An excellent piece in Foreign Affairs arguing that the United States must use it’s considerable leverage to avert both human and strategic disaster in the region.
But this is precisely the time that Washington must be the cooler head and save Israel from itself. The impending invasion of Gaza will be a humanitarian, moral, and strategic catastrophe. It will not only badly harm Israel’s long-term security and inflict unfathomable human costs on Palestinians but also threaten core U.S. interests in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and in Washington’s competition with China over the Indo-Pacific order. Only the Biden administration—channeling the United States’ unique leverage and the White House’s demonstrated close support for Israeli security—can now stop Israel from making a disastrous mistake. Now that it has shown its sympathy with Israel, Washington must pivot toward demanding that its ally fully comply with the laws of war. It must insist that Israel find ways to take the fight to Hamas that do not entail the displacement and mass killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.
An excellent piece in Foreign Affairs arguing that the United States must use it’s considerable leverage to avert both human and strategic disaster in the region.
So I’ve read that the Hamas leadership is mostly living it up in Qatar and remotely directing people to die back in Gaza. There is no dismantling them by carpet bombing Gaza. They should be doing...
So I’ve read that the Hamas leadership is mostly living it up in Qatar and remotely directing people to die back in Gaza.
There is no dismantling them by carpet bombing Gaza. They should be doing the Munich thing and hitting them where they are instead.
Yea I had similar thoughts. If you’re already going to be violating international law you probably don’t care about a few extra-judicial murders and they would be a lot more justifiable to your...
Yea I had similar thoughts. If you’re already going to be violating international law you probably don’t care about a few extra-judicial murders and they would be a lot more justifiable to your allies and probably the world.
My guess is that an operation like that doesn’t materialize in a few weeks and it’s probably not an option to satiate the public desire for action in the short term.
Their senior leadership got kicked out of Palestine and nobody else wants them. Even being there would have made them high priority assassination targets anyway.
In some respects could that also be considered not to be much of a distinction for Israel? If they root out those who are heeding orders from Hamas leadership, then Hamas leadership is no longer...
So I’ve read that the Hamas leadership is mostly living it up in Qatar and remotely directing people to die back in Gaza.
In some respects could that also be considered not to be much of a distinction for Israel? If they root out those who are heeding orders from Hamas leadership, then Hamas leadership is no longer leading if there's no one listening to them. Of course leaving whatever leaders may possibly be in Qatar or elsewhere to continue existing leaves open the possibility they will find new people to listen to them, and perhaps Israel will go for them still via other means, but seemingly they want to get rid of people who would listen to that kind of leadership to begin with, even if those people aren't the leaders.
If they didn’t spot this attack ahead of time I really doubt they have the intelligence networks in place to actually know who is and isn’t Hamas on the ground. So while that might work, it seems...
If they didn’t spot this attack ahead of time I really doubt they have the intelligence networks in place to actually know who is and isn’t Hamas on the ground. So while that might work, it seems a lot harder than disrupting their leadership and foreign financial connections to starve them out that way. Much lower human toll too.
The article does a terrific job of looking at the broader picture and emphasizing that the siege and ground invasion of Gaza are strategically and criminally wrong. Hamas is getting precisely what...
The article does a terrific job of looking at the broader picture and emphasizing that the siege and ground invasion of Gaza are strategically and criminally wrong.
Hamas is getting precisely what it was aiming for - a disproportionate Israeli retaliation that will further alienate the Arab world and demolish any hope of peace for decades to come.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn Gaza into a trash compactor, but I’m curious what response would have eased tensions. Clearly there are less bad options, but how about good ones?
I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn Gaza into a trash compactor, but I’m curious what response would have eased tensions. Clearly there are less bad options, but how about good ones?
I don’t know if there are any good options. People are making the argument that Israel has to do something, which I’m sympathetic to but the same line of reasoning kicked off an Iraq and...
I don’t know if there are any good options.
People are making the argument that Israel has to do something, which I’m sympathetic to but the same line of reasoning kicked off an Iraq and Afghanistan quagmire which was nothing short of a disaster.
If they must proceed with an invasion, they could setup refugee camps along the border and give people weeks to get out. Control access/weapons and arrest known Hamas members that try to leave. Then proceed with an invasion. You’re not going to eliminate Hamas that way, but you could do a great deal to disarm them.
And not to sound callous, but if they need ‘retribution’, a Mossad kill squad directed at the Hamas leaders in Qatar is going to be actually directed at those responsible and have both less blowback and be considerably easier to accomplish successfully than a ground invasion of Gaza with no clear end goals. And it’s not like Israel hasn’t done similar in the past.
At the end of the day, I don’t think Israel gets a free pass on there being a lack of options. Even just slowing down their current course of action would be a great deal more humane.
When Israel told Gazan civilians to evacuate from the city towards southern Gaza, Hamas countered by telling them to stay in their homes. Hamas hides behind civilians -- they would not in a...
If they must proceed with an invasion, they could setup refugee camps along the border and give people weeks to get out. Control access/weapons and arrest known Hamas members that try to leave. Then proceed with an invasion. You’re not going to eliminate Hamas that way, but you could do a great deal to disarm them.
When Israel told Gazan civilians to evacuate from the city towards southern Gaza, Hamas countered by telling them to stay in their homes. Hamas hides behind civilians -- they would not in a million years allow everyone to get out this way, nor any other because it means they lose power.
That's why it's also fanciful that the author says Israel should "find ways" to get at Hamas without harming innocents. It has been proven time and time again that no matter what Israel does, innocent Palestinians are killed... That's just the Hamas MO. They only gain power from being able to blame Israel for every civilian life lost. They hold their own population hostage because they would rather rule over the rubble than yield.
This is a call for higher standards of execution, not lower standards. More focus is required, the idea that you need to loosen rules of engagement and limit expediency as a result of increased...
Imagine a mass shooter scenario, like the kind we have so many in the US. Except now imagine one that has taken their nihilism to a new level of depravity. Imagine a heavily armed maniac running a crowded public place. But now imagine he has multiple infants strapped to his chest; he's using them as literal human shields.
This is a call for higher standards of execution, not lower standards. More focus is required, the idea that you need to loosen rules of engagement and limit expediency as a result of increased situational difficulty seems like a fallacy. There are a lot of extremely intelligent people in Israel, defaulting to "our hands are tied and we can only bomb innocents to neutralize the threat" seems absurd. It seems more of an appeal to bloodthirst than THE ONLY way to help resolve the situation.
I feel that you are missing @isleepinahammock 's point. In every situation, everyone wants "higher standards of execution". A programmer wants 100% test coverage and six months of QA and bugfixing...
In every situation, everyone wants "higher standards of execution". A programmer wants 100% test coverage and six months of QA and bugfixing time. Magnus Carlsen wants another five minutes to think about his next move. Their point is that there are costs to those higher standards.
I don't think it's reasonable to handwave these costs away, just because "there are a lot of extremely intelligent people in Israel", therefore a solution must exist.
Empirically, no such solution has surfaced in the last few decades. There are a lot of things that really intelligent people have failed to do, and there are problems with no known solutions.
A person might disagree with Israel's valuation of Israeli lives versus Palestinian civilian lives, and by extension, disagree that the level of threat posed by Palestine justifies Israel's actions.
But I think that completely handwaving away the existence of the tradeoff, in favour of an unexplained perfect alternative which might not even exist, is not very reasonable and not very convincing.
Sometimes in a war, an enemy takes advantage of your constraints. These might be physical constraints - for example, they have the high ground and you don’t. It may be that some attacks are just...
Sometimes in a war, an enemy takes advantage of your constraints. These might be physical constraints - for example, they have the high ground and you don’t. It may be that some attacks are just impossible and it’s better to try something else, or there’s no alternative you can see, so it’s a stalemate.
I think when the constraints are physical it’s understood that you don’t always succeed.
An enemy might also try to take advantage of your moral constraints; there are things you won’t do. And then the question is, when are moral constraints real constraints?
It’s sometimes said that war is a moral solvent, meaning that people find themselves doing things they would never consider under normal circumstances, because victory or at least avoiding defeat is that important. It of course starts with killing people, which is already morally abhorrent, but accepted and even celebrated in a war when it’s the enemy being killed. But how far are you going to go?
There are international standards for what counts as a war crime, which is a sort of backup moral constraint - sure, you’re killing people, but you won’t do that. The enemy can take advantage of those too. And again, the question is whether a moral constraint is a real constraint or not.
Sometimes you don’t win. Maybe there is no solution you can see within your constraints. (And also, maybe committing war crimes wouldn’t change that?)
If “stopping Hamas without massive civilian casualties” is impossible, maybe that means winning is impossible? It seems like not winning (yet) is an option?
Where does the insistence that the Israelis must win now at all costs come from? The Israelis may suffer losses, but they aren’t going to lose. The situation doesn’t seem nearly so desperate as what the Ukrainians had to deal with. This conflict has been going on, off and on, for decades. What’s the hurry?
I don't think this is a very strong argument. There are very obvious ways that Israel can begin to escalate to signal very clearly their intent if they desired and people aren't fleeing because...
Second, waiting would result in fewer civilians evacuating when a later invasion comes. Right now, the average Gazan civilian can fully understand why an Israeli invasion is imminent. Gaza isn't a totalitarian police state where all external news is censored. The people of Gaza know exactly how bad the Hamas attack was, and they can fully understand why Israel would be enraged by such a thing. Even a civilian who supports Hamas wholeheartedly can understand that Israel is enraged, and can in turn realize that they don't want to be anywhere near an advancing Israeli ground invasion. Fear is a powerful motivator, and far more civilians are likely to evacuate from what they perceive as an enraged army bent on revenge than an invasion launched years from now out of the blue and without immediate provocation. If the civilians in northern Gaza think the IDF is about to sweep in like the hoards of Genghis Khan, they're likely far more likely to evacuate than if some carefully measured invasion happens a year from now.
Finally, you need to consider human nature and the boy who cried wolf. Imagine again Israel thinks about this for a year and only then launches an invasion. In that subsequent year, the Gazan population will be subject to constant rumors that an invasion is imminent. Some of these will be the natural result of the rumor mill; some will be deliberate Hamas misinformation. And when the invasion finally does happen, many civilians will think it's just another false alarm and refuse to evacuate until the IDF actually comes storming across the border.
I don't think this is a very strong argument. There are very obvious ways that Israel can begin to escalate to signal very clearly their intent if they desired and people aren't fleeing because they think Israel is in a blood rage, they are fleeing because their city is being bombed.
What Israel is doing now is actually likely pretty close to the optimum strategy to minimize civilian casualties.
This argument seems to be premised on the fact the a ground invasion is successful and Hamas is destroyed. That seems like a very unlikely outcome to me, bordering on fantasy.
Israel has already publicly stated it won't reoccupy Gaza. If that's true, (and most likely even if it isn't), they have no hope of solving any problems. Even if they were able to destroy Hamas, which is extremely dubious when many of them can just melt back into the civilian population, the power vacuum left by a destroyed Hamas will be filled by somebody else. If Israel expends the lives of thousands of its soldiers and thousands of civilians and accomplishes almost nothing, how is that a good outcome? And that's not even the worst outcome, dragging Hezbollah and Iran into this conflict is a possibility that must be considered that will alter this world's trajectory for the next century.
The only other alternative is doing nothing, and just letting Hamas continue to exist, and to continue to plot their next atrocity.
This is a false dichotomy. You are saying that if Israel does not conduct a ground invasion immediately, nothing can or will be done at all. That's very evidently not true. Consider a hypothetical scenario where a country with a credible nuclear threat brazenly assassinated several US politicians. Surely, there would be a response but it definitely wouldn't be an immediate ground invasion. Sometimes, the strategic picture must inform the response.
Israel has the right to exist and the right to defend itself. But this invasion is not even in it's own self interest, never mind general human interest. It plays directly into Hamas' hands, who have an interest in making the human price as high and as unbearable as possible. When your enemy tries to provoke you into making strategic mistake, your best option is to respond in a manner they didn't predict. This is assuredly what Hamas predicted and has prepared for.
This isn't really a realistic option for a large number of reasons. I'm sorry but this comes across as poorly-informed fanfiction that's trying to justify what would ultimately result in a...
This isn't really a realistic option for a large number of reasons. I'm sorry but this comes across as poorly-informed fanfiction that's trying to justify what would ultimately result in a genocide.
For one, we know how Israel wants to fight this war, there is no shortage of analysis out there. Their military is currently trying to adapt a new doctrine, 'Decisive Victory', which is aimed at a short war in which Israel can successfully overwhelm it's enemy, potentially on multiple fronts, and disengage to end the conflict on its own terms. It seeking to do this with a combination of overwhelming fire and targeted strikes at key decision-making centers of the enemy. They have no interest, nor the ammunition to level an entire city. Nor would it even be effective. Using artillery to entirely dislodge someone from an urban environment is not even something that's realistically possible, if it was there would not have been a battle of Bakhmut or siege of Mariupol.
I don't know what Hamas will do next. It's my understanding that from a military point of view they are pretty limited, and the idea that they could murder every Israeli seems far-fetched. The...
I don't know what Hamas will do next. It's my understanding that from a military point of view they are pretty limited, and the idea that they could murder every Israeli seems far-fetched. The argument that there's only so much that can be done from the air applies to them too, particularly with supplies cut off.
Also, I never said anything about Israel doing nothing or never responding with force.
Probably the next thing to do would be to try to answer my own question about what are the sources of urgency, but I think I've run out of steam on this discussion so I'll leave it here.
They have definitely tried to stop people, setting up roadblocks and such. But people are definitely evacuating and on the move. I’ve been watching a lot of livestreams and videos coming out of...
They have definitely tried to stop people, setting up roadblocks and such. But people are definitely evacuating and on the move. I’ve been watching a lot of livestreams and videos coming out of Gaza, Hamas either hasn’t been effective at or isn’t trying to stop everyone.
And regardless, you don’t get to do basically nothing and then say “well it wouldn’t have mattered because it wouldn’t work anyways.” There is a moral imperative to try, even if you’re not successful.
Indeed; Israel may be in a kind of zugzwang, where the best (long-term) option would be no (immediate) action, and yet that is completely infeasible from a political perspective.
People are making the argument that Israel has to do something, which I’m sympathetic to but the same line of reasoning kicked off an Iraq and Afghanistan quagmire which was nothing short of a disaster.
Indeed; Israel may be in a kind of zugzwang, where the best (long-term) option would be no (immediate) action, and yet that is completely infeasible from a political perspective.
One comment on the matter that put the scale of this attack on Israel in perspective for me was the comparison that if scaled to the proportions of the USA, it would have been like as if around...
One comment on the matter that put the scale of this attack on Israel in perspective for me was the comparison that if scaled to the proportions of the USA, it would have been like as if around 45.000 people had been killed in a single day. On US soil.
Imagine what would happen then? How would the country react to an attack of that dimension?
Reminds me of how one of the silver linings of 9/11 is that the World Trade Center was relatively empty at the time of the attacks -- "only" ~2,000 were killed, but the towers had an average peak...
Reminds me of how one of the silver linings of 9/11 is that the World Trade Center was relatively empty at the time of the attacks -- "only" ~2,000 were killed, but the towers had an average peak working population of ~50,000 during the day, and that's not counting the many thousands of tourists. I can't even imagine how much more traumatizing an attack of that magnitude would have been -- and even 9/11 was not an attack aimed at a particularly bitter ethnic and religious divide, launched on a religious holiday, and with countless cases of torture and ongoing hostage-taking on top of the raw body count.
I think a ground invasion of Gaza is a historic mistake, but the idea of any Israeli government (let alone this one) doing nothing out of the ordinary in response is hard to imagine.
I wanted to double-check for myself: USA population is 340M and Israel is 9.2M, which is almost a factor of 37. So depending on how many Israelis died on October 7th (1,300? 1,400?), it would...
I wanted to double-check for myself: USA population is 340M and Israel is 9.2M, which is almost a factor of 37. So depending on how many Israelis died on October 7th (1,300? 1,400?), it would proportionately feel like 48k-52k deaths.
For comparison, the Gaza Strip has 2.1M people. Wikipedia currently says 1400 Israelis and 2339 Palestinians dead; scaling these up to the US population (Israel 37x, Gaza Strip 162x, fudging the numbers a little bit because city sizes don't quite line up), imagine terrorists killing everyone in San Luis Obispo — and in retaliation, New Orleans was flattened. It's hard to imagine either side being happy about the outcome.
In terms of foreign policy, I can't say---but in terms of domestic policy, we likely would have gone (even further than we actually did) down the path of reducing freedoms and creeping...
How would the country react to an attack of that dimension?
In terms of foreign policy, I can't say---but in terms of domestic policy, we likely would have gone (even further than we actually did) down the path of reducing freedoms and creeping militarization. I wouldn't consider that a good thing.
I’m not really educated on the matter but I’ve also wondered if shoring up defenses, rescuing captured Israelis, and imprisoning insurgents would be the best move short and long term.
I’m not really educated on the matter but I’ve also wondered if shoring up defenses, rescuing captured Israelis, and imprisoning insurgents would be the best move short and long term.
How exactly would they go about rescue and capture in a way that is different from what they are doing? Hamas is going to put up a full defense against any level of invasion so sending only a...
How exactly would they go about rescue and capture in a way that is different from what they are doing? Hamas is going to put up a full defense against any level of invasion so sending only a small force would just result in a bloodbath of the IDF. Sending a large force will inevitably result in widespread collateral damage and any civilians caught up in the sidelines will struggle to survive. So the only way to do what you say is exactly what they are already doing.
The only other alternative is doing nothing at all.
How are they going to imprison anyone without a ground invasion? You can’t air strike someone into prison. And Hamas’ infrastructure is complex — it would be futile sending in small teams to...
How are they going to imprison anyone without a ground invasion? You can’t air strike someone into prison. And Hamas’ infrastructure is complex — it would be futile sending in small teams to extract hostages from a universally hostile population.
So it has been 24 hours since Israel sent out the evacuation notice and they haven’t proceeded with whatever it was people assumed they’d do. This leads me to believe what’s happening is either...
So it has been 24 hours since Israel sent out the evacuation notice and they haven’t proceeded with whatever it was people assumed they’d do.
This leads me to believe what’s happening is either the US is talking them down in back channels or there is a lot of disorganization in the Israeli ranks. Or some combination of the two. Like we know Netanyahu and his people are idiots, just from an administrative standpoint. I suspect the civilian leadership and comms offices are saying moronic shit off the cuff and then the more seasoned IDF and counter-terrorism people are trying to mellow it out.
New York Times is reporting the invasion is imminent but I had similar thoughts to you. Hopefully the USA is able to move the needle on this one, I really don’t see this going well.
New York Times is reporting the invasion is imminent but I had similar thoughts to you. Hopefully the USA is able to move the needle on this one, I really don’t see this going well.
It's both; they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. The deadline is 24 hours, but they've also publicly acknowledged that their deadline is impossible and said it'll take a few days -...
It's both; they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. The deadline is 24 hours, but they've also publicly acknowledged that their deadline is impossible and said it'll take a few days - which is also impossible; a few months would be the shortest realistic option here. Like, Israel knows there aren't millions of spare houses in the southern Gaza strip, let alone everything else.
Israel is/was just trying to manufacture a justification for future war crimes - "we gave advance warning for civilians to leave, but they stuck around after the deadline". They never actually intended for the deadline to be followed, it's just political theatre.
I think that's going a bit far. This doesn't justify the attack and you don't have to like it, but giving warning is better than not giving one, because some people are evacuating. There is a PR...
I think that's going a bit far. This doesn't justify the attack and you don't have to like it, but giving warning is better than not giving one, because some people are evacuating. There is a PR aspect to it, but also a real-world effect that's not theatre.
Dissolve the State of Israel as we know it essentially by removing references to being a Jewish nation state, renaming, and taking on a slightly different constitution. Restore Palestinian...
Exemplary
Dissolve the State of Israel as we know it essentially by removing references to being a Jewish nation state, renaming, and taking on a slightly different constitution. Restore Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Juruselem, pull all insances of internationally illegal settlements from occupied territories. Lift the siege of Gaza and pull back forces, create a security situation that would challenge and degrade any terrorist activity within the country. Begin a dialog with the Palestinians and other Arab nations that as the violence eases, Palestinian access to Israel will slowly be restored. Request a third party Arab nation to assist keeping security within Palestine, if acceptable to the Palestinians. Brace fo further attacks while allowing the situation to improve within Palestine, allow Palestinian refugees to return to Palestinian controlled territory.
Terrorism is an act of desperation used by groups to wage war against an overwhelming enemy force that they can't otherwise confront. Despite its portrayal in Western media, terrorism is a rational act. If security and economic opportunity were restored to Palestinians along with a level of reroachment from Israel, then I could guarantee that terrorist activities would be a pale shadow of what they are now and could quite possibly evaporate.
Israel is staring down it's own post-9/11 moment. After the US was attacked it should have taken a hard look at its activities in the Middle East and found a new way to engage the region. We all know what happened instead and twenty years later after much wasted blood and treasure both the US and Middle East are worse off than before. Israel is about to enact that same path and will end up energizing an enemy and creating an insurgency, if they stay in Gaza which will a but be a requirement, and will lose much credibility that they have in the world. Peace is not easy, it requires nations to humble themselves and turn the other cheek, but it can be done
A delicate situation: if civilians stay in Gaza they risk becoming collateral damage; if they have to leave, where would they go? If Israel invades, fighting house-to-house and street-to-street...
A delicate situation: if civilians stay in Gaza they risk becoming collateral damage; if they have to leave, where would they go? If Israel invades, fighting house-to-house and street-to-street would be no easy task; if they bomb, shell or blockade suspected strong points before civilian evacuation they risk international outrage.
They believe that Israel’s intention is to carry out another nakba, or “catastrophe”: the forced displacement of Palestinians from Israel during the 1948 war. They do not believe—nor should they believe—that they will be allowed to return to Gaza after the fighting.
The choice is temporary displacement or enforced martial law: two bad options, but the inevitable consequence of the attack on Israel. What alternative is there?
Although these rules may not trouble Israeli leaders, they pose a significant strategic challenge to the United States in terms of its other highest priorities. It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defence of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza. The states and peoples of the global South far beyond the Middle East will notice.
The world supports Israel now, but they too have only so much political capital. IMO now is the time to start planning to win the peace: what should a post invasion Palestine look like?
They could, and the government would immediately be replaced by another that will do it. The populace wants revenge. Telling them they should just accept the losses and calm down isn't going to work.
They could, and the government would immediately be replaced by another that will do it. The populace wants revenge. Telling them they should just accept the losses and calm down isn't going to work.
This gets into what really counts as an alternative. Is an option that's physically possible, but has as a prerequisite getting millions of people to change their minds, really an option?...
This gets into what really counts as an alternative. Is an option that's physically possible, but has as a prerequisite getting millions of people to change their minds, really an option?
Certainly for any one of us, we can treat an Israel invasion as unstoppable and practically inevitable. That goes for most Israelis too. Unlike with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, maybe there's no single person who could stop it?
Which actions of Hamas would you consider inevitable? Their decisions are certainly not up to us. They aren't up to most Palestinians either.
Maybe you can't stop the war, but there is a choice of whether or not to personally participate. For some people that's very limited. Conscripts still have choices, but they are operating in a system that's designed to enforce their participation.
I believe Israel has required military service. I have only a vague notion of what pressures Palestinians operate under.
If they can't stop themselves, maybe the rest of the world should stop them. I am getting major flashbacks to the way I felt at the start of the invasion of Iraq, where I was so, so angry at other...
If they can't stop themselves, maybe the rest of the world should stop them. I am getting major flashbacks to the way I felt at the start of the invasion of Iraq, where I was so, so angry at other countries for going along with the US when what the US was doing was clearly wrong (in both senses of the word). Those countries should have said no — if you proceed, you will materially lose our support, in both this and in future endeavors.
I think the US's leadership would have approached things a lot more thoughtfully in that case and found a less profoundly stupid and horrible way to placate the idiot masses (after all, they had already convinced the public that Saddam Hussein should take the fall instead of Osama bin Laden; however bloodthirsty the public was, they were still very easy to manipulate to a laughably absurd degree).
And Israel is far more reliant on external allies than the US is. If doing this meant that Israel would be alone in this world, I think they would figure out a different way — like targeting Hamas leadership in Qatar and emphasizing the importance of this in their propaganda outlets. Yes, something has to happen to placate the too-angry-to-think voters, but Israel's leadership actually has a lot of control over the details here.
Sure, if they could pull off removing all Hamas fighters from Gaza without an invasion then you'd be right. That would be a diplomatic/political miracle; and if you can solve that, then you could...
Sure, if they could pull off removing all Hamas fighters from Gaza without an invasion then you'd be right. That would be a diplomatic/political miracle; and if you can solve that, then you could almost solve the Middle East peace problem.
I don't see how they'd do that with an invasion either, as long as there are more people who become willing to fight. It's easy to see how people will suffer and not very clear what might be...
I don't see how they'd do that with an invasion either, as long as there are more people who become willing to fight.
It's easy to see how people will suffer and not very clear what might be accomplished. Perhaps the Israelis had a contingency plan ready, but we don't know what it is.
No problem, I figured you didn't know. May I ask where you saw the article? I think it's a good idea to carry upstream if you think the framing 'here's what a US marine thinks" is naive rather...
No problem, I figured you didn't know.
May I ask where you saw the article? I think it's a good idea to carry upstream if you think the framing 'here's what a US marine thinks" is naive rather than malicious (which it often can be).
Firstly it's not as though the Israeli security establishment, left-wing groups and the press haven't warned that increasing oppression of the Palestinians was bound to lead to some kind of...
Firstly it's not as though the Israeli security establishment, left-wing groups and the press haven't warned that increasing oppression of the Palestinians was bound to lead to some kind of response. If you kill someone's with a targeted missile strike, and they choose to kill all of your family members in revenge, that's not justified – but it is a reason (laying aside moral considerations and taking only self-interest into account) not to kill their sibling (or lock up their sibling, etc).
But the conclusion of your argument seems to be that it is worth killing tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of brown people who have been forced into what is effectively an open-air prison if it makes the wealthy white people next door will feel more secure?
I think you started out with a possibly good argument against continuing the revenge cycle, but it really went off the rails at the end. Being secure against attacks is something everyone wants...
I think you started out with a possibly good argument against continuing the revenge cycle, but it really went off the rails at the end. Being secure against attacks is something everyone wants and deserves. Being rich or white doesn't make it less of a valid desire. Also, many Israelis are neither.
Sure, and the Palestinians also want to be secure against attacks. Israel is a mostly white country whose citizens live protected by the Iron Dome and a massive security establishment. The...
Sure, and the Palestinians also want to be secure against attacks. Israel is a mostly white country whose citizens live protected by the Iron Dome and a massive security establishment. The Palestinians enjoy none of this.
Of course I understand that Israelis don't want to be blown up by rockets and this desire is reasonable. I'm not arguing that Israelis aren't justified in wanting to have security – I am arguing that their security has come (and probably will come) at the expense of the Palestinians who have never been able to achieve even a modicum of the security Israelis have since the early 1900s (because of the Israelis). I am also arguing that Israel is best understood in the context of other colonial settlements such as France in Algeria.
Also, many Israelis are neither.
Israel is a majority white country and it is a wealthy country (similarly wealthy to most other western countries). It's similar to how most people would think of France as a predominantly white country even though it has a large ethnic minority population.
I still don’t see how framing this as a generic racial conflict or in terms of generic colonialism is helpful. Colonialism of course plays a large role in Israel’s history as well as the entire...
I still don’t see how framing this as a generic racial conflict or in terms of generic colonialism is helpful. Colonialism of course plays a large role in Israel’s history as well as the entire Middle East, but it’s a complicated history, there are special circumstances, and it seems like making analogies to other countries’ colonial histories only goes so far?
Perhaps I’m wrong, though. Has someone written a comparison you like?
Let me first avoid beating around the bush and say that in the position we are today I don't think Israel should be dismantled and should continue to exist – but with substantial changes to make...
Let me first avoid beating around the bush and say that in the position we are today I don't think Israel should be dismantled and should continue to exist – but with substantial changes to make it more democratic. I broadly support a one-state solution (of the kind Arendt and Saïd supported). The real problem in my view is that the Palestinians have been chosen as a scapegoat (the irony of that word is not lost on me) for European sins and European antisemitism. Obviously the whole "the Jews could have been given a chunk of Germany" is a ludicrous suggestion, but Germany could have provided the Palestinians funding to establish their own state, or agreed to provide German passports to those who were made stateless. Even today Israel serves as a foil for the right to hide their antisemitism – by using it to discredit the left and direct focus onto left wing groups and away from their facist antisemitic views.
I think Edward Saïd has some interesting work on the issue (see Zionism from the Perspective of its Victims).
I think that in geopolitics we have to think about outcomes and ignore ideological justifications – in terms of outcome how is the Israeli case not a case of settler colonialism? We have seen a group of predominantly white Europeans move to a country, force out the inhabitants and claim it as their own. They have then established a state where they have literal apartheid (with big fences and walls) and maintain a big open air prison with multiple million people in it. The only way to have real peace is for Israel to provide the Palestinians with citizenship and form a state where both sides may exist peacefully.
I think it's also worth reading some of Norman Finkelstein's work for a more radical Jewish perspective on the historical memory of the Holocaust.
This implies that Palestine itself is not antisemitic and potentially genocidal against Jews. They voted for Hamas, which states clearly in its 1988 charter that its intention is to destroy Israel.
The real problem in my view is that the Palestinians have been chosen as a scapegoat (the irony of that word is not lost on me) for European sins and European antisemitism.
This implies that Palestine itself is not antisemitic and potentially genocidal against Jews. They voted for Hamas, which states clearly in its 1988 charter that its intention is to destroy Israel.
That's not what I'm saying – my point is that the impetus for the creation of Israel was the Holocaust which was (surprise) not actually carried out by the Palestinians. The Germans, Italians,...
That's not what I'm saying – my point is that the impetus for the creation of Israel was the Holocaust which was (surprise) not actually carried out by the Palestinians. The Germans, Italians, Austrians, etc were the ones who actually carried out the atrocities, however the Palestinians have had to suffer the loss of their homes and their right to self-determination; the continental Europeans have not.
An invasion would expend the last dregs of moral authority that Israel has left, but I don't see the current US admin doing anything but being solidly supportive of the impending slaughter. Biden...
An invasion would expend the last dregs of moral authority that Israel has left, but I don't see the current US admin doing anything but being solidly supportive of the impending slaughter. Biden has described himself as a Zionist in the past, he's ideologically aligned with the people like Netanyahu who want ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Palestine. He'll say what he needs to publically about wanting to follow international law and place humanitarian need as a priority, but he'll do nothing of substance to ensure that happens or to hold Israel to account.
Read between the lines, over the weekend the line has gone from "we support israel's right to defense" to "israel should follow the international law for war." That's about as explicit of a "wtf...
Read between the lines, over the weekend the line has gone from "we support israel's right to defense" to "israel should follow the international law for war."
That's about as explicit of a "wtf are you guys doing" that you'll ever get from the state department. They've seen some shit, and it's not good.
This just isn’t true at all. We already know the US has been trying to delay the invasion until human corridors can be established. They might not end up being successful but I highly doubt it...
This just isn’t true at all. We already know the US has been trying to delay the invasion until human corridors can be established. They might not end up being successful but I highly doubt it will be for lack of trying.
An excellent piece in Foreign Affairs arguing that the United States must use it’s considerable leverage to avert both human and strategic disaster in the region.
So I’ve read that the Hamas leadership is mostly living it up in Qatar and remotely directing people to die back in Gaza.
There is no dismantling them by carpet bombing Gaza. They should be doing the Munich thing and hitting them where they are instead.
Yea I had similar thoughts. If you’re already going to be violating international law you probably don’t care about a few extra-judicial murders and they would be a lot more justifiable to your allies and probably the world.
My guess is that an operation like that doesn’t materialize in a few weeks and it’s probably not an option to satiate the public desire for action in the short term.
Not directly doubting you, but I find this tough to believe on face value. Source, please?
Their senior leadership got kicked out of Palestine and nobody else wants them.
Even being there would have made them high priority assassination targets anyway.
Thanks!
In some respects could that also be considered not to be much of a distinction for Israel? If they root out those who are heeding orders from Hamas leadership, then Hamas leadership is no longer leading if there's no one listening to them. Of course leaving whatever leaders may possibly be in Qatar or elsewhere to continue existing leaves open the possibility they will find new people to listen to them, and perhaps Israel will go for them still via other means, but seemingly they want to get rid of people who would listen to that kind of leadership to begin with, even if those people aren't the leaders.
If they didn’t spot this attack ahead of time I really doubt they have the intelligence networks in place to actually know who is and isn’t Hamas on the ground. So while that might work, it seems a lot harder than disrupting their leadership and foreign financial connections to starve them out that way. Much lower human toll too.
The article does a terrific job of looking at the broader picture and emphasizing that the siege and ground invasion of Gaza are strategically and criminally wrong.
Hamas is getting precisely what it was aiming for - a disproportionate Israeli retaliation that will further alienate the Arab world and demolish any hope of peace for decades to come.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn Gaza into a trash compactor, but I’m curious what response would have eased tensions. Clearly there are less bad options, but how about good ones?
I don’t know if there are any good options.
People are making the argument that Israel has to do something, which I’m sympathetic to but the same line of reasoning kicked off an Iraq and Afghanistan quagmire which was nothing short of a disaster.
If they must proceed with an invasion, they could setup refugee camps along the border and give people weeks to get out. Control access/weapons and arrest known Hamas members that try to leave. Then proceed with an invasion. You’re not going to eliminate Hamas that way, but you could do a great deal to disarm them.
And not to sound callous, but if they need ‘retribution’, a Mossad kill squad directed at the Hamas leaders in Qatar is going to be actually directed at those responsible and have both less blowback and be considerably easier to accomplish successfully than a ground invasion of Gaza with no clear end goals. And it’s not like Israel hasn’t done similar in the past.
At the end of the day, I don’t think Israel gets a free pass on there being a lack of options. Even just slowing down their current course of action would be a great deal more humane.
When Israel told Gazan civilians to evacuate from the city towards southern Gaza, Hamas countered by telling them to stay in their homes. Hamas hides behind civilians -- they would not in a million years allow everyone to get out this way, nor any other because it means they lose power.
That's why it's also fanciful that the author says Israel should "find ways" to get at Hamas without harming innocents. It has been proven time and time again that no matter what Israel does, innocent Palestinians are killed... That's just the Hamas MO. They only gain power from being able to blame Israel for every civilian life lost. They hold their own population hostage because they would rather rule over the rubble than yield.
This is a call for higher standards of execution, not lower standards. More focus is required, the idea that you need to loosen rules of engagement and limit expediency as a result of increased situational difficulty seems like a fallacy. There are a lot of extremely intelligent people in Israel, defaulting to "our hands are tied and we can only bomb innocents to neutralize the threat" seems absurd. It seems more of an appeal to bloodthirst than THE ONLY way to help resolve the situation.
I feel that you are missing @isleepinahammock 's point.
In every situation, everyone wants "higher standards of execution". A programmer wants 100% test coverage and six months of QA and bugfixing time. Magnus Carlsen wants another five minutes to think about his next move. Their point is that there are costs to those higher standards.
I don't think it's reasonable to handwave these costs away, just because "there are a lot of extremely intelligent people in Israel", therefore a solution must exist.
Empirically, no such solution has surfaced in the last few decades. There are a lot of things that really intelligent people have failed to do, and there are problems with no known solutions.
A person might disagree with Israel's valuation of Israeli lives versus Palestinian civilian lives, and by extension, disagree that the level of threat posed by Palestine justifies Israel's actions.
But I think that completely handwaving away the existence of the tradeoff, in favour of an unexplained perfect alternative which might not even exist, is not very reasonable and not very convincing.
Sometimes in a war, an enemy takes advantage of your constraints. These might be physical constraints - for example, they have the high ground and you don’t. It may be that some attacks are just impossible and it’s better to try something else, or there’s no alternative you can see, so it’s a stalemate.
I think when the constraints are physical it’s understood that you don’t always succeed.
An enemy might also try to take advantage of your moral constraints; there are things you won’t do. And then the question is, when are moral constraints real constraints?
It’s sometimes said that war is a moral solvent, meaning that people find themselves doing things they would never consider under normal circumstances, because victory or at least avoiding defeat is that important. It of course starts with killing people, which is already morally abhorrent, but accepted and even celebrated in a war when it’s the enemy being killed. But how far are you going to go?
There are international standards for what counts as a war crime, which is a sort of backup moral constraint - sure, you’re killing people, but you won’t do that. The enemy can take advantage of those too. And again, the question is whether a moral constraint is a real constraint or not.
Sometimes you don’t win. Maybe there is no solution you can see within your constraints. (And also, maybe committing war crimes wouldn’t change that?)
If “stopping Hamas without massive civilian casualties” is impossible, maybe that means winning is impossible? It seems like not winning (yet) is an option?
Where does the insistence that the Israelis must win now at all costs come from? The Israelis may suffer losses, but they aren’t going to lose. The situation doesn’t seem nearly so desperate as what the Ukrainians had to deal with. This conflict has been going on, off and on, for decades. What’s the hurry?
I don't think this is a very strong argument. There are very obvious ways that Israel can begin to escalate to signal very clearly their intent if they desired and people aren't fleeing because they think Israel is in a blood rage, they are fleeing because their city is being bombed.
This argument seems to be premised on the fact the a ground invasion is successful and Hamas is destroyed. That seems like a very unlikely outcome to me, bordering on fantasy.
Israel has already publicly stated it won't reoccupy Gaza. If that's true, (and most likely even if it isn't), they have no hope of solving any problems. Even if they were able to destroy Hamas, which is extremely dubious when many of them can just melt back into the civilian population, the power vacuum left by a destroyed Hamas will be filled by somebody else. If Israel expends the lives of thousands of its soldiers and thousands of civilians and accomplishes almost nothing, how is that a good outcome? And that's not even the worst outcome, dragging Hezbollah and Iran into this conflict is a possibility that must be considered that will alter this world's trajectory for the next century.
This is a false dichotomy. You are saying that if Israel does not conduct a ground invasion immediately, nothing can or will be done at all. That's very evidently not true. Consider a hypothetical scenario where a country with a credible nuclear threat brazenly assassinated several US politicians. Surely, there would be a response but it definitely wouldn't be an immediate ground invasion. Sometimes, the strategic picture must inform the response.
Israel has the right to exist and the right to defend itself. But this invasion is not even in it's own self interest, never mind general human interest. It plays directly into Hamas' hands, who have an interest in making the human price as high and as unbearable as possible. When your enemy tries to provoke you into making strategic mistake, your best option is to respond in a manner they didn't predict. This is assuredly what Hamas predicted and has prepared for.
This isn't really a realistic option for a large number of reasons. I'm sorry but this comes across as poorly-informed fanfiction that's trying to justify what would ultimately result in a genocide.
For one, we know how Israel wants to fight this war, there is no shortage of analysis out there. Their military is currently trying to adapt a new doctrine, 'Decisive Victory', which is aimed at a short war in which Israel can successfully overwhelm it's enemy, potentially on multiple fronts, and disengage to end the conflict on its own terms. It seeking to do this with a combination of overwhelming fire and targeted strikes at key decision-making centers of the enemy. They have no interest, nor the ammunition to level an entire city. Nor would it even be effective. Using artillery to entirely dislodge someone from an urban environment is not even something that's realistically possible, if it was there would not have been a battle of Bakhmut or siege of Mariupol.
I don't know what Hamas will do next. It's my understanding that from a military point of view they are pretty limited, and the idea that they could murder every Israeli seems far-fetched. The argument that there's only so much that can be done from the air applies to them too, particularly with supplies cut off.
Also, I never said anything about Israel doing nothing or never responding with force.
Probably the next thing to do would be to try to answer my own question about what are the sources of urgency, but I think I've run out of steam on this discussion so I'll leave it here.
They have definitely tried to stop people, setting up roadblocks and such. But people are definitely evacuating and on the move. I’ve been watching a lot of livestreams and videos coming out of Gaza, Hamas either hasn’t been effective at or isn’t trying to stop everyone.
And regardless, you don’t get to do basically nothing and then say “well it wouldn’t have mattered because it wouldn’t work anyways.” There is a moral imperative to try, even if you’re not successful.
Indeed; Israel may be in a kind of zugzwang, where the best (long-term) option would be no (immediate) action, and yet that is completely infeasible from a political perspective.
One comment on the matter that put the scale of this attack on Israel in perspective for me was the comparison that if scaled to the proportions of the USA, it would have been like as if around 45.000 people had been killed in a single day. On US soil.
Imagine what would happen then? How would the country react to an attack of that dimension?
Reminds me of how one of the silver linings of 9/11 is that the World Trade Center was relatively empty at the time of the attacks -- "only" ~2,000 were killed, but the towers had an average peak working population of ~50,000 during the day, and that's not counting the many thousands of tourists. I can't even imagine how much more traumatizing an attack of that magnitude would have been -- and even 9/11 was not an attack aimed at a particularly bitter ethnic and religious divide, launched on a religious holiday, and with countless cases of torture and ongoing hostage-taking on top of the raw body count.
I think a ground invasion of Gaza is a historic mistake, but the idea of any Israeli government (let alone this one) doing nothing out of the ordinary in response is hard to imagine.
I wanted to double-check for myself: USA population is 340M and Israel is 9.2M, which is almost a factor of 37. So depending on how many Israelis died on October 7th (1,300? 1,400?), it would proportionately feel like 48k-52k deaths.
For comparison, the Gaza Strip has 2.1M people. Wikipedia currently says 1400 Israelis and 2339 Palestinians dead; scaling these up to the US population (Israel 37x, Gaza Strip 162x, fudging the numbers a little bit because city sizes don't quite line up), imagine terrorists killing everyone in San Luis Obispo — and in retaliation, New Orleans was flattened. It's hard to imagine either side being happy about the outcome.
In terms of foreign policy, I can't say---but in terms of domestic policy, we likely would have gone (even further than we actually did) down the path of reducing freedoms and creeping militarization. I wouldn't consider that a good thing.
I’m not really educated on the matter but I’ve also wondered if shoring up defenses, rescuing captured Israelis, and imprisoning insurgents would be the best move short and long term.
How exactly would they go about rescue and capture in a way that is different from what they are doing? Hamas is going to put up a full defense against any level of invasion so sending only a small force would just result in a bloodbath of the IDF. Sending a large force will inevitably result in widespread collateral damage and any civilians caught up in the sidelines will struggle to survive. So the only way to do what you say is exactly what they are already doing.
The only other alternative is doing nothing at all.
How are they going to imprison anyone without a ground invasion? You can’t air strike someone into prison. And Hamas’ infrastructure is complex — it would be futile sending in small teams to extract hostages from a universally hostile population.
So it has been 24 hours since Israel sent out the evacuation notice and they haven’t proceeded with whatever it was people assumed they’d do.
This leads me to believe what’s happening is either the US is talking them down in back channels or there is a lot of disorganization in the Israeli ranks. Or some combination of the two. Like we know Netanyahu and his people are idiots, just from an administrative standpoint. I suspect the civilian leadership and comms offices are saying moronic shit off the cuff and then the more seasoned IDF and counter-terrorism people are trying to mellow it out.
New York Times is reporting the invasion is imminent but I had similar thoughts to you. Hopefully the USA is able to move the needle on this one, I really don’t see this going well.
The headline was 24 hours, but in the story I read they said it wasn't a hard deadline.
It's both; they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. The deadline is 24 hours, but they've also publicly acknowledged that their deadline is impossible and said it'll take a few days - which is also impossible; a few months would be the shortest realistic option here. Like, Israel knows there aren't millions of spare houses in the southern Gaza strip, let alone everything else.
Israel is/was just trying to manufacture a justification for future war crimes - "we gave advance warning for civilians to leave, but they stuck around after the deadline". They never actually intended for the deadline to be followed, it's just political theatre.
I think that's going a bit far. This doesn't justify the attack and you don't have to like it, but giving warning is better than not giving one, because some people are evacuating. There is a PR aspect to it, but also a real-world effect that's not theatre.
Dissolve the State of Israel as we know it essentially by removing references to being a Jewish nation state, renaming, and taking on a slightly different constitution. Restore Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Juruselem, pull all insances of internationally illegal settlements from occupied territories. Lift the siege of Gaza and pull back forces, create a security situation that would challenge and degrade any terrorist activity within the country. Begin a dialog with the Palestinians and other Arab nations that as the violence eases, Palestinian access to Israel will slowly be restored. Request a third party Arab nation to assist keeping security within Palestine, if acceptable to the Palestinians. Brace fo further attacks while allowing the situation to improve within Palestine, allow Palestinian refugees to return to Palestinian controlled territory.
Terrorism is an act of desperation used by groups to wage war against an overwhelming enemy force that they can't otherwise confront. Despite its portrayal in Western media, terrorism is a rational act. If security and economic opportunity were restored to Palestinians along with a level of reroachment from Israel, then I could guarantee that terrorist activities would be a pale shadow of what they are now and could quite possibly evaporate.
Israel is staring down it's own post-9/11 moment. After the US was attacked it should have taken a hard look at its activities in the Middle East and found a new way to engage the region. We all know what happened instead and twenty years later after much wasted blood and treasure both the US and Middle East are worse off than before. Israel is about to enact that same path and will end up energizing an enemy and creating an insurgency, if they stay in Gaza which will a but be a requirement, and will lose much credibility that they have in the world. Peace is not easy, it requires nations to humble themselves and turn the other cheek, but it can be done
A delicate situation: if civilians stay in Gaza they risk becoming collateral damage; if they have to leave, where would they go? If Israel invades, fighting house-to-house and street-to-street would be no easy task; if they bomb, shell or blockade suspected strong points before civilian evacuation they risk international outrage.
The choice is temporary displacement or enforced martial law: two bad options, but the inevitable consequence of the attack on Israel. What alternative is there?
The world supports Israel now, but they too have only so much political capital. IMO now is the time to start planning to win the peace: what should a post invasion Palestine look like?
No invasion is an option. They could call it off now.
They could, and the government would immediately be replaced by another that will do it. The populace wants revenge. Telling them they should just accept the losses and calm down isn't going to work.
This gets into what really counts as an alternative. Is an option that's physically possible, but has as a prerequisite getting millions of people to change their minds, really an option?
Certainly for any one of us, we can treat an Israel invasion as unstoppable and practically inevitable. That goes for most Israelis too. Unlike with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, maybe there's no single person who could stop it?
Which actions of Hamas would you consider inevitable? Their decisions are certainly not up to us. They aren't up to most Palestinians either.
Maybe you can't stop the war, but there is a choice of whether or not to personally participate. For some people that's very limited. Conscripts still have choices, but they are operating in a system that's designed to enforce their participation.
I believe Israel has required military service. I have only a vague notion of what pressures Palestinians operate under.
If they can't stop themselves, maybe the rest of the world should stop them. I am getting major flashbacks to the way I felt at the start of the invasion of Iraq, where I was so, so angry at other countries for going along with the US when what the US was doing was clearly wrong (in both senses of the word). Those countries should have said no — if you proceed, you will materially lose our support, in both this and in future endeavors.
I think the US's leadership would have approached things a lot more thoughtfully in that case and found a less profoundly stupid and horrible way to placate the idiot masses (after all, they had already convinced the public that Saddam Hussein should take the fall instead of Osama bin Laden; however bloodthirsty the public was, they were still very easy to manipulate to a laughably absurd degree).
And Israel is far more reliant on external allies than the US is. If doing this meant that Israel would be alone in this world, I think they would figure out a different way — like targeting Hamas leadership in Qatar and emphasizing the importance of this in their propaganda outlets. Yes, something has to happen to placate the too-angry-to-think voters, but Israel's leadership actually has a lot of control over the details here.
Sure, if they could pull off removing all Hamas fighters from Gaza without an invasion then you'd be right. That would be a diplomatic/political miracle; and if you can solve that, then you could almost solve the Middle East peace problem.
I don't see how they'd do that with an invasion either, as long as there are more people who become willing to fight.
It's easy to see how people will suffer and not very clear what might be accomplished. Perhaps the Israelis had a contingency plan ready, but we don't know what it is.
Yeah man, only bad options.
Also this article Al Monitor Security Briefing
Thank you. Deleting.
No problem, I figured you didn't know.
May I ask where you saw the article? I think it's a good idea to carry upstream if you think the framing 'here's what a US marine thinks" is naive rather than malicious (which it often can be).
Messaging you. Good idea.
Not ending Hamas.
Who is saying they should do that? Offense is different from defense. There are also a lot of different approaches to offensive action.
Firstly it's not as though the Israeli security establishment, left-wing groups and the press haven't warned that increasing oppression of the Palestinians was bound to lead to some kind of response. If you kill someone's with a targeted missile strike, and they choose to kill all of your family members in revenge, that's not justified – but it is a reason (laying aside moral considerations and taking only self-interest into account) not to kill their sibling (or lock up their sibling, etc).
But the conclusion of your argument seems to be that it is worth killing tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of brown people who have been forced into what is effectively an open-air prison if it makes the wealthy white people next door will feel more secure?
I think you started out with a possibly good argument against continuing the revenge cycle, but it really went off the rails at the end. Being secure against attacks is something everyone wants and deserves. Being rich or white doesn't make it less of a valid desire. Also, many Israelis are neither.
Sure, and the Palestinians also want to be secure against attacks. Israel is a mostly white country whose citizens live protected by the Iron Dome and a massive security establishment. The Palestinians enjoy none of this.
Of course I understand that Israelis don't want to be blown up by rockets and this desire is reasonable. I'm not arguing that Israelis aren't justified in wanting to have security – I am arguing that their security has come (and probably will come) at the expense of the Palestinians who have never been able to achieve even a modicum of the security Israelis have since the early 1900s (because of the Israelis). I am also arguing that Israel is best understood in the context of other colonial settlements such as France in Algeria.
Israel is a majority white country and it is a wealthy country (similarly wealthy to most other western countries). It's similar to how most people would think of France as a predominantly white country even though it has a large ethnic minority population.
I still don’t see how framing this as a generic racial conflict or in terms of generic colonialism is helpful. Colonialism of course plays a large role in Israel’s history as well as the entire Middle East, but it’s a complicated history, there are special circumstances, and it seems like making analogies to other countries’ colonial histories only goes so far?
Perhaps I’m wrong, though. Has someone written a comparison you like?
Let me first avoid beating around the bush and say that in the position we are today I don't think Israel should be dismantled and should continue to exist – but with substantial changes to make it more democratic. I broadly support a one-state solution (of the kind Arendt and Saïd supported). The real problem in my view is that the Palestinians have been chosen as a scapegoat (the irony of that word is not lost on me) for European sins and European antisemitism. Obviously the whole "the Jews could have been given a chunk of Germany" is a ludicrous suggestion, but Germany could have provided the Palestinians funding to establish their own state, or agreed to provide German passports to those who were made stateless. Even today Israel serves as a foil for the right to hide their antisemitism – by using it to discredit the left and direct focus onto left wing groups and away from their facist antisemitic views.
I think Edward Saïd has some interesting work on the issue (see Zionism from the Perspective of its Victims).
I think that in geopolitics we have to think about outcomes and ignore ideological justifications – in terms of outcome how is the Israeli case not a case of settler colonialism? We have seen a group of predominantly white Europeans move to a country, force out the inhabitants and claim it as their own. They have then established a state where they have literal apartheid (with big fences and walls) and maintain a big open air prison with multiple million people in it. The only way to have real peace is for Israel to provide the Palestinians with citizenship and form a state where both sides may exist peacefully.
I think it's also worth reading some of Norman Finkelstein's work for a more radical Jewish perspective on the historical memory of the Holocaust.
This implies that Palestine itself is not antisemitic and potentially genocidal against Jews. They voted for Hamas, which states clearly in its 1988 charter that its intention is to destroy Israel.
That's not what I'm saying – my point is that the impetus for the creation of Israel was the Holocaust which was (surprise) not actually carried out by the Palestinians. The Germans, Italians, Austrians, etc were the ones who actually carried out the atrocities, however the Palestinians have had to suffer the loss of their homes and their right to self-determination; the continental Europeans have not.
An invasion would expend the last dregs of moral authority that Israel has left, but I don't see the current US admin doing anything but being solidly supportive of the impending slaughter. Biden has described himself as a Zionist in the past, he's ideologically aligned with the people like Netanyahu who want ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Palestine. He'll say what he needs to publically about wanting to follow international law and place humanitarian need as a priority, but he'll do nothing of substance to ensure that happens or to hold Israel to account.
Read between the lines, over the weekend the line has gone from "we support israel's right to defense" to "israel should follow the international law for war."
That's about as explicit of a "wtf are you guys doing" that you'll ever get from the state department. They've seen some shit, and it's not good.
This just isn’t true at all. We already know the US has been trying to delay the invasion until human corridors can be established. They might not end up being successful but I highly doubt it will be for lack of trying.