Hamas Strikes Israel in Unexpected Assault
October 7, 2023 10:04 AM Subscribe

On the morning of October 7, 2023, the Palestinian fundamentalist organization Hamas orchestrated an unanticipated assault on Israeli soil, marking it as one of the most significant attacks in recent years. The operation was multifaceted, involving rocket barrages and ground infiltrations, as well as taking military and civilian hostages.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin extended their condolences and assured support to Israel. The European Union, represented by Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen and Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell, vehemently condemned the violence, labeling it as "terrorism in its most despicable form".

In contrast, reactions from the Middle East were mixed. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asserted the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves against what was described as the "terror of settlers and occupation troops." Iran, through various official channels, lauded the Palestinian fighters, pledging allegiance till the 'liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem'4.

posted by Anonymous (1605 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite

The Israeli tracked vehicle losses are high. Today I have counted at least the following, mostly captured but some also damaged:

6x Merkava Mk.4 MBT

10x Achzarit APC

5x M1113 APC

2x Namer APC

On top of these, there are multiple wheeled vehicle losses for the IDF.

Also "cope cages" probably soon appear in every army - as it turns out even a Merkava is vulnerable to a cheap drone dropping explosives on the top of the turret (video).
posted by kmt at 10:28 AM on October 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

“We are at war,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address, declaring a mass army mobilization. “Not an ‘operation,’ not a ‘round,’ but at war.”

“The enemy will pay an unprecedented price,” he added, promising that Israel would “return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known.”

(source)
posted by doctornemo at 10:30 AM on October 7, 2023

Almost seems like a florid way for Hamas to abandon Gaza, since this will probably result in Israel re-establishing military control of Gaza, with plenty of people in the current Knesset supporting resuming settlements in Gaza to boot.
posted by MattD at 10:32 AM on October 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

I've seen a few takes (not sure how well informed) that point to the recent Saudi-Israeli rapproachment attempts as something that Hamas would see as threatening. This might be a way to kill that in the cradle.
posted by AdamCSnider at 10:39 AM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

The news alerts I got from my phone this morning were very propaganda-like on the side of Israel.

That said, please take care in this thread, granted how I/P threads have gone previously on MeFi. I'm sure a number of us would like this thread to lean heavy on the 'Filter' part of the site. Thanks!
posted by JoeXIII007 at 10:45 AM on October 7, 2023 [45 favorites]

Hamas besides being a shit organization has the absolute worst sense of strategic timing. They've been like this forever and don't seem to exist for any reason but to make things worse for the people they claim to be defending.
posted by kokaku at 10:46 AM on October 7, 2023 [22 favorites]

I wonder if Hamas has a second step or if they burned it all up in this one go. If you're going to do something like this, you have to have a campaign in mind to follow it up and keep the pressure going or else you're just dooming yourself to annihilation.
posted by hippybear at 10:49 AM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

. for the dead and injured on both sides.

This feels as though it will get ugly(ier) before it's over.
posted by fight or flight at 10:56 AM on October 7, 2023 [23 favorites]

Text Message from my cousin:

“Tel Aviv is quiet, but the situation is severe.

We have several hostage situations in sattlements around the border with Gaza, plus kidnapped soldiers & civilians that were dragged to Gaza strip.

This definitely will start a war in Gaza where Israel might behave as if "the landlord went crazy," meaning flattening neighborhoods in Gaza.”

posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:00 AM on October 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Comment removed for insensitive content, per the Content Policy.

Folks, there's going to be a lot of understandable emotions about this and from all sides. Be mindful that various people on all sides will be suffering, so please don't try to paint any one side as all good or all bad, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 11:24 AM on October 7, 2023 [22 favorites]

My instinct is this will not be great for the efforts to resist Bibi's authoritarian power grab or any effort to slow the pace of Israeli settlements...Has anyone seen any well informed takes on what Hamas hopes to gain? Or the political fallout in Israel?

I’m not saying Hamas is playing 5-dimensional chess or anything, but if you sense your enemy is slow-rolling into authoritarianism/fascism/non-democracy, one might as well do something big to speed the self-destruction along.

But, yeah, the retribution is going to be horrific, I fear.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:33 AM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

Absolutely shocking operational and intelligence failure by Israeli security services. This is something that *should* trigger resignations (all the way up to Netanyahu), but won't.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:33 AM on October 7, 2023 [24 favorites]

AdamCSnider ... there's a lot to that. Normalization of relations between Israel, on the one hand, the Gulf States and the Saudis on the other, along with far less hostile relationship with Syria than traditionally obtained, really threatened the relevance of Hamas.
posted by MattD at 11:40 AM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

well this was an awful thing to wake up to. I am devastated for all (ALL) the loss of life, destruction of homes etc., it's distressing to think how this is going to playout, but I do think its going to be ugly.

.
posted by supermedusa at 11:49 AM on October 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've always wondered how much the Palestinians could achieve with nonviolent resistance. The only thing this path will achieve is more death and suffering. It's so sad.
posted by netowl at 11:53 AM on October 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

More than 200 murdered. Israeli TV says that this is a Pearl Harbor like event, that justifies a proportional response like the US did in 1945 (since the number of deaths is proportional). Hinting that they're going to "flatten the ground of Gaza" and destroy Hamas completely
posted by avi111 at 12:00 PM on October 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

[This is not good]
posted by loquacious at 12:05 PM on October 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

I woke up to pee at 430am and took my phone. Oops. Hamas has been posting video of them killing rooms Israeli of civilians in bomb shelters with bullet sprays. Posting videos of putting tied up families on the backs of trucks as hostages.
posted by atomicstone at 12:08 PM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

intelligence failure by Israeli security services

From the perspective of Natanyahu this is like a gift. He cares about himself and his power, sacrificing little people to perpetuate that is no biggie for him.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:10 PM on October 7, 2023 [31 favorites]

Another comment removed for attempting to tell other commenters how to respond. Please don't do that.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 12:16 PM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Hamas besides being a shit organization has the absolute worst sense of strategic timing.

What with the ongoing slide of Israel from a semi-democracy and Apartheid state into something that would like more ...permanent solutions to its Palestinian problems and which is turning the violence it has routinely meted out to them onto its own citizens recently, you could argue that "if not now, when".

Gaza has been an open air prison for some seventeen years already; kids have grown up in there who have never been able to leave it. Peaceful protest, as in the "great march of return" protests lead to 227 demonstrators killed; more recent protest saw Israeli snipers crippling them.

Meanwhile settler violence elsewhere, in Jerusalem and the other Occupied Territories has increased dramatically these past few years.

In short, there was bound to be a reaction sooner or later.

From a Hamas perspective, better sooner than later and better at a time that's both of symbolic value (50 years after the Yom Kippur War) and when Israel itself is consumed by internal conflict.

It's tempting to see all this as just a senseless terrorism campaign but the fact that all of this came as a surprise is not just an Israeli security failure, it hints that this campaign has broad support at least in Gaza.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:26 PM on October 7, 2023 [80 favorites]

More comments removed for not being considerate and respectful. This isn't the thread to posting snarky comments about the Middle east situation. Please be respectful and respectful and avoid the temptation to equate this to something in America, thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 12:38 PM on October 7, 2023 [19 favorites]

Alarabiya is reporting Israel has shut off electricity to Gaza.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:58 PM on October 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Netanyahu is telling civilians to leave Gaza before he "flattens" the entire area, but he has the entire place blockaded and surrounded. Where are civilians supposed to go before this happens? What happens to those that aren't able to leave or are forced back inside by the IDF?
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 12:59 PM on October 7, 2023 [47 favorites]

How do you leave a place people aren't allowed to leave? I mean, even in times before this event?
posted by hippybear at 1:00 PM on October 7, 2023 [38 favorites]

i wonder if hamas is counting on others to join their uprising? - either through solidarity or because of the bloody reprisals that are sure to happen?

my opinion is that a truly significant news event is being overshadowed by this - Drone attack on Syria military college kills at least 89 and wounds hundreds more

i am not claiming this has anything to do with hamas at all - but for the first time that i'm aware of drones with explosives have been used to this extent against this big a target

this could be done by anyone, anywhere, against anything - add to this hamas' tactics of mass rocket attacks that seem to be somewhat more accurate, motorized paragliders and the ability to evade some very strict security and what we have here is a new kind of war that may not be suppressed

this is a frightening day for all of us, not just those who live in the middle east
posted by pyramid termite at 1:21 PM on October 7, 2023 [11 favorites]

Absolutely shocking operational and intelligence failure by Israeli security services.

It is amazing that Hamas could plan and initiate such a large-scale attack with either no word getting out, or with the Israeli security services failing to understand what they were hearing. I would have thought they had much deeper penetration into those networks.

The images and videos are just shocking and unfortunately it looks like the violence will further escalate from here. The comparisons to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are understandable, but also make me really worry for what comes next.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:22 PM on October 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

Joe Biden's official statement:

The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel. Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people. The United States warns against any other party hostile to Israel seeking advantage in this situation. My Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.
posted by doctornemo at 1:25 PM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

i am not claiming this has anything to do with hamas at all - but for the first time that i'm aware of drones with explosives have been used to this extent against this big a target

One of the things that has been worrying me, as I've been watching what's coming out of Ukraine, is just how obviously attractive investment in drone technology is going to be going forward for terrorist organizations. Everywhere.
posted by AdamCSnider at 1:38 PM on October 7, 2023 [22 favorites]

The images and videos are just shocking

Do what you feel you have to do I guess, I completely understand the need to feel informed about a very scary situation, but I would encourage everyone to avoid watching this kind of footage. Its upsetting nature makes it an extremely powerful propaganda tool, and in my experience it is almost never illuminating in any useful way to the outside observer. I've seen several of these videos called out as being pulled from previous or entirely unrelated conflicts. In each instance the person doing the calling out was ganged up on for diminishing the overwhelming tragedy, which makes me really uncomfortable with the motives (or at least judgement) of the people doing the compiling and sharing.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 1:40 PM on October 7, 2023 [63 favorites]

To have done this, Hamas must have gradually degraded Israeli SIGINT and HUMINT over years -- probably ran and permitted the exposure of multiple facade operations so that the Israelis thought their intel was working, and had some pretty amazing OPSEC as they were preparing to execute this operation.

And yet ... in service of converting a political fight between Hamas and Israeli center and right politicians in which Hamas had significant international support, into a war between Gaza and Israeli that Gaza is certain to lose.
posted by MattD at 1:48 PM on October 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Netanyahu is telling civilians to leave Gaza before he "flattens" the entire area, but he has the entire place blockaded and surrounded. Where are civilians supposed to go before this happens?

I would wager the message was really a thinly-veiled message to any Israeli operatives and assets in Gaza, who should have no problem getting out of there.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:24 PM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

.

If people are looking for sources of info, I will recommend Haggai Matar, an Israeli journalist based in Tel Aviv with a long record collaboration with Palestinians and activism against apartheid. Which is to say, very critical of the Israeli state, but not blind to the humanity present on both sides. Should that sound like a source you'd want to listen to.
posted by coffeecat at 2:24 PM on October 7, 2023 [55 favorites]

My instinct is this will not be great for the efforts to resist Bibi's authoritarian power grab or any effort to slow the pace of Israeli settlements. (Not that that was seeing huge success anyway.) Has anyone seen any well informed takes on what Hamas hopes to gain? Or the political fallout in Israel?

Attacks by Hamas have generally worked more to the benefit of Israeli hawks than Israeli doves. It's classic accelerationist extremist thinking. If you view something as inherently illegitimate, you want the nastiest, most authoritarian representatives of that system to be in power in order to make its illegitimacy more noticeable to the uncommitted normies. If you put a more softer or more liberal version of that system of power, it might win the consent of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, which Hamas views as fatal to its political project.
posted by jonp72 at 2:27 PM on October 7, 2023 [17 favorites]

Well, NPR has already reminded me twice in about 35 minutes that Israel is the victim in its decades-long conflict with the Palestinians.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 2:27 PM on October 7, 2023 [25 favorites]

Its upsetting nature makes it an extremely powerful propaganda tool, and in my experience it is almost never illuminating in any useful way to the outside observer.

Unless you're looking for specific information on tactics or weaponry or something like that, I agree. The Ukraine War has gotten me used to seeing videos of ground-level killing become almost humdrum (I know it was going on before then, I feel like there's been a massive escalation in how much there is out there in the past few years but that may just be because I wasn't paying attention as much before). I sometimes wonder how that's going to affect things in terms of resolving conflicts, when anyone can mass-forward a link to footage of "our boys" being killed, or even a YouTube video of the same accompanied by reaction videos of people on the other side giving humorous commentary. I can't help but feel this is going to help keep conflicts simmering longer.

a war between Gaza and Israeli that Gaza is certain to lose

Gaza will lose. It's possible that Hamas is betting that, in terms of increased recruitment and funding stimulated by whatever Israel is going to do in response, they will win. I don't know much about how Hamas governs Gaza (and I'm not entirely sure where I'd get actual trustworthy information on the same if I went looking), but most revolutionary groups who have to settle down and govern see their popularity dip considerably as a response. Maybe Hamas' leadership is afraid of losing support, either among Palestinians or their backers abroad, and a crisis will firm that support back up.

Or this may indeed have been a massive miscalculation - terrorist groups are no more immune to those than any other organization.
posted by AdamCSnider at 2:29 PM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

I would wager the message was really a thinly-veiled message to any Israeli operatives and assets in Gaza, who should have no problem getting out of there.

Serious question: How?

Presumably it would involve going to an Israeli-controlled checkpoint and somehow proving you're an Israeli asset. In the current situation, how would a person get to such a checkpoint without (A) drawing the attention of Palestinians, some of whom may (I think not unreasonably?) assume the person is an Israeli asset trying to flee, and quite possibly attempt harm against that person, and (B) approach the checkpoint in such a manner as to not freak the likely highly-on-edge guards with the possibility that maybe the person is a suicide bomber or something?
posted by Flunkie at 2:52 PM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

To be clear, I'm not arguing they wouldn't have a problem getting out. I have basically no knowledge of such things, and I'm genuinely asking how they would do so safely and easily.
posted by Flunkie at 2:54 PM on October 7, 2023

I seriously doubt Netanyahu is trying to give covert warnings to agents. It’s much more likely an attempt to look reasonable to an international audience.
posted by Galvanic at 3:51 PM on October 7, 2023 [28 favorites]

If people are looking for sources of info, I will recommend Haggai Matar, an Israeli journalist based in Tel Aviv with a long record collaboration with Palestinians and activism against apartheid. Which is to say, very critical of the Israeli state, but not blind to the humanity present on both sides. Should that sound like a source you'd want to listen to.

It does, thank you.

So much of the response to this is and will be measured not in what has happened, but in what people believe has happened. Whether attacks and retaliations are targeted -- and at whom -- or wildly indiscriminate. Whether those killed and captured are civilians, collaborators, persecutors or something else. Whether snapshots and videos and stories of vile atrocities are legitimate, clips from another time and place, wild exaggerations, whisper-down-the-lane turning one thing into another rapidly,

Twitter is overflowing right now, for example, with reports of not just rocket strikes and hostage-taking but sexual assaults, indiscriminate door-to-door murder sprees, and every form of depravity ever imagined. Which is no surprise, of course, as the first rule of any breaking event is "don't trust a damn thing you read on social media." But it is a struggle to determine which mainstream sources, let alone breathless vengeance-seekers, are even close to delivering an accurate report.
posted by delfin at 4:00 PM on October 7, 2023 [14 favorites]

It wasn't a covert message to Israeli assets or a warning to leave Gaza. Israel has long maintained that Hamas operates from civilian buildings — apartment buildings, mosques, hospitals, etc. In context, he seems to be telling Gazans to leave the places Hamas are operating from.
posted by cosmic owl at 4:11 PM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Which is exactly the trouble: the hawks in the Israeli government claim Hamas operates from basically anywhere and everywhere in Gaza, yet they also make it extremely difficult to impossible for civilians to leave Gaza. Similar statements warning civilians to leave an area have been used by various governments on various sides of international conflicts (that is, whoever you might consider “us” and “them”, they’ve almost certainly been used on both sides - the US used such statements in Vietnam among other conflicts, for example, as has Russia in Mariupol more recently) to justify attacking civilians by claiming that any actual civilians would have left whatever area, so whoever was left who got attacked and killed must not have been a civilian (and thus they didn’t just do a war crime).

The comparison with the 9/11 attacks seems apt in both this being quite a serious attack by a group classified as terrorist by most of the world, while also coming in the context of a significant power differential between that group and the country/government attacked; where a belligerent, autocratic, government is currently in power who have a history of not caring at all about civilian casualties of particular ethnicities; and in the context of a long-standing and complex international conflict. Except that in this case because anti-semitism is a big problem worldwide, when saying so we need to clarify that Jewish people are very much not synonymous with the Israeli state or current government when pointing out that, yes this attack was terrible, and the likely indiscriminate retaliation from the Israeli government is likely going to be many, many times worse (given the usual scale of Israeli military retaliation for Hamas attacks, along with the magnitude of this attack and the current Israeli leadership, I’m worried for the existence of Gaza or that the scale of retaliation might reach genocidal proportions) - because both the current far-right government of Israel and anti-semitic bigots around the world will both want to conflate any such critique of the Israeli government or military actions with a critique of Jewish people in general (albeit for different reasons/in the service of different arguments).
posted by eviemath at 4:53 PM on October 7, 2023 [29 favorites]

Impressively bad takes from everyone here. If you're looking for information on this, I suggest anywhere but here.

For hot Intel takes, agreed. but others have brought forth news, even though it may be out there already. Also, mefis can share, if deemed appropriate, news from the area.

"Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told residents of the besieged enclave to “leave now”, saying Israel’s forces “will turn all Hamas hideouts into rubble”
what does this piece of information tell me. it follows the line of thinking that Israel might not go all out, yet. Israel has already tightened its borders, called up reservists. I'm pretty positive no one really has a direct line to Sayeret Matkal regarding intelligence failures and intelligence failure is a failure to collate existing pieces of information to come to proper assessment of the probability of imminent attack. one thing I've noticed from both sides though is a solidarity. the Wikipedia page for this conflict has one of the attackers as lion's den, a group formed from discontented members of Hamas etc and they do oppose the Palestinian authority. most of the Israeli opposition groups have already supported the IDF as well as the judicial reform protest group. Forum 555 despite their beliefs has advocated for reservist to follow their orders. we also have an apparent reason for the offensive, retaliation for attack on the al aqsa mosque and the detention of thousands of Palestinian prisoners.
posted by clavdivs at 4:54 PM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

but he has the entire place blockaded

Not just Netanyahu, but also Egypt. Israel has 4 border crossings with Gaza and periodically allows the passage of export / import goods through it. The single crossing between Egypt and Gaza is even more restricted, mostly only allowing the passage of people, because ironically Egypt has more to fear from Gaza than Israel does. Israel only fears rockets and terrorist infiltrators - Egypt fears the spread of radical Islam to its people - the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Basically, no one wants anything to do with Gaza. No one disputes that sovereign nations have the rights to enforce their own borders.

The ocean situation is a grey area. I know the US / Australia makes intercepts in international waters (refugees, drugs, weapons, pirates) in the name of national security, and I am sure almost every other nation does as well. State actions in international waters seems to be more of a "might makes right" situation, which is why the US maintains such an impressively powerful navy to ensure the status quo (capitalism, and international trade, which the US benefits from handsomely) is maintained.

Transportation and intelligence minister Yisrael Katz (himself also eyeing the Prime Minister position) was advocating that Israel build for Gaza its own international seaport and airport as an artificial island off the Gaza coast. This would alleviate pressure on Israel to lift its "blockade" as movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza could occur somewhere else besides Israeli land and thus simplify the security situation along the border.
posted by xdvesper at 5:16 PM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

The size and surprise of this attack reminds me of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:37 PM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

As for what a response from the IDF would look like - given the comparisons to 9/11 and Pearl Harbour (leading to the wholesale firebombing of Tokyo) - I don't believe Israel is realistically capable of doing very much, and in fact may not want to do very much, based on recent history.

In 2006 the IDF launched an attack on Lebanon that arguably stretched its military capabilities to its limit, for what in comparison to today seems an extremely small provocation - a Hezbollah raid that killed 8 soldiers and captured 2 more.

Israel's Chief of Staff Dan Halutz declared that if the 2 abducted Israeli soldiers were not returned, they would set Lebanon back 20 years. Israel fired 170,000 artillery shells and launched 11,000 air strikes - and also used its entire stockpile of aging cluster weapons, saturating Lebanon with 4.6 million cluster submunitions. Western allies provided support, with the US supplying additional munitions. Despite that, Hezbollah was not defeated. After the ceasefire, they continued firing rockets into Israel, but Israel had no longer any capability or will to fight back - their stockpiles of artillery and bombs were dangerously depleted.

Dan Halutz's actions were severely criticized in the Winograd Commission, leading to his resignation along with many other high ranking members of cabinet. Not only were the 2 abducted soldiers not returned, and the lives of 121 other IDF soldiers sacrificed in the process, but the most disastrous of all, Israel played its strongest hand and was proved a toothless tiger.

Obviously it's impossible to predict what they will decide to do now, but if they're smart they won't make the same mistakes they made in 2006 - maybe explore non-military options, etc.

If they "do" want make a repeat of 2006, drawing from recent history, the closest analogy would be the pacification of Grozny (the second time round in 2000) - Russian forces just laid minefields around the city to choke out its supplies and bombarded it to rubble from a safe distance rather than engaging in urban warfare, in order to minimize casualties. Finally the remaining survivors attempted a breakout, got caught in a minefield, and were finished off by artillery strikes. Then Russia moved in, rebuilt the city, and called it peace, and it seems to have worked for 20 years...
posted by xdvesper at 5:46 PM on October 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

The size and surprise of this attack reminds me of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War.

It was co-ordianted. It was a military surprise to some degree. As to the size no but comparitive in size and troops in either A.O. I see a comparison but whats interesting is the CIA report warning of an attack. also, many South Vietnamese troops we're home for the holiday.
posted by clavdivs at 6:20 PM on October 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't think Lebanon, a sizable country, is a good comparison with the Gaza Strip, which is basically a reservation entirely dependent on Israel. They've already cut electricity. The Israeli public mood is bloodthirsty, I can't imagine anything less than a severe reprisal. In the short term there's no question Israel will rally around the flag but in the longer run, I wonder where the blame from the massive intelligence failure will fall. If Bibi, will he be replaced by somebody to his left or right?

Interesting that 30 years ago the Gulf War's image was so sanitized that it was practically entertainment but now the proliferation of miniature cameras and the internet has made the broadcast of violence an important tool in rallying and polarizing target audiences. Not sure which one is worse, either way it becomes a way of manipulating the public. It's very easy to rile people up with emotive videos, much harder to fairly explain complex historical context.

I think these load-bearing abstractions of "Hamas" or "IDF" - as in we wish the Palestinians/Israelis well but hate Hamas/the IDF - are past their breaking point and not really helpful, if they ever were. Hamas has broad support among Palestinians, the Israelis have national service and can get called up, instantly transforming into the IDF. There's not a clear distinction between them - indeed, one of the justifications for strategic bombing in WW2 was that the rear kept the frontline supplied. Often times it's just thin rhetorical cover so people can pretend they're only against the "bad guys", not "the people"
posted by ndr at 6:47 PM on October 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm glad I found this. [4m] It's Jon Stewart talking about the I/P situation, and it's really a point of view that I've felt useful in trying to understand. Resolving this situation doesn't benefit anyone with power, it only benefits the Palestinians, and they have no power at all.
posted by hippybear at 7:02 PM on October 7, 2023 [25 favorites]

The size and surprise of this attack reminds me of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War.

This exact thought occured to me as well. From what I learned in school and read elsewhere, Tet ended in military defeat for the Vietnamese but resulted in a political victory because it turned the American public against the war. I'm struggling to find a political endgame that ends well for either the Palestinians or Hamas, though. I guess their hoping to limit Israeli reprisals using the hostages they've taken, but then what?

The best case scenerio I can see for Hamas is if Israel's strikes are so bloody that international opinion, particularly that of other countries in the Middle East, turns against Israel. Even then, though, where does that lead? Israel has nukes.

I suppose the most likely driver of Hama's actions might be desperation. One one side you have the US pushing a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. On the other side you have an increasingly authoritian Israeli government escalating and in some cases enacting violent rhetoric against the Palestinians. Given the failure of the recent non-violent protests, I suppose they might view this as the best of a bad set of options. I just only see the recent attacks further emboldening Israeli hardliners.

Looking beyond the immediate conflict's confines, I wonder if this will push Iran to redouble efforts to aquire nukes. Israel/Europe/the US have been able to thwart those efforts in the past, but Iran appears to have technology (drones) that an established and increasinly desperate nuclear power just to its north reqiures.
posted by eagles123 at 7:17 PM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've always wondered how much the Palestinians could achieve with nonviolent resistance. The only thing this path will achieve is more death and suffering. It's so sad.

This is so grossly offensive and completely ignorant of the history of Palestinian national movement. Have you heard of the intifada??

Why wonder when you can just pick up a book? Wendy Perelman has a great book studying why there is sometimes violence and sometimes nonviolence in tbe Palestinian National Movement. Her argument is that when the central national leadership is strong, they’re able to coordinate and mobilize, and nonviolence is more likely. Fractious infighting among the leadership increases the pressure to commit violence and for those advocating violence to win out.

However, the track record of nonviolent resistance is poor in general and very poor when it comes to anti occupation movements, very poor. The great revolt from 1936-1939 started with massive strikes all throughout Palestine. They completely shuttered major urban areas for months. This amounted to almost nothing. It was only when the revolt turned into a rural insurgency, people started getting killed that the former colonial overlords changed policy and granted a concession. This lessson has not been lost on the Palestinians. Paul Chamberlains book also shows how Palestinian violence catapulted their national movement onto the world stage during the 70s.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:21 PM on October 7, 2023 [59 favorites]

So if I understand the situation, Hamas has ruthlessly slaughtered women and children in response to the Israelis ruthlessly slaughtering women and children to which offense the Israelis will repond by ruthlessly slaughtering women and children? Excellent. Great stuff all around

This is true but misses an essential point: these two groups have a massive power imbalance. This isn’t “wow these two groups don’t get along”. You wouldn’t say that about white and black South Africans. You wouldn’t say that about Uyghurs and China. You wouldn’t say that about the British and Indians under colonialism.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:28 PM on October 7, 2023 [36 favorites]

"Residents of the Gaza Strip, pay attention! Hamas operations force the IDF to operate in your place of residence. For your safety, you must leave your place of residence immediately," Avichay Adraee, IDF spokesman for the Arab media, said in a post on X on Sunday. The post includes four videos that give instructions to civilians in Gaza on where to go in each area of the city.

So I guess the idea is that civilians are supposed to gather in some sort of safe zones in the city so that their houses and apartments can be blown up? Which I guess means that the plan is to blow up a bunch of houses and apartments?
posted by clawsoon at 7:56 PM on October 7, 2023 [15 favorites]

Israeli air chief warns of security threat from judicial reform crisis

JERUSALEM, July 28 (Reuters) - Israel's air force chief on Friday warned that the country's enemies may exploit its ongoing political crisis, as members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party voiced impatience with the embattled leader's stubborn pursuit of judicial reforms.

Major-General Tomer Bar said his forces needed to remain "vigilant and prepared" after parliament on Monday passed the first of Netanyahu's widely contested changes, despite nationwide protests and misgivings from the White House.

"It is possible that at a time like this they (Israel's enemies) will try to test the frontiers, our cohesion and our alertness," Bar said in an address to his forces, according to a statement released on Friday. He did not elaborate.

The overhaul pursued by Netanyahu and his right-wing government has sparked a seven-month crisis, spurring unprecedented protests, opening up a deep social divide and shaking the commitment to call-up duty of some army reservists.

Protesters accuse Netanyahu of working to weaken the courts' independence even as he argues his innocence in a graft trial. One of their leaders, Eran Schwartz, said demonstrations would continue on Saturday.

As the crisis escalated following Monday's vote, Israel's Ynet news said Netanyahu received at least four letters from Military Intelligence warning of serious security ramifications arising from the judicial overhaul crisis.

According to the report, senior intelligence officials said Israel's enemies, particularly Iran and its heavily armed proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, view the crisis as a low point in the country's history.

A spokesperson for Netanyahu declined comment.

In a series of interviews to U.S. broadcasters, he defended the new law which removes the Supreme Court's authority to void what it deems "unreasonable" decisions by government and ministers and played down any impact on security.

[…]

posted by jamjam at 8:45 PM on October 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Pod Save the World has a special podcast out which I found useful (as someone who knows some things, but certainly not a lot, about the conflict). I have a small team of colleagues who work for me from Tel Aviv and I found it insightful to help me understand what is going on for them in these first few hours.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 8:53 PM on October 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

the closest analogy would be the pacification of Grozny

...and the Russians totally got away with it.

Loud noises and grumpy speeches all around, followed by absolutely nothing from anyone while the artillery murdered everyone.

Grozny 2.1 inbound, unless Egypt does something unexpected (they could, after all, open their side and let everyone escape except ... oops, the Palestinians are more useful as puppets, not actually people, we can't have them on our territory that might encourage them to stay! Loud noises! Speeches all around!)
posted by aramaic at 9:08 PM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

“Poetry as Violence | An Excerpt From Let This Radicalize You,” Kelly Hayes, Organizing My Thoughts, 07 October 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 9:14 PM on October 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Were there vehicle losses like this for the IDF previously?

If not, another possibility is that Hamas thinks it has the drone based tools to make this incredibly painful for land forces. The wars in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh have demonstrated a lot to everyone facing down tanks and armored vehicles.
posted by Slackermagee at 9:16 PM on October 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The New Arab - a non-sectarian news source.
posted by latkes at 9:29 PM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

One removed (and a couple of responses); totally contentless "everyone here is wrong" remark. Please focus on the info and the facts being reported and not on attacking other members.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:48 PM on October 7, 2023 [15 favorites]

One thing that hardens the situation is that Palestinians have an alternative to non-violent resistance and random terrorism-- limiting themselves to attacks on military targets. Instead, they're been sending a clear, expensive message that they're willing to kill Israelis in general.

This obviously isn't the only thing going on-- there are substantial factions in Israel who want to kill , abuse, and/or drive Palestinians out of their homes, whether for religious or secular reasons.

In this case, Hamas had a completely free choice of only and effectively attacking military targets, to do damage, kill people, and have hostages. They didn't chose that.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:20 AM on October 8, 2023 [17 favorites]

This obviously isn't the only thing going on-- there are substantial factions in Israel who want to kill , abuse, and/or drive Palestinians out of their homes, whether for religious or secular reasons.

I think it’s important to point out that 1) that things are happening and have happened and 2) those people are running the government.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:01 AM on October 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Do you consider Israeli settlers military targets or not?
posted by krisjohn at 5:14 AM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

:Do you consider Israeli settlers military targets or not?:

Probably not, but it could certainly be argued either way. They're an intermediate case, and less like military targets than people who are currently military.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:25 AM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Until people living or "settling" in land that is not internationally recognized as theirs are recognized as intruders - and the UN consensus is such, as of 2023 - endless violence has and will continue to result, arguments about terminology notwithstanding.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:37 AM on October 8, 2023 [15 favorites]

At this point, I think there are so many people on both sides who want violence (not to mention third parties outside Israel and Palestine who want violence) that the violence isn't going to stop. I have a lot of respect for Israelis and Palestinians who work to make peace, but no hope.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:16 AM on October 8, 2023 [18 favorites]

Just wanna say that I appreciate the information and commentary as presented here on MetaFilter, especially since right now my algorithmically-assigned feed diet is mostly a pretty disturbing mix of "Death to Palestine!" and "Death to Israel!" accelerationist rhetoric. Moderators, thank you for your service.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:20 AM on October 8, 2023 [41 favorites]

> especially since right now my algorithmically-assigned feed diet is mostly a pretty disturbing mix of "Death to Palestine!" and "Death to Israel!" accelerationist rhetoric.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-7-2023

"...

The Kremlin is already and will likely continue to exploit the Hamas attacks in Israel to advance several information operations intended to reduce US and Western support and attention to Ukraine. The Kremlin amplified several information operations following Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, primarily blaming the West for neglecting conflicts in the Middle East in favor of supporting Ukraine and claiming the international community will cease to pay attention to Ukraine by portraying attention to the Middle East or alternatively Ukraine as a zero-sum comparison. Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev claimed the United States and its allies should have been “busy with” working on “Palestinian-Israeli settlement” rather than “interfering” with Russia and providing Ukraine with military aid.[1] The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) accused the West of blocking efforts by a necessary “quartet” of Russia, the US, the European Union, and the United Nations, leading to an escalation in violence, implicitly blaming the West for the current fighting.[2] Prominent Russian propagandist Sergei Mardan directly stated that Russia will benefit from the escalation as the world “will take its mind off Ukraine for a while and get busy once again putting out the eternal fire in the Middle East.”[3] These Kremlin narratives target Western audiences to drive a wedge in military support for Ukraine, seek to demoralize Ukrainian society by claiming Ukraine will lose international support, and intend to reassure Russian domestic audiences that the international society will ignore Ukraine’s war effort.

Several key sources within the Russian information space shifted the focus of their daily coverage to the situation in Israel on October 7, which may impact the information environment around the war in Ukraine in the coming days or weeks. Many Russian milbloggers focused largely on the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, and some promoted Kremlin information operations by claiming that the West’s attention has shifted away from Ukraine and towards Israel.[4] This focus on Israel even prompted one Russian milblogger to urge others to not “forget” about the war in Ukraine.[5] ISW cannot forecast at this time how the source environment will change as the Hamas attacks in Israel unfold but will provide clear updates on any impact on ISW’s ability to collect from Russian milbloggers and geolocation sources, and subsequent effects on the detail available ISW can provide in these daily assessments.

... "

posted by sebastienbailard at 6:47 AM on October 8, 2023 [10 favorites]

Until people living or "settling" in land that is not internationally recognized as theirs are recognized as intruders - and the UN consensus is such

This statement is particularly ironic because the original conflict stemmed from
the Arabs rejection of the original UN partition plan. The international recognition or non-recognition of Israeli land rights means approximately zero to the Arabs and Hamas.

Israel has seen the settlement buffer zones as mandatory to its continued existence as a state due to how fast determined attackers can cover ground in a surprise attack - proven again and again throughout history, even this week.

In practical terms, the majority of rockets and infiltrating terrorists originated from Gaza, where Israel forcibly removed all 21 of its settlements. Not the West Bank, where the settlement activity has actually been going on. From a security standpoint, the settlement strategy is evidently the more stable one.
posted by xdvesper at 6:56 AM on October 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

This statement is particularly ironic because the original conflict stemmed from
the Arabs rejection of the original UN partition plan. The international recognition or non-recognition of Israeli land rights means approximately zero to the Arabs and Hamas.

So just throwing this out there but if a bunch of neoliberals came onto your property, backed up with the combined arms and military might of the Western world, then wanted to kick you out of your house, force you to live in the garage or shed, all because people had a claim to it nearly 2,000 years ago, you'd gladly acquiesce, right?
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:25 AM on October 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

This statement is particularly ironic because the original conflict stemmed from
the Arabs rejection of the original UN partition plan.

Please don’t come into this thread and try and fool people into thinking that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in November of 1947. The Palestinian leadership had good reason to reject the majority partition plan (there were IIRC hundreds of villages in Palestinian land that was assigned to the Israelis.). No national movement would ever accept those terms. The would be Israeli leadership cheered when the votes came in for the majority plan.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:28 AM on October 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

I’ve been crying since I heard the news. This is a catastrophe for Palestine and Israel. I have studied all the history, learned the languages, visited all the places, met the people, and heard their individual stories. I have no interest in reviewing or debating with anyone the history or reasons of this on the Internet. Things seem pretty grim at the moment and the forecast is for it to be much worse for all involved in the days ahead. Pray that someone figures out a way to de-escalate this.
posted by interogative mood at 7:34 AM on October 8, 2023 [64 favorites]

So just throwing this out there but if a bunch of neoliberals came onto your property, backed up with the combined arms and military might of the Western world,

This isn’t quite true either. The US was tepid, as was the USSR. The would be Israel leadership was reluctant to violate the 1947 border before they received recognition because they knew US support was not a forgone conclusion. The British wanted fuck all to do with the situation and evacuated in haste.

Sorry for commenting so much, I’ve published a couple academic articles on this topic and it’s way more complicated and fascinating than some make it out to be.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:35 AM on October 8, 2023 [23 favorites]

This isn’t quite true either. The US was tepid, as was the USSR. The would be Israel leadership was reluctant to violate the 1947 border before they received recognition because they knew US support was not a forgone conclusion. The British wanted fuck all to do with the situation and evacuated in haste.

Western world isn't just the US. Before the US started in '62 in order to oppose the USSR arming Arab armies in the region, France was giving Israel weapons hand over foot. You think those Dassault Mystères appeared out of thin air?
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:39 AM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

France wasn’t arming Israel in 1947-1948.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:43 AM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sometimes I want to yell at people who focus on selected parts of history, WOULD YOU PAY ATTENTION TO HOW YOU'RE TREATING PEOPLE NOW?

Not just at how other people are treating you.

***

Task and and Purpose around 21:30.

Maybe Iran wanted to derail rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Palestinians say it's been the most deadly year in the past 20 years for Palestinians.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:54 AM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

A case study of several attempts at nonviolent movements, part of the class "Power and Politics in Today's World" by Ian Shapiro.

Lecture 18 - Political Limits of Business: The Israel-Palestine Case, by Nicholas Strong

1) Breaking the Impasse
2) SodaStream
3) Rawabi
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:56 AM on October 8, 2023

France wasn’t arming Israel in 1947-1948.

It was. It was one of many countries that the Yishuv were pulling arms from clandestinely via Operation Balak. Poland in particular were also supplying the nascent state of Israel with weapons. You think Haganah or the newly minted IDF can prosecute a war against the Arab coalition without arms? Or that they magically appeared?
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:01 AM on October 8, 2023

I'm trying to get a sense of how many hostage situations there were/are and how they're being handled, because that seems to me to be the emotional/cultural lens through which this will be seen.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:17 AM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don’t know how this de-escalates. I think that the most likely situation will be that Israel attempts to reoccupy Gaza and either they succeed or as with their last push into Lebanon against Hezbollah they discover new limits to their strength. Syria, Iran and Hezbollah will or won’t decide to get more directly involved. My forecast is for grim times and sadness.
posted by interogative mood at 8:35 AM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have family in a Gaza border kibbutz. I lived and worked there a lifetime ago. We've been texting. They're in bomb shelters (which locks are not a priority for) awaiting evacuation from the military. I just care about them getting out of the direct line of fire/kidnap.
Also, it's wild to to me can text right now.
posted by atomicstone at 9:20 AM on October 8, 2023 [29 favorites]

I'm frankly surprised there hasn't been more of this kind of thing.

The Palestinian population are being slowly and purposely segregated, dispossessed, and dehumanized on a daily basis. Gaza in particular is cut off and locked away from the world, it's infrastructure and economy dependent on the whims of Israeli control, the region and the world apparently content to pretend they don't exist and simply wait for them to die off. What people anywhere would just sit and take it?
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 9:29 AM on October 8, 2023 [16 favorites]

> What people anywhere would just sit and take it?

Maybe one that is being effectively segregated and dispossessed. We are often led to believe that a truly oppressive tyranny would not be tenable because the people will rise up and destroy it. But perhaps with the resources they have, this is all they could muster.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:38 AM on October 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

Dozens of American citizens among the hostages, German citizens as well, 11 Nepali students missing. Has there been a situation where Hamas has taken foreign nationals hostage before?
posted by cosmic owl at 9:38 AM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Gee, I don't think the commenters here are interested in peace after all!

I would not call the situation before this peace, I would call it "controlled".
posted by Slackermagee at 10:40 AM on October 8, 2023 [23 favorites]

I will recommend Haggai Matar

Thank you for that. From yesterday, his take on the local context includes this:

The Israeli army is routinely raiding into Palestinian cities and refugee camps. The far-right government is giving settlers an entirely free hand to set up new illegal outposts and launch pogroms on Palestinian towns and villages, with soldiers accompanying the settlers and killing or maiming Palestinians trying to defend their homes. Amid the high holidays, Jewish extremists are challenging the “status quo” around the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, backed by politicians who share their ideology.

In Gaza, meanwhile, the ongoing siege is continuously destroying the lives of over two million Palestinians, many of whom are living in extreme poverty, with little access to clean water and about four hours of electricity a day. This siege has no official endgame; even an Israeli State Comptroller report found that the government has never discussed long-term solutions to ending the blockade, nor seriously considered any alternatives to recurring rounds of war and death. It is literally the only option this government, and its predecessors, have on the table.

Lots of good links in those two paragraphs.
posted by mediareport at 11:13 AM on October 8, 2023 [18 favorites]

Please keep comments productive and relevant to the thread's intended purpose. Refrain from making jokes/sarcasm.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 11:40 AM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's going to be bloody and it's going to be horrific.
As Palestinian journalist Mariam Bargouti wrote ' Gaza just broke out of jail.'
Knesset member Ariel Kallner has already called for a second Nakba.
posted by adamvasco at 12:04 PM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

The mother of tattoo artist Shani Louk who was paraded semi-naked on a Hamas truck makes a public plea for more information

The mother of a woman whose body was paraded through the streets by Hamas has pleaded for help finding her daughter.

A video showing German tattoo artist Shani Louk on the back of a pickup truck circulated on social media after the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

Louk had been attending an outdoor "Festival for Peace" party near Kibbutz Urim when the area was targeted.

I don't think this is what most Palestinians want from their champions, whatever their views on violence.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:11 PM on October 8, 2023 [18 favorites]

The ultimate outcome of the Israel/Palestine conflict is obvious to everyone: Israel will take total control of all the occupied territories and the Palestinian people will either be driven out or killed.

We call that "genocide" and that's what Israel is clearly aiming to achieve.

But in the West no political leaders want to admit that because to do so would imply a moral obligation to stop the genocide. And we could. "We" being the rest of the nations on Earth.

Apartheid fell in large part because the other nations cut off South Africa and refused to subsidize Apartheid. Israel could be compelled to end its plan of genocide via similar means. But America won't do that, so the march to genocide continues and anyone who doesn't expect more responses like this from the Palestinian side is a fool. People do not tend to go calmly and peacefully to their own genocide.

But the American response is summarized perfectly by Biden: Israel good, Palestine bad. So the genocide will continue.
posted by sotonohito at 12:20 PM on October 8, 2023 [49 favorites]

You're not wrong sotonohito but you can't expect the President's response to massacres which kill 700+ (mostly) civilians, take hundreds of hostages including small children, and upload dozens of horrific images and videos to the world to be like "Actually, they do have some legitimate grievances...", no? There's no realistic response here besides "we condemn these brutal and horrific actions in the strongest possible terms."
posted by Justinian at 12:33 PM on October 8, 2023 [56 favorites]

There's a difference between emancipatory insurrection and undifferentiated retribution. Hopefully, there's still consensus on Metafilter that spraying down saferooms crosses that line. It's predictable and probably inevitable that some violence will go too far, when it arrives as it must. But what doesn't pass in Bucha isn't somehow permissible in Sderot.

The more disproportionate the Israeli response, the less meaningful internal response Hamas will face for its choices in these actions. But I'm not holding out any hope for restraint by anyone with meaningful influence over that response. The current government just got done shredding basic civil rights protections for the state's recognized citizens.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:37 PM on October 8, 2023 [19 favorites]

Justinian The problem with that argument, and Biden's response, is that it completely ignores the dead Palestinian civilians.

To say that the deaths on the Israeli side are horrible (and they are, no argument at all) without the context of the thousands of Palestinian deaths erases the Palestinian deaths and does nothing but present the aggressor and oppressor in this situation as the victim.

I'm not sure how exactly someone might navigate that in a political speech, I'm not a speechwriter nor am I a diplomat. But I'm pretty sure there's an option other than uncritical, unthinking, unambiguous, praise for Israel.

Because Israel isn't the victim. They're the oppressor.
posted by sotonohito at 12:56 PM on October 8, 2023 [27 favorites]

But what doesn't pass in Bucha isn't somehow permissible in Sderot.

No, there is not a sensible analogy to be made between atrocities committed by a more-powerful aggressor during a deranged war of choice, and atrocities committed by people with very little leverage, in a very longstanding desperate situation, facing down impending genocide from an open-air prison. Irrespective of whether the specific people involved have some cynical motives or are exploiting the situation. The Bucha analogy is totally ridiculous and offensive.
posted by busted_crayons at 1:01 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

No, arguing that murdering cowering civilians in a basement is context sensitive, as you sit in front of a keyboard somewhere in Europe, is what's ridiculous and offensive.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:05 PM on October 8, 2023 [40 favorites]

Israel could be compelled to end its plan of genocide via similar means

If Republicans demand to know why the US sends Ukraine military aid, it remains an open question why they do not ask the same question about the United States underwriting the Israeli military. Part of this ongoing genocide is funded by Americans, by us, with our tax dollars.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:25 PM on October 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

Nothing justifies this. It is only going to lead to more dead civilians, more of Palestine in ruins and less land for Palestinians. Hamas has taken Gaza hostage and intends to martyr them along with a few hundred Israelis. Is it awful. Gaza should be a paradise and example of what Palestine could be, instead it is ruled by thugs who refuse overtures for peace and fire salvos of rockets over the border to ensure the blockade never ends so they can keep their absolute control and recruit more foot soldiers to their cause.
posted by interogative mood at 1:33 PM on October 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

thugs who refuse overtures for peace and fire salvos of rockets over the border to ensure the blockade never ends

The blockade will continue till morale improves?
posted by splitpeasoup at 1:42 PM on October 8, 2023 [10 favorites]

> We are often led to believe that a truly oppressive tyranny would not be tenable because the people will rise up and destroy it. But perhaps with the resources they have, this is all they could muster.

huey p. newton had this concept he called "revolutionary suicide." his theory was that the american apartheid state had constrained the life prospects of its victims to the point where there were only two options available to them:

predatory drug dealing, pimping, sex work under the thumbs of pimps, assault, robbery, murder, and ancillary gang violence. he called this way of life reactionary suicide, because it would sooner or later kill the person doing it, and because doing it worked to reinforce the oppressive system.
joining the panthers or similar organizations working toward black liberation and the eventual overthrow of the apartheid state. he called this revolutionary suicide, because the apartheid state is good at self-defense and will take every chance it gets to kill people who might weaken its control.

newton is very, very clear about how both of the available options lead to death, but likewise is clear about how one of the options leads to a death that might mean something.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:46 PM on October 8, 2023 [61 favorites]

Attempts to end the blockade as a part of ceasefire negotiations have failed as a result of repeated violations of ceasefire agreements. If Hamas wanted to end the blockade through negotiations it would end.
posted by interogative mood at 2:09 PM on October 8, 2023

If Hamas wanted to end the blockade through negotiations it would end.

This is definitely not my area of expertise but what is the supporting evidence for this statement?
posted by kat518 at 2:17 PM on October 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

To say that the deaths on the Israeli side are horrible (and they are, no argument at all) without the context of the thousands of Palestinian deaths erases the Palestinian deaths and does nothing but present the aggressor and oppressor in this situation as the victim.

There's nothing in that "context" that justifies a straightforward terrorist attack, including gunning down more than 100 young people at a festival. Attacks on Israeli military installations or even political institutions, sure, you can make an argument that there is a justification for that. Not an irrefutable argument, but it's not gross either. What is gross is providing justifications or excuses for attacks on unarmed civilians, meant purely to instill terror and instigate wider conflict.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:24 PM on October 8, 2023 [23 favorites]

The only humane option left with a shred of a likelihood is returning the hostages, and then a peaceful evacuation of Gaza and relocation of the civilians.

Decades of diplomacy, concessions, and bribery failed. The two-state solution failed. Hamas is an organized criminal enterprise (whose membership includes multiple millionaires) masquerading as a dysfunctional government. They saw the rest of the Arab world reaching accords with Israel and read the writing on the wall. So they make their move knowing the retaliation will be terrible and inhumane in a sick recruitment and sympathy drive.

If you want to avoid the worst case scenario, let your sympathy for the Palestinians move you to get any other nation to take them in, because there's no political capital remaining within Israel, the US, or Europe to negotiate anymore. If you think there's any other options that are actually achievable please let me know how.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 2:24 PM on October 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Gaza should be a paradise and example of what Palestine could be

What's the plan for building a paradise from the present imposed economic reality in Gaza? What would you have the inhabitants build their paradise out of?
posted by busted_crayons at 2:28 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Pluto Gangsta, what you are proposing is called "ethnic cleansing".
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:43 PM on October 8, 2023 [45 favorites]

The present reality is a consequence of Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza and its refusal to even recognize the right of Israel to exist as a country and proceed down the path of negotiating a two state solution.
posted by interogative mood at 2:55 PM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

I’m not proposing anything, I’m saying that I don’t see any other solutions with a snowball’s chance of actually occurring.

And again, if you think there's any other options that are actually achievable please let me know how.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:03 PM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Let's call it an "outcome" rather than a "solution."
posted by I-Write-Essays at 3:04 PM on October 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

2 million new Palestinian refugees isn't really a solution to anything, it's just a new, different problem.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:08 PM on October 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

Let's call it an "outcome" rather than a "solution."

A final outcome, if you will.
posted by clawsoon at 3:09 PM on October 8, 2023 [23 favorites]

Refugees - whether Palestinians or otherwise - are not a "problem". The circumstance that forces people to seek refuge is the problem.
posted by splitpeasoup at 3:16 PM on October 8, 2023 [17 favorites]

The distinction between "outcome" and "solution" -- other than me dumbly giving you a free shot at me, very droll haha, I'm so glad I took the time to post here again after spending the morning calling to make sure my relatives are still alive because they attended Simchas Torah services -- is that the latter actually implies that someone could make a humanitarian effort to save lives and reduce bloodshed. An "outcome" is just letting inertia take over without intervention.

And yes, it's a new different problem! It's a new, terrible, moral injustice. And it still might be the most humane option left.

For the third time, if you think there's any other options that are actually achievable please let the world know how.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:18 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm not trying to take a shot at you. Calling it a solution implies that the outcome is desirable in some way. Calling it merely an outcome allows one to remain neutral on whether it is good or not. We can then discuss the desirability of that outcome. Calling it a solution will antagonize people who think it is undesirable.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 3:22 PM on October 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ethnic cleansing is not a "humane option". I'm surprised I have to type this out.
posted by splitpeasoup at 3:25 PM on October 8, 2023 [26 favorites]

Turning 2 million people into refugees isn’t going to solve anything or bring any kind of peace. I fear that Israel will do something like this anyway. This is one of the reasons I’ve spent the last 48 hours crying.
posted by interogative mood at 3:30 PM on October 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Let's call it an "outcome" rather than a "solution."

A final outcome, if you will.

I'm not sure how cheekily referencing "The final solution" (i.e. the Nazi goal of Jewish genocide), but as a dark joke since it's about Israel committing genocide is productive of doing anything but treading into the dangerous territory of conflating the Israeli state with Jewish people, which I'd really like to avoid in this thread.
posted by coffeecat at 3:31 PM on October 8, 2023 [17 favorites]

Door A is slow strangulation at the hands of Israel. So the status quo.

Door B, everyone wins, has been nailed shut by the blood and grievances of literal generations.

So there's either a Door C like Pluto Gangsta is suggesting or we all watch them walk through Door A. And the Door C option won't be "and someone hands Hamas/Israel their ass diplomatically and/or militarily and enforces a peace on the ground like the US did in Iraq". We, the world's greatest military, spent twenty one trillion goddamn dollars and all we did was make Al Qaeda 2 and a country that will almost assuredly lose it's elected government like Afghanistan if we leave.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:31 PM on October 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

If you want to avoid the worst case scenario, let your sympathy for the Palestinians move you to get any other nation to take them in, because there's no political capital remaining within Israel, the US, or Europe to negotiate anymore. If you think there's any other options that are actually achievable please let me know how.

Other countries have already taken in 5-6 million Palestinians, haven't they? I'm pessimistically putting your idea into the category of "one of many things that has already been tried many times without solving anything."
posted by clawsoon at 3:33 PM on October 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

Anyway...

Whenever something like this (i.e. political violence) happens, there is always a lot of debate about whether it's justified or not, which to me always seems to miss the point. Because that determination is always going to be subjective, and doesn't seem very productive. A better question, to me anyway, is why did someone do what they did? Rare are psychopaths who commit violence for no reason.

meant purely to instill terror and instigate wider conflict

I obviously cannot get inside the minds of Hamas, but if they truly have no other goal than creating more conflict and terror, then that speaks to the absolute horror of life in Gaza under apartheid. We have no reason not to believe that Hamas is acting logically in responding to their abject circumstances. As has already been stated in this thread, it's an open-air prison, and even that is honestly too nice of description- I mean, there are certainly nicer prisons than Gaza. I'll give another recommendation - the Breaking the Silence (IDF vets) account on Twitter @BtSIsrael has a recent thread on how what happened can be blamed on the Israeli state. The last two tweets in that thread:

"Our country decided - decades ago - that it's willing to forfeit the security of its citizens in our towns and cities, in favor of maintaining control over an occupied civilian population of millions, all for the sake of a settler-messianic agenda.

The idea that we can "manage the conflict" without ever having to solve it is once again collapsing before our eyes. It held up until now because only few dared to challenge it. These heartbreaking events could change that. They must. For all of us between the river and the sea."

I obviously have no idea what will happen, I can only hope that enough Israelis feel failed by the Israeli state that the voices of those working within Israel to upend the status quo become amplified. I'm not saying I think that will happen, but I can only hope.

I will throw in: we also don't know how this may change US opinion. I'm not sure if there has ever been a poll on "how much do you care about this conflict?" but my guess is that most Americans fall into the camp of "Gee, seems complicated! I don't really have an opinion." US support for Israel has little to do with domestic politics, it's based on the US seeing Israel as a source of "stability" for democracy in the region. There has never, at least in my living memory (I'm late 30s), been a mainstream movement in support of Palestinian rights. I'm not sure what it would take for that it happen, but it doesn't seem impossible. It seemed striking then, to see this clip on CNN giving voice to the Palestinian side.
posted by coffeecat at 4:03 PM on October 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

Something I've seen going around is that Hamas claims it got its weapons from Ukraine, and that this indicates that the attack is all part of a Russian plot to pin atrocities on Ukraine to erode global support for them. Seems like quite a conspiracy theory. Has anyone else heard this thread going around?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:07 PM on October 8, 2023

No.
posted by clavdivs at 4:09 PM on October 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

Well the dems were extraordinarily quick to shit on the "End the Palestine Occupation Rally" in NYC, so I'm guessing US opinion will not be terribly helpful with regards to the rights of Palestinians.

On the "the weapons came from... !" There's going to be unsourced claims galore. These were abandoned US weapons when we fled Afghanistan and it's Biden's fault! These were weapons sent to Ukraine and it's Biden's fault! This weapons were bought directly with German aide money please elect the AfD!

We'll know when we know and not before hand. I'm actually worried that the reflexive responses (The Med carrier group moving in closer, Israel gearing up for a ground offensive) are what is desired. As seen in Ukraine, a LOT can go wrong.
posted by Slackermagee at 4:11 PM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Well, yes, massacring and raping your way through a thousand civilians, many of them elderly or children, tends not to improve the opinion of third parties towards the side the death squads claim to be aligned with. I can't imagine this should be a surprise to anyone?
posted by Justinian at 4:16 PM on October 8, 2023 [18 favorites]

CNN
Mustafa Barghouti, Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
posted by adamvasco at 4:21 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Doesn't CNN even use their own website anymore? Could someone please summarize for those who refuse to use that wretched site?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:26 PM on October 8, 2023

Who's talking about "justified"? That's not an answerable question because one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist.

I'm talking about explanations.

The attack by Hamas is not inexplicable, it isn't due to cartoon supervillain evil for the sake of evil, it wasn't because they hated us for our freedoms.

It was the easily predictable outcome of Israeli policy and people full of rage and despair lashing out because they thought they'd die anyway.

It is not possible to keep a people in a pressure cooker like Gaza without an explosion.

What bothers me is that this was so predictable and yet no one in the Israeli government predicted it. Was their thinking really so distorted by their ideology they imagine they could stomp on Gaza until the last Palistinian was killed without any push back?

I don’t know. And I make no argument at all about justified vs unjustified violence. I just look to understand the forces at work. And this isn't rocket surgery. Beat someone up enough for long enough and they're going to snap one day and go wild. The leadership in Hamas may be motivated by more cold and selfish goals, but the rank and file who executed the attack weren't looking to get rich. They were just pushed past a breaking point.

Justinian I'm not trying to be snarky or make a point, I'm genuinely unable to tell if you're talking about Israel or Hamas there.

I kind of assume Hamas because your other posts tend to indicate if not support of the Israeli position at least less distaste for it. But I'm not sure so I thought I should ask.
posted by sotonohito at 4:39 PM on October 8, 2023 [24 favorites]

There's no realistic response here besides "we condemn these brutal and horrific actions in the strongest possible terms."

and sending in a carrier group.

I can understand this militarily and even in the lens of bilateral politics. but I do question the overall wisdom of sending a carrier group. Israel has declared a state of War which overtime could easily isolate them politically and militarily. but I think it would be morally egregious not to dress the isolationism of the Palestinian people.
if this is some other state actors larger grand plan because it seems fashionable to go to war that is indeed a very troubling place a place Evan Boland called Outside History
"I have chosen:
out of myth in history I move to be
part of that ordeal
who darkness is
only now reaching me from those fields,
those rivers, those roads clotted as
firmaments with the dead.
How slowly they die
as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.
And we are too late. We are always too late."
posted by clavdivs at 4:41 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

clavdivs I am sure of very few things, but one thing g I am sure about is that America sending in a carrier group for any purpose at all will do nothing but make the problem worse.

We have the entire last 60 years of American military adventurism in the Middle East to demonstrate that America doing anything military is like trying to fight a fire with gasoline.

The best thing America can do from a military standpoint is get out of the Middle East and never go back.
posted by sotonohito at 4:44 PM on October 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

CNN
Mustafa Barghouti, Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

That's a genuinely incredible interview, I'm as utterly shocked as the poster that CNN even aired it. Kind of surreal to see a cable news network let a Palestinian person speak and make all of their points without any interruption. Thanks for sharing that adamvasco.
posted by windbox at 4:50 PM on October 8, 2023 [26 favorites]

My own experience visiting Gaza was that it was not a prison. It is a surprisingly typical developing world city with the vibrancy and culture of a city and city problems. It has some nice beaches and hotels, upscale housing districts. The blockade and travel restrictions are a hassle but people have found workarounds. The local authorities are basically criminal gangs governed by Hamas. The TV has constant propaganda of hatred towards “the Jews”. If you go there visit the British World War 1 Cemetery. It is this strange vestige of the empire.
posted by interogative mood at 4:54 PM on October 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

A different Israel with a majority that really believed a two-state solution was in its own interest could have by now fostered a real Palestinian state in the territories that everyone agrees are Palestine (or used to) without insisting on final status on all borders and other disputes or questions, or that all segments of Palestinian society abandon all violence and become orderly and free from outside influence in unison.

A different Israel could respond to dead-enders (on both sides, or from outside) attempting to blow it up and spoil it by rebuilding it with the same insistence as it currently does Israeli settlements. It could refrain from collective punishment of families, not tolerate settler pogroms (and call them that), not blow up entire apartment buildings on short notice. It could not do things like having units dedicated to kneecapping kids for getting too close to a fenceline. It could recognize that it is avoiding applying the founding narrative of the Jewish experience in Europe to its policies, poisoning its own society, losing its democracy, undermining its principles along with its security.

If a few generations of Palestinians were to grow up with the kind of life-chances that Israel could impart to a state it actually felt a responsibility to raise up, or at least free from ghettoization and immiseration and push-button violence at scale, then the situation would very likely evolve in our lifetimes.

I'm not saying an Israel that's legitimately dedicated to fostering a durable and healthy Palestinian state and society as the key to its own future is anywhere near the realm of the present reality. It's harrowing how far things have slid since Rabin's assassination.

But those are things it could do, in the sense of being what a two-state solution would really call for.

And it is possible to recognize these things, and also abhor what Hamas has done in these latest actions.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:54 PM on October 8, 2023 [36 favorites]

Two states or one state, the real issue is human rights. I like how Dr. Barghouti keeps the focus on being treated as equals.

I found a non-twitter source for the interview, btw.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:06 PM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

My own experience visiting Gaza was that it was not a prison

It's hard to avoid the comparison if Palestinians are unable to travel either in or out without the permission of their jailers.

Btw if anyone wants a humanizing take on Gaza, look up the episode that Anthony Bourdain did there (which appears to have disappeared from the Internet, unfortunately...).
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:07 PM on October 8, 2023 [19 favorites]

The best thing America can do from a military standpoint is get out of the Middle East and never go back.

politically, that won't be an option if hamas really is holding americans hostage - if biden does nothing about that, he loses the next election - count on it

also, and this is where it really gets hairy, israel will probably need some help with iran and i'm sure the u s is ready to give it

this is totally awful
posted by pyramid termite at 5:33 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Palestinians could have had a deal in 1979 at Camp David but they turned it down. They had another opportunity under Clinton with an agreement that would have shared administration of Jerusalem, but Arafat backed out at the last minute. Rabin could have gotten a deal done but Israeli fanatics assassinated him. There could have been a deal in 1949 with some land swaps but the Arab states decide to block Palestinians from negotiating anything because Jordan wanted Transjordan and Egypt wanted Gaza. Right after Israel won in 1967 they said at last the Arabs will have to make peace — call us when you want to make a deal, no one called until Saddat in 1976. Then Saddat got murdered.
posted by interogative mood at 5:35 PM on October 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

Sadly I don't see a path to a just and durable peace from here.

Israel was founded as a Jewish homeland - and given the history, who can blame them for wanting one?
Would you accede to living in an ethnoreligious state where you'd be regarded as a perpetual foreigner on land you have no less of a claim to? Would you be willing to fully share power with a minority (who might one day become majority) you regard as outsiders? If you start with the idea of a Jewish homeland, a one state solution was a pretty tall order then and it's even less realistic now.
A two state solution might've been possible in the past but never materialized. We're now further away than the 2000 Camp David Summit. Israel believed they could put a lid on it without boiling over - they were wrong. If there's no realistic prospect of a peaceful solution, where do you suppose all the energy will go?
The longer it goes on, the more extremist parties are able to wrest credibility by selling themselves as resisting the "enemy". How do you even start to build trust and good faith when every concession gets portrayed as surrender?

Without getting into a historical back-and-forth about who started it, I want to note the power balance overwhelmingly favors Israel in the relationship. They control the borders, the water, the electricity, have the advanced military and developed economy. It is within their power to improve the conditions that are the source of much discontent. The pursuit of perfect security is the enemy of good security here.

I support the Palestinian movement for autonomy but the deliberate targeting of non-combatants was not necessary and wrong. The status quo (which is not peace and is full of violence - settlers advancing with tacit support of the state, strangulating the daily lives of Palestinians, maiming/killing peaceful protestors) is also wrong. And now I'm concerned full-throated support for Israel will be used as cover by Netanyahu to pursue even more extreme actions. One of the more tiresome things about these types of discussions elsewhere is if you express an opinion, it's taken as a package deal and anything less than unconditional support is interpreted as aiding the "enemy".
posted by ndr at 5:39 PM on October 8, 2023 [44 favorites]

It turns out there are two interviews. In one of them, Dr. Barghouti says he doesn't believe civilians were taken hostage. That only military targets were attacked. He later says something along the lines of "even if there are civilian hostages..."

I found those statements, which are rather at odds with the prevailing narrative, to be noteworthy. I can think of a number of ways to interpret them.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:47 PM on October 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Well the dems were extraordinarily quick to shit on the "End the Palestine Occupation Rally" in NYC, so I'm guessing US opinion will not be terribly helpful with regards to the rights of Palestinians.

To be clear, I was speaking in terms of the unknown future. At the moment, there are more Israeli casualties than Palestinians, a fact that is unheard of in recent times. The NYTimes has a helpful infographic detailing this - it's usually a disproportionate number of Palestinians who are killed, by a great magnitude. Based on statements from Netanyahu, it appears he feels emboldened to do as much carnage as he likes, and so it is an open question as to how much violence can happen before it impacts international opinion. I'm not claiming to know what will happen, but it does feel like we're in a somewhat unprecedented moment - the world seems to be paying attention to a degree it wasn't before, and nobody knows how this will play out exactly, except that it will be brutal.
posted by coffeecat at 6:16 PM on October 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

WSJ: Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks (ungated):

Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.

posted by gwint at 6:23 PM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Based on statements from Netanyahu, it appears he feels emboldened to do as much carnage as he likes, and so it is an open question as to how much violence can happen before it impacts international opinion.

Setting aside the countries that are anti-Israel no matter what, a country that has suffered this scale of attack on civilians is going to be given a lot of latitude in its response. Unfortunately for people caught in the middle, there aren't really many brakes on this train.

“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.

If it turns out to be true that Iran was in the driver's seat, the consequences would be grave. Personally, I'm hoping it is fiction because that would lessen the risk of a larger conflict, but it's also hard to see Hamas pulling it all off as a purely homegrown operation.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:30 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Looks like we will see a big push to get the US to attack Iran. This just keeps getting worse and worse. Fuck.
posted by interogative mood at 6:36 PM on October 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

I can only assume that Iran cares more about hurting Israel than it does about helping Palestinians.
posted by clawsoon at 6:38 PM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

The longer it goes on, the more extremist parties are able to wrest credibility by selling themselves as resisting the "enemy". How do you even start to build trust and good faith when every concession gets portrayed as surrender?

There are a few examples from around the world that could be looked to for ideas. (There will always be important differences in individual context requiring that any strategies that worked for one conflict be adapted to meet the individual situation, of course, but as starting points one could look to the political resolution of the Irish-UK conflict, or various truth and reconciliation processes (Rwanda, South Africa, Canada vis-a-vis colonization and relationship with Indigenous nations). All of these examples are still incomplete to varying degrees, and will be no doubt for at least a couple more generations. But they give ideas for potential starting points; and to the extent they haven’t succeeded in their aims, give cautions for pitfalls to avoid.
posted by eviemath at 6:39 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

”We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.

If it turns out to be true that Iran was in the driver's seat, the consequences would be grave. Personally, I'm hoping it is fiction because that would lessen the risk of a larger conflict

Thus the very cautious approach by US diplomats.
posted by eviemath at 6:44 PM on October 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Well, you'd think if the US had any evidence it wouldn't hesitate to show it, so all we have now is Summer Said's unnamed sources. We'll see; we've certainly seen this kind of story before that turned out to not be true but led to a massive new war anyway.

Here's a short bit that might make the hostage situation more complicated, from the WSJ live stream and the same reporter who wrote the Iran piece, with the same kind of unnamed officials:

Israel has asked Egypt to help mediate in the release of Israelis captured by Hamas, Egyptian officials said.

It is not clear how many Israeli captives are being held in Gaza by Hamas and Palestinian militants. A spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A senior Hamas official and Egyptian officials told The Wall Street Journal that the Palestinian group had lost contact with some of the militants holding hostages, and civilians also had participated in taking hostages, making it difficult to determine how many are being held.
posted by mediareport at 6:45 PM on October 8, 2023

it remains an open question why they do not ask the same question about the United States underwriting the Israeli military. Part of this ongoing genocide is funded by Americans, by us, with our tax dollars.

This is going to be a very long comment, covering
- what kind of leverage does the US buy with ongoing military aid to Israel
- how this leverage was used in the past (1973) and what the US gained from it
- could this leverage be used today in a similar fashion to achieve peace with Gaza (this is mostly fiction, but one can dream)

When peace was achieved between Egypt and Israel, it was through Israel being forced at gunpoint by the US, where the US gave extremely generous terms to Egypt and told Israel to suck it up, because the US had eyes on two bigger goals - wresting Egypt away from the Soviet sphere of influence and gaining control over the Suez. Israel is just a tool of the US, and US gained this leverage by supplying them with arms - do as we say, or we stop arms supply, and your state ceases to exist because you will lose to the Arabs supported by the Soviets.

If peace with Hamas ever happened, I think it would go down that path, with Israel being coerced by the US into giving up a large amount of land and economic resources to Hamas in return for Hamas switching from an authoritarian dictatorship that is a client of Iran, to being an authoritarian dictatorship that is a client of the US. Rational, dictator state actors care about survival - power, weapons and money, not so much where it comes from. Egypt didn't care if it was a client of the Soviets or the US. Outwardly Hamas uses religious fanaticism to gain influence, but I wonder if the top leadership really believe it themselves - are they true believers, or is religion just a tool for control?

As short of a TLDR of the Egyptian parallel as I can make it, unfortunately leaving out a lot of nuance - I promise there are some weird parallels to what just happened this week.

Egypt was a Soviet client state, and Sadat had a problem on his hands. Egyptians were deeply angry - a burning desire for war against Israel, anger at the incompetence of Egypt's army and its humiliation in the 1967 war, anger at the state of the economy. But Egypt was incapable of winning a war against Israel, even with the latest Soviet weaponry, and the Soviets forbade him from doing so anyway.

The 1967 conflict had frozen at the Suez, which meant traffic through it had halted, paralyzing an extremely important economic resource. As long as both sides of the Suez were on different sides of the Cold War, the conflict would never end. Sadat was powerless to end the conflict even if he wanted to, if he did so there would be an immediate revolt against him.

In response to an Egyptian troop buildup on the Suez, Israel wanted to execute a pre-emptive strike similar to how they won the six-day war in 1967. The US forbade them, threatening to halt arms resupply which would lead to their defeat against the Arabs. Egypt expelled their Soviet military advisors, which led Israel to believe that no attack was imminent, since it was implausible that Egypt would attack without Soviet support. So Israel did nothing and waited with their arms tied behind their back, and they got surprise attacked in 1973, suffering shocking casualties when the Egyptians crossed the Suez in overwhelming numbers. The Israeli army and air-force had an aura of invicibility due to their stellar performance in the 1967 war, but they were now being routed. Within a few days, 200 out of 300 tanks in the Sinai were disabled or destroyed. Their celebrated air-force was forced to stop operating in the skies due to the unexpected effectiveness of Soviet SAMs destroying 1/4 of their operational aircraft in the first few days. There was shock and horror all around at how the Israeli intelligence machine could fail to notify them of such a huge attack, and the sudden vulnerability of their military forces against new technology. (seem familiar? cue the conspiracy theories...)

The US suggested that against the superior Soviet ATGMs and SAMs, rather than attacking the Egyptian army head on, that the IDF break through the Suez themselves and cut their army off from resupply while threatening Cairo and their ports. The Egyptians suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the Suez with no supply lines for over 100,000 soldiers, dependent on whatever food and water the IDF kindly allowed through for leverage. The IDF themselves were within a day's advance to Cairo with no opposition between them. In a single stroke Israel could have ended the Egyptian government and ended a large portion of the Egyptian army.

This is where the US intervened, and again forbade the Israel from touching either Cairo or the Egpytian army. They forced the parties to the negotiating table, and at this point they excluded the Soviets, who were powerless to help their client anyway - even if they rushed troops to the battlefield, it would be too late, and the Soviets had zero leverage with Israel. In return for Egypt switching from a Soviet client state to a US client state and choosing peace, the US would force Israel to withdraw their army, give up the Suez (worth billions in revenue per year, $10 bil last year alone) and give up the Sinai.

So Egypt got to claim they won the war, beating Israel head on in a decisive battle, restoring Arab pride not only in Egypt but throughout all Arab states. They got the Suez, a huge economic victory, and got all their land back in the Sinai. Using this newfound political clout, Sadat was able to convince his people to accept peace with Israel.

The US managed to wrest Egypt away from being a Soviet client state to becoming a US client state, without shedding a single drop of blood (see how well that went in Korea and Vietnam). They also got indirect control over the Suez, since both sides of the Suez are now US puppets.

Israel "won" the war but lost everything. They had their defensive strategy crippled by the US, got severely beaten in battle, then even after they maneuvered themselves winning position they weren't allowed to capitalize on it and they had to give up concession after concession with nothing in return.

That's what US military aid bought in the 1970s. In my idle (impossible) fantasy about how peace in Gaza could be achieved, it's that the US eventually finds a rational state actor in Hamas, then runs the same playbook - a decisive attack on Israel that gains Hamas enough domestic support to force peace along with significant material concessions in land and resources, and Hamas becomes the latest US puppet in the Middle East (like Saudi Arabia).

As for today, the US still wants to project force and influence in the Middle East and keep the Suez open. So the US needs to keep Israel dependent on it for military aid as leverage so it can use Israel as its puppet. However, when there is a flare up in the conflict, dead Palestinians in the media increases domestic pressure within the US to stop military funding, as evidenced in this thread.

This is why when Israel only funded 2 Iron Dome systems to protect its military assets - the US stepped in and funded 8 more systems (plus ongoing missile resupply) to protect Israeli civilians, at the cost of billions of dollars. Preventing Israeli civilian deaths alleviates the pressure within Israel to retaliate, which means less dead Palestinians, which benefits the US. Looking at it cynically, a terror attack on your soil increases support for the current government (see 9/11 and Bush). Not to say that Israel wouldn't have gone ahead to build 8 more Iron Dome systems on their own, but with the current system of incentives, the US wants it more, so they fund it. That's where a substantial amount of military aid is going.

The IDF have been disciplined and stuck strictly to protocol (calling ahead, then doing a door knock, then only destroying the target) largely because the US is still calling the shots. The US prevents Israel from committing genocide, because that would not serve the US's interests. If Israel departs too far off-script then the US will be unable to maintain its current relationship with Israel due to domestic pressure, there's no threat in that, that's simply the reality, and Israel doesn't want that either.
posted by xdvesper at 6:47 PM on October 8, 2023 [27 favorites]

Although Iranian involvement is a 100% not good thing, I think there’s no US war with Iran regardless. It would be very bad for Bidens reelection.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:47 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Didn't the Iranians have a top scientist assassinated on their own soil by the Israeli government?

Plus whatever else has happened that was a blip in the news.
posted by Slackermagee at 7:11 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Operation Praying Mantis happened without kicking off a full war. In the spring of a Presidential election year.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:31 PM on October 8, 2023

and the Major naval battle before that, the gulf of Tonkin.
posted by clavdivs at 8:11 PM on October 8, 2023

The IDF have been disciplined and stuck strictly to protocol (calling ahead, then doing a door knock, then only destroying the target) largely because the US is still calling the shots. The US prevents Israel from committing genocide, because that would not serve the US's interests. If Israel departs too far off-script then the US will be unable to maintain its current relationship with Israel due to domestic pressure, there's no threat in that, that's simply the reality, and Israel doesn't want that either.

Are we really sure about this? It took the US years to do much about what happened in Yemen, and the US didn't bat much of an eye over what just happened in Azerbaijan. People under 40 or so in the US might be becoming more critical of Israel, but I get the sense older generations, who still control politics, tend to view the Palestians with much more suspicion. The fact that Hamas targeted innocents in the recent attacks certainly won't help their perception, particularly given the editorial slant of major news networks.

And that's before you even get into the byzantine influence networks that govern the US government. From what I can tell the Democrats support the Ukraine war but tend to be more skeptical of Isreel - at least until the recent attack. The Republicans are split over Ukraine but ardently pro-Israel. Trump is anti-Ukraine but ardently pro-Israel. At least part of the Democrat's recent beef with Israel, at least until now, centers around Netanuahu and his support for Trump. It's a tangled web.

I guess I'm just throwing ideas out there because this whole thing makes me ill. I just can't see a way out of it that doesn't end in violence and death. For my entire life the entire region has basically been a case of an immovable object meeting an irresistable force, and I have awful feeling that things are about to break.
posted by eagles123 at 8:54 PM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

The US prevents Israel from committing genocide, because that would not serve the US's interests.

Oh, that's the sticker, nice, Wikipedia? You realize you left out a huge chunk of history prior to 67'. pretty much the whole of 1956. You left out the fact that other countries did attack Israel at the same time,..The Golan heights etc.so that would mean that the United States is also holding pressure on those countries

Saudi Arabia
Algeria
Jordan
Iraq
Libya
Kuwait
Tunisia
Morocco
Cuba
North Korea
what about the fact that Bzrehnev and Nixon met in June with Brzerhnev warning that if Israel does not pull back from the Sinai, he might not be able to control the Egyptian response. Americans and the Soviets warned both sides not to attack each other for very obvious reasons. the Suez canal was part of the Soviet doctrine. See Nassar. And how that work out for Sadat. one of his assassins had a colleague in his cell, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He and others had a Master Plan'

it's that the US eventually finds a rational state actor in Hamas, then runs the same playbook -

no one wants Hamas around for anything but a political tool and why would we want to engage with the political tool, again .

As for today, the US still wants to project force and influence in the Middle East and keep the Suez open.

lot of folks want the suez open, look how everybody sorta trips out when a boat gets stuck for a day.
posted by clavdivs at 9:11 PM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

The US didn’t force Egypt to make peace. Egypt and Israel made peace because then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat wanted to make peace. The US helped close the deal. The US has never had the kind of leverage over Egypt or Israel to force them into anything.
posted by interogative mood at 9:14 PM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Reuters has a camera on the Gaza skyline broadcasting live for now
posted by interogative mood at 10:02 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Egypt and Israel made peace because then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat wanted to make peace. The US helped close the deal. The US has never had the kind of leverage over Egypt or Israel to force them into anything.

The leverage the US had over Egypt was saying, we could stand aside and let Cairo burn and your army be destroyed - it takes decades to rebuild an army, all that expertise and experienced officers lost. But give me what I want, and I'll tell Israel to stand down. It was a very credible threat - the US would have been ok with Egypt totally destroyed (removes one Soviet client state) but if the US could gain a client state for itself, that would be even better.

The leverage the US had over Israel was the arms resupply they desperately needed. Israel was literally alone in the conflict. While in years prior Europe had provided arms to Israel, starting in the mid 1960s the Europeans found they were dependent on the Arabs for oil, and one by one they stopped or reduced arms sales after being presssured by the Arabs - first Germany, then UK, eventually all of Europe. In the meantime, the Arabs were being armed by the latest in Soviet technology. This is where the US sensed an opportunity and stepped in to supply arms to Israel instead. The US would pay the price for this intervention by being the target of an oil embargo by OPEC, but they judged it worth it to nab themselves Egypt away from the Soviets and also gaining indirect control of the Suez.

If Sadat wanted peace, going to war in a surprise attack was an odd way of showing so. Sadat wanted to regain the Sinai, and he was boxed in - military means was the only one he had, so he took it. Whether he was playing 4 dimensional chess and deliberately lost the war to gain everything he wanted is debatable, of course, but I think the more credible read is that he wanted the Sinai and the Suez, and was willing to trade peace for that.

You left out the fact that other countries did attack Israel at the same time,..The Golan heights etc. So that would mean that the United States is also holding pressure on those countries.

I didn't mention the Golan Heights because no peace deal was ever made - it's still in conflict. I'm mostly interested in how peace was achieved in that instance, and confined the overly long comment to just that.

lot of folks want the suez open, look how everybody sorta trips out when a boat gets stuck for a day.

People want it open, but most countries aren't committing billions, or trillions of dollars to ensure it remains open. There's a theory that the US maintains the world's most capable blue water navy by such a huge margin and stations its carriers specifically to ensure all the international trade routes remain open. As I mentioned earlier, international water operations are mostly "might makes right" which is why it pisses China off whenever the US sails near it. The US is the top dog in a world built on international trade and flow of resources, and it has a vested interest in keeping it that way. There's a whole economic theory on the vast wealth unlocked through trade, and all that goes away if trade gets stopped if every nation along the way tries to extract excessive tolls for movement through their waters or holds the world to random by stopping it entirely.
posted by xdvesper at 10:29 PM on October 8, 2023 [10 favorites]

The US has never had the kind of leverage over Egypt or Israel to force them into anything.
But there have been times when the u.s. did say they might not support something like Kissenger saying "not one nail' if Israel attacked first. that's a choice. Force no, imagine a CIA and mossad at a bar
"your going to do this or no cookies"
your theating, why threaten, you don't threaten.

what countries have done is use Israel to manipulate other countries for example in 1948/49 United States and Soviet Union gave diplomatic support for Israel because Stalin regarded Britain not America as the major adversary so Stalin saw supporting the new state as one of his best chances of undermining the British position within the middle East pursuing this he allowed Czechoslovakia then a Soviet satellite state of course to give weapons to Israel.
posted by clavdivs at 10:31 PM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

A note on an exchange above: re the "final outcome" crack; please do not do this. Don't make witty little jokes about genocide, etc. in this thread. Likewise, do not target what someone has said in what can be assumed to be good faith, even if they have not cushioned it all around with assurances that they do actually care about the lives of other people, and then peck away at it over and over to prove that the person is a Bad Person. Don't direct your energy toward other members at all, in fact. Discuss reasonably yes, offer your own contrasting / different opinion respectfully, but don't derail the thread with continuous mini versions of "the main character" thing here. Please focus more on news and background than other members. There are fewer and fewer places where people can get reasonably trustworthy up-to-date reports on serious events like this; please don't make it impossible for us to have threads to provide that for each other. We can only have posts on this topic if people are willing to regulate themselves here.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:46 PM on October 8, 2023 [80 favorites]

The Zeihan-alike prognostication about what happens when an increasingly autarchic US stops doing globalization and guaranteeing freedom of navigation because shale oil and onshored chip fabs (i.e., whether the suez crisis would play out now as it did then) is not really on topic here to the point it needs to be argued about.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:05 PM on October 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

This has been a horrifying day.
posted by y2karl at 11:45 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Reportedly 78 Palestinian children killed so far as of ~12 hours ago in the counterattacks, number of Israeli children killed "is so far unconfirmed."
posted by clawsoon at 3:48 AM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

re the "final outcome" crack; please do not do this.

My apologies.
posted by clawsoon at 3:49 AM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

This has been a horrifying day.

About to get much worse: Israel says imposing 'total' Gaza blockade in battle against 'beastly people' (Reuters):

JERUSALEM, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Israel is escalating measures against the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to a “total blockade” including a ban on admitting food and fuel, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday, describing this as part of a battle against “beastly people”.

posted by kmt at 3:57 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's probably worth mentioning that Defense Minister Gallant was fired by Netanyahu this past spring for objecting to the right-wing plan to take power from the Supreme Court because it "poses a clear and immediate threat for Israel's national security." Protests (and pressure from Biden, apparently) forced Netanyahu to reinstate Gallant a few weeks later.

And now this. There will be an investigation into how this attack happened with all of Israel's infiltration, technology and massive control over Gaza, and I'd bet good money Gallant will be the primary sacrificial lamb.
posted by mediareport at 5:13 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd guess Gallant is also under tremendous pressure because of the above to show extra special mercilessness.
posted by mediareport at 5:15 AM on October 9, 2023

Siege - let's be clear: starvation of civilians - as tactic: was a war crime when Assad's government did it, when Putin's government did it, and no matter the scale of the war crime and murderous atrocity committed by Hamas, will be a war crime when, if as they say they will, Netanyahu's government do it.
posted by lalochezia at 5:27 AM on October 9, 2023 [40 favorites]

if as they say they will, Netanyahu's government do it.

I don't think you have to worry - I read that as bluster aimed at his own voters. Netanyahu literally does not have the ability to enact a blockade on Gaza - there is a 12 kilometer border between Gaza and Egypt that he does not control. All Israel can do - as any sensible nation should - is focus on securing their border against continued attempts at incursion, which means sealing it with military presence until the security situation is stabilized.
posted by xdvesper at 5:53 AM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Don't direct your energy toward other members at all, in fact.

I understand this as a general rule, but do think we should be allowed to ask questions about a user's specific comments, if done respectfully. For example, I'd love to ask the user who described Gaza as "not a prison...a surprisingly typical developing world city" to let us know when they were in Gaza and for how long, and think that should be allowed, as I've never heard or seen that said before from a Gazan and am very interested to hear more about that (to me) very unusual perspective. I mean, I know people create vibrant culture and figure out ways to live creative lives under the worst kinds of oppression, so am interested to learn more about that comment.
posted by mediareport at 5:57 AM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

xdvesper, I think the point is that doing all you can to block food to a civilian population is itself a war crime, whether or not that population finds other ways to get its food.
posted by mediareport at 6:01 AM on October 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

there is a 12 kilometer border between Gaza and Egypt that he does not control

Which is sealed off just as tightly, if not more so, than the Israeli-side crossings. Egypt has not been a great friend to Gazans over the years, I'm sorry to say! Egypt has its own misgivings about Hamas, etc. Unfortunately no great relief from any Israeli action is going to come to Gaza from the southern border.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:15 AM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

as any sensible nation should -. I implore everyone to understand that this conflict is not between two states with full sovereignty and should not be treated as such, conceptually or practically.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:16 AM on October 9, 2023 [21 favorites]

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think if one has the ability to leave Gaza at will, their experiences are not comparable to those of someone who lives there.
posted by kat518 at 6:34 AM on October 9, 2023 [15 favorites]

It is a surprisingly typical developing world city

There aren't many available, but here are a few Google street view pictures of the Gaza strip:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/oXNnBpRZPkyBt2V66
https://maps.app.goo.gl/1kMyaF6pyZJ8vYgc7
https://maps.app.goo.gl/2RwkLyNZmVLni7J76
posted by Lanark at 6:39 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here is a Turkish TV tourist guide to Gaza from 4 years ago.
posted by interogative mood at 6:52 AM on October 9, 2023

"Life in Gaza is cool and fun, and here's a tourist guide to prove it" is certainly a take.
posted by sagc at 7:03 AM on October 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

there is a 12 kilometer border between Gaza and Egypt that he does not control

Which is sealed off just as tightly, if not more so, than the Israeli-side crossings

Here's a UN report on "Movement in and out of Gaza 2022":

Incoming goods - General goods (excluding fuel and gas)

* In 2022, fewer goods entered from Israel into Gaza, for a total of 74,096 truckloads. While commodities entering from Israel more than doubled compared with the average for the first seven years of the blockade, in 2022 they were 26 per cent below the annual average of 100,477 truckloads between 2015 and 2021.

* The Egyptian authorities more than doubled the volume of goods allowed into Gaza through their border, letting 32,353 truckloads in, up from 14,974 in 2021. This is more than five times the annual average of 5,918 truckloads recorded between 2015 and 2021 and the largest figure since monitoring began.

* Overall, 106,449 truckloads of imported goods were allowed to enter Gaza through any of the borders. This is about 12 per cent above the 95,335 truckloads that entered in 2021 and slightly higher the annual average of 106,369 truckloads that entered between 2015 and 2021.

So it looks like about 30% of goods into Gaza come in from Egypt.
posted by gwint at 7:11 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I could maybe understand how Gaza before and after 2007 might be very different experiences, for example.
posted by mediareport at 7:16 AM on October 9, 2023

The Palestinians could have had a deal in 1979 at Camp David but they turned it down. They had another opportunity under Clinton with an agreement that would have shared administration of Jerusalem, but Arafat backed out at the last minute. Rabin could have gotten a deal done but Israeli fanatics assassinated him. There could have been a deal in 1949 with some land swaps but the Arab states decide to block Palestinians from negotiating anything because Jordan wanted Transjordan and Egypt wanted Gaza. Right after Israel won in 1967 they said at last the Arabs will have to make peace — call us when you want to make a deal, no one called until Saddat in 1976. Then Saddat got murdered.

isn't the average age in Gaza right now like 19 years old?
posted by JimBennett at 7:39 AM on October 9, 2023 [19 favorites]

the violence is abhorrent but i do not expect people who were born with their backs against the wall and have never known anything else to make rational decisions.
posted by JimBennett at 7:46 AM on October 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

It hasn't been mentioned here, but this attack occurred during the holiday of Jewish holiday of Shmini Atzeret / Simchat Torah, which is one of the major holidays on the Jewish calendar. Within the Orthodox community outside of Israel, people only learned about the attacks piecemeal, because we didn't have access to electronic media. In my synagogue we heard fairly early, because we have a hatzala ambulance driver in our congregation who saw it on CNN at the hospital and told our rabbi, who made an announcement with the little he knew. Others found out later in the day, through friends of friends. I'm on the Upper West Side in New York City, with dozens of synagogues, and you could almost see the ripple effect - it's a holiday built around dancing and celebration, and no one knew what to do. There's a part of the service where there's a singing call and response between members of the congregation. In the synagogue my stepson goes to, they have a tradition of dividing those in fun ways - for example, all people who are Cohens, then everyone answers. All the people who have been members of the shul for more than 20 years. All the Mets fans. Lefties. They asked for all the people who have family members in Israel to do the calling. And then - no one sang the response. In a shul filled with easily over 150 people, it turned out there wasn't a single person there who didn't have a family member who lives there. No one knew if they had a family member who was killed, who was wounded, who was kidnapped. Yesterday, when the holiday had ended within Israel but not yet outside its borders, people were asking rabbis if it was okay to ask their non-Jewish neighbors or doormen to call their parents and siblings to see if they were safe. If it matters to anyone here, my stepson and his wife live there. All of my husband's siblings are there (his mother was born in Jerusalem in the 30s). We spent last night on WhatsApp and on the phone.

I came here late last night because this is one of the places I get my news after events. I expected to see ongoing links as things had progressed. I did not expect to see a thread that not only had no links, but one that read like a thread you would see after an Israeli attack.

700 Jews were killed in one day - the largest Jewish civilian death toll in one day since the Holocaust. And since it took place, Jewish communities in the West have seen upticks in incidents tied to the conflict. Thank G-d only vandalism, so far. We need to take care not to conflate Israel and Israeli policies with Jews and Judaism. They are completely separate. And by extension of that, I know we're not supposed to conflate Israeli deaths with Jewish deaths. And yet. At a time when violent anti-semitism is on the rise around the world, and when people who hate Jews have no problem conflating them, when are we allowed to talk about it? This was an act of war aimed directly and almost entirely against civilians. There are videos of unarmed Jewish people being rounded up that are being disseminated by the people responsible for the roundups, people who call us Jews interchangeably with Zionists, and it feels like we are required to think that this is entirely geopolitical, nothing to see here. It's become distasteful to see Jews as Jewish victims if they live in Israel.

The amount of sympathy for Palestinians in this thread is understandable. And necessary. But the lack of sympathy for Israelis here is palpable. Hamas does not represent all Palestinians. We can't conflate that either. It does no one any favors.

I'm bowing out of this thread. I'm not looking for a fight. I'm certainly not saying Israelis are, or will be, the only victims, or the only ones that matter. But I wanted to remind people that people like me are here.

I'm praying for peace.
posted by Mchelly at 8:00 AM on October 9, 2023 [106 favorites]

the lack of sympathy for Israelis here is palpable

Fwiw, I spent a significant amount of time yesterday looking at horrible videos and sobbing. I have relatives in Tel Aviv right now. I'm trying very hard to be reasonable, but hearing one of my relatives thinks we should "burn Palestine to the ground" has been hugely difficult, so yes, while I'm very much aware of the bodies in the streets and those horrible mob scenes in Gaza, I'm also doing my best to remain primarily focused on making sure Palestinians are not dehumanized and destroyed even more than they have been over the last - jesus, how many years? It's not an easy balancing act, I admit.
posted by mediareport at 8:16 AM on October 9, 2023 [25 favorites]

Friendly reminder—-and this is not directed at anyone in particular—-that there are about 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. They’re about a fifth of the total population.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:28 AM on October 9, 2023 [24 favorites]

It is a surprisingly typical developing world city

Although it's one where you have to explain to your children the whole death comes from the sky thing, which I imagine takes a toll. Although I guess that has too often been the case for developing world cities in the crosshairs of imperial powers all over the world?
posted by clawsoon at 8:34 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

So it looks like about 30% of goods into Gaza come in from Egypt.

Which, notably, is quite a different thing from the amount of people that are able to move between Gaza and Egypt.

In any event, Israel just bombed the Rafah crossing and it has been closed. So whatever limited interchange that crossing provided has been cut off.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 9:17 AM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

MisantropicPainforest

I'm not really sure why you think that's relevant, could you expand on that a bit?

Israel cannot absorb the entire Palestinian population as Israeli citizens and remain a Jewish religious/ethno state.

And that's the entire justification for Israel existing as Israel, to have a place of refuge for Jews in case of Holocausts. Giving that up would not only be unacceptable to the average Jewish Israeli citizen but would eliminate the entire reason for Israel to exist at all.

And for all that I'm bitterly opposed to the current Israeli government and its policy of genocide, I remain sympathetic to Jews worldwide who support the idea of Israel as a religious/ethno state. Jews have been the victims of pogroms and genocide for thousands of years, it is entirely reasonable for Jews to want a place of refuge. I get that and support it insofar as I can support the idea of any religious/ethno state.

But the fact that Israel has permitted a minority of Palestinians to be citizens isn't relevant to anything. Israel will not, and cannot, permit any Palestinian who wants it to become an Israeli citizen.

That's why talk about a one state solution was never anything but talk about genocide in disguise. There can't be a single state occupying all the territory involved, not if it's going to be a Jewish religious/ethno state. And if Israel isn't going to exist as a place of refuge for Jews worldwide then why bother with it at all?
posted by sotonohito at 9:31 AM on October 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Amber Noelle on Twitter (I refuse to call it 'X'):

Just really embarrassed at the number of Americans right now sitting in a little comfy chair in their safe little home with a little beverage and furiously typing things like “ALL CITIZEN DEATHS ARE NECESSARY COLLATERAL”

posted by non canadian guy at 9:55 AM on October 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Just to add to my note above about visiting Gaza in recent times. It absolutely had a lot of poverty, misery and problems. Things had not been improving . I'm not going to give any more details about when and with whom at this time given the situation. I only wanted to point out that it was different than my expectations and that as with everything the picture you get from news reports is an extreme simplification and often leaves out the nuances and details of reality. I think that one of the reasons this conflict is hard to resolve and hard to even talk about is this inability for news programs to go into these subtleties and when they try they get attacked.

The decision by Israel to turn off the water supply and implement a complete blockade is wrong as is the refusal to provide for the safe evacuation of civilians / refugees. Israel could setup temporary housing in the West Bank or in the Negev. I don't want to see more Palestinians relocated from their homes as this has tended to become a permanent thing, but I prefer that to the idea of two million people trapped without food or water and no means of escape during a blitz.
posted by interogative mood at 10:09 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Haaretz
In an editorial places the responsibility 100% on Netanyahu when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions.
posted by adamvasco at 10:15 AM on October 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

archive.ph version of above op-ed.
posted by jquinby at 10:18 AM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

That's why talk about a one state solution was never anything but talk about genocide in disguise. There can't be a single state occupying all the territory involved, not if it's going to be a Jewish religious/ethno state
Whoa. All of us—-including Israelis—who advocate a one state solution are decidedly not advocating genocide. I have the strong conviction that there should be 0 ethnostates in the world.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:27 AM on October 9, 2023 [24 favorites]

Al Jazeera's live feed is one way to keep up with developments:

Ireland rejects suspending EU aid to Palestinians
Ireland has called on the European Commission to clarify the legal basis for suspending aid to Palestinians and voiced opposition to halting the assistance...

Al-Qassam Brigades threatens to execute Israeli captives
Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades have threatened to execute Israeli captives if Israel continues to bombard and kill civilians in Gaza. “Any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met regretfully by executing one of the captives in our custody, and we will be forced to broadcast this execution,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the brigades, which represent the armed wing of Hamas...

Israeli army says attacks on Gaza to continue even if harm reaches captives
The Israeli army radio has reported that military airstrikes on Gaza will continue, even if that bombardment threatens the lives of Israeli captives. “Attacks on the Gaza Strip will be carried out powerfully and widely, even at the cost of harming Israeli hostages who are in captivity in Gaza.” The report, however, clarified that Israeli forces would avoid attacking areas where intelligence indicates captives are being held.
posted by mediareport at 10:51 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, that human shield mustache-twirling should help out whoever's regretfully preparing the Air Tasking Order.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:55 AM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

FYI for anyone wondering about water access to Gaza what with the area being practically next door to one of the busiest shipping routes in the world I finally remembered I've got access to the sum knowledge of the world in my pocket which let me know Gaza has been under Israeli naval blockade since 2007. Only a small Palestinian fishing fleet is allowed to come and go.
posted by Mitheral at 11:16 AM on October 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

“The day the latest war started,” Garrett Bucks, The White Pages, 09 October 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 11:21 AM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

One of the most infuriating things about media coverage of Palestine is the constant insistence that there are just 2 sides to the argument just because that is STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE for all journalists. The ugly truth is that there are always at least 5 sides involved: the political parties, the religious leaders, the actual people living on both sides and then the various vested interests from outside states.
If it was as simple as getting two sides to agree, they would probably have worked something out by now.
posted by Lanark at 11:33 AM on October 9, 2023 [19 favorites]

I also am morally against the establishment of ethnostates. I don't think a Jewish ethnostate is an effective way to provide refuge to persecuted minorities, and I'm not convinced by the claim that there's no point in having an Israel if it's not an ethnostate. Maybe that's an argument that could have been made before Israel was founded there, but I'm not comfortable in making a statement like that about a group of people who already live there and whose living there precedes their birth. That ship has sailed, there is already an Israel.

That's theory. As a practical matter, however, if we are framing the discussion as "Should there be one state or two states?" then without considering anything else, one state means Palestinian subjugation. Two states, without considering anything else, also means subjugation. That subjugation just get shifted off into a South African style Bantustan. It doesn't matter if there are one state or two states, without respect for the Human Rights of one's neighbors.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:16 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

a ban on admitting food

wut
posted by Flunkie at 12:17 PM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have a personal connection to Israel as well. My family and I were allowed to emigrate from the USSR in the 80s through the Jewish Resettlement Program that sought to rid the empire of Jews, by letting them move to Israel. The train took you to Rome, where a connecting flight would then take you on to Israel. We got off at Rome, sold our tickets, and applied for political asylum in the US. Other members of my extended family finished the trip. So, I understand what it means to say that Israel provides a refuge for persecuted Jews. Without the fiction of a Jewish Homeland, there would not be an easy way for countries to purge themselves of Jews like they did with my family.

I don't think this is a healthy way to run a geopolitics.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:32 PM on October 9, 2023 [19 favorites]

It would be great to have a refuge for persecuted people in general, but how and where?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:35 PM on October 9, 2023

I also am morally against the establishment of ethnostates

People really don't seem to think of a "democratic ethnostate" as the contradiction it is, at least in the liberal-democratic sense that most of us envision.
posted by klanawa at 12:39 PM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

The one state solution means abandoning the project of creating a state that is predominantly Jewish culturally and allowing for a multi-ethnic / multi-religious country with shared power. That is a really hard sell and gets to a deep kind of existential crisis at the heart of Israel. The whole national mythology is wrapped up in the idea of the Jewish state, I don't know how you would even begin to get the kind of cultural shift necessary for a one state solution to work.

Consider how Americans struggle with a concept of an "American identity and culture". We've made some progress on multi-culturalism, but I think that a bipartisan supermajority of Americans probably would reject the notion of moving away from the melting pot view that immigrants will eventually assimilate and adopt most of our values with limited expressions of the old world in terms of food, religion and a cultural festival.

I think the only solution will be some kind of two or three state solution. Israel, Gaza and the West Bank being the components and perhaps some kind of weak federal system among them to manage common resources, protect minorities and maintain the peace. It is impossible to get there though with Hamas. They have rebuffed every attempt to get them to accept the idea of a two state solution and negotiate towards that end.
posted by interogative mood at 12:51 PM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

To be clear, I'm not advocating a one-state or a two-state solution. But what I've learned from listening to Palestinians on the subject is that the key dispute is not how many states there should be, but whether Palestinians should be allowed to live as equal human beings. Multiple states don't work either if Israeli leaders don't accept that basic idea.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:59 PM on October 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

In addition to the no food/no fuel stated by Reuters, Josh Marshall adds no water.

He only mentions it in passing, with no references, so I am not sure if he's just accidentally assuming the "no water" part or if he got it from somewhere.
posted by Flunkie at 1:11 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

The NYT is also saying no water. And they give it as a direct quote from the defense minister, along with another addition (no electricity) to what Reuters said:

The announcement by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” has led aid agencies to warn of a worsening humanitarian crisis.

posted by Flunkie at 1:20 PM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

From the BBC on Aug 14:

As tens of thousands of Israelis continue to join weekly protests over the government's highly controversial plans to change the justice system, as many as one in three citizens is thinking of leaving the country, according to a poll.

Professor Chen Hofmann is one of them. Together with his wife and their children, they start the Jewish Sabbath with a meal together every Friday evening. Nowadays they end it at a huge anti-government rally.

"It's not our ritual to go and protest in the streets but we're forced to because we're losing our country, that's how we feel," says the doctor, while attending the weekly Saturday night demonstration in central Tel Aviv.

The leading Israeli radiologist is now in the process of moving to a hospital in the UK. Moreover, he is trying to persuade other members of his family, who all have European passports, to consider leaving too.
[…]

Who knows how the war will affect the desire to leave.
posted by jamjam at 1:21 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Gaza gets most of its water and electricity from Israel and those pipes and power lines have been turned off. There is limited local power via generators, rooftop solar installations and limited water supplies from wells and cisterns. The blockade is also stopping food, medicine and any humanitarian supplies from coming into Gaza. They are also not allowing any one to leave -- there are no humanitarian corridors or refuge centers being setup. Israel has struck over 1000 targets in Gaza in the last 24 hours. I don't know what is going to happen next and I'm not going to make any predictions because when I ponder those things it makes me sick.
posted by interogative mood at 1:29 PM on October 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

The Reuters live camera shows the impact of the power cuts as it is currently nighttime. Most of the city is blacked out. In the distance you can see the lights of Israel and occasionally burst of activity over it as Iron Dome defense activates to try to stop rocket attacks. You will also hear or see explosions about once every 5-10 minutes.
posted by interogative mood at 1:45 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

It would be great to have a refuge for persecuted people in general, but how and where?

In theory that is all countries who have signed onto the UN refugee protocol. There is a lot of gamemenship currently by most to side step or deny the obligations they have agreed to though.
posted by Mitheral at 2:03 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Here in NZ my (Jewish) partner helps resettle refugees, in the past couple of years she's had a Gazan family, and a 3rd generation Palestinian double refugee family (grandparents were marched into Syria in 1948, grandkids now refugees from Syria). I think it's worth noting that people who were expelled by Israel don't get citizenship of the countries they were forced into, nor do their children.

So some Palestinians are making it into international refugee programs, certainly in NZ's case we don't take nearly enough
posted by mbo at 2:13 PM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

The NYT is also saying no water. And they give it as a direct quote from the defense minister, along with another addition (no electricity) to what Reuters said

Here's the full quote:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba.
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he adds.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:17 PM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yoav Gallant who called them "inhuman animals" is the guy who wrote this in 2016. This crisis is brining out the worst in people.
posted by interogative mood at 2:25 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Gallant

What a wretched (false?) cognate.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:27 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

> “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he adds.

hard yikes to that
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:56 PM on October 9, 2023 [15 favorites]

I apologize if comments like this have been removed earlier for being too US-centric, but while I am not an expert on the Israel/Palestine conflict (though, I have my opinions and sympathies in all of this), I can't help but see what's unfolding in terms of 9/11. An asymmetrical assault on the population of a militarily powerful, nuclear nation. Heartbreaking. Horrific. Easy (for some) to imagine themselves killed in such a way.

But then the misinformation, the baying for blood, the lock step insistence on nothing less than absolute innocence (less now than before, I suppose), the shock and anger overwhelming any sense of a history or actions that might have brought us to this moment and, of course, the untold misery and death to come, inevitably outweighing the initial assault in its sheer force and cruelty. Whatever sympathy might exist in the immediate aftermath turned to dust in days, spitting on the memories of the dead in a quest for vengeance and extermination.

My heart breaks for anyone who loses someone they care about in such a sudden and bloody way. I don't think I'll ever understand feeling cold to it, and I can't imagine that understanding the larger notions of power and control and your own passive(?) complicity in it makes the experience any less miserable. It's just strange to get older, to see the same mistakes repeat themselves over and over again within your own lifetime without any reflection from those with the power to actually enact change.
posted by StopMakingSense at 3:19 PM on October 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yoav Gallant who called them "inhuman animals" is the guy who wrote this in 2016. This crisis is brining out the worst in people.

I suspect he might say that he's just doing what he said he would back in that 2016 article:

First, we must protect our people. Over more than three decades as a combat soldier, I learned that we have no choice but to fight terrorism and cut its branches without hesitation or compromise.

"Without hesitation or compromise": Given the Israeli state's commitment to collective punishment, and the number of times he must have ordered or carried it out in three decades of combat, what's happening today is a straightforward application of the principle he stated in 2016. Remember, that was just 2 years after the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers led to 2,000 Gazans being killed. His 2016 op-ed is outlining both the carrot (promises to build housing for the "good kind" of Arab Israelis) and the stick.
posted by clawsoon at 3:24 PM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Which brings us back to genocide.

What, precisely, is the goal of the Israeli government if not genocide?

They've closed off Gaza. They refuse to let anyone leave. They've cut off all food, power, and water. And they're bombing the fuck out of it.

1,000 "targets" in 24 hours is close to carpet bombing for a place as small as Gaza.

So what's the outcome of trapping 2 million people in a tiny place without food, or water, and then bombing those people?

If Israel isn't seeking genocide I'd really like to know what they think they're doing.
posted by sotonohito at 3:35 PM on October 9, 2023 [31 favorites]

‘We will never be safe’: A day of bombing in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp
posted by clawsoon at 3:47 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Israel's president is posting video clips on Twitter of his military's bombing of what appear to be residential neighborhoods. The bombing seems to me a clear war crime that's effectively the mass murder of civilians, including children.

EU leaders are now retracting the earlier statement from a Hungarian EU commissioner that aid to Palestinians will be halted:

“There will be no suspension of payments” at the moment, a terse European Commission statement said late Monday, five hours after EU Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi had said that all payments from the development program for Palestinians would be “immediately suspended. All projects put under review. All new budget proposals … postponed until further notice.”

...EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also criticized Varhelyi, insisting that “the suspension of the payments — punishing all the Palestinian people — would have damaged the EU interests in the region and would have only further emboldened terrorists.”

Individual EU countries like Germany and Austria have "said they were suspending development aid for the Palestinian areas for the moment."
posted by mediareport at 3:48 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

The thing that has always bothered me is that several countries (Jordan, Syria etc) don’t give citizenship or allow integration of Palestinian refuges. These are people who have been living as refugees since 1948. Gaza itself has something like 11 refugee camps. It seems that it’s useful to keep a population that’s always an “other”. It’s really confusing to me and I feel Palestinians have been used as pawns for decades. The who situation right now is so devastating.
posted by misterpatrick at 3:52 PM on October 9, 2023 [15 favorites]

So we’re on to the later part of my earlier comment:

So if I understand the situation, Hamas has ruthlessly slaughtered women and children in response to the Israelis ruthlessly slaughtering women and children to which offense the Israelis will respond by ruthlessly slaughtering women and children? Excellent. Great stuff all around.

I’m sure Hamas will find a way to return the favor of slaughter. Or Hezbollah. Or Iran. And then we'll go around again.
posted by Galvanic at 4:12 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

The thing that has always bothered me is that several countries (Jordan, Syria etc) don’t give citizenship or allow integration of Palestinian refuges.
posted by clavdivs at 4:29 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’m sure Hamas will find a way to return the favor of slaughter. Or Hezbollah. Or Iran. And then we'll go around again.

Over the last couple of decades, Israel has being winning the slaughter at a ten-or-twenty to one ratio. Based on the rhetoric so far, it doesn't seem like this will be an exception.
posted by clawsoon at 4:37 PM on October 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

Gallant is in Netanyahu’s coalition so his views have always been right wing; but he’s about as moderate and pragmatic as you see in that group. I think his comments and actions suggest that the hard liners are currently in total control and operating with no restraints.
posted by interogative mood at 4:38 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Israel has being winning the slaughter at a ten-or-twenty to one ratio

I don’t even know what that means. Are there league standings on slaughter? An Olympics? An FA cup?

Is one side “right” because they’ve killed fewer children?
posted by Galvanic at 4:42 PM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

https://www.metafilter.com/200955/Hamas-Strikes-Israel-in-Unexpected-Assault#8464196

"Absolutely shocking operational and intelligence failure by Israeli security services. This is something that *should* trigger resignations (all the way up to Netanyahu), but won't."

Really appreciate&love your "*should*" statement, Pseudonymous Cognomen

Perhaps there are those amongst us who remember a [now {thankfully}] historical figure, Condoleezza Rice, who--during her Tenure--directly presided-over the improvidence leading-up-to (and during) the events that unfolded in the USofA on 11/9/2001.

In the face of the wont of her lack of active efforting, she was awarded the Title of "Secretary of State" in the Next Administration.

Unfortunately, it is my {reluctlantly} sincerest belief that neither Bibi--nor Crew--will not be held responsible (or irresponsible) in these events *shrugs*

We're in a World of Shit :(
posted by splifingate at 4:48 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Galvanic—people are rightful upset that you continue to frame this as (group A fights with group B, then B fights with A, and around we go!) without acknowledging that group A kills many many more than B and is war more powerful than B. Obviously framing them as equals benefits one group more than the other and obscures the truth.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:51 PM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don’t even know what that means. Are there league standings on slaughter? An Olympics? An FA cup?

It's an acknowledgment of the disproportionate loss of life by Palestinians in the ongoing conflict.

Is one side “right” because they’ve killed fewer children?

I'm not sure what you're going for here. What I will say though is that most people do look on the killing of children and other innocents as evil, and doing so in greater proportion as more evil. (Most people would hold this judgment regardless of which side of a conflict is killing children and innocents.) But again, I'm not sure what you're going for with that particular rhetorical question.
posted by kensington314 at 4:55 PM on October 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

Israel has being winning the slaughter at a ten-or-twenty to one ratio
I don’t even know what that means. Are there league standings on slaughter? An Olympics? An FA cup?

It means that Israel has killed ten or twenty times as many people as Hamas has.

I don't know how true that is, but to be blunt, I suspect that you knew exactly what was meant, and I don't think that snarkily pretending otherwise, seemingly as some sort of attempt to reframe the meaning as trivializing due to the use of the word "winning", isn't really a particularly good look.
posted by Flunkie at 5:01 PM on October 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

Gallant is in Netanyahu’s coalition so his views have always been right wing; but he’s about as moderate and pragmatic as you see in that group.

So moderate that Netanyahu fired him last spring for daring to criticize the judicial reform stuff, then rehired him under pressure. I'll say again that I suspect Gallant may become the scapegoat for the intelligence failures, and being in a precarious position like that may have hardened his stance to the point where he's spewing genocidal rhetoric now.
posted by mediareport at 5:04 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just like 9/11 where the Bush administration’s incompetency and failures to listen to intelligence services didn’t result in any consequence other than Congress handing them a bunch more power and letting them launch war on Iraq. Utterly depressing.
posted by interogative mood at 5:35 PM on October 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

I can't help but see what's unfolding in terms of 9/11. An asymmetrical assault on the population of a militarily powerful, nuclear nation.

It's the same dynamic, the use of atrocities against civilians as a way to provoke a massive response that inevitably mostly affects civilians, not the perpetrators.

It's a type of attack that works best when you have bad leadership that is basically guaranteed to respond in the most kneejerk and disproportionate way possible, which was the case in the US in 2001 and in Israel now. But even if you have someone better in office, it's hard to imagine many, if any, governments responding totally differently --the internal pressure to hit back is just too high.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:46 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I guess that Jordan/Syria/Lebanon want to avoid Israel simply herding the Palestinians across their borders (again) and see giving them citizenship as ignoring a great injustice.
posted by mbo at 6:09 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

"It means that Israel has killed ten or twenty times as many people as Hamas has."

Okay, so Israel is, as someone else put it, "winning" the slaughter. That doesn't reduce or justify the horror of what Hamas did; nor does what Hamas did reduce or justify the horror of what Israel is about to do (and has done in the past -- which didn't reduce or justify the horror of what Hamas/Israel/Hamas/Israel had done before that). And so on.

This urgent desire to "whatabout" and analyze the exact kill ratio of both sides for some kind of moral lever is just appalling.
posted by Galvanic at 6:13 PM on October 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Egypt intelligence official says Israel ignored repeated warnings of ‘something big’

In one of the said warnings, Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally called Netanyahu only 10 days before the massive attack that Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation,” according to the Ynet news site.

Unnamed Egyptian officials told the site they were shocked by Netanyahu’s indifference to the news and said the premier told the minister the military was “submerged” in troubles in the West Bank.

If true, more egg on the face for Netanyahu. I can't claim to be very knowledgeable about Israeli politics, but he was already very divisive for trying to force through judicial reforms (widely seen as breaking the basic social contract of Israel). And I hate to defend Bush, but the intelligence he received had some big holes (When? Where? How?) - in this case, Israeli intelligence knows to watch who and where but still gets flummoxed (on a holiday almost 50 years to the date of the 1973 Yom Kippur War!). There's no doubt heads will roll here.

Senior Hamas official says Iran, Hezbollah had no role in Israel incursion, but will help if needed

Denies it had to do with Israel-Saudi Arabia rapprochement but the recent Israeli actions
"He said even Hamas was shocked by the extent of the operation, dubbed “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm,” saying it had expected Israel to prevent or limit the attack."
Barakeh said Hamas has so far employed only a small number of its own forces. He said nearly 2,000 Hamas fighters have taken part in the latest fighting, out of an army of 40,000 in Gaza alone.

U.S. military presence near Israel is a blunt message to Iran and Hezbollah, officials say

Knowledgeable people I know regard Hezbollah as much more capable than Hamas. If they join in, this could spiral. The last time Israel launched an operation against Lebanon, they promised severe reprisals but weren't able to make the expected inroads.

Been seeing a lot of people react to Israel's reprisals with "Who can blame them?" but I don't think that's a stance consistent with condemning Hamas' attack as inexcusable. Either excessive violence is wrong on both sides or neither (not saying they're equal), but you can't pick and choose when it's ok based on who is committing it.
posted by ndr at 6:17 PM on October 9, 2023 [14 favorites]

This is probably a US centric view but what irks me about the #istandwithisrael crowd in the US that many of them have never raised a criticism about century long dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, then proudly condemn Hamas’ violence. Like when Btselem condemns Hamas there’s no doubt in my mind that they are doing so from a principled stance. But when Amy Schumer does it? Cmon.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:23 PM on October 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

In one of the said warnings, Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally called Netanyahu only 10 days before the massive attack that Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation,” according to the Ynet news site. Unnamed Egyptian officials told the site they were shocked by Netanyahu’s indifference to the news[...]

My respect for Netanyahu is so low that I can't trust my judgment here. Trying to be as generous as I can, does this suggest there was a part of him eager to benefit from an attack, but that maybe he assumed it would be much, much smaller, more like all the other little attacks over the years? Please set me straight. Is this silly conspiracist thinking?
posted by nobody at 6:36 PM on October 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

There's no doubt heads will roll here.

If recent history has taught me anything it is that leadership incompetence is now rarely punished.
posted by srboisvert at 6:38 PM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

If Israel isn't seeking genocide I'd really like to know what they think they're doing.

The government or the population? Netanyahu's thanking whatever horrible little version of God he holds in his heart that Hamas handed him the keys to holding onto power, and his administration is using what has been given them to the hilt. Much of the rest of Israel, as evidenced by at least some of the commentary posted above, is still in reaction mode - grieving and arguing. I agree with the 9/11 analogy - the people at the top know exactly what they want to do with what they've been handed and are moving fast to commit the country to the course they want before serious resistance can form.
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:44 PM on October 9, 2023 [13 favorites]

Is this silly conspiracist thinking?
I don't think so. I would be not at all surprised if this attack was seen as the perfect opportunity to pull out all the stops and say 'we're just defending ourselves, it's not our fault and we're just doing what any country would do when attacked in this way'.
posted by dg at 6:47 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

"He said even Hamas was shocked by the extent of the operation, dubbed “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm,” saying it had expected Israel to prevent or limit the attack."

This is what I've been mulling over and over. My fear has become that Hamas planned a large operation with the assumption that it would only be fractionally as "successful" as it was. Perhaps a hundred civilians killed and a dozen kidnapped. Then use those dozen to free thousands of Palestinian prisoners and get additional concessions from Israel that would benefit ordinary Gazans. Instead they perpetrated the largest killing of Jewish civilians in a single day since the Holocaust. They exposed massive Israeli intelligence failures. And most important, they left ordinary Israelis feeling, perhaps for the first time on a national scale, that their government and army could not protect them. The result of those feelings seem to be coalescing into a national level of fear, anger, and unity that makes the Israeli response and resolve dangerously unknown and unprecedented. It chills me to the bone.
posted by gwint at 7:01 PM on October 9, 2023 [43 favorites]

My respect for Netanyahu is so low that I can't trust my judgment here. Trying to be as generous as I can, does this suggest there was a part of him eager to benefit from an attack, but that maybe he assumed it would be much, much smaller, more like all the other little attacks over the years? Please set me straight. Is this silly conspiracist thinking?

I don't think he knew. His central claim to power is that he knows what he's doing and can keep Israel safe. For a major attack to succeed on his watch completely blows that away. If you gave him a choice, he would've rather succeeded in preventing the attack so the slow encroachment in the West Bank could continue. Now there's a lot of international attention on Israel and knives are out for him (see the Haaretz articles blaming him)

I also think if the Israeli intelligence apparatus knew this was coming, somebody would've said it by now. The culture in general is very outspoken and they are not afraid to air disagreements.
posted by ndr at 7:32 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah it seems super unlikely he knew. Whether he should have known is an entirely different and open question.
posted by Justinian at 7:45 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Trying to be as generous as I can, does this suggest there was a part of him eager to benefit from an attack, but that maybe he assumed it would be much, much smaller, more like all the other little attacks over the years? Please set me straight. Is this silly conspiracist thinking?

The unnamed Egyptians in that article seem to saying that he had gotten himself into such difficulties over the West Bank that this Gaza threat was a distant second place.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:00 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is this silly conspiracist thinking?

Not at all. I've beeen thinking the same last 24 hours - it is very similar to when the UK was 'surprised' by Argentina's assault on The Falkland Islands in '81, UK Govt. was warned overtly (by a group of British soldiers who'd been holidaying in Argentina several months before invasion) and 'missed' obvious intelligence (Argentina had ordered a lot of cold-water wetsuits a couple of years before - way bigger order than normal). But it suited them as UK was looking at a second summer of riots and all of sudden everyone's flag-waving...
posted by unearthed at 8:53 PM on October 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Israel massed troops in the West Bank. Then Hamas attacked from Gaza.

Analysts also point to a failure in political leadership. Netanyahu, they contend, allowed military preparedness to erode alongside Palestinian militant escalation as he pursued a contentious plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary — setting off months of furious protests that delighted the country’s adversaries...

The IDF issued rare public statements in recent months, warning that military deterrence was deteriorating. Netanyahu and radical members of his cabinet derided the officials as part of the protest movement, and the protesters as “anarchists,” asserting that the status quo with the Palestinians would hold...

The surprise attack started around 6 a.m., with a barrage of rocket fire followed by cross-border attacks. Yet it wasn’t until late afternoon that buses and trains were mobilized to ferry soldiers south. It took some 10 hours for the first troops to arrive in towns overrun by militants...

The Gaza border, it soon became clear, was minimally manned, and it took hours to redirect units stationed in the West Bank, which has been the main area of focus for the military this year. Palestinian militancy has surged in the occupied territory, from Jenin to Jericho, and Israeli raids have been increasingly common and deadly. Some in Netanyahu’s far-right government had called to annex the West Bank. Gaza, by contrast, appeared stable.

posted by BungaDunga at 9:00 PM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think if Israel goes into Gaza it could turn into an Iwo Jima like fight that makes the failed incursion into South Lebanon a huge success. The city is a maze of streets with 5-10 story concrete block buildings packed next to each other and under it all are hundreds of miles of tunnels and bunkers that Hamas has been digging for the last 10 years. If Israel knocks the buildings down the fighters will be able to use the rubble for cover and emerge at random places from their tunnels.
posted by interogative mood at 9:08 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Doesn’t Israel literally have the world’s most sophisticated intelligence operation? How could they have failed in such an epic way? I genuinely don’t mean this in a blaming way and hope it will not be taken as such. I just don’t understand.
posted by kat518 at 9:42 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

We have no reason not to believe that Hamas is acting logically in responding to their abject circumstances.

I'm going to say this as thoughtfully and kindly as I can, as someone that has experienced war.

Hamas' actions are not logical, and we cannot claim that the absolutely brutal assaults on civilians are a logical part of a war plan. I think that people are trying to do so out of a wish or need to uplift Palestinians during this time, and want to thus claim these are tactical moves, the horror isn't so horrifying, really, when you think about it, or somehow the horror is justified by what Israel has done.

It isn't, and it's not.

But what I will say is that some level of atrocities can be expected - not condoned, but expected - from undisciplined military forces, who are being whipped up into a propaganda frenzy in order to be willing to accept higher casualties. I join with others who think that Hamas did not anticipate this level of success, and so were unprepared for it.

In terms of "how did Israeli intelligence fail so badly", I think that the answer is probably Russian intelligence was acting to try to mask it, because this is a great distractor from the Ukraine situation.
posted by corb at 10:13 PM on October 9, 2023 [26 favorites]

Doesn’t Israel literally have the world’s most sophisticated intelligence operation? How could they have failed in such an epic way?

I can't find it now, but the speculation I've seen is that Israel got too reliant on electronic surveillance, and Hamas worked out how to avoid it by going fully analog. I doubt that's the full story, but it seems like it would have to be part of it.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:40 PM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

A 74 year old peace activist who spent her life trying to help Palestinians is among those missing.
posted by interogative mood at 10:45 PM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

So, collating all the info I can, my bad take is: Every drop of blood here, on both sides, is on Netanyahu's hands. He's been for working for this for 30 years, ever since he successfully called for Rabin's murder. This is what he wanted. This is his victory.
posted by longtime_lurker at 11:27 PM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

That is indeed a bad take because blood is always and forever first on the hands of the people who drew it. Yes, he is a revolting villain, but he can't be blamed for every drop. Leaders need followers, provocateurs need people to react, etc etc.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:31 PM on October 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

"Doesn’t Israel literally have the world’s most sophisticated intelligence operation? How could they have failed in such an epic way?"

Maybe nobody's intelligence operation is especially competent, so "best in the world" still isn't very good.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:10 AM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

Also, there's surveillance apparatus, and then there's the thinking about what's collected and drawing the right conclusions from it and getting the necessary people to accept those conclusions and act on them appropriately. The actual 'intelligence' part, where ideology and domestic politics and agency infighting also come into play.

Memoirs by Israeli retired intelligence officials about previous crises are full of that stuff; and so is the history of the CIA. Let alone the Soviet system.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:13 AM on October 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

In the airstrikes, Israel is talking as if their intelligence services know exactly which houses and mosques contain weapons and need to be blown up. But if they're in the middle of an intelligence failure when it comes to Gaza, how accurate is that knowledge likely to be?
posted by clawsoon at 3:57 AM on October 10, 2023 [19 favorites]

But if they're in the middle of an intelligence failure when it comes to Gaza, how accurate is that knowledge likely to be?

It's hard / impossible to predict what your opponent is going to do.

It's easy to react what your opponent has already done. Hamas launched 5,000 rockets at Israel in the first day alone and is continuing to fire more each day. Israel is striking back against launcher and rocket stockpile sites which can be back-traced from looking at satellite and aerial footage.

Israel uses a dud ordnance to door knock then a single small precision bomb. Secondary explosions positively identify a weapon stockpile hit. In some cases, the weapon stockpile was exhausted by the time the strike point was investigated, debated and approved, or were inert (rocket casings, launchers), or the intelligence was simply mistaken. But with hundreds of launch and stockpile sites it's a long list of targets that they have to work through before they're done. You'd also assume they are targeting high ranking Hamas officers and leaders.

If Israel didn't care about human casualties they'd just set up automated counter-battery artillery which automatically and immediately retaliates against the launch site the instant any rocket is fired from Gaza - this way, it would be harder for Hamas to launch a sustained stream of 5,000 rockets at once to overwhelm the Iron Dome system as their launchers would be destroyed in seconds. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't set this up as a counter-measure after this... it was only a matter of time before they managed to scale their launch volume so high that the Iron Dome could not defend against it.
posted by xdvesper at 4:55 AM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Israel has been working on that for at least a few years already.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:13 AM on October 10, 2023

> The city is a maze of streets with 5-10 story concrete block buildings packed next to each other and under it all are hundreds of miles of tunnels and bunkers that Hamas has been digging for the last 10 years.

i seem to remember a spate of articles from a good while back about the idf's devastatingly effective method of fighting in built-up areas: they walk through walls. soldiers blow a hole in a building, enter, and blow up every interior wall they encounter, blasting their way through people's apartments (often with those people still in them) until they get to the other side.

anyway.

i watched that video (why did i watch that video??) of soldiers from gaza attacking the screaming crowd at the music festival that was being held in the desert an hour's walk from gaza, or what would be an hour's walk from gaza if it weren't for the walls and soldiers and stuff in the way. and let me tell you, as a dissolute obnoxious festival-goer i reflexively identify with the folks being attacked and was horrified, beyond horrified, to see hamas soldiers gunning down obvious non-soldiers.

but then i'm like, wait, if i see civilians who remind me of me getting shot in a war and am horrified, i should be just as horrified for each and every one of the palestinian civilians gunned down by idf soldiers and blown up by idf bombers screaming overhead, the ten killed for every one, all the civilians i don't see and so — although i can identify with them on a thinking level — because i don't see them i don't have the chance to turn on that low-level animal part of my brain that sees other people and identifies with them at a mirror-neuron level deeper than cognition. and so my current strategy for thinking about this nightmare hangover from the nightmare 20^th century, this hideous post-credits scene of the worst movie ever made, is to always always always remind myself that i am for the civilians on both sides and against the generals on both sides.

anyway.

it feels like maybe israel is the side that could stop it all, because they're the ones with big armies and an air force and atom bombs and international recognition and everything, but maybe they're not able to stop it and maybe this nightmare is inevitable. but also even if it were evitable it seems pretty clear that that hideous bloodthirsty netanyahu prick and all his prick supporters will never accept any outcome except let's not mince words genocide.

(to be clear about my ignorance and outsider idiocy here, i let the part of my brain that shouts don't think about israel! don't think about palestine! drive things inside my head so often that i can't even type netanyahu's name without looking up how to spell it)

anyway.

here's that walter benjamin quote, written during the 20^th century's most wide-ranging genocide, you know, the one where the vast machinery of the modern industrialized state was bent toward managing an equally vast years-long europe-spanning pogrom. i have yet to find any better summary of the last century's brutality, that brutal century that just will. not. end., even though the calendar says it ended a generation ago. benjamin wrote this just a few months before genocide took him.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

anyway.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:17 AM on October 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

Hamas' actions are not logical, and we cannot claim that the absolutely brutal assaults on civilians are a logical part of a war plan.

There's no possible way you could know this.

There are so many potential effects and incentives for non state actors to commit violence. Anyone who argues otherwise is fooling themselves. It could be for international attention. It could be for internal recruitment. It could be due to factional infighting. It could be because they had an influx of arms and lower level recruits were demanding to use them. You have no idea, no one has no idea, so we shouldn't pretend we do know their precision decision making process. Read Kalyvas, or Adria Lawrence, or any of the scholars of civil war violence. There's a logic here and its foolish to dismiss it.

The British constantly paint the IRA (and really anyone). as irrational savages who just love murder, but it turned out that IRA bombings were the most effective tool to boost recruitment. Its
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:50 AM on October 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

From the Al Jazeera live feed (sorry, haven't figured out a way to link directly to the specific entry):

Willem Marx in West Jerusalem

While no nationwide polls have been done over the last couple of days about people’s views, every single person I’ve spoken to here has said they would like to pursue the most aggressive form of action against Hamas, essentially forgetting what the consequences might be for civilians in Gaza.

Some of them do acknowledge they have trepidation, but it’s not so much about the civilian casualties but more about the long-term strategic consequences for Israel following the kind of action that many people are calling for.

posted by clawsoon at 6:03 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Israel uses a dud ordnance to door knock then a single small precision bomb. Secondary explosions positively identify a weapon stockpile hit.

FYI, they have stopped doing the roof knocks. You can see it in videos, and also this item in the NYT has this quote from a military spokesman:

He also said that the Israeli Air Force was too stretched to fire the warning strikes — known as “roof knocks” — that it has fired in previous Gaza conflicts to encourage Palestinian civilians to leave an area before it is hit with larger missiles.

“Because we have right now this very, very big-scale event,” Colonel Hecht said, “we are stretched with our aerial assets, we’re stretched with our munitions.” It was not possible to verify his claim.

To my knowledge, the US and its partners never relied on roof knocks during urban fighting in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:07 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hamas' actions are not logical, and we cannot claim that the absolutely brutal assaults on civilians are a logical part of a war plan.

I think we will need to agree to disagree. There's an apparent logic to their attacks just like there was a logic behind the Al Qaeda attacks, or other atrocities against civilians that happen around the world (e.g., Boko Haram's attacks on schools). It's not senseless, it is meant to create certain outcomes, like provoking a disproportionate response, radicalizing people, making people leave an area, or whatever. It doesn't always work out the way the perpetrators intend, but it's a mistake to think that there isn't a plan involved.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:12 AM on October 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Hamas orchestrated the operation, but were clearly not the only group to participate in it. Those groups won't all be fully aligned with respect to their aims and how 'logical' they are, among other things.

There's a war on the rocks update out that discusses some of that.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:18 AM on October 10, 2023

We're starting to get a sense of the international scope of the murders and kidnappings:

via NYT:

* 11 U.S. citizens had been killed... An unknown number were still unaccounted for

* At least 18 Thai nationals have been killed and 11 have been taken hostage

* More than 10 British citizens are feared dead or missing

* Ten citizens of Nepal were killed in the attacks, Reuters reported.

* Seven Argentines had been killed and 15 were still missing.

* France has announced the deaths of four of its citizens in the attacks. The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that 13 others were still missing and that some of them “have very probably been kidnapped.”

* Two citizens of Ukraine were among those killed, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday.

* Shani Louk, a German-Israeli citizen, was abducted by Hamas militants while attending an open-air music festival

* Two Mexican nationals are still missing, according to Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.

posted by gwint at 6:44 AM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

the problem with logic and plans is they only work in a certain context with a certain set of assumptions - in a wider context, with the initial assumptions contested, so called logical actions can be proved to be quite irrational

gavrilo princip thought he was merely killing archduke franz ferdinand at the time - the logic and purpose of what he was doing got quickly lost as the consequences piled up

and therefore, we wait to see what our pile of consequences will be
posted by pyramid termite at 6:46 AM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

Good explainer from Shekhar Gupta.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:55 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

@corb, re: my comment about assuming Hamas is acting "logically":

I don't actually think we disagree really. I said that not as way of "uplift" or condoning the actions that targeting civilians. I don't condone them. I agree they are horrific. I wrote what I did further upthread because, as I'm sure many here are aware, whose violence is "logical" and whose violence is "illogical" often neatly lines up with who has an army attached to a nation state, and who does not. And this has a way of dehumanizing one side to the level of animals, as we've already seen in this conflict. Illogical violence is violence whose causes/motives/etc. you don't have to take seriously, because there are none - it's illogical, the work of a psychopath. And the only approach for dealing with a psychopath is annihilation, which I (and others) fear is what is going to happen here.

And just generally a guiding principle I have is to assume that most people choose their actions based on what they believe to be their best interests. That doesn't mean that people always engage in actions that are in their best interests, just that there is reasoning behind those actions. It's similar to my long-standing annoyance at the liberal argument "Oh, these poors who vote for the GOP are so dumb, don't they know the Democratic Econ policies would be better for them?" Like yeah, but that approach does little to understand why a given working class person might choose to vote for the GOP.

Anyway, I find it striking and heartening that in response to the NYTimes Editorial Board statement of how the US unite to help Israel, the top comments are currently quite measured/thoughtful rebuttals.
posted by coffeecat at 6:56 AM on October 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Ben Gvir’s ministry to buy 10,000 guns for civilian security teams
posted by clawsoon at 7:22 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think when people say "logical" or "explaniable" they don't mean that anyone at Hamas had a grand sweeping stratigic plan and saw murdering civilians as part of that.

At least that's not how I meant it.

I mean simply that Hamas was not acting out of sheer villanous malice and animalistic glee in murder.

People do things for reasons. Sometimes those are bad reasons, sometimes they are good reasons. But there's always a reson even if that reason is "the voices in my head told me to" or something equally out there.

It doesn't take a genius to see that Palestine is going to be killed. "Fuck 'em, I'll take an honor guard to hell" is a reason to attack any target you can. It's not a GOOD reason, but it isn't just frothing at the mouth antisemitism or whatever.

Saying that Hamas had reasons is not saying that attacking civilians is good, or justified. Merely that it is explainable, that there were causes and effects involved not just sheer random evil.

And I suspect there's at least two categories of reason involved. The leadership of Hamas is pretty well established to be a bunch of self centered grifters and criminals (not entirely unlike Netanyaho...) and likely are motivated by reasons of greed for money, greed for power, a desire for relevance, etc.

The individual Hamas member who actually carried out the attacks almost certianly had more personal reasons, a desire for revenge for dead friends and family, exestential despair at the inevitablility of the Palestinian people being eradicated culturally if not murdered to the last, and saw attacking ANY Israeli targets as a way to strike at an enemy they knew they could never truly harm deeply much less topple.

There's always reasons.

The IDF soldier who shoots a Palestinian child in the head has their reasons too, and those also aren't just sheer cackling cartoon villain type evil for the sake of evil.

There are a few truly deranged people who do evil because they just revel in evil, but most people who do something wrong see it as being justified or necessary in some way.

I don't think we can actually solve this via calm reason, there's too much volence and fully justified hatred on all sides for that. But by trying to understand WHY each side is acting as it does we can at least maybe see something.
posted by sotonohito at 7:31 AM on October 10, 2023 [15 favorites]

Every time I see a mildly famous queer person saying "collective punishment is a war crime" or "*all* civilian deaths are a tragedy", I find in the replies multiple versions of the same picture. Takei the latest. My university friends, holding a "Queers for Palestine" banner, edited with the alleged murder of a queer person beside it.

They stopped being queer officers after a year, I inherited that banner, I took it to protests, I got the messages from Zionists detailing just exactly how they usually liked to imagine their ideal dehumanised "HAMAS animal" hurting me. I moved on, it's been years. I didn't expect to suddenly see that picture again and again, in exactly the same context, people distracting from the crimes they actually support to graphically fantasize about what the "animals" in Gaza would allegedly do to people like us.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:45 AM on October 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

To me, there is an elephant in this room. There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people willing to put their name beside statements that "war is hell" and therefore war crimes are fine. People who openly say that teenage children are responsible for the votes of their parents, for or against. That it's unfeasible for the IDF to distinguish between militant and civilians and therefore they are within their rights to stop bothering to distinguish. That 10 minutes is plenty of warning for hundreds of people, many disabled by intentional mutilation programs, to entirely vacate entire apartment blocks. That it's totally okay to deny 9 people water if the 10th person living on that water might be a war criminal. People openly admitting that they know that Gazans have no-where to go, that active resistance to HAMAS might be fatal, but saying "that's a problem their leaders have to resolve".

I work in a high-school, tomorrow I'm going to try and run the numbers on what the average age of people in our school is. I'll let you know whether Gaza is more child-heavy than a high-school or less, but I really can't reliably estimate either way.
posted by Audreynachrome at 8:00 AM on October 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

I've been thinking about this a lot since the news broke last week.

The thing is, you can't judge oppressed peoples by the morality of the oppressors. In a vacuum, a lot of what Hamas is doing is immoral, but like all things in life, context matters.

The powerful have a moral imperative to act judiciously and slowly. That they usually do not, does not change this fundamental moral imperative.

The questions of Israel, Palestine, a one state solution, a two state solution, are all frankly meaningless distractions. Israel exists and isn't going anywhere. Israel has the power and they are going to use it. Palestinians being kept captive in Gaza are going to die.

I despair for a better world.
posted by rhymedirective at 8:10 AM on October 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

In a vacuum, a lot of what Hamas is doing is immoral, but like all things in life, context matters.

I guess I'm not sure what context would change my judgement about the gunmen massacring a music festival. I am not ignorant of the situation in Gaza, or the blockade, or the historical and ongoing wrongs against the Palestinian people, but I can't see how any of that changes anything about the morality of shooting festival goers at point-blank range. This isn't the collateral damage of a weaker party using indiscriminate weapons because its the only ones they have, it's just murder.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:27 AM on October 10, 2023 [24 favorites]

There is zero requirement to think that killing festival-goers is valid to condemn what is happening *now*, the collective punishment of Palestinians, which is the major thing we need to be talking about. The festival-goers are already dead. It's a war crime and a tragedy. 99% of people think killing Israeli dancers was wrong. A significantly lower percentage of people think that doing collective punishment, threatening to "bomb Gaza into the Stone Age" is wrong. That's why that should dominate the conversation. The tragic deaths of Israeli civilians are tragic, and mostly over. What we're looking at now is a discussion over exactly what proportion of the two million people in Gaza should be cleansed as retribution.
posted by Audreynachrome at 8:35 AM on October 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

I don't think it's fair at all to just expect people to move on from what literally just happened.

What's going to happen next has the potential to be much, much worse, but that doesn't mean I'm going to shrug my shoulders at comments along the lines of "well Hamas might have been justified here."
posted by BungaDunga at 8:41 AM on October 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

Did I say they were justified, or did I say that we should focus on the war crimes we can prevent, not the ones we can condemn?
posted by Audreynachrome at 8:43 AM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Well, "mostly over" was quite an overstatement. For the relatives of the 100+ folks who were brutally slaughtered at the Be'eri Kibbutz, or the 10-month old twins discovered hidden away 12 hours after their parents died fighting off Hamas terrorists, there's nothing about this that is "mostly over."

Netanyahu's ongoing murder of Gaza civilians is a war crime and needs to stop immediately, but minimizing the bloody carnage of the initial attack helps no one.
posted by mediareport at 8:43 AM on October 10, 2023 [19 favorites]

Also if you are in the US, your government is actively, and enthusiastically, supporting the punishment of Gaza.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:43 AM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Did I say they were justified

You definitely didn't, I was responding to a comment that said that Hamas' actions were only immoral in a vacuum. No, I think they're immoral in context. That's all.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:44 AM on October 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

Hamas rejected the idea of peaceful co-existence over and over again. They don’t want liberation they want annihilation of Israel. The people who want peaceful co-existence don’t have power in Gaza. It is awful.
posted by interogative mood at 8:44 AM on October 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

I'm in Australia, and my government is actively and enthusiastically supporting the punishment of Gaza. I voted against them, but I was outvoted. Do I deserve to be killed by a "surgically targeted" missile strike because my government is consistently Islamophobic? What if they say on the news that an ADF officer lived next door?
posted by Audreynachrome at 8:46 AM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Good reminder for folks in the U.S. to call their representatives today and tell them you're opposed to the bombing and want it to stop, given that our tax dollars support it. You can bet they're hearing lots of hawkish voices; the least we can do is be a voice for deescalation in their ear at this moment.
posted by mediareport at 8:54 AM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

The questions of Israel, Palestine, a one state solution, a two state solution, are all frankly meaningless distractions. Israel exists and isn't going anywhere. Israel has the power and they are going to use it. Palestinians being kept captive in Gaza are going to die.

It only took the English and the Irish 350 years or so to work things out, so there's still hope.
posted by clawsoon at 8:55 AM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Israel’s Channel 12 reports that Israeli officials warned their Egyptian counterparts against supplying aid to the besieged Gaza Strip, saying they would conduct airstrikes on trucks carrying supplies to the area.

Shortly after the announcement, convoys of fuel trucks and Egyptian goods due to enter Gaza via the southern border crossing with Egypt “retreated from the Rafah crossing,” said Channel 12. The crossing is closed indefinitely.

When contacted for comment about the threat of striking the aid trucks, an IDF spokesperson said they were aware of Channel 12’s report, but would not confirm whether they had issued the threat against the aid convoy.

posted by BungaDunga at 9:00 AM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Good reminder for folks in the U.S. to call their representatives today and tell them you're opposed to the bombing and want it to stop, given that our tax dollars support it. You can bet they're hearing lots of hawkish voices; the least we can do is be a voice for deescalation in their ear at this moment

Seconding this! I did it this morning, took four minutes to register this sentiment with two Senators and my Rep. Please call.
posted by kensington314 at 9:11 AM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

The US isn't going to pressure Israel to stop the collective punishment because that was, is, and will be our go to. From at least WWII through to today, we've collectively punished "enemy" cities (or whole regions) via bombing campaigns.

It's not even like the current government is trying to placate people like John Bolton, that's just how the people giving orders within and above the military think and act.
posted by Slackermagee at 9:16 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

It only took the English and the Irish 350 years or so to work things out

Speaking of Ireland, over the weekend Sinn Fein Foreign Affairs spokesperson Matt Carthy gave a fiery speech about Palestinian rights [full text included], specifically speaking to generations of Palestinians who can't wait any longer for their basic human rights; you can see a clip on Twitter here, which should be on the Sinn Fein TikTok account as well (don't have an account to search properly and can't see it there now). Then came this:

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald condemns Hamas attack on Israel as ‘truly horrific’

...Their comments reflected a hardening of position on Hamas from the initial statement issued by foreign affairs spokesman Matt Carthy on Saturday, when he said the attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians and military targets – and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza – must stop immediately.

“There is no justification for the killing of civilians on any side,” he said. However, Mr Carthy’s statement did not explicitly condemn the attack.
posted by mediareport at 9:16 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hezbollah ‘treads carefully’ as it shells Israeli position.
posted by clavdivs at 9:18 AM on October 10, 2023

Biden is about to give a speech on the current crisis. A live stream is here.
posted by interogative mood at 9:39 AM on October 10, 2023

*lowers expectations accordingly*
posted by mediareport at 9:43 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ben Gvir’s ministry to buy 10,000 guns for civilian security teams

“We will turn the world upside down so that towns are protected. I have given instructions for massively arming the civilian security teams,” says Ben Gvir.

Giving 10,000 guns and other combat gear to a bunch of unaccountable civilian fascists. Do they want a Rwanda genocide on steroids? Because that's how you get Rwanda genocide on steroids.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:00 AM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Israel's Coalition Heads Entrust Netanyahu With Forming Unity Gov't, Likud Says: "The coalition heads discussed National Unity Party's proposal, which conditioned its entry on the formation of a streamlined war cabinet excluding far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich."
posted by clawsoon at 10:05 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

> excluding far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

What about far-right minister Netanyahu?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:10 AM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

Archive link for the Ha'aretz article just above
posted by mediareport at 10:12 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do they want a Rwanda genocide on steroids?

"On [Ben-Gvir’s] first date with his future wife, they visited the grave of Baruch Goldstein, an extremist settler who, in 1994, had gunned down twenty-nine Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a holy site for Muslims and Jews in Hebron. Until recently, a photograph of Goldstein hung on the Ben-Gvirs’ living-room wall, at their home in the Kiryat Arba settlement in Hebron."

Lawfare: An Intelligence Failure in Israel, but What Kind?
posted by BungaDunga at 10:15 AM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

I guess I'm not sure what context would change my judgement about the gunmen massacring a music festival.

I think you should live in an area basically the size of Manhattan your entire life, without being allowed to leave, with only adequate supplies of water and food at the best of times, and being part of a majority in that place with no living memory of living any way else and no hope of a better future, and tell me what you might do in that situation.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:22 AM on October 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

Not kill children.
posted by gwint at 10:36 AM on October 10, 2023 [16 favorites]

While that might be a comforting thought, the real answer is that no one here knows what the hell they would do in that situation, me included.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:39 AM on October 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

Both sets of combatants seem to be operating with a working theory that if they kill enough of the people that the other side loves, the other side will stop killing people that they love.
posted by clawsoon at 10:44 AM on October 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

tell me what you might do in that situation

I guess I don't know, but I would hope that in that situation I wouldn't be given carte blanche to murder. Just because I can imagine myself violating my own sense of morality doesn't mean I have to proactively give it up.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:45 AM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think its pretty easy to draw a moral line here? Killing kids is never justifiable and any waffling on this will be used to exploit and kill by those with the most power. This conflict is incredibly complex but the moral line is pretty clear.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:47 AM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

it may be possible to understand why someone might decide to take revenge by mass-murdering a music festival but that doesn't mean we have to conclude that it isn't immoral.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:53 AM on October 10, 2023 [17 favorites]

Not kill children.

Then I guess you're not cut out for an exciting career in the Air Force.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has written about the psychological advantage of being the more technologically advanced side in a conflict, where you can murder children with the push of a button and not have to feel like a barbaric monster when you do it.
posted by clawsoon at 10:53 AM on October 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

i know what all of you would do - you'd type out screeds of existential political despair when the electricity was on
posted by pyramid termite at 10:56 AM on October 10, 2023 [26 favorites]

While that might be a comforting thought, the real answer is that no one here knows what the hell they would do in that situation, me included.

No, like - this is what is frustrating me about the rhetoric here, because it's a bunch of people who have never been in a war or occupation solemnly pronouncing about how it's unknowable to know how people would react in a war or occupation. Those of us who have been part of a war or occupation however are just kind of bewildered by this take, because you absolutely can know how people will react in a war, they largely react in very predictable ways.

War and occupation and despair are not some unknowable forces that no one has ever experienced. I may not know the numbers, but yeah, you can predict that some people will respond by attempting to brutally punish anyone even kind of related to the people who hurt them, and other people will draw moral lines and refuse to violate them, and it's not just "Oppressed people don't have morality" because that is its *own* dehumanization.

And yes, there are moral differences between accidentally killing children and intentionally killing children. JFC, I can't believe we are even arguing that.

Like: look, you can still say Israel did very bad things to Palestine and Palestinians, or that you would like Palestine not to face collective punishment, without somehow coming to this conclusion that no one can judge anyone who deliberately murders a kid. These are wild fucking takes and I don't know what they're serving here other than contrarianism.
posted by corb at 10:57 AM on October 10, 2023 [46 favorites]

And yes, there are moral differences between accidentally killing children and intentionally killing children. JFC, I can't believe we are even arguing that.

But is it an accident if you don't intend to kill children but you know that what you're about to do is going to kill children and you do it anyway? Is "collateral damage" a good enough excuse to lower your level of moral culpability? "I knew it was going to kill some kids, but aw shucks, I didn't really mean it"?
posted by clawsoon at 11:03 AM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

And yes, there are moral differences between accidentally killing children and intentionally killing children. JFC, I can't believe we are even arguing that.

The problem is, that in the US at least, many think that Israel only accidentally kills children and only Hamas intentionally does.

500 kids were killed in Israelis attack in 2014. How many of them were intentional? How many were accidental? These things are fundamentally unknowable.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:04 AM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

> Btw if anyone wants a humanizing take on Gaza, look up the episode that Anthony Bourdain did there (which appears to have disappeared from the Internet, unfortunately...).

This episode IS available on the internet! It is on Max, formerly HBOMax. Season 2 Episode 1, "Jerusalem". It is very good.
posted by MiraK at 11:10 AM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

even if it is exactly the same thing, that doesn't make it morally fine to do it just because you're ostensibly fighting for liberation, a worthy cause can't make that moral. If Ukraine started doing revenge Buchas in Russia, that would be immoral too.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:15 AM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

War and occupation and despair are not some unknowable forces that no one has ever experienced. I may not know the numbers, but yeah, you can predict that some people will respond by attempting to brutally punish anyone even kind of related to the people who hurt them, and other people will draw moral lines and refuse to violate them, and it's not just "Oppressed people don't have morality" because that is its *own* dehumanization.

corb, you're one of my favorite posters here, so I say this with a lot of respect: please don't quote me and then put words in my mouth. I never said "oppressed people don't have morality".

Furthermore, what I said is not for the benefit of or intended to be for an audience of oppressed people, it's for the people sitting around cheering on the Israeli right-wing genocidal hawks who are literally cutting off the water supply to Gaza and calling them "monsters".

It's easy to grow up in an internally-secure Western country and have the luxury of sitting on Metafilter in a warm and dry home with plenty of food in the fridge, typing comments (me included!) and tut-tut at Hamas and clutch your pearls and say you would never act that way, but who the fuck knows what 5 or 6 broad categories of people in occupation any one of us would turn out to be?
posted by rhymedirective at 11:16 AM on October 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

pres biden is on
posted by pyramid termite at 11:24 AM on October 10, 2023

even if it is exactly the same thing, that doesn't make it morally fine to do it just because you're ostensibly fighting for liberation, a worthy cause can't make that moral.

In case it needs clarification, I think killing kids is bad. What Hamas did the other day was horrific and indefensible. What Israel has done in the days since then is horrific and indefensible. What Israel did in 2014 is horrific and indefensible. When the Palestinians blew up school buses in the '70s, that was horrific and indefensible, too. I'm not arguing that it's okay if one side does it, or it's okay if it's done for the right reasons, or it's okay if it's collateral damage.
posted by clawsoon at 11:28 AM on October 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

it's for the people sitting around cheering on the Israeli right-wing genocidal hawks who are literally cutting off the water supply to Gaza and calling them "monsters".

This doesn't follow. You don't have to try to paint Hamas' actions as moral to condemn Israel's reprisals.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:28 AM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

'tut-tut' and 'clutch your pearls' have no place in this thread. Hamas orchestrated a wholesale massacre and if you find that difficult to condemn to the point you need to mock others who are able to, maybe log off for a while

It was not my intention to mock anyone (quite the opposite in fact!) and I have no specific posters in mind. I don't think I have failed in my attempt to communicate in this thread in a relatively dispassionate tone, and the "log off for a while" comment is weird. However, this'll be the last time I comment on this line of discussion so as to move on from it in this thread.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:46 AM on October 10, 2023

like so i have a notorious or whatever inability to stay on topic, but even i recognize that following the "how about we make this about events instead of each other?" guidelines in the note from tptb above is probably a good idea on this particular thread.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:57 AM on October 10, 2023 [15 favorites]

please don't quote me and then put words in my mouth. I never said "oppressed people don't have morality".

Sorry, to be clear, sometimes when I quote people I'm just grabbing a pull quote to discuss an area rather than necessarily addressing my statements to that person; you definitely didn't say that and I was more referencing general senses I'm getting, which is maybe not something to do in a contentious and heated thread.

I also will be really honest that I find this entire situation really agitating and am definitely seeing it through my own lens, as do a number of the other antiwar Iraq vets I know, and am definitely not at my best myself. Trauma is running through my brain; I haven't left the house since this started happening and a number of other folks I know have broken their sobriety or had similar effects. We also had a lot of connections with both Palestinians and Israeli anti-war refuseniks; this is hard in every possible way.

Personally, I know exactly where I would draw the line of not committing war crimes in a war, because I was in one and already had to make those decisions. People I care about already had to make the decision: what do you do when you witness someone you love killed in front of you, how do you react? Some people made the right choices, some made the wrong ones; I've also gotten to see how those choices impact them and destroy their souls fifteen, twenty years later.

I think it's difficult to have this conversation because we're all coming to it with such different experiences and expectations and are trying to do such different things. And even if people here aren't doing a thing, it's hard to keep experience of it happening out of our responses to each other. For example, I don't think anyone here has been hawkish or referring to Palestinians as deserving what's happening to them, but I think we all exist in other social media spaces where we see it. And so I don't know, these conversations seem like they have too many echoes and we're all cutting each other.
posted by corb at 12:02 PM on October 10, 2023 [34 favorites]

It is also easy to sit in your comfortable western home and invent justifications for the actions of Hamas or how you would react if your family, cousins, friends, and loved once were just butchered by Hamas soldiers who posted celebratory videos of their actions all over the Internet. I don't think you'd be open to a history lecture of how this is kinda maybe your fault or your governments. I don't think that would be effective at all in terms of attempting to calm people down, I suspect to the contrary it would make them more angry.
posted by interogative mood at 12:05 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think a lot of people are talking past each other in this thread (understandable). For one thing I don't think anyone has actually advocated that war crimes are a-OK from either side. I have seen some pretty disturbing Tweets from some academics chiding people mourning the violence for not being properly pro-decolonization, but I haven't seen that sentiment here, thankfully. But our President has just used the word "evil" and we all know that once one side is declared evil, it's essentially being declared psychopathic and worthy of annihilation. I don't approve at all of what Hamas did, but I'm also allergic to the language of good vs. evil, and what kinds of actions it can be used to justify.

corb, for whatever it's worth, I'm sorry you and your fellow vets are struggling right now.
posted by coffeecat at 12:24 PM on October 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

Several comments and its replies, deleted. Please avoid turning the thread into a 1-on-1 fight with someone else and allow others to continue the conversation.
posted by loup (staff) at 12:37 PM on October 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

It is also easy to sit in your comfortable western home and invent justifications for the actions of Hamas or how you would react if your family, cousins, friends, and loved once were just butchered by Hamas soldiers who posted celebratory videos of their actions all over the Internet. I don't think you'd be open to a history lecture of how this is kinda maybe your fault or your governments. I don't think that would be effective at all in terms of attempting to calm people down, I suspect to the contrary it would make them more angry.

"your fault or your governments [fault]" are two very different things, as critics of Israel are often reminded.
posted by JimBennett at 12:56 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

corb, for whatever it's worth, I'm sorry you and your fellow vets are struggling right now.

Ditto.
posted by kat518 at 12:56 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

"..was horrific and indefensible, too. I'm not arguing that it's okay if one side does it, or it's okay if it's done for the right reasons, or it's okay if it's collateral damage."

I can understand that vacillation. How Hamas killing its own people.
"These attacks by both Hamas and Fatah constitute brutal assaults on the most fundamental humanitarian principles. The murder of civilians not engaged in hostilities and the willful killing of captives are war crimes, pure and simple"
— Sarah Leah Whitson,
Middle East director for Human Rights Watch

what is Fatah position today
posted by clavdivs at 12:57 PM on October 10, 2023

I can understand that vacillation.

What vacillation? I thought I was pretty clear and direct.
posted by clawsoon at 1:01 PM on October 10, 2023

EU warns Elon Musk over ‘disinformation’ on X about Hamas attack [The Guardian]:
"The EU has issued a warning to Elon Musk over the alleged disinformation about the Hamas attack on Israel, including fake news and 'repurposed old images', on X, which was formerly known as Twitter.
...
If Musk, the owner of X, does not comply he can face a fine of 6% of his revenues from X or a total blackout in the EU.
...
X came under scrutiny in the past few days after concerns were raised about fake posts and Elon Musk’s recommendation of war coverage from accounts that have made false claims or antisemitic comments."
posted by mazola at 1:06 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Hamas soldiers who posted celebratory videos of their actions all over the Internet.

For those of you who are more deeply involved in this, did that celebration make it more egregious? Instead of lying and saying they didn't do it, or bullshitting that they didn't mean to do it, or obfuscating and using passive voice - all things that I've come to expect from Western governments when they commit war crimes - they came right out and said that they did it and were happy about it?

For me, hypocrisy adds its own stink, but I can understand that others would feel that the celebration of evil makes it much worse.
posted by clawsoon at 1:12 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fatah has urge people to join in the violence. The Palestine Authority’s official news agency has highlighted the Israeli response and the many reprisals going on by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. Police on both sides in the West Bank are trying to keep a lid on things but it is a mess. President Abbas is off to Moscow to meet with Putin.
posted by interogative mood at 1:12 PM on October 10, 2023

I can understand that others would feel that the celebration of evil makes it much worse

You mean like this? Or this? Acting like this only comes from one side is honestly kind of grotesque.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:25 PM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

You mean like this? Or this?

Jesus. This is awful.
posted by kensington314 at 1:29 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I saw a post on reddit this morning (sorry, I'm on my phone and I have deleted my old relay for reddit app, so no link) which was talking about the numbers of civilians killed in Israel and putting those numbers in context. There was a whole list of numbers and contextual comparisons, including the fact that apparantly, Hamas has killed more Israeli civilians in two days than Israel has killed Palestinian civilians in the last ten years, that more Israelis have been killed in this attack than in all five years of the second Intifada, and so on.

I tend to be critical of the Israeli state usually, and until just the past few hours my instinct was to think in terms of "This is devastating tragedy but Israel is the power player, they have all the tanks and the armies, this is also what happens when a people are kept under prolonged militarized occupation," etc. Because of my bias, many of the initial statistics in the reddit post were not making much of an emotional impact on me, even though I could intellectually appreciate the magnitude of these losses.

Then this post started talking about what it means to lose 1000 Israelis in proportion to their population. That, for example, it's proportionally like 34,000+ Americans dying, and there was like a whole long list of comparisons to other countries wrt their populations.

This reframe has jolted me to my core, y'all. Not because those comparison numbers are large (that I could only intellectually appreciate). But because it made me start thinking more viscerally about the MEANING of so many Jewish people being massacred. 1000 dead Israeli civilians in two days. 1000 dead people who are almost certainly all Jews, linked in a chain to all the thousands massacred before them. The particular way this rhymes with history across the ages is suddenly making me physically sick. Oh god, what a horror this is.
posted by MiraK at 1:37 PM on October 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

Then this post started talking about what it means to lose 1000 Israelis in proportion to their population. That, for example, it's proportionally like 34,000+ Americans dying, and there was like a whole long list of comparisons to other countries wrt their populations.

And in the couple of days since that happened, Israel has killed 700+ people in Gaza, which, proportionally, would be equivalent to about 100,000 Americans dying. That is also a horror.
posted by clawsoon at 1:47 PM on October 10, 2023 [22 favorites]

"and were happy about it?
For me, hypocrisy adds its own stink, but I can understand that others would feel that the celebration of evil makes it much worse."
clawsoon, you know I love you but Taz and Loup and others have called for less 1-1 on the high flame argument, that's my word.
But the comment I highlighted really requires an answer on a politicall and philosophical level. but for you to have to reiterate that you do not support the killing of children. I'm not going to read all the comments that led to that but there should be no reason why you have to reiterate that at all. each moment each day there's a chance that each one of us can make a small difference in here in America or in Europe etc. I had my chance today I think it went rather well, would be delighted to share and it's slightly on topic, human interaction across religion and resource.
instead of links or in formation, I see a lot of infighting and some people trying to get out of that. I'm angry I think a lot of people are angry and I'm frustrated.I personally flagged one of my own comments just after taz's note because it was a real zinger and I didn't want to add that stress, that is not needed within the thread. Clawsoon, the weight of History is accessing knowledge that is current within a chronology or past events interpreted by others working itself into a current chronology.this isn't on you this isn't on me this is not any of us here what has happened. but it feels that way.

Huey Newton...that was apt

posted by clavdivs at 1:51 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan says the US is working with Israel and others to try and figure out some kind of safe passage for civilians.
posted by interogative mood at 1:58 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hamas has killed more Israeli civilians in two days than Israel has killed Palestinian civilians in the last ten years

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis total 6407 between 2008 and mid September this year.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:02 PM on October 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

I believe that link is all casualties (on both sides), not civilian casualties. I don't know what fraction of either group (Israeli and Palestinian) are civilians but it's unlikely to be either 0% or 100%.
posted by Justinian at 2:10 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

If anybody sees anything in the data to clarify, by all means please link it. I'm still looking and I can't find it.
posted by Justinian at 2:13 PM on October 10, 2023

@Justinian, on the dashboard you can filter to "civilians." This leads to 3803 civilian palestinian fatilities since 2008, compared with 177 Israeli civilian fatilities in the same period.
posted by unid41 at 2:17 PM on October 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yeah, I appreciate the general sentiment MiraK, but the numbers are a bit off - even if we just go back as far as 2014, when over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, estimated to be mostly civilians. This is per NYTimes.

But another point to add is just how small Israel is - it's about the size of New Jersey, and the southern part is mostly sparsely populated desert. The drive from Tel Aviv to Sderot (one of the massacred cities) is about an hour.

On the other side of things, I was just listening to this podcast, which is an interview btw Slate's Mary Harris and Gregg Carlstrom, Middle East correspondent for The Economist) and one bit of information that popped out to be is that the medium (not average) age of Gaza is 18. The last election was 2006. Which means most people in Gaza were too young to vote for Hamas.
posted by coffeecat at 2:17 PM on October 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

I went back to look at the reddit post. Apparently OP mistyped in their title and amended it to "last five years". Their sources are the same link as thatwhichfalls provided from UNOCHA (note that selection is set to civilians only)and from Btselem.

(Please note, I wasn't quoting these numbers in my comment earlier to say that the numbers are right in and of themselves (I hadn't checked, still haven't really checked). I have no idea whether that reddit post is the least bit accurate. My comment was trying to highlight one moment of meaning that I found while reading the post casually. I'm sorry that my failure to check before posting hard numbers has caused a bit of a derail and confusion here - and appreciate those who checked those facts.)
posted by MiraK at 2:18 PM on October 10, 2023

You can change the "Victim Belonging" box to select only civilians - it's still about 3.8k.

Hamas rejected the idea of peaceful co-existence over and over again. They don’t want liberation they want annihilation of Israel. The people who want peaceful co-existence don’t have power in Gaza. It is awful.

You could replace Hamas with Netanyahu's government and it would be just as true. Indeed, Netanyahu actively supported Hamas as a spoiler to the Palestinian Authority so he could say there was no point in negotiating.

Not kill children.

Why not? After all, the Israelis have done it to your friends and family, both directly and indirectly, deliberately and incidentally. I condemn the individual act(s), but the real question is if we zoom out to the broader struggle, are you going to take a side? To riff on Rumsfeld, you go war with the army you have - it would be great if there's some strongly principled Palestinian movement that only hits military targets, respects all the laws of war, etc... but there isn't.
posted by ndr at 2:18 PM on October 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

thanks unid41!
posted by Justinian at 2:19 PM on October 10, 2023

> one bit of information that popped out to be is that the medium (not average) age of Gaza is 18

Yep. One of the many transcending tragedies of Palestine is that Hamas has a deliberate policy of relocating, then recruiting and using child soldiers - boys aged 14 are their prime targets. Hamas is an evil, evil organization and that is saying something given how evil the Israeli occupation is.
posted by MiraK at 2:25 PM on October 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

it would be great if there's some strongly principled Palestinian movement that only hits military targets, respects all the laws of war, etc... but there isn't.

I think in terms of "the laws of war", neither side has ever given a shit about it, in part due to -- what I see as -- the nature of the conflict. Hamas is a gang of criminal murderers. You don't fight a criminal gang with an army. That's the job of the police. But first everyone would have to commit to, "One Nation, with Liberty and Justice FOR ALL." And we all know that isn't going to happen.
posted by mikelieman at 2:29 PM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Simplifying a complex geopolitical holy war between states of millions of people over decades into "Why not kill more children?" is a very odd, trivializing take. Why not? Because a child for a child wipes whole peoples off the planet, that's why. Please let's not have this type of stomach-turning discourse.
posted by MiraK at 2:37 PM on October 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

So what are the actual paths forward for Israel and Palestine? Other than endless acrimony and perpetual war.

A non-genocidal, one-state solution, seems increasingly impossible. So does a two-state solution that isn't absurdly lopsided and doomed to re-ignite in violence, as is currently unfolding.

How about a No-State solution? Anyone tried that yet?

I have a hard time envisioning a peaceful outcome that doesn't involve the entire region being demilitarized, and administered internationally. Otherwise it's just going to be death death death, forever.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 2:53 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

one bit of information that popped out to be is that the medium (not average) age of Gaza is 18

This gets brought up when people try to blame the people of Gaza for voting in Hamas - the median Gaza resident wasn't even alive when the last election was held.
posted by charred husk at 2:54 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

My support and love for the Palestinian people and cause is enormous. I've spent over a decade in my academic career studying this conflict. I've publicly condemn Israeli violence against the Palestinian people. I learned Arabic. I did what I think was important work that in some small way helps.

But many of my allies---those who aren't necessarily experts in the conflict---fail to understand that Hamas is an incredibly regressive, violent, corrupt, and self-serving institution. Yes they bear the mantle of Palestinian resistance in Gaza. But they are capable of extraordinarily inhuman actions.

Edward Said is my intellectual hero and was brave enough to rail against the corruption of the Arafat regime. I've been missing his voice these past couple of days.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:56 PM on October 10, 2023 [40 favorites]

So what are the actual paths forward for Israel and Palestine?

Well, ...

Other than endless acrimony and perpetual war.

... never mind.
posted by Flunkie at 2:57 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Simplifying a complex geopolitical holy war between states of millions of people over decades into "Why not kill more children?" is a very odd, trivializing take. Why not? Because a child for a child wipes whole peoples off the planet, that's why. Please let's not have this type of stomach-turning discourse.

In case it wasn't obvious, I was asking the reader to put themselves in the shoes of a young Hamas fighter. Maybe you don't have a mother because of an Israeli air strike or a brother was killed when the IDF fired into a crowd. How inclined would you be to follow rules of conduct that failed to save them?

I think in terms of "the laws of war", neither side has ever given a shit about it, in part due to -- what I see as -- the nature of the conflict. Hamas is a gang of criminal murderers. You don't fight a criminal gang with an army. That's the job of the police. But first everyone would have to commit to, "One Nation, with Liberty and Justice FOR ALL." And we all know that isn't going to happen.

With all due respect, this is a terrible take. If as you allege they're just criminals, then there are even more stringent justice system standards than what the military operates under - chains of custody for evidence, testimony under oath, legal representation, etc - unless you believe that police ought to play the role of judge, jury, and executioner. You believe Hamas is "a gang of criminal murderers". The IDF is currently enforcing a blockade of water, food, and electricity (also a war crime), will you extend that description to them as well?
posted by ndr at 3:12 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

> You believe Hamas is "a gang of criminal murderers". The IDF is currently enforcing a blockade of water, food, and electricity (also a war crime), will you extend that description to them as well?

Uh yes
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 3:14 PM on October 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

I won’t be surprised if path forward is probably Israeli reoccupation of Gaza followed by an attempt to setup a friendly local government that can deal with internal security in a model similar to what Russia implemented in Chechnya. This will of course be super expensive, unstable and ultimately a failure.
posted by interogative mood at 3:27 PM on October 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have a more pragmatic/personal question to throw in here...

Does anyone have a good source for getting a sense of how things are feeling for residents of Tel Aviv at this moment? I have a friend there, she confirmed that she and her family are safe, and I know that the vast majority of violence has been surrounding and now is in Gaza - but I'm wondering what the day by day is like for her right now (and don't want to task her with a report at this difficult moment). I'm wondering about frequency of missile attacks, are the kids going to school, etc. etc.

Any suggestions?

(I can ask this on the green too, but I think this conversation has the potential for more what's-happening-on-the-ground source-sharing - thanks, e.g., for the Haggai Matar suggestion upthread - so I'm asking here first.)
posted by marlys at 3:28 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

thanks, e.g., for the Haggai Matar suggestion upthread

If you haven't already, check out +972 Magazine more broadly (directed by Matar), which publishes other Israeli and Palestinian journalists committed to working together, as well as lefty academics, etc.
posted by coffeecat at 3:39 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seth Abramson
As Israel Reels From Mass Deaths and a Seeming Intel Failure, Evidence Mounts of Negligence By Netanyahu—Or Maybe Something More Sinister
Israel has the world’s very best intel services, yet allegedly failed to foresee a massive invasion months in the making. Now media outlets are beginning to point a finger at Netanyahu—as is the IDF.
posted by adamvasco at 3:39 PM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

I (hope I) don't understand the idea behind the water ban (and to a lesser degree, the food ban). What's the plan? Wait a few days for people to start dying of dehydration en masse? And then what? Let them?

People running short of food and water will -- I would imagine the strategy goes -- put pressure on Hamas to surrender to the Israelis. The Hamas folks will be running short as well. That's what sieges are -- you force surrender by getting people to think that's a better option than dying en masse.
posted by Galvanic at 4:00 PM on October 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

The logic of collective punishment is that it can be electorally beneficial, establishes credibility which strengthens future deterrence, and can cause those suffering the punishment to blame their leaders for the punishment rather than those doing the punishing.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:02 PM on October 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is there credible evidence it has any of these effects rather than, say, the opposite?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:04 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

oh, well then, perfectly reasonable, carry on with the intentional and indiscriminate forced dehydration of two and a half million people
posted by Flunkie at 4:06 PM on October 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

I (hope I) don't understand the idea behind the water ban

Compel civilians to come to designated safe zones, however inadequate the facilities, so as to have them out of the way of clearing operations. Maybe.

Announcing a 'total siege' of a ghetto already under the state's control is basically just announcing an impending atrocity, so it may also be that there isn't any sense to make of it.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:07 PM on October 10, 2023 [17 favorites]

I (hope I) don't understand the idea behind the water ban (and to a lesser degree, the food ban). What's the plan? Wait a few days for people to start dying of dehydration en masse? And then what? Let them?

Same as my answer upthread about why the US supplies arms to Israel - leverage.

Israel supplies food, water and electricity to Gaza - even as they receive rockets in return - as a carrot / stick approach. Here's some carrots, and if you stray too far out of line, I'm taking away the carrots.

They're taking away the carrots.
posted by xdvesper at 4:07 PM on October 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

A siege is a long-standing practice in war. It tends to be better than storming the city immediately.
posted by interogative mood at 4:17 PM on October 10, 2023

For who? And in which century? And of an already captive population?

Lots of things are prevalent in the history of war that were effective but should draw approbation.

The Melian Dialogue isn't usually cited with admiration for the Athenians.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:19 PM on October 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Another Twitter account I'm appreciating is Lisa Goldman @lisang (who co-founded +972 Mag) - though she's now based in Canada, she is clearly still well connected to a range of people on the ground - she's also doing a fair bit of media analysis of Israeli TV, which I've found interesting - for example, she recently shared a clip from what she describes as the equivalent of Israeli Fox News, of a man (who is visiting injured relatives in a hospital) angrily talking straight into the camera "Mr. Prime Minister! Go outside, face the media, and apologize! A thousand people were murdered on your watch, sir! And where are you Ben-Gvir?! You're the world champion in bullshiting. Where are you?! Mr. Handgun on Twitter!... We will never forgive you. Never."
posted by coffeecat at 4:29 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

A siege is a long-standing practice in war. It tends to be better than storming the city immediately.

For who? And in which century? And of an already captive population?

Sieges are incredibly immoral tactics in war, but an often used one even in this century that the United States has engaged in as well. See: the siege of Fallujah, the white phosphorus and depleted uranium used there, and the refusal to allow "military aged men" between 15 and 50 to evacuate. I mean, I opposed both that siege and this one, and think sieges are a tactic that *should* be relegated to the past, but the plain fact is that they're not.

What I don't understand, though, is why Egypt is cooperating with Israel's siege.
posted by corb at 4:32 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

What I don't understand, though, is why Egypt is cooperating with Israel's siege.

Egypt has cooperated closely with Israel in keeping that border shut for a long time. The FT just published this article about the cooperation on keeping things locked up tight.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:45 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

There's also the choose-a-hegemon aspect, for Egypt. (The implied alternatives being Russia and China, which would be a tough choice right now.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:09 PM on October 10, 2023

What I don't understand, though, is why Egypt is cooperating with Israel's siege.

Egypt is even more afraid of Gaza than Israel is. The current Egyptian government is a result of popular protests and a military coup in 2013 against Morsi, who is from the Muslim Brotherhood faction. In 2014, the government sentenced 529 Muslim Brotherhood members to death and declared the group illegal.

Hamas grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. Egypt has denounced and accused Hamas of collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to overthrow the current government. Letting significant numbers of Palestinians into Egypt would certainly risk the overthrow of the Egyptian government by swelling the Muslim Brotherhood's ranks.

That's been same experience in Jordan, which was hosting 200,000 Palestinian refugees, who then staged the Black September civil war against the government.

Also the same experience in Lebanon, which was hosting 400,000 Palestinian refugees, who also staged a civil war against the government.

In both cases, the uprisings were orchestrated by the PLO.

Basically, no one dares to touch any Palestinian refugees with a 10 foot pole, if you were still wondering why no Arab states want to take them in.
posted by xdvesper at 5:21 PM on October 10, 2023 [28 favorites]

Two deleted. Just hopping to remind folks to hold off on battling it out with other users here. Either take it to MeMail or just take a break from the thread if you find yourself engaging in a commenting pattern that is combative and unhelpful.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 5:22 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Headlines are saying Bibi has accepted the unity government offer.

It's my hope some kind of operational pause results, and enough people in a position to matter across all the actors involved have a moment to think about how their decisions are going to play out on the historical scale that they'll ultimately be judged.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:25 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Egypt is going along with it because they hate Hamas as much as the Israelis. Hamas is linked to a lot of the terrorist groups in Egypt. They don’t want to have a bunch of Palestinian refugees in the Sinai either. The Palestinian refugees that fled to Lebanon in 1949 are still in those temporary refugee camps. Israel is going to have to provide a place for the refugees to go.
posted by interogative mood at 5:26 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

If as you allege they're just criminals, then there are even more stringent justice system standards than what the military operates under - chains of custody for evidence, testimony under oath, legal representation, etc - unless you believe that police ought to play the role of judge, jury, and executioner.

Arguably the biggest error post 9-11 was to have a military response and not a police or criminal response. Yes the crowds were baying for blood, but the entire premise of a "war on terror" was doomed to failure, and it failed on a grand scale at a cost of hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions, of lives. Clearly you can't just use the NYPD in Afghanistan (or Saudi Arabia for that matter) but there must have been ways of making this happen, at least in theory. Of course, one can see via Guantanamo Bay and Abbottabad, the USA was never interested in a legal or judicial outcome even after they had many of those responsible (and some innocents) in custody.
posted by Rumple at 5:41 PM on October 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

Hamas is linked to a lot of the terrorist groups in Egypt.

To clarify, the Muslim Brotherhood (in its original formation).

(I realize lots of us know that, but younger MeFites may not.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:59 PM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

US talking to Israel, Egypt about safe passage for Gaza civilians
The best I can say is that it beats no option to leave at all.

Arguably the biggest error post 9-11 was to have a military response and not a police or criminal response. Yes the crowds were baying for blood, but the entire premise of a "war on terror" was doomed to failure, and it failed on a grand scale at a cost of hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions, of lives. Clearly you can't just use the NYPD in Afghanistan (or Saudi Arabia for that matter) but there must have been ways of making this happen, at least in theory. Of course, one can see via Guantanamo Bay and Abbottabad, the USA was never interested in a legal or judicial outcome even after they had many of those responsible (and some innocents) in custody.

This is true and I'd argue it's because the real objective was to erase the image of American vulnerability with a show of overwhelming force to send a message that we weren't to be fucked with. Afghanistan wasn't enough of a display so we also went into Iraq, even though they had nothing to do with it (which erased Iran's counterbalance...). And just as unqualified support from the US public allowed this to happen, I'm afraid unqualified support from the US now is allowing Israel to flatten Gaza.

Crazily enough, the NYPD actually has oversea liaison offices.
posted by ndr at 7:27 PM on October 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

I always thought that we went into Iraq because Bush Jr. had a longstanding beef with his father, because he thought his father should have gone all the way instead of stopping at the limit of the UN mandate to liberate Kuwait. His father wanted to set a precedent by doing so, and his son didn't like it.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:33 PM on October 10, 2023

I-Write-Essays, From outside the UK-US axis it looked at the time like Bush Senior's was an operation to destabilize the oil price, as that seemed the main outcome. The sooner we decouple from oil the better (although next it will be Lithium wars, and then water).
posted by unearthed at 11:24 PM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

For those who were wondering how Israel got caught flat-footed: How Israel’s Feared Security Services Failed to Stop Hamas’s Attack
posted by ndr at 2:04 AM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

one bit of information that popped out to be is that the medium (not average) age of Gaza is 18

This gets brought up when people try to blame the people of Gaza for voting in Hamas - the median Gaza resident wasn't even alive when the last election was held.

I said I'd come back when I'd had a look at the numbers. The average age of a person in my school is 18.4
Of course, we're a high-school, and don't have anyone under 12, so it's not a direct comparison, presumably Gaza has a few more adults to balance out all the toddlers. I've still found this to be a useful way to conceptualize the demographics a very significant portion of the people around me in the grocery store think deserve collective punishment.
posted by Audreynachrome at 2:55 AM on October 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm not even talking about the rubes who believe that the IDF only ever does proportionate and necessary strikes. I used to worry about those people. Now I'm way more scared by how many people openly advocate for war crimes. My feed is just full of "they fucked around and now they're finding out, flatten the city, kill them all, they're genetically inferior and incapable of not doing violence" re: Palestinians.

I'd have thought I had one of those feeds everyone's talking about where hundreds of radical decolonialists are supposedly celebrating Hamas, but I seem to have accidentally been served the one where Zionists openly advocate for eugenics and genocide. Maybe it's an "X" vs. Twitter thing.
posted by Audreynachrome at 3:03 AM on October 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think there is a difference between watching military targets get bombed and just rolling up on a music festival in technicals and mowing down a bunch of civilians, kidnapping the survivors and then having a little party to celebrate. I guess we disagree.

The music festival massacre is literally the stuff of my nightmares. As a tiny fearful Jewish boy, I had more than a few recurring nightmares about Hamas, and it was basically the stuff that's taking place right now. I'm not morbid or insane enough to look too closely at footage of what's happening, because I could easily open up a can of worms from my childhood that'd take the better part of a decade to close again.

But at the same time, your phrase there, "military targets..."

Look, I'm not sure that anything sickens me more than the Israeli military. It's a visceral thing, and has been for a while now. Because Israel has been pursuing the systematic eradication of Palestinians for my entire adult life, and the military is both the propaganda arm of the government and the actual force that carries out that eradication.

What we're witnessing now is the carnal realization of Israel's right-wing government's wet dream. In the same sense that, while Bush and bin Laden weren't enemies, they shared the same fundamental view of the world, Netanyahu et al are the same sort of fanatic as Hamas. They just have the power and the geopolitical approval that lets them proceed a hell of a lot more patiently and cold-bloodedly. They are well aware that they take every opportunity to turn Gaza into more of a hellhole, not just through the ongoing casual massacre of its citizens but through whichever bloodless legal tactics might get them a bit more property, or erode a bit more of its citizens' rights. They overlook every instance of a Palestinian getting murdered in cold blood, because to them, Palestinians aren't human—they're an obstacle that Israel has been patiently removing.

I'm not going to both-sides this. Hamas is fucking terrible, and I don't feel the need to empathize with its actions. But atrocities committed by the powerless exist in a completely different category from atrocities committed by the powerful. That doesn't make them less atrocious, but my horror at Hamas doing the thing that literally kept me up at night in terror as a child is entirely eclipsed by the dread I feel at watching Israel's actions, and seeing the headlines at the New York Times and the Washington Post, and hearing the ways that Biden's phrasing the things he's phrasing. This isn't "like 9/11." This is going to be disproportionately worse. I wouldn't be shocked if Israel found a way to kill more Palestinians than US troops killed Iraqis—the only limiter is that there are fewer people for Israel to kill. And even if the "war" were to end today, rest assured that Israel will use this as justification to be an order of magnitude worse to the citizens they oppress than they already are, and they were already monstrous.

The problem with Israel choosing "military targets" is that Israel already has a storied history of declaring schools and hospitals to be military targets. Israel is already enormously suspect with its declarations of what is and isn't a target. It's not a conspiracy theory to say that Israel has a major sadistic streak, that it seems to enjoy actively tearing apart the fabric of society, that it revels in fundamentally making Palestinians' lives worse. It's not a conspiracy theory, when members of the Israeli government openly revere mass murderers and make jokes about immiserating their hostages—and the Palestinians are their hostages. And no, I don't think that Israel's shedding crocodile tears over their deaths, I think those tears are very real—but that grief and sorrow and frustration will nonetheless fuel shockingly cruel "revenges," and the non-revenge-based treatment of the Palestinian people qualifies as "shockingly cruel" already.

I understand anger and despair. I understand Hamas, in a way that I didn't when I was younger—not because I empathize with them or relate to them, but because I've seen enough of shortsighted human rage, enough self-righteous idiocy mixed with lusts for power, that their flavor of atrocity is an all-too-familiar one for me. Hell, they're only a stone's throw away from the shootings that break out in America near-literally every day. What I don't understand, what I still struggle to comprehend, is the calm systematic atrocity that Israel has committed for decades, the one where you quietly and happily and knowingly contribute to the eradication of an entire people. It's incomprehensible to me in the same way that the Holocaust was—not the part where shithead youths lit synagogues on fire, but the part that came after, the atrocity that concealed itself as bureaucracy, the tables and charts that meant eliminating everyone with the wrong value in the wrong column.

I am all too familiar with atrocity and with grief. But I still struggle with the quiet horror, the surreal madness, of knowing that we're going to watch Israel do worse things to Palestinian civilians on a weekly or daily basis than Hamas has ever had the power to do to Israelis and that it will be reported as either a triumph or a sound tactical maneuver, and then discussion of it will be silenced, moved past, as if it was dull inevitable history. And to some extent it will have been, because Israel has never been quiet about its mission to eradicate the Palestinian people, and when they're finished there will be fewer voices to speak up about it than ever. On the surface, Israel is acting out of grief and fury, but beneath that, unsettlingly, there's just the same quiet, patient, knowing plan, and the awareness that the governments of the world will not mourn the Palestinian graves, because they never have. The awareness, in other words, that whether the Palestinians are massacred today or five years from now is unimportant, because there is no rush, because the Palestinians have always been destined for massacre, and will be unless the world finds a way of changing.

That last bit is why I, as a Jewish man who once couldn't sleep for fear of Hamas, find myself so wholly focused on Israel's actions now. It's not that Hamas isn't terrifying or horrible, because they are. It's that time is more urgent for those of us who are hoping for a better outcome for the Palestinians—there is only so much time for them, whereas their oppressors have all the time in the world. And with this new development, it feels horrifyingly like that time might have just vanished. How quickly can Israel accelerate its genocidal campaign before the world takes notice? And if the world does notice, how likely is it that it will respond with more than just a slap on Israel's wrist? Either way, the repercussions won't rewind time, or halt whatever's to come. Either way, this ends, is ending, has already ended, with mass graves. And as a Jewish man, I never had nightmares about mass graves, because I never needed to. They were real. They were there. There they are again right now.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:54 AM on October 11, 2023 [121 favorites]

About the idea of treating the action against Hamas as a police action: There's the problem of the police force that Israel has got, which, as you might expect:

Yesh Din [PDF]: "The chance that Israeli law enforcement authorities will file an indictment against an Israeli who harmed a non-Palestinian in the West Bank (Israeli security personnel and others) is six times higher than the chance they will file an indictment against an Israeli who harmed a Palestinian."

Amnesty International: "Israeli police have committed a catalogue of violations against Palestinians in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem... including sweeping mass arrests, using unlawful force against peaceful protesters, and subjecting detainees to torture and other ill-treatment... Israeli police have also failed to protect Palestinian citizens of Israel from premeditated attacks by groups of armed Jewish supremacists, even when plans were publicized in advance..."

This is typical of police forces everywhere when an ethnic group has been stereotyped as "bad people". For a police action to improve the situation instead of incite more resentment and violence, I'm guessing you'd need a different police force. You'd probably need not just a different police force, but a different kind of police force, one where the members don't automatically assume that well-off people are the good guys and poor people are the bad guys.
posted by clawsoon at 4:29 AM on October 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

Israeli Brigadier General Dan Goldfus: "We will have to change the reality from within Gaza to prevent this from happening again."

Safwat Kahlout at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza: "The Israelis are destroying neighbourhoods – not specific or special buildings or institutions. We can see that the Israelis have divided Gaza into neighbourhoods, and now they’re destroying [them] one by one. There is fear here in Gaza that the Israelis are preparing for a ground invasion, so they are razing the main roads, the main areas to prepare for such ground invasion."
posted by clawsoon at 5:40 AM on October 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

A drama in the New York finance and legal community played out yesterday, with Winston & Strawn revoking the job offer of the NYU law school student government president who declared support for Hamas on the student listserv, and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman saying that he and some peers would not be hiring members of Harvard student clubs who took a pro-Hamas stance.

Wonder if this is going to be an inflection point on left-wing activists' recent move against free speech absolutism.
posted by MattD at 6:48 AM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

To add to my comment above about the cessation of "roof knock" warnings before bombing buildings:

Based on videos of recent strikes on buildings that are getting posted, it looks like they are still doing the roof knocks sometimes. There are a lot of videos where the cameraperson has had the time to get set up with the building perfectly centered, for example, where they clearly know the main strike is coming. But also, it is obvious that the IDF is not feeling constrained by the old policy and they are only doing the warning shots selectively at best.

Also, it's probably a small thing compared to the actual bombings and the cut-off of water and food supplies, but looking at the enormous dust clouds the bombs kick up, I have to wonder if people there are going to be having the same long-term lung issues that happened to some people who were exposed to the dust on 9/11 in NYC.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:01 AM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

No because censoring speech in support of Palestinians in the US has been a common occurence for decades. Its a no-no. You can easily get fired, harassed, doxxed. I've seen it happen to people. All of this is bad and all of this has never been condemned by the right-wing outrage machine about campus speech, because they don't really care about campus speech.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:02 AM on October 11, 2023 [16 favorites]

who declared support for Hamas

Also this is false.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:06 AM on October 11, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yeah, leftists have been pointing out the hypocrisy of "free speech absolutism" for years - it conveniently only applies to right-wing speech, and certainly never being pro-Palestine. That's why it's hard to take a lot of the free speech "absolutists" on the right seriously - this isn't going to change that.
posted by coffeecat at 7:23 AM on October 11, 2023 [12 favorites]

A few comments removed. Please help keep the discussion about Palestine and Israel and avoid bringing in Americanisms. This doesn't mean never mention America (or other countries), just to keep it focused on the current situation and refrain from talking about the American centric ideas, such as the "dream of America", thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:41 AM on October 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

Anyway, another source of info I'm finding helpful:

Shayan Sardarizadeh @Shayan86 (Twitter) is a BBC journalist on the disinformation beat, and he's keeping track of it on Twitter - a lot on both sides, with a strikingly international range.
posted by coffeecat at 7:45 AM on October 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

The attack on Israel was not a random outburst or riot by a group of poor Palestinians acting out of desperation. This was a deliberate, planned attack by Hamas and its military acting with full agency and awareness of the consequences. Leaders are responsible for the people they govern and have to weight the consequences of their actions. For example believe that the US should have been more aggressive in defending Ukraine and I know a lot of people pushed Biden to do the same. However Biden understands that there is a danger of a Russian nuclear response. He will he the one responsible if such an awful calamity occurred and the people he governs will suffer.
Hamas’ leaders decided to launch this attack with apparently no concern for the destruction it would bring. They had the agency and they bear responsibility. This is what happens when leaders don’t care about the people they govern and see them as disposable human beings. All the horrors that follow are the responsibility of Ismail Haniyeh. He is the one to direct your anger and outrage to.
posted by interogative mood at 8:12 AM on October 11, 2023 [11 favorites]

All the horrors that follow are the responsibility of Ismail Haniyeh

I'm curious about this moral position that the people ordering, planning, and orchestrating the bombing of civilians aren't actually responsible for it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:19 AM on October 11, 2023 [16 favorites]

I'm curious about this moral position that the people ordering, planning, and orchestrating the bombing of civilians aren't actually responsible for it.

I'm not the person you were replying to. However, Hamas 100% knew that the outcome was going to be a disproportionate counter-attack. That is a key reason people do asymmetric attacks like this, in order to provoke a cycle of violence that will mostly impact others (e.g., civilians in Gaza). So they knew this would happen, they deliberately provoked it, and therefore they bear a significant part of the moral responsibility for what we're all watching on the news right now.

I still think that the IDF should be more careful in its targeting. But let's not pretend that what is happening is any kind of surprise on the part of Hamas, or wasn't planned for. Their leaders had plenty of time to go underground, leaving regular people in apartment buildings to face the bombs.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:30 AM on October 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

So they knew this would happen, they deliberately provoked it, and therefore they bear a significant part of the moral responsibility for what we're all watching on the news right now.

I think this line of thinking proves too much, it would make any sort of armed resistance immoral if it might provoke reprisals. If Hamas had acted against IDF positions only, and captured dozens of IDF soldiers only, the response would not have been much kinder to Gaza civilians, would it?
posted by BungaDunga at 8:46 AM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

If Hamas had acted against IDF positions only, and captured dozens of IDF soldiers only, the response would not have been much kinder to Gaza civilians, would it?

The difference could be having some international sympathy vs zero international sympathy and that would likely influence response (it would make it hard to justify retaliation again civilians).
posted by mazola at 8:55 AM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

You could say the same thing about Israeli actions---that killing thousands of Palestinians would invite attacks, etc. etc etc.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:01 AM on October 11, 2023 [14 favorites]

it would be great if there's some strongly principled Palestinian movement that only hits military targets, respects all the laws of war, etc... but there isn't.

There have been plenty of principled Palestinian movements and protests. They have had no success in 50+ years and that's precisely why you don't remember them.
posted by srboisvert at 9:06 AM on October 11, 2023 [22 favorites]

Not to mention that Netanyahu and other right-wing elements in the Israeli government have advocated for funding Hamas, in part to prevent more restrained Palestinian leaders from effectively advocating for a Palestinian state.
posted by miltthetank at 9:13 AM on October 11, 2023 [16 favorites]

[no longer applicable]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:14 AM on October 11, 2023

There is much talk of genocide being thrown around so I worked out the numbers:
To completely eliminate every citizen of Israel would mean killing 25,654 people every day for a year.
To completely eliminate every citizen of Palestine would mean killing 13,487 people every day for a year.
Which is a way to say this terror could get much worse for much longer.

The birth rate in both countries is just over 300/day.

British Airways, EasyJet, Ryanair, Wizz Air, Air France, Lufthansa and Emirates have all suspended flights from Israel into the UK due to all the rockets flying around Tel Aviv.
posted by Lanark at 9:16 AM on October 11, 2023

I think this line of thinking proves too much, it would make any sort of armed resistance immoral if it might provoke reprisals. If Hamas had acted against IDF positions only, and captured dozens of IDF soldiers only, the response would not have been much kinder to Gaza civilians, would it?

I'll make just this response, then I'll step away from this to avoid a repetitive back and forth. I disagree completely -- the massive attack on civilians, with a lot of particularly grotesque aspects caught on film, means that the brakes are completely off, in a way that wouldn't happen with a smaller, military-only attack. The US wouldn't be sending a full carrier group (and I earlier saw unconfirmed reports that a second carrier group might be moved in that direction as well) for a "regular" (for lack of a better term) level of conflict, for example. (We'll see what happens, but I won't be surprised if the US takes on some level of active assistance for external borders to allow Israeli's military to pivot even further towards Gaza.)
posted by Dip Flash at 9:50 AM on October 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

The idea that the attack by Hamas was a beginning, or the start, of the violence is framing to paint the aggressor as the victim and shift all blame to the actual victims.

The violence has been ongoing for decades, and it has been mostly from the IDF against Palestinian civilians. To say that Hamas started this just a week ago is to argue that all the dead Palestinian children, the victims of IDF rape and torture, either didn't exist or don't matter.

Hamas didn't just randomly start attacking Israel out of nowhere.

People asking about "solutions" are deluding themselves if they think there is any outcome here other than the one state solution of Israel taking all the land and ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.

We see the seeds for that already planted in the "evacuation" of Gaza.

And let's not use weasel words. If it happens, it isn't an evacuation, it's an ethnic cleansing. Forcible relocation only just barely avoided being officially categorized as a form of genocide and it's definitely a crime against humanity.

I am forced to agree that ethnic cleansing via forced relocation is better than ethnic cleansing via mass murder.

But let's not pretend that aiding Israel in its ethnic cleansing, even if we're doing it under threat of mass murder as the alternative, is good. It's just less evil.

I will also agree that if the world really does help Israel ethnically cleanse Gaza and destroy the Palestinian people via forcable relocation that's a tiny baby step away from the planetary response to every other genocide.

That's a low bar to clear, given that the planetary response to every other genocide has been nothing at all. So it'd be the tiniest, Plank scale, step towards humanity being less awful. But that's assuming Israel bothers permitting this to be a mere ethnic cleansing instead of a bloodbath.

It may happen, Israel has picked the ethnic cleansing via forcible relocation option before. There are 5.9 million Palestinian refugees created by Israel's prior ethnic cleansings and the nations of the world have so far "helped" by establishing giant open air prisons we laughably call "refugee camps" and letting Israel's victims rot there for generations.

Which is why we shouldn't expect the ethnic cleansing of Gaza to be any different. If Egypt does "help evacuate" our history tells us that they'll just set up another open air prison, call it a "refugee camp" and create another 2 million eternal refugees.

Is it better than letting Israel set up concentration camps and start their own 1/3 scale Holocaust? Yes.

Is it still a horrible, evil, action that every single person on Earth should feel ashamed of having participated in? Also yes.
posted by sotonohito at 10:00 AM on October 11, 2023 [23 favorites]

For anyone looking for a tiny moment of sanity in all this, the opposition told Netanyahu it would only agree to form a unity government if its war cabinet - the group that will be making decisions about how to prosecute the ongoing bombing and upcoming ground attack on Gaza - excluded far-right racist shitheads like minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir (this guy) and finance minister Bezalel "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people" Smotrich.

Netanyahu agreed.
posted by mediareport at 10:01 AM on October 11, 2023 [14 favorites]

You could say the same thing about Israeli actions---that killing thousands of Palestinians would invite attacks, etc. etc etc.

The power imbalance is such that the consequences of violence will not be allocated evenly. War is awful. Hamas has had multiple opportunities to enter into meaningful talks to negotiate peace with Israel. They refused and instead chose to start butchering civilians. Concern for civilians and innocent bystanders has not factored into any of Hamas’ planning. Israel is facing an enemy military that has rejected any kind of meaningful peace deal with Israel for decades now. There are not any non-awful ways to evict an enemy army from a city of 2 million people, if that army will fight to the last soldier.
posted by interogative mood at 10:07 AM on October 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

sotonohito, you've posted your opinion that Israel is attempting genocide against the Palestinians at least 4 times in this thread. Your position is now well known. What are you contributing by posting it again?

This comment though: The idea that the attack by Hamas was a beginning, or the start, of the violence is framing to paint the aggressor as the victim and shift all blame to the actual victims.

is just a strawman argument. No one here is pretending that this attack by Hamas was the start of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. What people are arguing is that the attack was of a magnitude and level of barbarity that it has changed the calculus of the I-P conflict in ways that are going to be devastating, primarily to Gazans, and potentially cause a wider conflict that could affect us all. Acknowledging that fact does not diminish the massive suffering the Palestinian people have experienced!
posted by gwint at 10:17 AM on October 11, 2023 [23 favorites]

What people are arguing is that the attack was of a magnitude...

You may be arguing that. And I agree with that argument. Others are arguing that the responsibility for the devastating counter attack lies not with those committing the attack, but with Hamas.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:21 AM on October 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

All the horrors that follow are the responsibility of Ismail Haniyeh. He is the one to direct your anger and outrage to.

The above is such an appallingly simplistic comment it's difficult to know how to reply so I'll ignore it and respond to Dip Flash's more intelligent formulation:

So they knew this would happen, they deliberately provoked it, and therefore they bear a significant part of the moral responsibility for what we're all watching on the news right now. [emphasis added]

I don't see how anyone could disagree with the above, although it's not clear how that eliminates the Israeli government's moral culpability for the deaths of children due to its ongoing decision to heavily bomb residential areas.

As long as we're talking people who "deliberately provoked" things, I'd just add that the at the very least, you have to acknowledge that racist shithead Itamar Ben-Gvir also bears "a significant part of the moral responsibility" for what we're all watching on the news right now. His stupidly provocative actions over the past few years, including repeatedly disrupting the fragile status quo at the Temple Mount, most recently in July, and doing the same at the Al-Aqsa mosque, particularly in January as one of his first actions as minister, are a major contributing factor to this kind of violence:

Ben-Gvir has visited al-Aqsa numerous times since entering parliament in April 2021, but his presence there as a senior minister carries far greater weight. A controversial visit in 2000 by the then opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, was one of the main triggers for the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which lasted until 2005.

The Israeli opposition leader, Yair Lapid, had opposed the visit and predicted it would lead to bloodshed...The Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem called it a “crime” and vowed the site “will remain Palestinian, Arab, Islamic”. Hamas rules the Gaza Strip, and in May 2021 an 11-day war broke out in the territory between Palestinian militants and Israel after violence at al-Aqsa mosque. The leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, said that changing the status quo at the al-Aqsa mosque could lead to an explosion in the region, not just inside Palestinian territories.

But ok, sure, folks like Ben-Gvir bear no responsibility whatsoever here. He went to Al-Aqsa again in May. His pattern goes back for a long time; I'll stop with a quote from Israel's head of police, after one of Ben-Gvir's stunts led to violence in Jerusalem in 2021:

"The person who is responsible for this Intifada is Itamar Ben Gvir:" Israel's police chief, Kobi Shabtai, did not mince his words during the morning briefing with Benjamin Netanhayu. According to Shabtai, the provocations of the ultra-right MP and his supporters have fanned the flames of Palestinian anger and provoked the violent clashes that shook Jerusalem last week.

Hell, Ben-Gvir was planning another visit to the Temple Mount right before the Hamas attack; Netanyahu forced him to delay it.
posted by mediareport at 11:02 AM on October 11, 2023 [17 favorites]

*...until at least after the holiday, anyway.
posted by mediareport at 11:05 AM on October 11, 2023

A drama in the New York finance and legal community played out yesterday, with Winston & Strawn revoking the job offer of the NYU law school student government president who declared support for Hamas on the student listserv, and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman saying that he and some peers would not be hiring members of Harvard student clubs who took a pro-Hamas stance.

It's hitting broader than the NY legal community: student groups at my law school are wondering about statements and who should write them and what they should say. Though I think to a certain extent it's like "BigLaw gonna BigLaw", this isn't surprising, but it's still got people who were thinking of BigLaw careers concerned.
posted by corb at 11:07 AM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

sotonohito, you've posted your opinion that Israel is attempting genocide against the Palestinians at least 4 times in this thread. Your position is now well known. What are you contributing by posting it again?

there are multiple people saying the same thing over and over again in this thread, i appreciate sotonohito's position and they have the right to defend it. what are you contributing by saying this except to drown out someone you don't agree with?
posted by JimBennett at 11:37 AM on October 11, 2023 [24 favorites]

Recent report from Haaretz:

Israel's Environment Minister, Idit Silman (Likud), departed a hospital following an encounter with citizens, including hospital personnel, who voiced grievances related to the ongoing conflict. One employee told her, "You were once good, but now you've now ruined our country. Leave, go!" Another individual added, "It's our turn to stand together – left and right – and help without you. You've destroyed our country. Leave!"
posted by coffeecat at 11:38 AM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed (NY Magazine)
posted by BungaDunga at 11:53 AM on October 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

Edward Luce in the Financial Times.
John F Kennedy, Biden’s original hero, said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Israelis and Palestinians are on the brink of writing an even darker chapter in their history. Biden has the means to hijack that script. It is the most pro-Israeli thing he could do.
posted by adamvasco at 11:53 AM on October 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

coffeecat, did it (or could you) explain why there was so much vitriol against Silman? I'm getting the impression from Googling that she has been under attack for religious reasons, but I can't quite figure out if it was because she was too religious or not religious enough.
posted by clawsoon at 11:59 AM on October 11, 2023

Many Israelis are blaming the Netanyahu government for letting this happen (not intentionally)
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:10 PM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hell, Ben-Gvir was planning another visit to the Temple Mount right before the Hamas attack; Netanyahu forced him to delay it.

Israeli leaders understood that the likely consequences of Ben-Gvir's plan (a non-violent trespass on Harem Es Sharif / The Temple Mount) was provocative and likely to result in a violent outrage from Palestinians so they stopped it.

Hamas leaders also understood the likely consequences of their plan to massacre civilians and send thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities and they went ahead with it anyway.
posted by interogative mood at 12:14 PM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

did Israel make any attempt to negotiate the release of hostages before carpet bombing gaza?
posted by JimBennett at 12:14 PM on October 11, 2023

I'm not entirely sure in terms of this specific politician (perhaps someone else who knows more can shed light on her), I shared because I'm struck by the amount of anger towards the Israeli state/various politicians that's coming from Israelis from a range of political positions - this is just one more example of that (I shared some others upthread). That isn't to say all anger expressed towards the state wants a lefty/progressive solution, but there does seems to be a growing sense that there is no military solution to this (or at least, not a purely military solution), which I find vaguely hopeful (maybe?).
posted by coffeecat at 12:17 PM on October 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

coffeecat, I see that she also switched sides in 2022, bringing down the previous government and allowing Netanyahu to come back to power. So maybe that's it?
posted by clawsoon at 12:29 PM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Israeli leaders understood that the likely consequences of Ben-Gvir's plan (a non-violent trespass on Harem Es Sharif / The Temple Mount) was provocative and likely to result in a violent outrage from Palestinians so they stopped it.

Delayed it, you mean. No one has "stopped" any of the provocations Ben-Gvir has created that have regularly inflamed an already inflammatory situation.
posted by mediareport at 12:32 PM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I mean, is anyone seriously disputing that Ben-Gvir's goal with these provocations is to spark a violent Palestinian response that Israel can then respond to with even greater violence? That seems fairly obvious at this point.
posted by mediareport at 12:36 PM on October 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

1) disrupt the potential saudi-israeli closening 2) increase recruitment 3) placate their allies 4) invite reprisals by the Israelis that shore up domestic support
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:45 PM on October 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

1) disrupt the potential saudi-israeli closening 2) increase recruitment 3) placate their allies 4) invite reprisals by the Israelis that shore up domestic support

Most of these make the assumption that Hamas/Gaza will survive the repercussions, which doesn't seem like a safe bet for their leadership to make, knowing who's in charge of the Israeli government and what might ensue in response...
posted by greatgefilte at 12:59 PM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think if it were Jewish people trapped in the Gaza strip and being forced to live under the deprived and humiliating and deadly conditions that Palestinians currently do no one in this thread would hesitate for one second to call it exactly what it is, and would certainly not be facing pushback from people calling it an "opinion".
posted by windbox at 1:51 PM on October 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

I hate to wade into this morass of pain and anger any more than I have to, but it bears asking: given the immense amount of preparation and planning that must have preceeded this attack, has anyone speculated as to what possible strategic motive Hamas could have had in doing this, especially with the foresight that the Israeli response would be as devastating as it is has been? Even with all the Israeli provocations and the hatemongering by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich that no doubt inflamed the already-awful situation, what could this possibly accomplish other than self-destruction? Honest question.

I think the most probable explanation is that they did not expect to have the wild success that their attack did. Nobody would have predicted it. The probably expected it to be a border conflict quickly shut down by the Israelis after some small amount of terror was inflicted and a lot of their own hotheads were killed off (you have to do something with your hotheaded young men when there is 45% unemployment unless you want a revolution in your own government).

I think it is somewhat borne out by the lack of any significant planning for after the initial attack. They just rampaged. I think a lot of the Hamas terrorists were on what they expected would be a futile suicide mission and expected to be killed quicker than they were and that's why they made no attempt to conceal their identities. They had no expectation of being able to retreat back to Gaza and blend in. Now any who did are identifiable by all the cameras and will surely eventually be caught or killed.

It is really weird times we live in where Russia runs headfirst into a brick wall and Hamas runs through wet tissue paper. The times they are a changin.
posted by srboisvert at 1:54 PM on October 11, 2023 [26 favorites]

It doesn't feel like it should be particularly controversial to judge the IDF pilot who dropped the bomb exactly the same as we judge the Hamas militant who pulled the trigger.

We literally live in a world with a justice system that judges them differently, well, at least those of us living in western countries. That's why there are very different defenses for someone who:

1. Has a feud against his neighbour, and thus provoked beyond reason goes into their house while they are sleeping and murders their entire family in cold blood

2. Has a feud against his neighbour, and during an argument, the neighbour pulls a gun and starts shooting at him so he fires back and kills him.

In the second case, it's somewhat possible to mount a successful defense based on imminent and direct threat to life. We could defend the IDF by showing evidence that there was intelligence detailing the location of current ongoing rocket fire or rocket stockpiles in that location, and that they were acting in direct defense of the lives of others. We could show measures they actively took to minimize casualties, by making calls and announcements 24 hours prior that the building / area would be targeted and to evacuate, using door knock munitions, etc. The defense could still fail if the prosecution proves that the killer is the one that deliberately provoked the other person in the hopes of starting a fight, or that the threat had passed by the time he killed him which changes it from self defense to retaliation.

A defense of a person or military who ambushed and trapped families in basements / music festivals and beheaded children is significantly more difficult. The lack of imminent threat in time and space makes a self defense argument untenable, the best outcome you could get is them being declared criminally insane due to being provoked beyond reason and then locked up indefinitely for treatment in an asylum until they are mentally competent to stand trial.
posted by xdvesper at 2:13 PM on October 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

xdvesper---sorry but the line that 'the IDF takes precautions to minimize civilian casualties and are only there to defend the state' is either painfully ignorant of actual actions on the ground, reflective of contemporary US centrist thinking on the subject, or intentionally deceptive. Possibly all three!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:41 PM on October 11, 2023 [22 favorites]

If you really think that the current wave of Israeli violence against Gaza is motivated by a coolly rational desire to precisely eliminate imminent danger while minimizing civilian casualties, and not by a (justified!) rage and desire for revenge, I don't know what to tell you. You're staking out a position that even the Israeli Defense Minister isn't bothering to defend.
posted by rishabguha at 2:51 PM on October 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

3. Has a feud against his neighbor due to that neighbor having gone into his house while his family was sleeping and murdered them all in cold blood, and thus announces and starts acting upon his intention to give millions people who may or may not be related to or even supportive of the murderer a choice between delivering the murderer or else death by dehydration
posted by Flunkie at 2:56 PM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

but it bears asking: given the immense amount of preparation and planning that must have preceeded this attack, has anyone speculated as to what possible strategic motive Hamas could have had in doing this,

The NYT has an analysis piece trying to answer that question that you might find of interest. Newspapers, magazines, podcasts, etc. are going to be full of think-pieces for the next six months and longer, all presenting answers to the same question.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:06 PM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hesitate to add anything to this thread but seeing the comments it’s clear a lot of folks are not thinking about this with any strong sense of the history. There’s a lot in this post especially in the “my take” section that seems worth folks reading. I admit it largely aligns with my position but also the tone of it feels far more thoughtful than many “takes” out there.
posted by R343L at 3:08 PM on October 11, 2023 [12 favorites]

From the Al Jazeera feed:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed “every member of Hamas is a dead man”.

In a statement, Netanyahu for the first time clearly expressed Israel’s intention to “destroy” Hamas following its surprise attack on Saturday.

“Hamas is Daesh [ISIL/ISIS] and we will crush them and destroy them as the world has destroyed Daesh,” he said in a televised statement, the first delivered jointly with his war cabinet.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant added, “we will wipe Hamas off the face of the Earth”.

So that, it appears, is the plan.
posted by clawsoon at 3:13 PM on October 11, 2023

Israel's Tet Moment (paywalled, free trial)

This was the degree that the “Palestinian problem” was thought to be contained. It got to the point where the Israeli government not only could believe it could act with total impunity, but that they could manage Palestinian politics like they were moving pawns on a chessboard. In a series of shocking comments made to police investigators during a 2019 interrogation about his corruption case, Netanyahu flatly described how he saw Hamas as an asset in hobbling the Palestinian cause. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he said. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” Not really something you’d hear from someone who thought that peace could even hypothetically be preferable compared to the status quo. But this wasn’t even his most blatantly arrogant admission of the interrogation. Also speaking about Hamas, he said to the same officers:

“I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and then hit them over the head. It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them...Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”

posted by Apocryphon at 3:57 PM on October 11, 2023 [17 favorites]

How Israel’s Security Services Failed to Stop Hamas

The four officials said the success of the attack, based on their early assessment, was rooted in a slew of security failures by Israel’s intelligence community and military, including:

- Failure by intelligence officers to monitor key communication channels used by Palestinian attackers;

- Overreliance on border surveillance equipment that was easily shut down by attackers, allowing them to raid military bases and slay soldiers in their beds;

- Clustering of commanders in a single border base that was overrun in the opening phase of the incursion, preventing communication with the rest of the armed forces;

- And a willingness to accept at face value assertions by Gazan military leaders, made on private channels that the Palestinians knew were being monitored by Israel, that they were not preparing for battle.

posted by BungaDunga at 3:58 PM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

“I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and then hit them over the head. It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them...Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”

I have no insight into the mindset of Hamas, but when I read this I'm reminded of a guy I know who was bullied as a kid and would say as an adult, "Sometimes you've got to go berserk on your bullies."
posted by clawsoon at 4:01 PM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

In this analogy are the murdered Israeli children the bullies? Sort of a "you can't make an omelette without massacring a few thousand women and kids" attitude, really.
posted by Justinian at 4:21 PM on October 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

In this analogy are the murdered Israeli children the bullies? Sort of a "you can't make an omelette without massacring a few thousand women and kids" attitude, really.

Agreed, fair, my analogy sucks. Should probably be deleted from the thread. Flagging it myself.
posted by clawsoon at 4:26 PM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

my parents had this godawful line that i think they picked up from the weirdo awful christian offshoot group they had been a part of. when the topic of the middle east would come up they’d inevitably say something about how the israelis and palestinians “fight like brothers fight” i.e. they thought that semitic people are semitic people and that they’re just joshing around or something, i don’t know, i’m not sure how exactly it makes sense but it made such sense to them.

i bring this up because having grown up around my parents’ blisteringly dumb take on the middle east inoculated me against any analogy that relies on personifications of israel and palestine.

or really personifications of nations on the whole, like, what, do you think literal uncle sam is going to come down with actual john bull to break the fight up? hey do you think literal marianne is going to wade down through the mediterranean , or do you think she’ll sit this one out like she sat out iraq?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:30 PM on October 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

In this analogy are the murdered Israeli children the bullies? Sort of a "you can't make an omelette without massacring a few thousand women and kids" attitude, really.

The quote is literally by Benjamin Netanyahu, who is proudly admitting to cultivating Hamas as controlled opposition so that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are discredited by rule under a seemingly radical, unreasonable government that is simultaneously weak enough to be stomped down by Israel's military and technological might. Until, one day last week, they no longer could be.

Looking back in the context of the attacks, Israel’s occupation strategy since the construction of the Iron Dome appears strikingly similar to the U.S. strategy in Vietnam pre-Tet. Generally speaking, the Dome appeared to be a wholesale solution to the Palestinian “problem,” just as the American presence was supposed to “solve” Vietnam without requiring negotiations. And for Israel, with the West Bank occupied and Gaza locked down, the only costs of the occupation appeared to be the periodic rocket attacks from Hamas that the Dome would mostly deal with. After this happened, Israel would bomb them until they stopped. Then, Hamas would wait and rebuild. Then they’d ineffectively attack again, and Israel would bomb again. This practice became so habitual, even mundane, that Israelis would casually refer to it as “mowing the grass.”

Seriously, the Tet article is worth a read.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:02 PM on October 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

The only glimmer of hope I have right now is that the Israeli Public seems almost as angry at Netenyahu as they are at Hamas. His tough guy bullshit doesn’t work and will never work in terms of bringing security to the people of Israel.
posted by interogative mood at 5:06 PM on October 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

Yeah, I was pretty sure that this would be a political windfall for Netanyahu, but there seems to be considerably more of a sense that he fell down on the job here than, for example, there was with Bush after 9/11. (More fool me for looking at this through my parochial American lenses, I guess.)
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:14 PM on October 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

Biden gave another speech today to a group of Jewish community leaders..
posted by interogative mood at 6:27 PM on October 11, 2023

The present rhetoric coming from some US politicians who want extreme retaliation against Gaza -- e.g., Marco Rubio ("They have to be eradicated"), Nikki Haley ("Finish them"), Lindsey Graham ("Level the place") -- is sickening.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 7:40 PM on October 11, 2023 [12 favorites]

Completely weird thing happened where Biden said he saw pictures of beheaded children, then the White house has to clarify that no, he did not see any pictures.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:55 PM on October 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

the line that 'the IDF takes precautions to minimize civilian casualties and are only there to defend the state' is either painfully ignorant of actual actions on the ground

If you really think that the current wave of Israeli violence against Gaza is motivated by a coolly rational desire to precisely eliminate imminent danger while minimizing civilian casualties, and not by a (justified!) rage and desire for revenge, I don't know what to tell you.

I'm merely stating facts which are plain for all to see. There have been several thousand strikes on Gaza, and the death toll issued by the Gaza Ministry of Health stands at 1,100.

If the goal of the IDF was to maximize civilian casualties, they'd just use a a pair of bombs to destroy two apartment buildings in the night without warning, say 14 stories, 9 units per floor, occupancy of 5 people per unit, for over 1,200 deaths, to exceed the total death toll so far.

The only way the death toll is so low thus far is by judiciously minimizing civilian casualties - only bombing areas defined in advance with plenty of warning given for people to evacuate. If their goal was revenge and maximizing the number of deaths, they'd tell everyone to gather in a specific spot, then bomb it.

I'm not sure how these facts are controversial to anyone.

Yes, the rhetoric coming from the mouths of the leaders could be hyperbole to retain the support of their citizens, but their actions speak pretty clearly for themselves.
posted by xdvesper at 7:59 PM on October 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

the rhetoric coming from the mouths of the leaders could be hyperbole

Or they really want genocide, this time.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:06 PM on October 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Jfc can we not do this? Can we not parrot IDF propaganda about how when Israel kills thousands—-yes thousands—-all the baddies that were killed are done on purpose and all the innocents that are killed are a whoopsie? This thread is going pretty well largely because a lot of us know what we are talking about—-and a lot of us are pretty good at smelling bullshit.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:17 PM on October 11, 2023 [35 favorites]

The only way the death toll is so low thus far is by judiciously minimizing civilian casualties -

How many dead Palestinian civilians and children do we find acceptable by this judicious action? Because by day 5 there are as many dead Palestinians by Israelis bombs as Israelis killed in the abomination that Hamas wrought, and Israel is"just getting started"

In 2014 when Hamas kidnapped 3 soldiers, 2000 Palestinians were killed. By their own admission, this time, "the gloves are off ". I expect this ratio to this be exceeded, and everyone to be SO PROUD of the Israelis "restraint"
posted by lalochezia at 8:23 PM on October 11, 2023 [24 favorites]

It isn’t a scoreboard or a game of how many dead civilians. This is war. It is unfair, unjust and people die in awful and terrible ways at random. Those with more guns and more power determine the outcome. The war will end when the leaders agree to sit down and negotiate an end. Israel can’t negotiate with an empty room. Until Hamas agrees to negotiate the war will go on.
posted by interogative mood at 8:55 PM on October 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Israel is a sophisticated nation-state conducting operations against a coalition of insurgent groups (or against the territory itself, if you prefer). Despite all the rhetoric about wiping out Hamas to a man it's possible that Israel will obtain it's actual military objectives and then just withdraw and declare the war over, if no negotiations before then.

So as not to have to clean up the mess or be responsible for the population, and return to the position that 'Gaza isn't occupied.'
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:26 PM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

False Claims Around the Israel Attacks Include Recycled Videos and a Game Clip
Graphic imagery and footage has flooded social media since Hamas terrorists attacked Israelis. Bogus claims are also circulating, and risk obscuring real evidence of atrocities.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:03 PM on October 11, 2023

their actions speak pretty clearly for themselves.

They do, and what I hear them saying is "those of you we cannot justify killing outright as alleged militants or collateral, must leave and will never be allowed to return".

They're getting the ethnic cleansing, forgive me if I don't really want to celebrate that it's going to be a mixture of killing and forced removal instead of all killing.
posted by Audreynachrome at 10:39 PM on October 11, 2023

How Israel-Hamas war disinformation is being spread online

On Tuesday the European Commission issued a letter to Musk warning him over alleged disinformation on X about the Hamas attack on Israel, including fake news and “repurposed old images”. It is understood that X is cooperating with the EU’s request to provide information but it will be some time before Brussels takes any further steps.

Pat de Brún, deputy director at Amnesty Tech, said: “Social media platform companies like Meta and X have clear responsibilities under international human rights standards, such as the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, and these responsibilities are heightened in times of crisis and conflict.

“Social media firms are responsible for identifying and responding effectively to risks and taking effective measures to limit the spread of harmful content – the amplification of which can lead to human rights abuses. However, all too often, big tech companies have failed to step up in the face of such emergencies, enabling hate and misinformation to proliferate.”

X has been contacted for comment.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:19 PM on October 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Satellite images reveal destruction in Gaza following Israeli airstrikes [globalnews]

- Satellite imagery of the destroyed residential buildings in Gaza

"The UN Human Rights Commissioner said the independent commission of inquiry for the region has been collecting and preserving evidence of “war crimes” committed by both Hamas and Israeli forces since Saturday’s attack by Hamas."
posted by porpoise at 12:28 AM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

In 2014 when Hamas kidnapped 3 soldiers, 2000 Palestinians were killed.

This significant misrepresents what happened in so many different ways. It was three teenaged students, not soldiers. The kidnappings occurred in West Bank, not Gaza, and the result of the kidnappings were an operation to enter West Bank with troops to find and rescue the teenagers. The fighting resulted in 11 Palestinian deaths, and in the end the 3 teenagers were found dead.

The 2,000 deaths you are referring to happened in Gaza, which at the time fired 4,000 rockets into Israel and started infiltrating soldiers into Israel by land tunnels and sea. The Israeli air force launched strikes to halt the rocket fire and their ground forces entered Gaza to destroy the tunnel system.
posted by xdvesper at 2:39 AM on October 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

You are correct re the kidnapping of 3 teenagers, not soldiers; which was a hideous crime.My apologies.

The rest of your post: 4k rockets, "at the time" is an elision of its own re timing.

Again , the 2,000 deaths in gaza in 2014 is being exceeded as we speak, many times over. But I'm sure that when five, ten or twenty times as many Palestinian kids are killed this week (compared to the number of Israeli kids) by siege and bombing, that people will point out the great moral victory over the terrorists.
posted by lalochezia at 4:20 AM on October 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Comment removed. Please stay focused on the situation and refrain from treating all of this as a sort abstract discussion about racism, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:45 AM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

It looks like the slaughter at Kfar Azza, 2km from the Gaza border, will turn out to be worse than the slaughter at the Be'eri kibbutz. From Ha'aretz:

IDF officers don’t want to give a number for the death toll in Kfar Azza yet. Largely because the work of locating and removing the bodies only began on Tuesday afternoon and will take long hours, perhaps days, until the burial teams of the Military Rabbinate and Home Front rescue forces have gone from house to house. But quietly they say: “This is as bad, probably worse, than the slaughter at Kibbutz Be’eri,” where 108 bodies were discovered the day before.

Kfar Azza, the largest of the kibbutzim in the northern area of the Gaza border, where 800 Israelis lived until Shabbat morning, could turn out to be site of the biggest massacre of the first day of this war. It could be the biggest massacre to take place in a Jewish community in the Land of Israel since the start of the Zionist enterprise.

WaPo gift link to a similar story about Kfar Azza, where the suddenness of the attack left "full cups of coffee and a jug of milk...on the table in one kitchen."
posted by mediareport at 5:50 AM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

When you bomb hospitals, schools, vital infrastructure and large quantities of homes, you're practically killing people in slow motion. How are they supposed to live in Gaza now? (And Israel is "just getting started" in creating "a city of tents"). All my adult life I've been seeing footage of bombed buildings in Gaza and what is coming out now is unbelievable. Where before it would be close-ups of a building destroyed, now it's panoramas, vistas of everything flattened and broken.

It's not just a matter of "oh we bombed people's homes and schools and hospitals but we somehow managed our warnings deftly enough that only (!!!!) a thousand civilians were killed", it's bombing and destroying an enormous amount of human effort, of human civilization that people have carefully built up over decades and now it's all smashed. Who will rebuild it? Who has the money? Who will be allowed to bring resources in to Gaza?

Hell, how are they going to clean up all that rubble? Where is it going to go? How are they going to lift it all? How are they going to deal with the toxic dust and the dangerous broken things? It's hard enough to deal with a small amount of damage of this kind in a rich area where you have resources, how are they going to do it in Gaza?

You can't just magic up schools and apartments and hospitals. Think of all the medical equipment that is destroyed - that stuff is expensive and even if peace were declared today, there's no guarantee that replacements would be allowed into Gaza at all.

I cannot believe that people are logic chopping about under what conditions it's okay for a state to use airplanes and soldiers to bomb a confined area full of civilians, destroying their homes and schools, destroying people's shops and businesses. This isn't a war. There isn't a war. Where are the combatants? Where are Gaza's planes? This is a revenge action on the very people who didn't do anything. Do we think Hamas asked them, "should we go and machine gun a bunch of teenagers at a music festival" and everyone said "yes, that's a great idea"? Nobody asked me, "should we run a bunch of torture prisons and black sites around the world, American citizen", and frankly I voted in elections as recently as last year, because we have elections, although for how long god knows.
posted by Frowner at 5:55 AM on October 12, 2023 [65 favorites]

If folks want independent left-leaning news from the region, +972 magazine is a collective of Palestinian and Israeli journalists that looks useful.

The Qannans, the Shaheens, the Shaabans: Israel is wiping out entire families in Gaza
posted by mediareport at 5:59 AM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is war.

Is it? Serious question - how do we decide when something is a war vs a terrorist attack or a series of strikes vs mass murder? Part of that seems to be a linguistic distinguishing between state actors and non-state actors, with also some distinction between categories of non-state actors. Some buddy with an automatic rifle shooting up a music festival in Nevada is classed as a mass murder, for example, not a terrorist attack and definitely not a war. Clearly a mass murder and a terrorist attack can be unilateral, but can a war? Typically a war involves two opposing states, even if one is unilaterally the aggressor and the other is just defending itself. (Although if one state encounters negligible opposition from the other state in their aggression, that’s usually been referred to just as colonial conquest.) Is Hamas a state actor? They’re classed as a terrorist group and not recognized as a state government by any other country.
posted by eviemath at 6:00 AM on October 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Meant to include a quote from that +972 link:

Areeg Qannan, a Palestinian teacher who left Gaza two months ago to go and work in Kuwait as a maths teacher, lost every single member of her family in Israeli airstrikes on the Al-Sahaba neighborhood in eastern Gaza on Tuesday. On her Facebook page, she listed the names of her 10 immediate family members who were killed on Oct. 9: her father Mohammad, her mother Zuhayda, her sister Wesal, her brother Mohmoud, his wife Khitam, and their five children aged between 3 and 12 (Mayar 12, Mohammad 10, Reem 7, Omar 5 Lina 3). Khitam, Areeg noted, was pregnant.
posted by mediareport at 6:08 AM on October 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

Is it? Serious question - how do we decide when something is a war vs a terrorist attack or a series of strikes vs mass murder?

Hi, as a former academic specializing in political violence, I have two answers: one is that a lot of this is a judgment call. The Global Terrorism Database has three sets of criteria for terrorism that get increasingly narrow.

Wars are easy: 1000 people killed in a year. That may seem arbitrary but it neatly separates small scale conflict from larger ones (not many conflicts have 900 killed and not many have 1100 killed). Interstate is when its two states, intrastate is when its one state and a nonstate actor.

Now as you point out those definitions become murky in this case---sovereigtny is a continuum. So what we usually do when we're doing a global analysis is leave out Israel/Palestine. *shrug*

Ultimately those definitions are for our theories and our arguments to publish papers and books. I don't think they should be used for moral judgments. And I don't think international law matters much here. And I think who is right and who is wrong is pretty obvious and those theoretical categories are baggage.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:10 AM on October 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

The theoretical categories may not be the “right” ones, but I think that it is helpful to at least try for some relative consistency. As well, international standards around treatment of combatants vs civilians and what constitutes war crimes or not are the sort of thing I expect my country’s government to follow (and that I protest about when they don’t), and to expect other countries to follow. That such categories aren’t applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict in political science academic circles is perhaps illuminating. Why is that?
posted by eviemath at 6:20 AM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

If the goal of the IDF was to maximize civilian casualties

If the goal of the IDF is not to minimize civilian casualties, it does not follow that their goal is to maximize civilian casualties and I don't see anyone arguing that it is. If that was their goal, they could just drop a nuke on Gaza.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:22 AM on October 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

The other question I have - a lot of these news stories, including that horrible one about Kfar Azza, seem to be saying that a lot of Hamas fighters have been killed now. That story says that there have been ~1500 bodies of Hamas fighters found. If we're doing some kind of calculus about who gets to kill who and how many, that's got to count, right? Those are the people who, for whatever reason, chose to attack and kill civilians, including teenagers, peace activists and children. If there's any kind of accountability narrative here, it's got to be "these are the people who did these things, these are the guilty people".
posted by Frowner at 6:25 AM on October 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

If there's any kind of accountability narrative here, it's got to be "these are the people who did these things, these are the guilty people".

The accountability should always go up the chain of command. It's shameful that the US prosecuted a couple of low-level schlubs for "enhanced interrogation" excesses, rather than putting Rumsfeld et al in federal prison, for example. The foot-soldiers/terrorists who were told or volunteered to cross into Israel are obviously the direct perpetrators, but there is a whole organizational/administrative apparatus that planned and carried out the attack. And now, Israel's stated goals center on the removal of that organizational apparatus.

There's a different question not only of if it is realistic to plan to kill/remove an organizational structure that is embedded in a society, but also of how much "Hamas" is the organization and how much it is an ideology that would survive intact regardless of the organizational capacity.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:39 AM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Adding a second comment to avoid abusing the edit window: looking at the earliest videos of the border crossings, it is striking how almost no one covered their faces. Like someone commented above, they probably mostly expected to die quickly. But instead, there's now all kinds of camera evidence of faces, and some number of them survived and presumably recrossed back into Gaza.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:43 AM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

That such categories aren’t applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict in political science academic circles is perhaps illuminating. Why is that?

Its kind of like if you develop a theory of presidential power and behavior in the US, and then trump comes into office. Many view the conflict as sui generis. FWIW my work was dedicated to showing that generalizable theories did apply to the conflict.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:45 AM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think the question of whether Hamas is a state governing authority or not is also highly relevant to the moral question of assigning responsibility.

For example, we usually consider that states should have authority to determine who is or is not a citizen, issue passports to citizens, and control entry/issue visas to non-citizens. Other states refusing to do business as a boycott is ok, but an actual siege/blockade by one state on another is considered a hostile action - sometimes considered warranted in reaction to an earlier hostile action by the besieged or blockaded state, but still understood to be part of hostilities between the two states. We also usually consider that states have a right to defend themselves against hostile action by other states. And then there’s that pesky idea that in wars, “It is unfair, unjust and people die in awful and terrible ways at random.” which can be stated as an observational fact (and thence a reason why many folks have been fairly blanket anti-war throughout human history), or can be used to excuse the harms caused by one or both sides during a war.

But when a state faces a violent insurgent group within its borders, we usually recognize that slightly different rules apply, and that the state bears extra responsibility for civilian harms and minimizing impacts on bystanders - and that a state shouldn’t discriminate between a class of important citizens vs a class of expendable citizens who can be collateral damage.

These are exactly the questions that all of us here are grappling with. I think that it’s important, both for our treatment of each other and for any small amount of power we might potentially have as a community that includes people from around the world and in different positions within our respective societies to influence those who can influence the outcome of the conflict, that we remain clear about what our basic values and principles are (which will differ between Mefites, of course) and do our best to apply our values and principles consistently and based on accurate information.
posted by eviemath at 6:50 AM on October 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

(And thanks for your serious answers to my serious questions, MisantropicPainforest!)
posted by eviemath at 6:51 AM on October 12, 2023

That story says that there have been ~1500 bodies of Hamas fighters found. If we're doing some kind of calculus about who gets to kill who and how many, that's got to count, right?

So much this. You want to bring every Hamas fighter who did these horrific crimes to justice? I'm actually fine with that. The international discussion hasn't been about that though. It's been all about how a pre-teen living next door to them is acceptable collateral damage, when it's not bare-toothed "kill them all, dirty animals".

I would actually like to go further. I think every person who has openly said that Hamas is allowed to do rape as a punishment (whether or not the rhetoric around mass rape turns out to be true or not) or that Judaism is the problem should face a criminal sentence for hate speech.

As long as everyone who has said "flatten the city" or "they knew what would happen" or "they voted for it 15 years ago" is also charged.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:54 AM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Too many people think that you get to do war crimes if your enemy does war crimes. I say in an ideal world, with a juster legal system, they would all face sanctions, Zionist or Tankie.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:56 AM on October 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

David Klion, for N+1: Have We Learned Nothing?

There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11. Somehow, the upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground.

“They’re already dead,” I recall a campus antiwar activist saying to me on the night Bush announced that the US had begun bombing Iraq. He was right; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were about to die in Bush’s folly, their fates already decided. At the time I understood and somewhat appreciated what the activist was saying, but I also was parochial enough to wonder whether he even cared about the Americans at Ground Zero who were literally already dead (never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what happened to them). Today, though, his words echo in my head as I think about the Palestinians in Gaza, and the agony of knowing that they’re already dead no matter what any of us feel or think or say.

posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:13 AM on October 12, 2023 [11 favorites]

1,500 Hamas fighters.

I call bullshit. This isn't a video game where the bad guys are easily identifiable. How do you tell that a liquified corpse splattered across two city blocks by a bomb was a Hamas fighter?

This seems to be more of the same sort of thing the US engaged in with its kill counts for all its Middle Eastern bombings. America defined all men killed by Americans as terrorists. And presumably that included a large number of women and children who were too mangled to be identified as anything but goo.

It is flatly impossible to believe that Israel has positively identified 1,500 corpses as being Hamas fighters, let's not spread BS around just because the IDF is the source.

As for the "war" question, I have to ask why anyone thinks it's relevant? Does murdering children become morally permissable as long as you say you're doing so in a war?

I know the strong like to claim that. America maintains it is morally superior to Hamas because despite America killing around one million Iraqi civilians that was "war" and Hamas was "terrorism". But let's not play semantic games. The dead child does't care if they were killed in a "war" or not.

The entire concept of defining civilians murdered by soldiers as "collatoral damage" and claiming it's ok because they the soldiers pinkie swear it was totally an accident is one of the more blatantly self serving moral doctrines ever invented by the rich and strong.

Humanity has this weird bias towards justifying systemic, imperonal, evil while condemning more disorganized and personal evil.

"It's nothing personal" isn't an excuse for murdering children, if anything it's a contemptuous insult that makes it worse. Sorry kid, you don't matter enough for the soldiers to have even wanted to kill you, they killed you because it was "acceptable collatoral damage" for something more important than your life. Yeah, that's not a moral justification.

Dead is dead and the dead don't care if they were killed deliberately or just written off as acceptable losses by some bean counter somewhere. If killing children by beheading them is wrong and evil, I argue it is, then killing children by bombing the fuck out of them is also wrong and evil.

The ONLY difference is the strength and distance of the perpetrators. The weak are condemned and the strong are justified.

I reject the idea that morality is determined by who has greater strength and that the tools the weak use to fight are immoral while the tools the strong use to fight are moral. Might makes right is not a good foundation for a moral system.
posted by sotonohito at 7:47 AM on October 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

1,500 Hamas fighters.

I call bullshit. This isn't a video game where the bad guys are easily identifiable. How do you tell that a liquified corpse splattered across two city blocks by a bomb was a Hamas fighter?

The 1,500 figure I've seen seemed to refer to uniformed Hamas fighters found and killed outside of Gaza. They were pretty recognizable- uniformed, armed to the teeth, etc.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:03 AM on October 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

I call bullshit. This isn't a video game where the bad guys are easily identifiable. How do you tell that a liquified corpse splattered across two city blocks by a bomb was a Hamas fighter?

That seems really true. I agree. (To clarify - the article seems to be saying that the people considered Hamas fighters have mostly been killed during fighting outside of Gaza, so not people who were just going about their business.)

What I was thinking about when I commented was more the way that people (sometimes here, frequently elsewhere online) are stacking up the numbers, like "well Hamas killed X number of people so it's not monstrous or inexplicable that the Israeli government has killed X-minus-Y number of people", and that it seems weird to me that people can simultaneously say that Israel has killed a large number of Hamas fighters, a larger number in fact than they say that Israeli civilians were killed, and yet still somehow compare the number of civilians being killed in Gaza with the Israeli civilians killed.

I know that this is all propaganda but it's still striking that people want to play a numbers game and choose to play it by excluding a large, significant number that they themselves admit to be real. It really highlights the way that the purpose of the "logic" here is to justify collective punishment of trapped civilians.
posted by Frowner at 8:04 AM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Klion piece is very good, I was just going to post it here. Strongly recommend.
posted by coffeecat at 8:07 AM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

That such categories aren’t applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict in political science academic circles is perhaps illuminating. Why is that?

I can't speak for the IR people who drop I/P out of analyses, but political science (like most social sciences) finds itself in a difficult place.

On the one hand, the things we're studying are extraordinarily complex and not particularly amenable to strong theory (at least not on a level that's useful). Human mentalities, the most complex things we're aware of, interacting with each other. There's not as yet anything as handy as a theory of relativity for that, and the likelihood of one ever emerging is dim.

On the other hand, we're also not in the business of actually getting to the bottom of the things we study. The core, underlying answers to almost anything in political science are going to be exercises in neurology or something underneath that, because there's nothing else that the answers could possibly be. Start with these neurons connected thusly and input energy into sensory cells like this, and the following happens. But theories and answers like that would be singularly useless. Instead, we're in the business of creating (mostly) human-scale, human-understandable models of political stuff.

Which means lots of errors, lots of conditionality, lots of ideas limited in time and space, and that's fine.

But one of the consequences of all this is that it's very common to just drop weird, difficult-to-explain, or otherwise analytically troublesome cases so that you can get on with studying the other cases that happen to be more explainable. Myself, I mostly work on US state legislatures, of which there are 50. But you would not know that if you looked at state legislative research -- we almost always drop Nebraska because it's structurally weird and a lot of the time drop New Hampshire because it's structurally weird (but less than NE, but it's also a wretched hive of scum and villainy).

There are of course people who study some of those weird cases that commonly get dropped, but studying a few weird cases means that those studies end up being closer to anthropology or humanities than mainstream (US) political science. Moreso for weird cases that matter (I/P) than ones that few people would care about (Nebraska).
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:11 AM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

A child killed by an Israeli bomb had exactly the same moral worth as a child murdered by a Hamas militant. It doesn't feel like it should be particularly controversial to judge the IDF pilot who dropped the bomb exactly the same as we judge the Hamas militant who pulled the trigger.

Dead is dead and the dead don't care if they were killed deliberately or just written off as acceptable losses by some bean counter somewhere. If killing children by beheading them is wrong and evil, I argue it is, then killing children by bombing the fuck out of them is also wrong and evil.

I think that the problem with this discussion right now is that people are really conflating the actions of the state with actions of individuals. I don't think it's because my fellow posters are bad or disingenuous - I think it's a very tempting thing to bind together - but I think that if we are going to have a serious discussion about this, we need to not do it.

As someone who has participated in a war and seen and spoken with people on both sides of that war - the occupiers and the occupied - I can tell you that there are, in fact, moral nuances and differences both on the part of states doing the killing and on the part of individuals doing the killing, and we can tell that by listening to the affected people and by looking at the impact on those who committed the killings.

Morality generally considers intention and impact. That is why nearly every legal and religious system around the world has different categories of wrongdoing or sin according to what the person knew when they wree doing the action and what their intention was.

Killing matters - but how you do it also matters. There is a moral difference between people that torture other people to death and people who kill quickly, and that isn't just about which state people perceive is right. I think we can all agree (as of 2009, at least) that the United States using napalm on people and burning them alive was a particularly pernicious and morally problematic action, more so than just participating in Vietnam, which is why the UN calls the use of napalm against civilians a war crime.

There is a moral difference in the individual doing it, between someone who pushes a button and kills children, and someone who sees children begging for their lives and their mothers begging for their lives and chooses to look at that and kill them anyway. And that's why the people who do the latter also suffer more moral injury, and have significant and horrific trauma until their deaths.

But there's a difference between acknowledging that, and our discussion of whether the state which endorsed and gave the orders to do these things is moral or not.

And I do want to acknowledge sonohito's points about the states themselves, though we disagree on the moral status of the individuals. Because he is correct that not every state has those choices. For some, it's a choice of "do we fight/kill people, or do we not kill people?" Hamas doesn't have a well-disciplined and trained fighting force with access to bombs. It's not a matter of "do we accept a little less success in exchange for keeping to our morals" - it's a matter of 'do we attack at all'. And so we are comparing apples and oranges if we're trying to compare state versus state.

But that also doesn't mean that states which have those choices are unassailable. Israel absolutely has the means and tools at its disposal to react more surgically than it is currently doing. The violence at this time is the point - it's a "you should know what results so this never, ever happens again". However, they may *believe* that they don't have the choice - that that level of brutality is the only way to succeed at stopping this from happening again and making the people of Israel feel safe. They're wrong, but they may believe it.

And I think it's hard for us to judge the interior of someone's soul. How much did people engage in things joyously versus regretfully? How much are people themselves horrified? We can't know. We can only say our morality and try to influence the people making the choices.
posted by corb at 8:18 AM on October 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

Catching up with the news today.

-It's good to see the top NYTimes headline is "U.N. Warns of ‘Disaster’ in Gaza as Israel Strikes Back at Hamas." If people have Republican senators, as I do, my approach to contacting them was not to dispute giving military aid to Israel (seems like a lost cause) but to stress that we cannot abet a humanitarian disaster, and pointing out that half of Gaza residents are children.

-Secretary of State Antony Blinken has publicly said that the attacks carried “harrowing echoes” of Nazi massacres. This, along with Lindsey Graham's comment that it's a "religious war" is troubling. Though my Jewish identity is ambiguous, my name is not, and I've traveled fairly widely in the region, including Arabic programs in Egypt and Jordan (where a large percent of the population is Palestinian-Jordanian). My experience is that people of the region are very adept at distinguishing between Jewish people, Israelis, and the Israeli state, far more than the average American. This isn't to say religion doesn't play a role here, but making this into primarily a religious conflict doesn't make sense, and ignores the material/political/economic inequities/grievances at play - which I'd expect from someone like Graham, but I'd expect a bit more from Biden's cabinet.

-Something that keeps coming up in Israelis' anger toward their government is how long people in the kibbutzim had to wait for the military. And, I mean, it is really striking. This NYTimes article has an infographic. It was anywhere from 8 to over 20(!!) hours. Again, Israel is a small country - it's shocking to think it could take that long, and so I'm not surprised that Netanyahu is not enjoying much of a rally-around-the-flag boost.

-The NYU law student who lost their job for their statement on the war was going to work for a law firm that has Raytheon as a client, which worked on the Iron Dome System. Bad judgement, to put it mildly.
posted by coffeecat at 8:33 AM on October 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

I found this New Yorker interview that came out yesterday between [the GOAT of interviews] Isaac Chotner and Tareq Baconi, the president of the Palestinian Policy Network, extremely enlightening: Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes from Here

Tareq has written a book on Hamas and discusses a bit more in depth speculations on what they may have hoped to accomplish, as well as an in depth conversation about violence:

[...]when I hear the reports about dead children in Israeli towns, I sometimes have trouble thinking of this as military strategy, or some part of a coherent political struggle with clear ends in mind. It often seems like sadism. And I don’t know how we should think about these acts in the context of larger struggles, even larger struggles we support. How do you wrestle with that?

It’s a really important question and, I think, a very, very difficult one. I grapple with it every day. What you’re saying is absolutely right. There was no anti-colonial struggle or struggle for decolonization without violence. Part of the issue here is that it’s really important for us to go back to centering the primary cause in any anti-colonial struggle, which is colonial violence. It’s crucial to ground the discussion in that context because Hamas’s violence isn’t coming out of the blue. And part of the issue around, as you say, sadism, is that Palestinians have, day in, day out, been living with death and violence.

This is the first time I have been interviewed by The New Yorker, and it’s happening because Israelis were killed. What happened when Palestinians were killed in the thousands, just in the fifteen years that I’ve been covering Hamas? And so, when we really want to think about what this driver of violence is—and the pictures that have been coming out are sickening—we need to understand that colonial violence instills dehumanization both in the oppressor and in the oppressed. And it’s completely out of mind. It’s mind-boggling to me that Israeli protesters go out to protest for democracy in an apartheid regime. The only way they can hold that contradiction is if they accept that Palestinian lives are absent or expendable. And so we have to understand this violence, which, again, is heart-wrenching, in that context.
posted by windbox at 8:35 AM on October 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

My experience is that people of the region are very adept at distinguishing between Jewish people, Israelis, and the Israeli state, far more than the average American.

The other day I was reading a story about Qusra, a town in the West Bank where conflict has been amped up by, among others, Ben-Gvir. One thing that jumped out as me, a naive Canadian, was that the Palestinians in the town distinguished between "the Jews" (who were fine by them) and "the settlers" (who were not).

I see that 3 or 4 Palestinians have been shot and killed in the town in the past couple of days by settlers.
posted by clawsoon at 8:47 AM on October 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

There isn't a war. Where are the combatants? Where are Gaza's planes?

Hamas is the government of Gaza. They control internal security, provide government services, collect taxes and have eliminated meaningful political opposition within Gaza. Its armed forces and those of allied militia groups consisting of 30,000-50,000 troops. The forces primarily consist of light infantry with technicals (pickup trucks with machine guns / rocket launchers) and armored vehicles, artillery/rocket forces, anti-tank guided munitions, small drones (similar to the kind operated in Ukraine adapted from commercial drones) and a few paragliders. Their military maintains an extensive tunnel and bunker network under Gaza which houses factories for the production of ammunition, small arms and rockets; along with command and control infrastructure. The tunnels are also used for smuggling/infiltration operations under border with Egypt and Israel. Hamas' government in Gaza has diplomatic relations with a number of countries including Qatar, Syria and Iran.

Hamas' military launched a large scale offensive into Israel occupying military bases and villages with several thousand soldiers supported by missile bombardment, drones and paragliders. Israel's military responded to the invasion. Israel's government has issued a declaration of war. You have two states engaged in a military conflict -- it's a war. The combatants are the the military forces of Hamas and the Israeli army.

The fact that they don't have they don't have parity with Israel doesn't make it less a war. Wars are not fair fights. There is nothing moral in war. At best war is an exercise in damage control to what can be saved of our humanity. It is bleak, depressing and we should all want it to end as soon as possible.

Unfortunately Israel and Hamas are not ready to sit down and negotiate an end to their war. In light of recent events Hamas and its international allies will have to offer something other than death to Israel + ceasefire and lets fight again in a year or two as a starting point.

The prospect of the Israeli military conducting a ground operation to conquer Gaza is a nightmare -- 50,000 soldiers with sophisticated, well prepared fortifications and 2 million civilians with no place to go. Look at what happened in South Lebanon the last time the Israelis went in there, look what happened to the US Marines at Iwo Jima. The current Israeli plan seems one a ground invasion of Gaza to eliminate Hamas. This will result in very high civilian and military casualties. Perhaps some kind of negotiated settlement can be found because the prospects are rather dire. I don't know what offramp might even be available in terms of a negotiated end to this.

Ultimately all wars end with a negotiated agreement. Complete destruction of the enemy is seldom possible.
posted by interogative mood at 8:56 AM on October 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

Ex-PM Ehud Olmert was on DW's Conflict Zone. He said Netanyahu needs to go, and will 'be forced to' by the end of this, and that the current government are "violent, messianic thugs."

He also said that he does think that Iran was involved in organizing the attacks, but doesn't think there are plans for conventional military action against Iran by Israel.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:58 AM on October 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

corb: As someone who has participated in a war and seen and spoken with people on both sides of that war - the occupiers and the occupied - I can tell you that there are, in fact, moral nuances and differences both on the part of states doing the killing and on the part of individuals doing the killing, and we can tell that by listening to the affected people and by looking at the impact on those who committed the killings...

And I think it's hard for us to judge the interior of someone's soul. How much did people engage in things joyously versus regretfully? How much are people themselves horrified? We can't know. We can only say our morality and try to influence the people making the choices.

One challenge I have with judging the morality of a killing based on what's in someone's soul, a challenge that has been greatly amplified by the past couple of centuries of technological development, is that there is a motivation for states to make the evil they want to perpetrate as banal as possible for the operators.

Instead of limiting the state's pool of evil-doers to the ranks of psychopaths, the possibility of killing with the push of a button greatly expands the number of people that a state can bring into its evil-doing. The people who push the buttons, the people who make the buttons, the people who make the systems that the buttons fire, the people who give the orders to push the buttons - none of them have to be the kind of psychopath who would look at a baby they'd mangled and laugh.

It's a sort of moral version of Jevon's paradox: Reduce the moral impact on the people doing the killing, and you'll end up with a lot more killing, a lot more mangled babies in the rubble.

This has been the trend of Western warfare over the past couple of centuries. The Zionists who got the project of Israel going had lots of interesting ideas about how to build a better, fairer nation than what they had found in Europe, including some who wanted to build a completely classless society, but they were still fully in the stream of Western thought, so Israel followed the same trend. There have been so many more mangled children among the Palestinians than among the Israelis over the past 75 years in part because Israel, like other Western nations, has successfully lowered the moral bar in a way that allowed many more people to keep a relatively clean conscience while participating in atrocities. They don't have to wake up with nightmares about what they've done.
posted by clawsoon at 9:31 AM on October 12, 2023 [14 favorites]

Hamas now using the "collateral damage" excuse:

“When the military base was breached and Israeli occupation forces woke up to the surprise, they were in total shock – large numbers of people, men and women, armed and unarmed. And as a result, things went out of control. That’s why we reached out to the kibbutzim and other illegal settlements. Some security guards and soldiers were inside these kibbutzim along with civilians. That’s why many civilians were killed as collateral damage,” al-Arouri told Al Jazeera.

Modernizing their propaganda along with their weaponry, I guess.
posted by clawsoon at 9:39 AM on October 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Ex-PM Ehud Olmert was on DW's Conflict Zone . He said Netanyahu needs to go, and will 'be forced to' by the end of this, and that the current government are "violent, messianic thugs."

This interview poses the most important question going forward. If the only way forward is a one state solution, as per the hard line rightwing, what happens after Israel subsumes all the Palestinian land? It's not a homeland for the Jewish people. It would be a binational state with millions of Palestinian citizens. Like 50-50 Israel-Palestinian if Gaza and the West Bank are subsumed into Israel.

What then? Do the Jewish people give up political hegemony in what's supposed to be a homeland for them? What happens if the millions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Syria return and take up citizenship in this single state? Do the hard-right set up legalized second class citizenship for Palestinians in Israel? Or will Jewish people be a political minority in their own homeland?

Like I'm not quite sure the hard-right messianic factions have thought about what's going to happen when the dog catches the car in a one state solution.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:43 AM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

The only way the death toll is so low thus far is by judiciously minimizing civilian casualties

Glad to hear that the total ban on water is judiciously targeted.
posted by Flunkie at 9:55 AM on October 12, 2023 [12 favorites]

Like I'm not quite sure the hard-right messianic factions have thought about what's going to happen when the dog catches the car in a one state solution.

there are already demands for a "second Nakba". This sentiment is not new.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:58 AM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

To where? Back in '48 the Israelis kicked the Palestinians out of Israel to areas reserved for a Palestinian state inside the Mandate of Palestine. If that doesn't exist where do they drive the people to? Egypt is going to stop them from sending them into the Sinai. Jordan will stop them from sending more over. Lebanon and Syria?
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:07 AM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

To where? Back in '48 the Israelis kicked the Palestinians out of Israel to areas reserved for a Palestinian state inside the Mandate of Palestine.

They also forcibly expelled whole villages within the land assigned to the Palestinians.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:17 AM on October 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Reduce the moral impact on the people doing the killing, and you'll end up with a lot more killing, a lot more mangled babies in the rubble.

If you ignore the entire history and documentary evidence of warfare sure. The reason there are more mangled bodies in the ruins of Gaza than Israel is just a power imbalance and it doesn’t matter if it comes with the dropping of a bomb or old fashioned horses and pikemen.

Look at what happened in Rawanda or the Lebanese civil war. People are more than willing to go into their neighbors houses and kill them with machetes if that is what is available. War is now and always has been awful for civilians.

Also I think you will find that to drone operators and pilots who drop bombs suffer from the same kinds of post combat mental health disorders that soldiers who have shot the enemy feel. Drone operators often have it the worse because they might observe a position for days - weeks to get a sense of the routines or the target in hopes or catching them alone or when there are going to be fewer civilian casualties. They see a lot of stuff on those cameras, intimate moments with friends and family like kicking the ball in the yard with the kids and then one day they are ordered to fire a missile and blow it up. Lots of people can’t live with themselves after that.
posted by interogative mood at 10:21 AM on October 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

One challenge I have with judging the morality of a killing based on what's in someone's soul, a challenge that has been greatly amplified by the past couple of centuries of technological development, is that there is a motivation for states to make the evil they want to perpetrate as banal as possible for the operators.

You are one million percent correct here (For example, the US army started using human shaped targets to desensitize soldiers to the experience of shooting at human shaped people and make it automatic without requiring thought) but I think that the response has to be not our changing of our understanding of the personal morality of the people doing the killing, but rather, in challenging the states directly about how they are creating banality to up the casualty levels.

And I think there's important reasons to place the blame directly back on the states who are issuing the orders, to say that a state which can presumably see the logical consequences of its actions should take steps to avoid civilian casualties no matter how 'clean' the deaths look or are. Because they're also the ones who can really change what's happening, rather than the individual button-pushers, and are much more vulnerable to pressure. But in order to do that, their own citizens need to be willing to say, "I'm willing to accept the consequences in order for us to be moral."
posted by corb at 10:22 AM on October 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

It would be a binational state with millions of Palestinian citizens. Like 50-50 Israel-Palestinian if Gaza and the West Bank are subsumed into Israel.

If you look at all the other settled areas, there aren't any Palestinians living there, they get driven out during the process of occupation.
The question is: if 4 million people are driven out where will they go?
posted by Lanark at 11:45 AM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you look at all the other settled areas, there aren't any Palestinians living there, they get driven out during the process of occupation.

About 20-25% of the population of Israel is Arab/Palestinian. Although there are internally displaced refugees from past conflicts in the West Bank and Gaza who fled during previous conflicts and there are also refugees and descendants of refugees who are still essentially stateless residing in what have become permanent refugee camps in nearby countries such as Lebanon.
posted by interogative mood at 12:03 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Palestinians who stayed put in 1948 and are now Israeli citizens are in a very different situation to the Palestinians living in Gaza, they are not interchangeable.
posted by Lanark at 12:16 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Have We Learned Nothing? (David Klion, n+1)

There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11. Somehow, the upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground.

“They’re already dead,” I recall a campus antiwar activist saying to me on the night Bush announced that the US had begun bombing Iraq. He was right; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were about to die in Bush’s folly, their fates already decided. At the time I understood and somewhat appreciated what the activist was saying, but I also was parochial enough to wonder whether he even cared about the Americans at Ground Zero who were literally already dead (never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what happened to them). Today, though, his words echo in my head as I think about the Palestinians in Gaza, and the agony of knowing that they’re already dead no matter what any of us feel or think or say.

posted by non canadian guy at 12:24 PM on October 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

The 1,500 figure I've seen seemed to refer to uniformed Hamas fighters found and killed outside of Gaza. They were pretty recognizable- uniformed, armed to the teeth, etc.

You must have watched different footage from me. I saw some arabic headbands. Other than that it looked like ragtag mob. I doubt there were many identification issues though since they were killed in fighting. I do think it must have also been a terrifying day for Gaza residents who were working in Israel that day though and would be unsurprised if some were mistakenly taken for attackers and killed.

I think the identification issue is a big one though. Historically, Israel has been very liberal in who they label as a militant. The rule was pretty much any non-child male and probably still is. They also have a habit of retroactively declaring people militants when they are collateral damage or mistaken kills in raids and confrontations (The US military and politicians are also often guilty of this).

Likewise Israel's definition of Israeli civilians is extremely generous. They have mandatory military service for all but fundamentalists. This means almost every adult, male and female, is potentially a reservist. Is a reservist a civilian?

The mandatory service actually saved the attack from being worse for Israel because while the active duty military doddled the reservists and even retired generals stepped up to fight back.

As with everything in the Middle East it is all muddier and more complicated than the Western press presents it as.
posted by srboisvert at 12:29 PM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Do the Jewish people give up political hegemony in what's supposed to be a homeland for them?

I am not sure why this is a worse outcome than what even many Israelis agree is apartheid being used to maintain that hegemony?
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:30 PM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

There are Palestinians who are Israeli citizens from 1948 and another group from the area around Jerusalem thst received citizenship post 1967. Then there are the Palestinians in Gaza who are refugees/ defended from refugees vs people who were there. The same is true for the West Bank. There is also intermarriage where families have some with Israeli citizenship and others who are in the territories. Beyond that there is the Palestinian diaspora of refugees who are outside of Israel/Palestine. Among those there are the stateless refugees vs those who have gained citizenship elsewhere. My point was just that it is not as simple as the Israeli Jews came in and removed all the Arab Palestinians.

While there are similarities to Apartheid there are also differences in the sense that under the UN proposals going back to the end of British colonization the goal has always been separate states for the communities, not a single unitary country like South Africa. The inability of both sides to reach an agreement on borders or even to acknowledge the soverignty rights of other other has been a major hurdle to ending this . A single state solution seems unworkable, although perhaps some kind of EU style confederation would be possible. The Palestinians should make a deal while they have something left. It sucks, but every time they’ve held out for more facts in the ground have given them less and less. As an outsider it is easy for me to say that, much harder for Palestinians to agree to that.
posted by interogative mood at 1:04 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

“We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” - a less bleak message from the editor of Jewish Currents.

One of the most terrible things about this event is the sense of its inevitability. The violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence. Many people have struggled with the straightjacket of this inevitability, straining to articulate that its recognition does not mean its embrace. I am reminding myself that it was from Palestinians, many of them writing and speaking in these pages, that I learned to think of Palestine as a site of possibility—a place where the very idea of the nation-state, which has so harmed both peoples, could be remade or destroyed entirely. And it was Palestinians who opened my thinking to multiple visions of sharing the land. On the left, I hope we do not mistake the inevitability of the violence for an inescapable limit on our work or the quality of our thought. Even if our dreams for better have failed, they must accompany us through this moment to the other side. We need to imagine a movement for liberation better even than the Exodus—an exodus where neither people has to leave. Where people stay to pick up the pieces, rearranging themselves not just as Jews or Palestinians but as antifascists and workers and artists. I want what Puerto Rican Jewish poet and activist Aurora Levins Morales describes in her poem “Red Sea”:
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.

I wish I could be more hopefully about voices like that being heard and there not just being a blind stumble into more violence.
posted by Artw at 1:21 PM on October 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

While there are similarities to Apartheid there are also differences in the sense that under the UN proposals going back to the end of British colonization the goal has always been separate states for the communities, not a single unitary country like South Africa. The inability of both sides to reach an agreement on borders or even to acknowledge the soverignty rights of other other has been a major hurdle to ending this

Which doesn't change the fact that the current situation is de facto apartheid.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:27 PM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

The only way the death toll is so low thus far is by judiciously minimizing civilian casualties

On NPR this afternoon, a reporter claimed that more than half of the Palestinian deaths so far have been women and children.
posted by Flunkie at 2:35 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

The median age is 18, so women and children are probably 75% of the population.
posted by Lanark at 2:46 PM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ah, so, judiciously minimized!
posted by Flunkie at 2:49 PM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Israel: White Phosphorus Used in Gaza, Lebanon
posted by bcd at 3:21 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hamas ≠ 2 million people that live in gaza all of whom are being bombed and starved, including hundreds of thousands of children.
posted by lalochezia at 3:29 PM on October 12, 2023 [20 favorites]

Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip and the two million people. They enforce their laws rather stringently. They own that responsibility, and they should have thought about it.*

*they did think about it, actually, and decided that media optics of Israeli retaliation for their horrifying slaughter was worth the civilian casualties.**

**note that this does not morally justify the Israeli actions. I’d tell them not to get pulled into the trap.
posted by Galvanic at 3:54 PM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

There is a moral difference in the individual doing it, between someone who pushes a button and kills children, and someone who sees children begging for their lives and their mothers begging for their lives and chooses to look at that and kill them anyway. And that's why the people who do the latter also suffer more moral injury, and have significant and horrific trauma until their deaths.

This may be an agree-to-disagree thing, but I just entirely reject this, and I don't think it's quite as obvious a moral fact as you're making it out to be. You don't get to absolve yourself of moral culpability by hiding behind a screen and a drone. Murdering a child is murdering a child.
posted by rishabguha at 3:57 PM on October 12, 2023 [14 favorites]

I have no idea what this might portend: Syria says Damascus and Aleppo airports hit by Israeli missiles
posted by clawsoon at 4:04 PM on October 12, 2023

You know, if Hamas wanted to avoid massive Israeli retaliation

Use of incendiary weapons against civilian populations is an actual war crime, not "massive retaliation".
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 4:06 PM on October 12, 2023 [21 favorites]

Pretty gross to deny any agency to the state of Israel.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:16 PM on October 12, 2023 [13 favorites]

"You know, if Hamas wanted to avoid..." - who is arguing that Hamas's actions, with respect to both Israeli citizens and the Palestinian citizens who they ostensibly represent, are anything less than abhorrent?
posted by Flunkie at 4:26 PM on October 12, 2023 [13 favorites]

Use of incendiary weapons against civilian populations is an actual war crime, not "massive retaliation".

Based on what laws? Israel is a signatory to the to the 1949 Geneva accords but not the 1977 follow ons. It’s not a signatory to the Rome Treaty that established the ICC. Let me know what laws — that it has signed on to - that Israel has broken.

Also, before you get huffy, remember that I think that Israel’s response is morally horrifying, just like Hamas's initial assault.
posted by Galvanic at 4:45 PM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Those are unhelpful comments, Galvanic, and lacking the nuance and consideration most other posters are showing in this thread.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 4:49 PM on October 12, 2023 [16 favorites]

"based on what laws" is perhaps the most inhumane thing I've read in this thread.
posted by sagc at 4:52 PM on October 12, 2023 [16 favorites]

Mm. If you want to invoke legalities, you should actually know what laws apply.
posted by Galvanic at 4:52 PM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Based on what laws? Israel is a signatory to the to the 1949 Geneva accords but not the 1977 follow ons. It’s not a signatory to the Rome Treaty that established the ICC. Let me know what laws — that it has signed on to - that Israel has broken.

Whether signing on is relevant when it comes to war crimes is debated.
posted by clawsoon at 4:53 PM on October 12, 2023 [17 favorites]

Galvanic, in no way are you coming across as a person who "think[s] that Israel’s response is morally horrifying".
posted by sagc at 4:55 PM on October 12, 2023 [16 favorites]

You all should know that laws are written by the powerful to control the weak. Invoking legalities thus just puts the powerful in their position of strength and kills your position even before it starts. There’s a reason that the ICC has largely prosecuted African defendants as opposed to anyone else. They won’t go after the northern countries because of the power imbalance.

This is not an argument of law — because you’ll lose that 100 times out of a 100. It’s an argument of morals. The chances aren’t much better, but they’re there.
posted by Galvanic at 5:08 PM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’m sure the mods will be along soon to get you back in your comfort zone soon.
posted by Galvanic at 5:09 PM on October 12, 2023

jfc
posted by Flunkie at 5:14 PM on October 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

Or as that great philosopher of our age wint once wrote:

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
posted by rhymedirective at 5:15 PM on October 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

You know, if Hamas wanted to avoid massive Israeli retaliation, they might have wanted to not slaughter thousands of Israeli civilians and then follow-up by parading their bodies through the streets. I realize this is a simplistic solution but it has the virtue of actually working.

It never has before.

This isn't a justification of what Hamas did -- which was disgusting -- only that there is no clean warfare between Hamas and Israel. At least there hasn't been yet.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:25 PM on October 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

I read a this recently but I sadly can't recall the source.

"Context is mandatory. Context is not justification."

What Hamas did was horrific and inexcusable. Yes, it happened in context of horrible and inexcusable things that the Israeli government has done to Palestinians. I no more blame all Palestinians nor all Israeli for the acts of their worst humans than I do blame the family of the man who punched me. I do thoroughly blame those worst humans, particularly Hamas at this moment.

Decades (centuries?) of violence hasn't solved this conflict and it's insanity to keep coming back to "if we just kill more people on the other side, this will all be over." I despair that mass violence will continue to be the only solution that will be attempted by hardliners on any side.

Much sympathy to the families and victims.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:27 PM on October 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

It never has before

Sure it has. Israel hasn’t actually leveled Gaza before. Blockaded, attacked from the air, but nothing approaching what, eg, the Soviets did to Berlin in 1945.
posted by Galvanic at 5:31 PM on October 12, 2023

Galvanic, please take a break from this thread. Your comments are accumulating flags. You are arguing with users, don't seem to have intentions of contributing positively to the thread and are engaging in a back and forth that isn't productive.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 5:31 PM on October 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

X / Twitter link
I served in Israel for three years as a British diplomat. This is a thoughtful, clearly deeply felt piece that may help many people struggling to understand why we are where we are now. I urge you to read it.
posted by adamvasco at 5:41 PM on October 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

The Israeli public opinion blames their government for the attack according to a Jerusalem Post poll.
posted by interogative mood at 6:02 PM on October 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

One challenge I have with judging the morality of a killing based on what's in someone's soul, a challenge that has been greatly amplified by the past couple of centuries of technological development, is that there is a motivation for states to make the evil they want to perpetrate as banal as possible for the operators.
Corb gave a great response. There is a historical antecedent, I'm sure there's plenty but here we have Guglielmo Embriaco and Gaston of Béarn who supervised construction of the siege machines during the First crusade. when the crusaders entered Jerusalem they slaughtered between 40,000 and 70, 000 in just over a day. Jewish and Arabic people slaughtered. A Arabic historian noted that the streets literally ran with blood. I believe it's not so much the weaponry in the last 200 to 300 years that have tempered man's ability to slaughter each other for instance the machine gun on World War I but the important factor of a religious aspect and no doubt political. how many crusaders would question their actions when they're being sanctioned by God. which brings in the element of righteousness which makes this conflict much more harder because how does one find a moral aperture in the face of legality that is long lost its face.
posted by clavdivs at 6:12 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

The notion of destroying Hamas seems about as realistic as the US plan to destroy the Taliban. A plan based on an unobtainable objective is no plan and is doomed to fail. Israel should pause and assess what to do next, come up with an actual plan / strategy. The urgency now is to secure the border, bury the dead, spend some time focused on mourning, instead of vengeance. Lashing out when provoked it usually not a good idea, compose yourself first. The war will still be there tomorrow if they want it.
posted by interogative mood at 6:41 PM on October 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

adamvasco's X/Twitter link really does provide a comprehensive overview behind these horrific events that puts them in their historical context -- not unlike clavdivs"s comment just above. Horrific events over which we have strong feelings and no control. Hence this ever more fraught thread over what is not going to get anything but much worse for a long long time, I fear.
posted by y2karl at 6:50 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

[i am currently resisting the urge to respond to a friend's Facebook post about how this is important because Jesus was a Jew and events in Israel govern when he's going to come back with "this is insane". pray for me]
posted by clawsoon at 7:09 PM on October 12, 2023 [17 favorites]

The story that 'these people have been fighting for centuries' supports certain ways of understanding this conflict but lacks evidence. The conflict starts in 1948 or has its roots during WW1 according to many sources that aim for relative neutrality.
posted by latkes at 7:50 PM on October 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

post about how this is important because Jesus was a Jew and events in Israel govern when he's going to come back

I wouldn't without some levity. Tell them Jesus was born in a client state of Rome who's King was a darling to Augustus were the ruling religious leaders put down rebellion while the king's grandson hung out with Tiberius and Claudius who's son created a bigger monster and after four emperors in one year, another son, again, laid seige to Jerusalem.

these people have been fighting for I don't think anybody's really doing that. relative neutrality is apt if within the field of historiography. 1948 would be a starting point in as far a new country being formed.
Bernard Lewis wrote: "historiography in the Islamic middle East is of extraordinary range, richness, and variety, including local, regional, imperial and universal history, old and current history, biography and very rarely autobiography, histories of poets and scholars, of soldiers and statements, of ministers and secretaries, of judges, theologians and mystics. there are many different types of historical writing... "

The problem with history is that Hamas only teaches one type of history.
posted by clavdivs at 8:41 PM on October 12, 2023

JPost: UN says Israeli military warns 1.1 mln Gazans to relocate south

The United Nations said early on Friday it has been told by the Israeli military that some 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza should relocate to the enclave's south within the next 24 hours.

"The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.

"The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation," he said.

Dujarric said the order by the Israeli military also applied to all UN staff and those sheltered in UN facilities, including schools, health centers and clinics.

posted by Rhaomi at 8:45 PM on October 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

Yeah calling this a conflict spanning thousands of years is total bull shit and I struggle to take the rest of the comment seriously. I think it is more reasonable to consider this on of many conflicts that resulted from the migrations and ethnic/nationalist conflicts that came about as part of the decline and eventual collapse of Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empires and the redrawing of the maps as part of the end of WW1. As those empires struggled with the Industrial Revolution and nationalist movements there were a number of refugee crisis as various minority groups faced genocide and ultimately maps were redrawn. Israel is one of many countries that has its roots and border issues from those post WW1 maps. Yugoslavia, the Greeks/Turkish issues in Cypress, Armenia, etc you can point to a lot of conflicts that have their roots in this era and lots of similarities.

Many of those conflicts come down to who has the claim to the soil — the living people there today or some ancestral claim. For example Kosovo is overwhelmingly Albanian; but the Serbs see it as their ancestral soil. With Israel they face claims from Palestinians that they are the interlopers and colonists while at the same time some Israelis will claim all of the region as their ancestral soil. I think we are going to have to move away from that and address the living people today and where they are and build from that. Just as we’ve done to maintain the fragile peace in Kosovo.
posted by interogative mood at 8:57 PM on October 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

Israeli military spokesman pulling back on the impossible 24 hour demand, marginally:

IDF trying to minimize harm to Gazan civilians, spokesman says

After ordering residents of Gaza City to evacuate, IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari stresses that Israel does not want to harm Palestinian civilians.

“We are fighting a terror group, not the Gazan population. We want civilians not to be harmed, but we cannot live with the rule of Hamas-ISIS near our border,” Hagari says in a call with reporters.

He says the order to evacuate Palestinians from the area is intended to enable “freedom of action and to deepen the damage” against Hamas.

“Hamas carried out one of the most horrific acts the world has seen, we are carrying out an effort to evacuate residents to deepen the damage, to collapse this organization,” Hagari says.

After the UN says such an evacuation within 24 hours would be impossible, Hagari says “We understand it will take several days.”

“We are conveying [the warning] through communication channels and in Arabic, there are ways for the message to reach the population,” he adds. “Whoever does not listen to these recommendations, puts his family in danger.”

posted by Rhaomi at 10:10 PM on October 12, 2023

The conflict starts in 1948 or has its roots during WW1 according to many sources that aim for relative neutrality.

Or maybe the First Aliyah in the late 19th century? Some aspects of the conflict such as land ownership, were strongly influenced by Ottoman policy.
posted by vasi at 10:21 PM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

He says the order to evacuate Palestinians from the area is intended to enable “freedom of action and to deepen the damage” against Hamas.

Question, do they not think that Hamas moves with the rest of the population? Much like the "roof knocking", these "warnings" always come across like PR/ass-covering bullshit...yes, of course everyone will evacuate before we bomb them. Not hamas though! Oh civilians were killed? Well we warned them!
posted by windbox at 10:29 PM on October 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think we are going to have to move away from that and address the living people today
sure, just don't pick and choose. Kosovo was the Kingdom of Dardania before becoming a client state of Rome. Then, Byzantine and on and on to present Kosovo.
Ancient Judah is ahistorical but is recoded, 700 years before Kosovo was formed.
a lot of history involved in this thread which is primarily to justify one side or the other on a political, social, religious, and economic basis. I'm not quite sure what history as synthesis has much to provide for the current situation. in a war of provocation the aim is to draw out the enemy and have them overreact and overextend thus isolating them politically and militarily. for example, Russo-Georgian War.
posted by clavdivs at 10:35 PM on October 12, 2023

war crime in real time, just watch and see
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:30 AM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Re: Intent and impact in morality

I'm going to stake out a view that intent as part of our moral intuition is often unhelpful in forming judgments when we are at the scale of a state and other complex sociopolitical/sociotechnical systems. We value intent because it reflects the potential future behavior of moral actors (e.g. a person who steals from one person is more likely to do it again). The first problem with this is intent is often opaque. After all, I don't really know what somebody's intent is - I can infer it, try to reconcile it with their actions, maybe find some record where it's stated, but short of being able to read minds, there's no certainty. The second is when actions/decisions are distributed, the intent is often mismatched with the impact - there's no shortage of projects that set out to do one thing but fail to accomplish the goals because all the people executing it have their own agenda or the authority high up fails to apprehend ground reality.

So let's apply this to a state with many actors. When somebody asserts that X is trying to avoid Y but the results contradict that, I'm happy to disregard the claim because I can't know that. For instance, white phosphorous is an illegal weapon but allowable for illumination/smoke, so naturally nobody will ever say they intended to deploy it as a weapon. More importantly, typical moral reasoning appealing to intent (e.g. "Hamas is trying to kill noncombatants" / "Israel is trying to avoid casualties)" has limited utility above the individual level because regardless of what was intended, the actual impact exists and takes precedence over vague potentials. It's rhetoric to appeal to heartstrings and bypass serious, thoughtful judgment. It's also unhelpful in the sense that it's usually about shifting blame - even if I accept somebody is trying to avoid casualties, they're still being produced in massive amounts. I've seen a ton of discourse elsewhere that's just basically people advocating for their side instead of recognizing the problem or coming to a fair judgment.

At a higher level, the top decisionmakers know what the outcome will be but they still make their choices. Did Hamas and Israel know their actions would certainly result in many dead non-combatants? Absolutely. So at the end of the day, the leadership for both are saying "I'm willing to kill x children in order to accomplish my goals".
posted by ndr at 12:53 AM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Question, do they not think that Hamas moves with the rest of the population? Much like the "roof knocking", these "warnings" always come across like PR/ass-covering bullshit...yes, of course everyone will evacuate before we bomb them. Not hamas though! Oh civilians were killed? Well we warned them!

Hamas can't move it's equipment, weapon storage, rocket stashes quickly enough to escape bombing even with roof knocks. That's why whenever you watch the bombings of schools, hospitals, mosques, and highrises on the livestreams, there are generally secondary explosions that follow the bombing.
posted by Bobicus at 1:01 AM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

"whenever" "there are generally"

I feel this comment would benefit from some data analysis.
posted by latkes at 4:27 AM on October 13, 2023 [18 favorites]

A lot of people would think "when you drop bombs on modern buildings full of water mains, machinery, hospital gas supplies, etc, you might get secondary explosions; this is far more likely than the every hospital and clinic is in fact stocked with rockets, especially since we see fires and explosions after earthquakes and those don't even involve incendiaries".

On another note, we should all be really worried about the depraved indifference with which the world is regarding the bombing of Gaza. Depraved indifference is hard to turn off, seems to be the global mood lately and the world sure isn't getting any better. How many of us will be on the wrong side of it before we're done?
posted by Frowner at 6:02 AM on October 13, 2023 [24 favorites]

The white phosphorus shells appear to have been used to create smoke screens and for signaling — these are allowed uses and very different from firebombing a city. The stuff is still terrible.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure the children hit by it really appreciate that the smokescreen in their neighborhood is totally legal. I acknowledge you say it's terrible, but like... I think war crime laws are great, but, to parody one of the key international leaders of a left opposition party, "I welcome the laws again direct white phosphorus usage, but I would go further".

Airbursting of white phosphorus projectiles spreads 116 burning felt wedges impregnated within the substance over an area between 125 and 250 meters in diameter, depending on the altitude of the burst

*Maybe* in open farmland this would be justifiable. This is a city. The population density of London.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:38 AM on October 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

I’m still concerned about both the water situation and the hostage situation, and had been hoping there would be a water for hostages trade offered. I can understand that it’s easier to do reportage on things that explode, but I’m wondering when we’ll hear more about how people are coping.
posted by puffinaria at 6:53 AM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, is in the north. It's already overwhelmed with injured patients. How exactly are they going to evacuate?

A reminder to call all your reps today (it seems hopeless, but I'm doing it anyway).
posted by coffeecat at 7:06 AM on October 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

A Hamas recorded statement on the Al-Aqsa Flood attack

The most interesting thing here, from my perspective, is that they say that the intent of the operation was only to attack military targets and that any civilians killed were collateral damage. Which is probably not the most believable thing in the world, but nevertheless the same justification that Israel, US, etc. give for civilian deaths resulting from their attacks.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 7:17 AM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

At a higher level, the top decisionmakers know what the outcome will be but they still make their choices. Did Hamas and Israel know their actions would certainly result in many dead non-combatants? Absolutely. So at the end of the day, the leadership for both are saying "I'm willing to kill x children in order to accomplish my goals".

POSIWID
posted by bcd at 7:18 AM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hamas can't move it's equipment, weapon storage, rocket stashes quickly enough to escape bombing even with roof knocks

Most of that stuff is in the bunker and tunnel systems. Israel can turn the whole city to rubble and it won’t make any difference.
posted by interogative mood at 7:25 AM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

corb I suspect you may have found the root of much of the disagreement on this issue because I am in total disagreement with the position that somehow "war" and "nations" make immoral things moral.

The West established a doctrine that just following orders isn't an excuse for crime. It's selectively enforced of course, but I'm fairly sure in other contexts you'd agree that the principle is sound. But apparenlty it only holds for certain nations? Or crimes? Or something? I don't get it.

If a "nation" ordered its "soldiers" to rape people would that make it moral for the soldiers to commit rape? If not, then why is murder ok but rape is forbidden?

And who decides who is a "soldier" and who is a "terrorist"? Hamas, apparently, has "terrorists" so when they murder children it is horrible, evil, and must be condemned. Israel has "soldiers" so when they murder children it's not good exacly but it's morally acceptable becuase the murderers were "soldiers". WTF?

I also disagree that adding technological distance between the murder and their victims morally excuses the murderer. Is it a worse crime to kill someone with a knife than with a gun? If so why?

The idea that morality depends on tech level is baffling to me. If it's immoral to behead a child up close and personal I can't comprehend how a person could argue that it's moral to blow up a child with a missile launched from a few hundred kilometers away. The kid is just as dead. I care about outcome, not method.

But clearly a lot of people are in agreement with your view that as long as the child murder is done with the approval of a nation then somehow that's OK. Or at least not as bad. And it's even more OK the further away the criminal was from their victim and the cooler the tech is. What?

That seems to be at the root of a lot of the disagreement here. If group A has achieved the status of "nation" then it gets much wider moral latitude while if group B has not achieved that status it is more strictly regulated with regads to morality. That seems not only wrong, but backwards to me.

I'd argue that the more power a person or group has the more strictly we should regulate them and we should hold them to higher moral standards. Instead it seems that worldwide most people have the idea that morality more or less get turned off for a sufficiently powerful group.

Clearly I'm in the minority not just on Metafilter, but planetwide. A "soldier" can murder children and that's ok, but if a "terrorist" murders children that's not OK. I'm... baffled and horrified.
posted by sotonohito at 7:35 AM on October 13, 2023 [24 favorites]

I'm wondering if the ubiquity of cameras, in phones, drones, street cams, will make this "siege" different from its predecessors. Seeing war crimes with your own eyes in real time might affect its emotional impact.
posted by SPrintF at 7:39 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm honestly surprised Israel hasn't implemented a total internet and communication blackout in Gaza. It's pretty much SOP for any government about to do something evil these days. India cut off Kashmir just before going full war crime there.

Is it that Israel lacks the ability, or is there something else going on?
posted by sotonohito at 7:46 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The ongoing attacks on West Bank Palestinians by Jewish settlers have been mentioned above, but here are a couple of Ha'aretz stories (ungated):

Israeli Settler Documented Shooting Palestinian at Point-blank in the West Bank

An Israeli settler was filmed shooting a Palestinian at point-blank range in the southern West Bank near Hebron. In the footage, circulated by the B'Tselem organization, the settler approached the Palestinian, pushed him, and then shot him in the abdomen. At the stage, the Palestinian's condition is unclear. The incident took place near the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani, which lies south of Hebron. An IDF soldier is also visible in the footage standing in the background near the settler.

Palestinian Health Ministry: 3 Palestinians Killed in West Bank Village by Masked Settlers

Israeli settlers shot and killed three Palestinians on Wednesday after entering a village in the West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported. According to an Israeli security source, the Israeli army heard gunfire and saw masked men leaving the Palestinian village of Qusra with an ATV.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said that eight others were wounded and taken to hospitals in Salafit and Nablus, adding that three of them are in critical condition, with gunshot wounds to the neck and abdomen.

There are many more examples of things like settlers sneaking around at night throwing molotov cocktails at Palestinian-owned businesses; they're not hard to find. B'Tselem is on social media, for one source (also worth noting a former B'Tselem board member is among the missing and is presumed to be a hostage).
posted by mediareport at 7:52 AM on October 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

Cutting off all electricity and fuel goes a long way to accomplishing that indirectly.
posted by bcd at 7:52 AM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

On another note, we should all be really worried about the depraved indifference with which the world is regarding the bombing of Gaza. Depraved indifference is hard to turn off, seems to be the global mood lately and the world sure isn't getting any better. How many of us will be on the wrong side of it before we're done?

Not a bug, but a feature (of neo-liberalism, says the socialist )

On Social Sadism

by China Miéville | Salvage December 17, 2015

posted by mikelieman at 8:22 AM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Intent matters. The actions are not the same. Hamas soldiers went into a house and cut the head of a child. Hamas soldiers hid in a building and an Israeli pilot dropped a bomb or fired a missile at. the building. The fact that a child or other civilians were in the building is the fault of Hamas, not Israel. Human shields are prohibited under the Geneva conventions. This isn't a game of tag where you get to claim you are on base and can't be touched. War is a violent and terrible thing -- innocent and guilty alike die in terrible ways.

On another note, we should all be really worried about the depraved indifference with which the world is regarding the bombing of Gaza.

The world is not indifferent to the bombing of Gaza or the civilians living there. Even US media outlets are asking questions about protecting civilians in Gaza when interviewing Israeli officials. When US officials have held press conferences these questions have been asked and the same officials have given statements that they are very concerned about the fate of civilians in Gaza. The US has been working with Egypt, Qatar and others to attempt to negotiate some kind of hostage exchange and offramp for this. Why does it only fall on Israel and its allies to protect the civilians of Gaza and be the ones to act with restraint -- Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are doing nothing to protect civilians in Israel or Gaza, perhaps if they pressured Hamas to make a deal this war would end. There is the rub of it though -- they have no interest in peace with Israel and they don't care what happens to people in Gaza or Israel.
posted by interogative mood at 9:00 AM on October 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Hamas soldiers hid in a building and an Israeli pilot dropped a bomb or fired a missile at. the building. The fact that a child or other civilians were in the building is the fault of Hamas, not Israel.

I can see your logic here, but personally, I vehemently disagree with it. Especially when Israel also has a habit of mowing down non-violent protestors, casually refers to murders in Gaza as "cutting the lawn," and when its politicians often take active glee in the thought of murdering civilians, tearing apart families, and immiserating the people.

If I was able to believe that Israel was acting with honor and integrity, I might be able to start considering your logic—though I'd still find myself extremely torn. (In the Tanakh, God is asked to spare a city of vile sinners if a single innocent soul can be found there; it feels awful, to me, that "murder a city of innocent souls in order to target one vile sinner" is the rationale here, though I don't let religious works dictate the whole of my thoughts about ethics and war.)

But the fact of the matter is that I can't believe that where Israel is concerned, for the same reason that I won't buy any claims they make that "all of you, evacuate immediately" is anything but pretext for plans to murder tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people. Not when Netanyahu himself went out of his way to prop Hamas up, in part to weaken the less-violent attempts to protest Israel. I can't believe a thing Israel says at all. And I want nothing but peace for the Israeli people, but I find it hard to treat Israel like they're a legitimate actor in a legitimate war, when the "war" is against a people they've tried to ruthlessly wipe off the face of the Earth for decades.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:15 AM on October 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

I'm honestly surprised Israel hasn't implemented a total internet and communication blackout in Gaza.

Israel will stop all Internet services in Gaza starting on Saturday: Israeli Comms Minister
posted by BungaDunga at 9:19 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

interogative mood, do you accept that Israel has agency in what it chooses to do? Because you seem to keep walking right up to saying "Everything they do is simply a natural response, which cannot be controlled", but not quite getting there.

All of your comments here minimize Israeli state responsibility while completely maximizing all the alleged things Hamas could have prevented.

It's very strange, and maybe doesn't need constant restatement.
posted by sagc at 9:19 AM on October 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm wondering if the ubiquity of cameras, in phones, drones, street cams, will make this "siege" different from its predecessors.

One thing I've noticed is despite the I/P situation having been ongoing my entire life most people I'm encountering really had no idea of even the broad facts that lead us here. And just like people who were interested in learning got a crash course in viralogy four years ago they are getting a crash course in Middle East history and it's shocking most of them. Every morning while chatting waiting for our work day to start it is stream of revelations.
posted by Mitheral at 9:21 AM on October 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza 'De-Escalation' Talk

In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.”

posted by BungaDunga at 9:21 AM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Jesus, Moses and Muhammad wept.
posted by mediareport at 9:23 AM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Hamas soldiers hid in a building and an Israeli pilot dropped a bomb or fired a missile at. the building.

I just don't believe that the IDF has actual precise evidence that every building it is currently bombing holds Hamas soldiers. What about recent events should make us confident that Israel is able to have building-level pinpoint intelligence on the location of Hamas fighters? And what about the size and scope of the current bombing campaign would make us think they're using it to meaningfully restrict their targets?
posted by rishabguha at 9:26 AM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

If a "nation" ordered its "soldiers" to rape people would that make it moral for the soldiers to commit rape? If not, then why is murder ok but rape is forbidden?

And who decides who is a "soldier" and who is a "terrorist"?

The idea that morality depends on tech level is baffling to me. If it's immoral to behead a child up close and personal I can't comprehend how a person could argue that it's moral to blow up a child with a missile launched from a few hundred kilometers away. The kid is just as dead. I care about outcome, not method.

So to be clear: when I say "state" I don't mean "state recognized by the UN", I mean "entity performing the functions of a state, such that it has perceived legitimacy and authority". So in this, I actually do tend to define Hamas as more of a state, because it is currently governing in Gaza, and I do think its fighters are soldiers. They may not be super *disciplined* soldiers, but I dont' think that makes them not soldiers.

The reason perceived legitimacy matters, I think, is because I *don't* consider morality to be dependent on tech, but rather consider morality as generally a combination of act/outcome *and* intent. In the US criminal law, which isn't a perfect match obviously and I do have a lot of issues with, but it's one way we choose to define our codified morality, we separate things into the 'guilty mind' and the 'guilty act'; both are usually necessary for a crime.

And in terms of the intent, there are four categories, all of which apply here. Did you do it purposefully, ie, with the intent of killing the child? Did you do it knowingly, where you were pretty sure a child would be killed, and that may not have been your desired outcome, but you did it anyway? Did you do it recklessly, where you knew there was a strong chance you'd be killing a kid but weren't sure, and did it anyway? Or did you do it negligently, where you didn't know you might be killing a kid but you really should have known? And of course there's also aggravation circumstances.

And the thing about missiles and often orders is that they generally get people down to the stages of 2-4: where people range from being sure a child would be killed to should have been aware one maybe would have. The person pushing the button isn't sure a child will be killed - and because of how our brains work, is definitely going to try to tell themselves they probably won't even if it is a near-certainty. They're not trying to kill children, they're trying to kill "terrorists". They probably have media blackouts of some kind or are being encouraged not to read the news, and usually states try to distance their soldiers from the direct results of their killing as much as they can, because as someone pointed out upthread, it means they get more killers.

But choosing personally and deliberately to kill a child, when you have the choice not to, is always a purposeful killing. It jumps right to the first stage of this intent analysis. This is even more the case when nobody told you to do it, because then it's not part of a plan where the intent is different, it's just something you decided to do.

Why the authority-as-legitimacy matters is because it matters to the intent of the individual. Bringing it back to your first question, there is and can be no legitimate military purpose in rape, and so we know that if you are being ordered to rape, it is not for a legitimate aim and you should and must refuse that order. Similarly, if you're being ordered to intentionally kill a child as an individual there is no military purpose and you must refuse that order. But it gets messy with "collateral damage" and if you don't have a lot of good understanding of the ethics of war, people get confused. Personally I feel you have an obligation to avoid as much collateral damage as possible; but that's also why I and the United States military parted ways.
posted by corb at 9:30 AM on October 13, 2023 [16 favorites]

Most of that stuff is in the bunker and tunnel systems. Israel can turn the whole city to rubble and it won’t make any difference.

Maybe a slight difference if the cache was made harder to reach by blocking some access, and especially so if the bunkers and tunnels are corridors of unit movements. It looks like the best strategy for most stakeholders, besides Hamas, is to make a buffer zone of secular Israel-friendly neighborhoods on their borders, which involves invading and rebuilding it.
posted by Brian B. at 9:38 AM on October 13, 2023

State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza 'De-Escalation' Talk

Glad I used the phrase "behind the scenes or in public, whichever they prefer" when talking to aides in my Congresscritters' DC offices this week. Strongly encourage folks to do the same.
posted by mediareport at 9:42 AM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza 'De-Escalation' Talk

As Israel escalates its attacks on Gaza, the State Department is discouraging diplomats working on Middle East issues from making public statements suggesting the U.S. wants to see less violence, according to internal emails viewed by HuffPost.
In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.”

Looks like the US is all in on the northern Gaza plan, which means about to be complicit in war crimes on a scale that’s huge even for the Israeli occupation.
posted by Artw at 9:45 AM on October 13, 2023 [12 favorites]

The mother-in-law of Scotland’s first minister is among those trapped in Gaza.

In a post alongside that video, Yousaf said: “This is Elizabeth El-Nakla. She is my mother-in-law. A retired nurse from Dundee, Scotland. She, like the vast majority of people in Gaza, has nothing to do with Hamas. She has been told to leave Gaza but, like the rest of the population, is trapped with nowhere to go.”
posted by plep at 9:45 AM on October 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

Israeli President Says There Are No Innocent Civilians In Gaza:

As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

When a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president claimed, “No, I didn’t say that.”

But he then stated: “When you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”

posted by Gerald Bostock at 9:46 AM on October 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Intent matters.

it's a lie people tell themselves to feel less guilty about what they did

it isn't even the worst evasion of reality going on right now

just how does israel eliminate hamas without using scorched earth tactics that could kill 10s of thousands? if hizbollah decides they can not stand by and let this happen, the escalation will be off the scale

does israel really think they can occupy lebanon? they didn't the first time they tried

i think a ground offensive against gaza is a ghastly mistake - i don't believe they can pull it off in these circumstances

hamas has already gotten what they wanted from this - an assurance that peace will continue to be impossible for decades

that's a stupid and evil thing to want, but they got it
posted by pyramid termite at 9:48 AM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Hamas soldiers went into a house and cut the head of a child

Let's stick to "things that actually happened" please and not spread entirely unverified disinformation that has already been retracted by not only multiple news outlets but also the Biden administration themselves.
posted by windbox at 9:48 AM on October 13, 2023 [19 favorites]

Clearly I'm in the minority not just on Metafilter, but planetwide. A "soldier" can murder children and that's ok, but if a "terrorist" murders children that's not OK. I'm... baffled and horrified.

sotonohito, I'm in that minority with you.

These days I tend to see this double standard as an implicit and central tenet of modernity/coloniality (as some activists and scholars refer to modernity these days). The tenet is that inhuman, horrifying behavior is fine for powerful institutions as long as they maintain some sort of screen between them and those who they exploit. Democracy flourished within countries in europe and north america through hideous extractive and exploitative violence towards people and places deemed outside (and, in a million small and large, conceptual and actual ways, the lives and suffering of the exploited were made immaterial or invisible - were, in a sense, screened from view).

For all the particularities of this specific, awful conflict, sanctioning the Israeli state's violence as war and condemning Hamas' violence as terrorism actually fits so very neatly within that modernity/coloniality paradigm. But the structures built through modernity/coloniality are fraying quickly in the 21st century, and because of this, I actually think that increasing numbers of people are aware of and deeply disturbed by the double standard. Information - and specifically imagery - is more easily produced than ever and travels further, refugees are more numerous and visible than ever, climate disaster - based destruction is hitting a greater breadth and diversity of communities, more and more people living within powerful nations are aware that they, too, are being exploited in some way. The machinery is becoming more visible, less screened and so more horrifying.

I do think that this minority of the baffled and horrified is growing. Or that's what I tell myself, to maintain a shred of hope. The hope requires another idea too though, which is that collective horror has the potential to be transformed into substantive action and change...
posted by marlys at 10:00 AM on October 13, 2023 [12 favorites]

In case you don't want to visit X here's a nitter.cz link for the link in adamvasco's comment.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 10:11 AM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Intent matters.

Israel's intent in ordering the evacuation of over one million people who have nowhere to go and no way to get there looks a lot like a war crime (cf. Article 49 of the Geneva Convention) enabling ethnic cleansing and genocide, quite honestly.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:15 AM on October 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

i've been struggling to find a way to say this without sounding cruel or callous for days. i live in America and understand that i both benefit from empire and am powerless to stop it. i have to imagine this is also true for the many, many israeli citizens who support palestinian freedom. the people Hamas murdered did not deserve to die for the crimes of their state.

that said: if your average on the ground Hamas member did not see a distinction between "citizens" and "settlers", consider that one of the major projects of the Israeli government is to blur those lines. that there was a music festival happening within walking distance of Gaza at all is brain breaking to me, a level of settler colonialism i cannot put too much thought into without going insane, and i have not spent my entire life within Gaza. mandatory service in the IDF, colonizers in the west bank - these apartheid projects are designed to dehumanize Palestinians, but that effect works in reverse, too.

i heard the journalist Mohammad Alsaafin talk on Chapo about how the average Gazan child has never even seen an Israeli in real life, they just know bombs and sniper bullets.

i feel so hopeless and sick. this world makes no sense to me. i can only hope the voices of dissent from within Israel grow louder, because history has shown that there is no appetite from anyone else in the world to intervene on the behalf of Palestinians.
posted by JimBennett at 11:27 AM on October 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

Let's stick to "things that actually happened" please and not spread entirely unverified disinformation that has already been retracted by not only multiple news outlets but also the Biden administration themselves.

Biden simply walked back that he had not seen photos, only been told about the atrocities in a phone call with Israeli leaders. The IDF has refused to go into details of what happened in the nursery at Kfar Aza Kibbutz out of respect for the dead and the privacy of families. That is a long way from debunking it.

Israel has released some photos and showed a bunch more to US Sec of Stare Anthony Blinken yesterday. (warning describes some of the photos but does not show the photos). I’m not linking the photos that have been shared and I discourage others from doing that.
posted by interogative mood at 11:30 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

that there was a music festival happening within walking distance of Gaza at all is brain breaking to me

Thousands of people live within walking distance of Gaza, the music festival was on the outskirts of one of those villages.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:32 AM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

the journalist who first parroted the beheaded children claim on CNN now says she believes they were "mislead". i believe that's the whole reason why journalists usually fact check? the media's thirst for the WoT keeps echoing through my head.

I would argue we were mislead. I am going to report on what heads of governments say. That is what new orgs do. It doesn’t mean it’s true but it’s news they said it & had to retract it. In that same report I noted Hamas denied the acts but no one on here is complaining about that
posted by JimBennett at 11:35 AM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Biden simply walked back that he had not seen photos, only been told about the atrocities in a phone call with Israeli leaders. The IDF has refused to go into details of what happened

Well, since the IDF hasn't provided any proof that it happened, and nor has anyone else, it's probably better to treat it as an unfounded rumor until some evidence actually emerges. If the IDF had any evidence to back up these incendiary accusations of Hamas misdeeds, I don't doubt that they'd be very interested in sharing it!

The real question, in my mind, is why these kinds of rumors start and keep being persistently circulated and believed without any credible evidence. Probably because it makes Israel's military escalation against the Palestinians easier to, if not justify, tolerate for many. And because they distract from the real crimes (including, no doubt, some Palestinian children left non-intact from Israeli munitions -- if one is actually concerned about child safety) that are currently being perpetrated.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 11:42 AM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Windbox:

> Hamas soldiers went into a house and cut the head of a child

Let's stick to "things that actually happened" please and not spread entirely unverified disinformation that has already been retracted by not only multiple news outlets but also the Biden administration themselves.

———

I think the retractions were because it was heresay, and at that time unverified. But the claims of "disinformation" were themselves misinformation.

As it has since been verified:

If you go to the reddit link far below, and once there click through the link that looks like "http...redacted...imesofisrael.com/netanyahus-office-releases-horrifying-images-of-infants-murdered-by-hamas/"
there's apparently a Times of Israel article with the relevant photographs released by Netanyahu's office.

I do not suggest you do so; most of the reddit respondents to that comment said they chose not to.

I chose not to.

https://www.reddit.cm/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/176tj4b/comment/k4ovsqd/

(Leaving the above as text and with the .cm typo rather than a clickable link, so that people don't click through and click through carelessly, and then see images they wish they hadn't seen.)

But it seems to be of a piece with the mass killing of the 260+ music festival attendees, and in line with their 1988 Charter calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people there.

———

I would suggest reading this instead, a much more clinical description of events and aftermath of a massacre at one of the kibbutzes.

Note that this is mostly text, without graphic images of dead bodies. I think it's the text version of a 7 minute ABC tv news segment:

"ABC News: Israel's 'Ground Zero:' The Be'eri Kibbutz was among the bloodiest scenes of the Hamas attack
—
Inside the devastation from the Hamas attack on Israel

David Muir gets a firsthand look at the destruction from the weekend rocket attacks on a kibbutz near the Gaza border.
It is being described by locals as "Ground Zero" of Saturday's surprise Hamas attack on Israel, a once placid kibbutz near the Gaza border full of families and tidy houses that was turned into a killing field.

ABC News anchor David Muir toured the horrific scene left behind at the Be'eri Kibbutz, finding blood-stained and shattered homes, where Israeli military officials discovered unspeakable atrocities.

"They massacred everybody here, 112 residents of this kibbutz were murdered. We can see just the level of the destruction of what happened here," Maj. Libby Weiss of the Israel Defense Forces told Muir. "People were asleep. They surprised them in their homes. Some were butchered in their beds."

The slaughter began around sunrise on Saturday, as many residents were just waking up.

..."

abcnews: Israel's 'Ground Zero:' The Be'eri Kibbutz was among the bloodiest scenes of the Hamas attack

posted by sebastienbailard at 11:45 AM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

When I left my comment a few days ago, I said I would step away from this thread, and I did. I came back briefly once or twice, without the intent to comment. I had hoped that the little I had to say would make a difference. Instead, the thread I’ve found here is so far worse than I could have imagined that I can’t stay quiet. I’m sorry.

Respectfully, I want to ask you to hold space a moment to talk about anti-semitism, and about pogroms. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s a violent riot, generally involving rape, murder, pillage, assault and vandalism, incited with the aim of terrorizing or expelling an ethnic or religious group, and generally aimed at Jews (though not always; the Tulsa Massacre is often cited, for example). While the terms comes from Eastern Europe, they’re pretty universal, and you can find examples throughout history, including the Hebron massacre in 1929 and the Farhud in Iraq. Violent anti-semitism has always been everywhere; the Arab world is not immune. The geopolitical situation in Israel / Palestine is a territorial conflict. But it’s not only about land, and pretending that there aren’t other factors involved here is making this discussion (either unintentionally or suspiciously) really ugly.

There’s a quote from Golda Meir that used to be brought out a lot in discussions of I/P, that made a lot of liberal Zionists including myself incredibly uncomfortable. “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” On its surface, it’s a terrible sentiment – who doesn’t love their children more than they hate literally anything? It’s Islamophobic, insisting they don’t love children. I do not like this statement. It’s not even clear if she ever said it. But looking at the events of 10/7 – and its inevitable aftermath, which we’re watching unfold now – how else do you explain this? This wasn’t a military action. It was a pogrom. Stabbing children through their parents’ protecting bodies is a pogrom. Lining young people into a circle, pulling out the women to rape them and then killing them next to their dead friends is a pogrom. Killing an elderly woman and livestreaming it on her own facebook page is a pogrom. There’s a story that was going around the news a couple of days ago, posted upthread – a young couple in Kfar Gaza heard the gunmen coming, and were able to successfully hide their twin ten month old babies inside their safe room well enough that they survived to be found by search teams 12 hours later. The parents were slaughtered. And that’s still seen as a joyful story, that those two babies miraculously survived. “Miraculously” is the word that keeps being used, again and again. Everyone, including the parents at the time, knew that if the door was broken in, their infants wouldn’t be safe. That’s a pogrom. An extermination.

There is no justification for this, and no equivalency. None. Just stop right now. What you’re looking at is hatred. Bombing a building where militants are shooting rockets or hiding, even when you think there may be babies inside - even when you know there are babies inside – is not the same is going into a space where parents are covering children with their bodies and beheading those babies. (That does not mean bombing them is okay. It is not okay). Jews understand this because we have witnessed this happen to our people again and again and again throughout history – coming for the children intentionally. And then defending it. I won’t call out people directly, but when people say that no Israelis are civilians, or that all Israelis are evil settlers, they are saying kill the babies. They / you are excusing what in any other situation would be immediately understood as an opening incident toward genocide.

Calling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians genocide is untrue, and it is super problematic if not outright anti-semitic. In light of the atrocities on 10/7 this is particularly apparent. It used to be against site policy, but I guess the Overton window has shifted. I know there are some Jews who disagree about this (as there are Jews who disagree about everything; we're not a monolith). If you’re Jewish and still need to make this comparison, I can’t say anything to stop you other than how much it hurts and offends me as the granddaughter and relative of Holocaust survivors. If you’re not Jewish, I am asking you, again respectfully, to please stop.

I also reject completely that you can excuse the rape and murder of Jews in Israel because Gaza is “like an open air concentration camp,” so there is so much pent up rage and frustration that it makes it understandable. In 1946 tens of thousands of Jews were released from concentration camps. They experienced privations and violence far worse than the citizens of Gaza today. Exponentially worse. My grandmother had to walk home from Auschwitz to Hungary. As she got to her village she saw some kids wearing clothes that she had made for her two small children, who were killed when they arrived in the camps. Do you know what she did? Or what my grandfather did when he arrived home? They didn’t rape or murder anyone. They didn’t cut anyone’s babies’ heads off. I am certain they hated the people responsible for their pain every bit as much as some Palestinians hate Israelis. But they didn’t hate them as much as some Palestinians hate Jews. I see news reports in social media of random Israeli and Jewish people calling for blood, plus the usual right-wing "parking lot" threats. There's plenty of ugly hatred all around. But everyone I talk with both here in the US and in Israel is terrified. Parents are telling their kids to take off their kippot and put on baseball caps. Schools and synagogues have increased security.

There is real, true Islamophobia among a lot of Jews. The events on 10/7 confirmed those fears for many of them. That’s an additional, enormous tragedy. It will take a lot to heal this – and I think those of us in the liberal community in particular need to be the ones who are able to facilitate that conversation (the right obviously has no interest). But we can’t do it until we recognize anti-semitic anti-Zionism when we see it. If you believe that all the actions of the 10/7 pogrom were justified, if you think the Hamas gunman on a glider zooming into the rave is a cool anti-Zionist graphic, If you find yourself at a pro-Palestinian protest and this breaks out and you don’t leave – then don’t be surprised if Jews don’t see you as an ally at a time when we desperately need them. For Jews, Hamas are a genuine existential threat. They are proud of it. I am desperately hoping the hostages are still alive, and can be rescued. Even one more Daniel Pearl will be too many.

For years, people on the left have relied on the tactic of accusing Jews of cynically calling all criticism of Israel anti-semitism, even when that criticism was coming from Jews on the left. I understand why people don't want to admit it's there, and don't want to see it. Anti-semitism itself doesn't make sense. It's irrational. How can intelligent people, people we respect, people we agree with, also hold these views? I think that just like racism, which is just as irrational and just as pernicious, it's so socially conditioned that it's hard to see. I'm just asking, as gently as I can, to look a little closer at the idea that all violence is the same.

I also recommend the thread that adamvasco posted.

And I'm still praying for peace.
posted by Mchelly at 11:51 AM on October 13, 2023 [29 favorites]

why these kinds of rumors start and keep being persistently circulated and believed without any credible evidence

To the contrary, this sort of situation breeds unfounded rumors almost automatically. I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.

In this case a bunch of families were individually murdered in their beds in acts of unbelievable cruelty. Why would people- who have just had to adjust their beliefs about what sort of acts Hamas are willing to do- be especially skeptical about one particular claim of cruelty?
posted by BungaDunga at 11:52 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

because the people making the claim are using it as an excuse to displace 1.1 million people?
posted by JimBennett at 11:53 AM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

“The Trap,” John Ganz, Unpopular Front, 13 October 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 11:54 AM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

because the people making the claim are using it as an excuse to displace 1.1 million people?

They're using all the actually-documented entirely-real murders for that already. They don't need this one thing to do what they're already going to do.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:56 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

What's the preferred phrase to use, Mchelly? Ethnic cleansing? Non-genocidal killing of civilians in a way that simply looks from the outside like genocide?
posted by sagc at 12:02 PM on October 13, 2023 [21 favorites]

At least one person who experienced the Hamas attack at the Be’eri Kibbutz has more ability to see the humanity in everyone being hurt than my own (US) political leaders. Video of a young woman named Tamar on FB with English subtitles: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0oxHGayPPpcqXeJMJ8cSDpWfhbF41yMaJZoghN1znZ1dsCUMTHna1bt3aCcAr68url&id=702264129

I unfortunately cannot confirm the subtitles are accurate (though the words I do know match) or the accuracy of her story. But it certainly matches reports of widespread frustration by many Israelis (including some who live in kibbutzim) at the policies of their government for many years. There aren’t just two “sides” no matter what BS the leaders of Israel, Hamas or the United States say.
posted by R343L at 12:10 PM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Calling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians genocide is untrue, and it is super problematic if not outright anti-semitic.

we all have eyes, we all have ears, it is the information age. if 1.1 million jews or 1.1 white people were ordered to evacuate their bombed out homes and hospitals within 24 hours we would not even countenance this kind of discussion. no one in this thread is conflating Judaism with the state of Israel.

if you are unwilling or unable to recognize apartheid evolving into genocide in front of the world, i don't know what to say to you at this point.
posted by JimBennett at 12:18 PM on October 13, 2023 [28 favorites]

It's not a genocide, it's not ethnic cleansing, it's not even a warcrime.
posted by Bobicus at 12:20 PM on October 13, 2023

Ah, yes, that's why the UN is saying it will have "devastating humanitarian consequences". Lots of people who seem more concerned with word choice than what's actually occurring.
posted by sagc at 12:22 PM on October 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

Egypt is demanding Israel stop demanding Palestinians in Gaza move south and is requesting an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. Saudi Arabia has declared all efforts to normalize relations are frozen.
posted by interogative mood at 12:26 PM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

R343L: Video of a young woman named Tamar on FB with English subtitles: https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0oxHGayPPpcqXeJMJ8cSDpWfhbF41yMaJZoghN1znZ1dsCUMTHna1bt3aCcAr68url&id=702264129

Thanks for that. The most realistic positive outcome, though it probably won't happen soon, is younger generations getting sick of false promises from their elders of peace through war. That kind of generational turnover has helped bring an end to other long-running conflicts, though it's always a double challenge to get simultaneous generations on both sides that are sincerely dedicated to peace and mutual aid.
posted by clawsoon at 12:31 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's not a genocide, it's not ethnic cleansing, it's not even a warcrime.

From the link:

International humanitarian law insists on the principle according to which “the displacement of the civilian population shall not be ordered for reasons related to the conflict”...

...the evacuation of populations may never be used as a combat strategy and may never be carried out simply because of its practical efficiency in attaining a military objective...

posted by clawsoon at 12:35 PM on October 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

I should have noted where I found that video which was via a boost by Mekka on mastodon. I trust him to be careful about what he shares and hence my willingness to post here.
posted by R343L at 12:36 PM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

One comment deleted. Name calling goes against our content policy.
posted by loup (staff) at 12:38 PM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's not a genocide, it's not ethnic cleansing, it's not even a warcrime.

Tell that to the International Red Cross (nitter):

The evacuation orders, coupled with the complete siege, are not compatible with IHL [International Humanitarian Law]

posted by BungaDunga at 12:44 PM on October 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

I agree that the siege is not compatible with IHL and that the evacuation orders compound that. Israel must restore access to basic necessities as soon as possible.
posted by Bobicus at 12:52 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

This Twitter thread is a collection of Israelis who survived the initial attack or relatives of those killed urging for peace. It reminds me, sadly, of how many of the families of those who died in 9/11 made similar pleas.
posted by coffeecat at 12:57 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

wondering how long it will be before we literally get to a "Metafilter: Technically, not a warcrime" comment
posted by Flunkie at 12:57 PM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

It's not a genocide, it's not ethnic cleansing, it's not even a warcrime

From NYTimes:

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said airstrikes killed at least 40 Palestinians who had been trying to leave the northern part of the territory...

Airstrikes killed at least 70 Palestinians and wounded another 200 people who were fleeing northern Gaza, the Interior Ministry said. The strikes hit cars and trucks heading out on Salah al-Din Street, a route that connects Gaza’s north and south. Earlier reports had put the death toll closer to 40. Israel's military has told Gazans to evacuate from the north immediately.

Targeting civilians is a war crime.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:10 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's not a genocide, it's not ethnic cleansing, it's not even a warcrime.

yuck.
posted by JimBennett at 1:15 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Médecins Sans Frontières: "Israel has given Al Awda Hospital just two hours to evacuate. Our staff are still treating patients. We unequivocally condemn this action, the continued indiscriminate bloodshed and attacks on health care in Gaza. We are trying to protect our staff and patients."
posted by clawsoon at 1:27 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

interogative mood: "Biden simply walked back that he had not seen photos, only been told about the atrocities in a phone call with Israeli leaders. The IDF has refused to go into details of what happened in the nursery at Kfar Aza Kibbutz out of respect for the dead and the privacy of families. That is a long way from debunking it.

Israel has released some photos and showed a bunch more to US Sec of Stare Anthony Blinken yesterday. (warning describes some of the photos but does not show the photos). I’m not linking the photos that have been shared and I discourage others from doing that." (link to article here: https://www.reuters.com/world/nato-ministers-shown-horrific-video-hamas-attack-2023-10-12/)

A quick read through that link: "There were no images to suggest militants had beheaded babies -- a particularly explosive accusation that first emerged in Israel's media and initially confirmed by Israeli officials."
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 1:30 PM on October 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's not a genocide, it's not ethnic cleansing, it's not even a warcrime.

What a dispicable thing to say. Truly. Some people just aren't capable of viewing Palestinains as humans.

The occupation, the apartheid, and the collective punishment of Palestinians is absolutely a war crime, is absolutely ethnic cleansing, is absolutely a precursor to genocide, and pretending otherwise is absolutely farcical.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 1:36 PM on October 13, 2023 [27 favorites]

The Trap - by John Ganz - Unpopular Front

I share the profound fear and heartbreak my fellow Jews experience at witnessing a massacre of Jews and then the apparent indifference and even glee this can inspire in people. But I believe adopting the attitude at the core of extreme Zionism—that Gentiles hate Jews naturally and essentially, that they will always attempt to kill Jews or justify the killing of Jews, and that as a result Jews can only really count on each other—is to embrace despair and the premise of Nazism, if only in reverse: that Jews are not really part of the larger human community, that we are in some sense its implacable foes. The division of the world into intrinsically opposed hordes and swarms attacks the very notion of shared humanity. I refuse to indulge in the despair that accepts the logic of the enemies of mankind.

[...]

It is a deep temptation in moments like this to run and accept the embrace of nationalism. It seems to provide a sense of warmth and solidarity that compensates for the cruelty of the world on display. And it seems to offer the political means to answer that cruelty in kind and provide the appearance of safety. But it is just another trap: nationalism is the source of this all to begin with. They hug you—”Brother, you’ve finally joined us!”—and then they hand you a rifle. I believe one must resist the temptation of what Orwell identified as the core of nationalism: “[T]he habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad” and “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Above all, I refuse to become an insect or look on others as insects.

posted by non canadian guy at 1:43 PM on October 13, 2023 [21 favorites]

Ok, I truly don't get why people are so fixated on the beheading bit - babies and children were brutally murdered, there are many, many sources that confirm that - what purpose does splitting hairs over this do? But if you insist, this Twitter thread by a Lebanese-British journalist, who happens to be pro-Palestine, is keeping track of all the independent confirmations that yes, some babies were beheaded. That doesn't mean we can't condemn what is happening in Gaza right now, but seriously, you don't need to reject everything that doesn't fit your narrative.
posted by coffeecat at 1:47 PM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

70 killed after convoys of evacuees in Gaza hit by Israeli strikes
posted by Artw at 1:51 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ok, I truly don't get why people are so fixated on the beheading bit - babies and children were brutally murdered, there are many, many sources that confirm that - what purpose does splitting hairs over this do? But if you insist, this Twitter thread by a Lebanese-British journalist, who happens to be pro-Palestine, is keeping track of all the independent confirmations that yes, some babies were beheaded. That doesn't mean we can't condemn what is happening in Gaza right now, but seriously, you don't need to reject everything that doesn't fit your narrative.

the president said he saw a photo that he didn't see.
posted by JimBennett at 1:54 PM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Perhaps when shown photos and given descriptions of what was happening Biden didn’t look closely enough to determine if the dead baby corpse had their head cut off. Perhaps he misspoke about seeing photos instead of just hearing reports of beheadings.
posted by interogative mood at 2:09 PM on October 13, 2023

Great to see that in the post about the most difficult, intractable conflict in the world, which so many have tried in good faith to resolve and failed, Mefites are debating whether the murdered babies had their heads cut off or not. Really good stuff.
posted by cosmic owl at 2:18 PM on October 13, 2023 [15 favorites]

i'm exhausted by the "perhaps"es and the "what about"s. the president of the united states should be held to higher standards. i don't think history is going to look kindly on many of the people in power who chose the rhetoric of escalation.
posted by JimBennett at 2:18 PM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Forgive me if American presidents lying about war crimes in order to justify war crimes doesn't get a pass anymore.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 2:18 PM on October 13, 2023 [15 favorites]

right? like some of us remember 9/11. glad our society has learned nothing from the last 20 years of atrocities cheered on by the media.
posted by JimBennett at 2:20 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

If the babies were beheaded it's a war crime, but if they were merely killed it isn't? Let's be clear about what we're saying here.
posted by cosmic owl at 2:21 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Allegations of genocide

"After the rise of Islamic fundamentalist groups as political forces in the region, some scholars and pundits began using the language of genocide in discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both to describe calls for the destruction of Israel and the indiscriminate killing of civilians by Hamas and other Palestinian extremist groups, and also to describe the cumulative effect of Israeli policies in the Gaza Strip.

In 2000, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported being "shocked by calls broadcast on Palestinian television and radio urging the killing of all Jews."Some human rights organizations and policy makers called out the commitment to destruction and violence against Jews in the Hamas Charter as incitement to genocide.

After the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the electoral success of Hamas, some of these concerns about genocide perpetrated by Hamas were attributed to the actions of Gaza as a whole. Since then spokespeople for both Israel and Palestine frequently accuse the other of planning a scheme of genocide. During spikes in violence in the conflict, some scholars have described attacks by Hamas as illegal under the Genocide Convention, and others such as New Historian Ilan Pappé have compared retaliation by Israel and its overall policies in the Gaza Strip as a form of genocide, often broadening the term beyond the definitions of that convention."
posted by clavdivs at 2:24 PM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

i am saying when the PRESIDENT - the most powerful man in the world - says he SAW A PHOTOGRAPH he DID NOT SEE - that is a FAILURE. you can point to the fact that proof was found after the fact like it's a 'gotcha', but it's not - that's actual journalism and fact checking, the kind which should have been done before this claim was spread far and wide.
posted by JimBennett at 2:25 PM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

If anything, having a factual account of what happened will matter when Netanyahu and others face an ICC tribunal. It might not be important for Metafilter but it will matter for humanity.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:30 PM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

It is unbelievable that the manner in which Jewish babies were murdered is a topic of debate here. Have you considered that some of us may be mourning their deaths? Would you say this to our faces? Are we not human? Do we not bleed?
posted by cosmic owl at 2:37 PM on October 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

It's good to want the hostages back but expect some of them are dead and some of them may be lost.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:47 PM on October 13, 2023

It is unbelievable that the manner in which Jewish babies were murdered is a topic of debate here.

I get that many of you think it's not important discourse at all but there is precedent and history to this sort of thing and it's extremely important.

It is called atrocity propaganda and it's a specific type of rhetoric that is used to fuel a public sentiment that sides with war and bombing and collateral damage because "when we do it, you see, it is not like how they do it, they are brutal savage uncivilized monsters with baby eating evil running through their blood so when you fuckin' HIPPIES dissent just know who you are siding with".

I understand that the killing of children is always going to be disturbing and awful no matter what. But if your public grieving is going to include disseminating this type of "They Are Brutes, You See!!!" rhetoric, then I'm sorry, but someone has to point out that this is part of a long tradition of saber rattling that astonishingly sits on replay over and over.
posted by windbox at 2:47 PM on October 13, 2023 [42 favorites]

you can point to the fact that proof was found after the fact like it's a 'gotcha', but it's not - that's actual journalism and fact checking, the kind which should have been done before this claim was spread far and wide.

If you read the thread I linked to, these claims were fact-checked and confirmed from multiple sources from the start (and well before Biden's press conference), but again, I find this whole debate absolutely ghoulish and gross. Holding space for the grief that many are feeling over the horrific acts that happened last Saturday prevents nobody from speaking out about the horror that is on-going in Gaza right now. You're not helping anything by comparing a mild Biden gaffe* (which is soon corrected) to the conspiratorial activities done by the Bush admin to support the Iraq war. That's a weak historical comparison. I too remember 9/11.

*(it seems very reasonable that after a long flight and little sleep he mixed up reported events with the gruesome photos of dead babies that he did see)
posted by coffeecat at 2:47 PM on October 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

About 500 children have been killed by Israeli air attacks – one-third of Palestinian fatalities in the Gaza Strip.
posted by Artw at 2:49 PM on October 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

It is unbelievable that whether the manner in which Jewish babies were murdered is a topic of debate here. Have you considered that some of us may be mourning their deaths? Would you say this to our faces? Are we not human? Do we not bleed?

this is a wildly uncharitable take on this discussion. i mean personally i am more interested in the ethics of journalists and heads of states spreading an unverified rumor as if it were actual reporting than anything you're accusing me of in this thread. gaza's population is mostly children. you should care about the deaths of those murdered by hamas being used to propagandize for mass scale child murder.

If you read the thread I linked to, these claims were fact-checked and confirmed from multiple sources from the start

good lord, the thread you linked simply links to the same unreliable reports sourced from the IDF that we've been debating the legitimacy of for days (which is why we're even in this discussion in the first place?) the CNN report in the thread is literally the same one i posted earlier, where the reporter says they were mislead! only on the 12th, after these claims had been spread far and wide and the biden administration issued their correction, was the Jerusalem Post article with fact checking added to this thread.

i do not agree that it is a "mild biden gaffe" to lie about seeing photos of war crimes, regardless of whether he's an idiot or jetlagged or if it was intentional.
posted by JimBennett at 3:01 PM on October 13, 2023 [12 favorites]

1988. The Covenant of Hamas- main points.

On the Destruction of Israel:

'Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others."
"Thhe Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.' (Article 7)
The enemies have been scheming for a long time and have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media... With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe... They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about... With their money they formed secret organizations - such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions -which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests... They stood behind World War I and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge inancial gains... There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it.' (Article 22)

revised: 2017
posted by clavdivs at 3:03 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is long precedent for the murder of Jewish children as well. I am sorry that one news report and the words of a Catholic president mean that we are collectively grieving wrong. I see now that the deaths of children in Gaza, which I have never indicated are any less a tragedy than Jewish ones, mean that Jewish deaths may be discussed in the most callous way imaginable. I do not think I am being uncharitable, but it seems I am looking for humanity in the wrong place. I'll see myself out.
posted by cosmic owl at 3:06 PM on October 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

Bad information emerging from a war zone in the age of 24/7 media isn’t necessarily a sign of malign propaganda. That “500 dead Palestinian children” is a suspiciously round number, but that doesn’t mean it was made up by Hamas or that, even if it turned out to be someone exaggerating, people would be dumb or irresponsible to believe it now. The realm of plausibility is depressingly wide in situations like this.
posted by AdamCSnider at 3:08 PM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1712943385424642281

BREAKING: Hamas intentionally targeted elementary schools in Israel, instructed terrorists to seize hostages, move them into Gaza, and to "kill as many people as possible," maps and documents recovered from the bodies of attackers show.

Pics in the twitter thread. Of captured maps and stuff, not of NSFL things!
posted by Justinian at 3:10 PM on October 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

There is long precedent for the murder of Jewish children as well. I am sorry that one news report and the words of a Catholic president means that we are collectively grieving wrong. I see now that the deaths of children in Gaza, which I have never indicated are any less a tragedy than Jewish ones, mean that Jewish deaths may be discussed in the most callous way imaginable. I do not think I am being uncharitable, but it seems I am looking for humanity in the wrong place. I'll see myself out.

i did not say you were grieving wrong. we are simply having two different discussions, and i am not interested in ceding to your simplification of these issues. i don't know how many times i need to say the hamas murders were an atrocity in this thread.
posted by JimBennett at 3:12 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm seeing the funeral notices fill up my Facebook feed and some of you do need, if not to read the room, at least understand who is in it.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:12 PM on October 13, 2023 [18 favorites]

Let's dial back the straw men here: Literally no one in this thread is defending Hamas. We all think that killing children is wrong. We all believe murdering adults in their home is horrible.

Some are also arguing that Hamas brutally killing civilians should not justify the Israeli military killing hundreds of Palestinians.
posted by latkes at 3:18 PM on October 13, 2023 [32 favorites]

Bad information emerging from a war zone in the age of 24/7 media isn’t necessarily a sign of malign propaganda

Thank you, this was my point which seems to have been lost, either because people are being deliberately obtuse or just don't care.

good lord, the thread you linked simply links to the same unreliable reports sourced from the IDF

No, the CBS report on Oct 11 had two sources, one was IDF, the other a civilian volunteer org. Anyway, also going to take a break from this thread as it's become too full of bad faith and hair splitting. I made my original post as a plea to drop the whole "how many babies were decapitated" debate because if you think that's what really matters right now, you've lost the plot. I hope you've put at least as much energy into calling your reps and urging for deescalation and humanitarian aid.
posted by coffeecat at 3:19 PM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Some are also arguing that Hamas brutally killing civilians should not justify the Israeli military killing hundreds of Palestinians.

What should the Israeli response be to Hamas? (nb: I am not implying in any way that the response should be to target Palestinian civilians!)

But what I struggle with is the question of how Israel can confront Hamas in a way that won't result in lots of deaths, including innocent ones. How do you do that in a dense urban environment like Gaza? I don't see that "don't confront Hamas" is a realistic answer but it's obviously also unacceptable for many thousands more innocents to die in Gaza.
posted by Justinian at 3:23 PM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I would guess that a bunch of people here actually think "don't confront Hamas" is a realistic answer but I don't know what that would mean in the real world. Just... try not to let this happen again with more border security? But I assume people also, rightly, think that Israel's cordoning off of Gaza is extremely problematic. So how do you simultaneously stop Hamas from doing this again, punish them for their past actions, and preserve innocent life going forward in both Israel and Gaza.
posted by Justinian at 3:26 PM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

i_am_joe's_spleen: I'm seeing the funeral notices fill up my Facebook feed and some of you do need, if not to read the room, at least understand who is in it.

I can't imagine, and I'm sorry for your grief and loss, whether you're seeing funeral notices from Israel or from Gaza. Whatever the way is to peace, I hope it's found.
posted by clawsoon at 3:27 PM on October 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

No, the CBS report on Oct 11 had two sources, one was IDF, the other a civilian volunteer org. Anyway, also going to take a break from this thread as it's become too full of bad faith and hair splitting. I made my original post as a plea to drop the whole "how many babies were decapitated" debate because if you think that's what really matters right now, you've lost the plot. I hope you've put at least as much energy into calling your reps and urging for deescalation and humanitarian aid.

if you feel like i am being uncharitable to you (or "deliberately obtuse", which i am not), please consider that continually simplifying this discussion into "[debating] how many babies were decapitated" is also wildly uncharitable.
posted by JimBennett at 3:28 PM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

But what I struggle with is the question of how Israel can confront Hamas in a way that won't result in lots of deaths, including innocent ones.

Some would argue that granting political power and ending (reducing?) occupying activities in Palestine would be a more effective strategy for reducing extremist violence than engaging in a constantly escalating confrontation.
posted by latkes at 3:29 PM on October 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

So How do you simultaneously stop Hamas from doing this again, punish them for their past actions, and preserve innocent life going forward in both Israel and Gaza.

Based on quotes from Netanyahu from earlier in the discussion, the first, minimal, obvious step seems to be to stop Israeli government support for Hamas, and not let something like that happen again.

I have no idea what the step after that is.
posted by clawsoon at 3:31 PM on October 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

But what I struggle with is the question of how Israel can confront Hamas in a way that won't result in lots of deaths, including innocent ones

the question may have been rhetorical but still nonetheless good probably the most poignant I've seen this far

12 to 24 hour cool down period for the IDF of course they can gather information during this time stop the bombing immediately number two restore power water and food number three general honesty for Palestinians who turn in Hamas militants if this is not possible I would start with the UN
four $10 billion in immediate aid if Hamas is expelled from the country and the perpetrators who escaped this crime are hand it over to the Israeli authorities.

if this conflict comes to some sort of normality the reevaluation of normalcy should be examined and Benjamin Netanyahu should resign.
posted by clavdivs at 3:33 PM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

If I was cynical, and I am very, very cynical, I’d say that Benjamin Netanyahu’s political ass being in the trashcan is exactly why we are not going to see a good outcome. He needs to suck up to the far right to survive so of course he’s going to put on the biggest, most obvious genocide show for them.

I’d also say that the biggest threat to Israel right now is Israel, both in the form of the political unrest Netanyahu has already incurred, the collapse of democracy and the fallout of deciding to do said very obvious genocide on behalf of the worst people in the country.
posted by Artw at 3:41 PM on October 13, 2023 [19 favorites]

with the UN
four $10 billion in immediate aid if Hamas is expelled from the country and the perpetrators who escaped this crime are hand it over to the Israeli authorities.

Sorry, is the idea that humanitarian aid should be withheld from Gaza until the beneficiaries somehow root out Hamas themselves?
posted by BungaDunga at 3:55 PM on October 13, 2023

oh I'll be blunt it's called a bribe and a bounty.
posted by clavdivs at 3:56 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

There’s a quote from Golda Meir that used to be brought out a lot in discussions of I/P, that made a lot of liberal Zionists including myself incredibly uncomfortable. “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” On its surface, it’s a terrible sentiment – who doesn’t love their children more than they hate literally anything? It’s Islamophobic, insisting they don’t love children. I do not like this statement. It’s not even clear if she ever said it. But looking at the events of 10/7 – and its inevitable aftermath, which we’re watching unfold now – how else do you explain this?

this is vile
posted by sandwich board at 3:57 PM on October 13, 2023 [25 favorites]

“A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.”

-Golda Meir
posted by clavdivs at 4:05 PM on October 13, 2023

Justinian I would suggest there is a moral way to go about dealing with Hamas, its not even that complicated.

The problem is that like may good actions its hard, feels bad, expensive, and slow.

Israel could deal with Hamas by sending infantry to the places you think there is Hamas, or rockets, and then capturing Hamas members or taking the rockets

Overwhelming infantry force sent in basically a series of raids. In, get the target, out.

I'm sure there are problems with that approach. I'm sure that approach would still result in children and other civilians being killed.

But it seems less likely to kill children than all the bombs and white phosphorus and so on are. And it'd demonstrate good will on the part of Israel both to the innocent Palestinians and to the rest of the world.

Stop all the blockades, let in all the food and aid. Let the Palestinian people see Israel exhibiting actual restraint and spending the money and lives it would take to begin action against Hamas. It would show Israel is opposed to Hamas not the Palestinian people.

But, of course, that would be hard. And slow. And costly.

And most importantly it would require that Israel sees Hamas as their enemy instead of seeing all Palestinians as the enemy.

Since the Israeli government has explicitly said that it views all Palestinians as the enemy it responds with the immoral but cheap, feel good, easy, method of bombs and missiles.
posted by sotonohito at 4:19 PM on October 13, 2023 [15 favorites]

1988. The Covenant of Hamas

The thing is, when you give some crazy horseshit like this any serious consideration, from a literal gang of terrorist criminals, you give them legitimacy they don't deserve -- because they're a gang of terrorist criminals who you are now treating like a sovereign entity. Which they are not, because they're just another fucking gang of terrorist criminals.
posted by mikelieman at 4:57 PM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sharp article from AP about Palestinians who are extremely torn about leaving, since they know this is how the 1948 Nakba happened and they don't think they'll ever be allowed back. Certainly right-wing Israeli politicians are calling for that:

In Israel’s call for mass evacuation, Palestinians hear echoes of their original catastrophic exodus

...The military has said those who leave can return when hostilities end, but many Palestinians are deeply suspicious. Israel’s far-right government has empowered extremists who support the idea of deporting Palestinians, and in the wake of the Hamas attack some have openly called for mass expulsion. Some are West Bank settlers still angry over Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza in 2005...

Hamas, meanwhile, has told people to remain in their homes, dismissing the Israeli orders as a ploy. President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the internationally-recognized Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, also rejected the evacuation orders, saying they would lead to a “new Nakba.”

...Palestinians have heard their relatives’ stories, and have been raised on the idea that the only hope for their decades-long struggle for self-determination is steadfastness on the land. But many in Gaza may be too frightened, exhausted and desperate to make a stand...

“The experience that happened with our families in 1948 taught us that if you leave, you will not return,” said Khader Dibs, who lives in the crowded Shuafat refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem. “The Palestinian people are dying and the Gaza Strip is being wiped out.”
posted by mediareport at 5:12 PM on October 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

four $10 billion in immediate aid if Hamas is expelled from the country and the perpetrators who escaped this crime are hand it over to the Israeli authorities.

I wish I could agree, but we tried spending our way to a stable post-Islamist Afghanistan to the tune of $2.5 trillion or so, with nothing to show for it. Looking at the relative populations, we could spend as much as $148 billion with no greater guarantee of success.

If the locals were inclined to, or capable of, taking action against Hamas they probably would have done so already, since that might have headed off the bombing and saved thousands of their own family and neighbors' lives. Hamas is clearly popular enough and/or tough enough to keep control. And I'd be surprised if the bombing is having any meaningful effect on them, either - presumably the Israelis are targeting based on pre-attack intel on where Hamas' stuff is kept, and one of the things that's come out clearly is that Israeli intelligence did not have a great handle on what was going on on the ground.

Hamas isn't going anywhere unless Israel goes in and occupies Gaza completely, which might be actually less of a humanitarian catastrophe than the combined bombing and blockade we're seeing taking shape now, but which I don't think is on the table. It would

be hard. And slow. And costly.

And would have no real guarantee of lasting success. Israel occupied Gaza for decades before handing it off to the PLO, and Hamas' takeover followed shortly thereafter. Even if Israel did annihilate Hamas, there are other groups that could and doubtless would move into the vacuum. Would a Gaza branch of ISIS be an improvement?

If I was recommending a course of action, it would be to target Hamas outside of Gaza rather than within it. Concentrate on targeting their leadership, their recruiting, their financial networks. That would also hurt Gaza's civilians to some degree, since Hamas runs what passes for infrastructure and social safety nets in Gaza and people like that cut butter long before they cut guns. But it would hurt them less than what's going on now, and would hurt the organization more. Israel doesn't necessarily have that reach alone, but they have a lot of sympathy right now in the USA and Europe, who do. If Israel isn't going to remove Hamas, then the goal needs to be containing their capabilities, and killing a bunch of Gazans isn't going to do much in that regard. Cutting the pipeline on the funds needed for amassing the thousands of missiles needed to overcome Iron Dome, on the other hand, would.

cheap, feel good, easy, method of bombs and missiles.

It is also a tool immediately at hand and highly visible. Even if it weren't Netanyahu and the hardliners in charge, there's always pressure on politicians to do something quickly in reaction to things like this. And while it doesn't seem to have been serious, the noises Hezbollah were making up north probably added a desire to deter anyone else from jumping on the bandwagon.
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:22 PM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Respectfully, I want to ask you to hold space a moment to talk about anti-semitism

Thank you for doing that. But please don't assume those of us who are not posting in quite the way you'd like us to here on this internet site haven't also been holding space to think and talk about anti-semitism.
posted by mediareport at 5:27 PM on October 13, 2023 [12 favorites]

Calling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians genocide is untrue, and it is super problematic if not outright anti-semitic.

I do join others here in noting that the above is an appalling statement, though.
posted by mediareport at 5:28 PM on October 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

The words and actions of a right winger who labeled 2.2million human beings animals and promptly responded by cutting off food, water, and power to a trapped population shouldn't be defended because anti semitism exists and is also horrible.
posted by Jacen at 5:51 PM on October 13, 2023 [26 favorites]

Would a Gaza branch of ISIS be an improvement?
All 200 to 300 hundred? The larger point is to get 30 to 40 thousand militant solders to surrender or convince the rest of Palestinian people to point them out. looking to a document from a terrorist organization to prove a point is certainly not giving them any credence hence the amended document. Hamas trying to lend Credence to itself.
The salient aspect this conflict was how quick Israel was declare war. The downside to a war of provocation is that if one has not gathered allies or have sufficient means for counter attack one has endency to isolate oneself. something something sun-tzu strengths and weaknesses.
21-26. "agitate him and ascertain the pattern of his movement. determine his dispositions and so ascertain the field of battle. provoke him and learn where his strength is abundant and where is it deficient. the ultimate in disposing one's troops is to be without ascertainable shape. then the most penetrating spies cannot pry in nor can the wise lay plans against you. "
I believe Hamas will fail in these basic princeps militarily. and isn't that the real question is if all those 30,000 militants have just blended in to the general population.
posted by clavdivs at 7:32 PM on October 13, 2023

Keep in mind that Hamas is a huge social / political organization and the soldiers are only a small part of it. There are 40-50,0000 soldiers and then there are probably at least 3-4x that who are part of the political operation. This isn’t Lebanon in 1982 where the PLO can he deported to Tunisia.

What makes this awful is that there doesn’t seem to be a deal to be made at this point. Israel seems to think its only option is more violence.

I keep hearing rumors of a “Grozny plan.” It is as bad as it sounds. Israel does to Gaza what Russia did to Chechnya.
posted by interogative mood at 7:50 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

From a colleague's locked twitter:
It could not be clearer that the wager of the western powers is that the permanent destruction of Gaza would finally solve an inconvenient problem for them and will be bumpy now but forgotten in five years
posted by AceRock at 8:01 PM on October 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Is Hamas a terrorist organisation or a government? Because if its both, are all its branches legitimate targets?

Maybe it's a translation thing, but I'm often a little unsure exactly what's going on when a building is leveled and I hear that there were Hamas offices in it. Are they all military offices? To what extent does Hamas provide any other government services than a military?

Maybe the main justification I've seen regular people give for not caring about the food, water and electricity being shut off is "they should have spent their money on infrastructure, not rockets, then". If Gaza is ruled by Hamas, and anything that we might consider like, civilian government capacity is then technically Hamas, are they all valid targets?

It's hard to wrap my head around what this actually looks like in practice. This article from Al Jazeera says that 13 of the hospitals are run by the Ministry of Health. Presumably, some of the people in the Ministry of Health are Hamas? Maybe all of them? Are any of their offices then "Hamas offices"?

If Hamas hits a small claims court or the folks who enforce tobacco regulations, I think we count that as a war crime right? But does the same apply in reverse?
posted by Audreynachrome at 8:14 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ryan McBeth claims to have gotten a hold of copies of some of the operations plans and written orders carried by Hamas soldiers detailing the attack. He has posted a video summary on his YouTube.
posted by interogative mood at 8:21 PM on October 13, 2023

Calling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians genocide is untrue

A professor of Holocaust and genocide studies disagrees with you.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:22 PM on October 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

Why Israel Must Reconsider Its Gaza Evacuation Order - António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations.
posted by Artw at 10:55 PM on October 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

For the sake of discussion, a recent article about the origins of International Law and how gets applied. Galvanic didn't elaborate his skepticism of it, but I suspect the criticism would hew along these lines.

In the latest iteration of the same pattern, the now permanent International Criminal Court set up in 2002 was urged into being by the United States, which was centrally involved in its conception and preparation, but then made sure that the us would not itself be subject to the ICC's jurisdiction. When, to the great anger of the Clinton Administration, the draft Statute was changed to make possible the prosecution of members even of a state that was not a signatory to it, rendering American soldiers, pilots, torturers and others potentially vulnerable to inclusion in the mandate of the Court, the us promptly signed over a hundred bilateral agreements with countries where its military were or had been present, excluding American personnel from any such risk. Finally, in a typical farce, on his last day in the White House, Clinton instructed the us representative to sign the Statute of the future Court, knowing full well that this gesture had no chance of ratification in Congress. Naturally enough, the ICC—staffed by pliable personnel—declined to investigate any us or European actions whatever in Iraq or Afghanistan, concentrating its zeal entirely on countries in Africa, according to the unspoken maxim: one law for the rich, another for the poor.

Strategically, I think this has already been a success for Hamas - they have demonstrated that the status quo of slow encroachment is untenable and lured Israel into a massive response, halting rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and damaging its image in the Arab and Islamic World. They (and everybody else in Gaza) might get pummeled into dust, but I think the wider Palestinian liberation movement will get a boost and if it continues, countries that Israel could count on as reliable allies will distance themselves in the future. It's not something most of us would understand as a success, but if you value the idea of a "free" Palestine (or destruction of Israel) more than it's people...

U.S. and Qatar agree to prevent disbursal of recently unfrozen Iranian funds
Did Biden cave to the GOP on this? Kind of only peripherally related, but Israel's nightmare scenario is Iran getting a nuclear bomb. The US already unilaterally pulled out of the JCPOA and now this - if no deal can be trusted to be kept, Iran might just decide there's nothing to lose by going nuclear.
posted by ndr at 11:18 PM on October 13, 2023

One removed; focusing on another user personally rather than the content of their statement, and accusing moderation of promoting dehumanization of Palestinians.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:32 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I believe Hamas will fail in these basic princeps militarily. and isn't that the real question is if all those 30,000 militants have just blended in to the general population.

Here's an alternative. Annex Gaza. Remove the blockade. Normalize the delivery of everyday food & merchandise. Restore electric/gas/etc. Send in reinforcements to the hospitals. Issue everyone an Israeli passport. And at the same time the police can do their investigations into the criminal terrorist network, and after obtaining warrants, prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.

Can Hamas offer any of that?

"One nation, from the river to the sea, with liberty and justice FOR ALL!" is how this New York Jew rolls.
posted by mikelieman at 4:05 AM on October 14, 2023 [9 favorites]

Maybe the main justification I've seen regular people give for not caring about the food, water and electricity being shut off is "they should have spent their money on infrastructure, not rockets, then". If Gaza is ruled by Hamas, and anything that we might consider like, civilian government capacity is then technically Hamas, are they all valid targets?

If there's anybody who believes that it's important to spend on military capacity before infrastructure, I'd think it'd be students of Israeli independence. Not much point building infrastructure if your enemies are intent on driving it (and you) "into the sea", as Israel's enemies put it in 1948. (And, for that matter, I wouldn't expect anyone else to better understand the terrorist-to-respected-national-leader pipeline than people who voted for Begin and Shamir.)
posted by clawsoon at 4:19 AM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Here's an alternative. Annex Gaza. Remove the blockade. Normalize the delivery of everyday food & merchandise. Restore electric/gas/etc. Send in reinforcements to the hospitals. Issue everyone an Israeli passport. And at the same time the police can do their investigations into the criminal terrorist network, and after obtaining warrants, prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.

as i understand it (as someone whose understanding is so shallow that i have to look up how to spell netanyahu's name every time i use it) there is literally no way that israel's leadership will ever agree to any resolution that jeopardizes its status as a jewish-majority state. not in a million years. what you are proposing is what's referred to as the "one-state solution." although it is the preferred option of some on the left — noam chomsky is a big fan — it is wildly unpopular with the population of israel, unpopular to the point that there's speculation that the implementation of a one-state solution would result in mass emigration from israel out of fear of potential genocide.

so yeah turns out that this simple solution to the problem is, like all other simple solutions to the problem, not a solution at all.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:55 AM on October 14, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yeah, the "one-state solution" is never going to work. If you want to see why, just try switching around the state names in that paragraph, and imagine trying to convince anyone to give it a try:

"Here's an alternative. Annex Israel. Remove the blockade. Normalize the delivery of everyday food & merchandise. Restore electric/gas/etc. Send in reinforcements to the hospitals. Issue everyone a Palestinian passport. And at the same time the police can do their investigations into the criminal terrorist network, and after obtaining warrants, prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law."
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:12 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Which is why for now, I'll take whatever we can get that minimises the immediate bloodshed and suffering. But in the long-term, it will rise again if the solution includes an ethnostate.
posted by Audreynachrome at 5:59 AM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

no real way to stop it

I'm going to recuse myself for a bit after this to prevent excess posting but... There is turning off the tap. Ending the military aid, cutting Israel out of Five Eyes, stopping doing military training with them. Cutting them off diplomatically, economic sanctions. There's not *no* way. I mean, we could even go as far as cutting off their ability to fish in their own waters, if we all agreed that the Israeli government and political class weren't being reasonable.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:02 AM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't know. This feels like "unstoppable force vs. immovable object" territory, and clearly we wont be able to theorize our way into a resolution here. It's also clearly very upseting to those with personal connection to the conflict to have their lives weighed and measured by others from a comfortable distance.

Given that, I think maybe it would be ideal for this thread, and war threads in general, to focus on substantiated and specific news rather than the broader theory of the conflict. And since I'm not in a position to add anything substantive to this discussion, I think I will also excuse myself for now.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:16 AM on October 14, 2023 [12 favorites]

Part of me is wondering if Israel is bluffing with the order to evacuate part of Gaza to achieve a Nakba II. In the original displacement of Palestinians threatened terror was probably the biggest part of the strategy for taking over their land. Order Palestinians to evacuate the north of Gaza and then never let them back would be a strategy very consistent with the State of Israel's history.
posted by srboisvert at 6:37 AM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

founding of the modern state of israel in the absence of a messiah was an act of blasphemy and who as such refuse to set foot in it.

This is also their take on modern anything.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:52 AM on October 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

who argue that the founding of the modern state of israel in the absence of a messiah was an act of blasphemy and who as such refuse to set foot in it.

My sentiments about theocracy and theological organization exactly. It's not only the fake historical binds, but the mockery of the divine concept to be average human at best, evil at worst.
posted by Brian B. at 6:53 AM on October 14, 2023

As a person who is really, really, opposed to both ethnostates and theocracy and therefore is extremely opposed to theocratic ethnostates, I can understand why a lot of Jews would want Israel as a religio-ethno-state. And all you have to do is take the most casual of glances at the current state of extreme deference in Israel to the most horrifying radical misogynist, racist, Jewish fundamentalist minorities that exist to see how Israel is already an example of theocracy going bad. And I STILL understand why even secular Jews would want to keep Israel as a religio-ethno-state.

Leave aside the religious part where Judaism has a sort of mythologized geography centered around mythic Israel in general the the city of Jerusalem in specific. Just focus on the part where for over two thousand fucking years Jews have been the go to scapegoat and victim for pogroms and genocide all across Europe and the Middle East.

And more recently how in the 1930's as Jews were being rounded up for what was clearly another pogrom/genocide every nation on Earth told Jewish refugees to fuck off and go back to Europe and be killed like good little victims. Including, I should add, the USA which went to great lengths to prevent any Jewish refugees from entering America. If anyone here is not already familiar with the history of the St Louis, I recommend you read the Holocaust Museum's excellent writeup. TL;DR: in 1939 around 1,000 Jews tried to flee Germany and after sailing around for over six months without being permitted to dock anywhere they had to go back and send the Jewish passengers into Germany where roughly 1/3 were killed in the Holocaust.

So, given all that, and especially the part where Jews who saw the coming genocide and tried to flee but were rejected by every fucking country on Earth and sent back to die, I can understand how even the least religious and most nervous about ethnostates Jews would like the idea of a nation with a rock solid Jewish majority so they have a flat out, no exceptions, guaranteed place of refuge.

If I was Jewish I damn sure wouldn't trust any country on Earth to let me run there for safety and I'd be painfully aware that even the more supposedly friendly places can turn genocidal at the drop of a hat.

And the idea of turning Israel into a Jewish minority state with a majority population of not merely Muslims (and the long, ugly, history of Islamic antisemitism) but specifically Palestinian Muslims who have real grievances and reasons to hate Israel and are likely to turn that into a more generalized antisemitism isn't going to get any significant support in Israel, and polling indicates a supermajority of Jews worldwide don't support Israel as a Jewish minority state.

Which sucks. I hate ethnostates. But I can't blame them and I don't really see a way to get past that for at least another few centuries of no pogroms and the eradication of the virulent strain of antisemitism that's still circulating worldwide. Jews are at the core of every conspiracy theory out there from 9/11 trutherism to Flat Earth-ism to antivaccine and COVID conspiracy. Dig deep enough in any conspiracy and at the bottom you find people saying it's all the fault of the Jews.

Which is why talking about a one state solution that involves diluting the Jewish supermajority in Israel is never going to be anything but talk. Better to discuss realistic outcomes.

A one state solution that involves getting rid of the Palestinian population (either through expulsion or execution) that doesn't currently have Israeli citizenship is possible.

A one state solution that involves granting Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians residing in the Israeli occupied territory is not.
posted by sotonohito at 7:17 AM on October 14, 2023 [32 favorites]

Part of me is wondering if Israel is bluffing with the order to evacuate part of Gaza to achieve a Nakba II.

I don’t think there any need to wonder. This is exactly what Israel is doing.
posted by rhymedirective at 7:40 AM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Comment and response remove. Do not do Nazi dog whistles here, period. If folks see one, please flag it with a note or use the contact form to let the mods know.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:55 AM on October 14, 2023

I can't help but wonder if parts of the Israeli government are now considering the withdrawal of settlers from Gaza in 2005 a mistake, and the West Bank, where the Palestinian population is fractured into enclaves, harassed by settlers, and generally kept divided, demoralized, and politically impotent, a success. Is there any political push in Israel to turn Gaza into another West Bank?
posted by clawsoon at 8:50 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Never Misses:

‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That.

Moderate U.S. Politician Believes Israel Should Only Kill Half Of Palestinians.

Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.

Jewish Man Reassured After Being Told Antisemitism Doesn’t Exist.
posted by lalochezia at 9:08 AM on October 14, 2023 [16 favorites]

“a lot of things are true.” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Life is a Sacred Text, 12 October 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 9:24 AM on October 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Hamilton Nolan on Young Morality and Old Morality:

Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets?

Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.
posted by sandwich board at 9:29 AM on October 14, 2023 [15 favorites]

AP
US Air Force deploys fighter aircraft to Middle East.
Your tax $ at work.
The United States Air Force said overnight that it had deployed F-15E fighter aircraft in the Middle East to support its operations backing Israel after Hamas’ unprecedented attack Oct.7.
There is concern that Israel will apply some sort of varient of the Hannibal directive sacrificing hostages in order to destroy Hamas.
posted by adamvasco at 9:56 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

ob1quixote: “a lot of things are true.” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Life is a Sacred Text, 12 October 2023

From the comments:

Because the main narrative across the Western world, being pushed by almost everyone with any power, is that Israel (the state representing all its people, but also somehow all Jewish people, even those who do not consider themselves part of Israel) has done nothing wrong and is a perfect victim, but Hamas (and, by implication, Palestinians/Muslims) is evil incarnate. And I think my initial instinct to push back against that black-and-white narrative pulls me into an oppositional, but similarly nonsensical and unethical, standpoint. That to push back on that narrative, I had to be similarly un-nuanced and callous. Which is not to make excuses, but to explain the psychology of it from my exp. I fight this urge to simplify things in harmful ways, but it is a strong influence.

posted by clawsoon at 9:58 AM on October 14, 2023

As contentious as this thread has felt at points this has become my go-to place on the net to digest the developing news. So thanks to everybody for sharing your disparate opinions here freely and respectfully.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 10:04 AM on October 14, 2023 [34 favorites]

Benjamin Netanyahu's national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, in a televised briefing a few minutes ago:

The Israeli army is preparing to "implement a wide range of operational offensive plans" with "an emphasis on significant ground operations." Israel is aiming to "destroy the military and governance capabilities of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad."

And also, presumably from the same briefing:

"We hope Hezbollah won't, de facto, bring about the destruction of Lebanon, because if there is a war there the result will be no less."
posted by clawsoon at 10:22 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Insider: Descendants of Holocaust survivors protesting Israel's 'genocide' of Palestinians among those arrested in front of Sen. Chuck Schumer's house in New York

Dozens of protesters were arrested outside the Brooklyn home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York on Friday. The group demanded that the Democratic leader push for a cease-fire as he is set to lead a bipartisan delegation to Israel this weekend, according to WABC-TV New York.

The arrests included rabbis and several descendants of Holocaust survivors, according to Jewish Voice for Peace, with many attendees holding a banner that read "Jews Say — Stop Genocide Against Palestinians" as they blocked entry to the street where the senator resides.
posted by mediareport at 10:30 AM on October 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

Got around to watching the German public TV interview with former PM Ehud Olmert, linked above, and it's worth the watch. The "Netanyahu is history. He's done" line comes at 18:20, and he offers thoughts on the role of the Saudi-Israel-US talks starting at 19:10. At 21:30, the host asks if the 2-state concept is finished, and Olmert laughs and says "No. No. Look. There is no other solution."

The part where he talks about the current government as thugs starts at 25:00, as part of his reply to the question "How scared are you right now for your country?"

"I'm scared of the Israeli government. I'm scared of this group of thugs, violent messianic thugs run by a reckless, irresponsible person - Netanyahu - which is leading the state of Israel. We have to get rid of them, and we have to get rid of Hamas. First Hamas, and then we will have to make order within the state of Israel."

Also worth pointing to is the section at 10:40 where Olmert discusses Netanyahu's now well-known strategy of support for Hamas so he wouldn't have to negotiate peace with the Palestianian Authority, thus reducing the chances for an independent Palestinian state:

"For years Netanyahu explicitly preferred to deal with Hamas in order not to have to deal with the Palestinian authority...he put all the efforts in order to create a certain rapport with Hamas. We know that Hamas was financed with the assistance of Israel - for years - by hundreds of millions of dollars that came from Qatar with the assistance of the state of Israel, with the full knowledge and support of the Israeli government led by Netanyahu...throughout the period that he was Prime Minister, he made every possible effort to build Hamas rather than to destroy it...And in a certain way, the expansion of Hamas and the strengthening of Hamas is largely also a result of this policy of Netanyahu."

He's asked about the national unity government at 16:16 (I think this was before the announcement that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich would at least not be on any war council, and the unity government formation), and says he's not enthusiastic about the idea, since no one with minimal respect for themselves would want to sit with those two while they hold central positions in the government, and shouldn't join in. he then says Netanyahu should resign and will soon be forced to after the fighting is over, drawing a parallel with Golda Meir's resignation a few months after the 1973 war.

There's definitely spin there, and Olmert is certainly no paragon of virtue - resigned over corruption investigations, spent time in prison, etc. He dances around a number of questions, including the morality and effectiveness of a total blockade on food and water, and the effectiveness and need for a ground invasion, and also says around 6:18 that he wouldn't make a deal with Hamas for the hostages. But it's definitely an interesting interview.
posted by mediareport at 11:32 AM on October 14, 2023 [9 favorites]

The Israeli army is preparing to "implement a wide range of operational offensive plans" with "an emphasis on significant ground operations."

Yeah, my cousin's nephew just got called up as part of those "significant ground operations."
posted by mediareport at 11:39 AM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

Something that’s been bothering me: if someone trained with Hamas for two years, participated in a couple of operations, and left on good terms after promising to reenlist if ever called up, most people would have no problem viewing them as a valid target for an Israeli airstrike. Heck, many
in this thread would view a couple of innocent children as acceptable collateral damage. But our moral intuitions (rightly, I think!) shift entirely when regarding Israeli civilians who happen to be IDF reservists. I genuinely don’t know how to reconcile that.
posted by rishabguha at 11:42 AM on October 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Comment removed for being dismissive of others comments. Please be aware of the Guidelines and allow others to express themselves, while being respectful of their views!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 11:43 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Comments, requests, questions, and/or concerns about mod actions should be either sent via the Contact Form or you may submit a MetaTalk post.

Such comments will be removed to keep the focus on the topic of the thread and not moderator actions.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 12:09 PM on October 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister states that Israel will stop punishing the people of Gaza only if Hamas surrenders. (nitter). At the end he says "we want to open a humanitarian corridor so [civilians] can leave [into Egypt]".
posted by BungaDunga at 12:12 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Would like to echo Capt. The Mango's comment above and thank y'all and the mods for keeping things sorted, sifted, and filtered here.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 12:13 PM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

our moral intuitions (rightly, I think!) shift entirely when regarding Israeli civilians who happen to be IDF reservists. I genuinely don’t know how to reconcile that.

One reason is because the IDF uses forced conscription: you can't, without certain exemptions, be a citizen of Israel without participating in the IDF, no matter what you feel about the matter. I think - and I say this as a member of a volunteer army - that there is a difference between people who were drafted/conscripted and simply didn't want to go to jail, and people who made the active choice to participate in the armed forces of a nation. It's not that folks are promising out of their genuine intentions to return - they just are forced to.

Additionally, I think there's some gendered stuff there as well. Israel conscripts women as well as men; which means killing IDF reservists indiscriminately means orphaning a *lot* of kids. While it can be argued whether this is a correct take or not, most military ethics consider killing noncombatant women to be particularly abhorrent.
posted by corb at 12:14 PM on October 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

But our moral intuitions ...

Speaking for a group, without explicitly identifying that group, can easily be misinterpreted. mods sorry for the crosstalk
posted by achrise at 12:16 PM on October 14, 2023

Yeah, my cousin's nephew just got called up as part of those "significant ground operations."

One of 360,000, plus 170,000 regular troops, a total equal to about one-quarter of the Gaza Strip's entire population. How often do we see a force this large relative to the enemy population?
posted by clawsoon at 12:18 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hopefully it's only Hamas that is the enemy population but I know what you mean.

Basically never but that's probably because it's also basically never that the entire population of the area in question is concentrated in one small strip of urbanized land.
posted by Justinian at 12:28 PM on October 14, 2023

(forgive me if it was a rhetorical question)
posted by Justinian at 12:29 PM on October 14, 2023

Barak Ravid via Axios

Scoop: Iran sent a message to Israel on Saturday via the UN stressing that it does not want further escalation in the Hamas-Israel war, but that it will have to intervene if the Israeli operation in Gaza continues. My story on @axios
posted by Justinian at 12:48 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

"we want to open a humanitarian corridor so [civilians] can leave [into Egypt]"

And then when the all clear is signalled they get to come back right? Right?
posted by Meatbomb at 12:59 PM on October 14, 2023 [16 favorites]

For those interested in resources on how to take action:

I just got off a Zoom call with Jewish Voices for Peace, who are doing a daily action Zoom call at 3pm EST. You don't need to be Jewish to join.

They have made it easy for you to call all three of your representatives in a row. Keep doing it until your reps have called for a ceasefire.

They have also made it easy to contact all of the members of the NYTimes editorial board with a message of ceasefire. They recommend personalizing your message.

They are planning two protests in Washington D.C. this week. Getting people to come to DC is their focus this week (rather than NYC). While their website currently just lists details for an action on Monday, on the Zoom they made clear that this Wednesday will be the big day - details are still in the works. If you sign up on the form linked to, you can be added to their mailing list. Again, non-Jewish allies are welcome.
posted by coffeecat at 1:27 PM on October 14, 2023 [19 favorites]

If they want a humanitarian corridor into Egypt, maybe they shouldn't have bombed the only border crossing into Egypt?
posted by Flunkie at 1:44 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

BREAKING: Hamas intentionally targeted elementary schools in Israel, instructed terrorists to seize hostages, move them into Gaza, and to "kill as many people as possible," maps and documents recovered from the bodies of attackers show.

Pics in the twitter thread. Of captured maps and stuff, not of NSFL things!

I find a lot of the pushback in the thread, pointing out signs that these documents might be fake, pretty convincing. I don't really need these documents to convince me that what Hamas did was horrific but there's a ton of weird inflammatory disinfo going around (day of jihad?) and I really hope NBC News knows what it's doing.
posted by sandwich board at 2:00 PM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I haven't seen NBC comment. Israel has a lot of people who speak Arabic very well so it is super weird that, if the documents are fake, they would be done with a translation program. My guess is NBC will just memory hole the story since news is flying by so fast.
posted by Justinian at 2:05 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister states that Israel will stop punishing the people of Gaza only if Hamas surrenders.

That isn’t an exact quote. He said that Israel demands the immediate surrender of Hamas before they begin work on restoring services.
posted by interogative mood at 2:23 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

BBC documentary filmmaker Daniel Adamson has a Twitter thread, reposted on nitter.cz so you won't give clicks to Elon, with linked quotes from relatives of murdered or kidnapped Israelis who are calling for an end to the attacks on Gaza:

Some of the most measured voices I’m hearing on here, the ones who seem most serious about ending this agony, seem to come from Israelis whose loved ones have just been murdered or abducted by Hamas.

Some examples…In their pain, these people have summoned a serious, humane response that contrasts so sharply with the dogmatic, righteous, cocksure punditry that has dominated Twitter and degraded much of the political commentary...

Noi Katzman whose Brother Chaim was murdered by Hamas: “The most important thing for me and also for my brother, is that his death will not be used as a justification for killing innocent people”

Father of the girl taken hostage on motorcycle: “Also Gaza has casualties…mothers who cry…let’s use this emotion, we are two nations from one father, let’s make peace, a real peace"

Yonaton, whose mother, Vivian, was attacked by Hamas in Beeri and has not been heard from since: “You cannot cure dead babies with more dead babies. We need peace.”

And this remarkable young woman, just 19, who survived the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri:“I know what I want. I want a just peace…We cannot go on like this. We cannot.”

Neta Heiman, whose 84 yr-old mum, Ditza, was abducted by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz: “My mother and her friends in the kibbutz were people of peace…in her name, too, I plead: do not destroy Gaza. That will only bring an even more ferocious round of violence the next time”

Click through to see the full thread at nitter.cz, about half of the clips are in English.
posted by mediareport at 2:29 PM on October 14, 2023 [20 favorites]

"We hope Hezbollah won't, de facto, bring about the destruction of Lebanon, because if there is a war there the result will be no less."

it's beyond me how people this delusional can be said to make rational decisions
posted by pyramid termite at 2:45 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

'shock and awe?'

Though, I guess it did turn out to be fairly shocking and awful.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:17 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

How Hamas secretly built a 'mini-army' to fight Israel

"Necessity is the mother of invention," said Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, adding that the group had long drawn on money and training from Iran and Iranian regional proxies like Lebanon's Hezbollah, while bolstering its own forces in Gaza.

Difficulties in importing weapons meant that over the past nine years "we developed our capabilities and are able to manufacture locally", said Baraka, who is based in Lebanon.

In the 2008 Gaza war, Hamas rockets had a maximum range of 40 km (25 miles), but that had risen to 230 km by the 2021 conflict, he added.

Qassam rocket [appears to be outdated]

The Qassam rocket is the best-known type of rocket deployed by Palestinian militants, mainly against Israeli civilians... According to Human Rights Watch, Qassam rockets are too inaccurate and prone to malfunction to be used against specific military targets in or near civilian areas, and are mainly launched for the purpose of "harming civilians".

[T]he rockets are propelled by a solid mixture of sugar and potassium nitrate, a common fertilizer. The warhead is filled with smuggled or scavenged TNT and urea nitrate, another common fertilizer...

Early designs used a single nozzle which screwed into the base; later rockets use a seven-nozzle design, with the nozzles drilled directly into the rocket baseplate. This alteration both increases the tolerance of the rocket to small nozzle design defects, and makes manufacture easier by allowing the use of a drill rather than a lathe during manufacture...

(This all immediately reminded me of Moshe Dayan talking about how the pre-Independence Israeli forces set up their own arms factories, since they had a lot of trouble importing during the Mandate.)

Rocket attacks on Israel continue [from earlier today]

A few hours ago sirens went off in central and southern Israel – southern Israel, of course, being Israel south to the border of Gaza.

Rockets were launched from Hamas towards Tel Aviv. There’s been no reports of casualties. Now this, of course, has been happening pretty much every day for the last seven days since the Hamas attack on October 7.

How Long Has Israel Been Rocket Free For Really? [from 2019]

Traveling around Israel for work has its perks, yes. I still get to see the beauty of the land every time I drive through Beit Shemesh to go to Tel Aviv. It’s stunning. I get awesome food, and I meet really interesting people.

But lately, it has been rather distracting too. I now continue my meetings while running into bomb shelters, evacuating buses on the side of the highway because of impending rocket fire, attending the funerals of lone soldiers along with 30,000 of my brothers and sisters, and visit their parents in their house of mourning. And I cry. A lot more than I should. This appears to be what life has become...

It is hard to comprehend this, but since 2001, there has not been a month without rockets into Israel. That’s effing insane!...

posted by clawsoon at 4:41 PM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

A more up-to-date article on Hamas rocket capabilities:

Is Hamas’s military arsenal any match for the Israeli defence complex?

Hamas first developed the Q-12 and Q-20 rockets with short ranges of between 12 km and 20 km. By 2016, they were producing R-160 rockets, which can hit targets as far as 160 km...

"And this is something they managed to do by starting their own production... Iran was essential for enabling them to really build up their local production capabilities," argues Hinz...

Built in makeshift workshops in Gaza, the rockets used by Hamas cost around $2000 a piece. Their low cost means they do not carry advanced electronic components and circuitry - the mainstay for modern missiles, explains Kharief. "The rockets can be manufactured in any forge or soldering workshop and can be either stored directly in the hidden launching platforms or in underground storage facilities," explains Kharief.

However, each missile fired into the night sky by Israel’s Iron Dome costs around $50,000 while each battery - the system to launch the missile - costs around $50 million, he suggests...

He believes potentially that Hamas has 30,000-50,000 rockets in its arsenal, which means that the Israeli army would never be able to fully intercept them, impacting the Israeli defence budget by a "at several hundred billion dollars"...

posted by clawsoon at 5:16 PM on October 14, 2023

Something that’s been bothering me: if someone trained with Hamas for two years, participated in a couple of operations, and left on good terms after promising to reenlist if ever called up, most people would have no problem viewing them as a valid target for an Israeli airstrike. Heck, many in this thread would view a couple of innocent children as acceptable collateral damage. But our moral intuitions (rightly, I think!) shift entirely when regarding Israeli civilians who happen to be IDF reservists. I genuinely don’t know how to reconcile that.

There's a false equivalency here, no? Hamas is not to Palestine what IDF is to Israel. Hamas does not represent Palestine.
posted by Taro at 5:59 PM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

Hamas is the government of Gaza so while it doesn't represent Palestine, it does represent Gaza, no? In the same way that any government represents the place it governs even if that government is awful or oppressive.
posted by Justinian at 6:25 PM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hamas is the government of Gaza so while it doesn't represent Palestine, it does represent Gaza, no?

Not so much? There hasn't been an election in 17 years and the median age of the population is 18. Bit of a stretch to say that people are "represented" by a "government" most of them didn't vote for. The concept of "representation" is only useful or relevant in functioning democracies, which the Palestinian Territories are not.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 6:31 PM on October 14, 2023 [14 favorites]

But our moral intuitions (rightly, I think!) shift entirely when regarding Israeli civilians who happen to be IDF reservists.

Do they? I'm pretty sure I saw up thread people saying that settlers would be fair targets of attack, and they're civilians. I feel like we've seen a wide range of opinions (uncomfortably wide, at some points) on who's a legitimate target in this conflict.

I find a lot of the pushback in the thread, pointing out signs that these documents might be fake, pretty convincing. I don't really need these documents to convince me that what Hamas did was horrific but there's a ton of weird inflammatory disinfo going around (day of jihad?) and I really hope NBC News knows what it's doing.

Yeah. This is an active war zone where the propaganda dimension, especially that focused on broader world opinion, is even more important than it usually is. I don't mean any aspersions on the reporters on the ground there, who are doubtless doing their best, but there are a lot of people who have very good reason to blur the truth right now, both about what has happened and what is happening presently. As a friend of mine recently said to me about another conflict in which this is true - "I support Ukraine unequivocally. That does not require me to trust Ukraine unequivocally. If lying to us is necessary to the war, I expect them to lie to us."
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:37 PM on October 14, 2023

re: Hamas not representing Gaza

That seems like a semantic argument to me. Putin represents Russia and there hasn't been a real election there in god knows how long. Ditto China or any other non-democracy.
posted by Justinian at 6:38 PM on October 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

What does it mean to you to "represent" Gaza?
posted by sandwich board at 6:42 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

To be the recognized and/or de facto government of a place? Like how the Taliban now represents Afghanistan or Biden represents the USA?
posted by Justinian at 6:44 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Surely a lot of Gen X'ers here remember the Nayirah Testimony. War propaganda is a tale as old as time - no reason to think this war would lack it.

Having said that, Hamas atrocities are extremely real. As are Israeli state atrocities. If folks want fewer atrocities, it seems worth asking: what would bring us toward that outcome?
posted by latkes at 7:03 PM on October 14, 2023 [12 favorites]

I think Israel needs to be pressured to setup some refugee accommodations in Israel. I think that Palestinians would be less reluctant to go to Israel than Egypt or even the West Bank because Israel will absolutely not want those camps to be a long term thing. Israel would be very motivated to get people back to Gaza asap.
posted by interogative mood at 8:03 PM on October 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

Hamas is the government of Gaza

Hamas "governs" Gaza in the same way the DeCavalcante crime family "governs" Northern NJ.
posted by mikelieman at 8:33 PM on October 14, 2023

To be the recognized and/or de facto government of a place?

Seriously, if you want to keep playing devil's advocate here, recognized by whom? Probably not so much Palestinians? You probably don't want to take that argument too far, since Netanyahu backed Hamas over the Palestinian Authority, in order to keep Palestinians from forming their own state. Steps towards that would have likely prevented the ongoing war crimes and other atrocities.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:09 AM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

I don't understand the disconnect here. Hamas is recognized by basically everybody as the government in Gaza. Yes, Netanyahu is complicit in that. How does his complicity change anything in terms of whether Hamas has run Gaza for years. The PLO is in charge in the West Bank and Hamas is in charge in Gaza. This isn't controversial and, again, I don't understand why it seems to be. Is it simply the word "represents" that's a problem?
posted by Justinian at 12:44 AM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

(Fatah specifically in the west bank)
posted by Justinian at 12:50 AM on October 15, 2023

Putin represents Russia and there hasn't been a real election there in god knows how long. Ditto China or any other non-democracy.

So, do we support strikes on *any* Russian or Chinese government office? If Ukraine could blow up the Kremlin, with god knows how many public servants, visiting petitioners, etc, would we consider that a valid target?

Because I didn't really think we did. I thought we thought that the civilian population of Russia were just that, civilians, and there's a difference between hitting the military administration and any government office.
posted by Audreynachrome at 1:52 AM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Why would Israel want the refugees back? They have had absolutely no problems keeping people in camps before. I very strongly suspect that for the right wingers in power currently in Israel, every single non Jewish person disappearing and never coming back is the ideal situation. This is not always a situation where both/all sides want a peaceful solution. To some, racists and fanatics and zealots (Worldwide, I'm absolutely not singling out anybody in hundreds of years of cruel history here,) the problem is that X people exist and want to be treated like human beings.
posted by Jacen at 2:11 AM on October 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Just to keep things in perspective, when you read people pushing the notion that Hamas represents Palestinians and that, therefore, genocide is justified (or whatever semantically equivalent but more tasteful term you prefer), keep in mind that Israel wanted Hamas recognized as equivalent to Palestinian governance in order to prevent peace:

This was the degree that the “Palestinian problem” was thought to be contained. It got to the point where the Israeli government not only could believe it could act with total impunity, but that they could manage Palestinian politics like they were moving pawns on a chessboard. In a series of shocking comments made to police investigators during a 2019 interrogation about his corruption case, Netanyahu flatly described how he saw Hamas as an asset in hobbling the Palestinian cause. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he said. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” Not really something you’d hear from someone who thought that peace could even hypothetically be preferable compared to the status quo. But this wasn’t even his most blatantly arrogant admission of the interrogation. Also speaking about Hamas, he said to the same officers:

“I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and then hit them over the head. It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them... Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:58 AM on October 15, 2023 [27 favorites]

So, is the consensus still that it was some epic intelligence failure?
posted by krisjohn at 4:36 AM on October 15, 2023

The rocket attacks are frequent, but casualties are rare. I wonder at what point it kind of becomes just a fact of life. A lot of our collective responses and trauma are disproportionate to the actual harm - the mourning on the anniversary of 9/11 was almost sacred for years, while the peak of COVID with the same daily death toll has been memoryholed.

Having said that, Hamas atrocities are extremely real. As are Israeli state atrocities. If folks want fewer atrocities, it seems worth asking: what would bring us toward that outcome?

Less fighting. All war is a crime.

I alluded to this earlier, but after WWI sometimes you had literally whole villages denuded of young men. Millions of people thrown into the meatgrinder, for what? Moving the frontline back and forth a few miles? So one of the driving forces behind the development of air power was the idea you'd be able to decisively strike the rear. Sure, they're noncombatants, but they keep the front supplied and can get called up. Is a noncombatant's life worth more than a soldier's? Is it not better to end the war quickly, saving more lives? Of course, then in WWII we find out it actually is pretty hard to strike a decisive blow with it and instead of demoralizing them, it often stiffens the enemy's resolve.

I think to only way to reconcile the combatant-noncombatant divide is to recognize it's a matter of degrees, not binary. If you were bin Laden and wanted to strike a blow against America, you might not care about the janitor at the Pentagon but I think it's pretty hard to make a case that the high level decisionmakers weren't valid targets.
posted by ndr at 4:44 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

This might count as propaganda, or as a thrilling real-life story of heroism, or as the movie-ization of reality, depending on your perspective:

Retired Israeli general who rescued his family under siege from Hamas is being compared on social media to Liam Neeson's character in 'Taken'

The incident happened in Nahal Oz, which was the site of a famous speech in 1956 by Moshe Dayan which laid out the idea that Israelis captured their land by being violent assholes, that the Arabs in Gaza were full of hatred because of this, and - not that anything should be done to reduce the hatred or right the wrong! no, the opposite! - Israelis needed to always be violent assholes.

He put it more poetically than that, but that's the gist:

How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders? Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path, for the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms. Roi's blood is crying out to us and only to us from his torn body. Although we have sworn a thousandfold that our blood shall not flow in vain, yesterday again we were tempted, we listened, we believed.

We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon's maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us.

Am I right to think that Netanyahu follows this same instinct, to treat Arab hatred as inevitable, to amplify it as much as possible both because it "opens others' eyes to the truth" and because the more hatred there is the more useful they are?
posted by clawsoon at 5:09 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Dr. Gabor Maté Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 5:26 AM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Something that’s been bothering me: if someone trained with Hamas for two years, participated in a couple of operations, and left on good terms after promising to reenlist if ever called up, most people would have no problem viewing them as a valid target for an Israeli airstrike.

You think that it is morally acceptable to kill someone without a trial because they were a member of Hamas years ago?

I'm struggling to come up with a response to this beyond what the fuck?
posted by zymil at 6:22 AM on October 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

I think they're referring to combat operations not like tonsillectomies operations if that helps
posted by some loser at 7:06 AM on October 15, 2023

Raz Segal: A Textbook Case of Genocide

Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.

posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 7:27 AM on October 15, 2023 [11 favorites]

“Chartbook 245: Gaza, beyond de-development to disposability and destruction,” Adam Tooze, Chartbook, 14 October 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 7:50 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

This all is so sad and has been going on my whole life. The only way this gets solved peacefully is for both sides to have better leadership, and for regional and world powers to use their influence to push unequivocally for peace, which isn't going to happen. For example, the US should have cut off military aid to Israel decades ago; instead, we've taken a side that most of the world sees as illegitimate and hopelessly myopic.

This thread really lays bare a lot of eternal questions about morality, free will, and the purpose of being. Corb's comments in particular are great; why do our moral and legal codes punish proximate murder differently than actions that are likely or even certain to result in death down the line? For example, we have lots of threads where people say "policy X is literally killing [marginalized group]" but many people, while sympathetic, don't agree with the "literally" part. To oversimplify, it seems to me like progressives and leftists (including me) tend to think everything is the result of systems, and conservatives and hardliners tend to think that people have choices and should be judged by them. The former is almost antithetical to the idea of free will, and the latter dooms us to repetitive tragedy and prevents societies and systems from getting any better. I've been working on a moral framework that posits that, regardless of the true metaphysical answer, we have to give both equal weight in order to have a working society where we have people lining up behind one or the other.

So let's take something like a Black U.S. gang member who murders someone in a robbery. One side says he must pay with his life or be locked up forever; the other says he "had" to join the gang because what other options did he have? It's the historical impact of slavery, redlining, economic injustice, etc. Neither one satisfies me.

So in this case, I would say that Hamas leadership and members who attacked these innocent people absolutely must be held responsible, and Israel has the right to respond in a way that punishes them and limits the possibility of further attacks. Some of the haggling above about exactly what crimes were committed is a distraction; dozens of major news sources around the world have detailed, verifiable stories from Israelis of the most disgusting crimes, and it's a pretty laughable stretch to somehow minimize that.

However, Israel and the world need to look at what Israel and other nations have done to get us here and be much more humble and creative about ways out. Why not go back to a variation of the 1947 partition plan, with persistent multilateral focus from larger powers and the UN to solve the more escalatory nonsense like not recognizing Israel, who sets foot in whose magic temple, etc.? If that can't be done, isn't it because both sides feel they are superior, chosen people and that the Palestinian baker putting a kid's name on a birthday cake is "less than" the Israeli going to a music festival, or that the Israeli clocking in to clean people's houses is "less than" the Palestinian getting up early to open his shoe repair shop?

Some of the biggest facepalms (to me) I've seen on this whole multi-decade crisis:

* Israel just chomp-chomping away at the land with provocative and illegal settlements while they are supposed to be solving this problem;
* Iran funneling money and arms to Hezbollah and Hamas to try to make a somewhat secular human rights and land struggle into an Islamic fundamentalist magic sky god fight (both those organizations are fucking terrible);
* People equating individuals with their governments (imaging a country attacking the US and saying we have 24 hours to move Manhattanites to southern New Jersey, because hey, we could have risen up against Trump ...);
* The US unconditionally siding with Israel due to a now 80-year-old connection through WWII and the Holocaust;
* Politicians in the US literally making it illegal to support Palestinians or boycott Israel;
* Hamas preying on jobless young men and indoctrinating them into a murder cult in order to score points with Allah, with no real desire to achieve a workable Palestinian state;
* Even now, the US thinking that sending a ton of weapons to Israel and moving our forces closer is going to help (Jesus Christ, does the US have any other tools to solve problems? I can't wait till it becomes a regional war and the US tries to get my son to join the military and I get to say, FUCK OFF, YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELF);
* The hard-right Israeli politicians (men, naturally) who don't see that once a victim does not mean always a victim, and that they have become the oppressors;
* And just so much more.

This has been a bit of a ramble, but I appreciate everyone who has the courage to say, "Israelis killed my dad in a bomb strike, but I still hate Hamas", or "my child was murdered in their kibbutz, but I still don't want to hurt the average Palestinian going about their business." Those are never popular stances.

I am pretty removed personally from this, but I have acted as a driver and played chess with a man from one of the oldest living couples who survived the Holocaust (now dead, but I still remember seeing the numbers tattooed on his arm when his sleeve rode up as he reached to move a piece), and I have played music with Lebanese-Americans who dropped everything and flew back to Lebanon to vote against "those madmen in Hezbollah". So my fantasy is a world where those people and others like them can just live; but there are precisely zero government or military forces involved in this catastrophe who want that.
posted by caviar2d2 at 7:57 AM on October 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

A tweet about a message from a doctor in a hospital that the Israeli state gave two hours to evacuate. In the same thread is a link to a BBC interview with a doctor in a targeted hospital confirming their refusal to evacuate (and therefore determination to die in the hospital).

This is utterly monstrous. I've seen so many things on twitter* where people are saying that they won't evacuate, they are choosing to die in their homes, including one where an old woman declined to leave and then her house was bombed and she died. If people are ready to take that position, then they have been so beaten down by this situation AND previous conditions that they truly believe that they will die wherever they go, probably they are mostly right.

*For some reason, desktop twitter is less trashed than app twitter - people have remarked on this and it's really true. As long as I use my "following" tab, I'm still getting only marked sponsored content and posts from the people I follow.
posted by Frowner at 7:57 AM on October 15, 2023 [11 favorites]

You can't evacuate a hospital in two hours. You shouldn't bomb or come close to bombing a hospital. Lies about hospitals being used as military bases are incredibly common, not unlike when the US bombed the largest pharmaceutical factory in Somalia. When you destroy a hospital you are destroying a precious, precious stockpile of human labor and knowledge. You are destroying more than a building, you are destroying so much labor and time, you are foreclosing so much. It should never be allowed under any circumstance other than factual proof which can be shared with the world that major military operations are being conducted from there. Not even a few rockets being fired from a hospital should allow it to be targeted. Hospitals are too precious.
posted by Frowner at 8:02 AM on October 15, 2023 [38 favorites]

https://www.vox.com/2023/10/14/23917260/israel-hamas-war-gaza-humanitarian-crisis

Vox on some of the horrific and deliberately cruel conditions inflicted on Gaza
posted by Jacen at 8:16 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Even if military operations are being conducted from a working hospital I'm not sure blowing it to hell would be an acceptable response.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:44 AM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

The water is back on at least in Southern Gaza. The ground operation has been delayed due to weather conditions — this may be a cover to allow more time for negotiations. Seems like a lot of stuff is happening behind the scenes.
posted by interogative mood at 8:52 AM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

The ground operation has been delayed due to weather conditions — this may be a cover to allow more time for negotiations.

Or a cover for the fact that putting together an invasion force in one week is not really possible.
posted by mediareport at 9:07 AM on October 15, 2023

"with soldiers who were going about their ordinary lives until getting called up a couple of days ago", I should have added.
posted by mediareport at 9:11 AM on October 15, 2023

The whole "Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza" thing rubs me the wrong way for the same reason that people's emphasis on "Hamas beheading infants" rubs me the wrong way. It's not that it's untrue, to the extent that I understand the situation—it's that these things are being brought up to justify other things, with the presumption being that if THIS is true, then THAT must be an inevitable conclusion.

The "beheading" thing in particular has been bouncing around in my head all week. Because "Muslims beheading non-believers" has, for my entire life, been the go-to imagery used by people advocating Islamophobic policies. And it's not that Hamas and ISIS and Al Qaeda don't behead people—they have propaganda teams dedicated to pointing out that they do! But they conspicuously do it to provoke emotional responses in people, in order to keep those people from behaving rationally in response. The goal is literally terror, and fueling fears, and making people act out of panic and disgust. What's more, these organizations are aware that this provokes anti-Islamic responses in onlookers, in part because their goal is to heighten extremism, and to make monsters out of reasonable people.

But despite some of the claims being made here and elsewhere, Hamas is not the only organization that wields terror. Israel's literally using white phosphorus. Their politicians talk about how they want to strike terror into their enemies. They want bombed-out husks of buildings and molten bodies. Israel does it, the United States does it, and the fact that we get so hung up on the Muslim extremist-coded act of terror while shrugging off the rest is part of the way our propaganda works. It's a way of making emotional pleas rather than logical ones. What's more, it's a way of demonizing Muslims, reducing them to slavering monsters rather than to complex human actors. ("Complex" here does not mean "oh Hamas did it because they were mad," it means "Hamas does what it does to achieve political objectives, and we should be a little more aware of when we're playing directly into their hands." You know, the way the United States basically did Bin Laden's work for him in the aftermath of 9/11.)

Similarly, whatever control Hamas has over Gaza, it doesn't change the fact that Gaza's civilian populace is innocent. As an American, I would really rather not be thrown in prison for Donald Trump's instances of fraud. More broadly, we have a lot of conversations here about how going "fuck Georgia/Florida/Texas, they voted Republican" invalidates how shitty that is towards the residents of those states who hate their governments, are actively being oppressed by them, and are far likelier to suffer when the nation turns its back on them. And to bring matters closer to home, the argument that the Israeli people don't deserve to be gunned down at a music festival because they are civilians, and cannot be held directly accountable for Netanyahu's thuggery, equally applies to the people living in Gaza.

This, to me, feels pretty simple, actually! It feels simple enough to the United Nations too, since they're actively warning about a humanitarian crisis. And when the conversation goes to places like "you don't understand, they're BEHEADING people" or "are you saying Hamas DOESN'T hold power in Gaza," my response isn't to argue that these things are inaccurate, it's to say... those things don't actually affect the position that I (and many others) hold, and what's more, it sometimes feels like they're being transparently used as a rhetorical ploy intended to shut down conversation.

And "shutting down conversation" is basically what some people here are trying to do. Suggesting that it's anti-semitic to call Israel's treatment of Gaza genocidal doesn't actually contribute to the conversation: it's overtly an attempt to limit the conversation. Suggesting that its "war" really is a war and not a series of brutal extermination procedures against innocent people by arguing that Hamas is a legitimate government... well, that would require Gaza to be a legitimate nation, and Israel has been actively trying to delegitimize its people for its entire existence. To my mind, these are derails: they purport to be logical positions, but there's no logic to them, because there's no conclusion you can draw from them. "Therefore, Israel is justified in its actions" is not a conclusion, because no argument has been made. It's emotional rhetoric intending to make an emotional statement; "do you or don't you agree that X" similarly pretends to be a discussion of facts, when really it's more of a Gish Gallop, because the "facts" in question don't make a convincing point.

It occurred to me this morning that, as a Jewish man living in America, I don't know if I've ever lived through a time where anti-semitism was more prevalent than Islamophobia. It's not a competition, of course, and I've seen enough anti-semitism in my lifetime to take it seriously. But I've lived through eras of American life in which it was considered completely appropriate to joke about murdering Muslims. I've seen synagogues attacked, but it's always been taken for granted that synagogues ought to exist; meanwhile, I've seen angry mobs protesting the building of mosques in America, with their logic being that Islam is inherently anti-American or anti-Christian or anti-freedom. And it really is disturbing to see how quickly and how easily people turn to calling Palestinians animals, or fantasizing about horrible things being done to them; it's disturbing how quickly a group of violent extremists gets extrapolated out into an argument about "Arabs" not loving their children enough, and therefore it's fine to commit war crimes against them. And it's disturbing how many people formulate arguments that seem like they're putting forth rational propositions, when the subtext is: let's collectively agree that Israel can do whatever it wants now.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:44 AM on October 15, 2023 [81 favorites]

You can't evacuate a hospital in two hours. You shouldn't bomb or come close to bombing a hospital. Lies about hospitals being used as military bases are incredibly common, not unlike when the US bombed the largest pharmaceutical factory in Somalia.

I want to be clear that when I add in here, I am in no way supporting what is going on; I just think that military context is important in these discussions.

One of the major problems going on - and why Israel is getting away with so many strikes that under ordinary circumstances would be unacceptable - is that the Geneva convention - the thing that governs what we think of as the Laws of War - is written more for conventional forces battling other conventional forces, and it hasn't been significantly updated for conventional forces battling nonconventional forces. There is one section on 'conflicts not of an international character'

But Israel is still a signatory, and is bound. But the problem is that the nature of Gaza does not allow faciltiies to be created in the way that is generally expected of medical facilities. The general rule is that they should be

situated in such a manner that attacks against military objectives cannot imperil their safety

But how is that possible in Gaza, where Hamas is not a regular military force, and it situates its bases without informing the hospitals?

Additionally, protection of medical facilities may, under international law, be removed when they are used to commit "acts harmful to the enemy".

Examples of such use include firing at the enemy for reasons other than individual self-defence, installing a firing position in a medical post, the use of a hospital as a shelter for able-bodied combatants, as an arms or ammunition dump, or as a military observation post,

So in major international conflicts, hospitals are aware of what those acts are and tend to stay outside of them, and the military powers don't fuck with that because they know how important hospitals are. But again, this is not that kind of conflict, and Hamas does not have a disciplined military force or uniforms in the same way. So how, exactly, is a hospital supposed to check to make sure that they aren't sheltering able bodied combatants, versus to check that they are sheltering able bodied civilians? How are they supposed to ensure that Hamas is not using it as a military observation post?

So Israel is not necessarily breaking international laws of war in doing this, but I think this makes it obvious that the international laws of war don't go far enough, and there needs to be another convention held to discuss what you do in situations where states are fighting quasi-state actors who don't recognize the law of war. Because "well the protection is removed, bomb the hospital I guess" is just not an acceptable answer when there are no other hospitals.
posted by corb at 9:50 AM on October 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

some loser We're well aware that we're talking about hypothetical Hamas fighters who had engaged in violence. That still doesn't excuse murdering them without trial.

We see this come up frequently, and it's one of the things that seems to be an ungulfable chasm between different people.

To some/most people when doing what is good, right, and proper, costs too much or gets too inconvenient it's totally fine to just ignore the rules that supposedly make us better than them and start murdering people. We saw it right here on Metafilter when Obama ordered the CIA to assassinate American citizen and all around scumbag Anwar al-Awlaki.

The consensus here, and apparently worldwide, was that since arresting him was just too much fuss to bother with it was totally fine to murder him without even a trial in absentia.

And apparently that same line of thinking is at work with this hypothetical as well. The government says this dude did something bad in the past even though he's currently just living his life so it's totally cool to have him murdered. No need for trial. Or arrest. Or anything else, just trust that he had it coming, let the government get on with the extrajudicial killings, and stop being such a party pooping hippie with all that blather about trials and morality.
posted by sotonohito at 10:17 AM on October 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

International law and agreements like the Geneva Conventions actually do very little because ultimately war is killing. Every rule has an exception, most violations are unpunished. This is among the reasons that war is awful. We can’t make war less shitty, we can only work to make less war.
posted by interogative mood at 10:27 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I really appreciate your knowledge and perspective, corb. it's extremely informative.

At the same time, what I feel is that just because something isn't a war crime doesn't mean you have to do it. You could just say, "absent really strong, incontrovertible evidence that will stand up to scrutiny by parties of various political positions, we are not going to assume that this hospital is being used as a front for military operations". There might be Hamas people in any hospital because they might be injured or there with their families, etc. There might be Hamas-adjacent people likewise. That's what hospitals are for. I feel like "laws of war" are most often bullshit, just like regular laws, and they just get invoked against the weak, really. Anyone could say "regardless of the laws of war, we aren't going to starve people to death or bomb their hospitals".

~~

Further, a problem with the water in southern Gaza is apparently a lot of desalinazation plants and pumps won't work without electricity and a lot of the existing ones are damaged anyway. Turning the water back on will, I assume, get some water moving, but it's not just like turning all the taps on and them working.

What I see on the internet makes it seem like Gaza is about a day or two away from people starting to collapse and die of dehydration. If it's not a day or two, it's three or four. There isn't clean water, there isn't new water coming in, the desalinization plants are broken, the pipes are broken, the electricity is down. It's not clear to me that even an immediate mass relief effort with tanker trucks of water would be able to prevent this, because the streets are so fucked up, and then there's the question of repair - you're going to have to keep going in with tanker trucks until you get the system back up and running, and god knows it must be broken in hundreds of places. This is why a bombing attack on a city - especially a city without easy access to a clean river, many wells, a lake, etc - is a murderous attack even if people survive the bombs.

Breaking the things that people put life, money, effort and struggle into building! Smashing them! Destroying what people need to live is to destroy the people!!

If you've read W G Sebald's A Natural History of Destruction, there is a very harrowing section about what it is like in bombed cities where there is mass death. I won't go into it here, but it is worse than you are likely to imagine.
posted by Frowner at 10:27 AM on October 15, 2023 [27 favorites]

Audreynachrome So, do we support strikes on *any* Russian or Chinese government office? If Ukraine could blow up the Kremlin, with god knows how many public servants, visiting petitioners, etc, would we consider that a valid target

TBH, yes. Why shouldn't they?

In my opinion the entire world would be infinitely better off if the rich old men who ordered wars were the ones who had their lives on the line.

Ruler A decides he has a problem with Ruler B, so it is moral, apparently, for Ruler A to conscript thousands of young people who are poor and barely getting by and send them to murder other young people barely getting by that Ruler B conscripts.

That's war and it's cool, good, moral, justifiable, and when the young people, the "soldiers" murder each other it's heroic and they get medals.

If, on the other hand, Ruler B sends in some ninja to kill Ruler A then THAT is the worst thing ever, its forbidden by bazillions of solemn treaties and laws, how dare he kill one person who was actually running a country than tens of thousands if not millions of poor young people who'd been drafted?

If Hamas blew up the Knesset, I say that's an infinitely more valid target than any of the families, or even the military bases, they blew up. If Israel assassinates all the actual leaders of Hamas that's so much better than bombing the fuck out of hospitals or even Hamas fighters.

All of this is caused by a tiny handful of mostly old, mostly rich, mostly men who are kept carefully insulated from any risk, who do their utmost to never get without a hundred kilometers of any violence, and who sit around murdering millions with the stroke of a pen.

How is assassinating, say, Putin, less moral than killing thousands of poor Russian kids who got swept up by conscriptions squads? How is Hamas killing every elected member of Likud worse, morally speaking, than Hamas attacking Israeli soldiers? Or Israel killing every high official in Hamas worse, morally speaking, than Israel bombing Hamas fighters?

War via assassination seems infinitely better than war via bombs and soldiers.

And yes, I'm aware of the disconnect between this statement and my prior statement about extrajudicial killings.
posted by sotonohito at 10:29 AM on October 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

it sometimes feels like they're being transparently used as a rhetorical ploy intended to shut down conversation. And "shutting down conversation" is basically what some people here are trying to do.

You can really see that in this SkyNews interview with former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett. At 3:09, after a few minutes of allowing Bennett space to express outrage over the attacks by "Nazi Hamas", the presenter asks him about the responsibility of the Israeli army to make sure that "other families aren't torn apart by this, other innocents aren't lost in this, and I'm speaking specifically about the Palestinians in Gaza." After the former PM stutters a bit he states "IDF does not target civilians, ever; we're not like our Nazi enemy." But when the presenter dares to push back at 4:00 by asking him directly about "those Palestinians who are in hospital, are on life support, and babies in incubators, whose life support and incubator will have to be turned off because the Israelis have cut the power to Gaza?"

Whooo boy. "ARE YOU SERIOUSLY KEEP ON ASKING ME ABOUT PALESTINIAN CIVILIANS? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? Have you not seen what happened? We're fighting Nazis!" is how it starts, and devolves into a shouting match from there. It's about as pure an example of an attempt to shut down any conversation about the cost in dead children among the Palestinian population as you're likely to see.
posted by mediareport at 10:57 AM on October 15, 2023 [22 favorites]

the thing with the concept of war crime is that it absolutely positively should be drilled deep into the minds of anyone who takes up arms, but simultaneously it's a sort of aspirational myth. international law is in a lot of ways an aspirational myth, because so long as we have sovereign states relations between those states will always be a type of bad anarchy.

between equal rights, force decides. right now we're watching force decide, and it is a living nightmare without end.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:15 AM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Does anyone know where the false claim of Hamas beheading babies came from?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:21 AM on October 15, 2023

It started out as rumor—not sure if it arose locally or online first—and then Netanyahu's spokesman repeated it a press conference. Then Biden repeated it; implying that he had seen them. Then the White House clarified in press release that he was referring to the spokesman's remarks.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:43 AM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

A reporter for an Israeli TV news channel was giving a report about the situation at Kfar Aza Kibbutz after the attack and reporting on the casualties and removal of bodies. They reported that about 40 babies were killed and that soldiers had told him some of the babies were beheaded. Israel has released a couple of disturbing photos, but those photos don’t show a beheading. The IDF has said they will not comment on the specific injuries to the dead babies out of respect for the privacy and grief of the families. The story was repeated on media and included in a briefing given to Joe Biden. Biden was shown photos of the aftermath of the attack and told about the babies. Later when speaking to a group of Jewish community leaders he said he had seen photos of the babies. Later the White House issued a correction.

At this point the story has not been proven true or false. Eyewitnesses made the claim, a reporter echoed it, but authorities have not confirmed it.

Hamas has beheaded people and the reports from eyewitnesses at the music festival and the kibbutz along with photo and video evidence show extreme violence and brutality. On the other hand during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait it was reported that the Iraqi army had ripped babies out of incubators at the Kuwait City Hospital to make the case for war and that turned out to be a lie made up by Kuwaitis to help rally people to their side.
posted by interogative mood at 11:55 AM on October 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

Here's some articles about the origins of those reports
Unverified reports of ‘40 babies beheaded’ in Israel-Hamas war inflame social media (NBC News)

“BEHEADED BABIES” REPORT SPREAD WIDE AND FAST — BUT ISRAEL MILITARY WON’T CONFIRM IT (The Intercept)

What we actually know about the viral report of beheaded babies in Israel (Sky News)
posted by bitteschoen at 11:56 AM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Man, boy howdy am I not going to elaborate on this, but I think that it's entirely possible that people can have genuinely believed that babies had their heads cut off, whether or not it actually happened, because small bodies are fragile and because soldiers looking at dead children are not forensics experts. I also think that the focus on how precisely babies were killed doesn't do anybody on any side any favors and probably isn't great for people's mental health.
posted by corb at 12:21 PM on October 15, 2023 [28 favorites]

from the twitter acount for CAIR:

https://twitter.com/CAIRNational/status/1713629072843030969

"We are shocked and disturbed to learn that a landlord in Chicago expressing anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian views broke into a Muslim family's apartment and attacked them with a knife, injuring the mother and killing her 6-year-old son, Wadea Al-Fayoume. @cairchicago will hold a press conference this afternoon to share more details, God willing. The Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Palestinian racism being spread by politicians, media outlets, and social media platforms must stop. Now. #Palestine #Israel #Islamophobia #Wadea"
posted by JimBennett at 12:54 PM on October 15, 2023 [11 favorites]

CW: graphic content

Yes this whole casting doubt about beheaded babies thing is a strange derail. Hamas primarily uses AK-47 rifles and it's not in question that they executed people point blank in their beds and bomb shelters.

A single 7.62x39 round hitting an adult femur will shatter it into dozens of bone fragments that become secondary missiles like a grenade going off inside your body. The shockwave from the bullet passing though flesh will essentially vaporize it and leave an exit wound a foot wide. The effects of a rifle shot at point blank are much greater than when fired at a distance.

Let's put it this way, if you fired it point blank into the upper chest of a baby in their cot - we would reasonably expect the head to be separate from the body after that. It would be fair to characterize it as "beheaded" if you were a soldier or reporter who was moving quickly through a combat zone primarily concerned with enemies still firing at you or booby traps set by the invaders. Only a forensic expert can determine the real cause of death after cleaning up the body... And they might yet determine it was done with a knife, we don't know yet.
posted by xdvesper at 2:04 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I also think that the focus on how precisely babies were killed doesn't do anybody on any side any favors and probably isn't great for people's mental health.

Absolutely, I personally agree with what you're saying there but it does not change the fact that those reports have spread far and wide and establishing whether they are confirmed or not, verified or not, credible or not etc. is very important for the sake of striving for accuracy in media reporting which is so crucial especially during a war. That's all.
posted by bitteschoen at 2:04 PM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Senator Cory Booker was on msnbc the other day: here, and among other things he apparently is seriously involved in diplomacy in the middle east and has been for a long time, which I didn't know. His whole interview made me feel a little better about everything. Especially since I live in NJ and have to vote for the guy.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 2:08 PM on October 15, 2023

Let's put it this way

Could probably use a content warning? Maybe even a details tag?
posted by clawsoon at 2:11 PM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’ve added a CW to the comment above, open to further edits. Please flag or email if needed.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 2:20 PM on October 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Kylie Cheung on twitter -

So the dumbest most racist white people across the country just invented a “global day of jihad” for Friday the 13th, bosses & employers told their employees to be safe on the “global day of jihad,” social media let it spread, and now a Muslim child in Chicago has been murdered.
posted by sandwich board at 2:26 PM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

So the dumbest most racist white people across the country just invented a “global day of jihad” for Friday the 13th[...]

Someone should explain this to the French government - they'll find this news very interesting.
posted by kickingtheground at 2:44 PM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought the "global day of jihad" was a translation error. It's reasonable for Jews to be kind of jittery at the moment for some reason. Meanwhile, I'm glad that Muslims worldwide didn't think it makes sense to just murder people.

The murderer in Chicago is named Czuba-- it's a Polish name and I have no idea of what's going on.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:45 PM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's also been Islamophobic propaganda being spread about Lyft and Uber drivers supposedly noticing the last names of riders and threatening them if they were Jewish despite last names of riders NEVER being shown to drivers.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 3:03 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Started from the bottom of the thread and just scrolled up into xdvesper's graphic thought experiment, so that was nice
posted by ominous_paws at 3:03 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here in Toronto, we've had arrests for graffiti painted on a mosque and threats made at a Hebrew school. Not completely unusual, unfortunately, but evidence that people are feeling more license to express their hate.
posted by clawsoon at 3:10 PM on October 15, 2023

The murder was in Plainfield, not Chicago. It's about an hour from Chicago.

If there's another one related, I don't want to know, and would prefer if this thread didn't become a listing of hate crimes because the news is hard enough right now
posted by tiny frying pan at 3:20 PM on October 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

They reported that about 40 babies were killed and that soldiers had told him some of the babies were beheaded.

For folks who still want this clarified:

It was reporter Nicole Zedek with Tel Aviv's i24 news, at the site of the horror in Kfar Azar, who first passed along the report that "One of the commanders here said at least 40 babies were killed. Some of them, their heads were cut off," at 1:20 into this viral tweet on Oct 10 (on Nitter, to avoid Twitter). It got 750K views. Here's the subsequent 15-second clip of a unit commander telling Zedek in English, "They cut head off children, they cut head off women." (on Nitter again). That one got 1.5 million views. But the one that went hugely viral, now with 11.9 million views on Twitter, was this one (on Nitter), where Zedek says, 18 seconds into the clip, "Babies, their heads cut off - that's what they said."

So: the reports of 40 dead babies among those slaughtered at Kfar Azar, and the separate report of some women and children with their heads cut off (by whatever means, per the gross description above), seem to have gotten conflated into "40 babies with their heads cut off," which is the story that spread widely with little direct evidence available at this point. As many folks have since pointed out, the despicable brutality of the attacks is without question, beheadings or not. But since many folks are still wondering how the story began, I hope this helps.
posted by mediareport at 3:43 PM on October 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

OK feels like we're overly fixated on this horrible topic at this point. I actually really appreciate that people are disagreeing on this thread and able to continue the conversation but time for me to mute this I think I've hit my limit of that specific topic.
posted by latkes at 4:36 PM on October 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

would prefer if this thread didn't become a listing of hate crimes

Propaganda has consequences.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:40 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

People here can not do this, I'm sure.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:03 PM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Maybe don’t link directly to the inaccurate reports on Twitter so they don’t get extra views/engagement which would just make the algorithm spread them even farther?
posted by eviemath at 6:05 PM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yes, pretty simple to just not bring up this type of thing - if you want to justify bombing Gaza, by all means make your case but if you want to bring in graphic and unverified claims that Hamas is somehow operating at some "extra" level of sinister terrorist savage ultra-violence that is "beyond" what the civilized humanitarian IDF soldiers have done historically, then you invite a deeper level of discussion of graphic descriptions of ultra-violence. So how about just don't do it if you don't want to hear about it, and just argue that there shouldn't be a ceasefire or whatever without bringing imagery of savage Arab ISIS villains beheading people with swords into the conversation.
posted by windbox at 7:16 PM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

Likud Minister Formulates Emergency Regulations to Imprison Citizens Who 'Harm National Morale'
posted by Artw at 7:23 PM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

The President and others need to meet with American Muslim leaders and offer them the same kind of assurances that were given to Jewish leaders last week. We don’t need this conflict to spill over into our lives wh streets with all hate groups seeing this as a chance for American race / religious war.
posted by interogative mood at 8:45 PM on October 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

Von der Leyen does not speak for EU on Israel-Hamas conflict, foreign policy chief says

EU Foreign Policy Chief had called out Israel for acting against international law, then the EU Commission chief showed up in Israel and basically offered a blank diplomatic check, without any mention of restraint or the current situation in Gaza. Allegedly there's chatter by insiders that she's really stepped in it this time by singlehandedly undermining the EU messaging with the Global South on Ukraine and scuttling discussions with North African states about controlling refugee flow.
posted by ndr at 9:32 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Brooklyn Councilwoman Charged After Openly Carrying Gun at Protest

A Republican councilwoman from Brooklyn was arrested on Friday and charged with criminal possession of a firearm after images posted on social media showed her carrying a gun in her waistband at a pro-Palestinian rally at Brooklyn College the previous day...

Ms. Vernikov, a lawyer who was born in Ukraine, describes herself in her City Council biography as “a leading voice against antisemitism.” She posted a video of herself at the Brooklyn College rally, which was organized by the group Students for Justice in Palestine, saying that the protesters supported Hamas.

“If you’re here today standing with these people, you’re nothing short of a terrorist without the bombs,” Ms. Vernikov said in the video.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:08 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ms. Vernikov, 39, who has a license to carry a gun, surrendered her weapon — a Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter pistol — and her permit, police officials said. She was “observing a pro-Palestine protest” when she was seen with the butt end of a firearm “protruding from the front portion of her pants,” the police spokeswoman said.

New York issues permits to carry concealed firearms only; openly carrying a firearm is not allowed. A state law passed last year prohibits people from carrying guns in “sensitive locations,” a category that includes protests and rallies.

No one was “menaced or injured” as a result of Ms. Vernikov’s possession of the gun at the protest, the police said.

Let's not post 'propaganda has consequences' and then leave out facts that suggest extremely poor judgment over an intent to do violence. More like a stunt done for media attention.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:06 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Interview with one of the Kibbutz attack survivors where she suggests some of the casualties were the result of Israeli gunfire
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:55 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not that I'm expecting openness from the Israelis on this but would one be able to differentiate forensically between Israeli and Hamas weapons?
posted by Mitheral at 5:29 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe don’t link directly to the inaccurate reports on Twitter

I did not link directly to the inaccurate reports on Twitter; if you re-read my comment, I went out of my way to *not* link directly to Twitter. (If the above was directed my way, anyway.) Edit to add: I used Nitter.net, which is a Twitter mirror that allows folks to see tweets without visiting Twitter.com.
posted by mediareport at 5:44 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Always so damn quick to throw out the damn terrorist label when people dare to protest America's latest approved war. I'm not saying that Hamas doesn't deserve the label of terrorism, because that's clearly the tactics they use. (, I have almost the exact same views about Israel, just that they often use more state power and repression genocide tactics.) But Christ, American jingoism at all costs or YOU'RE WORSE THAN EVERYTHING ELSE PUT TOGETHER gets so incredibly frustrating. I think that's what my view of the two types of people is boiling down to. Some people are afraid and they try to understand, build bridges and civil spaces. Some people are afraid and view anything less than conformity as some sort of overwhelming threat that should be destroyed. Cuz it scary.

Forensics.... Depends. There's a lot of weaponry floating around the area, and has been for decades. A mandatory term in the military usually means a fairly heavily armed population. And the weapons are not all Israel produced, in addition to the USA there are guns from about six different countries. So telling what is friendly fire, from civilians especially, could be difficult. Both sides pretty much have access to the same things. An AK47 is still used because it just works. I'm sure experts can narrow down things like gunpowder and manufacturing areas, but I'm not confident that could completely say one way or the other in all cases.
posted by Jacen at 5:47 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not that I'm expecting openness from the Israelis on this but would one be able to differentiate forensically between Israeli and Hamas weapons?

Perhaps, but invaders on motorcycles would have scavenged the best grenades, guns and ammo immediately.

“I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and then hit them over the head. It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them...Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”

Netanyahu sounds like a war grifter who sees his power as perpetuating it, and the danger to stakeholders is incentivizing people like this with reactive military assistance. Most want it to be the last war, but not this guy. If Gaza is flattened, it would set the stage for US bases in Israel.
posted by Brian B. at 6:03 AM on October 16, 2023

It is extremely likely given the chaotic circumstances and panic in the attack that there were friendly fire incidents. I hope no one thinks that this fact somehow diminishes Hamas’ responsibility for this catastrophe.
posted by interogative mood at 7:32 AM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

interogative mood, are you saying that not only should the Israeli forces not be blamed for Palestinian civilian deaths, but also shouldn't be held responsible for *shooting Israeli citizens*? The lengths you're willing to go to in order to completely eliminate Israeli state agency are incredible.
posted by sagc at 7:34 AM on October 16, 2023 [9 favorites]

recent Al Jazeera interview with Norman Finkelstein (YT, CW: news footage accompanying the interview shows aftermath of Israeli response in Gaza, but graphic images are blurred out)

The interview ends with speculation on the possible widening of the conflict.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:50 AM on October 16, 2023

Forensics.... Depends. There's a lot of weaponry floating around the area, and has been for decades. A mandatory term in the military usually means a fairly heavily armed population.

That presumption doesn't apply to your average Israeli citizen who did their conscripted term and no more. Israel doesn't have anywhere near as many guns floating around the average household as the US. Or the kinds of provisions that Switzerland does, for its distributed defense.

From this March: Israeli gun ownership rising as violence surges (BBC)

Israeli gun ownership is low at about 2% of the population. It compares to about 30% of the population owning a gun in the US.

Usually citizens are allowed to hold a pistol and a limit of 50 bullets.

But now applications for gun licences have more than doubled, according to the national security ministry, from 19,000 in 2021 to 42,236 last year - the highest annual number made."

Someone who knows more about what weapons actual IDF reservists and local security forces in the area would have been issued would be better able to speak on what forensics will be able to show. (And which forensics — one thing to identify caliber from a spent casing or intact bullet; another from a wound with no other information.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:50 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Has anyone seen reliable recent information about the hostage situation? According to this WSJ report, there are over 25 countries that have reported missing citizens. Has there been any updates to Hamas' threat to execute hostages on live broadcast? There seems to be at least one confirmed video of Hamas kidnappers holding small children from several days ago. It looks like this BBC article is being updated as information is confirmed about people who have been abducted but it is a small percentage of the roughly 200 that Israel has claimed.
posted by gwint at 8:56 AM on October 16, 2023

If I may, a plea for people to be generous readers in this thread - I am seeing a lot of arguments against arguments that nobody is actually making in this thread. And given that this a 'hot' thread, before ripping into one post by a user, maybe take a minute to see what else they've written in the thread - that might at least lessen the amount of misinterpretation.

Also, a general reminder that many users are understandably on edge - while the details from the murder of the Palestinian boy outside of Chicago are still emerging, it appears the landlord was either mentally unwell and/or a white nationalist. Meanwhile, rumors are spreading (and being amplified by Twitter accounts with MAGA in the bio) that the murderous landlord was Jewish. I know I've been worried lately that this conflict presents the perfect opportunity for white nationalists in the US and Europe. This isn't to deny that violence has broken out between both sides within various diasporas, but just a reminder that others may take advantage of this moment.

Anyway, I've been interested in seeing how protests within Israel are being dealt with - not surprisingly, they are being dealt with harshly. An ultra-orthodox/left journalist, Israel Frey, was recently greeted by an angry mob outside his apartment. His crime? According to Haaretz (link has a paywall, sorry), "a video in which he recited the Kaddish Jewish mourners' prayer for the victims of the war, including hundreds of women and children in Gaza whom he claimed had been 'slaughtered.'" Eventually the police helped him and his family evacuate, but (again, quoting from Haartez) "Frey alleged that, as he was going down the staircase in his building to leave, one of the officers intentionally spat in his face and the other two didn't respond when he complained about it. The officers drove him a short distance in a police vehicle. During the ride, according to Frey, one of the officers elbowed him several times and accused him of "supporting Hamas and reciting Kaddish for Hamas."

As for how to handle the families of the hostages, the Israeli state is clearly in a bind. Family members protesting that not enough has been done to save them have been spat on (Twitter link). Meanwhile, Haaretz has reported on what appears to be efforts by Netanyahu to prop up a family of a hostage who wholeheartedly support him, which has angered members of the Families' Headquarters, the main group for families of the hostages. This Twitter thread is the clearest summation I've found (it's got a lot of moving parts), but their summation is probably all you need right now "TLDR: Netanyahu gov't not only screwing the hostages over as it reportedly gears up "to fight the war as if there were no hostages", but also tries to stage-manage the families' horror and grief + to play families off against each other. Despicable doesn't begin to cover it."
posted by coffeecat at 9:07 AM on October 16, 2023 [20 favorites]

Michael Clarke was on Times Radio UK yesterday discussing a possible Israeli invasion and the complexities of it. He is the former Director of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) an influential think tank based in the UK with strong connections to western governments. He raises a number of points about the prospects for how Hamas might decide to fight, international pressure on Israel to hold back, and the concerns that this is a trap for Israel -- just as Afghanistan and Iraq became traps for the US post 9/11.
posted by interogative mood at 10:03 AM on October 16, 2023

More of a 'terrible fucking idea' than a 'trap.' There's nothing hidden about the immense problems certain to result from invading and displacing half of Gaza.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:38 AM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

More of a 'terrible fucking idea' than a 'trap.' There's nothing hidden about the immense problems certain to result from invading and displacing half of Gaza.

It's a trap with a huge blinking neon sign overhead saying "This is a trap." I'm frankly not sure what the right approach is, but the wrong approach is to do what your opponents are hoping you will do. The US fell right into that obvious trap, and you'd think other countries would have learned from our sorry experience.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:50 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hussein Ibish writing for The Atlantic: Israel Is Walking Into a Trap.
posted by Numenius at 11:26 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Haven't seen these posted, so thought I'd drop them here, three pieces in conversation with one another, in Dissent. Both writers want an immediate end to Israeli war crimes in Gaza, and so this conversation is mostly an intra-left argument about how to talk about the massacre committed by Hamas.

"Toward a Humane Left," by Joshua Liefer

To hold everyone’s humanity—that is the task of the hour. To reject calls for retribution, to stand against the dehumanization of Palestinians and the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza, and—yes, in the same breath—to recognize the horror of Hamas’s attack and the categorical unjustifiability of killing civilians. If Israeli leftists still burying their dead can manage this, self-described leftists in New York or London have no excuse.

"On Mourning and Statehood: A Response to Joshua Leifer," by Gabriel Winant

For what it means is that it is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not. Many Israelis wishing for peace of course cry out that their loved ones should not be conscripted in death in this way. . . . . The state will do—already is doing—what it does with Jewish grief: transmute it into violence. . . . The Israeli government doesn’t care if you, a principled person, perform your equal grief for all victims: it will gobble up your grief for Jews and use it to make more victims of Palestinians, while your balancing grief for Palestinians will be washed away in the resulting din of violence and repression. The impulse, repeatedly called “humane” over the past week, to find peace by acknowledging equally the losses on all sides rests on a fantasy that mourning can be depoliticized. If only it were so—but this would be the end of Zionism, after all.

"A Reply to Gabriel Winant," by Joshue Liefer

If the aim was really to disarm what Winant describes as the Zionist “grief machine,” then in the days of Hamas’s attack and in the immediate aftermath, many on the left should have tried to avoid confirming Zionists’ worst suspicions—that indifference to Jewish death is rampant throughout the world. . . . Yet the greatest failure of Winant’s position is ultimately not strategic—it is moral. Winant writes, “the genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for both sides is, tragically, not true.” . . . To frame as inevitable and inexorable the instrumentalization of Jewish grief in service of apartheid, rather than working to demonstrate that it need not be, is to abdicate our moral responsibility to Israelis and Palestinians alike. The right to grieve is no less a human right than the right to live.

The latter two pieces include some references to Bernie Sanders' statement, which can be found here: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-statement-on-continuing-violence-in-israel-and-gaza/

All of these feel so out of date now, even though they're only a few days old. But I found them helpful in encapsulating and framing some of the discussion and tension that is going on in this thread.
posted by kensington314 at 11:31 AM on October 16, 2023 [18 favorites]

Yeah, Winant's idea seems to be that people need to... performatively not appear to care about Hamas' murders, in case doing so bolsters the case for reprisals? That's... pretty inhuman and generally fucked, and won't work anyway. It also makes the pro-Palestine Left look like ghouls to anyone who doesn't understand the meta-game they're supposedly playing.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:18 PM on October 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

leave out facts that suggest extremely poor judgment over an intent to do violence

Why make excuses for her? Like all gun owners who carry, she brought a gun to a demonstration with intent to commit violence, if not intimidate with the threat of violence, even if she may not have actually gotten around to drawing her weapon on innocent people. She has agency, hold her to account.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:32 PM on October 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm not making excuses for her, I'm providing the parts of the story left out that make it clear she was being more a posturing asshole than a threat; omitted for reasons that I'll pass on speculating about.

As to why I would do that, maybe because I actually do care about inflammatory 'propaganda' in light of the actual stochastic violence that is flaring up, as opposed to saying so and then doing the other thing.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:42 PM on October 16, 2023

Agreed, BungaDunga. And, as the examples from coffeecat's comment show, the instincts of terror and vengeance are to not accept equal grief. Equal grief means equal humanity, and a violent machine that's built on "those people are savage animals who need to be destroyed" does not get fed by equal humanity. The people running those machines know it, and that's why people in the party of peace can expect to be spit on.
posted by clawsoon at 12:43 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

A state law passed last year prohibits people from carrying guns in “sensitive locations,”

I swear to god I thought this meant "don't tuck it down the front of your pants pointing at your groin"
posted by caviar2d2 at 2:06 PM on October 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

The worst place to carry a pistol is in the front because when one lifts up the shirt, someone could easily grab it.

''Can Israel hold a war on two fronts'
posted by clavdivs at 2:34 PM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Aren't the events described in coffeecat's comment exactly what Winant is pointing out happens to the public grieving? I don't see a prescription but an open call to consider how one can grieve without having the sentiment getting hijacked. There's absolutely been a lot of attempts elsewhere to strongarm people into providing unconditional support to Israel and tarring the Palestinian movement as a whole to delegitimize it.
posted by ndr at 2:48 PM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

How many American evangelical Christians and their friends in the Republican Party see this as the start of Armageddon.
posted by interogative mood at 2:53 PM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

instincts of terror and vengeance are to not accept equal grief. Equal grief means equal humanity, and a violent machine that's built on "those people are savage animals who need to be destroyed"

Yeah.

It's been a week straight of people being condemned as terrorist sympathisers, Hamas supporters and rabid anti-Semites for acknowledging the horror of the Hamas attacks and pleading for there not to be collective punishment to the children and civilians of Gaza.

It's very clear what's being demanded: carte blanche to Israel, silence on Palestinian deaths.

We are supposed to be completely time-blind, any acknowledgement of what may have come before October 7 or what we all knew was coming after is deemed insufficiently sympathetic and pro-terrorist.
posted by Audreynachrome at 3:47 PM on October 16, 2023 [17 favorites]

It's very clear what's being demanded: carte blanche to Israel, silence on Palestinian deaths.

Please show me a single comment in this 800 comment thread that is demanding that.

I don't see any. But I do recall someone saying a week ago "deaths of Israeli civilians are tragic, and mostly over" and demanding what should and should not "dominate the conversation"

I remember it not because I'm trying to keep some sort of score, but because of how callous and tone deaf it was. How the discourse battle lines where only absolutes are true ("carte blanche to Israel, silence on Palestinian deaths") were being drawn up before the bodies were cold.
posted by gwint at 6:35 PM on October 16, 2023 [13 favorites]

I stand by that comment. It's completely in line with what I just said. Since then how many thousands have been killed in Gaza? How many hundreds of children?

If more people had accepted that the focus needed to be on immediately preventing Tzahal and rogue settlers from enacting retribution, perhaps that number might be lower.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:43 PM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

How the discourse battle lines where only absolutes are true ("carte blanche to Israel, silence on Palestinian deaths") were being drawn up before the bodies were cold.

It is sad that there was no real time and space for mourning. I would have preferred if we had a week, a month, a year or a decade to focus on those deaths.

But the Israeli response was near-instant, they're the ones who didn't want to wait for the bodies to be cold. Was I supposed to give them 48 hours to get started on the collective punishment before I started talking about it?
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:50 PM on October 16, 2023 [10 favorites]

I see some possible signs of progress. It took all day but Blinken managed to get some aid convoys cleared to go through the Rafa checkpoint.

The Washington Post has an interesting article with comments from a Hamas spokesperson and the head of Shin Bet. Reading with my most optimistic glasses I see some hints of an outside chance of a way to de-escalate things. Hamas will admit they went too far while also claiming a victory. Israel will admit they screwed up and let it get out of hand, but also claim to have secured things and killed the right Hamas people. Then Hamas might be in a similar position to Egypt after the Yom Kippur war. Saddat spun the war as an Egyptian victory and having restored Egyptian dignity and proven Israel vulnerable could finally make peace.

Ultimately Hamas is the political block you have to convince to make peace. I don’t think it is possible to completely destroy Hamas, any more than the US could destroy the Taliban.

I’m not holding my breath but I have to hope for something other than the dark path we seem to be on.
posted by interogative mood at 8:53 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ultimately Hamas is the political block you have to convince to make peace.

Well, one of two political blocks, anyway.

To be clear, I believe there have been multiple Israeli governments who actively, honestly, wanted and worked for peace over the decades. You'll have to excuse me for not feeling that way about Bibi's government.
posted by bcd at 10:16 PM on October 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

One thing Israeli society agrees on right now is they need to eradicate Hamas (actual details to be determined, of course). Many also believe if they don't make a big showy example out of Hamas, it will be interpreted as weakness and invite future attacks. They are a small country with no strategic depth - they might be able to fight a short, big, high-intensity war or a long, small, low-intensity conflict, but a long, big, high-intensity war would ruin them. I don't have a good feel for how hard it would be to defeat Hezbollah if they joined in, but it wouldn't be pretty.

I'm not sure the PA has the stature required to replace Hamas - after all, settlers in the West Bank are evicting Palestinians from their homes on the daily and they haven't been able to do anything about it. Would not be surprised if a more militant group took over instead.

Somebody better positioned and well-versed than me should write about how it is that Zionists determined to not repeat history ended up reproducing the same patterns of conflict they sought to escape in their own state. Everybody being traumatized didn't help, but I can't help but think ethnonationalism is a fundamentally flawed concept.
posted by ndr at 10:56 PM on October 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Prominent Iranian film-maker Dariush Mehrjui and his wife stabbed to death.

"To Mehrjui, cinema was like “poetry, which cannot take sides with anyone” and he remained adamant that “art must not become a propaganda tool”

Graham to Iran: ‘If you escalate the war, we’re coming for you’
posted by clavdivs at 2:23 AM on October 17, 2023

Perhaps it's time for a new thread that frames this according to the current situation (ground offensive threat, humanitarian issues, possible spread to Lebanon/Iran, etc?

I can't commit to doing a post myself today but ... this is occupying the entire world's attention and a lot has changed since the "Hamas attacks" framing of the OP.
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:21 AM on October 17, 2023 [8 favorites]

A summary of the aid situation and the Rafah crossing:

- more than 100 trucks carrying hundreds of tons of aid are lined up at the Rafah crossing
- Egypt says they don't want to open the crossing because they don't want to allow Palestinians to be forced out
- the US says that Israel says that they don't want to open the crossing because they're worried that Hamas will destroy the aid to prevent it from getting to Gaza
- Israel hasn't said much officially, but their bombing of the crossing seems to be speaking for itself

Bad faith in every single direction.
posted by clawsoon at 8:32 AM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Was this thread deleted and undeleted? It was previously unviewable and had a "deletion requested by poster" note.
posted by sagc at 9:00 AM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yep.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:18 AM on October 17, 2023

Was this thread deleted and undeleted?
It seems so; just for the record (and since I've found the thread very useful in terms of analysis and also a kind of x-ray of the moment) I'd saved it as a pdf up the Post deleted note. Hoping it won't be the only trace that remains.
posted by progosk at 9:41 AM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd saved it as a pdf up the Post deleted note. Hoping it won't be the only trace that remains.

Post seems to be definitively up now, though.
posted by kensington314 at 10:14 AM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe not appropriate here but I'd like to gather up news reports about the Biden administration's diplomatic efforts, for a social media post, to demonstrate to people how important it is that Trump isn't president right now. Would love some help with the googling and searching through this thread.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 10:23 AM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

This behaviour is just so massively reprehensible: "Israeli airstrikes continued to pound Gaza early Tuesday, killing dozens of people in the besieged enclave's south, where civilians from the north had been told to seek shelter days earlier."

This, combined with the attacks on the crossing into Egypt, seem to paint a picture of a state pursuing something almost completely opposite from peace.
posted by sagc at 10:48 AM on October 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Dozens? Reports are now in that Israel bombed the Al Ahli hospital. Death toll is in the hundreds, with some reporting (including the AP) that there are as much as 500 dead. Link here.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:50 AM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Israeli airstrikes just hit a hospital in Gaza city killing hundreds. "Several hospitals in Gaza City have become refuges for hundreds of people, hoping they would be spared bombardment after Israel ordered all residents of the city and surrounding areas to evacuate to the southern Gaza Strip."

Netanyahu yesterday in his opening remarks of the Knesset: "This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle".
posted by windbox at 10:58 AM on October 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

The mind cannot grasp the scale of what is going on, the sheer scale of human misery that is being caused by Israel this week.

Please do picture children when you picture what's going on in these headlines, in these anonymous triple and quadruple digit numbers. Almost half of Gazans are under age 15. Always picture children. It's important to always talk about it in those terms because those are the honest damn facts.
posted by kensington314 at 11:03 AM on October 17, 2023 [11 favorites]

Was this thread deleted and undeleted? It was previously unviewable and had a "deletion requested by poster" note.

Yes, sorry about that, was deleted for about an hour.

A user requested an account wipe and once I noticed the request, it was done, no questions asked. Took about 45 minutes to notice it was the user who created this thread, then I had to consider what, if anything, to do.

Decided to anon the thread and undelete it, as there had already been so many comments and information shared in the thread.

If folks have questions or concerns about those actions, please submit a MetaTalk post or use the contact form, to avoid derailing this thread, thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 11:06 AM on October 17, 2023 [22 favorites]

‘War knows no religion’: Gaza’s oldest church shelters Muslims, Christians [Al Jazeera]
posted by riruro at 11:24 AM on October 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Reading with my most optimistic glasses I see some hints of an outside chance of a way to de-escalate things.

Those are some strong glasses. Things are dire. Still, there are a few positive glimmers: the hostage is doing OK in the only released hostage video, no ground invasion yet, and some talk from the IDF that it might not be the next step (e.g. this SCMP article). Biden's visit tomorrow seems to be more than a photo-op, with a multilateral meeting in Jordan.
posted by netowl at 11:37 AM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

My late night cope gives way to yet another disappointing chapter in this conflict. Netenyahu and anyone involved in the decision to blow up the Hospital
should be arrested and tried for treason and crimes against humanity.
posted by interogative mood at 12:34 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

The IDF position appears to be that Islamic Jihad launched a failed rocket which hit the school. To be clear I have no idea whether that is true or how plausible it is but I do think if some folks spent a week litigating whether a bunch of little kids were beheaded vs just regular massacred we can allow a few hours to investigate who actually blew up a hospital.
posted by Justinian at 12:55 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The IDF also says that they warned the hospital.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:02 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

You can donate to the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. The Diocese serves the small mostly Palestinian Anglican/Episcopal community in Israel and Jordan. They operate St George's College at the old British era Cathedral in East Jerusalem and a number of medical facilities and schools including the Hospital that was destroyed today.
posted by interogative mood at 1:18 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The IDF also says that they warned the hospital.

Is there a link to any stories about that? I'm seeing IDF claims that it was one of "Hamas own misfires" though I seriously doubt they have even an ounce of that kind of firepower. They posted a video of god knows what on Twitter - blurry, grainy lights flying through the sky - and then deleted it. Are they trying to claim both at the same time? ("We warned them!"/"Actually it was their own fault!")
posted by windbox at 1:20 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Abbas said to cancel meeting with Biden tomorrow after Gaza hospital blast (Times of Israel)

This article says "The IDF has so far not commented on the blast, saying it needs more time to investigate if it was indeed an IDF airstrike" so I'm not sure what the Israeli position is.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:27 PM on October 17, 2023

https://twitter.com/IAFsite/status/1714372328182653288

Following an analysis by the IDF's operational systems, a barrage of rockets was launched toward Israel, which passed in the vicinity of the hospital, when it was hit. [...] According to intelligence information from a number of sources we have, Islamic Jihad terrorist organization is responsible for the failed rocket launch that hit the hospital.
posted by Justinian at 1:29 PM on October 17, 2023

(not vouching for the truth of their position for obvious reasons, but that's the official position. Or at least a publicly stated position by the Israeli military.)
posted by Justinian at 1:30 PM on October 17, 2023

lots of posts in the replies to this tweet (https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1714371894521057737) alleging that it was originally posted with a video showing an explosion timestamped 30 minutes after the hospital bombing was first reporting, then edited to remove the video once the timestamp was pointed out. here is a link to the original version of the tweet with the video (https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1714366327538794512). not conclusive proof of anything but definitely disturbing.
posted by JimBennett at 2:00 PM on October 17, 2023

I have to believe Biden will want something more solid than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ before standing next to Netanyahu at a podium tomorrow.
posted by Justinian at 2:05 PM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yes, the Israeli authorities seem to be going all in on blaming the hospital massacre on Islamic Jihad. With so much surveillance on that tiny part of the world, I would hope that definitive evidence will be found to determine who is truly to blame. Even if the public doesn't find out quickly, one would assume US intelligence agencies would be able to provide Biden with an answer? Of course, I have no idea what their real capabilities are...

MisantropicPainforest, I can't find any confirmation about your assertion above, could you provide a link?
posted by gwint at 2:09 PM on October 17, 2023

This, from "Spectator Index", is the one that I've seen linked elsewhere. I haven't been able to find the report they claim to be quoting in the Al Jazeera live blog.
posted by sagc at 2:14 PM on October 17, 2023

It sounds like they warned all the hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate?
posted by Justinian at 2:21 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

It sounds like they warned all the hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate?

AP, 16 hours ago: "Doctors and many hospital staff have refused to evacuate, saying it would mean death for critically ill patients and newborns on ventilators."
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:32 PM on October 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

I don't think telling people they planned to blow up the hospital really excuses or justifies anything.

Blowing up hospitals is wrong. No matter who does it, why, or if warnings were given.

Ignoring the part where you are going to find evacuating a hospital in short order to be somewhere between difficult and impossible, it also makes it clear that the goal is to do as much harm as possible and prevent people from moving back.

Hospitals take time and money to replace. One exploded hospital is years of people having problems before it can be replaced. And that's assuming the money exists to replace it.

If Biden accepts the cruel, malicious, "logic" that it's totally fine to blow up a hospital since they warned people they would it's. Well, it's Tuesday. But I'd like to hope that one day we can live in a world where it would be unthinkable.
posted by sotonohito at 2:35 PM on October 17, 2023 [22 favorites]

Ugh, I feel so gross searching through Twitter for answers. It's even worse than I thought it would be since I left. Virtually impossible to get signal through the noise. Now I understand why there are so few links to tweets in this huge thread.

IDF still says it was Islamic Jihad ("Intelligence from multiple sources we have in our hands indicates that Islamic Jihad is responsible for the failed rocket launch which hit the hospital in Gaza”) Islamic Jihad spokesman denies involvement ("There were no operations by the Al-Quds Brigades in the area at all")
posted by gwint at 2:42 PM on October 17, 2023

IDF still says it was Islamic Jihad

Same IDF that did this, so, forgive me for not finding them credible here (especially after the whole "look, a video! Whoops, we didn't notice the timestamps don't support our story, better take that down!" thing).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:46 PM on October 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Lots of FUD flying around regarding the hospital, probably best to wait for the facts to fall out. Lots of the footage isn't even new, just repurposed. Also some impersonators.

"Jordan's foreign minister says the summit with Biden in Amman on Wednesday is cancelled"

Disastrous. Abbas canceled too, the US is radioactive right now, Arab leaders can't be seen meeting Biden. The UK's PM, Sunak, might visit Israel as well, wonder if they're all trying to buy time for things to calm down.

Netanyahu:

"This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle"

So let's unpack this a little. By identifying Israel as a proxy for humanity, that relegates Hamas to inhuman. This isn't an assertion that Israel will act humanely, but rather the opposite: that nobody should object to inhumane treatment towards Hamas because they don't deserve it. There's a rich tradition of this kind of rhetoric in the context of colonialism/imperialism where people will tout how "civilized" they are in order to cast their victims as savages.
posted by ndr at 2:57 PM on October 17, 2023 [16 favorites]

AP, 16 hours ago: "Doctors and many hospital staff have refused to evacuate, saying it would mean death for critically ill patients and newborns on ventilators."

Yes, I wasn't saying that Israel warning them to evacuate would justify blowing up the hospitals, I was just clarifying if they specifically warned this single hospital to evacuate or if they issued a more general "all this stuff should evacuate" warning. Since it matters in trying to figure out who blew up the hospital.
posted by Justinian at 3:00 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Reminder: urls on Metafilter don’t automatically become links. You have to use the “Link” button on the right side of the little strip of formatting buttons below the text box where you are typing your comment.
posted by eviemath at 3:11 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am reminded of a comment of mine from several years ago:

Oh, please don't lecture me, Joe. It's not about one mosque; it's about the constant drumbeat of "We're completely blameless for the tragedy of us bombing random-thing-of-the-hour, we had absolutely no choice but to bomb random-thing-of-the-hour, by the way we didn't actually bomb random-thing-of-the-hour, that was a misfired Hamas rocket that did that, well, yeah, maybe it was us after all, but again, we can't be blamed for bombing things".

posted by Flunkie at 3:17 PM on October 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

Hospitals full of patients should not be on any target list period. They also shouldn’t be used a places to fire rockets from, but that still doesn’t make them a target. There shouldn’t be a warning to evacuate because it is a hospital full of parents and evacuation of patients is a last resort. The priority should needs to be to secure the humanitarian infrastructure, not destroy it.
posted by interogative mood at 3:24 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Seems like the Israeli line is, this rocket was fired from Gaza, somehow intercepted still in Gazan airspace, hit a hospital, exploded, and subsequently killed 500+ people. If true, that means Hamas/PIJ has a lot more firepower than we thought, and Israel is capable of intercepting rockets whose trajectory is entirely within Gaza.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:36 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't think a hospital being struck is a big surprise, by either side - it was merely a matter of time and it's possible we'll never know for sure what happened.

Hamas is still firing 700 rockets per day into Israel. From prior conflicts and depending who you ask and what batch of rockets they're using, between 5% to 40% of rockets fall short into Gaza itself due to poor quality control in the improvised manufacturing of these rockets. Some of these are large rockets - the largest being the R160 which is a 302mm rocket artillery ordnance with a range of 100km, weighing about 250kg and carrying 85kg of high explosive payload.

As a possible point to collaborate this, on the first day of the attack Israel publicly stated they were attacked by 3,000 rockets. Hamas publicly stated they launched over 5,000 rockets. We either ascribe this to Hamas inflating their launch numbers to look good, Israeli defense systems being overwhelmed by the sheer number of rockets fired and unable to track the number incoming, or we take both at face value and conclude 40% fell short of the border.

Israel has conducted multiple thousands of strikes on Gaza. Even at a 99.9% accuracy rate for precision guided bombs and intelligence analysts identifying launch sites and stockpiles - it's inevitable that an error occurs over thousands of strikes.

We could argue that Israel shouldn't be striking near hospitals, and that Hamas shouldn't be launching them from / near them either, but we are where we are. In any case, air-strikes seemed to do little to reduce the number of rockets fired, and rockets do little to reduce the number of airstrikes, as both sides use them as a means of low risk retaliation against each other. The IDF estimates Hamas still has 15,000 to 30,000 rockets stockpiled, which means they can sustain the current fire rate for several weeks yet.

There is intense pressure within Israel to "stop the rockets" due to civilian deaths, infrastructure damage and productivity / economic losses due to frequent air-raid alerts forcing people into shelters and the cessation of tourism into the country. The Iron Dome interceptors also cost 100x more than the rockets Hamas are lobbing into Israel.

The "cheapest" way (per rocket destroyed) is to continue air-strikes, however it is a very slow process and erodes the goodwill Israel has with the international community.

The "expensive" way is launch a ground assault, which is costly in terms of casualties incurred, but it can rapidly eliminate large weapon stockpiles from the target zone.

For example, in Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) Israel launched a ground assault to halt the rocket fire - they destroyed 980 rockets. The total operation cost $285 million, or $291,000 per rocket destroyed, and two IDF soldiers were killed.

How much did destroying 980 rockets save them? During the operation over 1,500 rockets were fired, 421 were intercepted ($100k per interception, so $42 mil), 142 fell on Gaza itself, 875 fell in open areas, and 58 struck urban targets, resulting in 4 deaths and 219 wounded.

With some crude maths, you could argue that the operation traded 2 soldiers lives for 3 civilian ones. This ratio gets significantly worse in Operation Protective Lead (2014) which resulted in the deaths of 67 soldiers - far more soldiers died in the ground operation than civilian lives saved. So it would seem that as Hamas gets more sophisticated at repelling ground assaults, it's just not worth it to launch a ground assault to destroy rockets. Israel's ground assault was meant to have happened last week, and it doesn't look like it will occur until the second Carrier Strike Group arrives in a week's time. By then, who knows? Maybe the ground assault never happens after all.

So it seems Israel's only option is a slow war of attrition where they play whack-a-mole by targeting rocket launch sites and stockpiles, and hope Hamas runs out of rockets before Israel runs out of Iron Dome interceptors and international goodwill.
posted by xdvesper at 4:13 PM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

So it goes x …
posted by mazola at 4:23 PM on October 17, 2023

is there any evidence the hospital had rockets or is it just speculation?
posted by JimBennett at 4:24 PM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

There were no rockets at that hospital. That Hospital is run by Episcopalians not Hamas. They are mostly funded by US donations from Episcopalians they are very careful to avoid anything that might endanger the mission of the institution or its funding.

Either Israel bombed it or a rocket from Gaza fell short/ went off course/ was intercepted and it blew up.
posted by interogative mood at 4:33 PM on October 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

OSINT group Geoconfirmed (cite: twitter | nitter):

Conclusion:

A missile launched by a Palestinian group exploded mid-air (Reason unknown) and one piece fell on the hospital causing an explosion.

The geolocation and timing of the footage is conclusive.

posted by kickingtheground at 4:36 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

one piece fell on the hospital causing an explosion.

The level of destruction would imply that that piece was made of antimatter.
Huge if true
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:38 PM on October 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

Hospitals have things like propane and oxygen tanks.
posted by interogative mood at 4:43 PM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

True, but by all accounts there were no secondary explosions.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:53 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

So this hospital had managed to accumulate a vast stockpile of explosive gas, stored it all in one place and it happened to be directly under a fragment of a failed missile?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:01 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

A missile launched by a Palestinian group exploded mid-air (Reason unknown) and one piece fell on the hospital causing an explosion.

so it exploded twice? and just happened to ricochet into the hospital? and the result was catastrophic enough to kill hundreds of people?

so how many times has that ever happened?

and no, a couple of people getting killed isn't on this kind of scale - i need to see an instance where one of these kind of rockets did major damage like this - which, come to think of it, in all the years of fools launching rockets in the middle east, no one's ever reported that the TARGETS sustained that much damage. much less places near the launch site

that's one theory

now the other theory is that the israelis warned people to get out of the hospital, the staff said well we can't do that in 2 hours we need more time and in a few hours the hospital got bombed with a substantial bomb - and i don't think there's any question that airplane dropped bombs can do this kind of thing

remember occam's razor?

which one of these scenarios is the simplest explanation?
posted by pyramid termite at 5:10 PM on October 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

I'm by no means certain that Hamas wasn't involved in the explosion one way or another, but that twitter link was far from convincing. There's so much bad/misleading information; I wish we would wait until there is solid sourcing before reposting things.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:18 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

PIJ extensively used the Badr 3 rocket, which appears to have been designed and tested in Iran, during the 2021 conflict. First unveiled by PIJ in 2019, the rocket carries a warhead weighing between 300 kg and 400 kg (661 pounds to 882 pounds), which is much heavier than warheads of most Palestinian rockets.

From the Wilson Center; emphasis added.
posted by kickingtheground at 5:20 PM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I guess I buy that the new heavy rockets could have big enough payloads but that would be some seriously bad luck that it fell directly dead center onto a hospital. It's not light the place is 70% hospitals.

Even more senseless things have happened but I also need a little more than random open source int guy on twitter declaring it CASE CLOSED.
posted by Justinian at 6:19 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Both the US and Israel have now stated that Israel has handed signals and other types of intelligence related to the hospital explosion over the US intelligence and the US says their people are analyzing it now. I hope they provide their analysis either way rather than just not say anything at all if they find it unconvincing. This situation is serious enough that burying it if it doesn't say what they want it to say won't fly. Shouldn't, anyway.
posted by Justinian at 6:24 PM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

TBH I’m not sure at this point that even if it says that the hospital attack wasn’t IDF that folks will believe it. The tweet editing to remove images will spawn a million doubts even if that too turns out to not mean what it appeared to mean. Given US leaders’ public statements seemingly in “unwavering support” of Israel will also mean that any U.S. analysis of data will be easily dismissed by many. :/
posted by R343L at 6:34 PM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I agree that a lot of people wouldn't believe it even if the US came out and said that they've seen intelligence showing it was a failed rocket from Gaza but it's still important to find out the truth as best we can.
posted by Justinian at 6:35 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

All missiles start with two possible bombs. There is the warhead and the rocket fuel. On top of that there are parts of it that are very hot. When a rocket breaks apart you can have hot metal debris, an out of control rocket motor with fuel and the warhead to contend with as possible sources of fire or explosions when it hits the ground.

The problem is that Israel told the hospital to evacuate and then there was a big explosion after their deadline had passed. If you tell someone they have 24 hours to get out of town or else and at your 25 that person gets shot, it is awfully hard to convince people that you didn’t shoot em. Even if you’re innocent.
posted by interogative mood at 6:39 PM on October 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

What Israel needs to do is make a public commitment to work to protect humanitarian infrastructure. They could negotiate a temporary ceasefire to allow water, food, medical supplies and power for the generators to get to the hospitals.
posted by interogative mood at 6:41 PM on October 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

The info should be given to Russia, and at least one other non-Five-Eyes nation, as the US has already written themselves out of the frame of objective truth with the "unwavering" message.
posted by unearthed at 6:46 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Russia will 100% blame Israel regardless of the evidence. The ICC in The Hague should be able to investigate and confirm
posted by interogative mood at 6:49 PM on October 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have infinite sympathy for the treatment of Jews historically and in the recent past. I think all religions are a little weird but as long as they aren't trying to harm anyone, cool. So this isn't based on anything but the situation, as best as I can interpret it from my armchair.

Israel still has the option to make peace. To not blockade and bombard a literal million children trapped in an area Israel and Egypt are keeping them in. The right wing politicians in charge of the military can also ensure that there are no Palestinians in Gaza, and thus, no problem! Realistically, who is going to condemn them? Or do so with enough power behind them to meaningfully inflict consequences.

Picture a scenario where the USA isn't sending several countries worth of military equipment to prevent the genocide of the Palestinians, but to insure that the various forces that are inclined to mess with Israel during this crisis stay in their own lanes. Yes, millions of people are going to be incandescently mad, but the people inclined to use violence against Israel aren't going to change that view if Israel commits more atrocities. And the group they have 'inside their borders' will have already been smashed hard, with the general Israeli flair for escalation (civilians killed!) and disproportionate punishment (Half these reported casualties are almost guaranteed to be under 18).

The Israeli leadership is using the language and actions, over and over, that makes me think they are entirely aiming for elimination of Gazans from Gaza. I think they stand an incredibly good chance of either succeeding, or making one hell of a crime against humanity in the attempt. How much infrastructure is even left to smash after over a decade of blockade? How much damage do you have to do to convince the survivors remaining is futile, dangerous, and escape is your best chance for survival? One month of little or no food during constant airstrikes? Two? And then oh look, a convoy to Anywhere Else, last chance, act now? I'm genuinely worried there won't be a Gaza next year. That 2.2 million people will be forced out of their homes, dispersed, put in camps, or killed. It's not too late, but I cannot believe some Israeli leaders aren't thinking about exactly that scenario.
posted by Jacen at 6:58 PM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

In evaluating the plausibility of the claim that a Palestinian rocket took out the hospital and killed 500 people, a relevant piece of information is that over a 10-year period, thousands of rockets fired from Gaza caused a few dozen total deaths.

None of this makes sense. So the Israeli line is that a rocket that was so inexpertly constructed and executed exploded mid-air but was also so powerful that it killed orders of magnitude more people than any other rocket fired by Hamas?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:10 PM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Israeli leadership is using the language and actions, over and over, that makes me think they are entirely aiming for elimination of Gazans from Gaza. I think they stand an incredibly good chance of either succeeding, or making one hell of a crime against humanity in the attempt.

porquenolosdos.gif
posted by Flunkie at 7:13 PM on October 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

If Gaza goes Israel will have full control of undeveloped Gaza Marine 1 and 2 gas fields, both in current Gazan waters.
There's an estimated 36 billion cubic meters of gas (for comparison the recently approved UK North Sea Rosebank field has 38 million cubic meters of oil plus gas)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:15 PM on October 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Israel still has the option to make peace.

How? Hamas doesn’t want to negotiate a peace deal. You can’t negotiate a peace deal with yourself and there isn’t anyone else with the political power on the other side to make a deal.
posted by interogative mood at 7:45 PM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Israeli leadership is using the language and actions, over and over, that makes me think they are entirely aiming for elimination of Gazans from Gaza.

It would explain why Israel supported Hamas.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:47 PM on October 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

None of this makes sense.

There's been many studies on the effectiveness of the multi-layered Israeli rocket defense, not the least to justify how and why Israel spends money developing them. Here's a really comprehensive one, after a dozen pages of maths and citations, comes to an estimate that during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge, that Israel ground and air attacks had destroyed half the rocket stockpiled, reducing their volume of fire by 50%. Of the rockets that were fired and were projected to hit populated areas, 67% were successfully intercepted by Iron Dome. Of the ones not intercepted, civil defenses such as early warning notifications and bomb shelters reduced casualties by a further 89%. For the duration of the conflict, 85 civilian casualties were recorded. If those three counter-measures were not in place - there were no pre-emptive strikes against rocket stockpiles, there was no Iron Dome, and there were no civil defenses in place - then statistically Israel would have suffered 4,523 casualties rather than just 85. (to be clear, casualties is killed + wounded, which would also depend on the medical infrastructure available. the ratio of killed to wounded would likely be higher in Gaza for an equivalent strike).

The Iron Dome effectiveness is interesting, especially compared to the touted over 90% success rate - it's statistically derived by using rocket arrivals versus insurance claims and casualties prior to the Iron Dome being set up as a control. But there are so many factors affecting the damage inflicted that an observational style control like this could be argued to be useless. Over time, Hamas / PIJ have been using larger and larger rockets, for example, or might be better at targeting dense urban centers, increasing the potential damage done per rocket.

TLDR - Israel's multi-layered defense system of proactively eliminating rocket stockpiles, interception and civil defenses reduces the casualties they take from rockets by a factor of 50. The current barrage of rockets from Gaza might have caused 10,000-20,000 casualties in Israel if countermeasures (including strikes on stockpiles in Gaza) were not implemented.
posted by xdvesper at 7:49 PM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Given the size of the explosion and the size of rockets fired from Gaza I think it's 100x more likely that this was an Israeli attack.

That said, if it was a Gazan rocket misfire that directly hit the hospital's oxygen tank farm or something, the contemptuous relationship the Israeli government has with the truth has made it worse for them.

The Israeli PM's spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack, said that the hospital had been warned, and then deleted the tweet.
The IDF tweeted unrelated footage from 2022 as evidence of it being a Gaza rocket and then deleted the tweet.
The IDF then tweeted unrelated footage from a different attack on the same night as evidence of it being a Gaza rocket and then deleted the tweet.
posted by zymil at 8:01 PM on October 17, 2023 [15 favorites]

Thanks for the analysis, xdvesper. Is there any sense of what impact the success of the defensive measures has had on Israel's motivation to work toward a long-term peace?
posted by clawsoon at 8:12 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

TLDR - Israel's multi-layered defense system of proactively eliminating rocket stockpiles, interception and civil defenses reduces the casualties they take from rockets by a factor of 50. The current barrage of rockets from Gaza might have caused 10,000-20,000 casualties in Israel if countermeasures (including strikes on stockpiles in Gaza) were not implemented.

I'm sorry but this is just bad math. Reducing the number of Hamas rockets that successfully strike somewhere in Israel has zero impact on the question of whether any one Hamas rocket has been shown to do anything like as much damage as this one is being coincidently claimed to have done.

The other factors reduce the odds of it happening, but this event has happened, and the rough scale of the damage does not seem to be in dispute by anyone.
posted by bcd at 8:22 PM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Today's Al Jazeera live feed is reporting protests in various Arab nations that are being broken up by security forces in each nation:

In the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, Palestinians angrily denounced Israel for the hospital attack, before turning their ire to the PA itself, before security forces turned on the protesters.

In the Lebanese capital Beirut, protesters gathered outside the US embassy in the city, before some attempted to break through the security barriers that surround the site. Security forces fired tear gas and water cannons in an effort to break up the protest.

In Amman, where Jordan had been planning to host a summit with President Biden, Egypt’s President el-Sisi and the PA’s President Abbas on Wednesday before it was cancelled, protesters also gathered outside the Israeli embassy compound, with some breaching one of the security barriers before being dispersed.

Hundreds gathered outside the French embassy in Tunis, chanting anti-French and anti-American slogans.

Egyptian opposition parties led protests in front of the US embassy in Cairo, while others took place in neighbouring Giza.

And in Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, protesters gathered outside the Israeli consulate, before police dispersed the crowd.

I wonder if those governments are worried that anti-Israel protests could mutate into anti-local-regime protests.
posted by clawsoon at 8:31 PM on October 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

How peace? In the immediate term, buy it with food, electricity, and no airstrikes. Agree to a ceasefire in exchange for making sure the people (Again, roughly 50% of whom are under 18) in Gaza are fed, sheltered, and safe. Not hiding from an air force while worrying about where to get clean drinking water.

Or, even unilaterally stop attacking. Just for a while, with the power on. Yes, guard the barricades, keep Iron Dome running, of course. But how much do they truly need to pummel Gaza? Does it bring back any of their dead, their losses, anything? The system of retaliation and disproportionate punishment sure hasn't seemed to work yet. Let countries bring in food, for somebody's God's sake. Stop escalating the situation and give it a chance to cool down. Stop calling them animals, stop acting like the king of the jungle and it's ok to kill everybody. Ask for a UN peacekeeping force? Let someone without a century of conflict take care of the people in what is pretty realistically called an open air prison? Don't make the people forced to be reliant on their jailors be isolated from the world?

Intermediate peace.... Stop the settlers program? Stop antics at religious sites designed to be provoking! Consider removing the roots of the conflict since 'mowing the Hamas grass' is clearly a failure. Open the borders to Gaza, guarantee the people there have food and shelter and no risk of airstrikes. Give them enough no strings attached money that they can build a comfortable life. Job opportunities. Outreach programs for all sides involved. Communication and building bridges. I don't understand the whole Jerusalem mess, but.... Open city? Back off for a while since everyone involved understands that force can and will be used if violence resumes? Again, let less emotionally invested people provide security? Treat their sites with just as much respect as you hope they would yours, and work towards a mutual respect and tolerance for each other.

At this point, Israel has the money, the military might, most of the world support (With notable exceptions, yes. Acknowledged.) and most of the land. They might need to go a little further than they want to for peace. Doesn't a compromise leave everyone unhappy? I don't know. I think instead of focusing entirely on a Jewish Homeland (Apologies if I got that wrong in any way), work on building a Jewish - Palestinian land? Where it doesn't matter what you are or what religion, just that the opportunities are the same. Where all the holy sites can be visited and appreciated for the works of art and faith they are, not as part of a nasty, avoidable conflict. That people get to vote. That they aren't locked into their homes, into territory constantly under encroachment from the military and settlers. I guess that's a one state solution? But it has to be based on everyone is human and thus equals, not.... Some are more equal than others.

Or commit to the two states solution almost immediately. Give Gaza and the West Bank as much land as possible, right now. Let them hold elections, provide self government, respect their territory and freedoms. Is that optimistic? I don't understand why people have to fight each other. It seems so much easier to try to work together. But yeah, sorry for the derail.
posted by Jacen at 8:42 PM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

The info should be given to Russia, and at least one other non-Five-Eyes nation

No, but pass it to New Zealand.
posted by corb at 9:10 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Intermediate peace.... Stop the settlers program? Stop antics at religious sites designed to be provoking! Consider removing the roots of the conflict since 'mowing the Hamas grass' is clearly a failure.

I don't mean to single this commenter out specifically, but it breaks my heart to see people on MetaFilter clamor for the site to keep having I/P threads, but then ignore the history (or perhaps if the commenter is young, never learned it).

The rise of Hamas as a well-funded terrorist militia controls Gaza is a direct result of the self-inflicted wound that Ariel Sharon inflicted on Israel, removing Israeli settlers in Gaza in the name of peace after earlier Palestinian orgs waned in power. I'm old enough that I remember IDF soldiers walking unarmed into those settlements, physically carrying settlers out of their homes one by one while their own countrymen spat on them, threw rocks, called them Nazis and screamed all sorts of terrible things at them. It ruined Sharon, cracked his coalition, and caused the Knesset to shift farther to the right in the next election.

From the Anti-Defamation League:

In August 2005, the State of Israel “disengaged” from the Gaza Strip, removing all Israeli military installations, 25 Israeli settlements (4 in the West Bank) with over 8,000 residents. The Israel disengagement was unilateral, and was not the result of negotiations with the Palestinians.

Israel’s Gaza Withdrawal 10 Years Later: More Successful Than You Think

Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza left a vacuum that was filled by Hamas and a new set of security threats. The withdrawal also created confusion about what Israel should do in response. As rockets from Gaza rained down, many Israelis questioned the decision to leave, believing they made a major concession only to see violence grow. After Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009, there were calls for reversing the withdrawal. The right-wing politician and head of the Israel Beiteinu party (which represents many Jews from the former Soviet Union), Avigdor Lieberman, when he was Foreign Minister, declared that the only way to stop more attacks was “a full occupation of the Gaza Strip.”

The Soldier, the Settler, and the Journalist: Remembering Israel's Withdrawal From Gaza

Since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, three wars have been fought against the Strip's rulers Hamas, the most recent last summer. Are these wars a direct consequence of the withdrawal?

I think it has great contribution. In 2005 we are already talking about 12 years of so-called peace process, including the second intifada. So already there is little trust. Arafat is already dead. Corruption in Fatah (the governing party in the Palestinian Authority and West Bank) is massive. Hamas gained because of this weakness of Fatah. Part of that was derived from the way Israel treats the Fatah. Part of it is from the way Fatah treat the Palestinians, instead of working for them making sure they have a nice back account to treat their family. Put all of this together you see why then the Hamas won the January 2006 elections… That was a victory for extremism almost straight after the withdrawal.

I beg you, for your own mental health as well as others, ask yourselves: if the solution for peace seems so clear and bright to you, take a look through the history of the region and ask yourself "has this already been tried?" It bothers me a lot that buntastic, who created this post, has now closed their account and wiped all their site history. Every I/P thread we have is a great example of why we stopped having I/P threads: we learn nothing new, we rehash every argument again, eventually one side crowds out the other with accusations and snark, and we all walk away a little sadder and angrier with each other, until the next one.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:55 PM on October 17, 2023 [17 favorites]

Israel released its first bit of data and its basically an analysis of the impact site that's not gonna convince anyone of anything who isn't already convinced. I'm not an expert on the impact craters made by various types of ordnance so "see? this impact is inconsistent with our JDAMs!" means nothing to me. Maybe its true! But I have no idea and just asserting its true is not going to move the needle for me.

I suppose if other intelligence agencies put out statements agreeing that the lack of a crater is inconsistent with Israeli munitions that might matter, but Israel saying it... no.
posted by Justinian at 10:16 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Biden is wheels down at Ben Gurion roughly 10 minutes ago.
posted by Justinian at 1:08 AM on October 18, 2023

"What's the exchange rate today to make you guys happy?"
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:48 AM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Pluto Gangster - I was just going to post something along the lines of what you did. As the well written links you posted say, Ariel Sharon's self-inflicted wound was still a good move overall - the nature of the Palestinian struggle was changing from resisting occupation, to demanding one-man-one-vote. This has far more resonance with the Western world, and would mean the end of the Jewish state. They had no choice but to excise Gaza from the state of Israel as soon as possible to maintain a Jewish majority.

The situation with West Bank is more complex than Gaza is (and please, I would really appreciate any corrections or clarifications to what I'm about to say). Besides the obvious fact that Israel doesn't want to give up Jerusalem, the one-man-one-vote argument seems to have less weight in West Bank because Jordan annexed it in 1948 and gave Palestinian Arabs there Jordanian citizenship and allocated them half the seats in their Parliament. In the 1967 war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and Golan Heights and allowed anyone there to become Israeli citizens. However, Israel did not annex the West Bank, and the Palestinians there remained Jordanian citizens with yellow and green cards giving them travel rights into Israel and into Jordan. Essentially Israelis voted in Israeli elections, and Jordanians voted in Jordanian elections, everyone had a vote in the occupied territory. At some point in 1983, during the Intifada uprising, Jordan unilaterally revoked the citizenship of Palestinian Arabs in West Bank.

A nation unilaterally excising a part of itself to maintain the racial majority of its ethnostate is vaguely similar to what Malaysia did when ejecting Singapore. Malaysia is a Malay ethnostate, organized around the constitutional fact that Malays are the rightful owners of the land and retain special privileges over other races. There was a decade long communist insurrection against the (British) Federation of Malaya from the Chinese population, which led to 11,000 deaths and ended with 600,000 rural ethnic Chinese forcibly removed from their homes (my own blue post) and placed into concentration camps. There were bitter disputes about whether the Chinese should ever have been granted citizenship in Malaya, and an effort at rewriting the national historiography to cast Chinese as newcomers to the country. After Malaya gained independence from the British in 1957, it removed the main motive for the Chinese insurrection. However, their military aims now became political - and thus even more dangerous - there were serious fears that a Chinese political party could win the election, and abolish the ethnostate entirely from within. Literally the worst thing the Malays could imagine.

Racial tensions regularly boiled over into race riots and bloodshed, leading to constant curfews. In order to maintain Malay supremacy, the Parliament voted to eject Singapore, removing its Chinese majority population from the nation.

Of courses, both situations are completely different to each other, but I appreciate some of the parallels - racial violence erupting in the birth of an ethnostate, the military goals of a minority evolving to even more deadly political goals, and forced relocation / expulsion being some of the solutions they ended up with.
posted by xdvesper at 3:00 AM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

"What's the exchange rate today to make you guys happy?"

For context, this is a Twitter link to Bassem Youssef speaking to Piers Morgan yesterday; here are low q/high q direct links to the video, to avoid the platform's interface.
posted by progosk at 3:29 AM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

So I took a closer look at the Twitter thread and it seems pretty convincing to me. There's footage taken from live broadcast and you can see an outgoing rocket sputter a bit before it suffers a small explosion, then an explosion on the ground, followed by a larger one that hits the hospital. I'd hazard something went wrong in the combustion chamber and the rocket ended up breaking apart - the first smaller explosion would be what's left of the fuel, the larger one would be the warhead. We typically think of these rockets fairly small, but if it was indeed a Badr-3 with a 300-400kg warhead, that could certainly account for the blast and no secondary explosion. It wasn't shot down by Iron Dome (too far away and difficult to hit on ascent), that I'm confident about.

If we're talking about coincidences, what's more likely - a rocket fails and falls on the hospital, or a rocket fails right as the IDF drops a bomb on the hospital at the same time? Israel hasn't been doing themselves any favors with the orders to evacuate, extreme rhetoric, past record of lying, having to delete tweets... but I think in this case they're not lying. Hananya Naftali is less a "spokesperson" and more an influencer, he was probably working off the same info everybody else had at the time. I do not put it past Palestinian Islamic Jihad to lie either, especially if they're the ones responsible for this cockup.
posted by ndr at 4:15 AM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Shireen Abu Akleh

A journalist with American citizenship intentionally killed by Tzahal snipers and denied medical aid. With clear lines of sight, so they could make sure they didn't hit the helmet.

They denied it, blamed their enemy, eventually admitted it was probably them but refused to investigate.

If an IDF spokesperson told me the sun rises in the east I'd be paying attention the next morning to be sure.
posted by Audreynachrome at 4:54 AM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

If we are going to talk about history and Hamas its rise to power in Gaza started long before Sharon withdrew and then had a catastrophic stroke. Hamas rose to power in the 1980s as the PLO struggled to maintain power and relevance after its exile from southern Lebanon to Tunis. There was even some Israeli efforts to strengthen Hamas as an attempt to fracture the Palestinian leadership. It was always strongest in Gaza and Gaza was always the more intact of the Palestinian Territories. When the Oslo process started there was an approach described as Gaza first. The idea was that the Palestine Authority would get much more control in Gaza to start with and build confidence with Israel that they could make peace. During the 90s a lot of aid was poured into Gaza, but the PA was often unwilling or unable to control the more radical elements — it was a mix of these elements playing a spoiler to negotiations and the utility to the PA of having deniability when it felt that it needed to apply pressure.

Sharon’s plan was to pull out of Gaza and much of the the West Bank. It would have ended further encroachment of settlements and created a defacto border. Unfortunately Sharon had a catastrophic stroke before he could execute his plan. Then the Bush administration pushed the PA to hold an election that literally no one thought was a good idea. Hamas won the election. Then Netenyahu won in Israel and any attempt to finish what Sharon started ended. Then Arafat died and the center of power really shifted to Hamas.

Hamas had done a better job delivering the basic services one expects from a government and of local politicking. They also were a little less corrupt. Finally they had the advantage of being able to claim that while the PLO was over in Tunis they grew in Palestine. Their more militant approach also was more popular in its confrontation of Netenyahu’s provocations and doubling down on carving off more of the West Bank slowly turning it into a collection of isolated Palestinian towns /villages.
posted by interogative mood at 5:10 AM on October 18, 2023 [11 favorites]

Every I/P thread we have is a great example of why we stopped having I/P threads: we learn nothing new, we rehash every argument again, eventually one side crowds out the other with accusations and snark, and we all walk away a little sadder and angrier with each other, until the next one.

I don't know what your experience of talking about this particular conflict is like in real life, mine is of very very very heated arguments at best, with extremist thinking and bad faith and naive takes and blatant lies on all sides, and only sometimes (more and more rarely) some decent analysis and commentary in between. For context I'm in Europe and I've lived in different countries with very different prevailing attitudes about this. I've listened to allll sorts of takes on this. But really since I've been a kid a long time ago in my experience it's been impossible to have a discussion of this conflict that does not run into the kind of issues you mention, especially if it's an online discussion. Why should it be different on MetaFilter? In fact it seems to me overall the range of views expressed here is not as extreme as the kind of stuff I've heard in real life. It's a very messy conflict that's been going on for a long time, why should we expect any discussions of it to be sanitized and conflict-free?
posted by bitteschoen at 5:27 AM on October 18, 2023 [24 favorites]

I suppose if other intelligence agencies put out statements agreeing that the lack of a crater is inconsistent with Israeli munitions that might matter, but Israel saying it... no.

Some OSINT account and commentary channels run by American vets have said similar, that the pictures of the site aren't consistent with aerial weapons (or the casualty numbers). I don't doubt those guys have seen examples of the damage from both aerial and ground based weapons in Afghanistan or Iran, but they all tend to skew 'conservative,' so I'm not going to link them. (Having seen a thing during a war as a soldier isn't the same as expertise.) If it's that objective, there should be better corroboration soon enough.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:28 AM on October 18, 2023

Here's a thread with pics:

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1714535497958334678

Txweeter is not an expert by any means, but may be useful. I have no idea what happened.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:39 AM on October 18, 2023

Please, when you post a link to a war zone or site of atrocity, describe the pics that I would see if I followed that. As a sort of Content Warning. Thank you. (I haven't clicked, as I have no idea what I will see).
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:13 AM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm very sorry that buntastic buttioned over this. Beyondthat, I feel that this thread has been... OK...? given the awfulness and complexity of the situation. There has been tension, sharp comments, and some mod action removing worse, but less than I anticipated. That doesn't mean we are doing well, but maybe better than before?
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:21 AM on October 18, 2023 [8 favorites]

The linked post is relatively safe, of a blasted parking lot with some damage to surrounding buildings. I don't think there are any bodies in it, though I haven't studied it that closely.

The photo has people talking as it at least superficially doesn't look like photos of acknowledged air strikes. I don't know what to think either. I would have expected the discussion to be based on photos of the actual hospital.

Whatever happened, the timing made it worse in derailing the summit in Jordan. Which I had vague hopes would bring at least a pause, get international relief in, and tilt the situation away from a war on the ground.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:30 AM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

I watched a video on youtube from Combat Veteran Reacts. It's got the mildly damaged parking lot, and argues that the hospital wasn't destroyed. I'm not taking it as definitive, but it's at least possible the hospital wasn't destroyed. I'm waiting for more information.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:34 AM on October 18, 2023

Biden has apparently seen enough from the Pentagon to conclude it was not an Israeli air strike that hit the hospital.

This is so convoluted politically that I don't even know what evidence would convince me one way or another - because Biden's unequivocal support for Israel would look horrific if they actually bombed a hospital, and so the incentives to not see that are extremely high. But on the other hand, helping to cover up a war crime is...a pretty far bridge for The President to go too.

And I hate that his colloquial approach is to refer to Hamas as "the other team" as though this is a game. I am sure he understands the grave nature of this for innocent civilians who are caught in this war but making this sound like it is two sides competing and not millions of innocent people caught in the cross-fire is callous.
posted by openhearted at 6:55 AM on October 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

But on the other hand, helping to cover up a war crime is...a pretty far bridge for The President to go too.

I dunno. Covering up war crimes has been a key part of the job for decades. Usually our own, though.

I think it’s going to take a while for enough clear, unmuddied forensics to get out on this incident. Unfortunately it’s way past the point where any evidence will sway the people directly in this conflict.
posted by Room 101 at 7:30 AM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

The US government is not and has never been a neutral or reliable source of information on conflicts in the Middle East. Biden has already had to walk back comments he’s made about things he’s “seen” in this conflict and he’s using language in his remarks that suggests he does not value the human lives that are at stake in Gaza and throughout the Palestinian diaspora. He is not a neutral actor. He is the leader of a massive military apparatus that has its own objectives; he is not a representative for the cause of humanity. His remarks should be considered propaganda and be subject to further independent verification.
posted by ohneat at 7:35 AM on October 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

Bellingcat's previous look at misinfo (from Oct. 11). I don't know if they will look at this, but I trust them more than White House press statements (whether delivered by the President or a spokesperson).
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:42 AM on October 18, 2023

All lines up with an administration that revoked initial calls for a cease-fire.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 7:48 AM on October 18, 2023

Jewish Currents, Dispatches From Gaza: "Three Palestinians describe life under constant Israeli bombardment—and lay out their visions for liberation."

Essential reading. An excerpt:

MR: What was October 7th like for you?

K: When I heard that the fence had been breached, I felt hope. It felt like a first step toward liberating Palestine. Contrary to Israeli propaganda and Western media narratives, it’s not impossible. When you have resistance, colonialism can be defeated.

MR: What do you fear?

K: I fear that I will die without achieving my dreams. I want to complete my PhD. I want to rebuild my family’s house, which has been destroyed. And I want—and this, for me, is the biggest dream—to meet my friends in person, to shake hands, to hug them. It sounds very simple, but colonialism disconnects a people from the rest of the world. I dream of a future where people are treated equally, where there is no occupation, no colonialism, no genocide, no ethnic cleansing.

MR: What is your message for the world?

K: Don’t leave us alone. We are making history now. What would you like your children to read about you? That you justified this oppression? Or that you stood on the side of the oppressed people?

Every single action counts. Don’t forget us. We are human beings who are losing our family members and our neighbors and our friends. If you believe in the equality and freedom of the Palestinian people, exert the maximum effort to ensure that your government stops supporting the colonial government. When every government boycotts this colonial system, it will be isolated. And that’s how it will end.
posted by JimBennett at 7:56 AM on October 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

Biden's unequivocal support for Israel would look horrific if they actually bombed a hospital

As opposed to bombing civilian evacuation convoys, after telling them "evacuate along this road"?
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:11 AM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

That's also disputed, according to the Guardian's longer article.

The warring parties blamed each other for the attack. Hamas, the militant group in control of the Gaza Strip, said it had been carried out by Israel. In a briefing on Sunday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) denied Israeli munitions had hit the convoy.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:21 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's also disputed, according to the Guardian's longer article.

It's not like they don't have previous where this sort of thing is concerned. The IDF target peaceful protesters with live ammunition and deliberately shoot to maim; they kill medical personnel and journalists. It's pretty fucking horrifying that a US president "unequivocally supports" this.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:44 AM on October 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

As opposed to bombing civilian evacuation convoys, after telling them "evacuate along this road"?

Yeah, while I understand why a hospital on fire with hundreds dying has become a flashpoint, it also seems somewhat - I'm not quite sure what word fits (arbitrary?) - that it's this and not the fact that millions of people have been without access to incoming food, water, and medical supplies for so many days I'd have to look up to make sure I'm correctly remembering for how long. Or the fact that, as mentioned, evaluation convoys were bombed on the precise road they were instructed to use, or that southern Gaza continues to be bombed even after civilians were told to evacuate. Intellectually, I understand why it matters how the hospital came to be enflamed, but it feels rather beside the larger point, which is that the level of suffering going on right now in Gaza is incomprehensibly awful, and while I won't pretend I know how peace in I/P is reached, I feel pretty confident that the first step is a ceasefire for at least a few days while a humanitarian corridor can be set up, and refugee camps can be set up, etc.
posted by coffeecat at 8:45 AM on October 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

It's being emphasised because none of the other horrendous things that have happened to Gaza have moved the needle in terms of state support for Israel. The fact that, even if it was an IDF strike, the US would *still* downplay it, is what makes it not beside the point. Or makes it emblematic of the frustration people are feeling with the failure to condemn the killing of civilians by the US, etc.
posted by sagc at 8:51 AM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Even calling it an “evacuation” obscures the violence inherent in what Israel is doing - forced relocation of a massive urban population under imminent threat of death by bombing. “Evacuation” makes it seem like Israel’s ongoing and forthcoming military actions are as unstoppable and inevitable as an approaching hurricane or wildfire rather than an active choice to engage in ethnic cleansing and the destruction of civilian life-sustaining infrastructure.
posted by ohneat at 8:53 AM on October 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

It's not like they don't have previous where this sort of thing is concerned.

Yes; and plenty of targets that Israel does acknowledge hitting in the current campaign are not of the kind I want to see Biden give carte blanche. Demolishing entire apartment blocks because of one suspected residence, for example. Not that US cruise missile and drone diplomacy has much of a moral high ground to offer.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:26 AM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

While acknowledging most or all of the above as true, it's still pretty darn important if the initial breathless coverage of an "Israeli strike" blowing up a hospital and killing 500 people which caused the collapse of a meeting between Biden and Arab leaders and a dangerous escalation in tensions in the region turned out to be completely false and it was in fact caused by Hamas itself (or Islamic Jihad).

That's not, like, just a small detail that can be glossed over with "but Israel is still doing lots of other bad things". It's a huge story. I mean people in this thread spent 4 days litigating whether or not a bunch of little Israeli kids were beheaded or just regular massacred as though it was a key point... whether or not Hamas/IJ blew up a ton of Palestinians and derailed a potential high level de-escalation meeting because people were too quick to judge seems even a teeny bit more important than that.
posted by Justinian at 10:02 AM on October 18, 2023 [21 favorites]

As far as I can tell, people are still welcome to post Guy Analyzes Unverified Video on Freedom Eagle dot Facebook and US Official Makes Statement That Supports US Military Interests. It’s also possible to wait for more reporting from trusted independent media outlets based on independent sources.
posted by ohneat at 10:13 AM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Bellingcat: "Identifying Possible Crater from Gaza Hospital Blast.
posted by clavdivs at 10:35 AM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

The only certainty at the moment is the suffering of civilians on both sides of the fence will continue.
posted by interogative mood at 10:38 AM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's easy to miss the key point of Bellingcat's analysis in that link which is: As noted by Marc Garlasco, a Military Advisor at PAX for Peace’s Protection of Civilians team, the impact point does not appear to be consistent with the 500, 1000 or 2000-pound bombs used in Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).
posted by Justinian at 10:39 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

The "IDF did not respond to a request to comment on the crater in their photo of no crater" bit was notable too. They don't seem to take a position on the number lives likely to be lost based on the kind of weapon used, beyond noting that two dozen bodies can be seen in other images/video and that people had taken refuge in the open areas.

They don't speculate about who employed which weapons, beyond agreeing that JDAMs would cause more damage.

It's informative but inconclusive, which I appreciate Bellingcat's willingness to be.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:50 AM on October 18, 2023

404media writes:

Verified Twitter 'OSINT' accounts are destroying the Israel-Palestine information ecosystem. What used to be a network of reliable experts has been taken over by profit and click driven verified accounts. Everyone loses out. "Unprecedented" levels.

I spoke to multiple respected OSINT experts who have been tracking conflict on Twitter for years. Now after Musk's changes on verification, profit:
- “all hell broke loose”
- “this entire space is 90% grifters”
- “It just creates more noise and less signal”

Note, this doesn't apply to Bellingcat, who has a very established reputation for doing good work, but it certainly seems to be a problem with other 'OSINT' accounts supporting both sides of the conflict.
posted by bcd at 11:01 AM on October 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

i think the original point of people's skepticism about the children (which i am not looking to discuss again here) was that one should be skeptical of claims made by the IDF while they are carrying out a bombing campaign on Palestinians. from this idealogical perspective, it makes perfect sense to be wary of claims from the IDF that this hospital was not bombed by them. again, not trying to debate, just trying to elucidate another perspective.

there will (hopefully?) be an international investigation into this and we will (hopefully?) all find out the truth... eventually. obviously now that things have played out the way they have, this specific attack is going to take over so much of the discussion as the bombings continue and more Palestinians are killed.

it is dispiriting.
posted by JimBennett at 11:12 AM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Gallup just released poll results based on polling done between July and September. Palestinian support for a two-state solution was down from 59% in 2012 to 24% today. Among Palestinians between 15 and 25 years old, it was only 16%.

This is similar to September poll results from religious Jews in Israel (17% and 7%). Only secular Jews (61%) and Israeli Arabs (41%) retained hope for a two-state solution.

I guess that means most are expecting the war to only end if one side is completely defeated?
posted by clawsoon at 11:25 AM on October 18, 2023

...note that the questions in the two polls are different:

Palestinian poll: "Would you support or not support a situation in which an independent Palestinian state existed alongside an independent state of Israel?"

Israeli poll: "A way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully."

...but both are being interpreted as "support for a two-state solution".
posted by clawsoon at 11:33 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the details surrounding what happened yesterday regarding the hospital are not important or don't matter, just that regardless of how the analysis of the evidence plays out, there is still plenty of evidence to demand that the U.S. government/our representatives in Congress do everything in their power to get a ceasefire and humanitarian aid into Gaza.

To quote Btselem, a respected human rights org in I/P "The war of words Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are now engaging in over who's responsible is also being waged at the expense of the victims, ignoring the suffering of their families and of hundreds of thousands more who are in fear for their lives." I will let the experts sort out what happened, but the answer won't change the urgent need for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid.

And on that note, NYTimes is reporting Biden "said he had secured a commitment from Israel’s government to allow food, water and medicine to be delivered to Palestinians in Gaza from Egypt in a humanitarian effort overseen by the United Nations and others." I will believe it when I see it, but I think it's important to not completely despair/conclude that placing pressure on our politicians is hopeless - the needle is moving, maybe not as fast as we'd like, but I see no reason to conclude that all the organizing work/individual calls to Congress/petitions/etc. aren't having an impact. Keep going.
posted by coffeecat at 11:33 AM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

there is still plenty of evidence to demand that the U.S. government/our representatives in Congress do everything in their power to get a ceasefire and humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Also the UN (where the US vetoed a resolution to do just that).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:43 AM on October 18, 2023

It's still way too early to state things with certainty, but what does seem increasingly clear from the photos and from analyses by actual experts is that this was not the kind of large munition that the IDF has been firing to bring down buildings (or that was used in that market that was struck). Those leave huge craters, destroy buildings, etc., which just didn't happen here.

But whether it was a malfunctioning Hamas/Islamic Jihad rocket, or a stray IDF air defense rocket, or whatever, doesn't seem to be definitively known, and I'm not sure there will be some piece of "ah ha!" evidence that would make everyone believe one way or the other. Along with that are increased doubts about the claimed death toll, but again, it is hard to see what would convince people, many of whom have already made up their minds one way or the other.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:56 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

The BBC Verify team say so far "findings are inconclusive" but they have "shown the evidence to a number of weapons experts, some of whom say it is not consistent with what you would expect from a typical Israeli airstrike."

(And then this not insignificant disclaimer: "Several experts we spoke to were not willing to put forward a view on what happened.")

They also mention a recording released by the IDF "of what it says is an intercepted conversation between two Hamas militants acknowledging the hospital was hit by a projectile fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)" but of course note that "It is not possible to independently verify this recording."

From a quick googling of "idf recording hamas hospital" I see this recording mentioned by the Daily Mail, NY Post, The Times of Israel and Haaretz, with an embedded link to this IDF tweet where you can listen with English subtitles.
posted by bitteschoen at 11:57 AM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

Biden’s Israel-Palestine policy ‘undermined’ amid ongoing war

The Biden administration basically took the Trump [administration] policy on this conflict.

It decided to follow the same plan, which was following the so-called Abraham Accords under [former] President [Donald] Trump – and that was to go around the Palestinians, to do normalisation deals with other neighbouring countries, and to try get more of those deals...

The whole policy of working around the Palestinians, ignoring the Palestinians, doing deals with others, that seemed to have completely failed. The Palestinians and their relationship with the Israelis are back to centre stage.

posted by clawsoon at 12:32 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

The polling of the people on both sides reflects the lack of any meaningful progress on this issue for over a decade now. Hamas and Netenyahu both feed off each other. Hamas needs Netenyahu and the Israeli right to keep provoking outrage among Palestinians. Netenyahu needs Hamas’ occasional outbursts of rockets to scare the voters away from moderation. Elsewhere in this thread people have pointed to Netenyahu’s confession to how Hamas is good for him. Remember that the opposite is true. Both these idiots are playing the same game, each thinking they are getting one over on the other. Netenyahu imagines trolling the Palestinians into letting him take Greater Israel. Hamas imagines trolling Netenyahu into overstepping to the point that a huge global war erupts where Israel can be finally driven out .
posted by interogative mood at 1:03 PM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think mostly what the instant assumptions about Israel and the hospital and Hamas and beheading babies, shows is what people expect and see as normal. For values of "normal" meaning "in this current horrifying bloodbath".

We expect to see Hamas and other Palestinian freedom fighters using rockets, conventional explosives, guns, even suicide bombs though that has declined to the point of being almost nonexistant these days.

Hamas killing babies? Yup, that fits in the expectations people have based on their experience and knowledge of this situation.

Hamas beheading babies? That's not something we expect, it's new, it's different, it's so outrageous it sounds like propaganda especially given the history of a) Israel lying, and b) Hamas not beheading babies in the past.

Similarly we expect to see Israel targeting schools, hospitals, orphanages, emergency medical and food supplies, and so on because that's what Israel does.

So when Israel officially anounces they're going to blow up a hospital and gives "warning" for people to evacuate, and then the hospital gets blown up, well, that's not unusual becuase Israel blows up hospitals. And generally we DON'T see misfiring Hamas rockets blowing up hospitals, or really doing any major infrastructure damage in Palestine when they go off course or fail.

In both cases it may well be that the unusual, unexpected, strange, thing turns out to be true.

But I don't think it's particuarly an indictment of anyone that they assumed otherwise from the outset because we tend to be skeptical of things that break pattern.

Now if you want an indictment of humanity in general, the people in this thread in specific, and of the entire horrible nightmare that has been Israel's war on Palestine since 1942 consider that we accept, as NORMAL, as usual, as to be expected that:

Hamas will murder children, blow up families, and generally target civilians.

and

Israel will murder children, blow up families, and generally target civilians AND critical infrastructure.

How bad is it when we don't say "hold up, that's so far from how people act that i can't believe it without really strong evidence" when we hear about yet another Palestinian/Israeli family murdered by the IDF/Hamas? That we've grown to just expect that's how things are over there and we're jaded to the horror.

Add to that, for Americans, that we find it entirely normal, expected, and usual for an American President to praise war criminals from any nation as long as they're our team, as President Biden so flippantly put it. We aren't shocked or horrified when the American President pals around with war crimianls. It's Tuesday.
posted by sotonohito at 3:01 PM on October 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

'With 2022 Deadliest Year in Israel-Palestine Conflict, Reversing Violent Trends Must Be International Priority, Middle East Coordinator Tells Security Council.'
posted by clavdivs at 3:26 PM on October 18, 2023

How many American evangelical Christians and their friends in the Republican Party see this as the start of Armageddon.

Christian Zionist, MAGA pastor Greg Locke says that Israel should destroy the Dome of the Rock so we can get the Third Temple rebuilt and usher in the Second coming of Jesus.

So, yes, as usual the worst people have the worst ideas.
posted by clawsoon at 3:39 PM on October 18, 2023 [18 favorites]

You first, Greg. Pack light.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:57 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

In response to a few of the recent comments, it is extremely hard, at least for me, to predict which stories will gain traction in a conflict and which narratives will dominate. Why is it Horrific Thing #5 that brings a reaction, not #1, #4, or #6? I don't know, because it it's not the world I live in (see also). I don't really understand, for example, how some people that support Ukraine's fight against Russia see Israel as Ukraine and Hamas as Russia in this conflict. I understand, that Ukraine has been very tactical in how its actions are perceived in the world's media. They have weathered (disingenuous) complaints about the speed of their offensive, while knowing full well that one accidental attack on a school or a hospital across the border into Russia would greatly sour global opinion. But when this attack happened, so many of the feeds I was following for that conflict were "Get behind Israel 100% or GTFO". This thread is a civil, measured exploration of events and opinions compared to all the on-line spaces I did, indeed, GTFO of.

Clawsoon's comment above was posted as I was typing this, and points to the part of this conflict I will never truly understand; Religion. Only through the lens of "narrative over fact" (see see also above) do I get a glimpse of the framing of these events that has brought us to a place where Horrific Thing #1 to #4 and #6 is "normal". The righteous rhetoric placing particular parties into the role of hero and others into the roles of villain or demon, the way this is used to justify taking monstrous acts, or to forgive those taken, is beyond my ability to fully comprehend, because not only do I not specifically live in the particular worlds that are the physical sides of this conflict, I also do not live in a world where community leaders stand in front of an audience and interpret a book for me in a way that makes me feel good about my actions, not matter what they are. I have no skin in this game, specifically, nor the one playing out globally every day. I do not need to imagine some improbable final act that reverses my fortunes just so I can survive each day. Walking away from this fight does not mean turning my back on my community, or risking my livelihood or my ability to continue living in my neighbourhood.

My wife made what I feel was a particularly astute observation as our attention shifted from Ukraine to Gaza. She said that the Ukraine-Russia war was being fought over there, but this conflict was being fought everywhere. She's right. The rockets might just be flying between Gaza and Israel, but the conflict is between beliefs, globally. It's in protests around the world. It's in canceled summits. It's in random stabbings of families seen as "other". And it's here. For brief moments I feel like I might grasp why, before I am again overwhelmed by the pure horror of it all.
posted by krisjohn at 4:06 PM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Vlad Vexler: Stay sane through Ukraine & Isr/Pal polarisation

I've posted some links to this guy's talks in the Ukraine war threads. Born in Soviet Russia (with family in Ukraine if memory serves), his family fled to Israel impliedly via Operation Exodus, left after his youth and is now a UK citizen. He aspires to be a kind of public intellectual. Maybe he's a little remedial for most MeFites but I find him reassuring.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:15 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

You'll notice that Locke is wearing some sort of tallit looking thing in that tweet. This is not new; there's a whole contingent of Christians who have been draping themselves in Jewish imagery over the past few years. Blowing a shofar is especially popular. This war seems to be like a hit of cocaine for them.
posted by clawsoon at 4:22 PM on October 18, 2023 [9 favorites]

US blocks UN Security Council resolution for a humanitarian pause and aid. Everybody else was For or Abstained, not good for the US to be isolated on this. If there comes a time a neutral broker is needed, I think it would have to be like... Norway or China or something, not the US. Israel needs to be thinking about a path to a political solution, they are not going to bomb their way to peace and security.

The whole point of OSINT is that the sources, methods, and reasoning are all presented so anybody who is equipped and inclined to follow it can verify it or find a flaw. I haven't seen any substantial challenge to the footage of the rocket breaking up and two following explosions yet. As a matter of epistemology, it sure beats out the perennial "anonymous government official not authorized to discuss the topic says" - in this instance, we don't have to take it on faith.
posted by ndr at 4:46 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

krisjohn: I also do not live in a world where community leaders stand in front of an audience and interpret a book for me in a way that makes me feel good about my actions, not matter what they are.

It's definitely not "actions, no matter what they are." You, like me, like most of us, are operating in the frame of consent-based morality. In this frame, the greatest sin is to hurt someone who was causing no harm to us. People who go around blowing up kids seem to be morally senseless, with no moral limits on what they might be capable of.

Fundamentalist religions are among the groups who are more into hierarchical morality, where the greatest sin is to offend someone above you in the hierarchy, and there's nothing wrong with someone higher in the hierarchy harming someone lower. So parents can harm children, men can harm women, people of God can harm heathens, and God, at the top of all the hierarchies, can harm whoever he likes. But: Don't you dare say anything against God; that's the worst thing you can do, and it's a moral line they will never cross.

Or that's my half-baked theory, anyway.
posted by clawsoon at 5:03 PM on October 18, 2023 [9 favorites]

Biden to deliver a prime-time foreign policy address Thursday

Said to address both Israel and Ukraine.
posted by Justinian at 5:16 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

You're right, Clawsoon. It's an oversimplification of mine that there are no boundaries of any kind to such actions, but the nature of those are so alien to me, and shift rapidly for reasons I'm not in tune with, making them seem arbitrary. Perhaps I can better express it by saying that that action and reason are rarely in the order I feel they should be amongst those that claim to be most righteous.

The hierarchical morality you describe seems consistent with my wife's recounted experiences with organized religion. I have been lucky to never have experienced living in a community where everyone is looking over everyone else's shoulder to judge and rank the quality of everyone's virtue signaling. I hope that no one here has to exist within the stress of constant worry that something you say or do will be spun as less than adequate within a rapidly shifting, fact-free, narrative and never-ending power struggle. Life in a zero-sum game is hell - even more so when you start at the bottom.

Despite the quantity of religion and belief surrounding these events, I find few if any actions to be in good faith. Where the Ukraine-Russia war is primarily one of territory and only secondarily one of propaganda, this conflict appears 90% about "hearts and minds" (and souls) and 10% about who's living in a 365 square kilometer open prison. Telling people to leave then giving them nowhere to go is not the humanitarian act of a moral state defending its security, it's akin to "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." (Informally: Kill them all; let God sort them out.)

At the end of the day, from very much the outside, all I see is broad, unceasing horror amplified by people that think god is on their side. The cruelty of someone who believes with all their being that they are inherently better than someone else appears to know no bounds.
posted by krisjohn at 6:10 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

As long as Biden calls out the Fascist Republicanist brigade for not supporting Ukrainians and Palestinians alike, while they are also pursuing a Christian Dominionist apocalyptic end to humanity, it all sounds good to me. Biden 2024: If We Live Long Enough To Vote.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:14 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yes,, the open area in front of the hospital entrance (where lots of people were sleeping) got hit by a missile/rocket/bomb of some kind. Who perpetrated it is the question, not whether or not it really happened. There's too much photographic evidence, accepted by mainstream experts, to justify anyone going down the conspiracy pathway on this.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:04 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Like I agree, there are too many respectable news outlets reporting that it happened for me to think it didnt happen, but man did I have some whiplash this morning.
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:22 PM on October 18, 2023

krisjohn It's worth noting that most humans have a tendency towards if not strictly hierarchal morality at least in-group based morality. There's almost always a tendency among people of any religion (or lack thereof) to hold people outside their in-group to higher moral standards and excuse, minimize, or downplay immorality by people from their in-group.

In the US one of the more stark examples of this was, and still is, the way the acting community rallied around rapist and pedophile Roman Polanski. Women who in other contexts identified not merely as feminist but as intensely and radically feminist blamed the victim, justified Polanski raping her, and loudly declared that it never happened and if it did it wasn't so bad.

We see it in the way people will defend a political leader they favor and go 100% DARVO on anyone who comes forth with allegations.

Same applies to Israel/Palestine and people's attitudes regarding the crimes committed by all sides.
posted by sotonohito at 7:26 PM on October 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

I agree, sotonohito. I'm reminded of this portion of the recent Folding Ideas video about an insular community based around a financial narrative.

Maintaining a stable community built entirely out of conspiracy, insecurity, and resentment is tricky. To get them through this Apes police sentiment like few others.

Even crypto, a product wholly at the mercy of sentiment, is more tolerant of bad news than Apes because they are nominally willing to engage with reality as it exists. They’ll spin bad news like the collapse of FTX as good for the ecosystem as a whole, pretending that it’s culling out bad actors, but they don’t deny that FTX has gone sour.

Since MOASS is basically a fantasy untethered from any real business fundamentals, the reasons to not buy in get longer and longer as time goes on, and so the restrictions on what is and isn’t permissible to talk about also grow longer and longer.

MOASS is, when you break it down, market manipulation via the prisoner’s dilemma. The big, theoretical payout only works if literally everyone holds the line, but simultaneously everyone involved has both the personal incentive and ample opportunity to screw over the others, and knows that everyone else has that same opportunity. It is a philosophy that demands extremely strict orthodoxy. You buy and you hold. Discussing exit strategy is derided as “price anchoring.”

Remember, the gains are not theoretically infinite, they are literally infinite. This leads directly to unhinged memes about Apes becoming “gorillionaires” from selling one single share. It leads to stories about the post-MOASS world where Apes don’t actually need to sell any shares at all ever, they just live off the dividends from GameStop for the rest of their lives, and for the lives of their children, and their children’s children, a future where one, single share confers wife-changing generational wealth. -- This is Financial Advice (1:33:22) Emphasis added

Separated from thousands of years of baggage, the situation is easier to digest. My takeaway is that if you back a person into a corner; placing them in an environment they don't understand and giving them no way to leave without giving up everything, you enter a performative world where everyone has to prove themselves more and more worthy and pious than the rest of the community in order to not end up vulnerable, targeted and shunned. Ultimately, the topic appears unimportant. It's the framework that echoes through the ages. This could be "apes" hoping to stay in the community they've convinced themselves will eventually confer great wealth if they just hold on long enough. This could be settlers trying to cling onto their property in the new world without being burnt at the stake as a witch. This could be actors navigating a world of monsters, desperate not to find themselves without the next job (see also). This could be politicians jostling for the party nomination in the next presidential election. In each case something huge, to the individual, is at stake, while objective facts have no impact on the outcome. Superstition, or any fictional narrative - religious or secular - requires participants to perform actions determined by a very liquid consensus to prove commitment. Broad outcomes become a matter of faith rather than action. In fact, action without positive result is "proof" of lack of faith. You don't fail because things are hard, you fail because you didn't believe hard enough, or you didn't perform your duty to the powers that be. Outcomes are left to the universe - which is not inconsistent with the times in comments above that people have discussed the implied lack of agency in Israel's response to the initial rocket attacks.

Pretty soon, nobody is actually trying to do or solve anything, they're just trying to raise their standing in the community. These are the old-school echo chambers that so many people are surprised about on-line, while they're in them IRL. But unlike a Facebook group that plans one insurrection a decade, these groups self-righteously bomb and shoot civilians every week while lamenting how nothing has been solved this whole time.
posted by krisjohn at 8:09 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

These musings on the psychology of religion seem like a derail. If not, then they are coming very close to saying the problem with Israel is Judaism.
posted by cosmic owl at 8:25 PM on October 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

These musings on the psychology of religion seem like a derail. If not, then they are coming very close to saying the problem with Israel is Judaism.

Concur. And they also flatten the varied forms of armed resistance in Palestine over the years, which have ranged from secular to religious fundamentalist. (I hasten to add that by using the term "armed resistance" I am not meaning to cast a positive tone on what Hamas did last weekend, because what they did makes me sick on several levels. I just don't have a better phrase coming to mind at the moment that describes the entire umbrella from the PLO years through today.)

And in my reading the general line of thinking is a cousin to the "these people have been fighting forever" narrative, which is reductive and fatalistic and ignores the geopolitics of the last century.
posted by kensington314 at 8:45 PM on October 18, 2023 [16 favorites]

I don’t know if somehow my news got thrown into a conspiracy hole or what but did a hospital actually get bombed? I see videos and pictures of a burned parking lot with building still standing all around and not much rubble and people supposedly living in Gaza saying the hospital is still there (don’t want to link as I don’t want to give views to fake news if it is)

I wouldn't say news got thrown into a conspiracy hole. It just went into the "scoop now, correction later" mode. Unfortunately, there's little concern for throwing readers, and a broad narrative, down the conspiracy hole.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:51 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

I/P threads prove to be different from everything else on Metafilter. If consensus is that I/P threads are not the place to thrash out the "why" of I/P thread issues using the specific events that provoke the initial post, I'm happy to leave it to MetaTalk, but I don't believe my recent few comments and those of members interacting with them are dissimilar from many previous comments in this thread.

Note, however, that my religious musings started from a comment responding to "How many American evangelical Christians and their friends in the Republican Party see this as the start of Armageddon." I don't claim to be an expert on Judaism, but if I'm pinning the problem on anything in particular (other than hopelessness), it's on religious communities dominated by leaders that claim that there's some big immanent event that negates the need for actual action in favour of pouring energy into being at the top of the heap when the music stops, and how this perpetuates... everything (gesturing at every event mentioned in this thread, and the thread Flunkie linked to from 2014)
posted by krisjohn at 8:59 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think, like a lot of people who probably don’t feel comfortable drawing lines around themselves with regards to this painful subject, I left part of my heart in this part of the world: friends, memories and hopes.

The considered analysis and aggregated insights into the (heart)breaking news, the healthy skepticism around the immediate claims of responsibility and defense, even the horrible tallies and body counts, keep me refreshing this thread. Most of the time I wish I could do otherwise, not the fault of the commenters.

Last night I dreamt of a long bus trip with a dozen friends on an empty road with occasional staging areas for weary passengers to stretch their legs.

At the third stop, which turned out to be the marble lobby of a grand hotel, an uncle awaited with trays and urns full of snacks and fruit. He said these were provided by Heniya, the Hebrew teacher in my kibbutz ulpan.

In the dream my throat thickened and my eyes filled with tears. Despite all of this horror unfolding in her part of the world, she remembered our bus trip and sent food and love.

My friends had all disembarked and asked where all the food came from, and I couldn’t speak her name from the suffocating emotion, so I woke up, drank a glass of water and cried.

I don’t honestly think this comment helps here. For me this thread is useful in terrible ways and I deeply appreciate those of you who contribute despite the obvious difficulties. But this thread is also filling up with far less helpful derails.

Should I post comment? As my dear departed kibbutz love Oscar used to say whenever such a question came up, “And why not?”
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 10:36 PM on October 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

Meanwhile, Josh Paul, a higher-up in the State Department, has resigned from the State Department over his frustration that there was nothing he could do to stop more arms being sent to Israel. He has made his resignation letter public on LinkedIn.

He is quite brave to take a stand that amounts to career suicide, if not the risk of being doxxed and targeted outside of the workplace by violent extremists.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:29 AM on October 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

Channel 4 reporters in the UK also put out a "visual investigation" of the Gaza hospital blast and reached similar conclusions to the BBC ie. that the kind of damage makes a typical Israeli airstrike unlikely, so Israel may be telling the truth here. Channel 4 also consulted two Arab journalists about the recording of the phone conversation between the two supposed Hamas militants, and they journalists state that one is a fabrication, based on accents and language used. (Plus I've seen a lot of comments about how it does kind of sounds scripted really, with the two spelling things out very clearly soap-opera- exposition style which alone doesn't make it very credible). So that's confusing but interesting!
posted by bitteschoen at 3:47 AM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re: the alleged hospital strike, I haven't seen this laid out in the thread so far, so if people want to judge the raw evidence for themselves rather than going to an external site, here they are. Videos are completely SFW, no bodies / blood visible.

Full footage from TASS, a Russia's leading news agency. Shows the allegedly strike area with several burned cars, also shows the inside of the nearby chapel of the hospital.

Wide angle view of the damaged courtyard. Visible are burned cars and scorch marks on the ground. All the greenery and trees in the courtyard are unaffected.

The alleged impact crater itself which is 30cm deep.

For context, there is a chapel in the hospital because the hospital is run by the Diocese of Jerusalem - link to the website of the hospital.

Live footage from the Al-Jazeera media network aired at 18:59 local time showed a bright light rising in the skies above Gaza. It flashes twice before drastically changing direction, and it then explodes. Corresponds with the alleged strike on the hospital at 19:00 local time.

My thoughts - the total structural damage seems to be limited to just some broken windows and superficial damage to eaves and tiles, and the 30cm deep crater is consistent with the low powered rockets that Hamas has been lobbing into Israel, as opposed to the bombs that Israel has been using that can level a 14 story apartment block with a single strike. The number of cars parked close together could have resulted in a scenario where one car close to the strike caught fire, and the fire spread to the rest of them - as we see in urban car park fires.

These images answer many questions upthread questioning how a Hamas rocket could cause such severe damage.
posted by xdvesper at 4:27 AM on October 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think it's fair part of this discussion to say that the intensification of fundamentalist religious responses has both been a result of the lack of progress in making peace and also an enabler for a particular kind of bad actor who takes advantage of fundamentalist belief to make peace less likely, whether it's Itamar Ben-Gvir, Greg Locke, or whatever Islamic hate preacher is encouraging and justifying Hamas atrocities.

There are plenty of religious leaders working for peace, but few of them seem to be fundamentalists.
posted by clawsoon at 5:19 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

A significant fraction - if not most - of the 2 million people in Gaza are still on the brink of starvation and dehydration - some thousands of whom will succumb in the next few days, irrespective of a few trucks trickling in from Egypt.

This is because Israel decided to run - and continues to run, an armed blockade - preventing the receipt of any fresh water and food - and fuel to run their damaged and overwhelmed hospitals.
posted by lalochezia at 6:08 AM on October 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

Not to mention the bombing of multiple bakeries.
posted by clawsoon at 6:26 AM on October 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wouldn't say news got thrown into a conspiracy hole. It just went into the "scoop now, correction later" mode. Unfortunately, there's little concern for throwing readers, and a broad narrative, down the conspiracy hole.

The NYTimes has a short article that walks through the timeline of what got put into headlines (from initial reporting on claims from Gaza entities to now) and how that has shifted (or not shifted) at a few mainstream news organizations.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:42 AM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

From clawsoon's last "bakeries" link to the AP:

Palestinians say Israel is targeting bakeries in Gaza

Israel has bombed and targeted areas with bakeries in Gaza over the course of the war while dozens of Palestinians were lining up to buy bread, causing high numbers of dead and wounded, Salam Marouf, the head of the government media office, said in a statement.

By repeatedly targeting bakeries, he said that Israel sought to worsen the humanitarian situation, inflict a greater number of casualties and “make it more difficult for citizens, to the point that obtaining some loaves of bread has become a dangerous journey.” More than five bakeries were targeted in different areas to the north and south of Gaza, either directly or in the area where they are located, Maarouf said.

Aid groups, including the World Food Program, have warned Gaza is running low on food supplies with shops only having a few days worth of supplies left. More are available in warehouses run by humanitarian organizations, but these are hard to reach because of constant bombardment.
posted by mediareport at 7:14 AM on October 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

Comment and response removed. Please stay focused on the subject of the thread, instead of brining unrelated aspects of unrelated past threads.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:20 AM on October 19, 2023

So Fetterman is out there tweeting, "Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire." Absolutely deranged policy from one of the more left-leaning democrats in the Senate.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:15 AM on October 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

Death threats and doxxing: War with Hamas fuels free speech debate on Israeli college campuses
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:37 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Simple statements of solidarity that would hardly be considered “political” in any normal context are being criminalized by the Israeli state
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:39 AM on October 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

It is clear that the US and Israel are determined not to return to the previous status quo of a ceasefire. This seems to be the emerging consensus among key political leaders and the result is that people who disagree are being ignored, silenced and pushed out of the chain of command and decision making. This is unlike the war in Ukraine where there was a long period where those calling for restraint and caution were involved and often able to win the argument of urging caution.

I don’t think the stated objective to destroy Hamas is possible. I think that an invasion of Gaza by Israel will be an absolute horror show. It will be extremely bloody for the soldiers on both sides and the civilians caught in between. Any plan based on an unobtainable objective is no plan.

The reality of the present circumstances are that a ceasefire might be the only thing that can be done, even though leaders and the public wants so much more.
posted by interogative mood at 9:02 AM on October 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

It's been going on long before the current war, but I/P policy and norms in the US make Israel look bad and contribute to the problematic equating of Jewishness with Israeli citizenship with Israeli political leaders. Sure, there are few college ding-dongs in the US who are coming off as pro-Hamas because of their overblown rhetoric, but "this is terrible for both sides; let's find a solution" or "what about Palestinian babies" is basically Not Something You Are Allowed To Say in the US. If you aren't American, we basically have:

* A bunch of laws making it illegal for people to boycott Israeli companies
* A bunch of rich assholes pulling donations from colleges because the colleges let students say "Palestine"
* Constant foreign lobbying by US-Israeli groups to keep the image of Shiny Happy Israel and Barbaric Subhuman Palestinians front and center, plus fuzzy distinctions between domestic and foreign lobbying in this space
* Mentioning Palestine is poison in both political parties and gets you painted as extremist
* Plenty of doxxing and danger for people speaking with the voice of reason; it's not just antisemitism - the other side gets it maybe more
* Israel-first foreign policy because of oil and needing a Middle East ally/puppet state, and I dunno, Nazis and WWII or something.
* The arms industry wanting to hand out weapons all over the world for no fucking reason.
* Bible Tours a.k.a. dumbass Americans touring the "Holy Land" and somehow linking their spiritual destiny with whatever's happening Over There

It's ridiculous. As an atheist with neither Israeli or Palestinian roots, all that has the effect of making me think of Israel as a problem, which isn't fair to the people who live there. But I totally get why people are no longer willing to just toe the pro-Israel line. Their government needs to put in some legwork to prove they are a democratic force for peace in their region, and stop being 100% dependent on the US to prop them up. I think their policies and choice of leaders would be very, very different if they had to make their way with charm and handshakes instead of US-made bombs. The latter shouldn't even be on the table. Where's the Jacinda Ardern of Israel?**

** Yes, I know - where's the J.A. of the US, for that matter?
posted by caviar2d2 at 11:39 AM on October 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

The arms industry wanting to hand out weapons all over the world for no fucking reason.

$$$$$$$$$$$
posted by pyramid termite at 11:44 AM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

As an atheist with neither Israeli or Palestinian roots, all that has the effect of making me think of Israel as a problem, which isn't fair to the people who live there.

Blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism absolutely is a problem, though (not to mention, dare I say it, fundamentally un-American), and it's Israel's raison d'etre and justification for settlement expansion. Pretending that isn't an issue, or that Israel is in any sense a "normal Western democracy", is frankly bizarre.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:15 PM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism absolutely is a problem, though (not to mention, dare I say it, fundamentally un-American), and it's Israel's raison d'etre and justification for settlement expansion. Pretending that isn't an issue, or that Israel is in any sense a "normal Western democracy", is frankly bizarre.

I dunno. I live in a Western democracy that was founded by settler colonialists, where the Indigenous inhabitants were pushed out of huge areas of land with the justification that Europeans were better humans, and it doesn't seem bizarre at all to me for a Western democracy to do something like that.

On the flip side, it's not hard to see why "[Jewish thing] shouldn't exist" would rightfully freak out a lot of Jewish people, based on their history.
posted by clawsoon at 12:37 PM on October 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

Blood and soil ethnic nationalism is the default for most of the world. The idea that Israel alone should be forced to give it up seems ridiculous. Especially given the the reason the Jewish people built their own country was so they would have somewhere to go because other countries wouldn’t reject that concept.

Every western democracy, even American suffers from ethnic nationalism — All those American political commentators are worried about “replacement theory” and demands to speak English.
posted by interogative mood at 12:38 PM on October 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

I dunno. I live in a Western democracy that was founded by settler colonialists, where the Indigenous inhabitants were pushed out of huge areas of land with the justification that Europeans were better humans, and it doesn't seem bizarre at all to me for a Western democracy to do something like that.

Something of a difference between being aware of that history and wholeheartedly supporting it, though. (And the USA wasn't actually a democracy until the 1960's and the Voting Rights Act; before that, it was a democracy for white people.)
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:51 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Americans urged to leave Lebanon ‘as soon as possible’.

Drone attacks on US bases in Syria and Iraq, missiles fired out of Yemen intercepted by a ship stationed in the Red Sea (target unknown). I hope this is all just people making noise to signal how tough they are instead of a prelude to a wider conflict.
posted by ndr at 1:05 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Why far-right Hindus in India are supporting Israel
posted by clawsoon at 1:32 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I suspect that we're seeing with Likud and the other right wing Israeli parties is something like the Republicans winning Roe, or the Torries winning Brexit. Right wingers achieving something they saw as useful propaganda but never actually wanted to happen IRL.

We don't know what Israel is going to do next becuse the leadership of Israel doesn't know what it's going to do next.

They're operating on reflex, bomb the fuck out of Gaza, cut off supplies and aid, hurt as many Palestinian civilians as possible, none of that's a strategy or a plan, it's just Israel doing what Israel always does when things get bad.

The only certain thing is that from now on there won't be civilian deaths on both sides, all the civilian deaths will be Palestinian from this point forward. And the only real quesiton is how long before it stops.

If Israel really does commit to a ground invasion it's going to be a blood bath.

So far it seems that across the West the consensus among the political elites is to cheerlead a war and to made calls for peace or a ceasefire unpatriotic.

I hope the Israeli people are able to succeed in stopping their leaders, because my leaders won't do anything useful at all.

Like the other right wingers who got what they claimed to want but didn't really want, Likud and the other right wing Israeli policies have little choice but to pretend they totally wanted this. Netanyahu misjudged how high to keep the fire and I suspect he's panicking.

A long drawn out war is going to be bad for him. A massive bombing campaign bringing death to millions would be bad for him. A ground invasion would be bad for him. A continued siege/starvation and occasional airstrikes approach will be bad for him. He's looking for a way out and there isn't one that doesn't involve political suicide in one form or another.
posted by sotonohito at 2:47 PM on October 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

A bunch of rich assholes pulling donations from colleges because the colleges let students say "Palestine"

Well this explains why my law school yanked the pro Palestine protest today on the most patently thin "content-neutral, but somehow only applied to the pro-Palestine protest" excuse they could muster. I was wondering what the fuck they were smoking.
posted by corb at 3:12 PM on October 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

One of the interesting parts of this is that it puts paid to the leftist argument about the US only being interested in oil. Israel is the last country you’d support if oil was your primary concern.
posted by Galvanic at 3:22 PM on October 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

Apparently a "blast goes off" at the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church in Gaza. (Other sources)
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:03 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Does anyone have an opinion or any information about the efficacy of donating money to a group like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund? The borders are closed and aid is not currently being allowed in, as far as I understand it. I'm happy to throw a few bucks in as a show of solidarity but I'm also considering making a larger donation and I would want that to be something that makes sense.
posted by GalaxieFiveHundred at 4:14 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Islamic Jihad and Hamas don’t mind blowing up the handful of Christians in Gaza if they can pin it on Israel.
posted by interogative mood at 4:31 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Let's try to steer clear of pure rhetoric unattached to any particular facts. I know everything is hard right now, for everyone. But that is all heat and no light.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:37 PM on October 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

Just a note to hold off on commentary that's based in speculation and is not factually accurate.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 4:51 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hope this is all just people making noise to signal how tough they are instead of a prelude to a wider conflict.

Well, this wasn't exactly how I forecasted the next front of WW3 opening up but it's definitely in the ballpark. And each one of these conflagrations emboldens another. Really hoping they find that missing CCP minister soon.
posted by pwnguin at 4:58 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well this explains why my law school yanked the pro Palestine protest today on the most patently thin "content-neutral, but somehow only applied to the pro-Palestine protest" excuse they could muster. I was wondering what the fuck they were smoking.

There've been pro Palestine protests on some campuses around the country letting some pretty vile anti Israeli and anti semitic sentiment boil over. I wouldn't be surprised to see college administrations broadly doing what they can to avoid that kind embarrassment.

Islamic Jihad and Hamas don’t mind blowing up the handful of Christians in Gaza if they can pin it on Israel.

It wouldn't be a completely wrong assessment on their part. They got an idea how many warm feels and benefit of the doubt they can get by accidentally bombing a hospital and pointing the finger elsewhere. At this point, they're in it for the maximum destruction, not the win
posted by 2N2222 at 4:59 PM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

accidentally bombing a hospital and pointing the finger elsewhere

That assertion is still unproven.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:07 PM on October 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

GalaxieFiveHundred: Only because I heard it often in the bed beside me for much of last week, my perspective on practical logistics of aid to Gaza is a little unusual. Filtered through that (somewhat loud and arguably overconfident, but not inexperienced) lens, I can't help but note that an update from four days ago said aid would be waiting to go in the following day and there hasn't been an update since. ABC News (Australia) this morning indicated that aid coming through the border from Egypt was immanent (and probably the only way it will happen), but as far as I know, no trucks have actually gone in yet and it's a race against the start of the ground assault.

If you're happy that your donation will contribute to the resources poised at the Egyptian border for the first opportunity to help in any way they can, with the small risk that they never get used, then my vote is to go for it. (A growing convoy of international aid stuck at a border is itself a very specific message of, I believe, significant value.) If you feel your money is wasted unless supplies actually make it into Gaza, maybe wait.
posted by krisjohn at 5:19 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

come on folks, they're not bombing the hospitals, they're just bombing the houses, roads, bakeries, stores, and designated escape routes AROUND the hospitals.
posted by JimBennett at 5:25 PM on October 19, 2023 [18 favorites]

“This action was a demonstration of the integrated air and missile defense architecture that we built in the Middle East and that we are prepared to utilize whenever necessary to protect our partners and our interest in this important region...The incident was one of a series in recent days with US bases being targeted by drones in Syria and Iraq amid increasing tensions in the region as the war between Israel and Hamas continues. ”

I understand why it's talked about this way but if you take a step back, it's pretty strange that the US military is firing shots in anger in multiple countries across the Middle East and it's a relatively minor news story. Just kinda taking for granted that of course the US has military bases in Iraq and Syria and Navy ships stationed off the coast of Yemen. I can see how this comment could be considered be a derail so I won't be mad if it gets deleted but I do find it relevant. When anyone else shoots rockets, it's a big deal. When the US does it, it's often just a footnote. Background noise. Not really trying to make an argument here. Just highlighting a news story that I think is interesting.
posted by GalaxieFiveHundred at 5:26 PM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Really hoping they find that missing CCP minister soon.

it gets better.

questioned the wisdom of sending the first carrier group but I don't question sending the second.
posted by clavdivs at 5:26 PM on October 19, 2023

come on folks, they're not bombing the hospitals, they're just bombing the houses, roads, bakeries, stores, and designated escape routes AROUND the hospitals

Can't speak fairer or more plainly than that.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:40 PM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Gregg Carlstrom of The Economist on Twitter: An analysis of satellite imagery suggests that, after less than two weeks of war, 11,000 buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. "At least 92,000 people will have no home to return to when the fighting stops."

(Paywall-free version of the article)
posted by JimBennett at 5:40 PM on October 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

Well, this wasn't exactly how I forecasted the next front of WW3 opening up but it's definitely in the ballpark. And each one of these conflagrations emboldens another. Really hoping they find that missing CCP minister soon.

As somebody who understands the historical background, I'm confident that China is not going to suddenly start an armed conflict out of the blue just because of global developments elsewhere.

Well this explains why my law school yanked the pro Palestine protest today on the most patently thin "content-neutral, but somehow only applied to the pro-Palestine protest" excuse they could muster. I was wondering what the fuck they were smoking.

I've been seeing reports of Palestinian reporters, speakers, and writers getting sidelined by NBC, the Guardian, Axel Springer (who owns Politico). France and Germany have been banning public demonstrations in support of Palestine out of concerns for supposed anti-semitism, which comically in some cases even includes left-leaning Jewish voices. Not to downplay anti-semitism that does exist, but there has to be a better solution other than just banning entire demonstrations for being on the wrong "side". Yet, I think the public mood is more balanced than in the past. The US State Department has a "mutiny brewing" right now and I don't think that would've happened 20 or even 10 years ago.

I'm a critic of US militarism but I think there's a difference between negating an attack that was launched versus offensive operations. In this case it might even be helpful, as it saves Israel from feeling like they need to respond strongly.
posted by ndr at 5:42 PM on October 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

There've been pro Palestine protests on some campuses around the country letting some pretty vile anti Israeli and anti semitic sentiment boil over. I wouldn't be surprised to see college administrations broadly doing what they can to avoid that kind embarrassment.

This was a silent memorial where they can yank your ability to be certified by the bar for character if you do stuff like that. I don't think that was really the concern.
posted by corb at 6:15 PM on October 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

it's pretty strange that the US military is firing shots in anger in multiple countries across the Middle East and it's a relatively minor news story

In the article you linked, the US military never fired any shots in anger. Iranian-backed Houthis fired several missiles which were intercepted by a US Navy warship.

The article you posted is actually relevant to this thread. The US warship was traveling in the Red Sea, and said the missiles overflew their ship, traveling north along the Red Sea presumably on a path towards Israel. The paths these missiles were taking over water seem to be deliberately skirting the Patriot defense coverage over Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis might have been hoping to exploit a gap in coverage and fire missiles into Israel.

The longest ranged missile that the Houthis have used so far (IIRC) is the Burkan-3, which has a range of at least 900 miles - the Houthis managed to strike the petroleum facilities at Ras Tanura on Feb 2021 which is 900 miles from their launch point.

The Houthis have publicly said they have Toufan missiles, can claim it has enough range to strike Israel - perhaps that is what they fired recently along the Red Sea. Iranians back both Hamas and Houthis and supply them with missile technology, and it's not implausible that these attacks are all one and the same.

---

For context, there has been a civil war in Yemen between the Saudi and US backed incumbent government and the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis have launched hundreds of ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia. The US have provided Patriot batteries to Saudi Arabia to intercept these missiles, the same way the US funds and helps manufacture the Iron Dome batteries in Israel to intercept Hamas rockets. (to intercept ballistic missiles, Israel uses a more sophisticated defense system called David's Sling)
posted by xdvesper at 6:21 PM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

anti Israeli and anti semitic sentiment

These are not the same thing. Criticising Israel is not in itself antisemitic. Many of the loudest voices calling for a ceasefire and engaging in protest have been members of the Jewish community. Conflating these things is not helpful.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 6:26 PM on October 19, 2023 [23 favorites]

It's is beyond the campuses.

Concerns for constituents stall Michigan House resolution on war in Gaza.

posted by clavdivs at 6:34 PM on October 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Biden gave a fairly unremarkable address to the nation (YouTube link) giving equal time to Israel and Ukraine. I'd note that, as he's consistently done, he emphasized the humanity of Palestinians and their legitimate rights.

Matthew Yglesias had an interesting piece yesterday pointing out that the Palestinian refugees right to return is not one of those mentioned rights, but its the one the Arab states with Palestinian refugees most care about.

And if you subscribe to the Bulwark, which i don't, JVL had a piece today running thru Bidens response to the crisis.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 6:37 PM on October 19, 2023

The longest ranged missile that the Houthis have used so far (IIRC) is the Burkan-3, which has a range of at least 900 miles - the Houthis managed to strike the petroleum facilities at Ras Tanura on Feb 2021 which is 900 miles from their launch point.

How the heck do the Houthis have better long range missiles than the Ukrainians do? (Yes, obviously the answer is "Iran," but still.)

This was a silent memorial where they can yank your ability to be certified by the bar for character if you do stuff like that. I don't think that was really the concern.

I'm just speculating, but my feeling is that for campus administrators, it's about 2/3 self-interested concern about staying out of the news and out of the controversy, and 1/3 hoping to protect students from getting caught on camera, doxxed, and blacklisted from employment.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:51 PM on October 19, 2023

Israel is within 200-300 miles of the Suez Canal, which supports a lot of oil industry. If Israel is a oil consuming nation's first, and often only, friend in the area, I think it hard to conclusively state oil has nothing to do with said friendship.
posted by Jacen at 7:03 PM on October 19, 2023

Friendly reminder that even a cursory glance on the literature of the geopolitics of oil will show you that oil is a global commodity and exists in a world market.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:09 PM on October 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

If Gaza goes Israel will have full control of undeveloped Gaza Marine 1 and 2 gas fields, both in current Gazan waters.
There's an estimated 36 billion cubic meters of gas (for comparison the recently approved UK North Sea Rosebank field has 38 million cubic meters of oil plus gas)

Per the above post by thatwhichfalls at 7:15 PM on October 17
posted by beaning at 7:49 PM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I feel very confident in saying that for all the reasons, good and bad, that Israel is bombing the shit out of Gaza, the gas fields are not a primary factor.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:03 PM on October 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

accidentally bombing a hospital and pointing the finger elsewhere

That assertion is still unproven.

Is that a glimmer of hope I detect?

These are not the same thing. Criticising Israel is not in itself antisemitic. Many of the loudest voices calling for a ceasefire and engaging in protest have been members of the Jewish community. Conflating these things is not helpful.

I never said they were. There was no conflation. I did say that there's been some awfulness expressed, anti Israeli and anti semitic, that's not very flattering to the institutions where it's being expressed. Which is exactly why I said anti Israeli and anti semitic.

And let's be real here. It doesn't take much for the two to be conflated in a heated demonstration. Which has revealed some real ugliness.

come on folks, they're not bombing the hospitals, they're just bombing the houses, roads, bakeries, stores, and designated escape routes AROUND the hospitals.

Yes, and Hamas can end it all. But they probably won't. Innocent Palestinians will suffer for it.

Gregg Carlstrom of The Economist on Twitter: An analysis of satellite imagery suggests that, after less than two weeks of war, 11,000 buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. "At least 92,000 people will have no home to return to when the fighting stops."

Who would have expected? And it's going to get worse. This was virtually a foregone conclusion when Hamas decided to attack the way they did.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:25 PM on October 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

via Bluesky (alt link): I have no idea why these two paragraphs were deleted from the AP's website, but they're a wire service so they live on in countless other syndicated stories across the web

Four U.S. officials familiar with the discussions said American diplomats became increasingly alarmed by comments from their Israeli counterparts regarding their intention to deny water, food, medicine, electricity and fuel into Gaza, as well as the inevitability of civilian casualties. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity so they could discuss private conversations.

Members of the Israeli security and political establishment told the U.S. diplomats that the eradication of Hamas would require methods used in the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. One official said he and others were told by Israeli counterparts that “a lot of innocent Germans died in WWII” and were reminded of Japanese civilian deaths from the U.S. atomic bombs. Israeli officials have publicly made similar comparisons.

posted by BungaDunga at 9:32 PM on October 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

Yes, and Hamas can end it all. But they probably won't. Innocent Palestinians will suffer for it.

anyone still saying this is simply on the wrong side of history.
posted by JimBennett at 9:35 PM on October 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

Israel approves regulations to shut down foreign news channels (Al Jazeera seems to be the target)
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 3:45 AM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was virtually a foregone conclusion when Hamas decided to attack the way they did.

This isn’t moral, good politics, smart, or even good for this discussion. We should refrain from saying things like, “X group isn’t actually responsible for all the things they do because that was an inevitable response to what Y did” is pretty fucked up in most contexts and specifically this context. Netanyahu has agency. hamas has agency. If you said “it was a foregone conclusion that the cops would shoot an unarmed black male when he chose not to listen to them” you wouldn’t get away with it here. I have no idea why this stands in this context.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:03 AM on October 20, 2023 [25 favorites]

Whoever is choosing the targets for the Israeli airstrikes is just playing atrocity bingo. Hospitals, schools, mosques, apartments, churches... 16 employees of UNRWA have been killed as of today.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:16 AM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is that a glimmer of hope I detect?

I hope the individuals or government officials behind the hospital bombing are made to face justice, when it is determined who was responsible.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:17 AM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Gentle reminder that saying one side is all good or all bad in this complex and layered situation doesn't help the conversation. Please remember to be thoughtful and consider how your words may start or perpetuate an argument, thank you!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:11 AM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

A lot of moving parts lately.

-An Israeli academic posted to Twitter a document (in Hebrew) put out by a right-wing Israeli think tank, headed by Israel's former National Security Adviser. According to him, it provides "a detailed plan for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai." Unclear how much sway this think tank has.

-There are growing tensions within the ADL after the CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote on Twitter regarding anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace "We long have said that these are hate groups, the photo inverse of white supremacists." The ADL has also, in light of Jewish-led protests calling for ceasefire, recently put out a statement that "anti-Zionism is antisemitism." Yet according to this survey, for Jewish Americans under 40, 38% agree with the statement "Israel is an apartheid state" and only 32% think it's antisemitic. Anyway, the next day a researcher at the ADL, Stephen C. Rea, quit over those official statements, and claimed that many within the ADL agree with him.

-What's happening the State Department seems noteworthy. From the article about a mutiny brewing, already linked to above, the senior official who quit is quoting saying “In the last 24 hours, I’ve been getting an immense amount of outreach from colleagues... with really encouraging words of support and a lot of people saying they feel the same way and it’s very difficult for them....My expectation was that no one would want to touch me with a 10-foot barge pole... because of the sensitivity of anything to do with Israel.” The reporting suggests that part of what is happening is that officials, particularly those with ties (personal or professional) to the Middle East, have avoided making their real views on I/P known due to concerns for their career, but this is proving the breaking point for people.

-Everyday, more Palestinians murdered in the West Bank. It's unfortunately hard to imagine this won't eventually escalate unless something is done to stop this, which seems unlikely.
posted by coffeecat at 6:44 AM on October 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Also, polls are showing that Biden has a ~25% approval rating for people under 30 (34 maybe?). Given the sharp drop, Biden's policy toward Israel, and more sympathy toward Palestinians among younger people in the US, theres likely a relationship there.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:44 AM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Galvanic Israel is of special interest to America's government for two (maybe three if we're generous) non oil reasons.

On the Republican side their millinarian mostly Scofield descended or influenced right wing religious base sees Israel not so much as a real place populated by real people but rather as a sort of Bible theme park and, more worryingly, as the trigger for the end of the world. And remember, they WANT the end of the world. Many American evangelicals are desperate for the world to end because they see it as a way to escape death and to acquire super hot sexy healthy bodies (yes, really).

Per Scofield and his intellectual descendants Israel must exist at roughly its Biblical borders and the Temple must be rebuilt (which will require destroying the Dome of the Rock) to prod Jesus and make him kick off Armageddon by blowing up Israel, killing all Jews and sending them to be tortured in hell for failing to be Christian.

None of that involves actually respecting Jewish people or opposing antisemitism, and in fact many of the more virulent "supporters" of Israel on the Republican side are also grotesquely antisemitic. There was a viral video a while back of a Republican voter, in a tshirt that said "I STAND WITH ISRAEL" screaming "Sig Heil" at an actual Israeli Jew who had disagreed with her about universal healthcare.

Plus, of course, "supporting" Israel pisses off a lot of Muslims, so to Republicans that's a bonus.

On the Democratic side Jewish Americans are a reliably Democratic voting block, and so Democratic politicians tend to flatten the complex and often opposing views of Jewish Americns about Israel and its government into "support Israel" because they want to keep those voters happy.

I think it's possible some elected Democrats actually also would like there not to be a second Holocaust and genuinely think supporting Israel is good from a moral standpoint. But that's probably not as important to them as imagining that it keeps Jewish voters happy when they more or less reflexively supporting anything the Israeli government does.

The fact that this demonstorably does NOT please a significant number of Jewish Americans is lost in the noise.

So yes, America "supports" Israel for non-oil reasons, but not for especially good reasons. The Democrats have better reasons than the Republicans, at least Democrats aren't "supporting" Israel because they want it to exist so it can be destroyed in divine fire and brimstone.

But either way there's an unthinking, uncritical, unanalyzed, "support" that mostly amounts to sending war money to Israel and the occasional bit of rhetoric.
posted by sotonohito at 8:00 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think that the younger people are, the more likely they are to use social media in a way that they see stuff from Palestine. (My feeling is that older people who use social media or the internet in this way were probably already at least qualifiedly for Palestinian liberation.

For me, even in the crumbling remains of twitter, almost all my content right now is absolutely horrifying, like scenes from hell. Operations being conducted without anesthetic in spaces that don't even make it to "makeshift operating room", people shrouding their children, people roaming landscapes that are nothing but broken concrete. A number of the people I follow don't usually post gory video even from bad situations, but they are posting it now. So many people I follow, a number in the extended activist milieu here in MPLS, are posting death notice after death notice of their friends and family in Palestine. Anyone can see that it is impossible that any significant number of these people are dangerous militants, even if they buy the idea that it's okay to just bomb residential areas as a war tactic.

Even someone largely uninformed or indifferent to politics can't view these scenes without shame and horror, and can't view US support (and increasingly obvious US lies) with anything but disgust and hatred. Watching the US lie about the situation and back a nightmare civilian-murdering regime in real time is, frankly, going to discredit the US government for many, many younger people. It is giving ordinary, uninterested people a quick version of the political education that you had to get with luck, books and the right social circle before social media. It's not just that it's going to hurt Biden, it's that many, many people are going to move from indifference and go-along-to-get-along feelings toward the government over into disgust, shame and complete disaffection. I'm not saying those people are going to be out there making revolution, but a massive increase in disaffection in already shitty and precarious times is going to change things.
posted by Frowner at 8:00 AM on October 20, 2023 [24 favorites]

Israeli military has 'green light' to move into Gaza, official says

The Israeli military has a "green light" to move into Gaza whenever it's ready, a member of the country’s security cabinet told ABC News.

Hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas, Economy Minister Nir Barakat told ABC News, "even if it takes a year."

Asked about the miles of tunnels Hamas has built under Gaza, he said they’d become the "world’s biggest cemetery."

posted by clawsoon at 8:05 AM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's not just that it's going to hurt Biden, it's that many, many people are going to move from indifference and go-along-to-get-along feelings toward the government over into disgust, shame and complete disaffection.

Come 2024, anyone who votes for the Republic nominee over Biden and cites "policies towards Israel and Gaza" as the reason... was likely already going to vote Republican anyway. Ditto for the House and Senate. "Vote Blue No Matter Who" is trite and reductive but it's still a survival mantra, given how narrow the majorities are.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:32 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

Haaretz: Netanyahu Is Petrified of the Hostages’ Families. It Could Impact His Judgment

In his last statement to the nation on Saturday evening, Netanyahu claimed to have spoken to those “who lost their loved ones or whose fate is unknown,” but no actual family member of a hostage was identified as having spoken to him.

On Sunday he finally met a group of representatives from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, when suddenly a man who claimed to also be a relative of a hostage entered the meeting and started praising the prime minister and saying he trusted any decision he makes.

It has since emerged that the man is a far-right activist with ties to members of the Netanyahu family but no known ties to the hostages. The man’s wife, meanwhile, had organized a counter-protest outside the Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv, opposite the families’ vigil. Some of the protesters screamed abuse at the forum members.

posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:52 AM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

sotonohito---any discussion of Why the US supports Israel without mentioning the Israel lobby is missing the elephant in the room.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:41 AM on October 20, 2023

Came here to post the link Glegrinof just did; it's a sharply opinionated analysis from a few days ago of the various forces at work in Israel about the hostages:

What is even more striking is that they [hostages' families] have appointed their own negotiators: former senior officials in the Shin Bet security service and Mossad, with extensive contacts in the Arab world. That’s how low their confidence is in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

There's a lot in the piece, including critiques of the slowness of assistance to the families and distrust of far-right finance minister Smotrich ("there's no such thing as the Palestinian people" is his most famous recent statement):

On Monday, Netanyahu finally got around to appointing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to head a “socioeconomic cabinet” that will handle these issues. However, his appointment is unlikely to go down well with the kibbutzniks from southern Israel, who rightly see Smotrich as a far-right religious politician focused on his own community’s narrow interests.

Indeed, before his appointment, there were reports from a number of finance journalists that Smotrich was pressuring officials in the treasury to rush payments to religious organizations and communities, who had been promised lavish funding in the governing coalition agreements, before the inevitable freeze on all non-war-related, special interest spending. That is not going to endear him with those who are now in dire need of assistance.

A recent article also noted there's been tension in the past between the kibbutzim in the south and the rest of Israel, with the towns being seen as less important (can't find it now). And a piece at Ha'aretz today discusses in more depth the right-wing government's abandonment of the Gaza towns, shipping their weapons to the West Bank settlements instead, which is a major theme among some of the folks angry at Netanyahu, The IDF Took Away Weapons From Gaza Border Communities in Recent Years, and Armed West Bank Settlers in the Thousands:

In recent years the IDF decided to change priorities in handing out weapons to local security details – the northern and southern border locales had many weapons taken away, while the settlements and illegal outposts were armed with thousands of weapons. Thus, the number of weapons in the south, from Ashdod to Eilat, dropped to 800, including the 57 locales close to the Gaza Border.

Along the northern border the number dropped to 900. The situation resulting is that entire locales in the north and the south were left with one or two weapons, while in the outposts and settlements, the ratio of guns to residents increased and was much higher...locales at a distance of four to seven kilometers from the [Gaza] fence had their weapons taken, leaving the locales with only two rifles apiece.

Some hostage families are also angry at the humanitarian aid being allowed into Gaza (ridiculously limited though it is), asking instead why the government isn't working to get the hostages food and medicine first; others are furious at reports that soldiers are being sent to battle without enough helmets and bulletproof vests (shades of the U.S. rush to invade Iraq; old leaders are always in such a hurry to send young people to war, sigh). So, a lot of different angry strains running through this.

(Sorry for not linking archive sites for Ha'aretz; archive.ph, archive.is, etc are all looping endless captchas for me right now, maybe they'll work for you. I simply went ahead and subscribed for a month for $14; it's been worth it.)
posted by mediareport at 10:10 AM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

2 U.S. hostages have been released by Hamas - a mother and daughter - with Qatar's mediation. Red Cross says they have them.
posted by mediareport at 10:44 AM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Here's the full interview with Egyptian TV host Bassem Youssef on Piers Morgan's Youtube channel, since progosk's links above weren't working for me. Youssef is very good throughout the half hour, even if it devolves into loud crosstalk a few times, as these things often do.
posted by mediareport at 11:29 AM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Al-Jazeera reports the Israeli military is once again demanding the immediate evacuation of the Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City:

Israeli military told director of Al-Quds Hospital to evacuate or bear consequences

Dr Bashar Murad...got a call from the Israeli army telling him to instantly evacuate the hospital and everyone in it to the southern Strip...‘I replied to that person from the Israeli army, I said, ‘If you want us to evacuate, please provide us with the necessary buses and transportation means so that we can evacuate over 12,000 people and patients to the south and make a place for us.” He told me that the person speaking to him from the Israeli army started shouting and he told him you can bear the consequences if you do not evacuate and hung up.

More:

Many patients at Al-Quds Hospital in intensive care, children: Palestine Red Crescent

Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, has said an Israeli demand to evacuate the Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City is impossible. “We have around 500 patients, many are in the intensive care unit, most in the intensive care unit are children,” she told Al Jazeera. “Many, many are in critical are condition and they are connected to life support machines. There’s no way to evacuate them safely.

“This will put their lives into danger...evacuation orders for hospitals are impossible to implement. They constitute a death penalty for all the patients.”

More from Palestine Red Crescent spokesperson

“We have received earlier three different threats, but today the threat was so much clearer: ‘Immediate evacuation, Al-Quds Hospital will be bombarded.’ We as a humanitarian organisation, we will not put the lives of our patients into danger. We will not neglect and just turn our back on 12,000 civilians who are now at the hospital. They don’t have anywhere to go to because of the continuous bombardment."
posted by mediareport at 12:07 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Forensic Architecture group, " an independent university-based research agency undertaking media and spatial research into state and corporate violence", has concluded (twitter thread) that the hospital was hit by an artillery shell and not by a rocket motor.
posted by Rumple at 12:35 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

State Dept official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest this week, noted that Leahy vetting routinely flags the IDF's human rights violations, but they get ignored by State Dept's senior leadership.

Important context as Biden announces $14 billion more in military aid to Israel.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 12:48 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

re: Forensic Analysis - if you want your analysis to be seen as objective and fact based its probably best not to end it with "[we] reaffirm our solidarity with the Palestinian people under attack" and refer to the IDF as the IOF, which is how Palestinian advocacy groups refer to the IDF.
posted by Justinian at 1:03 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Since I know somebody will take issue, it is not a bad thing to be an advocacy group for Palestinians! But it's no more an objective third party analysis than the IDF's analysis which people rightly view skeptically.
posted by Justinian at 1:04 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

if you want your analysis to be seen as objective and fact based

Because relying on the IDF for info is "objective and fact-based", right?
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:09 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I literally just said that the IDF's analysis is rightly viewed skeptically in the comment one above yours.
posted by Justinian at 1:10 PM on October 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

In fairness, Justinian also said, "(not vouching for the truth of their position for obvious reasons, but that's the official position. Or at least a publicly stated position by the Israeli military)" after the comment Pseudonymous Cognomen linked to.
posted by kensington314 at 1:12 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

If someone killed my child I’d want bloody revenge. But I’d be wrong – as is the Israeli government

When I was nine, my kind, gregarious neighbour Barry, a Jewish man, died of leukaemia. His family sat shiva, as is custom in Judaism after a death, and we joined them. I visited, and have treasured that memory all my life, and when my own son died of brain cancer five years ago, I let it guide me in how we handled the days following Henry’s death. Barry’s memory was indeed a spectacular blessing.

When I was 30, my friend Mahir’s father died, and afterward Mahir generously walked my wife and me step by step through the Muslim rituals of mourning and burial; how he attended and washed and shrouded his father, then personally buried him in the earth. We were rapt. When our son died, we had a beautiful template of intimacy to follow, thanks to the love of a Muslim son for his father.

I think I am saying that Jewish and Muslim ghosts guided me better during my time of greatest pain than today’s presidents and prime minsters and newspaper owners are guiding us today.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:16 PM on October 20, 2023 [12 favorites]

It's not like the IDF doesn't have a history of this exact thing.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:17 PM on October 20, 2023

Yes, both Hamas and Israel have previously killed civilians and then lied about it.
posted by Justinian at 1:19 PM on October 20, 2023

But it's no more an objective third party analysis than the IDF's analysis which people rightly view skeptically.

Ugh, what? the IDF is on the same level of objectivity w/r/t whether they dropped a bomb on a hospital and killed 500 people as an independent academic research institution dedicated to the study of political violence that also expresses solidatiry with the Palstinians? They're not more objective than the IDF? Give me a break.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:29 PM on October 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

When most people say 'objective' in a context like this, I think they mean to exclude the actual belligerents. As in 'objective observer.' So maybe this org is more or less objective than another; but the IDF is presumptively not.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:54 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ex-Israeli prime minister suggests Gaza's Shifa hospital a target

Barak said: "The central command post of Hamas is... in a bunker underneath the Shifa hospital.

"First of all, it's a matter of fact, it's known to everyone who knows the Middle East - every reporter that lives in Gaza or in Israel - knows that the command post of Hamas in Gaza is underneath."

When challenged on the claim, and told that no one besides the Israeli army was aware of such information and that a strike on the Shifa hospital could lead to a catastrophic number of deaths, Barak doubled down...

"I cannot promise you for sure that at a certain point we won't impose taking the patients out and passing them to another installation where they can be treated safely and then destroy the command post of Hamas."

posted by clawsoon at 2:11 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hamas and IJ are firing 700-1000 rockets per day. The rockets have a minimal guidance system and a target area probable that often includes Gaza. They also have a failure rate of at least 10% from the limited data out there. When they fail they often land in Gaza. At the current rate of fire 70-100 50kg warheads are going to be hitting parts of Gaza every day. Israel has been dropping bombs at about 200 targets a day.

Any reported strike on gaza has a 20-30% chance of being from Hamas and a 70-80% of being Israel absent any other information.
posted by interogative mood at 2:13 PM on October 20, 2023

Barak said: "The central command post of Hamas is... in a bunker underneath the Shifa hospital.

Is the Shifa hospital the one that got bombed/rocketed/whatevered where everyone agrees that someone else did it? Or was that a different hospital?
posted by Flunkie at 2:33 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Al-Ahli is the hospital with the disputed explosion.

Al-Shifa is "the largest medical complex and central hospital in the Gaza Strip, located in the neighbourhood of North Rimal in Gaza City".

I went looking for more info and found Gaza Under Fire [PDF] from Medical Aid for Palestinians. It took me a while of reading through all the accounts of hospitals and disability centres being attacked before I realized that the report is from 2014.
posted by clawsoon at 3:33 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

As of October 20:
22 journalists were confirmed dead: 18 Palestinian, 3 Israeli, and 1 Lebanese.
8 journalists were reported injured.
3 journalists were reported missing or detained.

CPJ is also investigating numerous unconfirmed reports of other journalists being killed, missing, detained, hurt or threatened, and of damage to media offices and journalists’ homes.
posted by adamvasco at 5:40 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Biden and Aides Advise Israel to Avoid Striking Hezbollah

U.S. officials learned that the Israeli defense minister and other military officials supported a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been cautious.

I assume this stuff showing up in the media is the White House's version of pulling the fire alarm.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:43 PM on October 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

"After over 15 years of having a Youtube account, now, while Israel is genociding Palestinians, Youtube has suddenly closed my account completely.

This is not coincidental. I had many videos which I took in Gaza, under Israel's bombs in 2009 & 2012..."

posted by urbanwhaleshark at 6:44 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

(further down it does say that "fears have receded for now because Mr. Netanyahu cooled to the idea" so maybe no longer immediately on the cards, but good grief)
posted by BungaDunga at 6:45 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

France’s military intelligence agency has concluded that a misfiring Palestinian rocket was the likely cause of the deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza [aljazeera]
posted by porpoise at 8:04 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Israel has admitted bombing the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church saying they were targeting a building nearby and missed. They say are reviewing targeting procedures. Of course this is a foreseeable consequence of bombing a city and waging war. War is horrible.
posted by interogative mood at 9:38 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

AP visual analysis: Rocket from Gaza appeared to go astray, likely caused deadly hospital explosion.
posted by mazola at 10:04 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Israel has admitted bombing the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church...

Could you link to your source? Lies are saturating everything, so general statements don't help.
posted by netowl at 10:54 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Any reported strike on Gaza has a 20-30% chance of being from Hamas and a 70-80% of being Israel absent any other information.

There's also some irony about them complaining about the alleged 471 deaths at the al-Ahli hospital from a small rocket (which more and more evidence points to being self inflicted) when they're launching 700 per day into Israel without knowing where they will land.

The 30% figure seems to be backed up AP's own past investigations. In Aug 2022, during a round of fighting that killed 46 Palestinians in Gaza, AP investigated 3 explosions which killed 15 of those 46 and said evidence point towards them being self-inflicted. In video aftermath footage of a strike in a refugee camp, a rocket casing could be seen sticking out of the ground. But when AP visited, the casing was gone and the hole had been filled in dirt, a sharp contrast to the usual display of evidence of Israeli airstrikes to international media. In all cases they occurred exactly as they were launching rockets from a nearby site towards Israel.

Even the ATACM missiles that Ukraine have been "secretly" supplied are impossible to hide - with large chunks of intact missile with even the date of manufacture clearly written on it found after the recent strikes on Russian airfields.

Netowl - Reuters article which states - "The Israeli military said a part of the church was damaged in a strike on a militant command centre"

At least for now, as news agencies Associated Press and Reuters are (mostly) maintaining their image as the gold standard in truth and unbiased reporting, but I already see some people openly distrusting their reporting.
posted by xdvesper at 11:03 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

Reuters article which states - "The Israeli military said a part of the church was damaged in a strike on a militant command centre and it was reviewing the incident."

Thanks for that. The Reuters article doesn't cite anything, but they generally don't. I trust Reuters enough that even though it's hand-wavy, there must be something there if I dug enough. Truth comes from trust, and I don't want to give up on truth.
posted by netowl at 12:13 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Shutting down the Palestinian voice in America:
Widespread attempts to suppress pro-Palestinian views in the US after the Hamas attack on Israel have forced the cancellation of major conferences, prompted demands for the dismissal of workers who express support for Palestinians and led to intimidation campaigns against Arab American voices critical of Israeli policies.
posted by adamvasco at 2:44 AM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Not just in the United States:

Since the War, Events About Palestinian Culture Have Been Called Off

They are among a growing number of events highlighting Palestinian culture, society and politics that have been called off or put on hold since the war began. A concert of young Palestinian musicians was indefinitely postponed in London. The Boston Palestine Film Festival decided not to hold live screenings and went online. And in one of the most high-profile cancellations, a German literary organization called off an awards ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair to honor the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli.

Some organizers said they were calling off the Palestinian-themed events because of security concerns. Others cited sensitivity, calling the cancellations and postponements understandable, if unfortunate, responses at a moment when emotions are raw: The Hamas attack killed at least 1,400 Israelis in what President Biden called “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” and since then Israeli strikes have killed more than 4,100 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

But some fear that the net effect will be to muzzle events, and voices, that might have promoted greater understanding at a key moment in the history of the region.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:07 AM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Associated Press and Reuters are (mostly) maintaining their image as the gold standard in truth and unbiased reporting

It is unfortunate the AP cites members of the US intelligence community, when our country has an open and vested interest in one side over another. The United States' long history of outright lying in order to start bloody and expensive wars would otherwise seem to require (if not demand) a higher level of scrutiny by a genuinely reputable news outlet using it as a source.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:59 AM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

First trucks carrying aid for Palestinians cross Rafah border crossing into Gaza

The border crossing between Egypt and Gaza opened on Saturday to let desperately needed aid flow to Palestinians for the first time since Israel sealed off the territory...

Egypt's state-owned Al-Qahera news, which is close to security agencies, said just 20 trucks had crossed into Gaza out of more than 200 trucks carrying roughly 3,000 tons of aid that have been positioned near the crossing for days...

But Cindy McCain, the head of the UN's World Food Program, said the aid was insufficient.

"The situation is catastrophic in Gaza," she said. "We need many, many, many more trucks and a continual flow of aid."

In the radio report, they said that hundreds of trucks per day are needed to meet the need.
posted by clawsoon at 4:14 AM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Reminder that Hamas is not the same as all Palestinians, or all Palestinians in the West Bank. Thus describing injuries caused by Hamas rocket misfires as “self-inflicted” without evidence of any damage to Hamas-specific facilities is inaccurate and needlessly inflammatory.
posted by eviemath at 4:26 AM on October 21, 2023 [24 favorites]

Meanwhile Israeli ethnic cleansing continues on the West Bank
“This was already the most significant displacement we’ve seen since the 1970s. Now you have seen two villages abandoned in one week,” Shaul said. “This is on steroids.”
Herder settlers living near the village of al-Mu’arrajat had begun stopping Palestinians, asking for their IDs and telling them they had 24 hours to leave their homes
posted by adamvasco at 5:21 AM on October 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Meanwhile: "⚡️Aerial photos of the #Yemeni human flood during the mobilization and mobilization march in support of the #Palestinian people in the capital, Sana’a."
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 7:07 AM on October 21, 2023

Of course this is a foreseeable consequence of bombing a city

Which, "of course," is a great reason to stop bombing a city.
posted by mediareport at 9:01 AM on October 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

the net effect will be to muzzle events, and voices, that might have promoted greater understanding at a key moment in the history of the region.

I continue to be struck by the similarities with the aftermath of 9/11. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got furious pushback when it required incoming freshfolks to read the book "Approaching the Qu'ran", a thoughtful look at the early surahs. The rage at being asked to examine Islam was disgusting; the court case the furious ones brought lost, twice, but the chilling effect stuck.

The same dynamic is at play now. It's striking, for sure.
posted by mediareport at 9:16 AM on October 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

Come 2024, anyone who votes for the Republic nominee over Biden and cites "policies towards Israel and Gaza" as the reason... was likely already going to vote Republican anyway. Ditto for the House and Senate. "Vote Blue No Matter Who" is trite and reductive but it's still a survival mantra, given how narrow the majorities are.

The concern isn't that there'll be some mass pro-GOP surge among younger progressives. It's that they'll refrain from voting altogether out of a sense that the US state is beyond salvaging. And, by extension, that the far right will weaponize these sentiments to their own purposes if they aren't already.
posted by non canadian guy at 11:28 AM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Criticising Israel is not in itself antisemitic. Many of the loudest voices calling for a ceasefire and engaging in protest have been members of the Jewish community. Conflating these things is not helpful.

Indeed, I would be so bold as to suggest that even being militantly anti-Zionist isn't inherently synonymous with antisemitism, though of course they can be (and too often are) coexistent.
posted by non canadian guy at 11:35 AM on October 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

One key component of this conflict is the denial of the right of Jewish people to have their own country in the Levant. I think this point of view — that Israel is illegitimate — is antisemitic.

When people start claiming that Israelis are colonizers as part of their criticism then they are being antisemitic.

Ultimately this conflict is about two nations and how they will set a border between them. How they may each enjoy security within those borders, their economic relationship. How they will manage shared resources like water, holy places. fishing, etc. Along with a few other issues like refugees who have been displaced by the multiple wars in this conflict.

It is possible to criticize Israel’s conduct without being antisemetic, but you need to focus on these issues; not as hominem attacks or denial of the underlying legitimacy of Jewish people in Israel to have their country.
posted by interogative mood at 12:48 PM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Just to add to my previous comment. As with other forms of racism it is very easy for people to say something racist without intent or awareness. Often when accused of saying or doing something racist people will argue intent. Unfortunately to the victim of racism the experience is the same. Listen and learn instead of being defensive. That’s the way to not be racist.
posted by interogative mood at 1:02 PM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

When people start claiming that Israelis are colonizers as part of their criticism then they are being antisemitic.

No, they aren't; Zionism is not Judaism. Zionism is a settler colonial enterprise built on a foundation of 19th century romantic nationalism. If Israel is not a settler colonial state then the term has no meaning whatever. And the notion that anyone has some sort of god-given right to territory because some of their ancestors lived there 2000 years ago is frankly absurd. By that standard I should be able to claim land in France because my Huguenot ancestors got kicked out 350 years ago.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:03 PM on October 21, 2023 [29 favorites]

When people start claiming that Israelis are colonizers as part of their criticism then they are being antisemitic.

The government-enforced settlements in the occupied territories sure seems like a hallmark of colonialism to me. Do you think I'm antisemetic because I think that? Or are you just saying "Ahah, but I said 'Israelis', and you conflated that with the government of Israel, so you're saying that all Israelis are colonialists!"?
posted by Flunkie at 1:07 PM on October 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

Zionists ARE colonizers. I'll quote a r/AskHistorians answer so people can click thru and see the sources used:

In contrast, other academics will counter that Palestinians weren’t necessarily against Jews living in Palestine (often noting the long history of relatively positive relations between Jews and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire) but objected to Zionist colonialism. The Zionist movement at the time was VERY open about its colonial nature, stating as late as 1942 in their official program “Their pioneering achievements in agriculture and industry, embodying new patterns of cooperative endeavor, have written a notable page in the history of colonization.”

The first step in the cycle of violence was to come to the Levant, not as immigrants who would integrate with the local population, but as settlers who would disrupt and evict them. In the 1800s and early 1900s this was entirely unremarkable. A lot of ethnic cleansings were going on at the time.

Here's another r/AskHistorians answer to Why did they split Palestine and Israel in that awful way? which I also found useful.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 1:11 PM on October 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

Disturbing to see the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and assembly in Europe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/21/israel-news-hamas-war-gaza-updates/#link-LGLTW3GB6FABDOKULO675XAQ7Y
posted by kensington314 at 1:27 PM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ultimately this conflict is about two nations and how they will set a border between them. How they may each enjoy security within those borders, their economic relationship. How they will manage shared resources like water, holy places. fishing, etc. Along with a few other issues like refugees who have been displaced by the multiple wars in this conflict.

There’s a distinction to be made between nation and state (see, for example, Quebec and the various Indigenous nations within Canada). Arguably Palestine is a nation, but it is most definitely not its own state. The Israeli government currently does most of what a state would do for Palestinians: controlling entry and exit, controlling basic resources, determining land area encompassed by the state borders, etc. This comment assumes a two-state solution, but part of the sticking point in the present is that’s not the current situation, yet neither are Palestinians citizens of Israel.

Arguably, when one country controls another region and its population in the manner that a state would but without that region being a full part of the country and without its population being citizens, the region is typically referred to as a colony of the country. Exceptions do include recognized Indigenous nations within Western states, where the land area is not fully separate and maybe two sets of laws apply in some cases, though in all such cases that I know of, Indigenous populations are also citizens of the country (and the whole situation arose due to past colonialism). Technically any state or ethnic group can colonize another, even though most examples we might typically think of are of Europeans colonizers. But Japan and China have both been colonizers at various points in their history, for example (colonization is thus not synonymous with white supremacy). And over the long arc of human history, there are certainly some groups who colonized other regions at some points, while themselves being colonized at other points (especially in the Middle East). Colonization is just a description of a specific power/control arrangement between a state and another region and population that is separate but not quite an independent state.
posted by eviemath at 2:05 PM on October 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

'I will never vote Biden': Some Muslim Americans in a key swing state feel betrayed by the president'
posted by clavdivs at 2:26 PM on October 21, 2023

'I will never vote Biden': Some Muslim Americans in a key swing state feel betrayed by the president'

Not just Muslims; latest polling has Biden at 25% approval among voters under 35 (a demographic which is notably more sympathetic to Palestinians than older groups).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:44 PM on October 21, 2023

Of all the reasons to push harder to protect Palestinians, polling seems like the worst one. If he was seen as insufficiently supportive of Israel there would also be important groups that got angry. I wouldn't call that a reason to push harder for Israel, either.

The polling from a few days ago had something like 44% of respondents saying he was providing Israel around the right amount of support. Then the other half was split between "not enough support" and "too much support". That is not an issue where you're going to come out with a big political win no matter what you do.

Which is why he should probably do what he thinks is the correct thing whether it polls great or not 'cause I would prefer he not conduct foreign policy based on polling.
posted by Justinian at 2:55 PM on October 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

73.5% of Israelis are Jewish. 21% are Arabs, and the remaining 5.5% are unclassified. Arab Israeli citizens have the same rights as Jewish citizens and are represented in the Knesset.

31.8% of Israelis are estimated to be Ashkenazi, although this includes some groups who identify as Sephardi. 44.9% are Mizrahi, which roughly means they come from east of Israel.

People who characterize Israel as a settler colonial state frequently treat it as though it is made up entirely of 'white' Ashkenazi Jews. If you look only at the development of the Zionist movement in 19th century Europe, then I do think it's a legitimate historical question. The movement only really picked up speed among Ashkenazi Jews after the Holocaust, when those who survived had nowhere to go. This ignores the huge percentage of the Israeli population who trace their heritage to Jews in the Arab world who were expelled and fled to Israel. It serves the interests of anti-Zionists to paint all Israelis as white colonialists to be equated to the European colonialists of the 15th-17th centuries. I think it's fair to say that the situation is more nuanced than that.
posted by cosmic owl at 2:57 PM on October 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

(Here's the polling I referred to, from CBS/Yougov. There's something for everyone in there. For instance, 52% of people think he should not send weapons to Israel.)
posted by Justinian at 2:59 PM on October 21, 2023

interogative mood If Israel wasn't founded by colonizers then where did all those Palestinian people come from and why are they in Israel?
posted by sotonohito at 2:59 PM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Escalation For Hezbollah, heating up the Lebanon-Israel border has a clear purpose, Kassem said: “We are trying to weaken the Israeli enemy and let them know that we are ready.” Hamas officials have said that if Israel starts a ground offensive in Gaza, Hezbollah will join the fighting.

Tonight Israeli jet strikes were the first time that Israeli jets struck targets inside of Lebanon since the start of border clashes on 8 October, amid Israel's war on Gaza.
posted by adamvasco at 3:06 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

DeSantis Says He Would Cancel Student Visas of Hamas Sympathizers

In a competition of hawkish messages on Israel, Ron DeSantis pledged on Friday night to revoke the student visas of Hamas sympathizers if elected president, while Tim Scott said he would withhold Pell grants from universities that failed to stamp out antisemitism.

At an Iowa showcase featuring most of the top Republican presidential contenders, the Florida governor and the South Carolina senator engaged in one-upmanship about who would best support Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally.

With their focus on students and academic institutions, they repackaged a traditional line of attack for Republicans: that liberal college campuses foster “woke” extremism, which they said was now taking the form of anti-Israel expressions.

“You see students demonstrating in our country in favor of Hamas,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Remember, some of them are foreigners.”
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:07 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

People who characterize Israel as a settler colonial state frequently treat it as though it is made up entirely of 'white' Ashkenazi Jews.

No-one here has said that.

If you look only at the development of the Zionist movement in 19th century Europe, then I do think it's a legitimate historical question.

The ongoing settlement project in the occupied territories makes it much more than a historical question. (Colonisers don't need to be "white".)
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:07 PM on October 21, 2023 [18 favorites]

92NY Pulls Event With Acclaimed Writer Who Criticized Israel

92NY, one of New York City’s premier cultural venues, decided on Friday to abruptly pull an event that evening featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen after he signed an open letter critical of Israel, drawing criticism that the organization was stifling dissenting voices.

The event at 92NY, formerly known as the 92nd Street Y, was to have featured Nguyen in conversation with the novelist Min Jin Lee about his new memoir, “A Man of Two Faces,” in an auditorium on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that seats roughly 900. But on Friday afternoon, after the Y said it would no longer go ahead with the event, the talk’s organizer, Bernard Schwartz, who leads the Y’s poetry center, moved it to a bookstore in Lower Manhattan where it drew a standing-room crowd of about 100...

In his introduction at the event, Schwartz, who has led 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center since 2005, called the Y’s decision “unacceptable.” Both Nguyen and Lee, he noted, have engaged with questions of war, memory, identity and trauma in their work.

“Who else in a moment like this would you want to hear from?” he asked.

The event was the latest example of cultural fallout over the Israel-Hamas war, which has led to complex debates across college campuses and cultural organizations about free expression, solidarity and the limits of permitted debate over Israel. Events featuring Palestinian artists or culture have been canceled, some statements of support for Palestinians have drawn debate and the leaders of some institutions have been criticized for what is seen as the failure to adequately acknowledge either Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians or Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:13 PM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

No-one here has said that.

It's never said half as clearly as I said it, of course. But I see it constantly. Here is something someone said up-thread:

And the notion that anyone has some sort of god-given right to territory because some of their ancestors lived there 2000 years ago is frankly absurd. By that standard I should be able to claim land in France because my Huguenot ancestors got kicked out 350 years ago.

This is antisemitic. It doesn't matter how it was intended. This is straight-forwardly antisemitic. It acts as though all Jewish connection to the land of Israel was severed with the destruction of the Second Temple. There have been Jews in Israel continuously for the past two millennia. There is not a single year in those 2,000 when there were not Jews in Israel. The history of the past 2,000 years is a history of Jews returning to Israel, most of them getting killed, and more coming. There are families in Israel that can trace their heritage back 2,000 years in the same town. I'm not defending Israel. I'm not defending a single action that Israel has taken since its establishment. I think even one dead gentile is too high a cost for a Jewish state. But I cannot be silent about the antisemitism on this site. There is a problem here.
posted by cosmic owl at 3:28 PM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

There have been Jews in Israel continuously for the past two millennia

So what? The Palestinians are descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Roman Palestine who first converted to Christianity and then to Islam. Why do they have no right to the territory they've continuously occupied?
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:38 PM on October 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

And the notion that anyone has some sort of god-given right to territory because some of their ancestors lived there 2000 years ago is frankly absurd.

I don't think most people are arguing that, the way most people see it, the legitimacy of Israel as a nation isn't too different from Australia or the US or any other nation in the world. Neither Palestinians nor Israelis would be able to use that claim, logically.

73.5% of Israelis are Jewish. 21% are Arabs, and the remaining 5.5% are unclassified. Arab Israeli citizens have the same rights as Jewish citizens and are represented in the Knesset.

31.8% of Israelis are estimated to be Ashkenazi, although this includes some groups who identify as Sephardi. 44.9% are Mizrahi, which roughly means they come from east of Israel.

And I think it's worth noting this (and the population of Gaza) in stark contrast to the experience of Jews in the surrounding nations - there were over 50,000 Jews in Yemen, and now there is just 1 remaining, and he is imprisoned. Sure, some left due to pull factors, but there were many who were subject to well documented racial violence, property confiscation, imprisonment, etc. That's what a "genocide" looks like, despite people throwing out the word carelessly in this thread to characterize Israel's actions.

It's a low bar to clear but if Israel were serious about genocide and acted like literally any of their neighbouring 20 countries in the region, I guarantee you there would not be a SINGLE Arab remaining in either Israel proper or the West Bank / Gaza Strip / Golan Heights today.

That is at least one reason why the US continues to support Israel, in fact, must continue to support Israel.
posted by xdvesper at 3:40 PM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Arab Israeli citizens have the same rights as Jewish citizens and are represented in the Knesset.

This is a popular claim, but it is not true in a number of important ways.

Yes, they have representation in the Knesset, but nothing like the 21% their population size would suggest. (This part is not specific to Israel, but a common problem with under-representing minorities in many democratic systems.)

The unique ways in which they do NOT have the same legal rights as Jewish citizens are mostly tied up in two things: The Law of Return and the Israel Land Authority.
posted by bcd at 3:46 PM on October 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

I think it's pretty clear that "the notion that anyone has some sort of god-given right to territory because some of their ancestors lived there 2000 years ago is frankly absurd" is not meant to apply to people whose direct ancestors have been living there uninterrupted ever since that time.

Saying this is "straightforwardly antisemitic" because of this seems like a misrepresentation based on a completely unreasonable reading of the claim.
posted by Flunkie at 3:46 PM on October 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

Arab Israeli citizens have the same rights as Jewish citizens and are represented in the Knesset

What to Know About the Arab Citizens of Israel

Today, nearly all Arab towns and cities have lower standards of living than those that are predominantly Jewish. This separation and socioeconomic disparity fuel intense debate. Some analysts argue that Israel has effectively established an unjust, segregated society. “Technically you don’t have redlining, technically you don’t have formal, Jim Crow–type segregation. In practice you do,” says Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi. Conversely, Arik Rudnitzky of the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) tells CFR that terms such as “segregation,” “de facto separation,” or the more conservative “voluntary separation” reflect individual worldviews, but that there is no expert consensus on how to characterize this separation...

Israel’s establishment as an explicitly Jewish state is a primary point of contention, with many of the state’s critics arguing that this by nature casts non-Jews as second-class citizens with fewer rights. The 1950 Law of Return, for example, grants all Jews, as well as their children, grandchildren, and spouses, the right to move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship. Non-Jews do not have these rights...

Statistics from IDI show that Arab citizens of Israel continue to face structural disadvantages. For example, poorly funded schools in their localities contribute to their attaining lower levels of education and their reduced employment prospects and earning power compared to Israeli Jews. More than half of the country’s Arab families were considered poor in 2020, compared to 40 percent of Jewish families. Socioeconomic disparities between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens are less pronounced in mixed cities, though a government audit in July 2022 found Arabs had less access to municipal services in those cities.

Arab citizens’ concerns about inequality mounted after Israel passed its nation-state law in 2018. Among other provisions, the law removed Arabic as an official language but gave it a “special status,” declared Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people, and said the Jewish people have a unique “right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel.” The language left many Arabs feeling that their rights as citizens were being undermined.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:50 PM on October 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

Thus describing injuries caused by H̶a̶m̶a̶s̶ Islamic jihad rocket misfires as “self-inflicted” without evidence of any damage to H̶a̶m̶a̶s̶ Islamic jihad -specific facilities is inaccurate and needlessly inflammatory.
posted by clavdivs at 2:24 PM on October 21

Don’t do this. Write your own comment explaining why you think I’ve used the wrong group name. Given this specific thread, including supporting links would likely be helpful. There’s enough unintentional twisting of people’s words already due to the large gap between perspectives and narratives on this issue; don’t do it intentionally and literally.
posted by eviemath at 4:02 PM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

More in the propaganda war:

Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida says he informed Qatar it was going to release two Israeli captives, but Israeli authorities refused...

“We will not refer to mendacious propaganda by Hamas. We will continue to do everything necessary to bring all the kidnapped and missing back home,” Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement...

Israel’s military denies it is telling civilians in north Gaza they will be considered “terrorists” if they do not heed evacuation orders. The military, in a post in English on X, said: "The translation from Arabic that has now spread across platforms is imprecise..."

posted by clawsoon at 4:05 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

it's not antisemetic because Israel has 2,000,000 Palestinians held in a concentration camp. anything beyond that is just moral calculus to excuse your own biases.

I don't know how to interpret this except as saying it is impossible to be antisemitic when discussing Israel.
posted by cosmic owl at 4:42 PM on October 21, 2023

One key component of this conflict is the denial of the right of Jewish people to have their own country in the Levant. I think this point of view — that Israel is illegitimate — is antisemitic.

So, I don't believe any state whatsoever is "legitimate". Am I automatically antisemitic by this definition?
posted by corb at 4:58 PM on October 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

I don't know how to interpret this except as saying it is impossible to be antisemitic when discussing Israel.

Maybe you should interpret it as "criticisms of the policy of the state of Israel and of the Zionist project are not in themselves inherently antisemitic" (which they aren't; you know what IS antisemitic? Conflating Israel/Zionism and Judaism).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 5:06 PM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd love to hear more about how those aid trucks are doing.
posted by krisjohn at 5:16 PM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

if an illegitimate State recognizes you do you accept that recognition. (rhetorical)

that Israel is illegitimate — is antisemitic.

I disagree with this statement because it's a matter of statehood, of polity despite religiosity and it's adherent social constructs.

apologies eviemath, I think you know that I know that you know that I know better. a damn fine dressing down though. one thing I've observed though is sometimes people can use symbols like a repeating comment and I get that, but they somehow become a simile.
posted by clavdivs at 5:20 PM on October 21, 2023

Few comments removed, "taking a break" means not coming back to make the same comments. Please take the night off.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:22 PM on October 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

clear example what I meant by simile is this. an American, who was a Japanese prisoner of war, helps write a book called Laughter in Hell. the question is is it funny. funny itself is a difficult word how about levity. humanity. In 1945 no one wanted to read a book like that as it took time roughly10 years for a book like that to be written. the problem with comparing this the current war is that happened a long time ago.
I do not believe one could write a book about this subject in the same context of this war.
posted by clavdivs at 5:34 PM on October 21, 2023

“The message the Arab world is hearing is loud and clear,” King Abdullah II of Jordan said in his remarks. “Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli ones. Our lives matter less than other lives. The application of international law is optional, and human rights have boundaries — they stop at borders, they stop at races and they stop at religions.”

Whatever goodwill Israel had slowly built up behind the scenes with neighbors seems to have evaporated, in the country's seemingly inexorable pursuit to make many or all of the same mistakes as the United States after 9/11.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:41 PM on October 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

One key component of this conflict is the denial of the right of Jewish people to have their own country in the Levant.

Reading is important! Did you know there are orthodox Jewish who live in Israel and are extremely anti-Zionist? They don’t think Israel should exist. Also, the Haganah leadership were iffy on statehood until the mid 1940s. Milsteins four volume official history of the 1948 war is really useful here. Was Ben Gurion antisemitic before he wanted a Jewish state and then not when he did?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:32 PM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Where did all the Palestinian people come from. Well there was a backwater region of the Ottoman Empire that was administered from Damascus and included much of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel, Gaza and the West bank. There was a demographic mix that was split between Jews, Sunni and Shi’a Arab Muslims, Armenians. Turks, Greeks, Arab Christians, Druze and others. Then because of ottoman land reform, tax policies, the Industrial Revolution, population growth and the shift from rural patterns to settlement to urban settlements a lot of people moved around to seek better opportunities. The Palestinian Arabs are mix of descendants from the region including people who can trace their family history back for generations and those whose ancestors came from outside modern day Israel Palestine. Modern Palestine was not an administrative entity or a country until the British mandate. Prior to that Palestine was not an administrative division of the Ottoman Empire it was just a regional designation on the map with out delineated boundaries — much like say “The Mid Atlantic Region” in the US.
As a cultural identity separate from the rest of the Levant it came about as part of the experience of the Nabka and the last 75 years of history — it is similar to the modern Israeli identity in that regard. It took a lot of work to get the outside world to recognize the Palestinians as something other than just Arabs and unfortunately there are Israelis today who believe that there isn’t any such thing as a Palestinian. It is the other side of the legitimacy/recognition problem.
posted by interogative mood at 6:36 PM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Do not do yourself the disservice of taking anything the Jordanian royal family (or the House of Saud) say at face value. They wanted treaties and business deals with Israel last month when it was economically expedient. Now they want to beat their chests and tear their clothes because it's politically expedient. Their concern for Palestinians was non-existent 16 days ago.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:41 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

it's not antisemetic because Israel has 2,000,000 Palestinians held in a concentration camp

Equating Gaza prior to the current violence as a concentration camp is inaccurate and makes it difficult to take you seriously. Concentration camps did not have luxury hotels and day spas. They didn’t have universities with students visiting from around the world. Several hundred Americans families with Palestinian roots have been trapped in Gaza, they went there to live and study. Life can be hard in Gaza, the sanctions, the government and other things can make life difficult; but the propaganda that equates it to a Nazi murder factory has to stop.
posted by interogative mood at 6:57 PM on October 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

Yes, they have representation in the Knesset, but nothing like the 21% their population size would suggest. (This part is not specific to Israel, but a common problem with under-representing minorities in many democratic systems.)

As a slight derail of something that I think is a positive (among all this negativity) - some countries do better than others - Australia is 3% indigenous but has 5% indigenous representation in Federal Parliament (11/227). But for Asians it's much worse, with 18% of the population identifying as Asian but only having 3% representation in Federal Parliament (6/227), and in fact it was even worse prior to the last election (3/227).

In Israel, Arabs make up 21% of the population and 8% of the Knesset (10/120). So Israel is doing better than Australia when it comes to Asians, but worse when it comes to Indigenous Australians.

I genuinely think it's admirable what Israel has managed to build in the region, out of virtually nothing, a democratic, multicultural society - while its neighbours have almost entirely cleansed their Jewish population and, not content with that, are now firing rockets into Israel. Surely it's evident that so much casual criticism of Israel and accusations of "genocide" is completely ignorant of this reality - it's easy to criticize when you live several thousand miles away and don't have hostile neighbours firing rockets into your city daily.

Can they be better? Sure, just like Australia can be better, as we've seen recently in the contentious Voice referendum.

That's the positive I see, anyway.

To me, the immediate future seems clearly defined. Gaza (whether Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any of half a dozen other groups) is firing 700 rockets per day at a cost of $700,000 to them, and forcing Israel to intercept roughly 250 of them at a cost of $25 mil per day.

When - and not if - Israel runs out of interceptors, and they start suffering casualties similar to the "small" rocket that allegedly killed 471 people at the al-Ahli hospital, they will immediately carpet bomb Gaza to eliminate the threat, international condemnation be damned. As they say, better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.

To delay the inevitable, the IDF is trying to clear out civilians and bomb stockpiles of rockets, manufacturing operations, leadership and coordination targets to reduce the numbers of rockets fired and slow the depletion of their interceptors. The US is also massively ramping up interceptor and precision ordnance production in order to supply Israel's needs. This seems to me the logical path of least casualties to either side.

That's the immediate, core elements of the conflict right now, as I see it. Strategically, the absence or presence of the 200 hostages doesn't seem to factor into things in the immediate term - the interceptor depletion rate is probably measured in days and weeks, while some hostages have been kept for years. If they are rescued in a ground operation, it would be part of a ground operation that also went in to destroy rocket stockpiles and tunnel systems.

As many analysts have said, there is no clear end-game for Israel, except for the resolution that this can't end like previous ceasefires did with Hamas. The most plausible goal I have come across is that Israel intends to weaken Hamas as much possible - and then restore Palestinian Authority to power there as their puppet, as a kind of brutal police state with total surveillance (The PA still claim the Gaza Strip, though Hamas has de facto control over it).
posted by xdvesper at 6:59 PM on October 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I genuinely think it's admirable what Israel has managed to build in the region, out of virtually nothing, a democratic, multicultural society - while its neighbours have almost entirely cleansed their Jewish population and, not content with that, are now firing rockets into Israel.

Wow. Out of virtually nothing? Palestine was one of the most economically advanced regions of the Arab world.

Also, absolutely grotesque for this story to be retold without mentioning that the entire political project you’re heralding necessitated the forced removal of over thee quarters of a million refugees.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:38 PM on October 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

Did you know there are orthodox Jewish who live in Israel and are extremely anti-Zionist?

The condescension here sure is something. There are Orthodox Jews in Israel who are pro-Palestine, believe in peace and an end to the occupation, and have been working tirelessly towards that goal. I've worked alongside them and count them as friends. But you mean the Satmar Hasidim. They are not anti-Zionist because they recognize the humanity of Palestinians. They are anti-Zionist because of a midrash in Ketubot 111a which says that Jews will not have a state in Zion until the time of the Moshiach. Satmars don't think Israel should exist as a state yet. But they took the opportunity to move there as soon as it arose anyway because, as Ketubot 111a says, "Anyone who walks four cubits in Eretz Yisrael is assured of a place in the World-to-Come." The disagreement between Satmar Hasidim and other religious Jews about the state of Israel is a halakhic one. It doesn't mean that anti-Zionism from others can never be antisemitic.

*It also contains the midrash that was my favorite as a kid, which states that when Moshiach comes Jews buried outside of Israel will roll through tunnels underground to be resurrected in Israel.
posted by cosmic owl at 8:08 PM on October 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Also, the Haganah leadership were iffy on statehood until the mid 1940s.

As, incidentally, were most Jewish Americans—who came to almost unanimously support for the Zionist project after World War II. While the Zionist project wasn't born out of the Holocaust (and perhaps—who can say?—may have even succeeded in a world without it), it would not be nearly as popular within the diaspora were it not for the murder of six million Jews in Europe and the feeling that similar tragedies were simply not preventable in other societies around the world.

I say this not to "play the Holocaust card," as it were, but to ask: are we really so confident that the Holocaust could never happen in a modern liberal democracy? If the Trump presidency taught us anything, it's that many of the securities we take for granted in America are really unenforceable matters of custom. It seems far from implausible that bad actors could (once again) take over the government and start targeting members of specific ethnic groups.

And I think that lack of trust in the modern liberal democracy is a key reason why—even as many young Jewish Americans call Israel an "apartheid state" and viciously criticize its government—many draw the line at denying Israel's right to exist. Looking at the survey that coffeecat linked above, it's telling that while only 32% of respondents under 40 thought that the statement "Israel is an apartheid state" was antisemitic, 58% thought the same of "Israel doesn't have the right to exist," and a further 8% don't seem to have expressed an opinion.

The trouble is that, anecdotally, many Jews (full disclosure, including myself) seem to interpret "Zionism" in its original sense of "support for a Jewish homeland"—but critics of Israel often use "Zionism" to mean "support for the Israeli government" or "revisionist Zionism." So when one side says "anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism!," the other side hears "Jews don't deserve to have a state." Sometimes that's the message that was intended in the first place (and it's a valid question: do Jews deserve a state if it has to be built on mass expropriation? and is it possible to be committed to a Jewish homeland outside of the Levant?), but sometimes it's not, and the ensuing confusion results in perhaps more tension than is otherwise necessary.
posted by the tartare yolk at 8:15 PM on October 21, 2023 [13 favorites]

Palestine was not one of the most economically advanced places in the Arab world. That would be places like Damascus, Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut. Palestine was multiple Ottoman administrative districts organized around relatively small cities and agriculture. The major towns were all pretty small with places like Jerusalem and Gaza having only perhaps 10-20,000 inhabitants.

In fact Ottoman attempts to modernize the economy of the region caused some of the problems we see today. The Ottomans had collected taxes from farmers by taking a share of the crops. The Ottomans decided that they wanted money instead. The farmers didn’t have an Ed’s to the infrastructure and market to efficiently sell their surplus (beyond what they need to eat) crops. So middlemen came in and offered them a deal where they would own the land for tax purposes and collect a share of crops just like the government used to and sell it to make the difference.
The land got bought and sold in Beirut and the farmers went about their business. Sometimes land would be vacant because people moved away from better opportunities or died without heirs, etc. A perceived shortage of workers was one of the reasons the Ottomans initially welcomed the first wave of Jewish migrants in the 1880s. The of course people got organized and started buying land from these absentee landlords. Initially on the plots they’d been assigned by these landlords, but gradually more land that wasn’t vacant. Suddenly people were getting evicted by new owner and that’s when the trouble began.
posted by interogative mood at 8:41 PM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Just want to add that there are of course conversations, critiques and even words that those who are target by some flavor of racism such as antisemitism get to use amongst themselves. That doesn’t mean that outsiders can do the same.
posted by interogative mood at 9:41 PM on October 21, 2023

Wow. Out of virtually nothing?

I'm talking about building a coherent democracy by merging locals and refugees in the middle of a conflict zone around the 1950s onwards.

When I say virtually nothing I don't mean literally nothing existed there. I'm talking about how useful any of it was, and how weak it was as a template for a building a nation. Are we talking about 1799 when Napoleon conquered Palestine as some kind of indication that the the Israelis got a head start on nation building by building on a French legacy of physical infrastructure and civil governance?

Are we talking about 1831 when the Egyptians annexed Palestine and so now we're saying the Israelis got a head start by building on an Egyptian legacy of physical infrastructure and governance? Or when the Ottomans gained control in 1860? Or when the British gained control in 1917?

It would be fair to characterize the area as not being a "nation" - as the world defines it - but rather simply some land that was repeatedly fought over by other, more powerful nations. That's what I mean by creating a nation out of nothing. And the Israelis didn't build their nation on a template based on anything that existed there, they created something new. Otherwise we'd just get Saudi Arabia 2.0 or Syria 2.0 which to be honest is probably the most likely outcome.

This has some (vague) parallels to how Siam was the sole power in South East Asia to escape colonization. None of the other powers in South East Asia were seen as being a nation by the Westerners. This problem reared its head when the British tried to negotiate some border issues between British controlled Burma and Siam. When the British ambassador asked the King of Siam for a map that defined the border, he produced a cosmological map, depicting the celestial kingdom of Siam above the devil kingdom of Burma below, with half the space occupied by a giant figure of the King himself. The King did not even seem to understand the problem. He repeatedly said the issue of the border had nothing to do with Bangkok, and it was a matter for the locals. Bangkok was simply the strongest power, in a system of overlapping spheres of influence, and 20-30 lesser powers far away from Bangkok paid tribute to him. If the British took some land off one of those lesser powers, was it really a problem for the King of Siam?

A later king - Chulalongkorn realised the danger Siam was in, and set out to create the "nation" of Siam. Proper maps and borders, land title registration, federal laws, federal command and control, unified language, taxation, even rewriting the national historiography - that's what really defines a nation today. It didn't stop the British and French from forcing unfair treaties and taking land away from Siam, but it created a situation where they could see it was a nation and thus it - morally - prevented them from outright colonizing it like literally every other power in the region. It would be like if suddenly you could talk to a cow, and it could tell you its hopes and dreams and how it was feeling today, and now you can't eat it. (well, most of us wouldn't).

Chulalongkorn created a western-looking nation, in the same way Israel created a relatively stable and functioning democracy. Neither created it out of nothing, but the fact that they did - while 10-20 other powers nearby failed despite having the same ingredients - is something that is noteworthy.

That's just my point of view. I could have worded it better, for sure, and I regret saying the words "virtually nothing" - it is uncomfortably close to terra nullius. And in any case, that line itself neither supports nor detracts from my main point - which is that Israel has good representation of Arabs in the Knesset that is neither better nor worse than our best democracies, so I'd be ok with retracting it if it's a distraction.
posted by xdvesper at 10:01 PM on October 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

A couple of comments (earlier, upthread) deleted. Don't attack other members.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:55 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Equating Gaza prior to the current violence as a concentration camp is inaccurate and makes it difficult to take you seriously.

you visited Gaza and were able to leave freely (something Palestinians in Gaza can not do) and will not tell anyone when you were in Gaza, which makes it difficult to take anything you say seriously.

the excuses people are willing to make for atrocities we all see unfolding on videos, christ.
posted by JimBennett at 2:04 AM on October 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

just going to state again that 2,000,000 Palestinians are living under Israeli occupation, we all see it, if you want to pretend it is something else then that's fine but it's very transparent.
posted by JimBennett at 2:06 AM on October 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Life can be hard in Gaza, the sanctions, the government and other things can make life difficult; but the propaganda that equates it to a Nazi murder factory has to stop.

hey sorry i think maybe you didn't hear about all the bombs
posted by JimBennett at 2:12 AM on October 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

Here's something that's nagging at me. There's a lot of history in this situation, but is there a way to balance knowledge of history-- history does matter-- with the fact of people living now? Past rights and wrongs aren't the only thing that's going on.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:02 AM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also, absolutely grotesque for this story to be retold without mentioning that the entire political project you’re heralding necessitated the forced removal of over thee quarters of a million refugees.

I have the impression that this was intertwined, both directly and philosophically, with the post-WW2 conviction in Eastern Europe that every minority was a problem, and every minority problem should be solved with a forced mass migration. There were plenty of differences between what happened in Palestine and what happened in Eastern Europe, but the stories are part of each other.
posted by clawsoon at 4:36 AM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, as if there wasn’t enough real antisemitism in the world (and particularly here in Europe in the past two weeks it’s become really worrying), some trolling idiot on Twitter decided to make up some ridiculous bullshit about an alleged antisemitic dogwhistle posted by none other than Greta Thunberg (yes the same Greta Thunberg who so far was accused of being a puppet of George Soros and the globalist/marxist/woke elites, nothing antisemitic about that accusation, nah), and such alleged antisemitic dogwhistle was... a plush toy in the shape of an octopus. Truly mind-blowingly stupid how so many repeated that complete fabrication, so much that Thunberg herself had to delete the photo with the toy, but the clearest proof we live in a ridiculous dystopia is that the Israeli government decided it would be a good boost to their public image to weigh in on Twitter/X doubling down against Thunberg for daring to express solidarity with people in Gaza... (And I thought the state of Israel scolding Gigi Hadid on Instagram was already surreal enough. Impressive social media strategy. )
posted by bitteschoen at 4:49 AM on October 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Whatever goodwill Israel had slowly built up behind the scenes with neighbors seems to have evaporated, in the country's seemingly inexorable pursuit to make many or all of the same mistakes as the United States after 9/11.

And this may, in fact, have been the point; whether it's good for the people of Gaza or not, Hamas may have calculated that provoking a backlash would take off the smiling mask and show what they felt lay beneath and remove regional support for it - in which case, Israel is absolutely playing into their hands.
posted by corb at 4:57 AM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another one from the Al Jazeera live feed: "Israeli settlers have cut down dozens of olive trees in the village of Yasouf in the central occupied West Bank."

In the middle of all the atrocities and bombings going on, this is kinda insignificant. It's also not the first time; it has been going on for years.

But when I think about the question of whether there's some sort of "settler colonial" thing going on in Israel or not, this brings to mind all of the times that colonial Western democracies have pushed out indigenous populations by allowing/encouraging settlers to destroy sources of food and income.
posted by clawsoon at 5:00 AM on October 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Also, absolutely grotesque for this story to be retold without mentioning that the entire political project you’re heralding necessitated the forced removal of over thee quarters of a million refugees

The primary cause of refugees has been the wars. Blaming it all on Israel seems to give the countries that attacked Israel at its founding a pass for their role in creating and sustaining the refugee crisis.
posted by interogative mood at 5:03 AM on October 22, 2023

About half the villages were depopulated by Israel before any Arab state intervened but go on.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:08 AM on October 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

"Israeli settlers have cut down dozens of olive trees in the village of Yasouf in the central occupied West Bank."

Not that anyone is keeping the less convenient religious laws...

Laws of Warfare
…19When you lay siege to a city for an extended time while fighting against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. You must not cut them down. Are the trees of the field human, that you should besiege them? 20But you may destroy the trees that you know do not produce fruit. Use them to build siege works against the city that is waging war against you, until it falls.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:50 AM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

I went to see journalist Ari Shavit give a talk on his book My Promised Land, when it came out in 2014.

A main premise of the book is interrogating the way in which the Palestinian presence was elided to suit the narrative of 'empty land.' With a focus (in the book) on the Lydda 'expulsion' (or 'massacre,' depending on who you ask). That chapter was published in The New Yorker:

Lydda 1948

Lydda is the black box of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist. In retrospect, it’s all too clear. When Siegfried Lehmann arrived in the Lydda Valley, in 1927, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to a Jewish state, and that one day Zionism would have to remove it.

But Dr. Lehmann did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For decades, Jews succeeded in hiding from themselves the contradiction between their national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive groves and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, Lydda was no more.

From the talk:

The flaw of 'not seeing....'

A conflict rooted in mutual refusal of recognition.

Why the history of Lydda matters for the future of Israel (and '48 vs. '67 in people's thinking).

On the desire for peace after Oslo (in 2014), the 'Black Box of Zionism' (its exclusionary urge) and its mirror in rejection of Israel's basic existence (as a Jewish state).

"We must make clear every day that we really mean it about the Democratic Jewish State. That means there should not be occupation..."

I didn't entirely enjoy it as a book, it's kind of middling and self-indulgent in its style (and with Shavit himself given to condescension in interviews), and I don't fully agree with Shavit's essentializing approach to the history of the land and its peoples, but I do think the book's insistence on confronting that myth was good.

(Use you can browse the transcript to cue the video to the parts that interest you if not inclined to watch the whole thing.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:08 AM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

[Fixed version of the last deeplink, on democracy and occupation, Israeli extremism, etc.]
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:19 AM on October 22, 2023

Truly mind-blowingly stupid how so many repeated that complete fabrication, so much that Thunberg herself had to delete the photo with the toy, but the clearest proof we live in a ridiculous dystopia is that the Israeli government decided it would be a good boost to their public image to weigh in on Twitter/X doubling down against Thunberg for daring to express solidarity with people in Gaza...

It was an effective ableist campaign by Israel insofar as it managed to use Thunberg's autism as a stick to beat her into submission, in the short term. Still, throwing out random accusations of anti-Semitism at everyone and anyone who dares speak out seems likely to backfire in the long term, when that accusation becomes meaningless as a means to correctly label people who are actual anti-Semites - and who we all really need to know are anti-Semites, more importantly.

in any case, that line itself neither supports nor detracts from my main point - which is that Israel has good representation of Arabs in the Knesset that is neither better nor worse than our best democracies, so I'd be ok with retracting it if it's a distraction.

As discussed in citations in previous comments, the above is false and ultimately underscores the fact that Israel is effectively an apartheid state to the very real extent that its legal structure codifies different laws for Jewish Israelis, non-Jewish Israelis, and those whose lands are currently occupied, as outlined by the UN.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:21 AM on October 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Opinion piece in Ha'aretz explores Netanyahu's long-term strategy of boosting and funding Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority so he won't have to negotiate with the PA, which is well-discussed in Israel but much less so in the U.S.: A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance (archive)

And essential Ha'aretz from Oct 11: Why Did Netanyahu Want to Strengthen Hamas? (archive)

The Times of Israel just ran a piece about the rapid transition of the movement against Netanyahu’s judicial power grab to assisting victims of the Hamas attack in ways the government is slowly only now starting to do itself, with momentary alliances forming between elements of Israeli society who wouldn't have sat at the same table before the attacks: In stunning response, 15,000 volunteers fill leadership vacuum to help victims of Hamas

I'll spare you the pull quotes but there's lots of interesting stuff in those pieces.
posted by mediareport at 6:21 AM on October 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Benjamin Netanyahu is walking right into Hamas’s trap. They crave a rage-filled reaction from Israel’s prime minister. Wise heads should temper his response – and then be rid of him.
Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian
posted by adamvasco at 6:22 AM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

The awful situation unfolding at the hospitals (that is, those that haven't been bombed): Little light, no beds, not enough anesthesia: A view from the ‘nightmare’ of Gaza’s hospitals

When the Israeli bombing intensifies and the wounded swamp the Gaza City hospitals where Dr. Nidal Abed works, he treats patients wherever he can — on the floor, in the corridors, in rooms crammed with 10 patients instead of two. Without enough medical supplies, Abed makes do with whatever he can find – clothes for bandages, vinegar for antiseptic, sewing needles for surgical ones.
...
A shortage of surgical supplies forced some staff to use sewing needles to stitch wounds, which Abed said can damage tissue. A shortage of bandages forced medics to wrap clothes around large burns, which he said can cause infections. A shortage of orthopedic implants forced Abed to use screws that don’t fit his patients’ bones. There are not enough antibiotics, so he gives single pills rather than multiple courses to patients suffering terrible bacterial infections.
...
In some hospitals, the lights have already switched off. At Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis this week, nurses and surgical assistants held their iPhones over the operating table, guiding the surgeons with the flashlights as they snipped.
...
The scenes — infants arriving alone to intensive care because no one else in their family survived, patients awake and grimacing in pain during surgeries — have traumatized Abed into numbness.

posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:42 AM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

They sucked his brains out! Still, throwing out random accusations of anti-Semitism at everyone and anyone who dares speak out seems likely to backfire in the long term

I think you're 100% wrong there.

That behavior is vile. It's underhanded. It's mendacious. It's character assassination. And of course it's also just factually incorrect.

It's also been the standard operating procedure for the Israeli government and its apologists since forever and has been working quite well for them so far. Israel is growing ever closer to achieving the Israeli right's long time goal of expanding to more or less its Biblical borders and getting rid of those pesky indigenous people.

Far from backfiring it's been incredibly successful. It still works, see all the various people shut up, events canceled, etc that have happened over the past few weeks. Its not even necessary for someone to be critical of Israel to be smeared as antisemitic. Just saying Palestinians are people and have human rights is all it takes right this second for the Israeli propagandists to appear in force and loudly declare that person is antisemitic.

Heck, they'll cheerfully say that actual Israeli Jews are antisemitic because maliciously false accusations of antisemitism work so well. Remember when Natalie Portman was accused of being an antisemite by then Infrastructure, Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz? He said she had been a horrible antisemite because she declined an invitation to an event Netanyahu was sponsoring.

So yeah. It works really damn well, and shows no signs of failing to work anytime soon. I don't LIKE it, I think it's morally wrong. But I can't deny that it works.
posted by sotonohito at 6:56 AM on October 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

Gaza absolutely meets the technical, legal, and moral definition of a concentration camp. It's unquestionably holding a population captive and dependent. Wether you want to call it a more Hitler style death factory, I guess depends on who died in the latest round of bombing. But concentration camp, 100% accurate as the term had been used well before the atrocities of WW2. Even if you want to call it a prisoner of war camp, preventing food, supplies and power is still atrocious treatment.

No group gets a pass for locking people away. No group gets a pass for then bombing a trapped, very poor population. No history of persecution and yes, being victims of the death camps excuses putting people in concentration camps. If it's not right to do it to them, it's not right for them to do it to someone else.
posted by Jacen at 9:55 AM on October 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

There were also the post-war DP camps, for a parallel in which a form of regular life was possible, but still as captive non-citizens. The long term inadequacy of that situation was part of the rationale for the establishment of Israel.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:34 AM on October 22, 2023

There was a lot of violence between Arabs and Jews including atrocities on all sides especially as British Mandate ended and the war started. The fact that Israel was more successful militarily in the first war tended to tilt the impacts on civilian populations toward Arab civilians. As a starting point consider the Wikipedia entry.

War is never proportionate or fair. It is a brutal, ugly mess and horrible. War crimes happen and they should be punished but that is merely an attempt to triage and limit the extend of the horrible moral wounds war inflicts on every participant.
posted by interogative mood at 11:08 AM on October 22, 2023

Are there any places where the British (or other former colonial powers) partitioned areas up into newly created countries (their former colonies, or through treaties to end wars) that aren’t still having conflicts? The principles on which India and Pakistan were set up don’t seem to be holding up super well for everyone either, for example. Seems like one could look at what common principles were applied in various post-colonial/post-war partitions that have led to ongoing conflicts, and at least place some blame there if not get some ideas for potential solutions. I imagine political scientists have already thought of that?
posted by eviemath at 12:14 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not that anyone is keeping the less convenient religious laws... Laws of Warfare…19When you lay siege to a city for an extended time while fighting against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees

The rest of that chapter is pretty brutal, and I imagine Ben-Gvir reading it to himself every night. "Rather, you shall utterly destroy them..."
posted by clawsoon at 12:18 PM on October 22, 2023

Seems like one could look at what common principles were applied in various post-colonial/post-war partitions that have led to ongoing conflicts, and at least place some blame there if not get some ideas for potential solutions. I imagine political scientists have already thought of that?

Sri Lanka wasn't partitioned when the British gave it independence in 1948, but that didn't help.
posted by clawsoon at 12:21 PM on October 22, 2023

War is never proportionate or fair.

A massive bombing campaign against a population of two million civilians who've been under seige for almost two decades followed by a ground invasion expected to cause "hundreds of thousands to a million civilian casualties" (in the words of the Israeli cabinet) isn't "war", it's an atrocity.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:38 PM on October 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

The Israeli position

Looks quiite a lot like ethnic cleansing and genocide (the West Bank is not Gaza. Bands of armed settlers have been murdering Palestinians in the West Bank with IDF protection.)
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:14 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think I've been pretty willing to see Israel's side of things as evidenced by this thread but I'm gonna go ahead and stake out the "if you kill a million civilians out of a population of two million civilians you have chosen to do a terrible and unforgiveable thing that you didn't have to do" position.

I don't expect that to happen. It would mean the complete isolation of Israel from the world community, including from its current allies in the West. Frankly, it's hard for me to see how it could happen and I assume whoever said it (an Israeli cabinet member?) was talking out of their ass. But I feel like this should not be a difficult question.
posted by Justinian at 1:15 PM on October 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

I assume whoever said it (an Israeli cabinet member?) was talking out of their ass

Try "the Israeli cabinet, as a collective" (at least going by the AP's reporting):

During the Blinken-Netanyahu talks, U.S. officials familiar with the discussions said they had become increasingly alarmed by comments from their Israeli counterparts about their intention to deny even supplies of water, electricity, fuel, food and medicine into Gaza, as well as the inevitability of civilian casualties.

Those comments, according to four U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, reflected intense anguish, anger and outright hostility toward all Palestinians in Gaza.

The officials said that members of the Israeli security and political establishment were absolutely opposed to the provision of any assistance to Gazans and argued that the eradication of Hamas would require methods used in the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II.

One official said that he and others had heard from Israeli counterparts that “a lot of innocent Germans died in WWII” and had been reminded of the massive deaths of Japanese civilians in the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:31 PM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

I imagine political scientists have already thought of that?

We have. It was a big research question a while back, see kaifmann and Sambanis’ papers.

Important to remember the British didn’t partition Palestine and in fact boycotted the UNSCOP.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:36 PM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

War is an atrocity. There is no clean war. The Israeli position is Hamas can surrender at any time and if they want to fight Israel will fight them in Gaza not Ashkelon.
posted by interogative mood at 1:05 PM on October 22 [+] [!]

I don't know how to read this except as "It's fine to kill untold thousands of women and children and other innocents who are NOT HAMAS because that's how war works." We actually have some rules around war, it's not allowed to work this way. I beg you to clarify that this isn't what you're saying or else I don't know how the rest of us can engage with you as a serious or moral person in this thread or any other thread on this website.
posted by kensington314 at 1:39 PM on October 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

War is never proportionate or fair.
A massive bombing campaign against a population of two million civilians who've been under seige for almost two decades followed by a ground invasion expected to cause "hundreds of thousands to a million civilian casualties" (in the words of the Israeli cabinet) isn't "war", it's an atrocity.
War is an atrocity.

jfc
posted by Flunkie at 2:00 PM on October 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

Are there any places where the British (or other former colonial powers) partitioned areas up into newly created countries that aren’t still having conflicts

Eviemath, I briefly mentioned the case of Malaysia upthread, and I'll add additional context to that. The British policy of using immigration to mix three different races and religious groups (Malay, Chinese, Indian) then segregating and sowing division between them to keep them attacking each other and unable to unite and effectively resist British rule is part of their playbook.

The problem in Palestine is that it boiled over so violently they couldn't control it and had to leave.

In Malaya there was a decade long communist insurgency which resulted in 11,000 dead and 600,000 ethnic Chinese forcibly relocated to concentration camps, their villages burned and communities fragmented. To break up any communist cell coordination, they would raid each village without warning and take each household to a different concentration camp. If you happened to be away from your home that night you never saw your family again.

Ringed by barbed wire and shoot to kill orders, the British kept the ethnic Chinese inside these "new villages" under strict caloric rations while using Agent Orange defoilant in a campaign of deliberate starvation to defeat the ethnic Chinese communists not yet rounded up. The fact that starvation was such an effective tactic made this the prototype for the American use of it in Vietnam.

And like the situation with Gaza being excised from Israel, their military aims morphed into political ones - using votes to get what they wanted rather than guns. After the British left a Malay ethnostate behind with a constitution that elevated Malay status over other races in every part of life, the Malays still had serious fears the ethnic Chinese could win an election and abolish the Malay ethnostate.

Racial violence erupted regularly with riots and killings and police curfews being imposed, and finally resulted in Singapore (primarily ethnic Chinese) being expelled. This would guarantee that the Malays retain a clear majority, and thus political control and special race privileges.

In terms of borders, the British creation of Malaysia resulted in an undeclared war with Indonesia (who wanted to claim the whole land as theirs). The British, Australians and New Zealand sent troops and military hardware, and Indonesia was supported by Phillipines (who also claim the land as theirs) and Vietnam.

There are also ongoing conflicts in the northern Malay states which were absorbed by Thailand - there is an ongoing separatist conflict consisting of Malay Muslims who would rather not be part of Thailand thank you very much. The Malay Patani states have historically paid tribute to Siam and lived in their sphere of influence for hundreds of years (rather than paying tribute to the Malaccan Sultante, which sort of become Malaya). Which explains why they were not partitioned into Malaysia - I think they might be happier as part of our Malay ethnostate but I've not heard anything to that effect.

When Thailand modernized they imposed direct control over all their territories and forced a Buddhist-Thai cultural assimilation on them - changing the language from Jawi to Thai, removing their Muslim Islamic legal system and replacing it with a centralized secular system, etc. So they revolted. I've also mentioned this upthread where Siam had to remake itself in the image of Western nations to avoid colonization, and ironically became colonists themselves. In fact Thailand had their eyes on a couple of northern Malay states and actually gained control of them for a number of years during WW2 when they made a deal with the Japanese. In return for staging, supplying and allowing passage of Japanese troops they would be granted some of the newly captured states, Kelantan, Perlis, etc. They had to give it back after the war.

Anyway. Things in Malaysia and Singapore are fine. You can come visit! These "new villages" are basically just inextricably part of Malaysia's urban landscape now. My own mother was separated from the family with no contact for a few days as she was working in the hospital when racial killings between Chinese and Malays erupted and the (Malay) military enacted a shoot on sight curfew, allegedly mainly targeting the Chinese. My own grandmother had to disguise herself to avoid being used as a Japanese sex slave while my grandfather had to go into hiding as well during the "sook ching" ethnic cleansing. Honestly, despite how much flak western colonialism gets in left leaning circles, if you asked my ancestors they would much prefer the British colonial rule (despite all their misdeeds) over the horrors of Japanese colonial rule or Malay ethnostate rule.

The Malay ethnostate's special race privileges are a push factor that leads to continued migration of ethnic Chinese out of Malaysia into Singapore.
posted by xdvesper at 2:16 PM on October 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

the case of Malaysia

Was Malaysia founded as a Malay ethnostate in territory already occupied by another group who outnumbered the Malays three to one? No? Then Malaysia isn't particularly relevant to the discussion.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:46 PM on October 22, 2023

Nothing about this situation is ok. It just is. I feel nothing but sorrow and I don’t see any end to it unless Hamas actually decides they want peace. Then pressure can be put on Israel to back down. There are rumors of talks in Qatar between some western governments and Hamas with the aid and initial hostage release as maybe a step towards something; but it is a long shot.

America missed its chance in 2001 when the Taliban were on the ropes to cut a deal with them and get out. The Taliban sent out offers. Instead we wasted a trillion dollars and 20 years. Perhaps this was what Biden alluded to in his remarks.
posted by interogative mood at 3:08 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Pseudonymous Cognomen, the ratios are closer than you might think. Before Singapore was expelled, Malaysia had a population of around 12 million, with roughly 5.9 mil Malay, 5.1 mil Chinese, and 1.1 mil Indians, which gave the Malays a 49% race share, which couldn't guarantee them control of an ethnostate.

After Singapore was expelled, Malaysia now had 5.5 mil Malay, 3.5 mil Chinese, and 1 mil Indian, which gave the Malays a 55% race share. Today that number is up to 70%.

In any case, I don't think the exact numbers or ratios matter, or even who was in the majority, or who lived there first.

I'm saying the British deliberately poisoned the well by fostering conditions for racial and religious strife in their territories (India / Malaysia / Palestine as examples) to prevent them from effectively resisting British rule. It takes some serious nation building to undo the damage and create a stable, lasting, multi-ethnic democracy from what was left behind.
posted by xdvesper at 3:15 PM on October 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

> unless Hamas actually decides they want peace. Then pressure can be put on Israel to back down.

Why can't it be "unless Israel actually decides they want peace. Then pressure can be put on Hamas to back down"?
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 3:20 PM on October 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

unless Hamas actually decides they want peace

The IDF are carrying out airstrikes in the West Bank (which is not governed by Hamas); armed settlers with the protection of the IDF have been killing Palestinians with impunity and committing genuine atrocities.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:26 PM on October 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

unless Hamas actually decides they want peace

I'm not sure what terms Hamas could possibly offer that Israel's current government would accept short of unconditional surrender, and even if their leadership was somehow convinced, that their rank-and-file would go along with it and quietly surrender.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:32 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

MisantropicPainforest: We have. It was a big research question a while back, see kaifmann and Sambanis’ papers.

I think I found one of those papers, Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature. What I'm getting from a quick skim is that partition or not doesn't make much difference one way or another in terms of whether you end up with war. You can cherry pick a few cases to find that partition creates less war, or cherry pick a different set of cases to find that it creates more war, but overall it's a wash.

Did I read that correctly, and is that representative of the conclusions of the research programme as a whole?
posted by clawsoon at 3:35 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

i think it's only fair to remind everyone that peace is not the mere absence of people shooting at each other - it involves mutual respect, accommodation, empathy and dedication to justice
posted by pyramid termite at 3:37 PM on October 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

Jacobin: Israel’s Apologists Are Showing They Couldn’t Care Less About Palestinian Lives
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 3:41 PM on October 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

In all good faith, I would like to know from the people currently angriest at Israel - what do you think was the right way for Israel to respond to the October 7th events? Much appreciation if you also clarify your definition of “right” for the purposes of your answer.

(and apologies if people have stated it upthread and I missed it somehow)
posted by Calibandage at 3:46 PM on October 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

what do you think was the right way for Israel to respond to the October 7th events

How about "by not committing atrocities in the West Bank", is that too much to ask? And by not bombing civilian evacuation convoys, hospitals, and churches where civilians are sheltering, for that matter.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:55 PM on October 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

Might as well ask "For people currently angriest at the United States, what do you think was the right way to respond to 9/11?"

It's pretty unreasonable to demand that people solve Israel/Palestine before they can be angry about, say, Israel's near-instant reaction of cutting off water and fuel to Gaza.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:59 PM on October 22, 2023 [22 favorites]

Popular Front (Jake Hanrahan): Inside the New Israel - Palestine War

Today we speak to journalist Ari Flanzraich about the new war between Palestine and Israel. Flanzraich has been on the ground covering the war from all borders. He gives us an insight into the missions of Israeli soldiers and speaks on how the killing of civilians in Gaza has no end in sight.

It's also on Spotify, should be on YT and other platforms soonish.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:00 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the Jacobin article, Noisy Pink Bubbles! I appreciate that it condemns the Oct. 7 attacks explicitly at multiple points, which is very different from condemning violence on all sides in a blanket statement. But I do think that it overlooks a number of cases of troubling rhetoric from pro-Palestine activism in the West, from the use of paraglider imagery and justification of the Hamas massacres as eggs broken in the omelette of anticolonial resistance among student groups to the infamous "Gas the Jews" rally in Sydney (I figure if Jacobin wants to bring in the UK, Australia's fair game, too, right?). I don't deny that there's plenty of "cheerleading for human rights abuses" among pro-Israel activists and political groups, or even that it's a major problem with the pro-Israel side in general. But to claim that such issues are "overwhelmingly coming from the pro-Israel side," as Jacobin does, strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.

And this is a shame, because the violent rhetoric we see on both sides not only helps perpetuate violence against both Palestinians and Israelis over in the Middle East, but it also contributes to both Jews and Muslims feeling unsafe in America (and the world at large).
posted by the tartare yolk at 4:17 PM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

(To clarify: blanket statements condemning violence are *also* distinct from general anti-violence statements that explicitly condemn the Hamas attacks, as with Corbyn's and Varoufakis's statements linked in the Jacobin article! I'm just frustrated with people who say that "well, all violence is bad" and refuse to explicitly condemn anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, or antisemitic violence right now. Not directed at anyone in this thread, but it's something I've seen a decent amount of in my life over the past few weeks.)
posted by the tartare yolk at 4:24 PM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

In all good faith, I would like to know from the people currently angriest at Israel - what do you think was the right way for Israel to respond to the October 7th events?

Calibandage, unfortunately (as evidenced by the "answers" above), I don't think you'll get many good faith replies to your question at this point. Emotions are just too high and most of the Mefites who are still posting in this 1000+ comment thread have their rhetorical fists out and are just looking to take swings.
posted by gwint at 5:03 PM on October 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

efuse to explicitly condemn anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, or antisemitic violence right now

These things are not the same; please stop conflating them. There is no place for antisemitic violence, or for violence directed against the Jewish people. Israel is engaging in an illegal occupation and has been for nearly sixty years, while expanding illegal settlements in occupied territory in direct contravention of international law and creating a system of effective apartheid. The Israeli state is not innocent, and occupied people have a legitimate right of armed resistance. The specific actions of Hamas on 7 October are atrocities, and should be condemned.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 5:04 PM on October 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

I mean in the abstract I will not condemn anti-Israel violence directed at the armed forces of Israel, any more than I will not condemn anti-Russian violence directed at the armed forces of Russia. I think this is a perfectly reasonable position.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:24 PM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

These things are not the same; please stop conflating them.

I didn't mean to conflate antisemitic, anti-Jewish, or anti-Israeli violence here (hence my use of "or" as opposed to "and"); nor did I intend to include combat with the IDF within my rubric of "anti-Israeli violence." I'd say I think of that as "anti-Israel" violence, but am aware that may well be a linguistic quirk of my own. "Anti-Israeli violence" (by which I really meant violence against civilians, e.g., the Hamas attacks) was probably a poor choice of words. Though I would caution: just because the three terms are conceptually distinct, that doesn't mean that there isn't occasional overlap between them.

My point was that violence targeting civilians for any of these reasons should be condemned directly and specifically, much as violence targeting Palestinian civilians should be condemned directly and specifically. Recognizing a particular cause of grief is important for expressing sympathy; that's all I really wanted to say here. I apologize if my wording came off as stronger than intended.
posted by the tartare yolk at 5:29 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

(I wrote much of this comment before the comment posted by the tartare yolk at 1:29 AM)

What, exactly though, is "anti-Israeli violence"? And for that matter, what's the difference, exactly, between "anti-Jewish" and antisemitic? How are they "conceptually distinct"? A quick search for a definition says the latter is when people are the former. If you're going to stack a sentence with three things, two of which are the same and the other "a poor choice of words", it feels like a disingenuous effort to equate unequal things (or to overstate one side of equal things).

I see that you've attempted to clarify, but is "anti-Israeli" violence simply disagreeing with Israel? Is it showing support for Palestinians? Is it fighting back against an Israeli ground force? Is it throwing rocks at border guards? Is it defending your land against illegal settlers? If it's none of these things and only about killing unarmed Israeli citizens in farms and homes, and with indiscriminate rocket barrages, then I think there's been plenty of explicit condemnation of that.

There's also been plenty of condemnation of antisemitism. The grit in the gears of this, and every similar conversation on the planet, is that Israel would like to extend the definition of antisemitism to not doing exactly what they want when they want it (to the point where declining an invite is labeled as such), and much of the rest of the world would like to contract the definition back to "prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews" for no reason other than them being Jewish. I would suggest that the gap between these positions drives at least a good two thirds of the arguments in this thread.

It's not that any of these words are "strong", it's that they're Rorschach tests. People see in them what they want to see.
posted by krisjohn at 5:38 PM on October 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

In all good faith, I would like to know from the people currently angriest at Israel - what do you think was the right way for Israel to respond to the October 7th events?

I don't know that I'm angry, and I don't think I have any answers. In the abstract: Whatever would be most likely to bring a fair, just peace. What that translates into in practical terms, I don't know. The actions of Hamas seem to have been calculated to make that outcome least likely, and in that regard they're "working". The actions of the right wing of Israeli government and society over the past few years/decades have been "working" in a similarly counterproductive way.

The best friend of an extremist is an extremist on the other side, and that's who's winning right now.
posted by clawsoon at 5:40 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

How is this possibly a "good faith" question?

My guess is what Calibandage is getting at is asking how people propose Israel neutralize Hamas if not with a military response in Gaza. A military response in a dense urban environment is going to cause a lot of innocent casualties even in a best case scenario where you're doing your best to avoid them. And there's obviously a spectrum there ranging from "tried hard to minimize civilian casualties but a lot happened anyway" to "leveled the place with carpet bombing and killed basically everyone". But a lot of folks clearly oppose even the lower end of the spectrum and would consider it a crime, so I think Calibandage is trying to get at the question of whether people think Israel just has no right to confront Hamas militarily in Gaza and if that's the case, how they should stop them.

But that's just my read of the question, your mileage may vary and I'm not Calibandage.
posted by Justinian at 6:10 PM on October 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

krisjohn, I appreciate your frustration here! (And to think, I only made the clarification because I was concerned people would take my initial condemnation of blanket statements as a condemnation of blanket statements that then go on to talk about actual concrete tragedies and center particular violent acts and "types" of violence! Goes to show, the road to hell, etc.)

So, a few more clarifications:
1. Most importantly: I agree that there has been plenty of condemnation of the Hamas attacks (which were largely what I meant when I talked about "anti-Israeli" violence—as noted above, I don't include the IDF here since they're targeted as state actors, and I'd be prepared to extend a similar treatment to settlers. As for criticism of the government, I struggle to see how that could be construed as violence on even the most generous terms)! I even singled out a few in my original comment.

My frustration here isn't with pro-Palestinian activism broadly writ, but rather with a number of activist groups in my own life who were silent after the original attacks and later released statements either outright glorifying them as anticolonial resistance or otherwise insinuating that if there were Israeli dead, it was their own fault for participating in an apartheid society. So yes, there has been plenty of condemnation, especially among politicians, but in my personal experience it feels far from universal.

2. The distinction I was trying to draw between Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism is one that (very broadly speaking) is rooted in opposition to Judaism as a religion rather than an ethnic group. That one hadith you see in the 1988 Hamas charter (which I'm aware is not the current charter, but it's a good example at hand) about the Day of Judgment not coming until the Muslims fight and kill the Jews? In a technical sense, it's possible to read that as anti-Jewish rather than antisemitic. But it's quite common (as I should have realized when writing that post) to refer to both under the single term of antisemitism. So here I have been overly clinical and academic in my terminology, and again can only apologize.

3. I admitted that "anti-Israeli" was a poor choice of words! It's clear that you consider it disingenuous; I'm not sure how I could convince you that the comment was written in the best of faith and the worst of eloquence.
posted by the tartare yolk at 6:18 PM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ooohh, more constructive answers. Ok. Ironically enough, the answer I came up with is invade Gaza. Not with hate, not with weapons or anger. Break through the Israeli barricades with food and medicine and supplies. Get kitchens running, hand out free food and clean water. No ulterior motivations, no lectures, just neighbors coming together in the worst time in recent history. Everyone who is tired of being painted with the actions of an increasingly unhinged right wing government has a stake in this. How many Israeli voluntary human shields would it take to stop bombs falling on Gaza? 10k? A thousand? A hundred? If there's a bunch of civilians marching towards the checkpoints with food, is the army really going to stop them?

Make friends, not the conditions for endless war. Mutual support benefits both sides. Fascism and exclusion, control, only benefits the cruel. Going more right wing is never the answer. I don't think it's ever worked in history. I think after the long blockade, it's probably fair to say most Gazans have never met an Israeli, or at least never had a positive interaction with one. Would a steady supply of food and help guarantee peace? Dunno, but it's way more likely than bombs and cycles of reprisals. Everyone involved is human, and love heals way more than violence.

I understand that there's some intensely Human reasons this won't work, even if I don't understand why not. That my Autism Idealism doesn't survive the real world well. That people sometimes spend way more effort on hate over tiny differences. A huge portion of the Gaza population is younger than the blockade itself. Of course Israel is wrong for choosing more violence. Of course Hamas is wrong for choosing more violence. Somebody has to commit to swords to plowshares and stick with it. It's usually the strongest side, militarily speaking, that has to make the biggest commitment. I think peace through potluck has a way better chance of meaningful changes, cooperation, tolerance than repression and violence. I think the more people try to control others, the more damaging it is to their soul. Their self image. Their capabilities to love and forgive. To reach out to the hurting. And that's heartbreaking.

So force peace. Zero tolerance for violence and captive populations. 'Our way is the only way ' doesn't work. Almost all religions say to help your neighbor. To treat them well. Love should be the first choice, never the last.
posted by Jacen at 6:22 PM on October 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group is being handed over to CENTCOM. Not sure if this means instead of being stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean it'll be east of the Suez instead, as a possible move to deter Iran. Hezbollah vs Israel would be bad enough, but if Iran gets directly involved it could be damaging worldwide (Remember the disruption from Ever Given blocking the Suez? Imagine that, except ships getting sunk) Simmering in the background is also Azerbaijan (supported by Turkey, Israel) vs Armenia (supported by Iran) - they invaded and took over Nagorno-Karabakh last month, leading to 120k Armenians fleeing their homes. Judging by the noises Azerbaijan's president has been making, it's possible they're not done and might try to establish a land border with Turkey - or worse. I usually think the idea that something happening in the world means somebody elsewhere is going to take advantage of the opportunity to change the map is a paranoid fantasy, but in this case I regard it as a depressing possibility since it's on the periphery of a potential Israel-Iran conflict.

Lots of PR mistakes by Israel lately (e.g. supporting Greta Thunberg who had an octopus plushie means you support terror), definitely getting emotional and lashing out

Re: whether Israel is a colonial state, there's a neat bit of elision between "Jews are native to the region" to "Therefore Israel is valid". That might apply to the Jews whose families have been there all this time, but you can't really include the diaspora who were gone for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years without invoking some sort of right to return - the same right to return that Israel has been steadfast in denying Palestinians.
posted by ndr at 6:27 PM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

How about "by not committing atrocities in the West Bank", is that too much to ask? And by not bombing civilian evacuation convoys, hospitals, and churches where civilians are sheltering, for that matter.

Agreed, these things are terrible.

It's pretty unreasonable to demand that people solve Israel/Palestine before they can be angry about, say, Israel's near-instant reaction of cutting off water and fuel to Gaza.

Agreed. I’m not asking anyone to do that.

It's not the job of anyone here, unless we have Israeli government officials present, to have an answer to that in order to condemn obviously wrong responses

Agreed. I haven’t asked anyone to stop.

This being the place it is, I wondered if people had any opinions on not-obviously-wrong courses of action.
posted by Calibandage at 6:30 PM on October 22, 2023

But to claim that such issues are "overwhelmingly coming from the pro-Israel side," as Jacobin does, strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.

Well, the Jacobin article quotes national political leaders, op-ed writers of major newspapers, cable news channel hosts, well-known journalists, etc. -- people with influence and power who are showing little regard for the human rights of Palestinians in their speech and writing.

The people spouting objectionable anti-semitic rhetoric you are referring to are scattered cranks -- and ones very unrepresentative of the vastly larger group of people that is concerned with preserving Palestinian human rights -- at rallies and on the Internet.

These two groups of people are not the same. Yeah, you're right, XtremeTankie69 might say something objectionable on Twitter, and someone with deranged opinions might show up to a pro-Palestinian rally. Are any of those people mayors, congressmen, senators, presidents? Of course not, and that's why this article's focus is -- quite properly, in my view -- on political and media elites, people whose opinions actually carry weight in public discourse. This is yet another case in the Israeli/Palestinian context where claims of "both sides" obscures a dramatic disproportionality.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:41 PM on October 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

Calibandage Well, part of the problem is that from my POV if there was an Israeli government capable of a better response the attack never would have happened.

I'll also emphasize that I am not a military strategist, nor a diplomat.

From my POV this is just another awful uptick in the cycle that's been the news out of Israel for my entire life: Israel makes life miserable for the Palestinians and takes more of their land, a militant and violent resistance lashes out at Israel, and Israel responds by making life miserable for the Palestinians and taking more of their land. Repeat forever.

So the answer I have is: break the cycle.

This would require an Israeli government that both says **AND BELIEVES** that the enemy is Hamas, not the Palestinians, and that while the immediate problem is Hamas the longer term problem is the suffering of the Palestinians.

There wouldn't be airstrikes. I don't know if what I envision is valid or would be any better, but a series of raids in overwhelming force where infantry goes in, destroys Hamas weapons and then leaves again might work better than just randomly bombing the shit out of innocent people.

Such a response, one acknowledging that the problem is Hamas not Palestine, would involve not a blockade, but lifting the blockade and promoting humanitarian aid as part of an overall strategy of making the Palestinian people less miserable and oppressed not more miserable and oppressed.

The better response would involve NOT attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, where Hamas isn't the government, and would involve preventing Israeli colonizers from further encroaching on the few remaining Palestinian settlements.
posted by sotonohito at 6:50 PM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

I may be projecting from other parts of my life, but when we respond to comments on here, if we actually wish to be in good faith, we should try to respond to what the comment says, rather than taking a portion of the comment then extending the narrative internally (based on prior arguments) and responding to that. When I say it's horrible that an Israeli child was killed, I'm not saying Israel should have the right to any and all response. When I say it's horrible that a school in Gaza was bombed, I'm not saying that Israel doesn't have a right to protect its security through force. Extrapolating my (or anyone else's) comments way past anything that could be justifiably assumed to be their intent and into a deliberately indefensible position and then attacking that is of no value.

Similarly, I can have negative feelings towards an event without needing to draft an effective solution to the I/P conflict that doesn't require a time machine. I am allowed to be upset even when other people in the world are suffering worse than me. I should be able to feel empathy for anyone, even an opponent, trying to survive in a miserable situation without that meaning that I condone 100% of their actions.

While the battle is taking place in millions, if not billions, of social spaces like this, what hope do we have that it gets resolved where it needs to?
posted by krisjohn at 7:11 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Justinian: And there's obviously a spectrum there ranging from "tried hard to minimize civilian casualties but a lot happened anyway"

I think that would be easier to judge if it were happening, or if there were any reasonable prospect of it happening. But the commitment to collective punishment, and the apparent determination to inflict at least ten times as many deaths as received in every conflict, means that it's an unlikely hypothetical.

And, as you point out, the Hamas tactic of trying to mix with the population makes it basically impossible.

Netanyahu's support for Hamas suggests to me that he has long been trying to avoid any civilian-death-minimizing response. He wants to make what you're hoping for impossible, and he has succeeded.

Another four hundred or so Palestinians were killed in the past day, bringing the total somewhere up over four thousand.
posted by clawsoon at 7:19 PM on October 22, 2023

Such a response, one acknowledging that the problem is Hamas not Palestine

Except the real problem is the same as it's always been, neither Hamas nor Palestine but the Israeli occupation and ongoing settlement-building enterprise. Same as the real problem in 1876 wasn't Native Americans. Any real response would acknowledge the actual root of the problem rather than engaging in what is effectively victim-blaming.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:20 PM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Agreed. Given the context, there’s not a lot of good options that keep civilians out of harms way, gets rid of Hamas, and increase Israel’s security. But the context is of their own making!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:25 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

In all good faith, I would like to know from the people currently angriest at Israel - what do you think was the right way for Israel to respond to the October 7th events? Much appreciation if you also clarify your definition of “right” for the purposes of your answer.

I'll try my best at good faith here! My definition of "right"--I think the right thing to do is whatever prevents more suffering by innocent people, which I will define here as "Israelis and Palestinians who are not military or paramilitary or otherwise combatants." I think that is always the right thing to do.

I'm not a military tactician or a game theorist or diplomat or a foreign policy official. Like almost everyone, I don't have the intelligence (like literally the intel) to answer your question from a strategic or comprehensive standpoint. I have the moral intuitions that guide my actions and guide my meager advocacy for what I want from my government.

I will invoke BungaDunga here: as an American I suppose 9/11 emerges as metaphor, however imperfect. When 9/11 happened, and a year later, and five years after that, and now 20 years later, my opinion never once changed: what I wanted was for us not to launch major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that caused hundreds of thousands of people just like you and me and the rest of us to be maimed and killed, altered the course of the region and global politics forever, and caused profound moral injury to us as individuals and a nation. I think history has shown that 20 year old brand-new-adult-me was basically right. What we did was not worth the human cost. What we carried out did not honor the dead, nor did it bring them back. We still haven't fully mourned their loss, in my view, because we immediately took to war.

So, I think that Israel should focus on protecting Israelis rather than launching a major military campaign of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing against innocent people. It's worth saying that Israelis are extremely angry that they were left so vulnerable by their government's incompetence--this also invokes 9/11 to me. Am I naive enough to believe that there would be no military response? No. But the response has been disproportionate and insane, and the fact that October 7 happened at all points to an extreme failure of intelligence, that it was not inevitable that this massacre was going to occur. The Israeli government has to face that.

Smarter people than me have also commented that these events mean that Israel can no longer pretend like having the longest ongoing refugee crisis in the world can be sustained. I'm not saying, "Let's just start negotiating a two-state solution tomorrow with Hamas," I'm not an idiot. And who even knows, at this point, what shape a final agreement could take. But something that resolves this crisis of a stateless people who are internally displaced has to happen. The whole world knows it and has known it for decades. I'm sure the players with the most power in this situation (Israel, the U.S., for example) could come up with some creative steps in the right direction, that open up a future possibility of a resolution on terms that are approaching justice for Palestinians. Jacen was extremely humble about the likely efficacy of their suggestions, but I think Jacen points in the right direction. Forge peace, indeed.
posted by kensington314 at 7:26 PM on October 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

These two groups of people are not the same.

This is a good point, and one I'm well aware of! If we're talking about actual power to effect structural change, I completely agree that rabid anti-Palestinian sentiment is much more dangerous than the reverse. And if Jacobin exclusively uses "the Left" to refer to politicians rather than organizers, activists, and grassroots movements, I have no issues with their framing there.

If not, however, I don't think it's both-sidesing to point out that violent rhetoric does have its place (however cranky—though I would wonder whether DSA chapters, student activist groups, etc. can really be considered "cranks" here) in pro-Palestinian activism. It would be both-sidesing if the Jacobin article had confined itself to saying "pro-Israel activists have been promoting some really fucked-up and occasionally outright genocidal rhetoric" and left it there—or acknowledged that pro-Palestine extremism exists, but pales in comparison to the vitriol poured forth from the other side. But instead, Jacobin categorically denied that extreme rhetoric has any place on the left, which trivializes some of the very real incidents we've seen in the past few weeks! Yes, they are not of a kind with politicians' calls to level Gaza; but they exist, and to pretend they don't plays into a historical pattern of Leftists' unwillingness to seriously grapple with the (even fringe) presence of antisemitism within their movement.

And this creates an issue for progressive Jews! Yes, the people in power are overwhelmingly pro-Israel and extend their vitriol to Palestinian civilians as well as Hamas; that is terrible, and I condemn it wholeheartedly. But speech without power matters, too; as I look around my political sphere and see former allies openly celebrating the deaths of innocent Israeli civilians, it makes it hard to join in them with any sort of common cause (despite the fact that I also condemn the way the Israeli government is conducting its operations in Gaza, and indeed, the way it's treated Palestinians for the past 70 years). So perhaps I am expressing a personal frustration that does not matter much in the scheme of this wider conflict; but I am frustrated with the inability of the major groups in my personal orbit to express empathy with Israeli victims while working towards a more equitable future for all.

(krisjohn, I'm not sure whether the "good faith" part of your most recent comment was directed at me, but if so: I was being 100% on the level when I said my comments weren't directed towards anyone in this thread [which overall I've found to be much better at general empathy than my usual IRL fora]. There is no need to qualify every condemnation of one side with a condemnation of the other; but a blanket condemnation of violence does not do much in the way of empathizing with any set of victims.)
posted by the tartare yolk at 7:27 PM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Somebody has to commit to swords to plowshares and stick with it. It's usually the strongest side, militarily speaking, that has to make the biggest commitment.

Quoted for truth.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US could have chosen a political, rather than military response. One threat focused on working with other countries around the world to bring the planners of the attacks to justice. There was so much worldwide goodwill that would have put pressure on even less willing governments to assist such an effort - there was so much pressure to assist the falsely targetted military response of invading Iraq; a more skillful political response could have brought even more pressure to bear on bringing bin Laden to justice through an actual court process. But the US had the greater political and military power - and, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, also moral/social power. Thus it was the actor that had more choice in responses.

Similarly, a different Israeli government response to the October 7 attacks could (with the help of more politically powerful allies - I’m not so naive that I don’t understand that the US’ military and economic might impact its ability to put political pressure on other countries) have chosen a political response of calling on other countries in the region that had maybe given some level of support to Hamas to cease that support and help them bring the attack planners to a fair, non-military justice. To be effective, that would need to be coupled with carrots for the majority of Palestinians who weren’t involved: improving conditions within Gaza and improving self-determination for Gazans; and I don’t know how well the situation in Gaza can be separated out from the situation in the West Bank by residents of either part of Palestine, but possibly also retuning land in the West Bank that has been illegally taken, and ceasing to turn a blind eye to the smaller scale violence perpetrated by the more belligerent settlers who volunteer themselves as part of the mechanisms of that theft.

It’s not just doing the moral thing out of the goodness of one’s heart. It’s turning the tragedy into political opportunity by taking advantage of having been placed in the moral high ground position by those committing mass slaughter, and really using the resultant global outpouring of sympathy to maximum political effect. (Countries have the ability to do that in a way that doesn’t apply as much to individuals who are directly impacted by violence and tragedy.)
posted by eviemath at 7:35 PM on October 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

There’s Aways Something You Can Do [YT, catchy children’s song], by Sarah Pirtle

While noting that states/governments have a different set of options and issues than individuals, so direct analogies with interpersonal conflict will not always be sufficiently accurate, the principle that one always has the choice of avoiding physical violence^* still applies.

(* Even though it might not always be your best option. But keeping the existence of non-violent options in mind and making a habit of looking for them can also help one choose, when necessary, from among physical self-defense options the one that most directly gets you out of harms way with as little additional violence as possible, as opposed to the whole castle doctrine/stand your ground approach.)
posted by eviemath at 7:51 PM on October 22, 2023

The Jews are also like Native Americans. They are the descendants of the indigenous people of the region who were conquered, enslaved, deported and had their temple razed and relics taken. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Romans, Muslims, Crusaders, Ottomans, etc — they all made efforts to eradicate their culture, their history and presence. In the late 1800s it was down to perhaps 25,000, yet they persisted and endured.
posted by interogative mood at 9:35 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Jews are also like Native Americans. They are the descendants of the indigenous people of the region who were conquered, enslaved, deported and had their temple razed and relics taken

And Palestinians are descendants of the indigenous population of the region who converted to Christianity and then Islam (and who inhabited the region continuously).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:51 PM on October 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Can we all agree (hah!) there is no matching analogy such that someone can summon it to declare checkmate like a well-known chess endgame? Every attempt to liken it to something else is flawed, and every flaw is a crack through which someone will drive a wedge. The elements may seem familiar, but that tells us more about humans than it does about the I/P conflict. It certainly doesn't offer a solution.

Meanwhile

Second aid convoy enters Gaza as Israel steps up bombardments, but
IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari emphasized that “fuel will not enter Gaza.” (about two thirds of the way though the article) Israel is concerned that the fuel can be used by terror groups to manufacture weapons.

posted by krisjohn at 10:32 PM on October 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

They are the descendants of the indigenous people of the region who were conquered, enslaved, deported and had their temple razed and relics taken.

According to the religion, they wandered into the land, were told by their god to conquer it from the peoples who were already living there (and at least for some of those peoples, explicitly told to kill them all), and followed those orders.
posted by Flunkie at 10:37 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

What Israel should do now. "Israel’s current approach is clearly wrong. Here’s a better way to fight Hamas — and win."
posted by BungaDunga at 11:09 PM on October 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

One IDF soldier killed and several others injured in raid into Gaza
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 2:47 AM on October 23, 2023

We've already seen what Israel needs to do in South Africa and Northern Ireland. The occupier has to take a step back and make enough concessions to get the other side to the negotiating table.

The initial step has to come from the occupier because even in the West Bank the underlying reality is so bleak for average Palestinians that any attempt to sue for peace from the Palestinian side is going to be seen as collaboration and the people who make the attempt will lose legitimacy.

Concessions like giving Palestinians a path to Israeli citizenship and voting rights, tearing down settlements, and starting to prosecute settlers and IDF members who murder Palestinian civilians would go a long way to reconciling the Palestinian public with a peace process.

Once Hamas loses popular support it would be feasible to prosecute their members for the October 7 attacks. Given that you'd also be prosecuting IDF members and settlers they wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
posted by zymil at 2:49 AM on October 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

There's a thesis that the techniques of fascism in Europe were a repatriation of techniques that had been developed to control and/or eliminate populations in overseas colonies. Are liberal Israelis worried that the techniques currently being perfected by Israeli settlers might someday be turned around and used on them?
posted by clawsoon at 4:43 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Israel was in a roil over the judicial reforms and state power grab before this crisis broke.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:02 AM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Jews are also like Native Americans. They are the descendants of the indigenous people of the region who were conquered, enslaved, deported and had their temple razed and relics taken

And Palestinians are descendants of the indigenous population of the region who converted to Christianity and then Islam (and who inhabited the region continuously).

I, frankly, couldn't care less about who is the original descendant of this land. Its completely irrelevant. Its fundamentally unknowable, and, if there was some study that had definitive evidence that traced the lineage of one group to the land, how in the world would this affect anything?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:48 AM on October 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

freud (none of the following should be taken in any way as an endorsement of freud) was famously terrified of rome, because all the layers upon layers upon layers of rome built on top of layers and layers and layers of rome seemed like a metaphor for the unknowable depths of the unconscious mind.

the area that we currently call israel and palestine is like that, but add an extra 5000 years or so to the process of layer-accretion. that land is the homeland of so many people that the only way to honor all the ancestral claims upon it would involve, i don't know, building a series of anime-style floating disc cities above it. it says something about how dystopian the struggles over that land are that the anime floating disc city idea seems less dystopian.

as such a solution dependent upon deep-historical ancestral claims is not a solution, and appeals to deep-historical ancestral claims as the sole (or even primary) basis for the justness of actions taken in the present day is tantamount to saying that raw force is determinative, since everyone involved has equivalent deep-historical ancestral claims. between equal rights in the bad anarchy that is international law, force decides.

this particular mutual death struggle is one which the extant models for how to govern people and places cannot apply. it's the westphalian state's equivalent of division by zero. any attempted solution, including the attempted ancestral claims solution, that treats a positive resolution as possible (here "positive" in the sense derived from "posit," "positive" meaning not "good" but instead "we can say what it is") is not a solution.

this is i think one of the reasons why conversations about palestine and israel are impossible: although similar recent situations (most notably south african apartheid) were ones where truth and reconcilliation were at least theoretically possible, any good outcome to this dispute is going to require a healthy dose of uncertainty and silence as a key component.

conversations about israel and palestine fail specifically because frank conversation in this particular context is a form of geopolitical sabotage.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:58 AM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

a series of anime-style floating disc cities above it.

If only this problem could be solved by Rosa Salazar punching it.
posted by krisjohn at 6:04 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

The part about Jews having some unspecified linkage with or connection to Israel keeps coming up, some people have said it's antisemitic to say that the Jewish population which migrated to Israel post-WWII were colonizers due to this concept. And possibly that extended to calling the current set of Jewish people forcibly evicting Palestinians from their homes and property colonizers as well.

But heres's the thing. The assertion of a Jewish connection or linkage with Israel seems to have at least two significantly different meanings.

It seems to be possible to take that concept to mean:

1 - Israel is religiously significant to Jews.

or

2 - Israel is religiously significant to Jews and therefore no non0Jewish land claim in Israel has any validity whatsoever and from a moral standpoint land within Israel which is not owned by Jews can be considered to be empty and in need of settlement because it's empty.

3 - Something else possibly on the spectrum somewhere between 1 and 2.

I'm working on the assumption that no one in this thread means that in sense two, but that leaves me and I suspect most other people on this thread unsure what exactly is meant.

This further complicated by the fact that the single most powerful, politically and militarially, group of Jews on Earth very much mean those assertions in the second sense. Which makes the people making those statements in a vague, unspecified, sort of way even more confusing to people like me.

So, if I can ask for clarification, for people who talk about a Jewish connection, or linkage, or relationship, or whatever, to Israel what EXACTLY does that mean? nd why is it significant to the current issue of Israel massacring Palestinians in Gaza and Jewish colonizers, apparently with the backing of the Israeli government evicting Palestinians from their land on the West Bank?
posted by sotonohito at 6:10 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

The occupier has to take a step back and make enough concessions to get the other side to the negotiating table.

Occupier? First let's talk about Gaza, the UK occupied it from 1918 to 1948, and Egypt occupied it from 1948 to 1967, and Israel occupied it from 1967 to 1993, when they granted the PA limited self governance through the Oslo Accords, and then from 2005 onwards granted Gaza full self governance while demolishing all their settlements and returning the land to them.

The only people who actually gave Gaza their independence has been Israel, while the UK and Egypt have been occupiers.

Yes, but you say what about the "blockade"? The border itself is like any sovereign border, Israel gets to decide what passes through, each nation control what goes on in their side of the border. There were periodic air and sea blockades from 2005 in response to various attacks, which became permanent when Hamas became the governing power and declared their goal was the eradication of the state of Israel - a de-facto declaration of war. Israel has basically been at war with Hamas since 2007.

I don't believe anyone can argue with a straight face that a de-facto wartime blockade isn't justifiable. It's explicitly to slow the build-up of rockets and arms in Gaza which are used to target Israeli civilians - and they're firing 700 per day into Israel, and which supposedly a single rocket is able to kill 471 people, according to Hamas anyway. It's not like Israel is acting alone: Egypt puts up an even stricter blockade on their side of the border because even they don't want the terror group Hamas to get more powerful.

Occupier or not I don't realistically see what Israel could offer at this point as a concession. Gaza is merely 76km from Jerusalem, 71km from Tel Aviv. Hamas managed to penetrate 25km deep into Israel and slaughter civilians, as far as Ofakim. In my most optimistic view Israel could offer several kilometers of extra land to Gaza as a concession without putting their major cities in direct danger, and I'm certain it would change nothing for Hamas who is still calling for the total eradication of Israel.

The situation in the West Bank is even murkier. The UN says Israel is occupying the West Bank, but occupying it from who? Jordan seized the land in 1948 and unilaterally made all residents there Jordanian citizens and allocated them half the seats in the Jordanian Parliament. Israel won the 1967 war and kept the West Bank as a buffer zone against a future attack. Should Israel return the West Bank to Jordan, who themselves are occupiers, and who don't want the land anyway since they unilaterally revoked the citizen status of Palestinians and made them stateless in 1988?

Would Jordan return the land to the British who want nothing more to do with it? Are they saying to return to the original UN partition plan which the Arabs violently disagreed with in the first place? Should Israel create a new nation state on their border and grant them independence for the first time in their history, like Gaza - which, if we are all perfectly honest, will most likely end up with another 700 rockets per day coming into Israel from a different direction?

In light of all these facts I find it hard to believe anyone would seriously agree with the logic any of these solutions.
posted by xdvesper at 6:22 AM on October 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

So, if I can ask for clarification, for people who talk about a Jewish connection, or linkage, or relationship, or whatever, to Israel what EXACTLY does that mean? nd why is it significant to the current issue of Israel massacring Palestinians in Gaza and Jewish colonizers, apparently with the backing of the Israeli government evicting Palestinians from their land on the West Bank?

Look, this isn't Reddit. ELI5 isn't really a useful approach here, and I don't believe you lack any idea why narratives of ethnic and religious origin and belonging are connected to the concept of the ethno-state and national home, or centuries of struggles over control of "The Holy Land."

'What does being Jewish or Muslim have to do with the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall'

But if you really need it explained, that Shavit chapter reprinted in the New Yorker I linked above is a decent start.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:32 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

as anecdotal evidence toward my hypothesis that resolutions to this problem must involve uncertainty and silence, i present to you the inevitable result of anyone either asking or trying to answer the questions above.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:44 AM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm not pretending to be stupid, but the problem is the concept is so vague you can't tell a Likud right wing "all of Israel belongs to Jews so we can kill Palestinians just for funsies" type from a person who just means "I think we need to approach the question with some trepedation and a degree of religious sensitivity".

The current government of Israel is very much of the position that only Jews are legitimate within Israel, and seems to take the position that Israel's Biblical borders are the correct borders. The actions they take agianst Palestinian civlians reflect that viewpoint. That viewpoint must be taken into account when analyzing the actions of Netanyahu and his government of war criminals.

It seems really unfair and meanspirited on my part to just assume anyone talking about a "Jewish connection to Israel" means it from the Netanyahuist standpoint. But absent any actual clear statement of what a person means I have absolutely no fucking clue because, as I mentioned, there are multiple, radically different, meanings for that sort of statement.

So in furtherance of my ongoing efforts to be less of a flaming asshole, I ask for clarification instead of just assuming the person I'm talking to is a pro-genocide Likud type.
posted by sotonohito at 6:51 AM on October 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

It's because those voices are winning, and are dictating the response, and are responsible for Palestinian deaths? The right-wingers are also happy to take everyone saying "it's complicated, and we can't condemn Israel as colonialist" as a support for their position? It's been used in this very thread to shut down discussion of literal settlements.
posted by sagc at 7:07 AM on October 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

Do I get to demand you distinguish yourself from the Hamas members who killed infants, before I listen to you?

In the experience of, no doubt, many here, the play is that that exact demand gets made, ad nauseam, and then, regardless of the response, there's no listening.
posted by busted_crayons at 7:14 AM on October 23, 2023 [12 favorites]

But heavens forbid the "Israel has a right to defend itself" people address that what's been going on in the West Bank completely gives a lie to everything Israel says about what their goals are.

I think the line is "the left can be held to account for what their wildest college students say online, but the right cannot be held to account for what their elected leaders say in press statements"
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:14 AM on October 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

or people who talk about a Jewish connection, or linkage, or relationship, or whatever, to Israel what EXACTLY does that mean?

Don't move the goalposts. The demand being made here is explicitly 'justify any connection Jews feel to Israel.' To the point that we need 'linkage, relationship, or whatever' because, hey, it's just a bunch of bullshit right?

Unlike all the other national liberation movements by dispossessed and displaced, or diasporic ethnicities that the same people have no trouble understanding and valorizing, so long as they're out of power.

If it's not rhetorical, in a pretty shitty way, then it evinces a need to go do even a minimal amount of homework.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:26 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

snuffleupagus, did you just compare the current state of Israel to a "national liberation movement", in this moment? How is that not wildly offensive to Palestinians? Do you really think what's happening in Gaza right now, perpetrated by the IDF, is liberatory? In the West Bank? If all support for Israel is identical to support for Palestinians, then why are we complaining, right?

That's exactly the kind of rhetorical move that makes this hard to discuss.
posted by sagc at 7:34 AM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Of course not. That's a wild misreading of what I just said. Did you miss the 'in power' part? Or the references to Zionism (in Israel's founding vs. now) throughout the thread, and the context of the demand to explain the cultural, historical, and religious attachment of all Jews to Israel as a homeland? That's the kind of rhetorical move that makes this hard to discuss.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:37 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Amnesty International Oct 20: Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza In their stated intent to use all means to destroy Hamas, Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure, while new restrictions mean Gaza is fast running out of water, medicine, fuel and electricity. Testimonies from eyewitness and survivors highlighted, again and again, how Israeli attacks decimated Palestinian families, causing such destruction that surviving relatives have little but rubble to remember their loved ones by.

UN RWA Oct 21: Statement from UNRWA CG - The Gaza Strip: Fuel is running out, without fuel, humanitarian response will stop In three days, UNRWA will run out of fuel, critical for our humanitarian response across the Gaza Strip. Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and bakeries. Without fuel, aid will not reach those in desperate need. Without fuel, there will be no humanitarian assistance. No fuel will further strangle the children, women and people of Gaza. UNRWA is the largest humanitarian actor in the Gaza Strip. Without fuel, we will fail the people of Gaza whose needs are growing by the hour, under our watch. This cannot and should not happen.

MSF Oct 23: What is the current situation? The situation in Gaza has been described by our teams as ‘horrific’ and ‘catastrophic’. Hospitals and clinics – the ones that are running – are overwhelmed and are barely functioning, running out of electricity and medical supplies. Surgeons in Al-Shifa hospital are now operating without painkillers. A state of siege has been imposed by the Israeli government on Gaza, including the withholding of food, water, fuel and electricity. This is unconscionable. As a result of the blockage, Gaza's water shortage has now reached a critical threshold. People are drinking salty water. The bombing of Gaza is relentless. People have been killed while forced to move to look for safety, including family members of our colleagues. People are trapped; those who wish to leave are unable to do so.
posted by ohneat at 7:38 AM on October 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

it evinces a need to go do even a minimal amount of homework.

Have you spent any time in the replies of a mild post asking the IDF to show a modicum of restraint? Anything that's not full-throated endorsement of Israel?

People post fantasies of Gaza, levelled, Palestinians all removed, remade as an Israeli seaside waterpark/resort, and the people who criticise them are labelled Hamas supporters.

Somebody hasn't done their homework here, but I think you might be confused as to who.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:38 AM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

snuffleupagus, I guess I'm now confused, because it sure seemed like you were arguing that people shouldn't ask questions about reflexive support for Israel as a state? And saying that it *doesn't matter* that it's in power? Like, as people are trying to make clear to you, even being massively oppressed doesn't get you a free pass from people Just Asking Questions about why you can't just be peaceful. We have seen some incredibly blatant examples of this in the thread.
posted by sagc at 7:46 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

People post fantasies of Gaza, levelled, Palestinians all removed, remade as an Israeli seaside waterpark/resort, and the people who criticise them are labelled Hamas supporters.

did that actually happen?
posted by haptic_avenger at 7:54 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yet another complicating detail is what people mean when they talk about colonialism or settler colonialism in the context of Israel and Palestine (because the part about historical Jewish connections to the land often comes up in response to someone describing Israel as a colonial power or colonial occupier of Gaza and/or the West Bank).

In North America, where many of us Mefites live, colonialism involved people coming from another continent and displacing Indigenous inhabitants, where our current lived experience is not only that white people have the political and economic power, but also are more numerous. But that “more numerous” part is often not the case in other instances of colonization; and of course Black people in North America, or more recent immigrants from outside of North America or Europe, are not themselves the descendants of settlers or colonizers, despite not having ancestry indigenous to North America. I would argue (and my understanding is that many Indigenous leaders seem to agree?) that eg. denying African Americans a connection to the land in North America would be unjust, despite that lack of as historical an ancestral connection. Colonialism or colonization is thus more accurately viewed as a political or political-economic relationship between a state and a non-state group of people in a given region (what in Canada we refer to as a nation, and which I suppose you could call a non-state nation in general? I’m sure the political scientists in the thread could give us better info about suggested terminology), with the settler component being merely one tactic in enacting colonialism. (I am not certain, but I think this is what some people mean when they talk about “settler colonialism” as opposed to just plain old colonialism?)

Israel has a colonial, but not settler, political relationship with Gaza. Israel has a colonial relationship that uses settler tactics with the West Bank (explicitly - using non-military people to literally occupy land that has been recently expropriated from other people, as a means of consolidating political control over a region). I’ve definitely heard support for Palestinians that relies on the more simplistic understanding that equates colonialism with settler tactics - and I’ve heard some North Americans who support Palestine (average people, not so much people with political power or influence) who seem to have heard the critique of Israel as having a colonial relationship with Palestine who interpret that in the North American sense and seem to assume that means that all Jewish Israelis arrived in the aftermath of World War II (many did, of course, including some whose ancestral connection to the region is not more recent than that of any other European; but as some folks have noted, the region was not devoid of Jewish residents beforehand nor has it been since the early days of Judaism). And I’ve heard some who support Israel apply a similarly simplistic interpretation and assume that any critique of Israel’s political, military, and economic policy toward Palestine as being colonial in nature means that all Jewish residents came from elsewhere and don’t have ancestry in the region.

This is why the issue of Jewish historical connection to the region comes up in any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, it’s kind of a derail, but it comes from something that is a common misperception on both sides about the meanings of the words we use - specifically, what we mean by colonialism, or settler colonialism, or whether settlers necessarily have to be non-indigenous to the region being settled.
posted by eviemath at 7:54 AM on October 23, 2023 [16 favorites]

you were arguing that people shouldn't ask questions about reflexive support for Israel as a state?

I think they were saying that if you are “just asking” “Why do the Jews think they need a country anyway??” … you should do some homework.
posted by haptic_avenger at 7:55 AM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

did that actually happen?

Yes. Yes it did. Maybe I can memail you examples to morrow, it's 2am, but like... Yes, and how you can not know about it terrifies me. How am I supposed to have a reasonable discussion with people who are completely oblivious to how many Israelis, and far more Zionist non-Israeli, non-Jewish people, are openly fantasizing about genocide.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:57 AM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

snuffleupagus, I guess I'm now confused, because it sure seemed like you were arguing that people shouldn't ask questions about reflexive support for Israel as a state? And saying that it *doesn't matter* that it's in power?

No, you attacked me for saying the founding of Israel is seen differently than other national liberation movements, that haven't succeeded in taking power. It is now an established nation-state (or close enough) and should be held to the prevailing standards of international relations, etc.

Today Israel is no longer a national liberation movement, it's the aftermath of one. But people dismiss that history when pretending to by mystified by any idea of a "Jewish connection, or linkage, or relationship, or whatever, to Israel." Or, again, they've made zero effort to learn anything about what they're explicitly asking about.

Just Asking Questions about why you can't just be peaceful.

No, Just Asking Questions about 'what does Jewishness even have to do with any...'linkage or whatever' to Israel anyway?'

People post fantasies of Gaza, levelled, Palestinians all removed, remade as an Israeli seaside waterpark/resort, and the people who criticise them are labelled Hamas supporters.

Somebody hasn't done their homework here, but I think you might be confused as to who.

Maybe stay away from Twitter. Homework is not the comment section on a shithole social media site that has literally been abandoned to the worst of its users.

Homework here would be remedying the apparent lack of any awareness of why Jews have an attachment to Israel that has been carried forward through thousands of years of oppression. Not that I really believe people don't understand the concept.

It doesn't in any way detract from the ability to deplore what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank now.

I agree with the view that just goes directly to saying what Israel is doing as the established and powerful nation-state in control of a captive population is completely unacceptable and needs to stop immediately without needing to reconcile all the other aspects.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:59 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Al Jazeera English [twitter link] Oct 23: This exclusive footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the extent of destruction after Israeli strikes hit the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza last night.

ABC Oct 16: Scenes of destruction inside Gaza refugee camp Scenes from north Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp show destruction caused to buildings and streets following Israeli strikes on the enclave.

UN RWA Oct 17: Gaza: UNRWA school sheltering displaced families is hit At least six people were killed this afternoon when an UNRWA school was hit in al-Maghazi refugee camp, in Gaza’s middle area. Dozens were injured (including UNRWA staff) and severe structural damage was caused to the school. The numbers are likely to be higher.
posted by ohneat at 7:59 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

openly fantasizing about genocide

I meant has this been happening on Metafilter? the
posted by haptic_avenger at 8:24 AM on October 23, 2023

The people spouting objectionable anti-semitic rhetoric you are referring to are scattered cranks -- and ones very unrepresentative of the vastly larger group of people that is concerned with preserving Palestinian human rights -- at rallies and on the Internet.

Eh, I wish it were that simple. Maybe you’re talking about the US context only, I don’t know. But in Europe at least we definitely have a problem with antisemitism coming from more than a few "scattered cranks" who are "unrepresentative" of pro-Palestinian supporters on the left. It’s too much to get into now and there is a long history of it and how it’s changed through the past decades, but just to stick to the last couple of weeks, we had people celebrating the Hamas attacks in more than one European major city, so much that in France and Germany authorities outright banned pro-Palestinian rallies. (NB not saying the ban is a good thing, it is far from a good outcome really, but has to be understood in its specific context there). Like the tartare yolk already said above, it’s a bit much to claim the violent rhetoric is only coming from those in power aligned with Israel. Really wish it were that straightforward.
posted by bitteschoen at 8:24 AM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

To clarify my earlier comment on a comparison to Native Americans was merely in response to the claim that the Israeli’s are like the European invaders of North America and the Palestinians are like the Native Americans as a means to make some moral argument against Israel’s existence. This isn’t Australia or the Americas it is one of the oldest places for human agriculture and cities in the world. It stands at the crossroads of Asia, Africa and Europe and the region has seen waves of migration and shifting influence for millennia. It is simultaneously part of the west and apart from it. Remember it was Arabic commentaries on the ancient Greek philosophy and trade from Venice to the Middle East, that laid the ground work for the Renaissance and modern western civilization. The arguments over historical rights and who was the most wronged are ultimately counter productive. I’ve argued with Israelis who remain convinced that Palestinians are just recent Arab migrants and not a real culture like Jews. The argument over who is more legitimate is racist and inflammatory. If you want to help support peace you must accept that Israel and Palestine legitimate and the people there need to find peace, not be turned into refugees. Supporting peace means you don’t hurl insults like “colonizer” that imply one side is totally illegitimate. If someone started shouting insults at you would you be inclined to listen to them or would you want to fight?

I’ve been critical of Palestinian leadership and especially Hamas in this thread, let me make a few observations about the ways the Israeli leadership continues to fail.

First of all they absolutely need to crackdown on the settlers. The hate crimes committed in the West Bank since October 7th by settler groups are outrageous and only making things worse. A state must have a monopoly on the use of violence and must not allow its people to attack the neighbors. The individuals involved must be arrested. Israel also needs to take a hard look at every settlement and focus on deconfliction. They immediately remove the most conflict prone settlements. Do it in the name of establishing a security / buffer zone. They seem to think collective punishment works, apply it to the settlers who make trouble.
Second of all the government needs to make a strong statement in support of a two state solution. They should ask Saudi Arabia, the UAE Jordan ‘s Egypt to help with a Palestinian statehood project focused on nonviolent co-existence.
Third Israel’s biggest mistake since 1967 has been the failure to foster and outright opposition to the development of Palestinian civil society and government. They put their energy into creating facts in the ground in terms of settling people and claiming more territory for Israel. They should have put that energy into fostering a peaceful relationship and building up the Palestinians. They have had defacto control for over 50 years. Time to start doing more than just complaining that the Palestinians won’t make a deal.
Finally Israel must come to terms with the refugees from 1948, 1967, and 1973. Those who were marched out of Israel at gunpoint need some kind of compensation and there should probably be at least a symbolic return of some refugees to Israel. I understand that the 20 million or so member Palestinian diaspora is unlikely to return and Israel would not be able to agree to that; but perhaps the now elderly people who spent their lives in exile could be allowed to return and be cared for in a retirement community.
posted by interogative mood at 9:05 AM on October 23, 2023 [13 favorites]

Supporting peace means you don’t hurl insults like “colonizer” that imply one side is totally illegitimate.

I think we are actually getting to the heart of the issue here.

For some of us, words and truth have meaning. Colonialism is not just an insult, it’s an analysis; eviemath does some unpacking above. We look at the situation, apply it to our tools of analysis, and decide whether or not something is colonialism on that basis.

For others, it’s an insult, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it shouldn’t be said because it makes people angry and feel bad and escalates the tensions.

This is very similar to the racism/racist situation, “whether or not you’re a racist, you’re doing some racist things.” Whether or not anyone intends to be a colonizer, Israelis are participating in colonialism *whether or not they were there in the first place*, because they *gained the power to take the land by receiving it from colonial powers*.
posted by corb at 9:33 AM on October 23, 2023 [22 favorites]

sotonohito laid out the following range and asked where people stood within it.

1 - Israel is religiously significant to Jews.
or
2 - Israel is religiously significant to Jews and therefore no non-Jewish land claim in Israel has any validity whatsoever and from a moral standpoint land within Israel which is not owned by Jews can be considered to be empty and in need of settlement because it's empty.
3 - Something else possibly on the spectrum somewhere between 1 and 2.
...
So in furtherance of my ongoing efforts to be less of a flaming asshole, I ask for clarification instead of just assuming the person I'm talking to is a pro-genocide Likud type.

snuffleupagus responded:

The implication would seem to be because you can't imagine a legitimate version of a Jewish connection to Israel, only Likud's kind, which is lazy or worse. Now I'm going to stop posting for while.
...
Don't move the goalposts. The demand being made here is explicitly 'justify any connection Jews feel to Israel.' To the point that we need 'linkage, relationship, or whatever' because, hey, it's just a bunch of bullshit right?

Aren't you talking past each other here? Sotonohito does not appear to be questioning whether Jews have a connection to Israel. Or demanding anyone justify that connection. The question is who believes that only Jews have a legitimate connection to that same piece of Earth? This is an important question because the current government of Israel appears to firmly of that view.

At the risk of more bad analogies, this is a reverse of the bad faith attacks on "Black Lives Matter" as a slogan by pretending it means "Only Black Lives Matter" rather than "Black Lives Matter Too".

I haven't seen anyone in this thread suggesting Jews don't have a connection to Israel.

In contrast with BLM, the idea that only Jews have a connection to the piece of land called Israel, on the other hand, does seem to be supported by some here.
posted by bcd at 9:42 AM on October 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

because they *gained the power to take the land by receiving it from colonial powers*.

I would argue not even this, in fact, but because the current power relationship between the state of Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank is a colonial relationship. Maybe that wasn’t even necessarily the case initially back before 1948. But it is the current political and power relationship.
posted by eviemath at 9:44 AM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think the problem is that using a single bad word to designate a party, be it terrorist or colonizer, is no way to solve any problems. It’s a conclusory label, not an analysis.
posted by haptic_avenger at 9:44 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sometimes when people do bad actions, it is important to label the action or power relationship clearly. Eg. if we can’t say that a policy has a racist impact, because racism is a bad word, then we can’t understand and fix the problem. The word “racism” or “racist” isn’t a bad word. The action it labels is (for most of us, according to our own moral or ethical beliefs at least; not so much for proud white supremacists or similar of course).
posted by eviemath at 9:49 AM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

For some of us, words and truth have meaning. Colonialism is not just an insult, it’s an analysis; eviemath does some unpacking above. We look at the situation, apply it to our tools of analysis, and decide whether or not something is colonialism on that basis.

For others, it’s an insult, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it shouldn’t be said because it makes people angry and feel bad and escalates the tensions.

I do not think claiming that people who agree with you are people for whom "words and truth have meaning" while those who disagree are irrational, indifferent to truth, and lacking in analytical tools is getting to the heart of the matter. The people who disagree with you have given reasons, over and over and over, for why they hold the position they do. Let's not resort to these kinds of ad hominems.
posted by cosmic owl at 9:52 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Like, understand that words have impact, yes; and use them with intention and precision as much as possible. Question whether others are using words accurately in high impact situations, and discuss when your understandings of the definitions differ. But don’t object to the descriptive word as a “bad word” when what you object to is either the action described, or whether the description applies as used.
posted by eviemath at 9:55 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

From an Irish woman I know online: "Well, we don't recognise the British claim on Northern Ireland. We've just decided to try and stop killing each other and find legal ways of accommodating everyone:"

Damned if I know how to get from here to there for Israel and Palestine.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:09 AM on October 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

In contrast with BLM, the idea that only Jews have a connection to the piece of land called Israel, on the other hand, does seem to be supported by some here.

Yeah? Who would that be? I don't see that anywhere here. I see people eager to make the accusation, though.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:25 AM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Why do you get to demand every interlocutor distinguish themselves from the worst of the people you associate them with? Which other groups do you impose this requirement on? Do I get to demand you distinguish yourself from the Hamas members who killed infants, before I listen to you? Does every American have to explain why they aren't a Trumpist, or some other brand of white supremacist? Aren't you a colonizer on stolen land, profiting from it, as much as any second generation Israeli?

I actually think that in the context of discussion and debate on this topic, or topics that are similarly serious and controversial, asking people to lay out their terms like that is probably reasonable and good! I know I don't have anything to hide in my viewpoints, and am happy to explain them.

"Do I get to demand you distinguish yourself from the Hamas members who killed infants, before I listen to you?" In my view, you are welcome to make this demand. On the American left, a lot of people are complaining that they have to constantly assert that they think what Hamas did was no good. Of course it is awful, why do I need to constantly say that it was awful before I make any criticism of Israel? Well, you know, it's not a difficult thing to do, and it helps people to know where you are coming from before launching into a blistering critique of the Israeli government. It's good to help people understand you.

"Does every American have to explain why they aren't a Trumpist, or some other brand of white supremacist?" Well, not typically to one another, because we are a dramatically sorted country, politically, and we also can read social cues and basically know our fellow travelers and our political opponents when we encounter one another. But if I were talking to someone from another country, you know, I'm sure it would be reasonable for them to at least wonder if I was a Trump voter, and I'm QUITE HAPPY to distinguish myself from that group!

Another note that I think is worth considering: There are some go-to modes of communication here on MetaFilter, and in long threads like this one, we tend to get . . . I'll call it elliptical, and sometimes deliberately obtuse, and sometimes unnecessarily snarky. We often have tone doing a lot of expository work for us even though tone is a notoriously difficult communication technique in person-to-person writing. I often find myself reading someone's comment, in this thread and others, and thinking, "What did that mean? Do I agree with them? Are they an asshole? Was that mean or was it like . . . just insider-y? Let me go look at their . . .[ctrl-F] . . . 47 comments here and see where they seem to be coming from." There's a ton of that MetaFilter mode of writing in this 1,000+ comment thread and it would be helpful in a long thread if we could be very direct about what we are saying.
posted by kensington314 at 10:35 AM on October 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yeah? Who would that be? I don't see that anywhere here. I see people eager to make the accusation, though.

Thank you for the thoughtful engagement with the bulk of my comment about how you two were talking past each other. I'll leave you to scroll back and look for yourself to answer that question yourself. While you are doing so, perhaps find the comments you keep alluding to that deny Jews have any connection to Israel?
posted by bcd at 10:37 AM on October 23, 2023

So, me? I'm struggling to remain polite, so I've had enough. Enjoy the thread. Keep making direct accusations you can't support and misquoting people, maybe others will engage with you.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:38 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

To be crystal clear, no, I don't think snuffleupagus has ever shown any sign they are in the "only Jews have a legitimate connection to Israel" camp. I value their comments here. I was trying to clear up what appeared to be a misunderstanding about what sotonohito asked in the first place. Clearly I failed in that. My apologies.

I do believe there have been voices in this thread that do not believe Palestinians have a connection to the land every bit as legitimate as Jews. My last comment was about not being willing to go reread a thousand comments to pick out the worst offenders, not an accusation about snuffleupagus being one.

(No apologies for misquoting anyone though. I stand by the accuracy of those literal copy and pastes.)
posted by bcd at 10:50 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'll reiterate my historian's quote from earlier:

The Zionist movement at the time was VERY open about its colonial nature, stating as late as 1942 in their official program “Their pioneering achievements in agriculture and industry, embodying new patterns of cooperative endeavor, have written a notable page in the history of colonization.”

That is the Zionists own words calling themselves colonizers. I'm insisting on this not as a form of insult (I don't think it makes Israel illegitimate) but because of it's explanatory power, because it amply explains the source and nature of the conflict. It explains the support from the US and opposition from Arab parties.

I don't think it makes Israel illegitimate any more than Turkey or Greece or Hungary or Russia. Lots of nation-states had to do some ethnic cleansing to get to their current state of peace. At the same time, it means I don't have much sympathy for Israeli deaths. Reaping, sowing, living by the sword, etc.

finally i'd like to say i liked this thread a lot better when it was more about sharing news and analysis of facts on the ground.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 10:55 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

It explains the support from the US and opposition from Arab parties.

Ehhhh not really. US support was almost entirely driven by domestic politics and Arab states buying Arms for the soviets. The US could care less whether the project was colonial or not
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:03 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

also wow - At the same time, it means I don't have much sympathy for Israeli deaths
posted by haptic_avenger at 11:12 AM on October 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

haptic_avenger, you may not seeing it has having explanatory or useful power, but I'm not sure that should dictate whether it should be used. I agree with the above comments that you can't just shut down conversation by saying "it makes people angry to be called colonizers!" without doing the work to say why it's *inaccurate*.
posted by sagc at 11:14 AM on October 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

“Colonizer” is a kind of invective label now

well i'm obviously not using it in that way. I'm saying that Zionists in 1942 thought that their cause paralleled European colonization. And I agree with them. I'm not sure how I would "prove" these parallels to anyone's satisfaction.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 11:43 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Perhaps it would be helpful if I clarified myself since I asked for clarification?

I do not think the modern state of Israel should be abolished. I do not favor evicting Jews from Israel. I am not arguing for any pogroms or violence against Jews. I am not arguing that the religion of Judaism is any more or less valid, true, or worthy of respect than any other religion that exists. I am not motivated in any way, shape, or form by animosity against Jews and am as opposed to antisemitism as I am to other forms of bigotry.

I am not asking that anyone JUSTIFY any connection, linkage, feeling, or belief Jews may or may not have towards the land of Israel.

I'd also like to clarify that in other contexts I have appreciated and enjoyed snuffleupagus' comments and I am sad to learn that I have, however indadvertantly, offended them so deeply.
posted by sotonohito at 11:53 AM on October 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Ontario NDP kicks Hamilton MPP Sarah Jama from caucus after controversial Gaza comments

Apropos of this thread, what led to her ouster was a tweet using the words "settler colonialism". The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs is "pleased" to see her kicked out; the Canadian Union of Public Employees is not.
posted by clawsoon at 12:44 PM on October 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

I appreciate, and it's not that I'm deeply offended, more frustrated; and in that way that I've learned to recognize means it's better for me to stop posting for a while. All of these aspects that are really about the wider discourse can wait, as disconcerting as some of it is to me.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:09 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

sotonohito, I believe your request for clarification was made in good faith. But the hypothesis you presented is way off the mark.

The assertion of a Jewish connection or linkage with Israel seems to have at least two significantly different meanings.

It seems to be possible to take that concept to mean:

1 - Israel is religiously significant to Jews.

or

2 - Israel is religiously significant to Jews and therefore no non0Jewish land claim in Israel has any validity whatsoever and from a moral standpoint land within Israel which is not owned by Jews can be considered to be empty and in need of settlement because it's empty.

Option 1 is a massive oversimplification that reduces the connection to something that no one could take seriously. The Jewish "linkage" to the land of Israel is far more than religious significance — Israel is religiously significant to Muslims, Christians, and many other religious groups besides. The connection between Jews and the land of Israel is an ethnic and historical one as well as a religious one. Meanwhile, option 2 is a cartoonishly evil and obviously false view that no one in this thread could possibly hold (I don't know anyone who would claim the land is or was "empty and in need of settlement", and I know a lot of Zionists who hold a wide range of positions I find utterly abhorrent). The spectrum you posited is very far from the reality and complexity of the Jewish relationship to Israel and reduces the whole thing to only one facet, that of religion. I am not snuffleupagus, but I imagine that this is part of why they suggested you educate yourself on the subject.
posted by cosmic owl at 1:10 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Netanyahu told to 'quit now'. A recent poll has found that 80% of the Israeli public blames Netanyahu for the security failures. A ground invasion of Gaza remains popular with 69% support. 49% of the Israeli public want Benny Ganz to lead a national unity government.

We are still a long way from having cooler heads prevail but maybe we're getting closer. There are also reports that another 50-100 hostages might be released soon.

Netanyahu's response to this has been completely inept. The heavy handedness of the response has burned a lot of initial goodwill Israel had gained with this attack. They've claimed to have killed a few Hamas leaders (although many are unconfirmed). They've conducted thousands of airstrikes on Gaza (a very small place) and the rocket attacks continue unabated. The ground invasion and re-occupation of Gaza keeps getting delayed because it is obvious to anyone with the slightest understanding of the nature of Hamas' fortress under Gaza that this is going to be a total bloodbath for all involved with thousands of civilians caught in the cross fire. Everyone with any sense also understands that destroying Hamas isn't possible. By declaring this the objective Netanyahu has already handed Hamas a victory, because they have to do is hang on.
posted by interogative mood at 1:11 PM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

There are also reports that another 50-100 hostages might be released soon.

Hamas is not too enthusiastic about those reports: “We don’t know why they are spreading these rumours. Maybe they want to sabotage the whole process or undermine this step or something else,” the Hamas spokesman said.
posted by clawsoon at 1:21 PM on October 23, 2023

So I did some digging to answer my own question/remedy my ignorance about what exactly “settler colonialism” means. Not a lot of digging yet - an hour of internet search certainly does not make one an expert in anything. But it was a helpful start. Surprisingly to me, the Wikipedia article seems more comprehensive and informative than some of the other sources I looked at. It has a section on the differing views about whether Zionism can reasonably be considered as settler colonialism, and there is in fact an entire Wikipedia article just on that topic. It sounds to me like there are many aspects of the kind of official academic definition that apply, but some that don’t, so there’s arguments to be made based on what you think are the more important aspects or defining characteristics. I would recommend starting with the general article then moving to the specific. For those who take offence to the term being applied to Israeli actions, both articles do also describe arguments on that side that engage with and critique the analysis, which one or two of you may find helpful at least to avoid really weak arguments like calling colonialism a bad word and saying that it shouldn’t be used in any context whatsoever. For those of us who do see elements of colonialism in Israel’s actions toward the West Bank and/or Gaza, I also found it helpful in clarifying my thinking and adding useful nuance that will likely help me understand some of the clear miscommunications that seem to commonly occur in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
posted by eviemath at 1:23 PM on October 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

I think that to categorize it under settler colonialism misses a key part of the story. The main driver of the migration to to the region was the decline, not the expansion of empires. As the empires of Eastern Europe (Austria-Hungary / Czarist Russia / The Ottomans) went into terminal decline there was massive political upheaval, civil unrest and lots of refugees and relocation of peoples. Look at what happened between Greece and Turkey, Poles and Germans, the Armenian Genocide, Yugoslavia, etc. The migration of large numbers of Jews to the Levant was not just by choice, it was often as a last resort when places like the United States turned them away. When the British took over they did issue the Balfore Declaration but they also would later limit Jewish immigration into Palestine. The idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel was not at the top of their agenda and many British governments actively worked against it.

That is very different from other settler colonial projects that the British undertook at the time like Australia and parts of Africa.
posted by interogative mood at 2:28 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Whatever the metropole did/wanted is almost immaterial to what is happening on the ground, that seems like a distinction without a difference. There’s also a burgeoning literature on non-Western Empire forms of settler colonialism, which is probably more relevant but ultimately they’re variations on a theme.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:49 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

That is the Zionists own words calling themselves colonizers. I'm insisting on this not as a form of insult (I don't think it makes Israel illegitimate) but because of it's explanatory power, because it amply explains the source and nature of the conflict. It explains the support from the US and opposition from Arab parties.

I don't think it makes Israel illegitimate any more than Turkey or Greece or Hungary or Russia. Lots of nation-states had to do some ethnic cleansing to get to their current state of peace. At the same time, it means I don't have much sympathy for Israeli deaths. Reaping, sowing, living by the sword, etc.

I’ve been lurking at Metafilter for twenty years and hardly comment because I don’t usually feel like a have something to bring to the conversation that’s not being better articulated by someone else, but I have to break-in here. I really appreciate this comment because it illustrates why “colonizer” and “settler”is such an emotionally charged term in THIS discussion.

I’m a Canadian Jew. I acknowledge that I am an uninvited settler on the lands of the Halkomelem speaking peoples. I don’t know of any synagogues that participated in the residential school system but Jewish Family Services did participate in the 60’s scoop, where Indigenous children were adopted out of their communities and were subject to racism and cultural erasure. The fact that Jewish children were subjected to this in parts of Europe ourselves did not prevent Jewish institutions from participating in a harmful settlement project.

Like many Jewish families, in the dawning of the 20th century, my ancestors fled pogroms and generally were pushed to two destinations: North America or to the Mandate of Palestine. I accept that both were settler projects, but I fail to understand why one was more morally just than the other. In fact, even after generations of exile, we were still less alien to the Levant than Canada. And surely a Jew and how she can safely relate to the world is different than someone who is identified as Dutch or Turkish or English. I feel like I’m a more clear-cut colonizer as a Canadian Jew than I would be as an Israeli Jew, as at least I could trace part of my ancestry to that region. If I practiced Judaism, my myths and prayers and worship would all be directed in that direction. That’s not to say that this means I’m more deserving to be there than another people, multiple peoples can be
Indigenous to an area at once. I have no intention of leaving Canada.

And yet, I feel like my children, God forbid, should they be murdered in Canada for being Jews, it wouldn’t be described as them reaping what they sowed. “Colonizer” is a term we might use for accurate analysis of systems of oppression, like you describe above, but some of us are hearing it as a description in this particular situation that disqualifies those labeled with it with the right to life and safety. Because that’s literally how it’s being used in heated discourse right now.
posted by gomi at 2:53 PM on October 23, 2023 [28 favorites]

The migration of large numbers of Jews to the Levant was not just by choice, it was often as a last resort when places like the United States turned them away.

The first Wikipedia article I linked also described Black people brought to the Americas as slaves and their descendants as technically being settlers. I think it would be more useful to distinguish between cases of forced relocation and more traditional settlers; though I can see where there’s a spectrum among European settlers in the prototypical North American case even, with many being essentially pawns whose choice was between moving to the “New World” as a settler or starvation or religious persecution at home. So for the many Jewish people who maybe had a more remote ancestral connection to the Middle East who moved to Israel after World War II for safety reasons or because they effectively had no other choice, that may be in keeping with that spectrum of who political scientists consider to be settlers?
posted by eviemath at 2:58 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think that to categorize it under settler colonialism misses a key part of the story..

Not especially; Zionism was explicitly a colonial project facilitated by settlement (ongoing settlement and population displacement that continues to this very day.) The fact that you aren't comfortable with the description doesn't make it less true.

Definitionally:

[Settler colonialism is] a system...where an exogenous collective aims to locally and permanently replace indigenous ones.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:11 PM on October 23, 2023

While I agree that colonialism is a relatively apt description of the state-to-non-state power dynamics, it’s not hard to see that the “exogenous” part of that definition is what is being disputed.
posted by eviemath at 3:24 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

interrogative mood: I think that to categorize it under settler colonialism misses a key part of the story. The main driver of the migration to to the region was the decline, not the expansion of empires. As the empires of Eastern Europe (Austria-Hungary / Czarist Russia / The Ottomans) went into terminal decline there was massive political upheaval, civil unrest and lots of refugees and relocation of peoples.

My paternal grandparents also fled from the upheavals of Eastern Europe, and I have no problem saying that they were part of a settler colonial project when they landed in Canada, as were their relatives who went to Paraguay and Mexico. Just because they had a good reason for fleeing doesn't mean that they weren't part of a deliberate effort to displace an indigenous population. I say that even though they, being irrationally committed to peace, never took part in the violence required to carve out a settler state. (Heck, their move into Eastern Europe was also part of a settler colonial project, since Catherine the Great wanted to push nomadic tribespeople out and bring settlers in.)

But Canada is not Israel; in many ways, Canada is worse. (Once Israel has spent a century forcibly taking all Palestinian children from their parents, sexually abusing most of them, doing starvation experiments on some of them... then there'll be a closer basis for moral comparison.)

That is very different from other settler colonial projects that the British undertook at the time like Australia and parts of Africa.

It was a smaller settler colonial project; it was a settler colonial project that didn't have a powerful metropole behind it where the settlers could retreat to if it didn't work out; it was a "less successful" colonial project, in that it hasn't yet driven the indigenous population to the edge of extinction; it is a settler colonial project which is, for that reason, still going on. In those ways it's different from Canada.

But as ugly as the Moshe Dayan quote that I posted above was, it recognized what the situation is: "We are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon's maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home." (It's certainly more honest about the situation than my ancestors were with themselves.)

"Settler colonial" might not be the perfect term for what Dayan is describing, but to me there's a connection.
posted by clawsoon at 3:29 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

it’s not hard to see that the “exogenous” part of that definition is what is being disputed

I am not disputing that the historic origin of the Jewish people is in the territory of the present state of Israel. What I am disputing is the notion that that has any relevance or meaning to the present. The mere fact that someone's ancestors lived somewhere two millennia ago (and I believe there is no dispute that the majority of the present population of Israel have recent origins elsewhere) does not give them superior rights over that territory compared to the present occupants; I find this idea both insane and offensive, and am honestly gobsmacked that anyone believes it's an argument with actual weight.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:33 PM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I think there should be no borders and everyone should be able to live where they want, whether someone’s ancestors lived in an area 2000 years ago is irrelevant to whether they can, at the barrel of a gun, force people out of their homes and destroy their whole village. It’s irrelevant.

We are once again talking about the feelings of people in the West while children are being bombed. Bravo.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:40 PM on October 23, 2023

I don’t think a single reference to the word “colonizer” in 1942 comes anywhere near to supporting that a) Zionism parallels European colonization and b) the word is being used in the same way now as it was in 1942. “Colonizer” is a kind of invective label now, applied to everything from sushi to classical music.

I reference how this relates to the defensiveness over racism because I think that’s something that most mefites understand. “What do you mean I’m racist? Are you saying that my micro aggressions are like the KKK/David Duke?” is not something we would tolerate as an excuse here - just because something isn’t the most extreme level of something doesn’t mean it isn’t the thing. Engaging in Zionism is engaging in being a colonizer, even if it’s not engaging in what you may think as the most extreme form of the word.

Yet the comment above about Canada and Israel is spot on - because in many ways the vast and overwhelming majority of us participate in or benefit from settler colonialism, and I don’t think that it is more acceptable just because it happened in the more distant past. With indigenous people across North America having absolutely horrific economic and health outcomes on reservations, with blood quantum still a thing used to deny sovereignty, with most of us not giving a single solitary thought to changing those conditions - we are absolutely no better.

And so yes - to say that Israelis deserve to be slaughtered because they are colonizers, but not saying Americans or Canadians deserve the same, I’m going to agree that’s antisemitic. That’s not about the word, that’s about agreeing certain people are deserving of death because they look or act differently than you and you think their sins are different than yours.

Most of us are guilty of the original sin of settler colonialism, and we all must pay its reparative price together. We cannot displace that guilt entirely onto Israel. Israel must stop what it is doing to Gaza, but that does not make its citizens deserve murder.
posted by corb at 3:50 PM on October 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

gomi: And yet, I feel like my children, God forbid, should they be murdered in Canada for being Jews, it wouldn’t be described as them reaping what they sowed. “Colonizer” is a term we might use for accurate analysis of systems of oppression, like you describe above, but some of us are hearing it as a description in this particular situation that disqualifies those labeled with it with the right to life and safety. Because that’s literally how it’s being used in heated discourse right now.

There are so many ways in which feelings of vulnerability are part of this. I'd like to think that where I'm coming at this from - and maybe many of us are, on all sides? - is wanting to protect those who seem to be most vulnerable.

To Israelis who have been facing daily rocket attacks for over a decade, who have just seen the murders of hundreds of innocents, for Jews who have been facing extermination for centuries, there are sites of vulnerability in every border that doesn't have a buffer zone, in every anti-Semitic social media post, in every atom of U-235 that comes out of an Iranian centrifuge.

When I read about the situation, Israel seems like the strong party, and Palestinians the vulnerable one. It's not that I think Israelis don't have a right to life and safety; it's that I feel like they're more than capable of taking care of that themselves, and they've used their strength to erase the right to life and safety of Palestinians. There's vulnerability on both sides, but one side is a lot more vulnerable right now, a lot more in need of protection, than the other.
posted by clawsoon at 3:51 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

The question of who counts as indigenous to Israel/Palestine has nothing to do with the feelings of westerners and everything to do with feelings of the people who are currently at war. A war in which rockets and bombs are being tossed over both sides of the border — killing and injuring innocent civilians, including children. The fact that Israeli air defenses are more effective doesn’t make the rockets any less of a problem than Israeli air strikes.
posted by interogative mood at 3:54 PM on October 23, 2023

I'm glad you posted that comment corb, it's exactly what I've been trying to work through in my head for the last couple hours. I don't see how most of the arguments being made re: Israel don't apply to the US or Canada or too many other places to list. Is it just because we're more powerful than Israel that nobody argues that we're responsible for whatever we get? It seems like it.
posted by Justinian at 4:00 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Barack Obama: Thoughts on Israel and Gaza
posted by adamvasco at 4:01 PM on October 23, 2023

Hamas releases two more hostages
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:01 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

From Obama's Medium statement:

Perhaps most of all, it means we should choose not to always assume the worst in those with whom we disagree.
posted by porpoise at 4:07 PM on October 23, 2023

Looks like I slept through a big chunk of comments. There are some gems in here this morning. First up, thanks to everyone that posted links to updates.

"For some of us, words and truth have meaning. ... For others, it’s an insult" -- corb

Which, I felt was insightful. However, the phrasing contained just enough "us" and "our" for it to be clear which group corb put themselves in. This was almost immediately interpreded as corb putting everyone they disagree with in the other group.

"I do not think claiming that people who agree with you are people for whom "words and truth have meaning" while those who disagree are irrational, indifferent to truth, and lacking in analytical tools is getting to the heart of the matter. The people who disagree with you have given reasons, over and over and over, for why they hold the position they do. Let's not resort to these kinds of ad hominems." -- cosmic owl

This is a reaction to something that was not said because it was left open and interpreted through a personal lens. Let's put a pin in this.

"Why do you get to demand every interlocutor distinguish themselves from the worst of the people you associate them with?" -- snuffleupagus

There are an infinite number of things I've never said and a near infinite number of opinions I disagree with, so I tend to agree that this requirement is excessive, but it didn't take long before...

"I actually think that in the context of discussion and debate on this topic, or topics that are similarly serious and controversial, asking people to lay out their terms like that is probably reasonable and good! I know I don't have anything to hide in my viewpoints, and am happy to explain them." -- kensington314

Sure, maybe once or twice, but if forced to denounce people you don't support and things you haven't said every single time, it's not a reasonable request, it's a tactic to burn time and exhaust your opponent: "Sure, we'll listen to you for 10 minutes, but you have to spend the first nine listing all the things you don't mean. (And we'll talk over you for the last minute.)"

I think both these examples are related: Some people support and oppose ideas and some people support and oppose people.

For some, an enemy can never be right about anything, and for other a bad idea is bad no matter who says it. When corb tries to break people up based on a concept, cosmic owl immediately redraws the lines around the people on the different sides of this argument. When snuffleupagus refuses to go all in on one side or another, kensington314 attempts to create an environment that will force the issue by demanding increasing numbers of denouncements until an enemy is made.

The two sides of the argument here aren't Israel and Palestine, they're people who want to argue issue by issue and people that are 100% behind one side or the other, no matter what.
posted by krisjohn at 4:08 PM on October 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

At the same time, it means I don't have much sympathy for Israeli deaths. Reaping, sowing, living by the sword, etc.

Wow, saying the quiet part out loud. Ok then.

finally i'd like to say i liked this thread a lot better when it was more about sharing news and analysis of facts on the ground.

More now than ever, agreed.
posted by gwint at 4:09 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

re: Obama's statement, I don't think it's been mentioned in this thread: Harvard Protesters Accuse Obama Of ‘Genocide’ At ‘Die-In’ Demonstration, Calling For End To Violence In Gaza

The demonstrators chanted, “Free, free Palestine” and “Barry, Barry you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” as they marched from university president Claudine Gay’s office to Klarman Hall at Harvard Business School, where they lay on the ground and continued their chants.

posted by gwint at 4:12 PM on October 23, 2023

One reason Canada and USA get less scrutiny for their treatment of the Indigenous people within their borders is because most of the invasive colonizing actions took place outside of living memory.

Whereas the active colonization (as in, forced displacement of peoples) in Israel/Palestine both began within living memory and is ongoing.

However, I also think that comparing the plight of Turtle Island Indigenous and Palestinians at this moment is not a very useful exercise.

This is not to say that Turtle Island Indigenous are any less deserving of sovereignty, safety, and self-determination than Palestinians are.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 4:22 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Pentagon has sent military advisers, including a Marine Corps general versed in urban warfare, to Israel to aid in its war planning
posted by clawsoon at 4:24 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am not disputing that the historic origin of the Jewish people is in the territory of the present state of Israel. What I am disputing is the notion that that has any relevance or meaning to the present.

And what some of your interlocutors are disputing is that at least some Israelis have a more recent connection to the region in present day Israel and Palestinian Territories than “historical origin” implies.

(To me, it seems clear that there is a wide range in terms of how far back in any given Jewish Israeli’s family ancestry one has to go in order to make that connection, filling in pretty much the entire range between ‘going back to the origins of Judaism itself’ and ‘have been here contiguously/never left’. I don’t know enough of the regional history to make any sort of guess at the distribution along that range, however.)
posted by eviemath at 4:26 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

the active colonization (as in, forced displacement of peoples) in Israel/Palestine both began within living memory and is ongoing

This is why it's honestly gross to hear someone say "but the US/Canada/Australia/etc are settler colonial states!" like it's some sort of gotcha, or like that excuses or justifies what's happening in the present.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 4:30 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

The fact that Israeli air defenses are more effective doesn’t make the rockets any less of a problem than Israeli air strikes.

Their missile defense being more effective does in fact make the rockets less of a problem. That's the whole point of having it. The fact that rocket attacks inflicts a minimal amount of damage to Israel allowed them to pursue their deliberate strategy of utilizing the PA as a proxy to keep the West Bank suppressed and Hamas as an argument that there was no point in pursuing a political solution because the Palestinians themselves were split. It allowed the Israeli public to compartmentalize the issue as just a fact-of-life, not an urgent problem with potential consequences to be solved. As I've pointed out before, Israel was happy with the state of affairs until the attack happened.
posted by ndr at 4:31 PM on October 23, 2023 [14 favorites]

To clarify: my point is not about whether some critical proportion of Jewish Israelis do or do not have a sufficiently recent ancestral connection to the region, nor do I have any idea what a cutoff for “sufficiently recent” would look like. I am commenting on a miscommunication that I see happening in this thread.

One reason Canada and USA get less scrutiny for their treatment of the Indigenous people within their borders is because most of the invasive colonizing actions took place outside of living memory.

Whereas the active colonization (as in, forced displacement of peoples) in Israel/Palestine both began within living memory and is ongoing.

What I learned from reading the Wikipedia articles I linked upthread while trying to figure out what settler colonialism meant is that one of the things that distinguishes settler colonialism from other types of colonialism (specifically, what I learned is referred to as exploitation colonialism) is its ongoing nature - that the people who were initially displaced continue to be displaced.

There are certainly important differences between North American colonization and whatever we call the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and this is probably furthering a derail. But the “living memory” part is not one of these differences. I know people who were taken from their families and sent to residential schools in Canada. Some of them are my age or only a little bit older. The Oka Crisis was within living memory. The struggles at Elsipogtog and in the Wet’suwet’en Nation and various less direct Indigenous land claims struggles in Canada are not only within my lifetime, but within the half of my lifetime since I immigrated to Canada and ongoing in many cases. I’m less aware of the US context (my own failing), but at least know that residential schools within the US are also within living memory, and that there have been land struggles of at least some sorts more recently. On top of ongoing challenges to sovereignty on reservations.
posted by eviemath at 4:46 PM on October 23, 2023 [15 favorites]

(See also: current conflict in the Canadian Maritimes over treaty rights to “moderate livelihood” fisheries, which have involved direct physical violence between Mi’kmaw and non-native fishers over the past couple years.)
posted by eviemath at 4:51 PM on October 23, 2023

For some, an enemy can never be right about anything, and for other a bad idea is bad no matter who says it. When corb tries to break people up based on a concept, cosmic owl immediately redraws the lines around the people on the different sides of this argument. When snuffleupagus refuses to go all in on one side or another, kensington314 attempts to create an environment that will force the issue by demanding increasing numbers of denouncements until an enemy is made.

I appreciate the comment, although my intention was not to demand increasing numbers of denouncements, or to be on the side of people (one camp) over issues (principles). My relevant principles are this: I think that in a conflict, there should be a serious effort to avoid civilian casualties on all sides, to not make a strategy of killing innocent people. I also think that Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and a right to some kind of revived peace accords process that allows them to live as fully-enfranchised citizens of a state, on just terms. Those are my commitments to issues instead of sides!

My intention with my comment was really just to say I personally prefer on this issue to know where people are coming from in really direct terms, especially on a really long thread like this. Apologies if it came across as like, demanding that we establish one another as enemies. If I had it to do over, I wouldn't have made the comment. Even if interpreted as I intended it, I doubt it added enough value to justify it.
posted by kensington314 at 5:05 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Israeli officials shared raw footage taken by the October 7th attackers with journalists the New York Times has a report up. (Extremely triggering content warning). Also reported by The Guardian and The Times of Israel.
posted by interogative mood at 5:17 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

For those who don’t want to read the report; the Guardian has confirmation of rapes and killing of children. Truth matters; no matter which side we are on, and I’ve been struggling with people on the pro-Palestinian side who have wanted to deny the intentional killing of children and raping of women. It is now confirmed and can no longer in justice be denied.

That is not a justification for brutalizing Gaza. Sometimes things are not clear cut; in fact, they rarely are. If you think the side you’ve chosen has only good guys, you probably aren’t paying attention. Our job is to minimize the evil done on all sides. But we cannot lie about or hide from what’s happening in order to do it.
posted by corb at 5:49 PM on October 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

Truth matters; no matter which side we are on

And yet no-one here has denied that these things happened. (I have referred to Hamas' actions as "an atrocity" in this very thread.) Which, you're right, doesn't justify what's happening in Gaza, and isn't justified by the expropriation of Palestinian land by settlers, murder of Palestinians by settlers, and casual maiming of Palestinians by IDF snipers (which are all things that have been going on for quite some time before 7 October). It's interesting that no-one feels that Israel supporters need to disclaim the violent settlers, or the actions of the IDF, when they've been in many cases equally morally repugnant.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 6:14 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's interesting that no-one feels that Israel supporters need to disclaim the violent settlers, or the actions of the IDF, when they've been in many cases equally morally repugnant.

I've been following this thread pretty closely from the beginning, and to the best of my recollection even the most pro-Israel voices were clear up front they don't support the criminal violence regularly committed by settlers in the West Bank or war crimes when committed by the IDF. No one needs to 'feel they must disclaim it' because they already have.

The open question is more about whether the West Bank Settlements are a legitimate project and whether what the IDF is doing right now is mostly a war crime or mostly unfortunate collateral damage necessary to defend Israel's safety.
posted by bcd at 6:29 PM on October 23, 2023

whether the West Bank Settlements are a legitimate project

They aren't.

whether what the IDF is doing right now is mostly a war crime

It is.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 6:36 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

sotonohito: If Israel assassinates all the actual leaders of Hamas that's so much better than bombing the fuck out of hospitals or even Hamas fighters.

Your wish may be starting to come true, depending on who you believe. Omar Daraghmeh either died in custody from a heart attack while an ambulance was on the way, or he was assassinated in custody by being tortured to death. Either way, it led to mass demonstrations in a West Bank city.
posted by clawsoon at 6:41 PM on October 23, 2023

They aren't - Pseudonymous Cognomen

The hypocrisy and ignorance in that article is breathtaking, talking about "situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967"

You do realise the West Bank was itself, by their definition, "illegally" seized by Jordan in 1948 and unilaterally made into Jordanian territory?

Are they saying Israel should return it to Jordan? They don't want it. Then why only say it's occupied "since 1967?" To be fair to everyone we should say occupied since 1948 by Jordan. Or that it was occupied since 1917 by the British, or 1860 by the Ottomans, or 1830 by the Egpytians.

Treating Israel differently from any other state actor is literally the very definition of anti-semitism, which is a real problem as has been stated by repeated commenters.

I think it is pretty clear that Jordan has publicly revoked all ties to the West Bank in 1988. Therefore Israel's control and ownership of West Bank is de-facto as settled as Jordan's was from 1948 to 1967, or the Ottoman's from 1860 to 1917, which no one has raised any objection to - whatsoever.
posted by xdvesper at 6:49 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

UN Revolution 242 passed unanimously by the Security Council in 1967 made every one of those settlements illegal.
posted by interogative mood at 6:54 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

passed unanimously by the Security Council in 1967 made every one of those settlements illegal.

Yes, because in 1967, the UN recognized that Jordan owned those territories and Israel had taken it from them by force. Why?

If the UN had done the same thing in 1948 they would have said Jordan's occupation of West Bank was illegal. But now in 1967 suddenly Jordan is the legal owner of the West Bank?

A lot has happened since 1967. Jordan renounced their claim on West Bank in 1988 and made peace with Israel in 1994. It doesn't make any sense to be quoting Resolution 242 as if we're still living in 1967.
posted by xdvesper at 7:08 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

From here on out every time I criticize Israel I will also criticize the Ottomans.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:11 PM on October 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Therefore Israel's control and ownership of West Bank is de-facto as settled as Jordan's was from 1948 to 1967, or the Ottoman's from 1860 to 1917, which no one has raised any objection to - whatsoever.

Except doesn't Israel insist that it is an occupation, not an annexation, because annexation would be obviously illegal? de jure occupation and de facto annexation lets Israel avoid the whole thing. And avoid giving civil rights to the Palestinians living there because they can insist that that must be worked out in some sort of peace process, rather than admitting that they owe them citizenship. You want to annex a bunch of land with people on it, you at the very least owe them equal rights, otherwise you're just admitting that you're running an apartheid state.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:33 PM on October 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

It doesn't make any sense to be quoting Resolution 242 as if we're still living in 1967.

How about the 2004 ruling from the International Court of Justice concluding that none of the events since 1967 have changed the status of the West Bank and it remains an Israeli-occupied territory. In particular, a 'belligerent occupation', a legal term that carries legal obligations. Is that recent enough to count?
posted by bcd at 7:39 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I guess we’re at the point in the thread where “it’s actually an open question if settlements are good”, which is even more pro Israel than the US official position! Wtf!!!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:44 PM on October 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

Or, even more recently, UN Security Council Resolution 2334. That's from 2016, which is surely recent enough to count?

It is short, you can read the whole thing, but it opens with, "Reaffirming its relevant resolutions, including resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973), 446 (1979), 452 (1979), 465 (1980), 476 (1980), 478 (1980), 1397 (2002), 1515 (2003), and 1850 (2008)." So yes, 242 still seems pretty relevant.
posted by bcd at 7:49 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Except doesn't Israel insist that it is an occupation, not an annexation

upon looking, Israel actually insists that it's a third thing, a "disputed territory", and no sort of occupation at all, let alone an illegal one.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:50 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

And avoid giving civil rights to the Palestinians living there because they can insist that that must be worked out in some sort of peace process, rather than admitting that they owe them citizenship.

They were all Jordanian citizens with passports and travel right to and fro Israel and Jordan from 1948 all the way up until 1988 when Jordan rescinded their citizenships, removed their seats in Parliament, and made them stateless.

Yes, de jure occupation and de facto annexation is exactly how I would describe the current situation, and why Israel hasn't annexed Gaza or West Bank. They did annex East Jerusalem and Golan Heights and they offered equal citizenship to everyone there. I predict it will end rather like Malaysia and Singapore where Israel will eventually de jure annex a portion that provides enough of a security buffer and excise the rest from itself in a two-state solution while looking to balance the racial composition of its state.

Annexation being "obviously" illegal isn't much of an impediment to things, seemingly, as people have taken Resolution 242 to mean Israel has been doing "obviously illegal" things since 1967 anyway...
posted by xdvesper at 7:55 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Only Palestinians in the West Bank were Jordianian citizens. Palestinians in annexed East Jerusalem were made citizens of Israel. Palestinians in Gaza have been stateless since 1948 since Egypt didn’t annex Gaza unlike Jordan claiming the West Bak.
posted by interogative mood at 7:59 PM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

It doesn't make any sense to be quoting Resolution 242 as if we're still living in 1967.

UN resolution 2334 is from December 2016.

This now seems to be a thing with you, where, just as with the sublegal status of Arab Israelis, you ignore citations of fact repeatedly made in this thread.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:00 PM on October 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

which no one has raised any objection to - whatsoever

In those days the world was full of empires, today not so much. But I will also lend my voice to the unjust Ottoman and British occupations.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:01 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

one of the few good things that the benighted 20^th century gave us was a set of international norms that say that right of conquest isn't valid. you can send all the soldiers you want into a place, you can declare that place yours, you can tell those soldiers to shoot anyone in that place who says that place isn't yours, those soldiers can go ahead and actually do the shooting, but absent a valid claim rooted in something other than conquest none of that will ever result in you having an internationally recognized claim to that place.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:13 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

In those days the world was full of empires, today not so much.

No, now the empires are settled and accepted as fact. It doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The United States is no less an empire because the nation of Hawa’ii was overthrown in 1893: we still haven’t given the land back, and native citizens own a fraction of what they did before the seizure.

So yes, in many ways it is hypocritical for people to criticize Israel for annexing land through conquest and not giving it back when they don’t criticize their own country for annexing land and not giving it back. However, that doesn’t make it totally okay for Israel to do it just because everybody else did and shouldn’t they get a little imperialism, as a treat?

As an anarchist I am fortunate enough to be able to criticize all states for seizing land by conquest and not giving it back, but a lot of people struggle with this.
posted by corb at 8:21 PM on October 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

Jordan revoking the citizenship of the residents of the West Bank in 1988 seemed pretty crappy to me. I've got to say, though, that I'm struggling to see its relevance to the fact that Israel has been occupying the West Bank for the greater part of a century. Let alone its relevance to this thread.

There sure seems to be a lot of Gish galloping going on in this thread.
posted by Flunkie at 8:33 PM on October 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Palestine crypto donation scams emerge amid Israel-Hamas war - The page ends with some good suggestions for donating safely.
posted by krisjohn at 8:34 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

> As an anarchist I am fortunate enough to be able to criticize all states for seizing land by conquest and not giving it back, but a lot of people struggle with this.

let's hope that we somehow eventually manage to find our way to the zero-state solution.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:41 PM on October 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

but yeah the non-secret secret of the end of the right of conquest as a valid claim to territory is that the nation-states only let it happen because all the conquest-based claims established before 1945 or so got grandfathered in.

one of the many, many, many diabolical aspects of this problem is that the modern state of israel was founded smack dab in the middle of the transition period between the system of international norms that recognized claims based on new conquests and the system of international norms that rejects claims based on new conquests.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:47 PM on October 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Treating Israel differently from any other state actor

You ARE aware that post-WWII (which is to say, for the entire period of the existence of Israel as an independent state), under international law, right of conquest is explicitly NOT recognised as valid (and Jordan's annexation of the West Bank was likewise never recognised as valid)? This is holding Israel to the same standards as every other country.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:54 PM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

the Ottoman's from 1860 to 1917, which no one has raised any objection to - whatsoever.

I object to it! I also object to all the various occupations and conquests preceding that and do hereby demand that the entire territory -- Gaza, Israel, West Bank, whatever else in the vicinity -- be returned to whoever can be demonstrated to be descendants of the canaanites and everyone else forcibly evicted.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:54 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

US preparing for wider war

I haven't felt like the US was this close to a major war since before the Iraq invasion in 2003. Even then, though, Iraq was a crippled, internationally isolated state hardly able to defend itself. Iran would be an infinitely more dangerous opponent.

At this point I would think the US is expecting widespread attacks by Iranian proxies throughout the Middle East. I would think Iran would want to avoid hittiing US forces directly, but there is not telliing what might happen in the fog of war, or how the American public would react to dead US troops.
posted by eagles123 at 8:56 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Our job is to minimize the evil done on all sides

all sides? but everyone deliberately murdering children and deliberately punishing non-combatants is on the same side. everyone organizing and committing rapes in war is on the same side. they are not fighting against each other with unforgivable but inevitable civilian collateral damage, they are fighting together as collaborative partners and comrades against the same set of hated victims. even if some are more effective at it than others.

nobody who was actually upset as a human being about the murder of children in israel could or would have been so inspired by the sight that they ordered or carried out the bombing of children in gaza afterwards.* nobody who’s bothered by children dying feels moved to prove on as many bodies as they can reach that in fact they don’t mind it, not at all.

of course you are right that if an act is correctly identified as an atrocity, it cannot be more justifiable to immediately repeat it, once or ten times over, than to commit it the first time. but I think a little less indulgence of the basic retaliation/revenge concept is in order. we treat it as if it makes sense by soberly arguing against it, but it doesn’t. it’s a joke, it’s a lie.

* also before. but you know.
posted by queenofbithynia at 9:00 PM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

right of conquest is explicitly NOT recognised as valid (and Jordan's annexation of the West Bank was likewise never recognised as valid)

If you're making that argument, then who did Israel conquest it from, if Jordan's annexation was also illegal?

The territory as a whole was given independence, and Israel formed a state out of the land, Jordan took some, and Egypt took some. It's like all the multiple times the British gave independence to any of their colonies, they're free to form their own nation after independence - they didn't "conquest" the land from anyone.
posted by xdvesper at 9:03 PM on October 23, 2023

If you're making that argument, then who did Israel conquest it from, if Jordan's annexation was also illegal?

Don't argue with me, argue with the UN, who recognise the territory as under belligerent occupation.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:20 PM on October 23, 2023

And that doesn't invalidate my original argument, which questions why the UN only recognizes West Bank as being occupied by 1967, and not 1948 if indeed it saw Jordanian occupation as illegal? I can only see it as anti-semitism, holding Israel to a different standard than Jordan.

Yes, the UN or Security Council or Court of Justice or whatever has repeatedly claimed that Israel's actions are illegal. But quoting them is just an appeal to authority, not an actual argument itself - why do they actually say it's illegal?

Even Resolution 242's wording is deliberately vague and vastly open to interpretation - that was the only way it ever got passed, and Israel can perfectly claim to have 100% abided by its exact wording.
posted by xdvesper at 9:28 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Even Resolution 242's wording

There are more recent resolutions. You're awfully stuck on that one for some reason.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:38 PM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

UN resolution 181 of 1947 established the official plan for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into two states and Jerusalem as an international city under the UN. The UN never recognized the Jordanian claims over the West Bank. Fun fact until the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, Jordan officially claimed most of Israel as well. Although it is a fairly open secret that the Jordanians had lots of secret dealings with Israel from almost the founding of the State of Israel. Jordan basically gave up on the West Bank and trying to get it back after the Black September crisis where the PLO tried to overthrow the King, King Hussein decided he wanted fewer Palestinians in his country. Officially they couldn’t of course.
posted by interogative mood at 9:42 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Any question of current legal status of anything is aways resolved by an appeal to authority. In particular, the authority of the relevant governing body and/or court system. You may disagree about whether a law is just, or whether a court has interpreted and applied it correctly, but that's what 'laws' are.

The only argument to be made that the settlements are legal involves declaring the UN & ICJ to be illegitimate and having no jurisdiction over these matters. Yes, the Israeli delegation does suggest that regularly at the UN, but if that is the argument you are trying to make, be clear about it.
posted by bcd at 9:43 PM on October 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

xdvesper: The territory as a whole was given independence, and Israel formed a state out of the land, Jordan took some, and Egypt took some.

That's a lot of gentle verbs to describe a war. :-) And you know that the war started before any independence was granted, and that all the parties in the pre-independence civil conflict knew that they were "conquesting" the land from each other.

It wasn't any UN or British partition plan that determined the borders of the state, it was war, it was conquest and deportation. The Arab determination to push Israel into the sea, and the Israeli determination to establish defensible borders and dramatically reduce the number of Palestinians within those borders, meant that it couldn't be anything other than that.

It's like all the multiple times the British gave independence to any of their colonies, they're free to form their own nation after independence - they didn't "conquest" the land from anyone.

Partition was also the plan for post-independence India, and I'm sure there have been similar arguments over terminology about Kashmir.
posted by clawsoon at 9:54 PM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Israel Is Stretched Thin and Hezbollah Knows It

“[Secretary of State Anthony] Blinken and Biden had to stop the Israelis from a pre-emptive strike against Lebanon in the days after Oct 7,” the U.S. official said, confirming multiple media reports.

“[Israeli Defense Minister Yoav] Gallant was insisting the attack was as much Hezbollah as it was Hamas and that the real battle should be in the north. [Netanyahu] was indecisive but was considering approving the operation. Biden had to offer a blank check of military aid, political support, and two aircraft carrier groups off the coast of Lebanon, not to threaten Iran or Nasrallah as much as to reassure Israel.”

I thought Biden was operating off instinct and decades old orthodoxy, but if true it does make me feel better restraining Israel is a major consideration.
posted by ndr at 11:33 PM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

A. Shatz, Vengeful Pathologies (20 October, LRB); long, very in-depth.
posted by progosk at 12:47 AM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

You may disagree about whether a law is just, or whether a court has interpreted and applied it correctly, but that's what 'laws' are.

But that's literally what the comments or forum discussion is for. The Supreme Court would give their reasoning behind their decision on Roe v. Wade, or making race based admissions illegal, and people could reasonably debate and discuss those reasons, why they made sense or not, and whether they thought the Supreme Court was right or wrong.

You wouldn't just say, it's the law, end of story, we can close the thread here.

The facts and reasoning I've laid out says their logic in saying Israel gained the land by conquest is shaky at best. Conquest from whom? Once the former owners gave the land independence, they're allowed to do whatever they damn well please with it, you don't get to say they're wrong. The British granted Malaya independence in 1957, and they had the self determination afterwards to choose when, where and with whom they wanted to form a country (Malaysia, in 1963) and decide who to include (parts of Borneo) and who to exclude (Singapore). To accuse Malaysia of doing all this illegally or by conquest would be absurd, and there was an actual, armed, shooting conflict with Indonesia and Philippines who disputed the formation of the nation. Israel has chosen what parts of itself to include / exclude in its nation just like other former British colonies.

I agree if Israel had gone and invaded Jordan and captured their capitol and absorbed it into itself, that would be plainly illegal. That's what the UN / ICJ is for. That's black and white.

You can't say the same about the West Bank, which was part of the territory that was granted independence in the first place - what distinguishes the West Bank from every other part of Israel then? If you're calling West Bank illegal then the entire existence of Israel is illegal!
posted by xdvesper at 1:59 AM on October 24, 2023

If you're calling West Bank illegal then the entire existence of Israel is illegal!

they're both outside the law because there has never been a treaty signed by israelis and palestinians - legitimacy isn't something that can be taken - it's something that others have to recognize and give
posted by pyramid termite at 2:17 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Xdvesper—-given that your view is far outside what the US thinks about Israel, what many Israelis think about Israel, what nearly everyone in this thread thinks about Israel, I think maybe we should drop this line of argument. It’s a derail and you’re also hand waving a lot of things away “sure some things happened and now everyone criticizes Israel, they’re not criticizing Ancient Rome so they’re definitely anti semites!” When “some things happened” = forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:05 AM on October 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

Conquest from whom?

So, you’re making a terra nullius argument?

But also oppose calling that colonization, if I’ve interpreted your past comments in this thread accurately?

That’s not particularly internally consistent, as arguments go.
posted by eviemath at 4:11 AM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Noisy Pink Bubbles: Hamas releases two more hostages

One of them, Yocheved Lifshitz, has spoken about her experience. She had been a peace activist who helped sick Gazans. She described being beaten on the way into Gaza - "I went through hell" - but then said that once they were in the tunnels, "They were very generous to us, very kind." She shook hands with her captors after her release and wished them peace. There is some level of disquiet in Israel about Lifshitz telling her story.
posted by clawsoon at 4:52 AM on October 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

Not just Muslims; latest polling has Biden at 25% approval among voters under 35 (a demographic which is notably more sympathetic to Palestinians than older groups).

US Turnout Rates by Attributes 2014, 2018 and 2022
posted by y2karl at 5:02 AM on October 24, 2023

I haven't felt like the US was this close to a major war since before the Iraq invasion in 2003. Even then, though, Iraq was a crippled, internationally isolated state hardly able to defend itself. Iran would be an infinitely more dangerous opponent

Hard to imagine this turning into an actual war with Iran. Running the '88 playbook again seems more likely. Biden will not have forgotten the politics of that moment.

This is holding Israel to the same standards as every other country.

That's the idea anyway.

But - Tibet, Goa, West Papua, Morocco in the Sahara, Turkey in Cyprus, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea & Donetsk (before the full invasion), Nagorno-Karabakh....South Vietnam, arguably (though I wouldn't include it).

I'm probably missing some.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:47 AM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

There is some level of disquiet in Israel about Lifshitz telling her story.

I looked up reactions on Reddit. I'm sure I'm not getting the whole story, since I'm limited to English-language sources, but most of them either explain away her story (her husband is still a captive, so she's saying what Hamas told her to say) or are sarcastically angry (yeah, sure, these Hamas baby killers and rapists are such nice people).
posted by clawsoon at 5:52 AM on October 24, 2023

must we debate and equivocate over history and the definition of "colonizer" all day while Israel continues to drop bombs on Palestinian children? this is a farce.
posted by JimBennett at 6:30 AM on October 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

2,000 children killed in Gaza, aid group says, as doctors warn fuel shortage is a death sentence (Save the Children is the aid group)
posted by R343L at 6:36 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Perhaps, rather than focusing on legal technicalities, however important they may be, the most critical aspect of the "settlements" is best evaluated on the morality of the action itself?

The "settlers" evict people from their homes and land by force of arms, sometimes murdering the property owners, and take the land and property for themselves.

I suggest that regardless of the status of the West Bank, that action is immoral, the people committing those actions are behaving in an immoral way, and it is a crime against humanity for the Israeli government to have condoned and encouraged it. Whether that land is occupied, disputed, annexed. Whether that land is govorned by Israel, Jordan, or any other polity.
posted by sotonohito at 6:38 AM on October 24, 2023 [19 favorites]

Deadliest period for Palestinians in the West Bank in 15 years

More Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the past few weeks than in any similar period in at least the past 15 years, according to Palestinian health authorities and historical data from the United Nations.

Israeli forces and settlers have killed 95 Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, health officials said, a surge in violence in what was already a particularly deadly year in the West Bank. One Israeli soldier was also killed in clashes.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:49 AM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

UN RWA Oct 23: Rapid Gender Analysis: Gendered Impacts of the October 2023 Escalation in Gaza
Since 7 October, 4,651 individuals have been killed...about 14,245 people have been reported injured...In total, 62% of those killed and injured are women and children. As of 22 October 2023, the number of displaced people stood at about 1.4 million, including over 566,000 sheltering in 148 UNRWA-designated emergency shelters in increasingly dire conditions...An estimated 50,000 pregnant women are facing extreme challenges accessing prenatal and maternity care, 5,500 women are expected to give birth in the coming month- an average of 160 per day...As of 21 October, 42% (164,756) of housing units in Gaza were reported destroyed or damaged...Shelters themselves remain unsafe due to indiscriminate attacks at civilian sites, including hospitals, mosques, and schools.
posted by ohneat at 6:59 AM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also believe I was entirely in error when I asked for clarification about connection to the land and what people thought it meant. That was the wrong question.

I'll back into what I think was the right question, and why in retrospect even that was still asking the less important question I was in X Y problem thinking.

Israel exists, Israeli people exist. That is the reality now, and it would be both immoral and a crime against humanity to attempt to make either Israel or the Israeli people not exist, whether through murder or expulsion.

Palestinian people exist and need a space in which to exist and thrive.

The core of all of this is the question of where, and how, the Palestinian people will be able to exist and thrive.

The government of Israel has answered that question, by action if not in explicit laws or statements, as "somewhere else, and we don't care". It wants the Palestinian people out of the territory it claims, and it is entirely unconcerned about what happens to the Palestinian people after they are pressured out of territory the government of Israel claims or wishes to have in its sphere of influence.

I think this answer is both extremely immoral and a crime against humanity.

Hamas has a different answer, Hamas thinks the answer is to commit genocide against Jews, dissolve the nation of Israel, and have the Palestinian people live there.

I think that answer is also extremely immoral and would be a crime against humanity.

From my POV the violence is due to Israel's answer to the question being harmful to the Palestinian people and some subset of those people acting violently.

I also see it as Israel's responsibility to do something to actualy end the violence by choosing a better answer because they're hte only party which has any power to change the situation.

Hamas has done its, evil, best to change the sitaution and they have failed, as their predecessor and successor violent organizations did and will fail.

The Palestinian people do not have the power necessary to change the situation so it is necessarially the responsibility of the government of Israel to change the situation.

Which is why way back when I was asking for clarification I messed up. The right question is:

Do Palestinians have any legitimate right to own land in Israel?

That's the right question, philosophically, because the answer determines which set of possible solutions can be implemented for the problem of where the Palestinian people can live and thrive.

If the answer is no, Palestinians do not have any legitimate right to own land in Israel, then the least immoral set of solutions would involve the government of Israel evicting the Palestinian people still in Israel and assisting them in getting a place to live and setting them up so they can thrive there. The less immoral options would also require the Israeli government to take responsibility for the Palestinian refugees it created in the past and find a place for them to live and help them establish themselves to thrive there.

If the answer is yes, Palestinians can legitimately own land in Israel, then other options exist which might include voluntary resettlement of some Palestinians outside of Israel but would also require full citizenship for Palsestinians inside Israel. Obviously that has its own set of problems as related to Israel being the Jewish homeland if Jews are a minority there, as they would be if all Palestinians were granted citizenship.

I THINK I've said that right.
posted by sotonohito at 7:09 AM on October 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

Do Palestinians have any legitimate right to own land in Israel?

Another way of saying this is, is it ok for one’s ethnicity to bar them from living in a specific area of land? Seems like there’s an obvious answer there.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:27 AM on October 24, 2023 [12 favorites]

The Hamas attack has given Netanyahu an excuse to ramp up his project of kneecapping Israel's democracy, this time by loosening the definition of "support for terrorism" and eliminating a requirement for police to refer to state prosecutors before arresting people for their speech:

Two activists from a Jewish-Arab peace movement were recently detained in Israel for putting up posters with a message that the police deemed to be offensive. The message was: “Jews and Arabs, we will get through this together.” The activists, members of Standing Together, had their posters confiscated, as well as T-shirts printed with peace slogans in Hebrew and Arabic.

It was not an isolated incident...The definition of pro-Hamas is often widened to include expressions of sympathy for the plight of Palestinian children trapped in Gaza, or calls for peace, especially if expressed in both Arabic and Hebrew...

The crackdown is directed primarily by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Since the attack, police have been given wide discretion to determine what applies as support for terrorism. They no longer have to refer back to the state prosecutors, which the human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said removes an important level of legal protection for individual free speech.

The other examples in the article are just as bad - the director of a cardiac ICU suspended for

his profile picture on social media – a dove carrying an olive twig and a green flag emblazoned with the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” He had adopted the picture last year, long before the Hamas attack, but it was nevertheless seen as somehow voicing support for the outrage.

Similar purges are happening elsewhere in the West:

CEO of Europe’s largest tech conference resigns over Israel-Hamas comments - the offense was stating "War crimes are war crimes, even when committed by allies" in response to Israel's total food and water blockade of Gaza.

The apology was not enough to sway a list of major sponsors and headliners who announced they would boycott the Web Summit event, including tech heavyweights Meta, Google, Intel, Siemens and Amazon.

CAA Agent Maha Dakhil Resigns From Board After Controversial Social Media Posts on Israel:

On Wednesday, Dakhil reposted a statement from an account labeled Free Palestine, which weighed in on Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 terror attack executed by Hamas. The post read, “You’re currently learning who supports genocide,” to which Dakhil added her own caption: “That’s the line for me.” She then posted a second photo captioned, “What’s more heartbreaking than witnessing genocide? Witnessing the denial that genocide is happening.”

And that's leaving aside the attempts to crush dissent on college campuses. It's very revealing to see what specific statements - war crime, genocide - are considered beyond the pale in some circles when applied to the right-wing shitheads currently running the Israeli government.
posted by mediareport at 8:26 AM on October 24, 2023 [19 favorites]

This brings us back to the Israel Land Administration/Israel Land Authority that I tried to bring up earlier. Under the current laws in Israel, the answer is mostly that no one but the ILA has the right to 'own' 93% of the land. Instead it is long-term leased from the ILA.

This is, obviously, a very different model of land 'ownership' than most in the Western world have any experience with - though it is my understanding that it wasn't a new concept introduced after Israel's formation as a country but based on existing regional practices.

The anti-Arab/anti-Bedouin policies of the ILA are well documented.
posted by bcd at 8:29 AM on October 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Good WSJ article yesterday [gift link]; scroll down for details from Palestinians who are choosing to stay in the northern part of Gaza, or left, then returned, then were forced to leave again, or who reject the (iffy at best) notion that other countries will receive them:
Palestinians Are Refusing to Flee Israeli Bombing in Gaza. ‘If I Die, I Die.’

Iyad Shobaki, 45, said his family of 10 is staying put in Gaza City. “The emigration of 1948 started like this,” he said. “People said, ‘OK, we’ll leave our houses and come back in one or two weeks,’ but they never did. How can I help my country? I will stay in my house. That’s what I can do.”

Israeli leaders have said they want Gaza residents to evacuate to the south for their own safety, although its military has been bombing the south, too...

On Thursday night, an uncle’s home in the nearby Al-Shati camp, where Abu Toha was born, was bombed. Besides his grandfather’s home, where he is staying, four other houses also were bombed. “There are still corpses under the rubble,” he said. “I can smell flesh.”

“To be made refugees again, to lose what we already built on this troubled land, is utterly devastating and inhumane,” said Abu Toha, who founded Gaza’s only English-language library and was a Harvard Scholar-at-Risk Fellow in 2019 and 2020...

Abdallah Hasaneen, a 23-year-old civic-education trainer and writer who is a descendant of refugees, said that if enough Gazans are forced to migrate to Sinai, it would be the end of the Palestinian issue. “I would rather die than be a refugee in Sinai or anywhere else,” he said. “This is our land.”
posted by mediareport at 8:44 AM on October 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

That article really makes clear that a large part of the problem, ironically enough, is very similar to the original Jewish problem that created the state of Israel in the first place - no one wants the Palestinians as refugees and no one is willing to integrate them. Half a century later in the places they fled they are still living in poverty and unintegrated even in Arab countries. There is no where good for them to go - just as after the Holocaust, no one wanted the Jews as refugees, and no one offered them refuge and integration.

I don’t have a solution for what to do about the broader situation, how to fix this issue without people fundamentally changing their hearts. But I think we don’t have to in order to say that what is happening in Gaza needs to stop now.
posted by corb at 9:00 AM on October 24, 2023 [13 favorites]

must we debate and equivocate over history and the definition of "colonizer" all day while Israel continues to drop bombs on Palestinian children? this is a farce.

Yes and no. It was relevant to the issue of whether debate or critical views of Israeli government actions should be allowed at all, or significantly restricted.
posted by eviemath at 9:44 AM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Since I don't think this has been addressed yet in this thread, a consensus has formed around the Al Ahli hospital explosion that killed between 100 and 500 Gazans: The cause of the explosion was most like due to a misfired rocked launched within Gaza.

French intelligence analysis:

France’s military intelligence agency has concluded that a misfiring Palestinian rocket was the likely cause of the deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, as Israel and Palestinian officials trade blame over the blast. The Directorate of Military Intelligence (DRM) said on Friday that an errant Palestinian rocket with an explosive charge of about 5kg was the likely cause of the blast and none of its intelligence pointed to an Israeli missile strike.

Canadian Forces Intelligence Command:

Canada has a “high degree of confidence” that Israel was not responsible for the deadly explosion at Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, its defence department has said, adding to a flurry of claims and counterclaims about the contested blast. The Canadian Forces Intelligence Command determined that the blast was more likely caused by an errant rocket fired from Gaza after an analysis using open source and classified information, Minister of National Defence Bill Blair said in a statement on Sunday.

British intelligence services:

UK intelligence services have concluded that the deadly blast at al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza was caused by a rocket fired by a Palestinian militant group rather than by an Israeli airstrike, Rishi Sunak has told MPs...Sunak said that based on intelligence and weapons analysis, the UK government “judges that the explosion was likely caused by a missile or part of one that was launched from within Gaza towards Israel”.

CNN:

CNN has reviewed dozens of videos posted on social media, aired on live broadcasts and filmed by a freelance journalist working for CNN in Gaza, as well as satellite imagery, to piece together what happened in as much detail as possible. Without the ability to access the site and gather evidence from the ground, no conclusion can be definitive. But CNN’s analysis suggests that a rocket launched from within Gaza broke up midair, and that the blast at the hospital was the result of part of the rocket landing at the hospital complex.

AP analysis:

The Associated Press analyzed more than a dozen videos from the moments before, during and after the hospital explosion, as well as satellite imagery and photos. AP’s analysis shows that the rocket that broke up in the air was fired from within Palestinian territory, and that the hospital explosion was most likely caused when part of that rocket crashed to the ground. A lack of forensic evidence and the difficulty of gathering that material on the ground in the middle of a war means there is no definitive proof the break-up of the rocket and the explosion at the hospital are linked. However, AP’s assessment is supported by a range of experts with specialties in open-source intelligence, geolocation and rocketry. Weapons and explosive experts with decades of experience assessing bomb damage, who reviewed the visual evidence, told CNN they believe this to be the most likely scenario – although they caution the absence of munition remnants or shrapnel from the scene made it difficult to be sure. All agreed that the available evidence of the damage at the site was not consistent with an Israeli airstrike.

NYT update:

Six days after Hamas accused Israel of bombing a hospital in Gaza City and killing hundreds of people, the armed Palestinian group has yet to produce or describe any evidence linking Israel to the strike, says it cannot find the munition that hit the site and has declined to provide detail to support its count of the casualties.

The fact that Hamas or Islamic Jihad are likely responsible for those who died in this massacre does not of course lessen any of the crimes the IDF have and continue to commit.
posted by gwint at 9:55 AM on October 24, 2023 [14 favorites]

Or to paraphrase: "we have analyzed more than a dozen videos provided by the IOF and despite their record of lying and falsifying evidence on every single other case of Accidental Bombing over the last 60 years, this time, although we can't be 100% certain, we think they are probably telling us the truth"
posted by Lanark at 10:27 AM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has been condemning the Hamas attacks, condemning Israeli collective punishment, and calling for aid for Palestinians in Gaza.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan is calling for his resignation, saying, "There is no justification or point in talking to those who show compassion for the most terrible atrocities committed against the citizens of Israel and the Jewish people."

Erdan is conflating "showing compassion for Palestinians" and "showing compassion for atrocities". Not an unexpected conflation during wartime, I guess - I can imagine that Curtis LeMay might've said similar things to anyone who asked him about the children of Tokyo.
posted by clawsoon at 10:32 AM on October 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

Lanark, perhaps you missed it in my comment, but:

CNN has reviewed dozens of videos posted on social media, aired on live broadcasts and filmed by a freelance journalist working for CNN in Gaza, as well as satellite imagery

The Associated Press analyzed more than a dozen videos from the moments before, during and after the hospital explosion, as well as satellite imagery and photos.

Presumably the governments of France, Britain, and Canada have access to the above resources, as well as additional information unavailable to the public.
posted by gwint at 10:39 AM on October 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

Erdan is conflating "showing compassion for Palestinians" and "showing compassion for atrocities".

It's so obvious, and yet still effective. Nothing to do but to keep pushing back on that garbage.
posted by mediareport at 10:40 AM on October 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

US Turnout Rates by Attributes 2014, 2018 and 2022

Cool, now do 2016 and 2020 (next year is a presidential election year, not an off-year election, so off-year election turnout isn't relevant).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 10:57 AM on October 24, 2023

One comment and its replies deleted. Can we please avoid "What about Turkey and the Kurds" type of comments and stick to the subject?
posted by loup (staff) at 11:33 AM on October 24, 2023

In apparent shift, Blinken says humanitarian pauses in Gaza should be considered

There was a comment upthread where US officials were saying that they were "increasingly alarmed by comments from their Israeli counterparts about their intention to deny even supplies of water, electricity, fuel, food and medicine into Gaza." Perhaps that concern has bubbled up to Blinken and Biden?

But is there any chance that the Americans, (who I assume are) Israel's largest supplier of weapons, whose military support will make it somewhat easier to reach their stated goal of destroying Hamas, can do anything to moderate the growing Israeli government equation of humanitarianism=>support for atrocities? Or is it too late for that, and Israel is ready to go it alone even if their allies think they've gone too far?

(I suppose that the one thing that would save Israeli hardliners from this dilemma would be a terrorist attack on American civilians, which would no doubt change the American mood to "go ahead, Israel, bomb them all." I was reading up on the Sri Lankan civil war the other day - almost as long and probably even more bloody than the Israel-Palestine war - and one thing that allowed the government to finally prevail over the Tamils, tens of thousands of civilian casualties be damned, was 9/11, which switched American and European attitudes toward civilian deaths when the target is terrorists.)
posted by clawsoon at 11:37 AM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

I suppose that the one thing that would save Israeli hardliners from this dilemma would be a terrorist attack on American civilians

I'm not sure how much the nationalities matter, so much as attacks happening on American soil. There were at least 33 Americans killed in the Hamas attack, there are 10 unaccounted for and possibly being held hostage. But it hasn't been widely viewed as an attack on America or Americans.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:57 AM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Cool, now do 2016 and 2020 (next year is a presidential election year, not an off-year election, so off-year election turnout isn't relevant).

Split hairs if you wish but that link was posted in response to this assertion:

....latest polling has Biden at 25% approval among voters under 35..
.
The under 35 part kind of muddles my observation but look at the 18-29 range alone: Young.People.Don't.Vote. I have made this observation for over 20 years on this site and almost every time I did so members in that 18-29 category went ballistic. But facts are un-alternatively facts.

See also

...almost a third (31%) of young voters who cast a ballot in the 2020 election self-identified as a Republican. The vast majority of those young Republicans (92%) voted for former President Trump, while 7% voted for Biden and 2% for another candidate. (This was the same as among Republican voters ages 65+, which somewhat belies the notion that young Republicans were less likely to support Trump.) Nearly all youth (95%) who identified as a “conservative Republican” voted for Trump, as did four out of five young youth who identified as “moderate” or “liberal” Republicans.

Young Republicans, Young Trump Voters, and the Future of the GOP

Statistics aside, my personal experience is that more than one son of more than one close friend, not to mention a nephew, are all in on Trump to the hilt. And their ears have disappeared on anything to the contrary despite all the ever mounting signs of dementia TFG displays day after day after day.

Our experience is what scares the shit out of us even though -- for all sorts of reasons statistically -- we should not be scared. A best friend's son once rappelled down a rope face first as a Marine to help liberate a hijacked supertanker and now he's Trumpier than shit to this day despite all the over ample evidence to the contrary. My heartfelt reaction is How can this be!?

So if 25% of young voters don't approve of President Biden, should he be quaking in his bedroom slippers? I think not. They have a choice and if by rare chance they choose to vote at all... wrongly -- well, apart from their small numbers, my age cohort will be out in force voting him in all the same.

But all the above is so way beside the point of discussion here that my derail stops here. Carry on.
posted by y2karl at 1:50 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

So if 25% of young voters don't approve of President Biden

The comment you're replying to actually says that 25% of 18-29 voters approve of Biden, not disapprove. Which would be a problem. Except I don't think it's true... Biden's approval is bad but it's not 25% among any age bracket much less under-30s.
posted by Justinian at 2:12 PM on October 24, 2023

I'm not sure how much the nationalities matter, so much as attacks happening on American soil. There were at least 33 Americans killed in the Hamas attack, there are 10 unaccounted for and possibly being held hostage. But it hasn't been widely viewed as an attack on America or Americans.

I wonder how much (a) having more competent people heading foreign policy now, US officials may be strategically ignoring this in order to not escalate further, or (b) (actually) anti-semitic tropes about Jewish people supposedly having divided loyalties or not really or fully being Americans/[your country here] also factor into that? Re (b), a not insignificant chunk of the louder voices in the US currently supporting Israeli retaliation unreservedly and uncritically - the Republican contingent - have their own reasons for doing so, which have nothing to do with caring about Jewish people, and often coincide with plenty of anti-semitism toward Jewish Americans (in addition to anti-Muslim sentiment). While supporters within the Democratic Party would worry about (a).
posted by eviemath at 3:04 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do polls so long before an election mean very much?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:05 PM on October 24, 2023

It depends, but I suspect Biden’s policy towards Gaza and basically unconditional support for Israel is going to hurt him with Arab Americans and young people. In swing states with high concentrations of Arab Americans, that may matter (don’t know offhand if there are such states).
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:20 PM on October 24, 2023

I can tell you that a lot of people are going to regret donating, and will not donate again, to Fetterman. He’s been grotesque.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:22 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's undoubtedly true that there are some people with whom Biden's policy here will hurt him. It's also true that if he took a pro-Palestinian stance it would hurt him with other people. I suspect but can't prove that the latter would hurt him more than the former will but that's impossible to know and "which will get me more votes" is not a good reason to provide or deny military support in either case.
posted by Justinian at 3:25 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Do polls so long before an election mean very much?

Historically they don't mean anything. Not hyperbole, almost zero. But some people, most notably G Elliot Morris, have argued pretty persuasively that this has been changing significantly over the last few cycles as partisanship increases and the candidates are known earlier. He thinks the margin of error for polling this early which has historically been something like 15 points (!) may be as little as 5 points this cycle, which would mean the current polling is not all that accurate for the election but far from meaningless.

To pick one example of the change, the polling in October of 2019 was actually closer to the true result than the polling in October of 2020, just a month before the election. Obviously that was probably a fluke but it's not something that would even have been possible 30 or 40 years ago.
posted by Justinian at 3:29 PM on October 24, 2023

Can we please not turn this into a Trump v Biden American politics thread?
posted by krisjohn at 3:43 PM on October 24, 2023 [25 favorites]

Hezbollah is funding Hamas. They are also firing rockets into northern Israel. They are a participant in this war. Their conduct and attitude with respect to protection of civilians and the war crimes matters. Their recent battlefield actions in Syria demonstrate a total disregard for any of these laws of war and rules for protecting civilians.

When looking at the casualties in Gaza it appears that Hamas is actively working to put as many civilians in harms way as possible. They are sheltering soldiers with civilians and firing rockets from civilian areas at Israeli civilians and 20% of those rockets are falling on the civilians in Gaza because they are unguided and poorly made.
posted by interogative mood at 3:45 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

wow interogative mood, this time you really nailed all us hamas lovers
posted by Flunkie at 3:53 PM on October 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

You could call contemporary politics the belief in, uh, the power of the powerless. The United States, possibly the most powerful nation in the world, is not responsible for going along with its client-state's actions, nope, nothing we could do except cheer the bombing and supply the ammo. Israel, a solidly developed state and the client of the world's sole remaining superpower, is also helpless - nothing they can do except bomb Gaza into powder (do you know that the big equipment in Gaza is out of gas now, so if you're under the rubble then god help you) to address the situation of the Palestinians. No other courses are available to these powerful and well-off entities.

Hamas, on the other hand-! The Palestinians, on the other hand-! They may be poor, they may be blockaded, they may be getting pasted by modern weaponry, forty-two percent of their buildings may be ash, but they could stop this any time. It's their fault! If they didn't start it, Israel would not have no choice but to take a thousand eyes for one eye. If Hamas, unlike Israel, can't buy high quality arms and fires their rockets on an attacking force and those rockets sometimes fall back into Gaza, then it's their fault! Stop hitting yourselves, Palestinians!

Vile, vile, vile. Fold up history, take us back before humans, never let humans come about. Never let us have to know that this is what humans are.
posted by Frowner at 4:01 PM on October 24, 2023 [19 favorites]

In other unfortunately predictable news, DeSantis is ordering universities to shut down student groups that he feels are "supporting Hamas". No clue on whether groups like NLG will be next.
posted by corb at 4:15 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember when the Hamas attack first happened, there were comparisons to 9/11. Like 1000+ civilians were killed, which obviously was less than 9/11, but given the size of Israel’s population, proportionally was larger. Well now we’re about 2000 CHILDREN dead in Gaza in the past couple of weeks. How many 9/11s is that? It’s unfathhomable. This is the level of carnage in gaza.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:17 PM on October 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

Hamas could stop attacking Israel at any time and surrender. There is no excuse for their actions on October 7th. Hamas has had the ability to end the blockade years ago by ending their efforts to completely destroy Israel and pursuing a two state solution.
posted by interogative mood at 4:25 PM on October 24, 2023

who exactly gave a fucking excuse for hamas's actions on october 7th
posted by Flunkie at 4:29 PM on October 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

A two state solution? What is this, 1993? Israel made that an impossibility long ago.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:31 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Chat GPT, please give me more bad-faith arguments"
posted by Flunkie at 4:32 PM on October 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

The path Israel is pursuing is not the only path available to Israel. It is the one that is maximizing human suffering, though.

We Americans did this too, and it wrecked us. The path Israel is pursuing is not the only path available to Israel.

Several people in this thread insist otherwise, and it is painful to watch people defend war crimes, because, once again: The path Israel is pursuing is not the only path available to Israel.
posted by kensington314 at 4:35 PM on October 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

If only Israel had another path...
posted by krisjohn at 4:36 PM on October 24, 2023

Hamas, on the other hand-! The Palestinians, on the other hand-! They may be poor, they may be blockaded, they may be getting pasted by modern weaponry, forty-two percent of their buildings may be ash, but they could stop this any time. It's their fault! If they didn't start it, Israel would not have no choice but to take a thousand eyes for one eye. If Hamas, unlike Israel, can't buy high quality arms and fires their rockets on an attacking force and those rockets sometimes fall back into Gaza, then it's their fault! Stop hitting yourselves, Palestinians!

You forgot to mention the whole 50% of Palestinians in Gaza being literal children, making them even more powerful and thus responsible for ending the conflict and carnage!

/s
posted by eviemath at 4:37 PM on October 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

Hamas has had the ability to end the blockade years ago by ending their efforts to completely destroy Israel

Are you just going to ignore the fact that Netanyahu spent years propping up Hamas, including allowing Yemen to fund them? Acting like Israel bears no responsibility whatever and has no agency at all is either disingenous or ignorant.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 4:50 PM on October 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

Several people in this thread insist otherwise

Along with the majority of elected Democrats; personally I'm appalled at the utter moral vacuity of anyone who thinks that what Israel is doing is right and proper and should be allowed to continue.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 4:51 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Jewish author Sim Kern has published a bunch of excellent TikToks on the topic of Palestine.
posted by Lanark at 4:52 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

More locally, while we’re not going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here on Metafilter (at least, I don’t *think* our membership includes everyone who would be needed to accomplish that, and possibly includes no one from that group of diplomats and world leaders), we can practice for ourselves trying to see other perspectives in large and seemingly intractable conflicts (even if we disagree with them), clarifying our own values and analyzing whether we have applied them well or whether other factors are influencing our perspectives, sorting out fact from perspective from narrative from what one of my links upthread referred to as “personal truth” (I think opinion or conviction might be more accurate terminology), and looking for overlaps and opportunities for agreement between differing perspectives.

Dropping in once or twice a day to repeat the same strong opinion without engaging with any of the discussion in between is not that, and is generally frowned upon behavior in our little online community. I’m cognizant that those of us concerned with Palestinian lives as well as Israeli lives but viewing Palestinians as the group with less power in this situation seem to have been more dominant in the thread today. For me, it has been interesting to have the rhetorical space to be able to get into some of the differences and nuances of our positions, but I’m also aware that for our fellow Mefites who have a more direct connection to the conflict, we should take extra care to avoid falling into tone policing. But some engagement with how the discussion has developed instead of re-posting basically the exact same comment each day seems like a reasonable expectation.
posted by eviemath at 4:55 PM on October 24, 2023 [13 favorites]

"Acting like Israel bears no responsibility whatever and has no agency at all is either disingenous or ignorant." -- Pseudonymous Cognomen

And a repeat. "After Hamas's actions, Israel had no choice but to..." has been used so many times in this thread that now it's barely worth acknowledging. I don't understand how a lack of self control or agency is considered by anyone to be just assumed and agreed such that a position can start with it and everyone is expected to just nod and say yes.

This is like the man with the gun telling one prisoner that they're responsible for the death of the other prisoner if they don't do what they're told.
posted by krisjohn at 5:03 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

As an American who opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (both Iraq wars), if somehow US policy and/or Israeli actions manage to draw Iran or other actors into this business, I want to go on record as saying the U.S. should immediately peace-out (literally) and have nothing to do with it. That goes double if somehow a missile hits a US ship, or some terrorist attack on a US base happens. Fuck no. I will go out in the street and talk to every serviceperson I see and try to convince them to conscientiously object.

We have the tools in hand right now (and so does Israel) to drastically reduce the chance of that, so if we both keep beating the war drums, I say it ain't my fight.
posted by caviar2d2 at 5:24 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ultimately Hamas’ leaders made the decisions. Netenyahu doesn’t run Hamas.
posted by interogative mood at 5:25 PM on October 24, 2023

interogative mood, who made the decision to destroy over 40% of the habitable structures in Gaza? Is that the same person who made the decision to murder over 2,000 Palestinian children, and over 5,000 Palestinian people total, over the last 17 days?
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 5:39 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Could we have less morally abhorrent comments backed by a wikipedia level understanding of the conflict in here?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:40 PM on October 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

Ultimately Hamas’ leaders made the decisions. Netenyahu doesn’t run Hamas.

Hamas's leaders made a decision. Do I think it was a good one? Absolutely not. But they made it expecting this level of response from Israel, so ultimately, heavy reprisals just play into their hands. So from a strategic as well as a moral standpoint, Israel is making the wrong decision here. Both Israel and Hamas have agency in this situation; neither is forced into merely reacting to the other, and accordingly both sides bear some degree of blame here. But as the finger currently pulling the trigger, Israel certainly deserves more at the moment. (Hamas started this particular fight, but Israel can certainly finish it.)

However—I think it's ultimately naive to expect a ceasefire just like that. The Israeli political establishment (and even, on balance, the majority of the Israeli public) is out for blood, and a ceasefire and return to the status quo—much less a turn to actual constructive politics between Gaza and Israel—will inevitably be viewed as a concession to terrorist demands.

With this in mind, I wonder—is there any way to spin peace as an Israeli victory? If it is possible to satisfy public grief without seeming to capitulate to international demands for a ceasefire (much less negotiate with terrorists), I imagine that said ceasefire would be a much more palatable option... though perhaps not for Netanyahu, who can only hope to save his reputation by atoning for it with Gazan blood.
posted by the tartare yolk at 5:41 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Hamas has had the ability to end the blockade years ago by ending their efforts to completely destroy Israel and pursuing a two state solution.

Jesus. It's been repeatedly explained in this thread that Netanyahu *deliberately* boosted Hamas, including allowing millions of dollars to be funneled to them via Qatar, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank precisely so he *wouldn't* have any solid partner to negotiate with over a two-state solution. In addition to the Times of Israel article from the day after the attacks that Pseudonymous Cognomen linked just above, which notes Netanyahu "was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state," there were also these two links posted in this thread 2 days ago:

Opinion piece in Ha'aretz explores Netanyahu's long-term strategy of boosting and funding Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority so he won't have to negotiate with the PA, which is well-discussed in Israel but much less so in the U.S.: A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance (archive)

And essential Ha'aretz from Oct 11: Why Did Netanyahu Want to Strengthen Hamas? (archive)

There's also the interview linked multiple times above with former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, who at 10:40 clearly states this:

"For years Netanyahu explicitly preferred to deal with Hamas in order not to have to deal with the Palestinian authority...he put all the efforts in order to create a certain rapport with Hamas. We know that Hamas was financed with the assistance of Israel - for years - by hundreds of millions of dollars that came from Qatar with the assistance of the state of Israel, with the full knowledge and support of the Israeli government led by Netanyahu...throughout the period that he was Prime Minister, he made every possible effort to build Hamas rather than to destroy it...And in a certain way, the expansion of Hamas and the strengthening of Hamas is largely also a result of this policy of Netanyahu."

interrogative mood, do you have a direct response to the claims I highlight (again) from those links? Do you think they are untrue? If so, why? At this point a direct answer, or at least an acknowledgement that you've seen the argument, is the least we should be able to expect from you as you once again assert broad spin. You've made some very useful contributions to this thread that I've appreciated, don't get me wrong. But this latest? It's surprisingly dishonest garbage.
posted by mediareport at 5:49 PM on October 24, 2023 [16 favorites]

This thread is like when you leave an old record player on and the arm gets to the end of the tracks and just loops around in the middle with crackles and pops because it doesn't have that thing where the arm lifts off the record, parks itself and turns off.
posted by krisjohn at 5:50 PM on October 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

Yeah, someone said above the thread is better when we're just posting links to good analysis we find online and I couldn't agree more.
posted by mediareport at 5:53 PM on October 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

Via Jewish Currents
A “McCarthyite Backlash” Against Pro-Palestine Speech
From university disciplinary hearings to death threats, supporters of Palestinian rights are facing a wave of reprisals.
This report is just about the US but is being mirrored in Europe
posted by adamvasco at 5:54 PM on October 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

The patriarchal view that posits (cis) men as slaves to their libidos, unable to control themselves around the temptation of a woman, has rightly been skewered as being a really shitty and dehumanizing view of men (as well as harmful to others).

The machismo required to perform toxic masculinity, where the only emotion allowed to (cis) men is disproportionate anger or rage, and they are supposed to defend their “honor” at all costs to themselves, their health or life or happiness, their families, or any innocent bystanders has rightly been decried as harmfully constricting (perhaps even emotionally abusive) to men (in addition to the violence everyone else suffers).

Likewise, the idea that Hamas has such near-total control over the choices and actions of the Israeli government, that the Israeli government is required to perform only one specific type of response to terrorist attacks - using disproportionate violence in retaliation, is reductive and insulting (and, if applied only to Israel, potentially also anti-Semitic); particularly given the tradition of debate and questioning and analysis of religious texts that provide, among other details, the moral framework of Judaism. (In addition to the harms that expectation causes others.)
posted by eviemath at 6:11 PM on October 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, someone said above the thread is better when we're just posting links to good analysis we find online and I couldn't agree more.

Just noting that the same person who said that also said " I don't have much sympathy for Israeli deaths. Reaping, sowing, living by the sword, etc."
posted by neroli at 6:17 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

In UK Michael Eisen has been informed that he is being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians.
posted by adamvasco at 6:19 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Would it make sense for someone to create a new post now that it's been a couple weeks from the first post?

Reasoning might include:

1. There's a sense/reality that MF doesn't do I/P threads, so some people who visit MF off and on may never have seen this post and wouldn't naturally search for it.

2. Regardless of #1 above, many viewers who saw it initially were engaging briefly around immediate events and would benefit from a new post for news and updates.

3. Related to #2, this post has devolved into a back and forth among very few members (like me), but the topic deserves broader engagement.

4. A new post might lead to a more link-heavy discourse, which I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate since Twitter fucking sucks now!!!!
posted by kensington314 at 6:37 PM on October 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

xdvesper, if you want to take 500 people off a 5000+ and counting death toll and somehow imply this resets the context of the whole conversation, I don't know what to do for you. I hope to encounter you in another thread where we can find common ground on ice cream flavors or cat photos or some such thing.

Comments like this, and the back and forth between a small number of us who will agree and disagree with it for the next four hours, are maybe another reason to consider this thread kaput and start over on current news from the crisis. Do others agree?
posted by kensington314 at 6:49 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just noting that the same person who said that also said " I don't have much sympathy for Israeli deaths. Reaping, sowing, living by the sword, etc."

Yeah, that's why I didn't favorite the comment. Like, empathy doesn't exist for that person or something.
posted by mediareport at 6:50 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

To be clear, I'd be happy to do the work of creating a new post, but don't want to just go do that if the 10 people left here are invested in this space.
posted by kensington314 at 7:02 PM on October 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

It may be that many are reading and not commenting.

Thanks to all that have. This hasn’t been the easiest thread, but we’ve done at least OK.

And since these are the events we’re confronted with, I’m grateful for the discussion here. The alternatives are grim enough.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:15 PM on October 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

Also, at least 870 children are missing in Gaza and feared trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings. With parts of Gaza looking like an earthquake hit it, it'll probably be a while before there's a better sense of the total number of deaths.
posted by clawsoon at 7:20 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Y'all there's no guarantee a new thread will go the way some of us would prefer. This one's got 2 weeks before it closes; unless the mods think it would be better for server load or something to make a new one, I don't see why we shouldn't just keep at it in this one.
posted by mediareport at 7:29 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

One comment deleted. Replies left up for clarity. Please refrain from commenting further if you are not planning to participate in good faith/plan to argue and debate with users and further derail the thread.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 7:44 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wandered into the reference library today and came across The Political Ideology of Hamas: A Grassroots Perspective, in which the author draws some conclusions from spending time with a Hamas-affiliated football club and a Hamas-affiliated university in the late 1990s. The vibe I got from it - with one jarring exception - was very much Mormon volleyball team and BYU.

The football club: It's the one you played for if you wanted to be seen as a "good Muslim", but the players were constantly ignoring the modesty requirements (navel to knees for men) and would move to a secular club if it offered a better opportunity. Not terribly serious as a site of Islamic teaching.

The university: Seen by students as the more academically serious alternative to the Fatah-affiliated secular university. Students were given exposure to a broad range of ideas, but always helped toward seeing that the Islamic solution was the best one. The one truly jarring moment came in English class: It was cruel to Hester Prynne to have to live a life full of shame with the scarlet letter on her; the Islamic approach, to stone her to death, was a kinder and wiser solution, said the professor.

The real site of Hamas indoctrination, though, the one where learners had the time, motivation and teachers needed to become fully committed to the cause, was Israeli prison.

For the young people who supported Hamas back then, twenty or so years ago, it was the feeling that Hamas might be able to do something, to inflict some sort of pain on Israel that would force them to concede a point or two in negotiations. In theory Israel was to be destroyed, but in practise, they said, the goal was to find (or force) some tolerable way to live with it.

I'm sure things have changed in Gaza since then, but the chapters I read were interesting.
posted by clawsoon at 7:59 PM on October 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

Clawsoon: Note that those numbers are from Hamas. We can hope that the real numbers will prove to be lower. They will still be high, though, particularly as the fighting continues.
posted by Justinian at 8:00 PM on October 24, 2023

The vibe I got from it... was very much Mormon volleyball team and BYU.

Oh, I should have mentioned that the biggest reason I got this feeling was that "good Muslim" respectability mostly meant no drinking, no swearing, modest dress, and separation of men and women. It's the same set of reasons that parents I grew up with wanted to send their kids to Bible college.
posted by clawsoon at 8:08 PM on October 24, 2023

Hamas rockets have a 20-25% failure rate and when they do they blow up in Gaza. 700 or so are being intercepted by Israel every day. So about 200 rockets are blowing up in Gaza every day. That’s close to the number of air strikes Israel is conducting. How many kids is that. By Hamas’ own counting 400+ kids died when their rocket hit the hospital.

Perhaps they should be the ones to implement a unilateral ceasefire.
posted by interogative mood at 8:09 PM on October 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

You really need to step away.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:13 PM on October 24, 2023 [12 favorites]

You know, actually, fuck it. I'll just leave this thread since it's basically been targeted for rhetorical vandalism by a small group of denialists. Maybe a new thread will open sometime, with broader participation. Peace, folks.
posted by kensington314 at 8:15 PM on October 24, 2023

Clawsoon: Note that those numbers are from Hamas. We can hope that the real numbers will prove to be lower.

The source is no doubt a concern, but I don't think that anyone else is in a position to do the counting right now, given that Hamas controls the state apparatus. Future revisions to the numbers, like those from other conflicts where casualty counts have been highly politicized, are going to be less a matter of "the numbers actually proved to be" and more a matter of "wide range of estimates from the low end to the high end."
posted by clawsoon at 8:16 PM on October 24, 2023

Clawsoon: Note that those numbers are from Hamas. We can hope that the real numbers will prove to be lower.

The source is no doubt a concern, but I don't think that anyone else is in a position to do the counting right now, given that Hamas controls the state apparatus.

They’re not from Hamas, it was the highest reported number from aid groups in Gaza. But why let facts get in the way when we’re talking about dead kids.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:27 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

interogative mood: Hamas rockets have a 20-25% failure rate and when they do they blow up in Gaza. 700 or so are being intercepted by Israel every day. So about 200 rockets are blowing up in Gaza every day. That’s close to the number of air strikes Israel is conducting. How many kids is that.

IDF data from last week: Nearly 13% of the rockets that were fired toward Israel Oct. 17 landed in the densely populated enclave.

IDF statement this week: One-fifth of the rockets fired by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have been misfired in the last day, landing inside Gaza and killing civilians... more than 550 rockets.

No estimates from either one saying how many civilians in Gaza might have been killed by Hamas/PIJ rockets, but I'm sure it's enough to be a tragedy all on its own. Organizations that produce suicide bombers are not ones that I expect to be careful with lives.

Perhaps they should be the ones to implement a unilateral ceasefire.

Unlikely to happen and unlikely to make a difference at this point, given that Israel has said that the goal is the total destruction of Hamas. Looks both sides are locked in for the duration, and it'll mostly be Palestinian civilians who suffer.
posted by clawsoon at 8:40 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

MisantropicPainforest: They’re not from Hamas, it was the highest reported number from aid groups in Gaza. But why let facts get in the way when we’re talking about dead kids.

To be precise, the 870 children number was from the Ministry of Health in Gaza. The aid groups in the story provided smaller snippets of information, including a report from one doctor to Save the Children on separated and unidentified dead children in his hospital, and a UN report on killed rescue workers.
posted by clawsoon at 8:57 PM on October 24, 2023

NYT: A Close Look at Some Key Evidence in the Gaza Hospital Blast: "A widely cited missile video does not shed light on what happened, a Times analysis concludes."

a detailed visual analysis by The New York Times concludes that the video clip — taken from an Al Jazeera television camera livestreaming on the night of Oct. 17 — shows something else. The missile seen in the video is most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital. It actually detonated in the sky roughly two miles away, The Times found, and is an unrelated aspect of the fighting that unfolded over the Israeli-Gaza border that night.

The Times’s finding does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab hospital blast, or who is responsible. The contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible. But the Times analysis does cast doubt on one of the most-publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case and complicates the straightforward narrative they have put forth...

Asked about The Times’s findings, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said The Times and American intelligence agencies had different interpretations of the video.

posted by BungaDunga at 9:24 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

meant to include the main finding, "The Times concluded that the missile in the video was never near the hospital. It was launched from Israel, not Gaza, and appears to have exploded above the Israeli-Gaza border, at least two miles away from the hospital."
posted by BungaDunga at 9:28 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’m not sure how one goes from

Netenyahu and anyone involved in the decision to blow up the Hospital should be arrested and tried for treason and crimes against humanity.

and

What Israel needs to do is make a public commitment to work to protect humanitarian infrastructure. They could negotiate a temporary ceasefire to allow water, food, medical supplies and power for the generators to get to the hospitals.

Israel has admitted bombing the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church saying they were targeting a building nearby and missed. They say are reviewing targeting procedures. Of course this is a foreseeable consequence of bombing a city and waging war. War is horrible.

and seemingly claiming that the Israeli government has no free will, can’t be held responsible for any of their actions, and that only Hamas has the power to affect the outcome of the current situation in the span of a week. The poster does seem to take in the information that was posted about the cause of the destruction at the Al Ahli hospital being a Hamas missile misfire rather than a targeted strike by Israel, and clearly had a very strong emotional reaction to that particular event, and the kids that died therein. But why only those kids?
posted by eviemath at 9:52 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

i’m pretty concerned about that “40% of residences in gaza destroyed” statistic that i’ve been seeing everywhere. pretty very concerned.

is this a reliable figure? is this as terrifying as it seems? picture that happening to your city. if you’re in the united states, think about how frightened people are about visible homelessness in the downtowns of major cities, and think about how that’s the result of a low single-digit number of people experiencing chronic homelessness.

think about how police do sweeps of encampments and steal and then destroy homeless peoples’ stuff every time they do. think about that happening to the middle class, if you identify with the middle class. think about those police with much better guns and with bombs and they hate your city and they hate you and they have burned down half the houses and shot your friends cause they can’t tell them from their enemies.

please tell me that statistic is wrong because if it is wrong i’ll go back to quoting walter benjamin on the catastrophe that is history and saying bloodless things about international law and diligently remembering that i’m thousands of miles and a continent and an ocean and a sea away and can’t even spell netanyahu’s name without looking it up because if that statistic is not wrong the leadership of a modern industrialized state with a hypermodern highly effective army has lost its motherfucking mind and is doing genocide and must be stopped and i say this as someone who identifies hard, like, hard with the party kids who were murdered and kidnapped by bloodthirsty hamas child soldiers — you know the median age in gaza, and you know damned well that an army from a population with that median age is an army of child soldiers even if they’re 18 year old child soldiers instead of 14 year old child soldiers, they’re children raised in jail with guns and no adult supervision.

fuck this, i hate this, i hate the government of the state of israel i hate them with a burning passion i hate them more than any state’s political leadership anywhere, bar maybe the creeps in charge of saudi and the creeps in charge of afghanistan and i wish the population of israel would do a fucking revolution and fling their fucking leaders into the fucking sea and stop this fucking war, and i say this even if doing a revolution and throwing the war monsters into the sea means more festival kids who are the people i wish i was when i was their age get murdered by child soldiers. i mean it.

please tell me that statistic is wrong. all those lives ruined and for what, for collective punishment from creeps who think those lives are animal lives?

i feel sick.

sorry for the cri de coeur but overeducated lowercase weirdo out it’s been real but i feel sick and i can’t i just can’t.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:38 PM on October 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

40% is uninhabitable, but not destroyed. It is uninhabitable because Israel has told people to evacuate certain areas and that represents about 40% of the hosing units in Gaza. The UN press release this came from also noted some satellite analysis they’ve done comparing May to the last few days of bombing. They estimate in the most heavily bombed part of northern Gaza 15% of structures have moderate to severe damage. They do not have the ability to know which structures were hit with an Israeli airstrike or Hamas missile.
posted by interogative mood at 11:08 PM on October 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

They’re not from Hamas, it was the highest reported number from aid groups in Gaza. But why let facts get in the way when we’re talking about dead kids.

It was, as clawsoon says, from the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Which is controlled by Hamas, yes?
posted by Justinian at 1:05 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. WaPo: Why news outlets and the U.N. rely on Gaza’s Health Ministry for death tolls
posted by ohneat at 1:48 AM on October 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Josh Paul: This is not the State Department I know. That’s why I left my job. (WaPo via archive.vn):

On Oct. 7, when Hamas massacred Israeli civilians, I felt sick to my stomach, both because of the horror being visited upon innocents and because I knew what would come next. Israel has a right to defend itself, but the country’s track record over a half-dozen major clashes in the past 15 years suggests that thousands of Palestinian civilians will die in the process.

Sure enough, Israeli requests for munitions started arriving immediately, including for a variety of weapons that have no applicability to the current conflict. These requests deserved the attention we would pay to any large arms package, and I urged a frank discussion. My urging was met with silence — and the clear direction that we needed to move as fast as possible to meet Israel’s requests. Concurrently, the same Congress that had previously blocked arms sales to other regimes with questionable human rights records was now pressing us to move forward to meet Israel’s demands.

The idea that U.S. arms should not be used to kill civilians has never been a controversial one in any of the four administrations I have served, dating back to my work helping rebuild the Iraqi security sector in 2004-2006.

posted by kmt at 3:40 AM on October 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

ِAt least 42 percent of all housing units in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged as a result of Israel's continuous strikes, the UN humanitarian office said.

"About 15,100 housing units were destroyed, and 10,656 housing units were rendered uninhabitable," the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a press statement sent to The New Arab.

"Moreover, 139,000 housing units were subjected to minor to moderate damage, pointing to the destruction of entire neighborhoods, especially in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, Shujaiya, the area between Gaza and the Beach refugee camp, and Abasan Kabira in Khan Yunis," OCHA added. [x]

So I make that 35% damaged and 6.5% destroyed or uninhabitable.
posted by Lanark at 3:42 AM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is after 18 days, so at the current rate it will take 277 days to destroy every house in Gaza.
posted by Lanark at 3:45 AM on October 25, 2023

The idea that U.S. arms should not be used to kill civilians has never been a controversial one in any of the four administrations I have served

Mark Thomas effectively ridiculed that idea in his book about similar British rules:

"What are you up to tonight?" he says, standing there in a brown overall with pens in the top pocket.

"We're going to abduct, torture, and 'disappear' some teachers and civil rights lawyers."

At which the quartermaster shouts down a corridor to an unseen assistant: "Keith! It's torture and abduction. Put the British guns away and get the bad guns out... that's right, the French ones."

posted by clawsoon at 4:09 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Legal Resources for Activists Advocating for Palestine Across the U.S. [Palestine Legal]

How to Rise Up with Palestine - North American Student Walkout today; March on Washington Nov 4. Templates for calling and emailing your reps and other actions. [US Campaign for Palestinian Rights]

The Gaza Impact: Understanding the Law & Addressing our Fears; discussion of the legal landscape surrounding Gaza and strategies for overcoming the fears that often accompany advocating for justice. [Muslim Legal Fund of America]
posted by ohneat at 4:20 AM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sure enough, Israeli requests for munitions started arriving immediately, including for a variety of weapons that have no applicability to the current conflict.

For various reasons, I know there are journalists from the NYTimes and other publications on Metafilter, and I would honestly like to hear more about this from our mainstream media outlets: Why does Israel demand US taxpayer-funded weaponry that would not help with legitimate self-defense needs, and what are they using that weaponry for?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:29 AM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

R343L: 2,000 children killed in Gaza, aid group says, as doctors warn fuel shortage is a death sentence (Save the Children is the aid group)

The IDF has responded somewhat mockingly to similar pleas from UNRWA:

These fuel tanks are inside Gaza. They contain more than 500,000 liters of fuel. Ask Hamas if you can have some.

What I don't understand about that tweet is that the Israeli government has made it clear that fuel is the #1 thing they want to deny Hamas since they view it as (literally) fueling the Hamas war effort, they clearly know where these fuel storage tanks are, they have the ability to bomb whatever they want to within Gaza... and yet they've left these fuel storage tanks intact?

I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason; it just seems a little weird to me.

Another thing I don't fully understand is that Israel has now bombed the Aleppo airport in Syria 4 times in the past couple of weeks. I guess the lack of Syrian response is a sign of how prostrated the country has become after a decade of civil war?

And in diplomatic news, Israel will now refuse visas to UN officials:

“We have already refused a visa for Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths,” Erdan said. “The time has come to teach them a lesson.”

posted by clawsoon at 4:41 AM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

The idea that U.S. arms should not be used to kill civilians has never been a controversial one in any of the four administrations I have served

This is just over the top, pants on fire, laughably wrong. His office would have been involved in approving arms sales to Colombia, Afghanistan, ongoing sales to Israel and Egypt, and of course vast arms sales to the fucking KSA.

Not to mention that the whole time his office was approving sales to despotic, corrupt, or otherwise nasty regimes, the US was itself happily slaughtering at minimum tens of thousands of civilians presumably using US weapons to do so.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:43 AM on October 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

North American Student Walkout today

If those numbers of campuses look small; a bunch of folks are walking out and have coordinated on campus and never bothered to tell anyone nationally. I notice my institution is not listed despite there absolutely being a very coordinated walkout so uh whoops.
posted by corb at 4:52 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

GCU Sweet and Full of Grace: This is just over the top, pants on fire, laughably wrong. His office would have been involved in approving arms sales to Colombia, Afghanistan, ongoing sales to Israel and Egypt, and of course vast arms sales to the fucking KSA.

In the Mark Thomas book I quoted, the British would get around that obvious reality by saying that they had been assured by the civilian-slaughtering regime that British weapons would not be used on civilians - hence Thomas' imagined quartermaster sending down the hall for the French guns instead.

As long as you are completely naive, those assurances calm any human rights concerns. And it's amazing how quickly a government with the world's most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus will develop naivete when there are arms sales to be had and strategic partners to support.
posted by clawsoon at 4:59 AM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is the US we’re talking about, using weapons to kill muslim kids, for a not insignificant portion of the population that happens to control one party, a feature, not a bug.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:07 AM on October 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

... and yet they've left these fuel storage tanks intact

Hamas are doing exactly what Israel want them to do.
posted by Lanark at 5:11 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Regional Leaders Fear Spillover From Israel-Hamas War

There are concerns that public anger against Israel’s regular bombardment of the Gaza Strip... is serving to... “reignite grievances and reanimate alliances” in the Middle East and North Africa, where another Arab Spring uprising can’t be ruled out.

...many Egyptians are already disgruntled with Sisi over the economy as the country heads into an election in December, providing a volatile mix. Critics have accused Sisi of piggybacking off public anger over Gaza to improve his approval ratings. He called for nationwide protests in support of the Palestinian cause last Friday—a rarity given his yearslong clampdown on political activism.

Cairo’s Tahrir Square—the epicenter of the 2011 Arab Spring protests that ousted former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—was not listed among sites at which people could demonstrate, and participants who gathered in the square were brutally removed by police...

Experts also fear the conflict could motivate Islamist militant groups in Africa to capitalize on public anger over the humanitarian crisis... “The broader impact of the Hamas attacks—even before a potentially escalating regional war—is the possibility that terrorist groups around the world will try to match the spectacular carnage that Hamas pulled off earlier this month.”...

As public anger extends toward Arab leaders, there is a fear that the war could spark new unrest...

posted by clawsoon at 5:28 AM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Comment removed for name-calling. Please stay focused on the issue of the thread and avoid attacking other members, thanks.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:18 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. WaPo: Why news outlets and the U.N. rely on Gaza’s Health Ministry for death tolls

Respectfully, they say that, then below it confirm that the US assessment of the evidence is that the lower end of a 100-300 range was most likely versus the 471 claim from the ministry of health. I apologize for being heated in my previous comment. "Generally reliable" in a warzone may acceptably include figures at a 2x to 3x variance.

For further correlations - Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of the nearby al Shifa hospital which treated the wounded from the blast, estimates the number of dead at 250. FRANCE24 reporting.

The board chair of the organisation that funds the al Ahli hospital said in an interview on local10 that they were in contact with Suhaila Tarazi, director of the al Ahli hospital, who conveys that their organization believes that 200 were killed.

I was trying to establish a pattern of behavior (tendency from all sides to spin the numbers in their favor) rather than nitpick a particular incident, and then tie it to AP reporting which backs the IDF figures on self inflicted rocket strikes.

But yes, I do agree regardless of whether violations of human rights occurred on sovereign land or not, or whatever the death toll is, Israel's actions deserve scrutiny and criticism, so I won't say any more on the topic.

Australia is also sending troops and aircraft in the event Australians across the Middle East need evacuation. I believe this is only the second country after the US to deploy military assets into the region.
posted by xdvesper at 7:51 AM on October 25, 2023

Fears grow that Israel has ‘no plan’ agreed for postwar Gaza
Washington has raised concerns about lack of post-invasion exit strategy, say people familiar with discussions
posted by adamvasco at 8:33 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Inspired a bit by all the "who has the right to the land?" discussion which eventually spirals into Biblical claims, I thought I'd take a bit of a dive into two ancient Hebrew foes who are arguably relevant to discussions of Palestine: the Philistines and the Amalekites. It's a derail for sure but maybe we could use one.

The Philistines are relevant because, if nothing else, the word "Palestine" is cognate to "Philistine". They're also one of Israel's more memorable Biblical foes, playing a significant role in some of the better known early-Judean legends (Samson's foes were the Philistines; Goliath was a Philistine; the entire David vs. Saul drama plays out against the backdrop of a war with the Philistines).

Amalek, on the other hand, is a very minor enemy but one that religious Jews over the years have tried their best to associate with whoever is the most hated enemy of the time, because the Amalekites are the one nation there is an explicit Torah commandment to commit genocide against (Deuteronomy 25:19).

The Philistines are a lot easier to figure out, because there's lots of archaeological evidence of who and where they were. They were an ethnically distinct group (described in ways which suggest they may have been Aegean seafarers) settled in the region from Gaza to the Negev in the 13th century BCE or thereabouts, and a significant military power in the region until getting subjugated by the Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BCE and then completely dissolved by the Babylonian Empire in the 6th century BCE, when they cease to be referred to as a nation, a state, ethnic group, or cultural group. The Babylonians were into forced dispersal of ethnic groups, so that's a good educated guess as to what happened to the actual people. But they'd been a big wheel for long enough that that area became known as "Philistia" or "Palestina" even long after the actual Philistines weren't a significant force in the region.

So, are the Palestinians the same people as the Philistines? Almost certainly not. The Philistines spent the better part of three millennia not being recognized by anybody, including themselves, as a distinct ethnic group. Even if they were not dispersed by the Babylonian conquest, that's a very long time for a group to remain coherent but completely unrecognized. The Philistines almost certainly ended up diffused ethnically and culturally among the other peoples of the Levant. There are probably Palestinians today with Philistine ancestry, but the same could be said for any group of people between Egypt and Turkey; as many generations as there were between the Babylonian conquest and the present, and given that the Philistines were, in their time, a reasonably numerous group, they probably figure in the ancestry of a lot of people over a wide geographic area.

Now, on to the Amalekites. They're kind of a problem because there's no extra-Biblical evidence that they even existed. That means that if Amalek does refer to a specific cohesive group in the Bronze Age, it can't have been a very important one (and presumably were entirely unacknowledged by the time of the Assyrian conquest, because the Assyrians were frighteningly detailed in their descriptions of subjugated kingdoms and peoples, and Amalek is nowhere on the list). The lack of any sort of independent evidence they even existed, unfortunately, is often used to convert Amalek from a reference to a specific ethnic group (which, if it ever existed, doesn't anymore, and a commandment to genocide them would be relatively harmless) to a metaphorical referent to enemies of the Jews generally; this is a conversion which has been sanctioned at various times by religious authorities; rabbinic commentaries from the Great Sanhedrin, for instance, associated Amalek with Rome, which is geographically and historically utterly unjustifiable but was definitely very politically expedient.

So, are the Palestinians Amalekites? Historically, ethnically, and culturally, definitely not; the Amalekites, if they ever existed at all, faded even earlier than the Philistines and were a smaller and much more obscure group; their identity would be pretty much completely subsumed into other Levantine ethnic and cultural groups. Metaphorically, well, there are a lot of people out there who would interpret the Palestinians as the latest incarnation of Amalek, and that brings us back to where we are now.
posted by jackbishop at 8:52 AM on October 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

Re the who has the right to land issue:
I found this interesting from Torah Judaism.
Rabbi Yisroel Feldman: “All lands should be returned to the Palestinian people” As Jews, “We will be safer under the Palestinian government”
Jews can never establish a state on earth, the Torah forbids this.
But the zionists came and declared war on the Torah and G-d and established an irreligious zionist state in the holy land, contrary to the Torah.
We want all the lands seized by the Zionites to be returned to the Palestinian people
My take away is that
Zionism is to the Israeli people what Hamas is to Palestinians.
I condemn them both.
posted by adamvasco at 9:56 AM on October 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Friendly reminder that Zionism doesn’t mean “establish a Jewish state in the holy land”, it could be anywhere. Ethiopia was considered before the mandate was chosen.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:10 AM on October 25, 2023

Maybe if this was 1897 and we were at the first Zionist conference the future location of the Jewish state would be relevant to some discussion of Zionism, but now Israel exists and its people are not going to give it up.
posted by interogative mood at 10:19 AM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

I found this interesting from Torah Judaism.

Look, I don't know crap about Judaism, but this account seems associated very specifically with Hasidic anti-Zionism, which is a real thing but it's also a very specific theological position and imho it's not helpful when non-jews (like myself!) discover that they exist and start waving them around as proof that anti-Zionism can be Jewish.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:38 AM on October 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

Just noting that the same person who said that also said " I don't have much sympathy for Israeli deaths. Reaping, sowing, living by the sword, etc."

since this has come up again a few times I thought I should say that I've been rethinking that over and over for the past day, trying to decide if it means there's something wrong with me and my view of the conflict. I thought I should avoid commenting for a while, for among other reasons, I am not someone who's opinion should be taken seriously. I might be one of the people with a wikipedia level understanding of the conflict. I didn't know where Gaza was exactly before this conflict started. So I don't think my self-reflections are a good use of thread space, but I thought I would let people know that it's happening.

It depends, but I suspect Biden’s policy towards Gaza and basically unconditional support for Israel is going to hurt him with Arab Americans and young people. In swing states with high concentrations of Arab Americans, that may matter (don’t know offhand if there are such states).

Michigan is just such a state, where Rep. Rashida Tlaib is elected from. And I don't think this will quickly be forgotten. I've seen tweets calling Biden "Genocide Joe". Here's a substack post with a roundup of links talking about polling, swing states, and the leftist pushback.

Maybe if this was 1897 and we were at the first Zionist conference the future location of the Jewish state would be relevant to some discussion of Zionism, but now Israel exists and its people are not going to give it up.

My favorite use of a time machine would be to give the Zionists Utah, so at least we'd have a different set of problems.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 10:42 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

yeah, we'd have mormons and jews calling each other gentiles and god only knows how that would work out
posted by pyramid termite at 10:44 AM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

interogative mood, do you have any thoughts at all about Netanyahu's strategy over the past 14 years of deliberately boosting Hamas to undermine any attempt at a 2-state solution?
posted by mediareport at 10:52 AM on October 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Hell, I'll settle for any one of the folks flooding the zone with defenses of bombing civilians addressing Netanyahu's pro-Hamas strategy. Maybe I've missed it by checking in and out of this conversation as it's gotten less useful, but right now it sure seems like their complete silence on that point is almost as if they wish it would go away.
posted by mediareport at 10:58 AM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

discover that they exist and start waving them around as proof that anti-Zionism can be Jewish.

to expand on this, sometimes people discovering Hasidic anti-Zionism get quite excited about this, as if conservatism is the correct measure of Jewishness and somehow gives extra weight to their anti-Zionism. It really shouldn't.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:00 AM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

(also, I withdraw my suggestion that we stick to this thread until it expires in a couple weeks. I have no preference, but load times on mobile devices as the comments pile up is certainly a factor I hadn't considered.)
posted by mediareport at 11:01 AM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Lindsey Graham Screams at Newsmax Reporter for Bringing Up Tlaib in Israel Briefing
posted by clavdivs at 11:25 AM on October 25, 2023

Wife, three kids of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief reportedly killed in airstrike
posted by bitteschoen at 11:25 AM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Times of israel
Rights group reports over 100 assaults by settlers on Palestinians since war’s start.
posted by adamvasco at 11:39 AM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Axois: Blinken told a group of American Jewish community leaders on Monday that he asked the Qatari prime minister less than two weeks ago to tone down Al Jazeera's rhetoric about the war in Gaza
posted by clawsoon at 12:29 PM on October 25, 2023

Axios: Blinken told a group of American Jewish community leaders on Monday that he asked the Qatari prime minister less than two weeks ago to tone down Al Jazeera's rhetoric about the war in Gaza

One hopes they told him to get stuffed; can't say I approve of the USA attempting to use diplomatic influence to stifle the press in another country (and what I've seen from Al Jazeera has only been objectionable in the sense that it doesn't support the Israeli propaganda; we're witnessing modern McCarthyism and people being fired over relatively anodyne statements about the horror of civilian casualties; this feels like more of the same, really, only extended to diplomatic arm-twisting).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:42 PM on October 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Who excused Hamas for killing children?
posted by Flunkie at 12:51 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Another one from Axois; it took a few seconds for my brain to register that both of the lines on this graph were measuring per-capita GDP: The Israel-Hamas war’s economic toll on Gaza
posted by clawsoon at 12:59 PM on October 25, 2023

I haven't read every comment in this thread (most, though), but I'm seeing a lot of that elsewhere. I'm just amazed how many people on both sides are like, yeah, those kids had it coming. That so many people are using motivated reasoning to ignore obvious atrocity is a very bad sign. I mean, maybe that's just another Tuesday in this context, but it's bothering me.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:01 PM on October 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

U.S. sees spike in antisemitic incidents since beginning of Israel-Hamas war, Anti-Defamation League says

The group recorded 312 antisemitic incidents from Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas attack, through Oct. 23, up from 64 in the same time period last year...

Since the war began, the messaging platform Telegram has seen a 1,000% increase in the daily average of "violent messages mentioning Jews and Israel in white supremacist and extremist channels," the ADL said...

In Germany, the Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism reported a 240% increase in antisemitic incidents...

posted by clawsoon at 1:07 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Netanyahu just finished a speech from Tel Aviv ( Full Speech Hebrew). Edited version with subtitles here.
posted by interogative mood at 1:09 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I haven't read every comment in this thread (most, though), but I'm seeing a lot of that elsewhere. I'm just amazed how many people on both sides are like, yeah, those kids had it coming.

I'm not talking about "elsewhere". Of course you can find a bunch of people among the eight billion human inhabitants of earth who will full-throatedly back any utterly horrific sentiment you may come up with.

I'm talking about this thread. Who here needs to be convinced "Hamas bad" or "Killing children bad"? No one, or possibly very, very close to no one, I think?

So what are the people who are quite clearly getting further and further into "explain away all Israeli culpability as really being completely on Hamas, Hamas being the only entity on earth that has any degree of agency whatsoever, and ignore all direct responses asking about anything that may contradict this view to any degree at all" mode trying to convince people of here? That is what I was saying I was wondering.

Do they honestly think people here need to be convinced that Hamas is bad, or that killing children is bad? If so, why? But if not, then whom are they trying to convince of what?
posted by Flunkie at 1:10 PM on October 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Both sides: a couple DSA chapters and twitter tankies on the one, on the other, mainstream public opinion and US foreign policy.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:13 PM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

BREAKING: Russia & China veto U.S. led security council resolution that condemns Hamas October 7 attack, supports Israel's right to defend itself and calls for release of hostages and for humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza.

This comes about a week after the US vetoed a resolution calling for a ceasefire. Dueling vetoes!
posted by Justinian at 1:20 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Actually it sounds like Russia also introduced a new resolution today in addition to the resolution that failed a week ago. Today's resolution was backed by China. But the US and UK voted NO and 9 members abstained, which means the vote on Russia's resolution failed without needing to be vetoed. So voted down but not vetoed.
posted by Justinian at 1:28 PM on October 25, 2023

One comment deleted. Cursing at someone else is not acceptable.
posted by loup (staff) at 1:28 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

So voted down but not vetoed.

Pretty sure a No vote from any of the five permanent Security Council members is a veto. (They can otherwise abstain.)

(Here's the UN page on SC votes.)
posted by nobody at 1:37 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Oh, wait, I see your point. The No vote being a veto didn't even need to come into play, thanks to the overall vote count.)
posted by nobody at 1:40 PM on October 25, 2023

Yeah, but you're right it amounts to the same thing. It wouldn't have passed even if it had been unanimous yes votes from everyone except US and UK.
posted by Justinian at 1:42 PM on October 25, 2023

Israel has agency but their choices and options are constrained by the necessity of confronting an armed adversary who is seeking to destroy them.

It is like a loved one has a late stage cancer diagnosis and the only choices are to select among the palliative treatment options. Meanwhile there is alway that one person in the room who wants to berate the patient or talk bending their back about the patients life of smoking, drinking, poor diet, lack of exercise etc. As if how we got to this place of misery and suffering matters anymore.
posted by interogative mood at 1:57 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm sorry, but the hell? Are you comparing the treatment of Palestinian civilians to... I don't even know, a cancer patient?

And you keep repeating that, effectively, you believe that Israel has no choice but to bomb civilians. Care to do, like, anything to dispel that notion?
posted by sagc at 2:00 PM on October 25, 2023 [10 favorites]

Gonna add ‘palliative treatment’ to my list of euphemisms for bombing civilians.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:01 PM on October 25, 2023 [12 favorites]

Like, just a hint for you: A large part of "how we got to this place of misery and suffering" is absolutely a matter of Israeli government policy. Not that I expect you to respond to that, given your track record here.

Hell, even your metaphor somehow makes it sound as if the people criticizing Israel are somehow bringing up the past, as opposed to being against an active starvation campaign.
posted by sagc at 2:02 PM on October 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

“They forced me to indiscriminately kill children.”

I don't know, I personally find that unconvincing.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:05 PM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m saying that there are often moments in the real world where our agency is constrained and that we end up forced to choose between a number of terrible options none of which will have a particularly good outcome. This is true for countries as well as individuals.
posted by interogative mood at 2:09 PM on October 25, 2023

OK, but you seem to be constantly emphasizing that Israel is so constrained that they literally have no agency or control over their actions. It is a very clear pattern. If you're trying to say "there are no good options here", maybe try to be a bit clearer? Because a lot of people are hearing "Israel doesn't have any option but to do exactly as they're doing right now". Which... I think we get it, at this point, that you think Israel is incapable of restraint.
posted by sagc at 2:11 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

“They forced me to indiscriminately kill children.”
I don't know, I personally find that unconvincing.

This is exactly what I was trying to say that I was wondering (which I guess might have been what your context-free recently deleted comment was referring to). What are such posts trying to convince whom of?

"Hamas bad"? "Killing children bad"? Then the "whom" part of my question is the most highly operative part of it.

"Israel blameless"? "Israel nearly blameless"? Then I've gotta say, this attempt at convincing people of the idea is doing a spectacularly bad job of it.

So that seems to leave either "These posters genuinely can't tell how awful their ever-repeated arguments which don't (or barely) engage with anyone they seem to be talking to look, even after it has been indicated to them many times by many people" (which... I guess I just don't think the posters are dumb enough not to have noticed), or, what, ridiculous conspiracy theories like my "Hamas plants trying to make anything pro-Israeli look bad" (which... no, like I said, it's ludicrous).

So I am left with no understanding of what they're trying to accomplish... I guess maybe the joys of trolling? I don't know.
posted by Flunkie at 2:17 PM on October 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

“I’m saying that there are often moments in the real world where our agency is constrained and that we end up forced to choose between a number of terrible options none of which will have a particularly good outcome.”

That's true. Honestly, I tend toward IR realism, though tempered by an awareness that this school of thought has far too short of a time horizon. So, yeah, I understand that Israel's leadership has limited options and they're all bad.

But their options are not limited strictly to what they've been doing and are planning to do. I recognize that public opinion is justifiably inflamed and such a drastic terror attack inevitably leads to some big changes. But these choices are the wrong choices.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:18 PM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Israel has agency but their choices and options are constrained by the necessity of confronting an armed adversary

They could be using their agency to not expand settlements in the West Bank, in contravention of international law; they could also be using that agency to exercise some modicum of restraint, instead of allowing the IDF to provide protection to settlers on murderous rampages; they could have ALSO not backed Hamas out of a "divide and rule" strategy, but the Netanyahu government decided the best thing to do was build them up. Those choices have led to the current situation as surely as anything Hamas has done.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:21 PM on October 25, 2023 [12 favorites]

Mushing together a couple of different comments:

Netanyahu just finished a speech from Tel Aviv

BREAKING: Russia & China veto U.S. led security council resolution

After the '67 and '73 wars, Israeli decision-makers talked about the races they were in to meet their military objectives before any UN ceasefire was imposed. There was a sense of urgency, almost panic.

I don't get any of that sense of urgency from Netanyahu. The war cabinet, he keeps saying, will decide when a ground invasion happens.

Does that mean he feels confident that the US will veto any ceasefire, and he has all the time he needs, no panic necessary? Or is there an argument going on behind cabinet doors about whether to invade at all?
posted by clawsoon at 2:23 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The reporting is that the ground invasion situation is super murky because there doesn't appear to be a plan for what to do after you break everything. Real Iraq 2004 vibes. My own impression is that Biden is basically the only guy who kept Netanyahu from throwing a tantrum and sending in troops immediately to just go HAM. Which is why I think some of the criticisms of Biden on this issue are prioritizing symbolism over substance. Would anybody have actually been better off if Biden had been less supportive of Israel publicly but that meant less leverage to keep Netanyahu even partially in check? Tough to say but I think probably not.
posted by Justinian at 2:38 PM on October 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ha'aretz: New House Speaker Mike Johnson, an Evangelical Christian, Holds Ties to Israel’s Far Right (archive)

Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson described his 2020 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount as ‘the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy’; his election is the most significant victory to date for evangelicals in D.C.

...Johnson traveled to Israel in February 2020 with an under-the-radar group called the 12Tribe Films Foundation...Johnson’s first stop on his Abelow-organized visit was to the Kohelet Policy Forum – the conservative think tank that has been an essential partner to the government’s efforts to weaken the judiciary.

The fourth-term congressman also visited the Temple Mount compound alongside Yehudah Glick, a former Likud lawmaker who has led the fight to change the status quo and permit Jewish prayer at the flash point Jerusalem holy site – in opposition to both official Israeli government policy as well as that of the international community, particularly the Biden administration and Jordan.
posted by mediareport at 2:39 PM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ha'aretz: New House Speaker Mike Johnson, an Evangelical Christian, Holds Ties to Israel’s Far Right (archive)

Very first order of business, Standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists, passed 412 to 10.
posted by clawsoon at 2:48 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Very first order of business, Standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists, passed 412 to 10.

Gross. Right up there with freedom fries. I'm ashamed of the Democrats who are all in on this presumably to satisfy what they think is their voter base and avoid a tricky 2024 election.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:16 PM on October 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

In fairness, I haven't seen the resolution's text. If it says "We are with the Israelis in agreeing that Hamas is bad and needs to be rooted out, but that Palestinian civilians must not be punished, and Israel must follow up any military action with concrete steps towards a two-state solution", I'm down with it. But I'm presuming not.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:19 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

It has never been electorally beneficial in the US to treat the Palestinians like humans.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:20 PM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

An Israeli software company [Wix] that employs 500 staff in Dublin encouraged its employees to create content supporting “Israel’s narrative” in the country’s conflict with Hamas militants in Gaza, leaked internal messages show.

One message in an internal company discussion, set up by a manager in the days after the Hamas attack in southern Israel, encouraged employees to “show Westernity” in social media posts backing Israel, as “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans or Americans”, it said.

posted by urbanwhaleshark at 3:23 PM on October 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think if you check my comments I’ve stated over and over again that Israel needs to do more to protect Palestinian civilians, stop the attacks by settlers, stop the expansion of settlements, and protect critical civilian infrastructure. I do reject statements describing Israeli air strikes as targeting kids or wantonly killing civilians along with other attempts to reduce the larger Israel-Palestine conflict to a bunch of simple one sided talking points.

The only way to end the suffering is going to be to end the war. Hamas and Israel will have to negotiate on the basis of a lasting two state solution. At the moment the biggest barrier to that is the leadership of Hamas. Netenyahu and the fanatical settler groups are a barrier, but can be overcome by elections if there is a real possibility for a deal.
posted by interogative mood at 3:26 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

BREAKING: Russia & China veto U.S. led security council resolution

Both sides: a couple DSA chapters and twitter tankies on the one, on the other, mainstream public opinion and US foreign policy.

I'm not sure how relevant this is to the present discussion, given that Anglophone activism must necessarily be focused on Anglophone politics, but Chinese Social Media Platforms Are Now Awash With Antisemitism—in no small part due to the recent conflict.

Personally, I found China's resolute stance of "pro-Palestine neutrality" somewhat surprising—after all, I'm used to politics like Spain resolutely refusing to recognize separatist movements around the world in case it emboldens those in Catalonia (among others), and aren't Tibet and Xinjiang kind of China's Palestine?

As it turns out, the Tibet side of the equation at least has been a subject of some debate, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 Lhasa riots: The Tibetan Intifada and its response, Debating Tibet (Dissent); Tibet, Palestine and the Politics of Failure (openDemocracy); Tibet and Palestine (CounterPunch), among others.

Meanwhile, China seems to have successfully squared its activities in Xinjiang with a pro-Palestine stance, having secured Abbas's blessing following a June visit to China.

In the end, it seems that the political benefits of opposing a staunch US ally in the region outweigh the risks of encouraging self-determination movements at home—at least as long as China can convincingly argue that there are, in fact, no real parallels to be drawn between the two situations.
posted by the tartare yolk at 3:30 PM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yes, you've stated over and over things like "War is bad, mmmkay?" in response to things like "What Israel's doing right now is awful" and in direct introduction to things like "Netanyahu can't be blamed for Netanyahu's policies".

Seriously, if you are not trolling, you're doing a catastrophically bad job at... whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
posted by Flunkie at 3:31 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also,

I think if you check my comments

This is why I'm somewhat ambivalent about the deletion of comments.
posted by Flunkie at 3:33 PM on October 25, 2023

caviar2d2: In fairness, I haven't seen the resolution's text. If it says "We are with the Israelis in agreeing that Hamas is bad and needs to be rooted out, but that Palestinian civilians must not be punished, and Israel must follow up any military action with concrete steps towards a two-state solution", I'm down with it. But I'm presuming not.

I'm looking for the text of H.R. 771 but so far not finding it anywhere, despite the fact that it was apparently introduced on October 11th and has 425 co-sponsors. If anybody is better at American Hansard than I am, I hope you'll dig it up for us.
posted by clawsoon at 3:36 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

claswsoon, text of HR 771
posted by Flunkie at 3:39 PM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thanks!
posted by clawsoon at 3:42 PM on October 25, 2023

The only mention of Palestinian civilians is that "Hamas is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds" of them.
posted by clawsoon at 3:51 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Washington has raised concerns about lack of post-invasion exit strategy, say people familiar with discussions

I mean, Israel definitely doesn't have one, but pot? kettle? Really? Washington, now you care about lack of a post invasion exit strategy?
posted by corb at 3:54 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Maybe they're learning! "Don't break everything and hope to figure out step 2 later!"
posted by Justinian at 4:14 PM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Israel will have to negotiate on the basis of a lasting two state solution

Why on earth should any Palestinian assume Israel is negotiating in good faith when previous negotiations have just led to more settlement-building and more forced dispossessions? Withdrawal from the settlements would have to be a prerequisite for any negotiation. (Honestly? It should also be a prerequisite for any continued US aid to Israel.)
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 4:15 PM on October 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Withdrawal from the settlements would have to be a prerequisite for any negotiation.

Unfortunately, this seems politically unlikely precisely because of how the move out of Gaza went in 2005. However irrational you might deem Israeli fears, a lot of people *do* fear that a unilateral pullout would constitute an unacceptable security risk. It seems much more likely that such a move would be a result of external pressure, like tying it to continued US aid or something like that.
posted by the tartare yolk at 4:24 PM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Palestinian leadership would have to assume Israel is negotiating in good faith for the same reason Israel would have to assume Palestinian leadership is negotiating in good faith despite longstanding calls for the complete elimination of Israel; because otherwise nothing will ever happen and the tragedy will continue forever.
posted by Justinian at 4:25 PM on October 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

I can only guess that many Israelis are currently viewing the withdrawal of settlements from Gaza as a mistake, and their expansion in the West Bank as a protective force.

There have been many settler colonial sort of enterprises which ended with the subject population being more-or-less extinguished, or put into a permanently servile position. That certainly seems to be the goal that the far right in Israel wants to drive the nation toward, and "look how much more compliant we settlers have kept the West Bank" will no doubt be used in support of that goal.
posted by clawsoon at 4:33 PM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

I’m not willing to pretend this isn’t a war or that war can be free of its intrinsic violent and awful nature. I think arguments such as saying “Israel is bombing children” presents a false picture of events by filtering out the actual target of Israel’s bombing campaign and implying an alternative motive. Children were not the target. It ignores the real motivation — Hamas’ attack on October 7th and the ongoing barrage of missiles fired by Hamas at Israel.
posted by interogative mood at 5:24 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nobody's asking you to pretend it's not a war or that war can be free of its intrinsic and awful nature.
posted by Flunkie at 5:31 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mods, is it possible for you to weigh in, and define the level of nonsensical doublespeak is permissible? Even if it is in the service of defending Israeli war crimes?

Look. The thing is happening. Whether or not this is what they're "motivated" to do, they're doing it. We're just asking to have that conversation without you constantly jumping in with "What if Israel just can't help killing children/journalists/civilians?" You've made your despicable point, despite it being drastically more extreme than anyone else in the thread. What do you want us to do? Preface every comment with "Of course, Hamas is worse, but..."?

We're not pretending shit about what a war is; we're questioning whether the current conduct of the IDF is, just maybe, not the most discriminate in who it targets.

Love for you to address whether Israel could make any choices to reduce civilian deaths, or if you think that literally every Palestinian death is somehow their own fault.
posted by sagc at 5:40 PM on October 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Israel To Deny UN Visas Over Guterres's Controversial Remarks On Gaza Conflict.
President Lula says war in the Middle East is genocide
It’s not a war, it’s a genocide that has killed nearly 2 thousand children who have nothing to do with this war, they are victims of this war. And frankly, I don’t know how a human being is capable of war knowing that the result of that war is the death of innocent children,” he declared.
posted by adamvasco at 5:58 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

More news of Israel's anti-democratic internal crackdown, from Jewish Currents: Gazan Workers Stuck in Purgatory After Israel Revokes Permits:

The permit revocation was ordered by the Coordinator of Government Activity in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli body in charge of Palestinian civilian affairs, and came without any explanation or instruction. And just hours after the permits were revoked, Israeli authorities began detaining the now-illegal workers. By October 17th, 4,000 workers had been detained without trial to check if they “helped Hamas in planning the massacre, ” according to Israel’s Channel 12.

Unable to return to Gaza, and suddenly without permission to be in Israel, they are now being hunted, including in areas under PA control in the West Bank, and sent to detention centers. Five Israeli human rights organization sent a letter to the defense minister and attorney general objecting to the detentions with no charge, no lawyer, and no information about how many permitted workers have been disappeared. Some who managed to pass into the West Bank have reported their phones and money stolen by soldiers. The letter goes on:

The detained workers are being held against their will in Israeli detention centers. We are so far aware of two facilities being used to hold them, Anatot and Ofer, Israeli military camps in the West Bank. The workers in detention are being deprived their basic rights, including the right to legal representation. The Israeli authorities also refuse to provide basic information about who they have detained.

Our inquiries to the Israeli authorities with the names of Gaza residents who have gone missing remain unanswered. Family members of workers who were in Israel on October 7 have no way of knowing how they are, whether they are being held in Israeli detention facilities and if so, where. According to reports (Arabic) in the Palestinian media, the Israeli army continues to carry out raids in the West Bank with the purpose of locating laborers from Gaza, who they then detain and take into custody.

Bonus: this detailed 2022 Ha'aretz investigation into the deeply exploitative conditions Gazan workers who manage to get the permits have to deal with. (archive)
posted by mediareport at 5:59 PM on October 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

Sagc maybe you should start by evaluating your own statements. If you look back at my comments you’ll find that I’ve made several suggestions on reducing civilian deaths and protecting important infrastructure like hospitals and ways that there could be negotiated end to this.
posted by interogative mood at 6:00 PM on October 25, 2023

It is important to reduce civilian deaths and protect important infrastructure like hospitals, and Israel is completely blameless that they are doing the opposite.
posted by Flunkie at 6:10 PM on October 25, 2023

Now I'm thinking that maybe rather than "Hamas plants trying to make Israel look bad", a better explanation might be "Get anyone who expresses an unfavorable opinion to just shut up out of frustration".
posted by Flunkie at 6:14 PM on October 25, 2023

(Just putting it out there that the repetitive back and forths are kind of the least interesting aspect of this thread.)
posted by nobody at 6:17 PM on October 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

Folks, this is a sensitive topic, with various views on both sides that are not going to agree with each other any time soon. Questioning other users about their views in this situation won't produce agreement, just further aggravation as one is again reminded that others think differently from one's self.

In short, consider refraining from the same back and forth with other community members and moving on to other aspects of this discussion.

No comments have been removed.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:18 PM on October 25, 2023 [14 favorites]

Hamas with rockets and Israel with bombs are saying that the lives of their soldiers are worth much, much more than the lives of children.

It's a common attitude for military forces throughout history, but that doesn't make it any less morally repugnant.
posted by clawsoon at 6:19 PM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

On top of providing temporary accommodations and allowing Gaza pass holders to continue working. Israel should setup refugee camps in Israel with field hospitals in advance of their ground invasion. Palestinian civilians would be much more confident of their prospects of returning to Gaza after the war if they were housed in Israel during the conflict.
posted by interogative mood at 6:52 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

NYT, today: "There’s no more water in the taps"
posted by Flunkie at 7:05 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

The US and Israeli generals have found another way to delay Netenyahu’s ground invasion. This time it’s to get more air defenses into the region for US bases and allied counties in order to be ready for any increase in Iranian/Houthi/Syrian/Hezbollah drone/missile attacks. Previous excuses have been “the weather”, Biden’s visit, Macrons visit and the need for consultations and equipment deliveries with the US.

The longer the ground invasion is delayed the more chances there are for a breakthrough in the talks in Qatar and some way out of this mess that isn’t a complete blood bath.
posted by interogative mood at 7:31 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

interogative mood - Israel should...

What has Israel done or plans to do? The evidence so far is that Israel is definitely not doing what we all think they should do.
posted by porpoise at 7:44 PM on October 25, 2023

The US and Israeli generals have found another way to delay Netenyahu’s ground invasion...

I was happy to see this, but it's also not clear that it's all gamesmanship--given the proxy and/or sympathetic attacks on US bases, it might be what it says on the label.

And it's weaksauce, compared to what the US could do if Biden wasn't attempting to triangulate electoral politics amidst this.

Want reloads, let alone unrelated weapons not previously authorized? Well, we're gonna sail one of those hospital ships from Covid off the shore of Gaza, and you're gonna let NGOs ferry critical casualties out. Nevermind the tender with all the antennae, we're sure you have nothing to hide.

(maybe park it where the Liberty was hit, for some extra signaling. and put some embedded journalists on it too. )
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:48 PM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Well, we're gonna sail one of those hospital ships from Covid off the shore of Gaza, and you're gonna let NGOs ferry critical casualties out.

A donated field hospital near the Israel/Gaza border seems like a good idea, if only for women and children. Lacking one seems suspicious.
posted by Brian B. at 9:07 PM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

White House transcript of the Biden / Albanese Joint Press Conference today, Biden got asked the very question many of us want to ask him, so I thought it was newsworthy.

Q And if I may, very quickly — in the 18 days since Hama- — Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed over 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 chil- — children. You’ve previously asked Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties. Do these numbers say to you that he is ignoring that message?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.

I think we should be incredibly careful. I think — well, not “we” — the Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that are the pr- — propagating this war against Israel. And it’s against their interest when that doesn’t happen.

But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.
posted by xdvesper at 11:26 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

In the UK, Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer faces a growing rebellion within his party after one in six of its MPs called on Israel to stop the bombing campaign against Hamas.
In every recent interview Keir has just continually repeated: "Israel has the right to defend itself" seeming to have no other thoughts or opinions about the conflict.

He is facing simmering dissent within the party with 23 councillors having already resigned in protest at his pro-Israel stance. In Oxford, the party has now lost its majority on the council.

The parliamentary motion on 'Protecting civilians in Gaza and Israel' tabled by Richard Burgon, a former shadow justice secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, has now been signed by 86 MPs including 2 conservatives, notably not one of the 15 Liberal Democrats have signed this yet.

In an attempt to row back on this position Kier has posted on the Alt Right social media platform X.com that we should "ramp up the aid provided" and "start talking about a two-state solution"
posted by Lanark at 12:56 AM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

In every recent interview Keir has just continually repeated: "Israel has the right to defend itself" seeming to have no other thoughts or opinions about the conflict. ... "start talking about a two-state solution"

Most of this behaviour is because Starmer is a mendacious authoritarian opportunistic careerist nihilist wanker, but the last quote is just bizarre. "Start talking" about a two-state solution? Where has he been for the past decades? Is he a literal fucking infant?
posted by busted_crayons at 1:15 AM on October 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

Biden got asked the very question many of us want to ask him

As a voter in the dedicated pain-in-the-ass demographic, I would ask why you are directing my tax revenue towards arming Israel with weaponry it uses to kill unarmed, non-violent civilians, most of whom are defenseless women and children. I'd ask that very question to his face, if I had the chance.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:44 AM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

I would ask why you are directing my tax revenue towards arming Israel with weaponry it uses to kill unarmed, non-violent civilians, most of whom are defenseless women and children. I'd ask that very question to his face, if I had the chance.

Agreed, but the answer would be: "If you don't like it, vote for Trump, Jack."

I've heard quite a lot lately about the Biden administration's tireless multidimensional chess efforts to "restrain" the far-right Israeli government's genocidal vindictiveness, and it's weird to me, because, given the scale of the disaster, the ones looking restrained are the Americans. Where's Israel's colour revolution? CIA-backed coup? Cuba-style economic embargo? Biden looks to me like a boss refusing to sack his direct report for gross misconduct. If people want to talk about double standards re: Israel, this is the one.
posted by busted_crayons at 3:46 AM on October 26, 2023 [9 favorites]

But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.

I would like to highlight that everyone, as someone previously pointed out, trusts the figures from the Palestinian health ministry, including the US government. Biden with this comment is just (again) giving the Israelis permission to continue the killing. Disgusting.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:45 AM on October 26, 2023 [14 favorites]

if only for women and children

Civilian Palestinian men do not somehow deserve less humane treatment for being men.

Israel conscripts women as well as men; which means killing IDF reservists indiscriminately means orphaning a *lot* of kids. While it can be argued whether this is a correct take or not, most military ethics consider killing noncombatant women to be particularly abhorrent.

I didn't bring this up at the time, but that's pretty fucked up of military ethics. You can orphan children by killing their fathers too. And a child with a father but no mother is not an orphan.

A lot of just casual acceptance, even on the pro-Palestine side, of the idea that any properly teenaged plus "male" is a valid target.

I'm probably not rational on this, after Ukraine and the terfs saying trans women should be forced to stay and fight (and claiming that they'd be treated fairly as men by the Russians) I'm particularly sensitive to this. As far as I've read, transphobes got their way on that one, and I don't want to know what horrors those women suffer when captured by Russians.

I don't know if there's any trans women in Gaza, probably, but if there are any, the IDF will treat them as badly if not worse than the cis women, and this kind of rhetoric only endorses the general viewpoint that ASAB determines your validity as a victim.
posted by Audreynachrome at 4:54 AM on October 26, 2023 [12 favorites]

I didn't bring this up at the time, but that's pretty fucked up of military ethics. You can orphan children by killing their fathers too. And a child with a father but no mother is not an orphan.

A lot of just casual acceptance, even on the pro-Palestine side, of the idea that any properly teenaged plus "male" is a valid target

To be clear, the reason I personally find it problematic is that in a situation of universal forced conscription of all adults of both genders, literally every parent, no matter their gender, is going to be a reservist; thus, if every reservist is an acceptable target, you would kill both parents, instead of potentially only one. It has nothing, in my mind, to do specifically with individual gender much less ASAB. You're not wrong though that there are a lot of patriarchal assumptions baked into the *general* military ethics that exempt women *specifically*, and that those assumptions are probably unconsciously cissexist even if they aren't examined, but I do think *some* system of ethics needs to be worked out wherein we are not deliberately orphaning children.

(My preferred choice on this is we don't kill noncombatants, which means people not actively engaging in combat, but apparently everyone thinks that one is just off the table)
posted by corb at 5:11 AM on October 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Palestinians in Gaza are burying the unidentified dead in mass graves, with a number instead of a name, residents say.

Now, some families are using bracelets in the hope of finding their loved ones should they be killed.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:34 AM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

US assessments of Palestinan deaths cannot be trusted.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:01 AM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Similarly: 'I Wrote My Children's Names on Their Bodies. At Least They'll Identify Them Before Burial'

“I wrote their names on their hip and their thigh. If anything happens to them and we also die, at least they will identify them before burial.”

Includes pictures of dead children in a morgue with their names written down their legs.
posted by mediareport at 6:01 AM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

(My preferred choice on this is we don't kill noncombatants, which means people not actively engaging in combat, but apparently everyone thinks that one is just off the table)

The dark laughter of the only actual good option being off the table. To be clear, I didn't mean to criticse Corb especially here, she laid out the expectations, she didn't make them.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:39 AM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Couple of comments removed. Do not accuse other community members of being plants, period. If you actually believe this is true, then contact the mods via the Contact Us form at the bottom of any page on the site. Otherwise, don't do it.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:54 AM on October 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

Times of Israel has a lot more detail from Israeli soldiers along the Gaza border who survived the attack and say their months of warnings of increased activity along the fence were ignored by higher ups:

Surveillance soldiers warned of Hamas activity on Gaza border for months before Oct. 7

Former tatzpitaniyot Amit Yerushalmi and Noa Melman corroborated the accounts of the two survivors in an interview published by Channel 12 on Thursday morning...

“We sat on shifts and saw the convoy of vans. We saw the training, people shooting and rolling, practicing taking over a tank. The training went from once a week to twice a week, from every day to several times a day,” she told Channel 12.

“We saw patrols along the border, people with cameras and binoculars. It happened 300 meters from the fence. There were a lot of disturbances, people went down to the fence and detonated an outrageous amount of explosives, the amount of explosives was crazy.”

Like Rotenberg and Desiatnik, Yerushalmi said that she passed the information along, but that nobody seemed to take it seriously.

Again reminds me of Netanyahu's focus on the West Bank and his mistaken belief that the cynical strategy of giving Hamas money and support to counter the Palestinian Authority in order to reduce any hope of a two-state solution would keep Hamas controlled. We can only hope Israelis force him out sooner rather than later.
posted by mediareport at 7:57 AM on October 26, 2023 [15 favorites]

Just to clarify there is no evidence that Netanyahu gave money to Hamas directly. He did increase the number of work permits that allowed Palestinians in Gaza to work in Israel (an indirect payment) and there was some kind of tacit agreement that allowed funds to be transferred from Qatar. Those funds were not from Israel or Netanyahu. There were also secret negotiations in Egypt between Hamas and the Israeli government.
posted by interogative mood at 8:19 AM on October 26, 2023

Good lord. Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2019:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel’s regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, a source in Monday’s Likud faction meeting said.

Netanyahu explained that, in the past, the PA transferred the millions of dollars to Hamas in Gaza. He argued that it was better for Israel to serve as the pipeline to ensure the funds don’t go to terrorism.

“Now that we are supervising, we know it’s going to humanitarian causes,” the source said, paraphrasing Netanyahu.

The prime minister also said that, “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
posted by mediareport at 8:24 AM on October 26, 2023 [11 favorites]

"I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people," says Dan Gillerman. (video snippet from SkyNews)

then goes on and call them "animals". Not Hamas, but Palestinian people in general.
posted by kmt at 8:28 AM on October 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

Something that's been oddly (to me) missing in the discussions of how October 7th happened is the political crisis Israel was in from 2018 to less than a year ago. They had five elections in less than four years. There was no stable governance during that time. I haven't been able to find any analysis on this, but I can't imagine that not contributing to the incredible failure in the lead up to these attacks and the shitshow of a response. Israel had a reputation of military competence and that's been pretty much dispelled.
posted by cosmic owl at 8:50 AM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would suggest ignoring American coverage and seeking out Israeli coverage if you want more on that - American coverage is basically a PR version of events.
posted by Artw at 9:13 AM on October 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

Israel had a reputation of military competence and that's been pretty much dispelled.

More its surveillance/security state rep; its military capability is what's on display now. Which may turn out to have less depth than popularly imagined if the conflict expands, too. But that remains to be seen.

I don't think the domestic political crisis ever really ended, even though the government was stabilized. See the post above about the org that was dedicated to opposing the judicial reforms pivoting to relief work after Oct. 7.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:18 AM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Agreed, but the answer would be: "If you don't like it, vote for Trump, Jack."

This is part of WHY I regard the Democratic Party with contempt. If your response to your voters is "fuck off and vote for the other guy if you don't like it", then my response is "fuck you and see how far that attitude gets you, assholes".
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 10:40 AM on October 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

There is no doubt that it was part of a cynical strategy of Netanyahu to divide the Palestinians. Israel should have spent the last 55 years building up Palestinian self governance with a goal of having strong Palestinian institutions and leadership that could make peace. Instead they kept burning it down.

I think Biden and other western governments need to make it clear that military aid is contingent on ending these self destructive policies and articulating a clear path to a two state solution.
posted by interogative mood at 11:08 AM on October 26, 2023 [11 favorites]

Saree Makdisi, "No Human Being Can Exist," n+1:

What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn.

...

Government spokespeople are calculating and insincere; the ultimate nihilists, they don’t actually believe in anything, least of all anything they say themselves. But the same cannot be said of the people all around us who, so desperately moved by the images and narratives of Israeli suffering, have nothing to say about Palestinian suffering on a far greater scale. How can anyone be so heartless? I’m not talking about overt racists who explicitly call for the destruction of Gaza and the expulsion of the Palestinians. I’m talking about ordinary people, many—maybe even most—of them solid liberals when it comes to politics: advocates of gender and racial equality, anxious about climate change, concerned for the unhoused, insistent on wearing face masks out of humane consideration for others, voters for the most progressive of Democrats. Their indifference is not personal, but a manifestation of a broader culture of denial.

posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:10 AM on October 26, 2023 [16 favorites]

Omer and Omar: How two 4-year-olds were killed and social media denied it

Omar Bilal al-Banna and Omer Siman-Tov lived roughly 23km (14.3 miles) apart, on either side of the Israel-Gaza perimeter fence. They never met, but both loved playing outside with their siblings.

The faces of these little boys have appeared on my social media feed in the past week. They were both killed as violence unfolded...

The way the boys' deaths have been denied by social media users is symbolic of an information battle, running in parallel with the war on the ground.

There have been brazen attempts to downplay or deny violence committed against children.

These false allegations have shocked family and friends grieving the loss of their loved ones - and the people who witnessed what happened...

posted by clawsoon at 12:13 PM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

“Trade unions, officials and humanitarian organisations have raised concerns for their safety after reports Palestinians with permission to work in Israel were rounded up, arrested and blindfolded before being taken to military camps.”

JFC
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:16 PM on October 26, 2023 [15 favorites]

In response to Biden's doubts about Gaza Health Ministry death numbers, they have released the names of 6747 Palestinians who have died (212 page PDF). The list does not include the 281 dead who have yet to be identified.
posted by clawsoon at 1:56 PM on October 26, 2023 [10 favorites]

Before and after satellite images show destruction in Gaza (CNN)
posted by kmt at 2:14 PM on October 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

The stupid and awful way they are dealing with Palestinian pass holders trapped in Israel by this catastrophe is another in a long line of fuckups by Netanyahu’s government.
posted by interogative mood at 2:31 PM on October 26, 2023

That US resolution 771 is worse than I even expected. Nothing in there about the Palestinians or the context at all. I mean, yes yes we resolve that Hamas are barbarians, now what? Voting for that is a true cowardly cover-your-ass move. I would not have voted for that without some language on the longer-term goals.

And the whole "the UN is persona non grata" ... Ok, fine, let's kick Israel out of the UN, take our toys and go home and see how they like it. We cannot let the only meaningful representative of international order (very imperfect) be threatened against saying basically "let's not let our bloodlust get the better of us, bad things are happening in Gaza".

Lastly, very angry at Biden on the comments about not trusting the numbers of Palestinian dead. Sure, I don't trust Hamas either, but is he arguing that tons of civilians are not dying? Because that's craz pants. Fuck, it's going to suck getting everyone to the left of me to vote Biden again in 2024. Sorry to US-center, but the US has an outsized role in how all this goes unfortunately.
posted by caviar2d2 at 2:58 PM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

And the whole "the UN is persona non grata" ... Ok, fine, let's kick Israel out of the UN, take our toys and go home and see how they like it.

I know you're mostly venting but kicking countries out of the UN because they're talking shit is a very bad idea and defeats the purpose of the UN. Lots of countries are in the UN despite constantly butting heads with them. Iran, North Korea, Russia etc. It's precisely the countries with which there are significant differences that makes the UN most important.
posted by Justinian at 3:12 PM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Given that 6747/2 = 3373.5, I would like an apology from everyone that disputed that thousands of children were killed. Or no apology, just live with denying ethnic cleansing on your record.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:52 PM on October 26, 2023 [13 favorites]

HR 771 Full Text here for context.
posted by interogative mood at 4:32 PM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

The orange line on page 4 of the Ministry of Health PDF is deaths of children. I get 2,716 as the total between October 7th and 25th.
posted by clawsoon at 4:52 PM on October 26, 2023

Lastly, very angry at Biden on the comments about not trusting the numbers of Palestinian dead. Sure, I don't trust Hamas either, but is he arguing that tons of civilians are not dying? Because that's craz pants.

Yup. B*den's denialist comment spawned press coverage, which, even when they are basically contesting his comment, serve a propaganda purpose of sowing extra, exceptional doubt. In fact, I note that the Gaurdian's headline has changed from something like "Biden doubts civilian casualty figures but experts don't" --- exact wording memory-holed --- to How does Gaza’s health ministry calculate casualty figures?. It sounds like people who actually know what the fuck is up think that the health ministry is reliable on that point, in which case the POTUS's comment is not actually really newsworthy: just report the numbers and the sources. In fact, that comment was designed to get propagated through the media to advance his agenda, and there's absolutely no reason for a newspaper supposedly aspiring to clear the very low bar of being the least garbage UK paper to do Biden's work for him.
posted by busted_crayons at 5:00 PM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

defeats the purpose of the UN

I would ask honestly what it is that the UN can do. One veto stops any meaningful resistance to war crimes — in a way, it was doomed to fail, when all it takes is a couple generations of humans to be given the veto power to forget the lessons of the Holocaust and redo another.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:40 PM on October 26, 2023

The Biden administration is apparently attempting to promote the $106 billion foreign aid package to Israel et al by saying it will be good for American jobs. Grim.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:45 PM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Vox is not optimistic about the chances of a ground invasion being avoided.
posted by Jacen at 5:50 PM on October 26, 2023

to promote the $106 billion foreign aid package to Israel et al

"et al" does a lot of work there, no? It's the big foreign aid bill which includes aid to Ukraine and Taiwan, among other things. They're trying new messaging to Congress because "help Ukraine and Taiwan defend themselves against authoritarian aggression" was apparently not cutting it with the house majority.
posted by Justinian at 5:50 PM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know you're mostly venting but kicking countries out of the UN because they're talking shit is a very bad idea and defeats the purpose of the UN.

Guilty of venting, yeah. Point taken. What frustrates me is that certain countries (the US especially) seem to constantly go against the grain of what the majority of countries clearly want. It feeds into hatred and mistrust of the US and in this case, Israel. I would also say that Israel is the one distancing itself from the UN here, right?
posted by caviar2d2 at 5:55 PM on October 26, 2023

Here's United Nations General Assembly resolution 67/19 from 2012 which upgraded Palestine to "non-member observer state status" in the UN General Assembly. You know, almoooost having a voice (D.C. residents can probably relate).

Voting:

138 for
9 against - US, Israel, Canada, and assorted island states etc.

The US and Israel do not want to have to sit across the aisle from smart, knowledgeable Palestinians advocating for their rights. They want the bogeyman of Hamas. They need it.
posted by caviar2d2 at 6:01 PM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

"I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people," says Dan Gillerman. (video snippet from SkyNews)

The horrifying rhetorical strategy there is so transparent. Does anyone have a link to the full video? Or the name of the Sky presenter? The Sky site is just a mess and all I can find is the same 1:34 clip. I'd like to see what happened next.

As a counterpoint, while searching I found this other Sky News clip (on Nitter.net, a Twitter mirror) with the same presenter interviewing an ex-Israeli soldier who has very sane thoughts about how the bombing and violence will only make things worse, noting a 2-state solution is necessary, but impossible with the current Israeli government.
posted by mediareport at 6:31 PM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

More at the BBC (again via Nitter) from that ex-Israeli soldier, Benzi Sanders, who was sent into Gaza in 2014, only to watch Hamas get stronger after the fighting. He's very clear.
posted by mediareport at 6:39 PM on October 26, 2023

U.S. Strikes Iranian-Linked Targets in Syria
posted by Justinian at 8:19 PM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene files censure resolution accusing Rep. Rashida Tlaib of inciting an insurrection
posted by clavdivs at 10:40 PM on October 26, 2023

Greene also believes Jews fire lasers from space to start forest fires.

That's the problem with throwing around the term and calling everyone an anti-Semite, if they are against the genocide of Palestinians.

Pretty soon, you run out of room to identify the real Nazis.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:46 PM on October 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

It truly is a sign of how far the credibility of the US has fallen (or conversely, how high Hamas has risen) when people trust the words coming out of the government of Gaza more than the government of the US.

The destruction of our institutional trust is real, and Biden has just accelerated that. Even if he believed he was right, that was totally the wrong way to do it, unless his aim (like Trump) is the destruction of those institutions.
posted by xdvesper at 12:28 AM on October 27, 2023

Pretty soon, you run out of room to identify the real Nazis.

And just to emphasize the problem: Literal-not-exaggerating-but-real-deal Nazis are now Israel's Best Friends in the United States. The same folks who had their second- or third-generation-removed relatives murdered in the Holocaust are now pals with violent Fascists who would do the same thing, given the chance. That should give everyone serious pause, when considering what the official line is out of both countries. Careful who you befriend.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:33 AM on October 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

xdvesper: It truly is a sign of how far the credibility of the US has fallen (or conversely, how high Hamas has risen) when people trust the words coming out of the government of Gaza more than the government of the US.

Based on successful American government (and compliant American press) disinformation campaigns about Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, and many more before, in between and after those ones, the credibility of the US when it comes to governments it doesn't like should've fallen a long time ago.
posted by clawsoon at 4:17 AM on October 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Justinian: U.S. Strikes Iranian-Linked Targets in Syria

And so that's all it takes - no fuss, no discussion, no declaration of war (maybe they have one sitting around somewhere that they never bothered to cancel?) - and Americans are blowing shit up.
posted by clawsoon at 4:19 AM on October 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

These strikes are a response to an attack attributed to Iran.

NBC, Oct. 24: Drone attacks on American bases injured two dozen U.S. military personnel

The groups conducting the attacks are supported by Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a Pentagon spokesman said.

I don't think we should necessarily prefer a declared theater war to these kinds of skirmishes.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:23 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas

Free link

Arab Barometer did a survey and found that the majority of Gazans don't support Hamas and want a two-state solution. They blame Hamas' misgovernment for food shortages, not the Israeli blockade.

"The argument that the entire population of Gaza can be held responsible for Hamas’s actions is quickly discredited when one looks at the facts. Arab Barometer, a research network where we serve as co-principal investigators, conducted a survey in Gaza and the West Bank days before the Israel-Hamas war broke out. The findings, published here for the first time, reveal that rather than supporting Hamas, the vast majority of Gazans have been frustrated with the armed group’s ineffective governance as they endure extreme economic hardship. Most Gazans do not align themselves with Hamas’s ideology, either. Unlike Hamas, whose goal is to destroy the Israeli state, the majority of survey respondents favored a two-state solution with an independent Palestine and Israel existing side by side."
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:14 AM on October 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

Interesting. The Palestinian Center for Survey Research, one of the institutions participating in the Arab Barometer thing, has this on its site:

support for a two-state solution among Palestinians and Israelis declines to just one-third on each side, along with growing opposition to the detailed items of a permanent peace agreement for implementing a two-state solution.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:20 AM on October 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Free ebooks on the topic from Verso: Solidarity with Palestine: Free Resources and Further Reading
posted by kmt at 6:34 AM on October 27, 2023

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi on BBC Question Time
The only high-profile politician giving voice to the British public's anger about what Israel is doing to Gaza is a Tory baroness.
posted by adamvasco at 7:37 AM on October 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

I don't know if this belongs here, but the editor of Artforum was fired after working at the company for 18 years---6 as its editor---after signing an open letter in support of Palestine. Other's have been fired for---you guessed it---retweeting the onion.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:07 AM on October 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

support for a two-state solution among Palestinians and Israelis declines to just one-third on each side, along with growing opposition to the detailed items of a permanent peace agreement for implementing a two-state solution.

Details from further down that page:

Findings show a slight drop in support among the Palestinians from 27% to 26% in 2022 (compared to 42% in mid-2018). But the drop in support among Israeli Jews is higher, from 36% to 31% during the same period (compared to 45% in mid-2018). But support for this permanent peace agreement package among Israeli Arabs rebounded significantly from a low point of 49% two years ago to 62% today. In total, 37% of Israelis support the detailed agreement.

The specific details of the 2-state peace proposal the poll asks respondents about are worth noting:

The peace package comprises: a de-militarized Palestinian state, an Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line with equal territorial exchange, family unification in Israel of 100,000 Palestinian refugees, West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall under Israeli sovereignty and the Muslim and Christian quarters and the al Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount under Palestinian sovereignty, Israeli and the future state of Palestine will be democratic, the bilateral agreement will be part of a larger peace agreement with all Arab states, the US and major Arab countries will ensure full implementation of the agreement by both sides, and the end of the conflict and claims. Fifty four percent of all Israelis (62% of Israeli Jews) and 72% of Palestinians are opposed to this two-state comprehensive package.

Thanks, Nancy Lebovitz and snuffleupagus; those are very interesting and useful links.
posted by mediareport at 9:47 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

In case anyone else wanted more info about the reliablity of the Arab Barometer poll; the Wikipedia page notes, "The project was founded by Dr. Amaney Jamal (Princeton University) and Dr. Mark Tessler (University of Michigan)."

Tessler is the author of A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, a very well-regarded book that's been recommended often (by me and others) in AskMe questions looking for resources on the conflict.
posted by mediareport at 10:10 AM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Amaney is the foremost authority on public opinion polling in the Arab world.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:14 AM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

It is hard to say if the opposition is based on specifics of the proposal or the loss of all hope for peace the last few years and a sense of overall grimness that this is how we live now.

The ground operation seems to have started. Internet and mobile phone networks are down. There is a frightening and dreadful silence from Gaza. The Red Crescent reports it has lost contact with the relief crews it sent in earlier. It wouldn’t shock me if Elon Musk is blocking the few Starlink terminals present.
posted by interogative mood at 10:40 AM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Per Al-Jazeera journalists, all landline, cellular and Internet communications have been cut in Gaza.
posted by toastyk at 10:42 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

CNN as well.

Jawwal, the Palestinian telecom company that provides mobile service to the Gaza Strip released a statement Friday night, saying "the intense bombardment in the past hour has resulted in the destruction of all remaining international routes connecting Gaza with the outside world" leading to a "complete interruption of telecommunications services."
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:45 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Accompanied by a total blackout of telecommunication services, lsraeli warplanes launch the most violent series of air attacks against Gaza Strip.

Killing people who have been abandoned in the dark, trying to hide the murders you commit, hoping people will ignore it or be silenced until it is forgotten.
posted by Frowner at 11:04 AM on October 27, 2023 [18 favorites]

Per Al Jazeera Israel says they're going to bomb Al-Shifa hospital. This is damnable.
posted by Frowner at 11:09 AM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Reuters: Israeli poll finds 49% support for holding off on Gaza invasion

Asked if the military should immediately escalate to a large-scale ground offensive, 29% of Israelis agreed while 49% said "it would be better to wait" and 22% were undecided, the poll published in the Maariv newspaper said. The daily said the results contrasted with its Oct. 19 poll that found 65% support for a major ground offensive.

"From a breakdown of the answers, it emerges that there is no division in accordance with political camp or demographics, and that it is almost certain that the developments on the matter of the hostages, which is now topping the agenda, have had a great impact on this shift (in opinion)," Maariv wrote.

Qatar's foreign ministry has said a ground invasion would make it "much more difficult" to free the hostages.
posted by mediareport at 11:22 AM on October 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Here's the last report AJE got from Gaza before the blackout.

This is just so sickening.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 11:27 AM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

UN aid agencies today offered an ever more desperate picture of life inside Gaza, with the World Health Organization reporting 7,028 deaths, more than 40% of whom are children. The WHO cited data from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza and said it had received significant detail about those killed.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:30 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Non Al Jazeera article on Al Shifa and other hospitals.

Even though I agree that Israel has provided evidence of Hamas committing a war crime by using the hospital for military operations. I understand that this technically make it a legitimate target under current rules of war. I also feel strongly that Israel should understand that they must not bomb the hospital and the rest of the world isn’t going accept their legal pleadings. They are going to have to find another way to evict Hamas from these places.
posted by interogative mood at 11:38 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

From this thread on Oct 13: I keep hearing rumors of a “Grozny plan.” It is as bad as it sounds. Israel does to Gaza what Russia did to Chechnya.

From a colleague's locked twitter: It could not be clearer that the wager of the western powers is that the permanent destruction of Gaza would finally solve an inconvenient problem for them and will be bumpy now but forgotten in five years

The Grozny plan would be consistent with what's going on, I think?

Second thing, I don't know how to evaluate this but the Middle East Eye is reporting plans to use nerve gas to clear the tunnels under the city.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 12:08 PM on October 27, 2023

I feel sick, helpless, and hopeless.

Grateful for this thread and all your voices helping me learn.
posted by EarnestDeer at 12:30 PM on October 27, 2023

The Middle East Eye story is to all evidence entirely fabricated. It's not remotely plausible according to anybody who has looked at it. For example, this from the Economist's Middle East correspondent:

Folks, the author of that "nerve gas" story has a long history of making shit up, the sourcing is a joke, there are some glaring factual errors (Delta Force is part of the navy?) and the "plan" it describes isn't even remotely plausible. Please stop sharing it
posted by Justinian at 12:33 PM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Breaking the international taboo over the use of chemical weapons would be very bad for Israel and the United States. With a tunnel / bunker are many alternatives to nerve gas that are just as lethal and horrible in those confined spaces. Once the ventilation system is wrecked even a small fire is quite deadly.
posted by interogative mood at 12:43 PM on October 27, 2023

What are the options for communication if everything is cut off? Ham radio?
posted by clawsoon at 1:00 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

HF radio, satellite comms, hand-to-hand message passing (such as via NGO staff, relief workers, diplomats or press able to cross boundaries).

You could come up with more fanciful methods, but those are the immediate alternatives.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:07 PM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Since the quality of information is going to dwindling, 'الحساب مزيف' al-hasaab mazeef means fake account in arabic. I just saw some horrible footage that turned out wasnt from Gaza, but arab commenters were quick to point it out.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:11 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

UN General Assembly Live Stream.
posted by interogative mood at 1:26 PM on October 27, 2023

Thank you for the correction, Justinian
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 1:32 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Rather than giving Sky News any views, you can watch the UN live stream here from the source.
Pretty much everything they do is both streamed live and archived there.
posted by bcd at 1:45 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

UN calls for immediate "durable and sustained humanitarian truce" in Israel-Hamas war.

The resolution also doesn't affirm Israel's right to self-defense or mention rocket attacks by Hamas and other militant groups on Israel.
posted by clavdivs at 1:46 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is the official text of the resolution that just passed, and this is the official text of the amendment from Canada that just failed to pass.
posted by bcd at 1:51 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

If there's one thing we know it's that both Hamas and Israel would definitely abide by a truce. What a toothless resolution. But it looks like any actually binding resolutions can't pass so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
posted by Justinian at 1:54 PM on October 27, 2023

Re the above - it is worth reading the actual text, not just the very biased claims about what is or isn't in each text.

In particular, the resolution that passed is careful to condemn violence from both sides and not name either as the target of the resolution. The amendment that was rejected names and blames Hamas but does not acknowledge any abuses by Israel, before or after the 7th.

But, as I said, don't trust me, go read the resolutions. They are very short.
posted by bcd at 1:56 PM on October 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

A concrete example of how misinformation about the resolutions has been spread. The pro-Israel camp claims the original resolution says nothing about releasing the hostages. While true that it doesn't contain the word 'hostage', it contains this passage:

Calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all civilians who are being illegally held captive, demanding their safety, well-being and humane treatment in compliance with international law;

Seems to address hostages to me. I expect the problem is that it also includes countless Palestinian civilians that Israel has been locking up without charges for years.
posted by bcd at 2:02 PM on October 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

The resolution also doesn't affirm Israel's right to self-defense

"self-defence" is an eccentric way to phrase "right to commit mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing" (the self-evident goals of Israel's operation in Gaza, from their own statements of "hundreds of thousands to a million casualties").
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:04 PM on October 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

You mentioned that statement before (from the Israeli cabinet) but I can't find it. Do you know when they said it or have a link? I want to be clear I am not saying it didn't happen I just would like to actually read it given the gravity of the situation.
posted by Justinian at 2:33 PM on October 27, 2023

Hamas cannot free captives until Israel-Gaza ceasefire: Official.
posted by clavdivs at 2:51 PM on October 27, 2023

You mentioned that statement before (from the Israeli cabinet) but I can't find it. Do you know when they said it or have a link

Last week, it was reported in an AP story which I saw on Twitter (relevant paragraphs about estimated casualties were subsequently edited out of said AP story, but screenshots and links to already-published versions confirmed it was in the original); I don't have a link, unfortunately, but this was part of the Israeli cabinet's discussions with US officials (where the Israeli justification was "well, you had to kill a lot of civilians in WWII").
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:03 PM on October 27, 2023

If it’s a credible offer then hopefully Israel will take them up on it. Keep in mind though that Hamas is still claiming that they only attacked military targets in Israel and it was others who followed them that did the music festival and other acts of brutality, even though there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary including videos, documents with orders, captured and killed Hamas soldiers with Hamas uniforms and ID papers and pay slips.
posted by interogative mood at 3:06 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks I'll keep looking for it Cognomen.
posted by Justinian at 3:28 PM on October 27, 2023

'self-defence" is an eccentric way to phrase. It is. more important question is, do the Palestinians have a right to self-defense.
posted by clavdivs at 3:37 PM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

do the Palestinians have a right to self-defense.

I'd certainly view the 7th October attack as self defense, as is the over 7,000 rockets they've fired at Israel.

Rather than nerve gas, more effective to flood the tunnels with seawater like the Egyptians did, but even the Israelis haven't been that indiscriminate. The sea water contaminates wells and scarce farmland, forcing them to be even more dependent on their neighbours. Ironically using gas would be the better option than permanently making Gaza uninhabitable by destroying all its water sources and farmland.

For context, Hamas have said that they have 500km of tunnels underneath Gaza - Reuters. It would be reasonable to assume that Hamas have hidden their command and control, weapons caches and manufacturing, and hostages within this tunnel network, safe from airstrikes. It would be exceedingly stupid to send IDF soldiers down into those tunnels.

The only plausible military objective for the IDF I see (given their task to "eradicate Hamas") is to destroy their underground tunnel network - gain control over the the northern portion of the Gaza strip, pump in seawater to destroy the tunnels, then leave, and allow Egypt to continue doing the same to the southern portion of the strip near Rafah.
posted by xdvesper at 4:41 PM on October 27, 2023

Maybe this is how autonomous armed drones get normalized. As the barrier in tunnels is the control link.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:48 PM on October 27, 2023

For context, Hamas have said that they have 500km of tunnels underneath Gaza - Reuters.

"In 2008-10, some tunnel owners were said to have become dollar millionaires as they shifted everything from Hummer vehicles and washing machines to cows and sheep through the underground system. Hamas imposed a tax on shipments."

No taxation without representation.
posted by clavdivs at 5:07 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd certainly view the 7th October attack as self defense

oh.

Hard to read that as anything other than justifying literally any action no matter how awful taken against Israeli civilians.
posted by Justinian at 5:12 PM on October 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

I don’t agree it is self defense, and don’t think that even in a settler colony civilians are acceptable targets, but by the state of Israel’s logic, Hamas killing civilians is self defense. Which is irrelevant really and hypocrisy is a pretty weak charge to level against a state. I just wish Western celebrities knew what they we’re asserting when they say Israel has a right to self defense.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:43 PM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Rather than nerve gas, more effective to flood the tunnels with seawater like the Egyptians did, but even the Israelis haven't been that indiscriminate.

"Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed with the destruction of smuggling tunnels, arguing that they had produced 1,800 millionaires, and were used for smuggling weapons, drugs, cash and equipment for forging documents. Abbas had previously recommended the sealing or destruction of the tunnels by flooding them and then punishing the owners of the homes that contained entrances to the tunnels, including demolishing their homes"

Interesting that Egypt first tried to erect barriers to limit expansion of tunnels which seem to work for period of time.
posted by clavdivs at 6:42 PM on October 27, 2023

justifying literally any action

Well if you take Israel's (and the US) justifications at face value, thousands of Palestinians will die as collateral in the process of attacking legitimate military targets in Gaza.

If you take Hamas' justification at face value, they attacked legitimate military targets in Israel and safely withdrew their fighters, while there was "collateral" damage as other militant groups that Hamas don't control broke through the fence and committed those atrocities.

Of course both sides have produced evidence to prove their position / disprove the other, some more credible than others. We're at the point where apparently the government of Hamas is more credible than the government of the US, according to some anyway.
posted by xdvesper at 7:09 PM on October 27, 2023

xdvseper, if you take pretty much anyone *but* Israel at face value, or even with a good decree of skepticism, you can still see ethnic cleansing happening now. With the internet blackout, I am utterly terrified of what we will be learning in the weeks ahead. With the world watching, Israel has killed so many journalists, children, aid workers, and civilians they directed to evacuate. I can't begin to imagine what will happen under the cover of a communications blackout.
posted by sagc at 7:29 PM on October 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

Back during the Trump presidency, there were credible government offices, and non-credible government offices within the US government.

I wouldn’t trust official claims about Iranian prisoners not being tortured, or political prisoners having made confessions, but there are also some very good universities in Iran, which I would trust the degree certifications from.

Governments have multiple parts, which can operate with different levels of trustworthiness.
posted by eviemath at 7:30 PM on October 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is the era of ubiquitous cameraphones. Communications may be down now, but what's happening will be seen by the world as it unfolded on the ground.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:35 PM on October 27, 2023

Well there is Chulalongkorn. He was a King of Siam who modernized his country because his father and grandfather tore through most of Southeast Asia making most countries their vassal state when colonial Powers came in, the king of Cambodia ask the French for protection against siam. Siam gave into many territorial disputes, acquiesced land, recognized the French protector of Cambodia. we won't even go into Burma.

so using this moral equivalent, would you say that Khmer Rouge and it's antecedents were acting in self-defense attacking the government of King Norodom Sihanouk?

I mean that dude saw the Japanese French Chinese The Americans the Vietnamese all basically come and go and pretty much stay around as if nothing ever happened.

so eventually in the 1990s the UN comes in to Cambodia, takes over for the first time in its history, the UN's history. I find no irony that a Japanese representative was head of this short internal 'government'.
Taking a step further, have the UN stand in for the state of Israel and have an internal administrative government until this all could be sorted out.

As principal, I can see the goodness of this. but we're talking about geography here. to get a step further, Ukraine. the UN couldn't stop that but hopefully and eventually perhaps their membership in the European Union will offer them greater protection, this is viable. early in this thread I said a war of provocation could easily isolate Israel politically and militarily as well as the United states due to its response. how's that working out.

I think the big winged Eagle in the room is this. Israel immediately declared war. now they may have done this for legal reasons and what not to order up reserves or something like fury but I think that quick action put a lightning bolt to a lot of leaders in the middle East. this conflict does not seem far away or old, anymore.
posted by clavdivs at 8:13 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

'Wait for the Great Nakba': Palestinians Find Threatening Leaflets on Cars in West Bank

Titled "You wanted war, wait for the great Nakba," the Arabic-language leaflets were addressed to "the enemies in the Jewish bank," and warned Palestinians that it was "their last chance to flee to Jordan in an orderly fashion before we forcefully expel you from our holy lands bequeathed to us by God."

posted by clawsoon at 8:20 PM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Biden, Trudeau, Sunak, Albanese, Scholz, Macron, all their lackeys and spineless oppositions, every journalist and editor who lied and said they were sure the IDF would do everything they could to minimise casualties and just reiterated "Israel has a right to defend itself", they must never be allowed to live this down.

Like the Iraq war hawks, this needs to follow them to the grave, it should become one of the first things anyone knows about them, that they gave their support to this slaughter.
posted by Audreynachrome at 9:28 PM on October 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Prologue for now
posted by R343L at 9:32 PM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

As principal, I can see the goodness of this. but we're talking about geography here. to get a step further, Ukraine. the UN couldn't stop that but hopefully and eventually perhaps their membership in the European Union will offer them greater protection, this is viable. early in this thread I said a war of provocation could easily isolate Israel politically and militarily as well as the United states due to its response. how's that working out.

In realpolitik terms its hard to see how this isn't a complete a disaster for the US. Since the Obama adminstration the US has been trying to piviot to Asia and away from the Middle East and Europe. The now impossible Saudi-Israeli normalization was supposed to more or less permanently stabalize the Middle East and allow the US to focus its resources elswhere.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Then after a year and a half of the US trying to rally the world against Russia, this happens. Outside of India, any hope of rallying the global south or the BRICs is now gone. Notice we haven't been hearing much in the news about Ukraine lately?

After the Russian invasion, the thought was that the United States was back as an "indistpensible" country because NATO was suddenly important again. Now, further defense of Ukraine will fall to European countries as the US focuses its efforts on the Middle East to aid Israel and prepare for a potential confrontation/war with Iran. Plus, the Republican Party is split on Ukraine aid but unanimous on giving Israel whaterver they want. My bet is that inertia will cause the bulk of US efforts to again focus on the Middle East, which will draw resources and attention away fromi Europe and especially Asia, which is where the US wanted to focus to begin with.

The net effect is a reduction in US power and prestige.

Last, the American government appears to be somewhat out of step with the American public. Biden is running a real risk of destroying his administration oiver this. A second Trump adminsistration would be even more likely to focus on the Middle East at the expense of everythign else and in an even more hamhanded way that the US is currently handling this.
posted by eagles123 at 10:16 PM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

There are a lot of dead civilians. It will be in the thousands even if the Gaza Health ministry is padding the stats. Israel is doing some things to mitigate civilian casualties; because if they weren’t the numbers would be like what we saw in Ukraine and Syria. It doesn’t change the fact that thousands of people are dying. Contemplating how much more awful it could be doesn’t make it less awful.
posted by interogative mood at 10:20 PM on October 27, 2023

If you don’t trust the numbers either way then how could you know if Israel is doing anything to decrease casualties? You can’t have it both ways.

“Israel is being careful not to murder too many children, sure they murdered a couple thousand this month but they’re really trying their best here” is one hell of a position to take.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:05 AM on October 28, 2023 [16 favorites]

like what we saw in Ukraine and Syria

We don't yet know what the 'evacuation zone' is going to look like on the other end of this. The tactic certainly resembles the way Russia has declared free fire zones and then presumes anyone who stays is a combatant.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:40 AM on October 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

Victoria Embankment in London right now

NB this is the back end of the march. #FreePalestine"

(Bat's account is well-worth following if you're interested in UK/London-based activism.)
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 7:41 AM on October 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pretty large (around 10 thousand?) and vocal demo march in Rome today, too. Quite a motley bunch of people and families, constant helicopter hovering, and apart from some off-colour signs, it was 99% just “Palestina libera!”
posted by progosk at 9:52 AM on October 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

There has been some Starlink back-and-forth:

Elon Musk said on Saturday that SpaceX's Starlink will support communication links in Gaza with "internationally recognized aid organizations"... but "no terminal has requested a connection in that area".

Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said, "Israel will use all means at its disposal to fight this," and claimed that Hamas would only use Musk's aid for terrorist activities.
posted by clawsoon at 11:38 AM on October 28, 2023

I feel as though "this is our second War of Independence" and "this is a war that will determine the next 75 years for Israel" (source) give some clues to what Israel may be hoping for as the outcome of the war, given how the first War of Independence and the associated Nakba went.
posted by clawsoon at 12:02 PM on October 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

clues to what Israel may be hoping for as the outcome of the war

Ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the total removal of any Palestinian presence? That should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:45 PM on October 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Since we did some back and forth on whether the Ministry of Health numbers can be trusted (and then Biden weighed in, spookily), I thought others might be interested in this piece by canadian social scientist David Zweig in which he pretty persuasively (at least to me) argues that the source of the "500 killed in hospital bombing" number probably wasn't even from the Ministry but rather the entire western media world ran with an Al Jazeera English mistranslation of a single statement by a single Ministry official.

tl;dr - one guy said there were probably 500 of what in English we would call casualties, which includes wounded etc, and then literally every English news outlet just ran with that mistranslation without even attributing the source.

It seems plausible to me.
posted by Justinian at 12:48 PM on October 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

My bet is that inertia will cause the bulk of US efforts to again focus on the Middle East, which will draw resources and attention away fromi Europe and especially Asia, which is where the US wanted to focus to begin with.

I tend to agree. Excellent take.I don't believe any ground 'offenses' are going to happen until the USS Eisenhower is in place and this worries me the most because of the retaliatory measures we take if some State actor tries to take out one of those aircraft carriers.
posted by clavdivs at 2:03 PM on October 28, 2023

I really don't think a state actor would be dumb enough to try to take out one of the carriers. It would be a declaration of war and they have to know that wouldn't end well for them.
posted by Justinian at 2:13 PM on October 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

>>> NEW THREAD <<<<
posted by adamvasco at 2:56 PM on October 28, 2023

They're trying to do that new thread as more of a sharing feelings space rather than a posting news space, so I dunno exactly what to do in terms of posting news links. I might just keep posting news links here? Not sure?
posted by clawsoon at 2:58 PM on October 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

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