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Is the current war in Palestine the first time the victim wound up being seen as the aggressor?
Something interesting about the latest escalations in the Israel-Palestine war since oct of last year is that Hamas was the one who launched the terrorist attack which lead to the current escalation.
Israel suffered a loss and was the victim on that day and the following days, but since their actions in Gaza and Rafah and other neighboring countries, the coverage of Israel very much shows the govt of Israel as the aggressor. It's felt like a complete role reversal to me.
Makes me wonder if this is the first time this has happened in such a short time? You can say that U.S. did the same thing after 9/11 but imo it's actions in the Middle east did not gain it a negative perception amongst world leaders nearly as fast.
I think some of what is shaping this perception is that a lot of people only started paying attention after October 2023, but the conflict was already well underway by that point.
Certainly the October attacks accelerated it, but the data shows a picture of extreme escalation leading up to it. Just poking around some data from the UN, starting at the earliest point they have data for, we can see there were around 305 Israeli casualties between January 2008 and October 2023. Meanwhile, there were 302 Palestinian casualties just between October 2022 and October 2023, stopping the count at October 1st. Compare that to 144 Palestinian casualties the year before. The October attacks were brutal, and I would argue unjustified. It still doesn't make sense to view the attacks as unprovoked or out-of-the blue. Rather, they were a predictable response to Israeli escalation and expansion.
It’s considered a surprise attack because, despite some people attempting to sound the alarm, the Israelis were definitely surprised. Hamas intended to make a surprise attack and they succeeded.
Saying it’s a “predictable response” seems like hindsight bias. There are other things Hamas could have done, and it’s still rather strange, from an outside perspective, that they chose something so catastrophically foolish strategically, that got them and huge numbers of people they’re allegedly fighting for killed. Even taking their side, it would be as if Ukraine made a full-scale attack on the Russians because they took Crimea, or Taiwan attacked China.
It’s not that easy to understand what they were thinking.
You don't have to guess. There is all but admission from Hamas that the goal was to make Israel angry enough to provoke a humanitarian catastrophe and use that to gain international sympathy. There is a reason Gaza has few or no bomb shelters (by contrast, they are everywhere in Israel)
And it worked. They just didn't bargain that Israel would be far less willing than it has been historically to bargain for hostages and sue for peace.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamass-sinwar-said-to-laud-high-civilian-death-toll-in-gaza-as-necessary-sacrifice/
Even given that, it still seems hard to understand what they were thinking. Has international sympathy gotten them all that much before? Worth risking everything over?
The alternative was let the Saudis normalize relations with Israel, and basically end any sort of Arab unity over the issue. From what I’ve read, planning started in 2020 after the signing of the Abraham Accords.
It's really horrendous how weaponized human rights have been in this conflict. I don't have an answer on how to deal with it either. Then there is Netanyahu continuing the fight in Gaza when it's unlikely to achieve any more goals... well apart from him continuing his time in power I suppose.
It's like mad ambition hijacked the already insanely complicated conflict. And normal people are paying the price.
I know this is going to sound conspiracy theory-is. But as someone who works in "intelligence".And works with a handful of Israeli intelligence companies (Cellubrite, CyberSix and a handful of others). Israel has some of the best intelligence operations in the world. They know when shit is about to go down. So there is a good chance the higher ups knew they were about to be invaded and just plugged their ears and stuck their heads in tbe sand.
Why?
My guess is so they could use a more aggressive asymmetric response.
I can imagine someone arrogantly thinking that if Hamas tries something, they won’t succeed, but the specific vulnerability exploited (something like taking out the power supply to the early warning system) seems difficult to predict the consequences of, other than it being very bad, so I can’t imagine them predicting specifically what happened.
there were warnings
@theD00d
Yep, I was vaguely alluding to that earlier with "despite some people attempting to sound the alarm." There were a lot of warning signs and it's a severe organizational failure. But there's a big difference between thinking they're "planning something big" and knowing what's going to happen.
I don't understand what frame of reference you are using to generate 'victim' and 'aggressor' -- the answer depends entirely on who you ask, doesn't it?
Morals have been taught to our culture by movies, books, and TV shows; reality is rarely as clear cut. Even the history books are notoriously biased by the culture which wrote them. Its difficult to accept but I think the world would be better if we stopped trying to push the "victim/aggressor" narrative on every single situation ever. It certainly applies in some scenarios, but hardly all.
A problem with this question is that it inevitably leads to arguing over who counts as a victim and how far back in history to go. Discussing all that history seems too complicated and controversial, and unlikely to lead to productive discussion? But perhaps it could be sidestepped by asking somewhat different, more military questions? For example:
I don't think surprise attacks like that happen all that often, because most militaries aren't that foolish and/or desperate. You need extremists willing to die for the cause, and furthermore, that are pretty indifferent about how many others will die along with them.
It's the sort of desperate attack that an army might undertake when they're surrounded and running out of food - siege warfare comes to mind. Arguably Gaza has been trapped the whole time, under bad but relatively peaceful conditions.
One difference is that with siege warfare, often the goal was to outlast the enemy, assuming the surrounding army couldn't keep it up forever. This isn't the case in the Middle East where these conflicts go on seemingly forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CTpVNKw7UM
From the description box:
If we are to assess who we think is the aggressor and who is victim, we should take into account what has happened in the bigger scheme of things. Over a longer time frame.
Exactly where we place the cutoff for "what we think should count" makes all the difference in how we percieve something, and how we then feel about it.
Questions and answers of this nature seems to me to be mostly emotionally based.
People will claim their position is one based on logic, we all do usually, but at the end of the day...
History is an ongoing event and it rarely offers a very clear cut "it started here".
It more often offers "it came to a head at this point". But again, where we consider that point to be is also going to differ.
Like so many things, the root viewpoint I would propose to keep in mind is this:
Things. Are. Not. Simple.
That is not meant as an insult, it is not meant to troll you. Please believe I am sincere in that. I am not saying this in the tone of being an ass to people on the internet.
As a follow-on to 'things are not simple' I would caution everyone to be skeptical and brutally critical of any information that comes across as A Simple Solution to a Complex Problem, or likewise, A Simple Explanation of a Complex Situation.
These are often not just misleading things, but dangerous and meant to have you view and judge a situation, or political issue, or nation, or person, from an intentionally constructed viewpoint that only allows you to see a narrow part of the whole.
Was Israel attacked? Yes. Did Israel act in self defense and retaliate along those lines (and in part to get their people back home)? Yes. Is that the whole of it? No. The larger view, which takes the history of the region and the interactive history of Israel/Gaza and before that back to the creation of the Israeli state, is messy. It is complex. It is not clean-cut with 'good guys' and 'bad guys' so easily labeled. I'm sorry if that comes across as condescending, I can see that tone in what I just typed, and I don't mean it like that. Please forgive me my imperfect ability to convey my thoughts.
The tensions between the nation of Israel and the Palestinian people (in this instance, the Palestinians in Gaza) has a history behind it, and it is not clean, not easy to assign blame to just one side or the other, for as you examine each act of retribution or suppression, you see further and further down the chain of 'back and forth' actions. The cycles of violence. People driven to suffering and misery, put in a position where it is easy to understand how a portion of them would see no peaceful solution and commit themselves to violence and hate. Please understand, that is not an apologist statement, nor is it intended to excuse any actions. It is about being willing to see the whole tangled, ugly, COMPLEX mess that the situation is, and acknowledge that there are no easy explanations to be told, no easy answers to be had.
At the same time, this is not me saying there are no solutions. There are things that can be done, just not anything I can think of that would come across as an all-in-one this-fixes-most-of-it answer.
Generally speaking no. I know there's going to be people who want to drag this into an argument over who was the first aggressor or whatever, but even if we abstract out the countries and just look at the concept, there's lots of "poking the bear".
Arguably the most famous in recent history is Pearl Harbor and WWII
Does anyone consider the US the “aggressor” in the pacific ww2 theater?
The West (broadly) and the United States (especially) did intentionally set up hostile economic conditions on Japan that were designed to forcibly end the war in China. In response, Japan took what it needed militarily instead (see more: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/j7r3is/why_did_japan_declare_war_on_america_in_1941/)
Though I would agree that the US shouldn't quite be considered the aggressor, even taking the above argument to the extreme.
The country that firebombed the hell out of Japan and would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender and dropped two nukes on them?
Yeah.
Obviously the pacific theater fight was a nightmare slog but it has absolutely been argued the US became the aggressor at some point.
Those arguing such a point as this do so on a poor foundation. The word aggressor, especially within the context of warfighting and international law, is defined by being the first to use armed force against a sovereign state. The United States could not have, by definition of the word, become the aggressor in the Pacific Theater of WWII during the duration of the contiguous conflict, regardless of any escalatory practices.
Then by this same definition, there’s no discussion to even be had because that’s exactly what the OP question is asking about
OP is asking whether there are additional examples of "victim nations" being perceived as the aggressor. The argument isn't about who is the aggressor, but who is seen as the aggressor, which is a different beast entirely.
Surely this also means that your earlier comment is irrelevant, though? If perception is what we're talking about, it doesn't matter if the US "could not have, by definition of the word, become the aggressor", right? The question is whether, at some point in the conflict, the US became perceived as the aggressor (presumably due to escalation), either contemporarily or in retrospect. Certainly I think there's a pretty strong case for the US perceived as the aggressor towards the end of the war, even if only in retrospect from the modern day.
My comment was not irrelevant, no.
Here is the question asked by stu2b50:
Asking this as an outright question broke the chain-of-context. It's more of an aside than a continuation of the conversation. This essentially resets conversational context. It is no longer a question of perception, but of definitions.
You are adding additional information by bringing 'perceived' back into the aside, so it was not a question of perception.
There are strong cases for unnecessary retaliation/escalation from the US, just as there are strong cases for the opposite. That is a tangential (though very closely-related) issue.
Right. Colloquially, you could perhaps become the aggressor if you take your defensive war too far, or perhaps if your unarmed actions leave the other party no other choice. The latter I'd reject out of hand, as I'd rather not turn non-violent action into a even-only-colloquially valid cases belli. Compare when Ukraine oriented itself towards Europe, or when the US embargo Japan: I'd like to view the respective violent responses as escalatory and unjustified.
Any argument that they were unjustified, but that some violent responses against some nonviolent provocation us justified, is probably too nuanced and subjective for international relations.
Judging by the OPs use of the word and context given I do not think that is what’s being discussed.
I presume by OP’s use of the word aggressor, they mean that it was seen as using “too much” force. Otherwise anytime a country starts a war and loses it would count.
I’m aware? Many people see the fire bombings and nukes as too much.
I think it’s very debatable, but hardly an uncommon argument
I would say that would at minimum be a view held after the fact. During the war, few other countries in the west particularly cared, and few would have objected when America was in total war against Japan, given the brutal fighting in the western theater.
Meanwhile, in Asia, every country other than Japan would cheer for the news of every Japanese death.
Sure. I don’t exactly agree with the stance, but it’s not an uncommon one.
Japan was a military dictatorship at this point and while their government had 2 factions, most of them were fully committed to fighting until the very end. There are a lot of arguments to be made that it saved a lot more lives to drop those bombs than if the US had invaded on the ground.
That is not to say that war crimes weren't. By the summer of 1945, the US was basically out of big cities to bomb. Japan was in ruins and their military production was almost fully disabled. The US then turned to bombing civilians, which was of course crimes against humanity and war crime upon war crime.
It can also be argued that the dropping of the bombs were actually good in the long run, because it showed the entire world what would happen if East-Westtensions after the war developed from a cold to hot war. While, from a US perspective, there was Korea and Vietnam, it did give Europe almost 80 years of peace post-war (the Jugoslav wars in the 90's broke that streak but that was a civil war)
I mean, we certainly were by the time we nuked them.
As already stated the answer is no.
If you want an example that is perhaps more comparable you can look at the Rohingya genocide. Just as in the Israel-Palestine conflict you have decades of history, but let’s ignore that to focus on a similar “aggressor to victim” event sequence.
In 2016 attacks on border police left police personnel dead. This resulted in intense crack downs on the pretext of those border incidents that left hundreds dead by the end of the year. This continued and we have the Rohingya genocide.
This is of course a very simplified version.
Can this be tagged as politics as well? It is bound to get political (in fact, already has).
@cfabbro
Sure, done.