who are citizens, though different states define this differently. Israel is doing similarly.
> 50% of Arab Israelis are under the poverty line because of wage discrimination and other factors.
Wage discrimination does not prove apartheid or any systemic discrimination.
Let's remember that Israeli Arabs can vote, can be any profession they want, a large percentage of the doctors in Israel are Arabs, there are Israeli-Arab supreme court judges, members of the Israeli Congress, etc.
> Nobody is asking for them to be deported. I mean obviously people like Yaakov Fauci would have to give back the houses they literally stole but a "1 state solution" does not require the deportation/killing of the Israelis.
That is exactly what Hamas is asking for. Deportation and/or killing of all Israeli-Jews.
A one state solution is a ridiculous idea that is not what anyone in the region wants, not what anyone who has ever seriously considered what to do in the region that has had any power has advocated, and would almost certainly lead to the death of one or both of the ethnic groups in the region.
Even if not, what country would ever agree to double its voting population with a population that is completely culturally different?
What do you tell Israeli members of the LGBT community, that it's totally ok to have a one state solution by adding 100% more voters that come from a society that wants to make homosexuality illegal? Do you think they should agree to that idea?
> Elsewhere in this thread I linked the Oslo Accords, I suggest you read about them, peace is possible.
Great! I'm in favor. Like any other serious solution, this process aimed to create two states for two people. As I said elsewhere, this process largely died, in my opinion, because sincere efforts of the Israelis were met with refusal to sign an actual deal from the Palestinians, and then met with violence and terror attacks.
And the last ~17 years have seen Israelis completely convinced that there is no partner for peace and never will be, while ignoring that Israel itself is causing the conditions for there being no partner for peace!
Both sides have to just accept the fundemantal reality - there are 7 millions Jews and 7 million Arabs on this land, neither is going anywhere, the only solution is to reach a peace agreement. This will not happen through violence, only through a negotiated deal.
> Firstly, Jews are originally indigenous to that part of the world
No, that's not how this works. My 23&Me says my family came from Africa (as did all people), then southwest Asia then Europe but that doesn't give me the right to go to one of those countries and claim land.
> The standard colonial pattern is [...] That is just not what most people are thinking of when thinking of colonialism.
Man, you can't quote me talking about the British Mandate of Palestine and then say they're not colonizers. Literally before the Holocaust Britain was arming Jews to go colonize Palestine. Yes, Jews fleeing the Holocaust did find refuge in Palestine but fleeing an ethnic cleansing of their own doesn't make the colonization that was already ongoing more legal.
I'm not even gonna address the rest of this point by point, you're just insisting that a 2 state solution is the only way because a 2 state solution is legalized perpetuation of the colonization.
A 2 state solution is not the only way, it is colonization.
No, Hamas does not want the death/expulsion of all Jews, that's simply a lie.
> No, that's not how this works. My 23&Me says my family came from Africa (as did all people), then southwest Asia then Europe but that doesn't give me the right to go to one of those countries and claim land.
You brought up indigeneity. In what way are Jews not indigenous? I agreed with you that it's irrelevant right after. I don't think it automatically gives anyone right to claim any land.
> Yes, Jews fleeing the Holocaust did find refuge in Palestine but fleeing an ethnic cleansing of their own doesn't make the colonization that was already ongoing more legal.
Who exactly were the colonizers? The Jews who legally immigrated to that land under the Ottoman Empire? The Jews who legally immigrated to that land under British rule?
The 90% of the Jews who came to Israel because they literally had no where else to go after being in DP camps after WW2 and the UN voting for them to move to that land?
I'm not sure who are these mythical colonizers who came in and violent expelled Palestinians from the land. Most of the Jews either came legally through immigration or were refugees.
> A 2 state solution is not the only way, it is colonization.
This is literally the first time I've ever heard this claim. A two state solution is the stated goal of the PA, the representative of the Palestinian people. It was the goal of Arafat. Are you seriously saying that their goal, had it been reached, was a continuation of colonization?
I really don't know what to make of this argument. Two people live on a land and don't want to be part of the same state, for good reason. Both have reasonable reasons to consider that land theirs (certainly at this point) and nowhere else to go. What can be more sensible than splitting up that land?
>A two state solution is the stated goal of the PA, the representative of the Palestinian people. It was the goal of Arafat. Are you seriously saying that their goal, had it been reached, was a continuation of colonization?
I'm sorry but wasn't this also you?
> OK. Can we agree that withdrawing all settlements and the military means less occupation than before?
Obviously, there are many in Palestine who would agree to a deal that *granted them statehood* and meant less occupation than before even if it didn't mean the full return of the land.
This isn't a serious line of questioning, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. You can't say they're doing more colonization without the deal and then say the deal was bad for Palestine.
First, occupation is not the same as colonization. Second, I was speaking of Gaza specifically when I talked about there being more vs. less occupation - not all of Israel.
> Obviously, there are many in Palestine who would agree to a deal that granted them statehood and meant less occupation than before even if it didn't mean the full return of the land.
So I don't understand what you're advocating. You said that a two state solution (which Palestinians so far have never agreed to) is just a continuation of colonization.
What solution do you think is a) the right one and b) the practical one? I don't understand how my advocating of what probably 95% of peace activists are advocating is wrong.
Occupation is not tautological to colonization but occupation can be the first step to colonization.
> You said that a two state solution (which Palestinians so far have never agreed to) is just a continuation of colonization.
It is a continuation of the colonization. It is also something the Palestinians *have* agreed to, that's what the Oslo Accords are.
> On September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Negotiator Mahmoud Abbas signed a Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, commonly referred to as the “Oslo Accord,” at the White House. Israel accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and the PLO renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace. Both sides agreed that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would be established and assume governing responsibilities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year period. Then, permanent status talks on the issues of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem would be held.
I'm fine with a 2 state solution if that's what the Palestinans want. My issue is that Israel is unlikely to follow the rules given their current behavior so why not just make it 1 state with equal rights? Is that really so scary? Equal rights?
But none of that matters because the first thing that has to happen before even a 2 state solution is a ceasefire.
> I'm fine with a 2 state solution if that's what the Palestinans want. My issue is that Israel is unlikely to follow the rules given their current behavior so why not just make it 1 state with equal rights? Is that really so scary? Equal rights?
YES! I don't know how else to say this. Giving equal rights which would effectively double the voting base with people who fundamentally oppose many things you think are important is terrifying. Again, if you were LGBTQ in Israel, and I told you we're bringing in 100% more voters who mostly think homosexuality is a sin and could now vote to make it illegal, wouldn't you think it's a bad idea?
And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that the the new state acts like every other state that has a Jewish minority, and eventually decides to kill the Jews. Made even more likely given the years of animosity between the two peoples.
You are again and again asking if it's really so bad to do something that 99% of people, including almost all peace activists, say will end in the destruction of the Jews in Israel, one way or another. If that is the only option, it is one that will never be accepted. I don't understand why you can't see that, unless you think you know better than almost everyone else that lives in the area or has studied the area.
(I'm totally open to different arrangements like A Land For All, which aim to make an Israeli/Palestinian federation, basically a two-state solution that has deals in place like the EU which would allow citizens to move between the countries.)
Yes, of course I think they should have their own state like any other state. That's what a two state solution means.
I think there will need to be some security guarantees to prevent it from turning out similarly to Gaza. I have no idea what that should look like, from either side's perspective - but that's part of the negotiations for actually making the two states.
And I'm sure there will have to be similar security guarantees from the Israeli side, so Israel doesn't just decide after two weeks to invade because of a random terror attack.
> YES! I don't know how else to say this. Giving equal rights which would effectively double the voting base with people who fundamentally oppose many things you think are important is terrifying. Again, if you were LGBTQ in Israel, and I told you we're bringing in 100% more voters who mostly think homosexuality is a sin and could now vote to make it illegal, wouldn't you think it's a bad idea?
It's wild to imply Israelis are great to the gay community. It's clear Israel is fine with discrimination.
> Forty-eight percent of Israeli Jews said they agreed with the statement that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, where they make up 19 percent of the population of 8.4 million.
> In addition, about 8 in 10 Arabs complained of heavy discrimination in Israeli society against Muslims, the largest religious minority, while 79 percent of Jews questioned said Jewish citizens deserved preferential treatment.
And don't forget that I cited to you how Israel did eugenics on the Ethiopian Jewish community until at least 2013.
> And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that the the new state acts like every other state that has a Jewish minority, and eventually decides to kill the Jews. Made even more likely given the years of animosity between the two peoples.
That is just mass hysteria. There are many diaspora Jews who feel safe where they currently live and acting like all Jews think Israel is the only safe place for them is actual antisemitism. Jews are not a monolith.
> You are again and again asking if it's really so bad to do something that 99% of people, including almost all peace activists, say will end in the destruction of the Jews in Israel
A ceasefire? I just told you hours ago that the first thing I really care about is a ceasefire.
You're just not responding to anything I actually said or anything I actually believe.
You asked why not give Palestinians "equal rights", meaning make them citizens of Israel with voting rights. I answered with why I think this would effectively roll back many liberal values of Israel, including LGBT rights, not to mention be an enormous risk for Jewish Israelis.
That has nothing to do with pinkwashing anything, I didn't say anything about the war (or what you call "the genocide"). You just haven't responded to my point, at all.
> It's wild to imply Israelis are great to the gay community.
The areas under full Israeli control are great for the gay community. Not perfect, and some areas of Israel are better than others, but far better than many countries.
It seems like in your zeal to only say bad things about Israel you refuse to actually see reality as it is.
> And don't forget that I cited to you how Israel did eugenics on the Ethiopian Jewish community until at least 2013.
I didn't forget, but I don't know anything about this topic at all and didn't have time to look into it. I don't comment on things I know nothing about, no matter what "side" it's on.
> That is just mass hysteria. There are many diaspora Jews who feel safe where they currently live and acting like all Jews think Israel is the only safe place for them is actual antisemitism. Jews are not a monolith.
Ok I was speaking with some hyperbole, but historically, except for the last 80 years, Jews have been discriminated against, killed or kicked out of most countries of which they are minorities.
Anyway, I just don't understand what is your actual view about the world, other than "Israel bad".
What do you think would happen if 7 million Palestinians become citizens of Israel and are granted the vote? What does that state look like in twenty years? That's what you're advocating, I want to understand what you think would happen.
> A ceasefire? I just told you hours ago that the first thing I really care about is a ceasefire.
Look, I'm in favor of a ceasefire. You are too.
I'm in favor of arriving at a peaceful solution that both sides are OK with. You are too.
The main thing I was pushing back on in my comment, was the idea of a one-state solution being anything other than ridiculous, whether in the guise of a new state, or by just "giving Palestinians equal rights" in Israel as it exists.
If you want to push for peace - it's worth advocating for things that a) have some chance of happening, and b) would not lead immediately to a situation that is 100x worse for everyone involved. That's why I advocate a two-state solution, as does almost anyone else seriously involved in pushing for peace.
Is there really cause to believe a peaceful compromise would have been possible even without the settlements? Has there been any period where the borders between Israel and its neighbors have been peacefully respected by both sides?
Israel's two largest borders are with Egypt and Jordan, both of which it has shared peaceful relations with for decades. It shares a complicated border with Syria, where it has for more decades held a salient into Syrian sovereign territory (the Golan), but until recently there has been little military activity involving it. It's the Lebanese border where all the action is at.
That's a misleadingly small part of the story of why there's no peace today.
Israeli went on to elect multiple other PMs to continue working towards a peace deal. Rabin was assassinated in 1995, but Barak met with Araft in 2000, 2001, Olmert was trying to make a deal all the way up to 2007. And in the meantime, famous military hawk Sharon actually withdrew all settlements and military presence from Gaza, supposedly giving them what they wanted - no more settlements.
What actually happened is that a result of the Oslo accords, while yes, one right-wing extremist killed Rabin (and another right-wing extremist committed a disgusting terror attack on Palestinians) - the Palestinians started a massive wave of terror attacks, probably spearheaded by Hamas with the express purpose of scuttling the peace process.
Oslo accords were almost entirely concessions from the Palestinian side. There were no meaningful concessions on the Israeli settlement policy. Not only that, you had stuff like Ariel Sharon encouraging people to settle all the land while they can. It was hard to really take in good faith.
And yes, with Arafat and the PLO seen as "selling out", as well as Baruch Goldstein's terror attack fanning the flames, Hamas was born and started their suicide attacks. I am not approving any of that of course, but the notion of "it failed because Hamas terrorism" is outright historical revisionism.
> Oslo accords were almost entirely concessions from the Palestinian side. There were no meaningful concessions on the Israeli settlement policy.
This is just not true. The Palestinians didn't have any recognized governing body before the accords; the accords made the Palestinian Authority the official representative of the Palestinian people, and outlined the areas from which Israel would withdraw and that would be governed by the PA completely. This all happened and is still the situation.
> I am not approving any of that of course, but the notion of "it failed because Hamas terrorism" is outright historical revisionism.
That is not the reason the peace process failed - it failed because the Palestinians at some walked away without agreeing to a deal, or giving a counteroffer that Israel could weigh. Multiple times. Had they agreed, there would be a peace in place today.
But the terrorism is the reason the Israeli Left eventually lost much public support - because the Right just said, correctly, that all attempts at peace and all concessions have been met with refusal and more violence.
I'm not saying Israel didn't do anything bad or was always the best negotiating partner, and I think settlement activity should've been stopped (and really, should never have happened in the first place!). But this notion that there was never any real chance at peace, that Israel never even tried to negotiate, etc, is something that people have only started saying in the last couple of years, it's not what anyone at the time was saying.
You don't have to trust Israelis for this, trust Clinton, trust the other Americans, trust plenty of historians who've looked at the deal.
As for historical revisionism...
> And yes, with Arafat and the PLO seen as "selling out", as well as Baruch Goldstein's terror attack fanning the flames, Hamas was born and started their suicide attacks.
It takes like two minutes on Wikipedia to show that this is not true. Hamas was founded in 1987 and carried out its first terror attack in 1988, about 6 years before Goldstein's terror attack.
> Had they agreed, there would be a peace in place today.
There was no meaningful "peace deal" because there were no meaningful concessions on the root cause: the settlement policy. And several Israeli politicians were sabotaging things by encouraging further settlements.
My case is very simple: there needs to be a significant compromise on the settlement policy first, and only then can any meaningful agreement be reached and violence be reduced. Any "peace negations" without that on the table are not really meaningful and just window dressing. "Please behave nicely according to our satisfaction until we maybe give you your due rights" is not a reasonable demand, especially not in the face of some of the people in government right now.
And "Hamas born" was not the right term. The point is they stepped up their game and became influential, which is not particularly controversial AFAIK. IIRC they also didn't do any suicide attacks before Goldstein, but I could be misremembering that.
> But this notion that there was never any real chance at peace, that Israel never even tried to negotiate, etc, is something that people have only started saying in the last couple of years, it's not what anyone at the time was saying.
Different zeitgeist. Post cold war 90s were very optimistic. Too optimistic probably.
Also less of a "second world war" hangover. Look, I grew up with stories from my grandparents about the occupation. Half my history lessons were about the war and Holocaust. I have great sympathy for the Jewish people and would even go so far to consider myself a Zionist, at least for some meanings of the concept.
But also, I'm young enough that as far as I'm concerned it's too long ago, and while some morally dubious actions from the past are at least understandable, it's no longer a reason. Even more so for people 20 years younger than me who never had grandparents who told them stories.
I mean, half of the US was on-board with "Satanic Ritual Abuse" during the 80s. Just because "people are the time" said X or thought Y doesn't mean it's correct.
> There was no meaningful "peace deal" because there were no meaningful concessions on the root cause: the settlement policy.
I don't understand what you mean. The negotiation was to come to an agreement to stop settlement activity and give all the territory to the Palestinians.
Are you saying the problem is that there were no concessions before the negotiations had reached an agreement? That is not how negotiations typically work.
> My case is very simple: there needs to be a significant compromise on the settlement policy first, and only then can any meaningful agreement be reached and violence be reduced.
Look, I agree that settlement activity should stop. Many Israelis agree and don't want settlement activity to continue.
The problem is that many Israelis are convinced, very likely correctly, that undoing settlements without a deal will cause far more violence to happen to Israel. This is exactly what happened with Gaza - a unilateral withdrawal of army and settlements, before any negotiated agreement, led to Gaza turning into a launching pad of rockets on Israel.
I still think the settler violence happening today in the WB is abhorrent, all new settlements must cease immediately, etc. I'm totally with you there. I don't know if it'll happen - we may be too far gone at this stage.
In any case, Palestinian violence has basically always backfired on Palestinians. Even if you can somehow accept it morally (which you absolutely shouldn't), the end result is that every single bad condition of the Palestinians has been the direct result of violence, including the horrific condition of Gaza right now. Maybe trying a different approach like renouncing violence is just a good idea?
OK. Can we agree that withdrawing all settlements and the military means less occupation than before?
I think the basic logic of "we're doing a move that gives them, at least directionaly, what they say they want, and they use it to wage even more war" is the guiding logic here, whether you call it occupation or not.
I’ve heard constant talk about there being a UN resolution that’s gone completely unenforced, which involved UN occupation in southern Lebanon to ensure protection from Hezbollah control and attacks targeting Israel. Is there any validity to that? If such a large policy isn’t being enforced to support Israel, does that not somewhat validate most of Israel’s seemingly-aggressive actions in Lebanon, since the area isn’t being protected as expected?
I think just about everybody intimately acquainted with UNIFIL believes that UNIFIL serves mostly to put soldiers from other countries in harm's way as a performative gesture by the UN (it has a long history). UNIFIL was chartered to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining the position it has today, and later to prevent the militarization of southern Lebanon. It has failed comprehensively. Both Hezbollah and the IDF are actively hostile towards it. The UN should withdraw from Lebanon.
My understanding, after having learned more about this topic in the last year, is that this runs much deeper in the Israeli political establishment than Israel's image in the west would suggest.
E.g., I found it notable that Likud's founding charter explicitly rejects a two-state solution, fully endorses the settlement policy and calls for an Israel "from the river to the sea" - in 1977! [1] (More recent updates to the charter are more ambiguous though)
That, btw, is itself already the "moderate" position in contrast to Likud's predecessor parties - which were platforming on extending Israel into the (back then occupied) Sinai [2] or taking over all of Jordan [3] (due to it having been the other half of Mandatory Palestine).
Every country has its fringe groups with extremist views, except in this case, the groups became the dominant government party.
A recent tweet [4] from Netanyahu in response to Macron also makes it clear that the "we conquered it fair and square, so it's ours now" mindset is still alive and well today.
None of that excuses the atrocities done by Palestinian groups - but it definitely calls into question who is the escalating side in this conflict. It also makes the west's one-sided support for Israel appear increasingly jarring and at odds with it's own values.
I think it's uncontroversial that Likud opposes a 2-state solution, for what it's worth. I think you're going to find a lot of people taking Israel's side in the existential question of whether it should defend itself as a sovereign, and/or respond to mass-casualty attacks from paramilitary militias in territories it occupies, but far fewer people endorsing Israel's leadership. "I support Israel's right to exist but Netanyahu belongs at the Hague" is a pretty common position.
The issue is: it doesn't get you anywhere in the Israel/Hezbollah conflict. I believe Israel has awful, possibly criminal leadership. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't respond to full-scale military attacks from neighboring near-peer militaries.
I think tallying up the morals of each side of this conflict is really unproductive, but in the spirit of just digging into the details here, I feel like it's worth pointing out that the details on Hezbollah's side of the scale are grim. Not in its conflict with Israel, but with the broader region, where it has killed civilians with great gusto.
(Full disclaimer: I have no personal ties to the conflict and I get the largest part of my information about it from Haaretz, Wikipedia and Al Jazeera. So I definitely have a bias)
> "I support Israel's right to exist but Netanyahu belongs at the Hague" is a pretty common position.
I think Netanyahu (and Smotrich, Ben Gvir, etc) are a big part of the problem, but it's too simple to blame everything on them. The differences to the other political parties seem to be mostly in details that seem relatively irrelevant for non-Israelis: Basically whether to conduct the occupation and settlement with a good or a bad conscience and whether in service of a religious destiny or for mundane security reasons. But no one has any plan to end the occupation or even just to clear the settlements. The recent bill to reject any Palestinian state was voted in across almost all parties.
> But that doesn't mean it shouldn't respond to full-scale military attacks from neighboring near-peer militaries.
I think tallying up the morals of each side of this conflict is really unproductive, but in the spirit of just digging into the details here, I feel like it's worth pointing out that the details on Hezbollah's side of the scale are grim. Not in its conflict with Israel, but with the broader region, where it has killed civilians with great gusto.
Yeah, I don't want to exonerate Hezbollah (or Hamas for that matter). It's just that in this conflict, Hezbollah so far behaved entirely rational and predictable. Their attacks were calibrated to put pressure on Israel but nothing more - and their objective was clear to see. Israel could have easily achieved its objective of bringing back the inhabitants of the north by agreeing to one of the US-brokered ceasefire deals.
It is relatively obvious that Netanyahu wants to continue the war in Gaza at all costs and is rather starting another war than to hold the attacks.
The other reason is that with Israeli military operations, self-defense and conquest seem always be intertwined. I find it uncanny how quickly settlement movements for Gaza and Lebanon pop up during something that is ostensibly a war of self-defense. (Not even starting with the extremely dehumanizing "proposals" what to do with Gaza's population that are apparently freely discussed in Israel's civil society, such as the recent "General's plan")
I'd be more on board if the fight against Hezbollah and Hamas was conducted by an international force with UN mandate than by the IDF alone - and if at the same time we put some actual pressure on Israel to end the occupation, so there is an actual alternative for Palestinians to the terror groups.
No, Hezbollah has not behaved "entirely rational and predictable". They have indiscriminately fired rockets at civilian populations in northern Israel, often over a hundred in a single day, averaging dozens every day continuously for almost a year, killing principally (as you'd expect) civilians (ironically, many of them not Israeli Jewish citizens), in one case including half a youth football team.
If "team A did bad thing X" is an argument for anything, could I counter that team B did X too, and more? You're complaining that Hezbollah kills civilians... So does the IDF.
Now if you tell me that one is intentional and the other one isn't the I know you're not being honest, because there's plenty of evidence that the IDF is really casual about collateral damage.
> Now if you tell me that one is intentional and the other one isn't the I know you're not being honest, because there's plenty of evidence that the IDF is really casual about collateral damage.
Casual about collateral damage and purposefully targeting civilians are different things.
Yes, you can make a list of terrible acts committed by almost any military, especially if you go back 76 years to before it was a state. It is very clear that some soldiers in the IDF, like in any army, have committed war crimes.
It's not "some soldiers", Netanyahu and others at the top have signified their intent to commit genocide with their repeated dehumanization of Palestinians as "Amalek". The Israeli Minister of National Security was a member of a recognized terrorist group. It's not some bad apples, the leadership in Israel is rotten to the core.
But it's clear that no matter what I say you're gonna excuse it. Throwing a baby into an oven in front of the father is some next level nazi shit. If you'll excuse that you'll excuse anything
> But it's clear that no matter what I say you're gonna excuse it. Throwing a baby into an oven in front of the father is some next level nazi shit. If you'll excuse that you'll excuse anything.
I didn't excuse it. I said it was a terrible act.
It was also committed more than 70 years ago, technically before Israel was even founded. Quite literally 3 years after millions of Jews were systematically burned in Nazi-Germany's ovens. Do you think Germany's actions in WW2 are relevant if discussing Germany today?
> It's not "some soldiers", Netanyahu and others at the top have signified their intent to commit genocide with their repeated dehumanization of Palestinians as "Amalek".
Those were statements made the week after the horrible October 7th massacre. They were propaganda statements that should never have been made, but you call it repeated. And it isn't.
What has been repeated is the thousands of times that Netanyahu and others have said that Israel is only going after Hamas, not Gazan civilians.
> The Israeli Minister of National Security was a member of a recognized terrorist group.
Well that I can't argue with. That minister is a disgusting human being who is completely destroying Israel from within, even apart from the vile things he is doing against Palestinians. Luckily his impact on the war isn't huge, but he definitely has some impact, including scuttling ceasefire deals and pressuring for the war to continue.
He is vile and Israel should be ashamed he has any influence on Israel at all, let alone being in charge of the police. (Most Israelis agree about this, unfortunately the totally corrupt Netanyahu needs him for his own political ambitions, because all normal Israelis politicians refuse to work with him!)
> It was also committed more than 70 years ago, technically before Israel was even founded.
> Those were statements made the week after the horrible October 7th massacre. They were propaganda statements that should never have been made, but you call it repeated. And it isn't.
Hmm... I smell a double standard. Cite Israeli aggression too recently and it's justified sensationalism - cite it from the 50s and you're passing an invisible statute of limitations. Most people on this site are American, they're not going to lambaste you for supporting a political nuthouse lest they scorn themselves. But they will (and rightfully so) contest anyone that tries laundering history to create a halo-effect for their favorite nation. Zionism deserves it's due shake no matter what the conditions were at the time, especially considering how interests in the region predated WWII with the Balfour declaration.
The problem isn't people, but politics. Israel (as does America with their Abrahamic militants) has an extremism problem that has been given undue control over government and military proceedings. Their actions (as you've admit with the propaganda concession) has justified insane actions and statements that cannot be rationally supported. The events of October 7th were gruesome indeed, but most people will admit that Israel's reactions were too incensed to take seriously. The world's apprehension would be proven correct as Israel made hot-headed mistakes like bombing aid workers and approving poorly-targeted operations as bloody restitution.
Two wrongs don't make a right. The US depends on Israel to not just enforce peace in the Levant, but to export the Western esprit de corps across the world. If Israel continues to allow it's politics to be dictated entirely by identity and emotion, then logic will be rhetorically unnecessary to justify any military action.
> Hmm... I smell a double standard. Cite Israeli aggression too recently and it's justified sensationalism - cite it from the 50s and you're passing an invisible statute of limitations.
My problem with citing one statement out of a thousand is that it gives the wrong impression, especially if that is made in the heat of war rhetoric.
And I don't think there's any double standard with saying that we should consider war crimes committed 80 years ago as less relevant. That's how everyone thinks of things all the time in other contexts. Egypt was one of the countries that fought wars with Israel multiple times - now Egypt and Israel have peace. Moving on from past violence is pretty much how every conflict eventually ends.
> The events of October 7th were gruesome indeed, but most people will admit that Israel's reactions were too incensed to take seriously.
Most people think so. And they might be right. I certainly have a lot of questions and doubts about the way Israel has carried out the war.
But it's worth noting that many/most of the most vocal critics of Israel were incredibly critical before Israel had done almost anything. Israel was accused of genocide almost days after October 7th. And indeed, all over the world, people were protesting Israel while Hamas militants were still inside Israel slaughtering families, before Israel had done any response.
So I take criticism of Israel from some people seriously, but with a huge grain of salt.
> My problem with citing one statement out of a thousand is that it gives the wrong impression, especially if that is made in the heat of war rhetoric.
The Amalek quote is from October or November but
“This is a battle, not only of Israel against these barbarians, it is a battle of civilisation against barbarism,” Dec 24th
> Israeli President Isaac Herzog said a few weeks earlier, on December 5, that Israel’s attack on Gaza is “a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilisation… [from] an empire of evil”.
> My problem with citing one statement out of a thousand is that it gives the wrong impression, especially if that is made in the heat of war rhetoric.
Heat of war rhetoric is exactly the problem here, though. The War on Terror is 20-odd years old now and people are just as skeptical now as they were when aggression initiated. Without objective or logical goals to attain, Israel's defense forces can't cripple the Iranian infrastructure that threatens them, and they instead fight in Gaza as a perceived proxy. And instead of stabilizing their neighboring region, the IDF tactically neutered it to prevent any chance at sovereign control. Their goals are pretty much blatantly obvious, if you're looking at the big picture.
> And I don't think there's any double standard with saying that we should consider war crimes committed 80 years ago as less relevant.
I disagree wholeheartedly, and I suspect the ADL would object too. War crimes are consistently relevant, and stain their associated administration with the intent of bringing specific criminals to justice and preventing patterns of abuse. When the Axis lost in WWII, the Nazi regime fell but the criminals, their ideology and the hateful rhetoric they used persisted. Germany only absolved themselves by committing to complete and good-faith national reformation, which Israel hasn't undergone since the nation's inception.
> Israel was accused of genocide almost days after October 7th.
They were accused of genocide for a lot longer than that. From the very start, Israel ordered the poisoning of wells in Lebanon[0], tacitly endorsed mass-killings in the West Bank[1] and researched minimum sustainment for the remaining Gazan population[2]. It doesn't make you antisemitic to note these things any more than it makes you racist for acknowledging slavery. These are politically and ideologically motivated fascinations with the suppression of a native people that errs on uncanny.
It's not my pleasure to report it in the slightest, because it's a harrowing reflection of how far global powers will bend over to support dubious interests. But it's also our global responsibility to excise all forms of dangerous extremism, otherwise we're just hypocrites. The IDF's attitude (and likely much of Israel, considering the terms of conscription) reaches dangerous levels of nationalism that are synonymous with supremacist and genocidal intent. We don't have to ask ourselves if Israel supports this or not, because settlers in the Golan Heights are allowed to molest the natives without fear of reprisal.
Take your criticism from wherever it pleases you, but do not write off anti-Zionist protest as transient or outdated. Israel has done this to themselves by creating a soft power echo-chamber that only rewards their worst impulses. They've had every opportunity to acknowledge their mistakes and address them, but they refuse relentlessly. I do not respect the IDF, and their actions embarrass me simply by being a member of the first world. They need to change, or Israel will sign their fate as another internationally embarrassing hermit kingdom.
> if you strip away the violence and Islamic extremism and all of that then the uncomfortable reality is ... they're not wrong in their core objections
Sure. Wars' aims usually aren't irrational. Both sides seem to be somewhat flippant about collateral damage. But Hamas and, to a lesser degree, to my knowledge, Hezbollah stand out for explicitly and proudly targeting Israeli civilians.
> why I think you can't really compare it to operations against ISIL or Taliban, whom have a far less legitimate complaints
They're all couched in the language of expelling foreign imperialists.
> conflict would be non-existent on the scale that it exists today if not for the settlement policy
Plenty of Iran's regional allies oppose Israel's right to exist. The formation of Israel is a can of worms. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran's positions would be strengthened--I think--if they tempered their demands to e.g. Israel returning to its original borders.
And Israel explicitly and proudly targets Palestinian and Lebanese civilian targets, as well as UN peacekeepers. They will deny it in US-facing communications, but are remarkably candid with their domestic media.
> Hamas or Hezb target civilians more than the IDF
Never claimed as much. The point is Hamas and Hezbollah explicitly target civilians. (The October 7th raid had a modest CCR of 2:1 inasmuch as there were 766 civilian and 273 security casualties [1]. Break down some of the raiding parties, however, and the CCR is much higher. Comparable to some of Israel's worst raids, or Russia's war in Chechnya.)
> IDF has killed orders of magnitude more civilians than either
This is how multiplying a big scalar by a smaller ratio works.
> We are rounding civilian casualties to integers. This is a necessarily inexact science.
I think what he's suggesting is that of the Israeli casualties on October 7th, we have no accurate breakdown for how many were caused by IDF implementing the "Hannibal procedure". It's possible the answer is "A LOT".
One case in which it is known that civilians were hit, a case that received wide coverage, took place in the house of Pessi Cohen at Kibbutz Be'eri. 14 hostages were held in the house as the IDF attacked it, with 13 of them killed.
Even if Israel gets rid of settlements in the West Bank, even If Israel goes back to pre-1967 borders, the Israel-Palestine conflict will not end. That's because Palestinians want a one-state solution, along with the return of Palestinian refugees, both the first gen and their descendants--and that's the real solution from the Palestinian side. Israel is never going to accept the real Palestinian solution.
It would be more fair to note that both Hamas and the current governing coalition in Israel very clearly want a one-state solution. In fact, if you could roll Israel back to 1967 borders, the Palestinians would be in an enormously better position than they are today; politics, and, in particular, the logistics of dismantling what are in effect whole Israeli suburbs illegally situated in the West Bank, are what keep us from getting that done.†
It's difficult to really get a firm grasp on what "Palestinians" demand, because (1) the Palestinian Authority is deeply corrupt, generally not trusted by Palestinians, and actively sabotaged by the Netanyahu coalition, and (2) Hamas took power in 2006 and then for almost 20 years refused any self-determination for Gazan Palestinians, all the while being tacitly endorsed and financially abetted by the Netanyahu governing coalition.
If your claim is that Hamas is not interested in a realistic brokered solution of the Israel/Palestinian crisis, you're right. Hamas is a death cult propped up by the IRGC QF, truly one of the most despicable organizations on the planet. But I would strongly object to Hamas' worldview being imputed to Palestinians more generally; Palestinians are Hamas' primary victims.
† There are other logistical problems that would need to get hammered out in a "'67 borders" agreement, like what the corridor between Gaza and the West Bank would look like. To hear skeptical Israeli policy commentators talk about it, you'd also put the structure of Palestinian security forces on that list, but I think the last year has counterfeited that concern: you literally can't do worse than the status quo.
Supporters of Palestinians, especially activists and students on campuses, in the West are not interested in the two-state solution. This position aligns with Arabs, who don't want a Jewish state in the Middle East. Hamas says it directly; others are not so direct, but one can infer their position through their actions.
One can say 'give voice and agency to those who want to make peace with the two-state solution'; then, make peace with these groups. I am not so confident on this adventure. Even the late Prof. Edward Said, who every postcolonial and postmodernist professor and student adore and worship, wanted a bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state, a variety of the one-state solution. Look at some version of a bi/tri-nationalism in the neighboring Lebanon: Hezbollah dictates the Lebanese govt.
> This position aligns with Arabs, who don't want a Jewish state in the Middle East. Hamas says it directly; others are not so direct, but one can infer their position through their actions.
Let's just put things into perspective here - Egypt and Jordan, both Arab countries, have had peaceful relations with Israel for decades. Saudi Arabia was probably very close to signing a deal with Israel as well - an offer that might even still be on the table, if the war ends.
I don't think it's accurate to say that "Arabs don't want a Jewish state in the Middle East". Not anymore.
And I don't think it matters particularly what "supporters of Palestinians" want, it matters what the people in actual power making the decisions want and do.
I'm not a campus activist. I don't care what campus activists say. Some campus activists have said truly dumb things; I won't impute them to Palestinians.
I agree that it's hard to get a firm grasp on the "Palestinians" demand. It's hard to get a firm grasp on what "Americans" demand of their government, and as we see every election cycle, there are pretty conflicting demands in a polarized country.
That said, the official representative of the Palestinians did have a chance to negotiate with the Israelis, received a generous offer according to Israelis and many outsider observers, and said no - walked away without a counteroffer.
The standard Israeli feeling is that there simply is no practical way to reach a negotiated peace because of this, especially since Palestinian representatives since that time have less political will and "moral authority" among Palestinians.
(And of course something that Israelis often miss is that Israel has spent 15+ years actively working against peace, so the lack of Palestinian leaders at this stage is at least partially because of Israel!)
This had nothing to do with the westbank and yes, Israel has a problem with extremism and illegal settlements. But that isn't the topic here.
Hezbollah has started its war against Israel and the pager attack was an efficient way to retaliate and cripple Hezbollah command. There is no justification for Hezbollah to attack Israel with missiles.
I don't really understand why their attack on Hezbollah logistics is even in question. Israel has to use all their capabilities to respond to these attacks.
In the end we need a two-state solution with Israel and the Palestinians have self-determination and security. The faults of those involved are many, but the solution is known - it is a two-state solution, an end to armed attacks on Israeli civilians/homes and an end to the settlements.
A two-state solution is a fever dream if the occupier is uninterested in it. We’ve seen that repeatedly for the past 75+ years in actions and literal words.
So the question is, if you were the subjugated population, what would you do?
Not kill 1200 people, including 815 civilians, and take an addition 251 hostage.
But I think it's really important to be clear about who "we" is here. Last I checked, a majority of Gazans are not old enough ever to have voted in an election (the last one was held almost 20 years ago). If you mean "Hamas", and you stipulate that Hamas is in any way operating in the best interests of living Gazans in the present, it's easy to give a clear answer to that question. If you mean Gazan civilians, the true victims of Hamas, it's much more complicated.
Hamas is a symptom of desperation. It certainly is not acting in the best interest of Gazans and they are suffering due to that.
But on the other hand, diplomacy has not been an effective tool for Gazans and, as all signs indicate, it never will. Not at least until US withdraws its unconditional support for Israel.
With status quo, Gazans have the choice to lie down and die or continue living under deplorable conditions under a military occupation, as Israel slowly annexes the land that, under international law, doesn’t belong to them.
I agree. Gazan civilians had no good options (though, as we've discovered, it was possible for things to get far worse for them than they had been, and I don't think it serves any purpose to sugarcoat that).
Having said that: I don't want to get into 2024 Israeli policy with regards to Gaza, because with this ruling coalition who knows anything, but in the status quo ante of this attack Israel was not in fact slowly annexing the Gaza. (They are slowly annexing the West Bank, to be sure, but these are distinct populations with distinct governance).
Yes, but that is a response to the October 7 attacks, and this thread is about the antecedents of that attack.
(I question the seriousness of that movement; Likud under Ariel Sharon disengaged from Gaza and dismantled the settlements there, for practical reasons. It is not necessarily in the long-term interests of the Israeli state to settle in the Gaza Strip. But it doesn't matter for this thread either way. If it needs saying: all of Israeli's illegal settlement programs are bad.)
> A two-state solution is a fever dream if the occupier is uninterested in it. We’ve seen that repeatedly for the past 75+ years in actions and literal words.
First, the Palestinian territories have not been under occupation for 75 years.
Second, there was a real effort at arriving at a two state solution made by Israel. It's often debated who is "at fault" for no solution having been reached, but without rehashing it - I think it's simply false to say that "the occupier is uninterested in a two-state solution. Not when Israelis elected politicians multiple times over 15 years to seek such a solution, not when Israeli politicians multiple time reached compromises with the Palestinians.
Btw, I think both sides often claim, falsely, that the other side is incapable of compromise - I think it's important to keep pointing out that this is false and that actual meaningful steps towards peace have been achieved. Especially outsiders should be looking at this broad perspective, and not play up the "one side is inherently unreasonable" argument, which is never true.
First, the Palestinian territories have not been under occupation for 75 years.
Only in its internal propaganda. The UN and even Israel's strongest allies consider all 4 areas to be occupied, and illegally so.
(With Gaza one try to could quibble that there was no "effective" occupation from 2005-2023, but even that was never true in regard to control of Gaza's borders).
> Only in its internal propaganda. The UN and even Israel's strongest allies consider all 4 areas to be occupied, and illegally so.
Oh, I meant that it hasn't been 75 years, not that the territories aren't occupied. They've only been occupied since 1967.
This isn't just a quibble btw - it's worth asking who the territories are occupied from. Because there was never a Palestinian state, and those territories belonged to Jordan and Egypt, who don't want them and have peace with Israel. Normally "Occupied" territory is territory that is contested by the country it was occupied from.
In this case it's more complicated, because the Palestinians that live on that land consider it theirs and have nationalistic aspirations. Which I 100% support, and absolutely think an agreement should be reached.
(Btw, itt is worth asking why, in the 20 years during which Egypt and Jordan had control over those territories, a Palestinian state wasn't created.)
My understanding is that every major attempt at getting to a two-state solution has been encumbered by pre-conditions set by Israel that have made the negotiations a non-starter.
For example, any deal that would have Israel give back territories it has been occupying since 1967 has never even been on the table.
The Oslo accords, perhaps the most serious of these, were deeply unpopular on both sides.
Also, any and all attempts by Palestinians to get formal recognition in the UN have been repeatedly vetoed by the United States.
> My understanding is that every major attempt at getting to a two-state solution has been encumbered by pre-conditions set by Israel that have made the negotiations a non-starter.
I'm sorry, not sure how else to say this - you're simply wrong. Pretty much everyone involved in the negotiations at the time disagrees with this idea. Whether the "final" offer that Israel gave to the Palestinians was "enough" or not is of course a matter of some opinion, though many at the time, both Israelis and Americans, thought that they were given an incredibly generous offer. In any case, the Palestinians never came back with a counteroffer of what they would accept, so it's hard to say how close or far Israel was from the "minimum" that Palestinians would consider acceptable.
> For example, any deal that would have Israel give back territories it has been occupying since 1967 has never even been on the table.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Literally every deal is that the West Bank and Gaza become part of a Palestinian state, that's the territories that Israel has occupied since 1967. One other territory, the Sinai, was given back to Egypt as part of the peace deal with Egypt (and is, btw, 4x the size of all of Israel).
And the Palestinian authority, as part of Oslo, did get a limited sovereignity over parts of the West Bank. Israel also completely left Gaza in 2005, though it still had some control over it, and imposed a blockade when Hamas was elected (together with Egypt).
So again, I'm not sure what you mean - literally every deal starts with Israel giving the pre-1967 land to the Palestinians, with some land swaps for land that Israel prefers not to give (btw, you call it "giving back" the land, which is inaccurate - it was never the Palestinian's land, it was part of Jordan and Egypt when it was occupied).
> The Oslo accords, perhaps the most serious of these, were deeply unpopular on both sides.
They are probably deeply unpopular now, but I don't think they were deeply unpopular at the time on the Israeli side. Indeed Israel elected multiple people trying to pursue peace after the Oslo accords, and while none of them had overwhelming public support, they had enough support to form majority coalitions and actually try to negotiate.
They're unpopular now because the result of what to Israelis looks like serious attempts at achieving peace with the Palestinians, ended with violence, terror and refusal to cooperate on the side of the Palestinians.
> In the end we need a two-state solution with Israel and the Palestinians have self-determination and security
The problem is the history of extracting a region from this miasma has involved (a) invasion and unconditional surrender to an outside power or (b) subjugation and thus the erasure of the divide. We decided after WWII the latter is unacceptable. That leaves the former.
The proper parties to do it would be the Middle Eastern military powers. But they, being monarchies and dictatorships, lack the legitimacy and stability to engage in such projects.
It’s refreshing to hear from someone else what I’ve been thinking and saying for a while now.
This perspective is conspicuously missing from all narrative you hear and read in the media, as well as the administration. The gaslighting is hard to ignore.
> I don't approve of Hezbollah or Hamas; but if you strip away the violence and Islamic extremism and all of that then the uncomfortable reality is ... they're not wrong in their core objections. Israel has consistently maintained that no, actually, the core problem is that Hezbollah and Hamas exist, and once we get rid of these people all the problems will be gone.
Let me offer you a counter-perspective on this. Israel and the PA actually worked to achieve peace - beginning with the Oslo accords that officially recognized the PA as the representative of the Palestinian people, and in which they officially recognized Israel on the '67 borders.
There followed a more than a decade of attempts at reaching an agreement for a two-state solution, which would have ended Israel's settlements and given the Palestinians what they ostensibly want.
Except this isn't the core objective of Hamas and Hezbollah. Their core objective has always been to eliminate Israel entirely. Which is why Hamas helped stop the very peace agreements which could've led to a two-state solution, by starting a wave of terror attacks. It's unclear to what extent the PA itself was involved, but Hamas was absolutely involved, and their stated goal was to not achieve peace, but rather scuttle any peace so that the fight could be a fight to the death of Israel, instead.
(And of course, Israeli extremists were working on the Israeli side to stop the peace process, with much fewer attacks and far less success, except for the one terrible blow they did manage to dish out - assassinating the Prime Minister that would've most likely been able to get a peace deal done!)
That is the sense in which many Israelis feel like - yeah, if Israel destroys the group that is actively seeking to disrupt peace and working towards Israel's destruction - we can actually negotiate with the reasonable people that are left. (I don't think this is correct or Netanyahu's full motivations, but it's not completely wrong, either.)
> Israel must resolve the settlement issue first, and THEN we can dismantle the violent extremist groups (which will take time and won't happen overnight – there will be a "Real Hamas" splinter group just as there was a "Real IRA"). This is the only way peace can happen.
Israelis believe that without those settlements, a far more massive attack would happen.
And they are probably right! Israel remvoed the settlements from Gaza, removed all military presence from Gaza, and the Gazans elected Hamas, which took over the Gaza strip (killing all PA members), then spent 15 years shooting rockets at Israel continuously, and spent billions of dollars of aid that was supposed to help Palestinians on, instead, building up towards the October 7th attack.
You're effectively saying to Israelis "if you want peace, just try to repeat this, except on a far more massive scale in the West Bank", and to trust that somehow, this won't turn out exactly the same as in Gaza. Israelis have good reason to mistrust this idea!
(For the record, I do think there are good counterarguments against this, and I am very much against the settlements, as are many Israelis. But the concerns I outline are real, legitimate concerns, and they have to be addressed or at least, understood.)
> And they are probably right! Israel remvoed the settlements from Gaza, removed all military presence from Gaza, and the Gazans elected Hamas, which took over the Gaza strip (killing all PA members), then spent 15 years shooting rockets at Israel continuously
Of course the outcome will be the same as Gaza if the period after negotiations fail is contemporaneous with "grind their economic opportunities into the dust....literally". If an asshole moves into your master bedroom and you want him GONE.....but he proceeds to hook you up with a FAANG job that prints money (and no, "aid" is not the same as the self-respect that comes with controlling your own destiny via hard work)....you'll be more inclined to tolerate living with him, after a period of extended mutual disdain, of course.
What makes you think that the Iraq war was not terrorism? You're comparing Israeli terrorism to United States terrorism. Israel and the United States are a prominent terrorist alliance, and they have been terrorizing the Middle East for decades.
I for one am much more comfortable with the military nature of the radio/pager attack as legitimately military now than I was in the days after it happened.
But I completely agree with your last point. It makes the Gaza invasion look _more_ like collective punishment than it already did (which is pretty wild).
In the same spirit I should say I'm in a much different place with respect to Gaza now than I would have been 6 months ago; I might not have fully agreed with your take back then, but clearly do now.
The pager attack cannot be considered a discriminating attack as they had no idea where the explosions would happen. Even assuming that only military personnel used the pagers they had no way to know where they would be or who else would be near them, especially since a pager is something you always carry with you.
tptacek, it’s hard to take any of your analysis seriously when you label Hezbollah, a non-state controlled armed resistance militia , with no tanks, fighter jets or submarines a “neer-peer military adversary” of Israel, which essentially has full & unlimited access to US weapons stockpiles and latest defence technology (minus nukes and subs).
You are wittingly or unwittingly utilizing the same propaganda strategy of the IDF to lionize their enemies and exaggerate threats so they can use it as an excuse to commit war crimes and inflict severely disproportionate attacks on civilians. With all due respect, we can’t all be experts in everything so please stick to talking about tcp.
One reason I call them that is that they fought Israel to a standstill in southern Lebanon not long ago; the missile attacks were presumably an attempt to lure the IDF into a similar confrontation. Hezbollah is Iran; they are an instrument of the IRGC. Israel and Iran aren't near-peer military forces; they are peers. Israel cannot unilaterally overwhelm Iran.
>The reason I call them that is that they fought Israel to a standstill in southern Lebanon not long ago
First off, they did not fight to 'standstill' with Lebanon, they occupied 10% of the country for 18 years and fought right up to the gates of north Beirut during that conflict, controlling up to half the country at some point. Every war eventually stops to a standstill, but to say they 'fought Israel to a standstill' is completely misleading and disingenuous. 19,000 Lebanese civilians were killed and compared to only 700 Israeli soldiers. Does this outcome look like a war between two 'peer militaries'? You say this despite knowing Israel is armed to the teeth with latest US weapon systems against a poor country that is half its size.
>..the missile attacks were presumably an attempt to lure the IDF into a similar confrontation.
This isn't true Hezbollah have said since the start they'll stop sending rockets once Israel stops its attacks on Gaza. If your aim is to get Israel to stop its attacks, it doesn't make sense why you would want to lure them in to attack them. Their leader also accepted a ceasefire soon before his death. [1]
>Israel and Iran aren't near-peer military forces; they are peers. Israel cannot unilaterally overwhelm Iran.
What does 'militarily overwhelm' mean? The United States, while they can do serious damage, cannot 'military overwhelm' Iran either, and they are not military peers. Russia cannot 'military overwhelm' Ukraine either, does that mean they are 'peer miltiaries'? Of course not.
I was confused why you seem to have so much bias, but then after some quick investigation it makes sense. [2]
The end of your comment was a shameful personal attack* and disgustingly anti-semitic**, made worse (if possible) by internet insults. If you pull a trick like that on HN again, we will ban you.
I don't see how it's in your interest to discredit your own argument with gutter-level slurs, but if that's what you want to do, please do it elsewhere. I wonder how the many Jewish people arguing for the same position that you are, some of whom even have "jewish names", feel about posts like yours.
(* the tinyurl.com link at the end points to a "let me google that for you" with the query "is Ptacek a jewish name".)
(** I don't use language like this in HN mod comments very often, because I don't want to cheapen it, but this is an exception.)
Please keep this stuff on reddit. HN is one of the last few remaining high-quality social websites precisely because we shun comments like this. It should go without saying, but if you disagree, please do so in a civil manner.
> Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA, said that the indiscriminate nature of these attacks makes him consider these attacks to be a form of terrorism:
This was the exact opposite of "indiscriminate". The Israelis blew up pagers belonging to members of a known terrorist organization.
People love to try an claim that they're anti-Israel and not antisemitic, but no other country in the world would be held to this kind of ridiculous standard in the face of constant terrorist attacks on a civilian population.
> the people who happened to be next to them when they went off?
Collateral damage. Same as in any war.
This discussion belies a naivete about how wars are fought. War--theconventional, legal, internationally-sanctioned kind--is horrible. The moment any side commits to war, it's committed to committing atrocities. You can't fight war without being shockingly cruel and inhumane.
We have certain limits that have been internationally agreed. But let's be honest, nobody in the Middle East is following them. (The difficulty being compounded when one side is filled with quasi-insurgent/quasi-state participants.) And let's be more honest: nobody has treated them as totally binding ever.
If a similar and equally large-scale attack was done by a nation at war with US, targeting US military command, would that be a low-casualty operation or an act of terrorism?
And would it matter if the technical interpretation differed wildly from the general perception?
For what it's worth, I consider both parties in their forever war to be irredeemable bastards. As I learned early on, the network of tunnels in Gaza has no civilian shelter space, a clear indication that their general population's safety has not been a concern. On the upside, if there is any to be found, at least it means there won't be human shields to speak of down there.
That said, I don't know if that would make a difference. Both sides have demonstrated that they are perfectly happy to slaughter civilians.
If there is a declared state of war between two countries, than someone else doing what Israel did to Hezbollah would be considered a valid act of war.
The problem is that Israel and Hezbollah are currently in a state of informal hostilities but are not in a state of declared war. That distinction matters at the international level.
In the case of Gaza, Israel and Hamas were in a truce, until Hamas unilaterally broke that truce on October 7, 2023. It turns out Hamas had been using the most recent truce to build up its forces and plan those terrorist attacks, which is why Israel is unwilling to enter into a new truce. (And on a historical note, Hamas has unilaterally broken or violated every truce and peace treaty it has negotiated with Israel.) Given that the Gazan civilian population was openly sheltering and supporting the Hamas forces, the international rules of war hold that Gazan civilians are legitimate collateral damage so long as there was no intent by Israel to deliberately attack civilian targets. Importantly, Israel is formally at war with Hamas, so the legal framework is different from what happened with Hezbollah.
Nations do not declare wars anymore, because wars are illegal since WW2. Quoting Wikipedia:
> Since 1945, developments in international law such as the United Nations Charter, which prohibits both the threat and the use of force in international conflicts, have made declarations of war largely obsolete in international relations
So since then, wars are now called "counter-terrorist operations", "peace enforcement operations", "special military operations" — you name it.
Nobody "declares war" anymore. See, for a defensive war (when a nation is being attacked) there is no legal need to declare it in the first place — and this is why Ukraine does not "declare war on Russia", and this is why Israel does not declare war against Hezbollah (and Hezbollah is not even a state to begin with) — it is a defensive war from the legal standpoint.
You declare an offensive war. And this is illegal. Once you do it, there will be legal repercussions, like troubles with purchasing weapons from other countries (as they often have laws prohibiting from selling weapons to countries at war). So why would anybody do it? It would be silly.
The UN is more of a forum for continued international dialogue despite international political status (and for supporting the agendas of the world super powers), and less of a world government. Its resolutions are more flexible than a Cirque du Soleil performer, and yet I think the world is a bit better with its existence.
Israel actually didn't do that - Netanyahu literally said "this is not another skirmish, this is a war" and gave explicit goals to the war (bringing back the hostages and dismantling Hamas). Later on an additional goal was added - allowing the return of Israeli internal refugees to their homes in the North.
Yeah, but that is for "internal consumption" and it doesn't affect any international relations, unlike "declaring war".
An interesting example is the U.S. which has been in a "state of war" (official term is "period of hostility") since 2001, a.k.a. "War on Terrorism" — and it still is! Which, by the way, gives a nice bonus of immediate citizenship for signing up for the military, without the need to wait for 5 years.
I haven't seen any actual data on who died as a result of this attack, but is it confirmed that it was essentially only members of Hezbollah's militant wing? I've heard reports that that wasn't the case. Are other members of Hezbollah considered legitimate targets? From memory, the Iranian ambassador had one. Were they a legitimate target?
> I haven't seen any actual data on who died as a result of this attack, but is it confirmed that it was essentially only members of Hezbollah's militant wing? I've heard reports that that wasn't the case.
> 4 of the 12 killed in early reports were either children and healthcare workers, so early estimates were 33% civilian causalities
A 3:1 CCR is close to par for the course for NATO and positively honourable for e.g. Russia [1].
Tptacek's take is correct. (Of course it's Patrick.) One can reasonably disagree with the strike, even if limited to the precedent it set for plastic detonators that most countries' scanners can't pick up. But as a military tactic, even taking Hezbollah's numbers at face value, it was normally discriminating for a Western power.
You have to think about the counterfactual. If Israel hadn’t utilized the pagers what would they do instead? The obvious answer is that they would bomb the residences where these people live. That would cause much much worse collateral damage than the pagers did.
Uh, does anybody not "consider this to be a form of terrorism"?
Of course it is terrorism, very much by definition. Obviously, it would be very unpalatable for any involved politician to call it as such, because of the connotations the word has (or rather "has assigned"), so they will exercise doublespeak, doing which perfectly is their core expertise. But it would be funny, if anybody at all buys into that.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/4893900-leon-panett...
Volker Türk, the UN commission for human rights "explained that international law prohibits the use of booby-trapped items used in daily life, and 'it is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians.'"
https://newrepublic.com/post/186244/leon-panetta-israel-leba...
Also covered by Human Rights Watch here criticizing the indiscriminate nature of the attacks means they were against IHL:
https://www.hrw.org/the-day-in-human-rights/2024/09/19