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Post by creature386 on Nov 7, 2017 15:11:20 GMT 5
The title says all, doesn't it?
I'm gonna explain the poll options.
One-state solution (Israel): The Palestinians are sent to the neighbouring Arab countries, the Jews get all the land. One-state solution (Palestine): The Jews are sent to Europe, the Palestinians get all the land. One-state solution (Israelistine): Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip all fuse into one single country shared by the Israelis and the Palestinians. Two-state solution [my favoured solution]: The West Bank and the Gaza Strip form a sovereign Palestinian state, Israel remains where it is. Three-state solution: Egypt takes the Gaza Strip, Jordan takes the West Bank, Israel remains where it is.
Discuss.
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Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Nov 7, 2017 20:51:18 GMT 5
Two state solution would work best.
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Post by creature386 on May 13, 2021 15:48:48 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 30, 2023 2:40:17 GMT 5
I forgot we had this thread. This has certainly become...very relevant in the news late this month.
I wanted to let this out: no, I do not condone Hamas at all, but Israel's actions in attacking/killing Palestinian civilians and cutting off vital food, water, and electricity is absolutely inexcusable.
As for the solution, the two state solution does sound good to me on paper, but I don't know how easy it will be to achieve in practice.
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Post by creature386 on Oct 30, 2023 16:10:55 GMT 5
Honestly, at this point, it feels like we are running in cycles.
1. Hamas commits an act of terrorism. 2. Israel retaliates and makes sure to kill at least ten times as many civilians as Hamas did. 3. Western media sides with Israel. 4. Anyone who doesn't like Western media sides with Hamas. 5. Western media complains about the people mentioned under point #4 and vice versa. 6. Rinse and repeat.
I know, it sounds cynical to put it that way, but since the conflict has been going on for almost eighty years now (and in some sense, the two parties have been at war for thousands of years), we have to ask: Will this ever end? Well, maybe it will once nukes are involved. If that happens though, the conflict has probably escalated far beyond the Near/Middle East anyway.
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Post by theropod on Oct 30, 2023 19:19:53 GMT 5
Pretty spot on. The only thing I’d add would be for point 5; "making sure to stress that anyone criticizing Israeli policy is an antisemite, or that anyone criticizing Palestinian militant groups is a colonialist".
Plus, of course, "Antisemitic mobs inciting violent riots worldwide whenever conflict flares up in Israel or Palestine".
I don’t think this cycle of violence can realistically be broken unless one side is willing to make a meaningful first step towards peace by foregoing its retaliation to the latest crime against humanity committed by the other side. That would have to mean either Israel lifting its siege on Gaza and its apartheid policy in the West Bank and recognizing either the national sovereignty of Palestine, or at the very least equal civic rights for the Palestinian population, thereby hopefully cutting the ground from under the militant groups, or Hamas relinquishing its regime in Gaza and its terror attacks against Israel and making way for a democratic government that acts in the actual interests of its people rather than using them as a human shield for its campaign to destroy Israel, thereby cutting the ground from under those people treating all Palestinians as terrorists that need to be collectively locked up. Needless to say, both are hard to imagine happening any time soon, even less so after this latest escalation.
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Post by Supercommunist on Oct 30, 2023 21:15:15 GMT 5
I used to be slightly more on Palestine's side but after doing some admittedly light research, it seems that Hamas is ridiculously brutal and uncompromising. When countries accepted Palestinian refugees many of those refugees tried to violently overthrow the government. Making deals with them is easier said than done. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September_OrganizationIsrael is far from perfect, and while it's true that they inflict more casualties on Palestine than vice versa, it's important to consider intent. If Hamas had the power, they would try to kill every Jew in Israel. Hell, they are apparently reports of them knowingly killing Thai workers that have nothing to do with the conflict. Israel could probably do a better job minimizing civilian casualties but it's inherently hard to do that in an urban battlefield and it doesn't help that Hamas have plain clothes fighters and intentionally station their fighters in civilian infrastructure like hospitals. This conflict kind of reminds me of World War II Japan. On paper, nuking the Japanese sounded like an absurd atrocity but when you actually do some digging and realize how fanatical imperial Japan was (military officials trying to enact a coup when Japan announced its surrender, Japanese forces repeatedly fighting to the last man [only 216 out of 20,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner during the battle of Iwa Jima] civilians killing themselves and their children because they bought into propaganda and thought Americans would rape and torture them. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incidentHamas seems just as fanatical and unfortunately, they don't exist in a vacuum. From what I understand, they were elected into power. I don't think peace can begin until Hamas is ferreted out and unfortunately, I don't think there is clean way of doing so. The gist of my point is this. Israel could do better but they do try to avoid killing civilians. Even if you suspect the people in charge don't actually care about Palestinian civilians on an emotional level, on a practical level they realize killing civilians is bad PR. If they could destroy hamas without killing civilians they would. Hamas on the other hand, actively hunt down and kill civilians and do so in a brutal manner. Apparently they filmed themselves beheading a Thai worker with a shovel. Not only were these killings brutal, they were detrimental to Palestine. It's obvious that Israel is vastly more powerful than Palestine and Hamas provoked it anyway. They are not rational actors. The onus is on Hamas to surrender.
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Post by Exalt on Oct 30, 2023 23:14:34 GMT 5
Israel had oppressed Palestine for decades, the election was in 2006 and nobody ever seems to question it's legitimacy.
Israeli officials have used highly dehumanizing wording, cut communications and deployed white phosphorus on civilians and deny resources, then excuse these actions by saying that Hamas is taking human shields and weaponizing said resources. Then they lie and say that Hama blew something up, then later say that they did it.
Anti-genocide is being construed as supporting terrorism and wanting to kill the Jews, and people are losing jobs over it.
I am sick of these evil people who construe Israel's actions as okay, and that the Palestinian people somehow deserve this.
Also, Netanyahu funded Hamas.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 31, 2023 4:13:21 GMT 5
Just want to say that if anyone has any contention with other people's posts here, we strongly encourage them to talk it out (in a civil manner, of course). Before we resort to reporting (this is not a function to be used lightly), please try to discuss with others.
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Post by Supercommunist on Oct 31, 2023 5:11:27 GMT 5
I did some research and according to a poll most Gaza's would have prefered to maintain a cease-fire, however, over 50 percent of Gazan's still maintain a somewhat positive opinion on Hamas. That's pretty concerning, given Hamas' recent over the top acts of violence. www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/polls-show-majority-gazans-were-against-breaking-ceasefire-hamas-and-hezbollahI will admit I am not very knowledgeable on the whole Israel Palestine conflict but from what I understand before October 7th peace talks were occuring and instead of using that time to deescalate tensions Hamas used that time to plan an attack on civilians. Israel has been in wrong in many instaces but you can't pin blame all on them. If I have to pick a side, I am going to have to go with Israel for now. Obviously the best solution would be for real peace to occur, but that's clearly not happening anytime soon.
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Post by theropod on Oct 31, 2023 5:14:34 GMT 5
Netanyahu most certainly didn’t "fund" Hamas, that sounds like an absurd conspirary theory. In this conflict in particular, people are way to happy to unjustly equate anything that may, in some manner and not necessarily intentionally, have benefited Hamas at some point with direct support for Hamas. What is true is that Israeli policy towards the Gaza strip has certainly not done much to weaken Hamas’ power base (in fact it certainly wouldn’t be absurd to claim that it made Hamas possible to begin with), which of course does indirectly serve interests of people opposing the peace process and/or a stable two-state solution by undermining any claim to legitimate statehood from the Palestine national authority, seeing how half of it is de facto governed by a terror organization.
I also think that Israel is better than Hamas has never really been the point of contention. But it is worth remembering that 44% of Palestinian voters voted for Hamas in 2006 (that is considerably less than the percentage of american voters who voted for Donald Trump even in 2020, yet, unlike Palestinians, who are collectively treated as terrorists, few people advocate occupying the USA and imprisoning all its residents…or all those that aren’t already in prison, anyway…in order to prevent it from committing any more crimes against humanity, such as the ones Trump openly glorified during his election campaigns), and that half of the current Palestinian population are minors, who couldn’t have voted for Hamas had they wanted to, seeing how they weren’t even born when Hamas was voted into power. The rest voted for Fatah and various smaller secularist parties. I am not knowledgeable enough about Palestinian politics to say much, but surely none of them appear to have been on a similar level of militarism or uncompromising extremist hatred as Hamas.
We absolutely should be holding a democratic state to which we offer our "unconditional support" to a higher standard than a fundamentalist terror organization that happens to have taken over a significant part of a formerly (more or less) democratic state and subsequently abolished democracy there. That is not to say Hamas doesn’t still enjoy a significant amount of popular support, which absolutely seems to be the case, especially in Gaza, but as Antonio Guterres correctly noted with regard to Hamas’ despicable acts of terror earlier this month (only to have Israeli government officials demand his resignation, an excellent example of the kind of moral superiority Israel claims for itself), this also did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in the context of a decades-long illegal occupation under martial law, including the withholding of basic human rights from the Palestinian population that is simultaneously treated as foreign citizens (being subject to either Israeli martial law, if any law at all, in the West Bank, or to the de facto government of a terror organization in Gaza) and denied any meaningful sovereignty or recognition of its statehood and self-determination. Palestinians are in this weird place where for decades, their identity has simultaneously been denied alltogether, and yet still used as a basis for collectively punishing them for the actions of a subset of militants whose goal is the destruction of the state of Israel. Much of the israeli right wing, Netanyahu included, literally deny that a people called "Palestinians" even exist. Yet they are also not willing to give the people living on the land they claim constitutes part of the state of Israel equal rights to other Israeli citizens.
In fact I find it hard to vote here for this reason; A two-state solution is certainly the solution favoured by most sane people, and there are good reasons to favour it, but even a one-state solution where all inhabitants are given the same civic and political rights would be far better than this current "worst of both worlds" option. The latter would turn Hamas or other palestinian militants into a case of domestic terrorism, subject to persecution under the rule of law, same as terror perpetrated by jewish or any other extremists. We don’t generally consider the killing of innocent civilians acceptable in such a scenario, at least not officially (that police forces like to ignore that whenever it is convenient and kill racial minorities as they see fit is another matter, but at least they aren’t officially ordered to do this by the state).
Part of what makes this conflict so hard to solve is that there are no others that can really serve as a model. There was an Apartheid regime in South Africa, but this was internationally condemned, and was finally overcome (mostly, anyway) from within. There are fundamentalist terror regimes and dictatorships governing other states in the region, such as Syria, Iran, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, but these states generally have their statehood internationally recognized, which also means that if they attack someone else, it is a war, subject to the rules of war, and a more or less clear military-civilian dichotomy. Which naturally is difficult in a territory that you don’t even agree is a state, like Gaza, that is so ridiculously overcrowded and at the same time isolated that there was never any hope of properly separating civilians from terrorists to begin with. When we look at historical examples of regimes so inhumane and dangerous that they warranted being overthrown by force (the example of WWII Japan has already been brought up, that of WWII Germany would be another obvious one), these were afterwards rapidly (and mostly successfully) reintegrated into the international community as sovereign states, and their citizens were not denied basic human rights the way the Palestinian population has been denied those rights for decades. Maybe to an extend with the exception of East Germany (although East Germany certainly lived in much better conditions than the inhabitants of occupied Palestine do), which to this day actually serves as a cautionary example of how economic deprivation and international isolation forster resentment and rejection towards modern, pluralist, democratic society and multiculturalism in favour of extremism and ultranationalism (in the case of East Germany, that manifests in the surge of right wing extremism, in the case of the Gaza strip it manifests in religious fundamentalism, but both ultimately have similar motivations fueling them).
Hamas certainly deserves to be rooted out for good, but is this practically feasible? How many civilian casualties would be considered morally acceptable in the pursuit of this goal, and, perhaps even more importantly, how many civilian casualties can be afforded without cementing the anti-Israeli hatred so much that the next terror organization will just immediately rise in its place, even if the IDF should succeed in destroying Hamas (for which I do not have sufficient military expertise to say how realistic it even is)? There are good reasons why certain actions are considered crimes against humanity, no matter what someone else may have committed previously to supposedly justify these actions, and not all of them are purely ethical, some are simply practical.
The onus may be on Hamas to surrender, disband, and submit themselves for fair trial and punishment for their actions, but realistically they will never do this. Just that a terror organization doesn’t do what’s right is no excuse for the democratic state of Israel, which justifiably lays claim to the moral high ground for itself, to not do so either. And from a purely practical standpoint, the mechanism by which hypocrisy and injustice from modern, pluralist, democratic societies drives extremists to reject and attack these societies is fairly obvious. If we ever want peace and democracy in the near east, we need to show them that ideals of tolerance, democracy and equality aren’t just empty promises that get ignored whenever it is convenient.
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Post by Supercommunist on Oct 31, 2023 6:12:24 GMT 5
44 percent is nearly half the voter base. As a US citizen I will readily admit that there are a lot of loons here. I will never object when people mock the USA for harboring so many idiots but Donald Trump does not hold a candle to Hamas. Far-right Trumpists don't infiltrate other countries, abduct people, and burn infants alive.
I do realize that the US military is guilty of toppling goverments for their own ends, which is why I am not super patriotic, but even when the US military is at its most imperialist I don't think it's nearly as bad as factions like Hamas.
I don't know if Hamas was openly as radical in 2006 but putting differencs asides is easier said than done when nearly half the population at least partly supports them.
History has shown us what happens when you leave a odious political faction intact. After the US civil war a lot of confederate politicians remained in power and actively obstructed civil rights. To this day, the USA still feels their influence and they're are still an alarming number of lost causers that think they were in the right.
Based on my cursory readings, radical Palestinian factions seem insistent on sparking civil strife in other countries and burning bridges When Lebanon and Jordan accepted Palestinian refugees, armed radicals amongst the refugees attempted to overthrow their governments. Keep in mind of both of these countries are predominantly Muslim. Even if Israel gave Palestinians very favorable terms, it's likely that a bunch of radicals will still try to inflict violence on Israelis unless a huge shift occurs.
I think it fairly obvious that the reason opinion on this conflict is so heated is because they is a lot of murky and grey areas which is usually why I gave the topic a wide berth. Based on what I have read, if I have to pick a side, I am going to pick Israel even though I harbor a lot of criticisms of their current goverment.
As for the whole "Palestine is an open air prison" I genuinely don't know anything about the topic so I am going to avoided commenting on that. My wild guess is both sides are culpable for the situation.
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Post by Supercommunist on Oct 31, 2023 10:54:23 GMT 5
Whelp there was recent footage of a Israeli tank blasting a civilian car that was clearly trying to back away from it. We'll see if this was an isolated incident or if it becomes a habitual thing.
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Post by Supercommunist on Nov 12, 2023 10:22:53 GMT 5
It would probably best to lay this topic to rest but there are two things I would like to say: I've seen one strong argument in regards to Hama's popularity in Palestine: They are either don't represent the populations wishes but are too powerful for the people two overthrow or they do have a lot support from the Palestinian public. I am guessing it's a mix of both. Based on polling data, it seems about half the country has a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas, but either way they are the dominant political force and it doesn't seem like any internal Palestinian factions will be able to oust Hamas anytime soon. Given recent events, you can't expect Israel not to respond. What are they supposed to do? Just take the hit and embolden Hamas to try again? Normally I don't support toppling other countries for the sake of regime change, but Hamas has outed itself as both wicked and stupid. They know they stand 0 chance against Israel in a no hold's barred fight and they deliberately hunted down Israeli citizens anyway. Imagine what they would have done if they were actually Israel's military peer. Israel can't afford to let them recover, or build up their strength. Think about how freaked out the world is rightfully freaked out about North Korea but as dystopian as the goverment they haven't launched any invasions. Hamas leadership is committed to the unrealistic goal of destroying Israel. You don't want these guys developing half decent military capabilities. The Palestinian blockade does seem messed up but from what I understand, the situation is not solely Israel's fault. It appears that other countries like Egypt are also culpableAs for the second point I would like to address, a lot of people claim that Israel is committing genocide but that simply doesn't appear to be the case. Palestine's population has grown and, a lot of Gazan's were obese before the recent siege. Now please understand that I am not claiming that because the Palestines are a overweight on average means they aren't suffering. There are plenty of incidents where Israel was clearly in the wrong but this "Israel is committing genocide rhetoric" appears blatantly untrue. I will admit, I don't know if Israel will be able to succesfully dismantle Hamas. For all I know this will end up like George Bush's awful "war on terror" but I am pretty sure every country would have reacted the same Israel did if they suffered a similar attack. www.worlddata.info/asia/palestine/populationgrowth.php#:~:text=From%201990%20to%202022%20the,155.0%20percent%20in%2032%20years. globalnutritionreport.org/resources/nutrition-profiles/asia/western-asia/state-palestine/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4510884/
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Post by theropod on Nov 15, 2023 0:10:21 GMT 5
Some remarks about this: Regarding obesity levels, I am not sure what this is intended to demonstrate with regard to the question at hand, except that at least part of the population is not imminently starving, which I don’t think is really relevant. High obesity rates as you acknowledge of course don’t mean prosperity. They don’t even mean food security. In fact I would go so far so say that they can often correlate with the opposite. This is what the obesity and poverty rates in the US look like: You will note that there is quite a lot of similarity between these two. In this example, there is actually a highly significant positive correlation between poverty rate (and, I strongly presume, rates of food insecurity, which I know is very high in some of the states with especially high rates of obesity, such as West Virginia) and obesity levels: Now this of course cannot necessarily be generalized, due to confounding variables, such as levels of education (which are, perhaps surprisingly, very high in Palestine, but if I am not mistaken tends to correlate quite negatively with obesity rates in the case of the US example). But still, in a territory like Gaza, with a huge refugee population and extreme levels of unemployment and almost nonexistent economic opportunities, high obesity rates should certainly not be surprising. I don’t think there is a prevalent allegation that Israel has been trying to starve all Gazans to death over the last years or decades (though access to sufficient nutrition has certainly become more of an issue in the course of more recent events, and unnecessarily so, unless someone can formulate an argument for how Hamas could potentially weaponize food). There is probably a positive link between the conditions there and the high obesity rates. As for population growth, this is yet another point whose relevance I can’t really discern. The UN defines "genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly."→Genocide is not defined based on its impact on population size (otherwise a genocide would stop being a genocide depending on the frame of reference, namely as soon as the population has recovered from it) but based on its destructive intent and targeting of a specific ethnic or religious group. I think it is the former point that is key here (the latter is not really up for debate I think). Now to be clear, I am not saying Israel is perpetrating a genocide, at least not yet. That is on the basis of there so far being no clear evidence of systematic intent in killing of Palestinian civilians (there are more than a few individual cases where this has happened, but those are individual cases of hate crimes or terrorism than a concerted effort run by the state). However, there are a lot of very worrying signs. Many of those have been going on for years or decades, but that doesn’t mean they cannot escalate towards new extremes (after all antisemitism had been going on since antiquity, and that doesn’t mean it didn’t come to a shocking escalation in the 20th century). What I find perhaps most shocking is the degree to which ordinary Palestinians get dehumanized and devalued, with a degree of racism that is not or only very thinly veiled. There is a very clear "inferior race" ("Palestinians didn’t use the land properly/fail to economically develop/only want handouts so they don’t deserve freedom or dignity" i.e. the same narrative European settlers used to justify their genocide of native americans) and historical revisionist ("Palestinians don’t exist/Palestine was empty of people before/'a land without a people for a people without a land'/violent expulsion of Palestinians didn’t happen") narratives going on with regard to this conflict, narratives that people in the current Israeli government have directly participated in (Netanyahu even personally narrated a spectacularly stupid video on PragerU in which he explains why Palestinians supposedly don’t exist and have no claim to the land), but which are also quite common among hardcore Israel-supporters in the western world (and of course plays right into the already massive anti-muslim xenophobia-wave currently engulfing Europe). Israel has also passed astoundingly racist legislation, such as the nation state bill, that makes it abundantly clear that Palestinians and even the Arab-Israeli minority are undesirable hindrances to their ethno-state concept. All that makes me not really feel all that much outrage when the same government is controversially being accused of genocide. They may not be doing it right now, but they sure aren’t going out of their way to put any such suspicions to rest, and there are certainly warning signs showing that this isn’t for a lack of hatred or of racism. What I think is the one important factor keeping this from happening is public opinion, both in Israel itself (Israel obviously still has a reasonably sized left that is staunchly opposed to many of the things the current government has been doing) and in the west (especially the US, Israel’s most important ally, which contributes almost 4 billion dollars to its military every year). That’s why I think pushing "the israeli government is always right and can do whatever it wants, and any criticism of it needs to be shut down" narratives (not saying you are doing this, but I have seen too many people do exactly that) is very dangerous. The casualty numbers in every major conflict since Israel was founded are one-sided as it is, even with what probably counts as "restraint" from the israeli side, restraint intended to avoid excessive public outcry and a souring of diplomatic relations with important allies. That is of course in a reality with significant international criticism of many of the actions Israel has taken. I don’t know what the death toll would look like if people like Netanyahu felt emboldened by more domestic and international backing and less criticism for their actions. When it comes to the deaths of thousands of civilians, I think one should err on the side of caution rather than lenience, at least since in this situation we cannot just assume all of those deaths are necessary or even helpful to protect civilian lives on the Israeli side. I know the "legitimate response to terrorism" is the obvious argument here, but I remain unconvinced as to its logic. Once again, the IDF is the most powerful army in the region, it has 4 times the active service personnel of Hamas, and has a ludicrously large edge in terms of training and equipment. The IDF should be more than capable of protecting Israel’s borders and preventing foreign militant groups from invading it. An attack like the one of October 7th could never have happened had the IDF focused its vigilance on the Gaza border. Instead, it was busy guarding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which, under international law, shouldn’t even exist, and enforcing martial law on Palestinian civilians there, while keeping Hamas on a rather long leash. If the goal was to protect Israeli civilians at all costs, certainly it would be more effective to work towards a resolution to the settlement issue (where 750 000 israeli citizens illegally live in a very dangerous situation of their own free accord, with government support) in otder to be able to focus the military efforts on containing the Hamas threat. Overall Hamas simply represents no genuine military challenge to Israel. What it represents is a terrorist threat, and these two things are not the same. Of course as long as Hamas exists and is free to operate in their territory, there will always be rocket attacks, some of those will make it through the iron dome, and yes, kill civilians, and every civilian killed by any form of terror attack is one civilian too many. Once again, I am not opposed to eradicating Hamas, I just don’t think it is a goal that can be accomplished with an acceptable price in human lives, and one that doesn’t defeat the purpose. But we need to put things in perspective here. In the 10 year period from 2004-2014 a total of 27 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian rockets. Again, every one of those is one too many, but if that were a case of domestic terrorism, you wouldn’t lock up 5 million people, nor would you bomb half a country, displace millions of people or accept tens of thousand civilian deaths as acceptable collateral damage in order to neutralize a terrorist who killed those 27. That is not even starting on the point I already raised earlier; even if the military operation against Hamas was a strategic success in terms of eliminating each and every single member of Hamas, but ended up killing 20 000, or 30 000, or 100 000 civilians in the process; do you think just because Hamas would be gone, that would really help to quell terrorism in the region and contribute towards a safer, more peaceful future? I don’t think so, what it would do it make even more Palestinians, who have just seen their families get killed, feel even more justified in their hatred for Israel. Terrorism has existed there before Hamas, and will likely exist after Hamas too, especially so long as there is no attempt at addressing any of the factors that strengthen the support for terrorism. We could tell the same to Hamas, of course, but we’ve already established that Hamas is a despicable, irrational, fundamentalist terror militia, not a democratically or diplomatically legitimate government. They care as little for whether their own citizens approve of their terror as they do for whether we do; their only international allies are other totalitarian terror states, such as Iran; and they are already completely isolated and cut off from legitimate economic and political relationships with most of the world, so there’s nothing except complete destruction (which for them just means martyrdom) that anyone can threaten them with. We could also tell the same to the violent antisemitic mobs that form in countries around the world every time there is an escalation in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but something tells me people who beat up jews in Europe because of something involving a majority-jewish country they are not affiliated with also probably won’t care about this, they are already quite happy with rejecting our values and ignoring what we think of them. So I think it would be fair to say that giving a detailed ethical essay on why Hamas’ terrorism is wrong is a bit of a waste of time, whereas criticizing Israeli policy might actually stand a chance of affecting some kind of positive change.
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