I think warrants issued against Sinwar, Al-Masri and Haniyeh are very likely. Warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant IMHO are over 50%
Proportationality and intention are important when the ICC interprets what constitutes war crime or crime against humanity. These cases also set up a precedents. Arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Gallant is for:
- Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Statute;
- Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health contrary to article 8(2)(a)(iii), or cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
- Wilful killing contrary to article 8(2)(a)(i), or Murder as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
- Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime contrary to articles 8(2)(b)(i), or 8(2)(e)(i);
- Extermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity;
- Persecution as a crime against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(h); Other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k).
ICC works in conjunction with national courts. If a country has a functional, independent judiciary, that judiciary gets the right to address the wrong. Or not.
Israel’s judiciary is both functional and independent. Very independent. Of Netanyahu in particular.
And the Israeli judiciary seems to be going along with this.
Source: https://www.icc-cpi.int/about/how-the-court-works
> The ICC is intended to complement, not to replace, national criminal systems; it prosecutes cases only when States do not are unwilling or unable to do so genuinely.
No, it does not.
> ICC works in conjunction with national courts
Not in the way you are suggesting.
> If a country has a functional, independent judiciary, that judiciary gets the right to address the wrong
No, the ICC will rule a case inadmissible if a state has investigated and/or prosecuted that specific case (not just if it has some general level of legal functionality), unless the ICC also fines that the investigation or prosecution was not genuine (e.g., was pretextual for the purpose of, say, giving the accused an exonerating document to wave around to protect against ICC prosecution.)
See Article 17 of the Rome Statute.
No. Israel’s courts ratifying alleged war crimes is the Israeli national system being “unwilling or unable to [apply international law] genuinely.”
Notably, the US is NOT a signatory of the ICC (this was a whole thing in the Iraq War days).
[0] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ICC_member_states.sv...
(Edit: I'm a dummy, this was the ICTY, not the ICC, but the ICTY was the precursor model of the ICC in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars).
If the israeli judicial system made a good faith attempt to prosecute this crime following the standards of international law, it would probably prevent this warrant even though Israel is not a party to the court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
The Biden admin cooperated with the ICC, specifically quietly handing documents to the ICC that details Putin's war crimes and urging them to submit arrest warrants for Putin. Notably Russia is also not a signatory of the ICC, so there is definitely precedent for this process that even has had the backing of the US.
IMO Khan's speech today really speaks for itself. The "International Rule of Law" is nothing but a joke if we don't not apply it equally and blindly that will ultimately lead to the degradation of modern society and our species. I highly urge people to go and check out his speech on the matter and to form your own opinion.
“Rule of law” means all people are equal before the law.
It’s hard to pull off. Some nations have, most haven’t.
But Chairman Xi isn’t going to face charges for his crimes against Uyghurs.
Most countries have no rule of law, and internationally, none do.
The fact that China gets away with its treatment of the Uyghurs (and plenty of other major powers that technically break ICC laws) is definitely an example of how much international law is a farce, though they aren't getting around the ICC by staying within their own borders.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_indicted_in_t...
Part of the "Rule of Law" is enforcement of that law. Who could realistically enforce it against the US? How about China?
This would mean that Netanyahu has been charged, tried and eventually acquitted of the same crimes. ICC investigates if the national proceedings are genuine.
To start the process, Israeli prosecutor must prosecute.
Does the fact that the ICC disagrees with the Israeli courts mean the ICC is correct?
> The ICC was established by its state parties as a court of limited jurisdiction. Those limits are rooted in principles of complementarity, which do not appear to have been applied here amid the Prosecutor’s rush to seek these arrest warrants rather than allowing the Israeli legal system a full and timely opportunity to proceed.[0]
---
The ICC defines:
> 1. Complementarity: The principle of complementarity governs the exercise of the Court’s jurisdiction. This distinguishes the Court in several significant ways from other known institutions, including the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the ICTY and the ICTR). The Statute recognizes that States have the first responsibility and right to prosecute international crimes. The ICC may only exercise jurisdiction where national legal systems fail to do so, including where they purport to act but in reality are unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out proceedings. The principle of complementarity is based both on respect for the primary jurisdiction of States and on considerations of efficiency and effectiveness, since States will generally have the best access to evidence and witnesses and the resources to carry out proceedings. Moreover, there are limits on the number of prosecutions the ICC, a single institution, can feasibly conduct.[1]
namely,
> The ICC may only exercise jurisdiction where national legal systems fail to do so, including where they purport to act but in reality are unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out proceedings.
The US argues that the ICC has not adequately allowed this process to play out through the courts in Israel.
---
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs states:
> The criteria of unwillingness or inability to carry out proceedings would involve some indication of purposely shielding the accused from criminal responsibility or a lack of intent to bring the person to justice. This may be inferred from political interference or deliberate obstruction and delay, from institutional deficiencies due to political subordination of the legal system, or procedural irregularities indicating a lack of willingness and inability to investigate or prosecute genuinely.[2]
---
Imo the hermeneutics are clear, though it will be up to the lawyers from either side to make arguments in favor of/against.
[0]: https://www.state.gov/warrant-applications-by-the-internatio...
[1]: https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/NR/rdonlyres/20B...
[2]: https://jcpa.org/article/would-judicial-reforms-in-israel-op....
"Prosecutor’s rush to seek these arrest warrants" does not seem to be true.
ICC prosecutor did not bring this case quickly without warning. He has consistently demanded that action must be taken or he will prosecute. Israel's Supreme Court has the authority to conduct judicial review of laws and government decisions and intervene in exceptional, extreme cases. Israeli prosecutors have had time to charge.
>Since last year, in Ramallah, in Cairo, in Israel and in Rafah, I have consistently emphasised that international humanitarian law demands that Israel take urgent action to immediately allow access to humanitarian aid in Gaza at scale. I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome Statute offences. I could not have been clearer.
>As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my Office takes action. That day has come.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-...
btw. The US has demanded same and put conditions to military aid.
EDIT: It's also important to note the odd timing of asking for arrest warrants for the Hamas leadership at the same time as the Israeli arrest warrants.
Clearly unlike Israel there is no chance in *$#@ that Hamas would prosecute their own leadership for violation of international humanitarian law. The Hamas violations have also occurred earlier.
I.e. Israel should be given more time for its independent legal system to evaluate whether or not there's a case and pursue it. Israel justice system has put prime ministers and presidents on trial. Hamas shouldn't be given any time.
Given this you'd think arrest warrants for Hamas leadership would come a lot sooner.
Since this isn't the case one has to wonder if the prosecutor is doing a "both sides" kind of thing, maybe afraid of backlash if they only go after one side, in which case the response of Israel to the request to increase aid (which has happened) is not relevant.
How long was that supposed ramp up? Maybe a couple weeks out of 7 months.
EDIT: I can't find a concise summary but latest update: "422 aid trucks were inspected and transferred to the Gaza Strip, yesterday, (May.19). These trucks entered from the various aid routes we developed: Ashdod port, Erez crossing, Judea and Samaria, and JLOTS (maritime route)."
Supposedly the UN said Gaza needs a minimum of 100 trucks a day. https://www.newarab.com/news/un-puts-gaza-humanitarian-aid-n...
EDIT2: It's worth mentioning that since Israel took control of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing Egypt is refusing to let aid in through that crossing.
It should be noted in context that even bringing in aid is dangerous. The population attacks the aid drivers for two reasons (one, to get the aid, and two, they consider those drivers "traitors" and have been attacking them for long before the current conflict). And there is not insignificant risk to the Gazans as well, there was an incident a few months ago where an aid truck ran people over trying to stop it and some people were killed in a very gruesome fashion.
I think yesterday or the day before the first aid came in via the port, actually.
The Hamas started calling this the "Flour Massacre" since it has a certain ring to it. Given where the information is coming from I suspect it's not true. Like anything else, we don't have independent information. The IDF did investigate this as well and admitted to shooting at people approaching their security vehicles (that were there to secure the aid delivery).
Need about 2X10^6 X 2000 = 4X10^9 calories as day.
At 600 cal/kg you need then 6.67 X 10^6 kg of rice per day.
Truckloads = 6.67X10^6 kg / 35,000 kg/truck = 190 truckloads of rice per day.
Most likely conclusion is Salafists and their supporters lie about everything.
Are you the salafist you speak of?
> Are you the salafist you speak of?
> Clearly unlike Israel there is no chance in *$#@ that Hamas would prosecute their own leadership for violation of international humanitarian law.
Huh, I almost forgot there were massive protests against the current PM when he set out to cripple the ability of the said Judiciary from trying him in court. But go on.
> it prosecutes cases only when States do not are unwilling or unable to do so genuinely.
And if you read the last part of the sentence you quoted it should make it pretty clear that it doesn't work like you have interpreted it.
It's similar to the ICC's impotent protest of Putin, when they only would pose a serious concern to those who would oppose Putin, and face investigation for their methods. The ICC is demonstrating the logical flaws at the very heart of its structure.
Most importantly, if a sheriff was trying to catch a murderer by burning down the hotel where the murderer was known to sleep in, with all other guests still inside, I assure you any legal system would seek to arrest the sheriff just as much as the original murderer.
Secondly, while Hamas is clearly a terrorist organization, it is also the de facto and de jure sovereign power in Gaza, it's not an outlaw gang. Just like Hitler was not an outlaw pirate, even though his actions were the highest crimes against humanity.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
The situation and history is impressively messy.
Let's extend your hypothetical-- let's stipulate there is a bloodthirsty monster that holds an entire hotel hostage while actively bombing and attacking a nearby town. The monster is de facto hotel manager, because the the despairing people in the hotel at some point elected the the monster to rule the hotel. The sheriff of the town next door (which is being bombed) shows up and defends the town as best they can by attacking the hotel, and there ensues a pitched battle.
What role at that point do bewigged stateless jurists play who have no force of arms at their disposal to defend or attack or secure the peace? As a matter of history Germany did suffer mightily in WWII for the crimes of the Nazis; if the ICC were in operation then would it have arrested (or investigated and hobbled) Churchill, Zukov, Patton and Eisenhower? And then impotently and cynically declared its dissatisfaction with Hitler and Goebbels after blunting the Allies' efforts solve the problem the only practical way available to anyone, by force of arms?
I sympathize with the humanitarian concerns on both sides, but in this case the ICC is demonstrating its own flaws, which are legion. In your hypothetical, the only people threatened by the bewigged jurists are the sheriff and town precisely because they respect the international order and rule of law, and the ICC would, practically speaking, due to its inherent flaws, solely do the bidding of a monster.
What were the people despairing of in this scenario? Did it have something to do with the actions of the nearby town?
Today, France or the UK or Germany or my own country, Romania, can claim that collaboration with the regime in Israel and/or the one in Gaza is not problematic, because no court of law has found that they engage in genocide. If the ICC finds that there is a credible enough case that they would issue arrest warrants for the highest ranking politicians of those two states, then this would be no longer acceptable. They would have no more fig leaf to hide behind: a court we recognize as legitimate has made it clear that there is a plausible case for genocide taking place, and so we must (if we abide by our own laws, treaties, and logic) end our collaboration with these regimes and seek to bring them to justice.
And I find it very interesting that you're comparing the Palestinians with Nazi Germany, and Israel with the Allies. In fact it was Israel that invaded and is currently occupying the Palestinian territories, just like Nazi Germany did with so much of Europe, and it is Israel conducting a genocidal attack in Gaza, not the other way around. Palestine is much closer in this scenario to occupied France or Poland, striking back occasionally at their occupiers. Unfortunately, they are lacking powerful allies like those two countries had to help them free themselves, and they have also been radicalized and are choosing to murderously and condemnably attack the civilian population of Israel instead of focusing on military and state installations as those revolutionary forces mostly did.
If Israel did so, Hamas would rampage and slaughter the people of Israel just as they did Oct. 7.
If Hamas did so, on Oct. 6 they would have lived in peace. If they did so now, the civilians of Gaza would live in peace, and Israel probably would downgrade its activities even against the Hamas organization specifically.
This indeed is the key issue in every war, which by its very nature is a failure of both politics and of "justice" of the bewigged variety. There is no "justice" in war, only the right to self defense which Israel alone reasonably claims here. I tend to be sympathetic to international institutions like the ICC, but this demonstrates it's either corrupt or impractical or both.
Peace in the sense of no actual violence, perhaps. But, from everything I’ve read, the actual conditions imposed on Gaza by Israel prior to October 7 seem barely tolerable by those at the receiving end. As far as I can tell, the West Bank has merely been peaceful-ish.
> If they did so now, the civilians of Gaza would live in peace
There are ~2.4 million people in Gaza, total land area of 141 square miles, no usable water or electricity (does anyone actual believe that, if Israel turned the water and electricity supplies back on right now, that anything would actually work?) and nowhere near enough food. Reports suggest that over half of the housing stock has been destroyed. There wasn’t a whole lot of economic activity before the war.
What would happen if Hamas disarmed itself tomorrow? Or disappeared outright? I don’t think Gaza would magically be okay.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Conference_of_1946%E2...
That is a fabrication that goes boldly against everything we know. If Hamas layed down their arms, the Gaza population would still live in an open-air prison, with no access to anything that Israel doesn't want them to have. It's very likely that Israeli settlers would start stealing their land like they do in the West Bank, with help from the IDF and enthusiastic support from the Israeli government.
It's telling that Netanyahu and most others in the Israeli government, and the general Israeli public, have been explicit and consistent for at least a decade: they see no future for Gaza and the West Bank different from the present. A two-state solution is unacceptable to them, and an integration of such a large Arab population into a single Israeli state would undermine the Jewish character of Israel. So, if the Palestinians put down their arms, they'll continue to live as a stateless people, without the right to leave the territory except at the whims of a country they have no say in. Basically, they'll live as prisoners, as will their children, and their children's children.
The alternative argument seems to be that Hamas should sacrifice Gazan civilians to make a moral point. There's a scene in Shrek about that kind of logic.
Even still, I do not agree at all that if Hamas stops fighting, Israel would immediately stop hostilities. I think they have proven very clearly, through words and actions, that they are seeking to break the spirit of Palestinians (or at least of Gazans), and to punish them for October 7th. If Hamas surrendered, Israel would just claim that they didn't, that it's either a ruse or that only a handful of the terrorists have surrendered and they need to continue the killing until they can confirm.
Again, I would say, the Rule of Lord Farquaad applies.
Edit: it does mention Sinwar.
Pretty clearly the U.S. and the South Vietnamese military. Just because you can't tell who is a combatant and who isn't doesn't give you permission to slaughter entire villages.
If the group killing your soldiers isn't adhering to these rules of war then all the civilians in the area will find themselves at risk.
There is no world where combatants can expect to be allowed to enjoy the protections civilians are afforded while still killing you.
The US base in Okinawa has a rather dubious reputation that continues.
That is true, but this does not take away the protection afforded to civilians. As a concrete example, if you take fire from people in civilian clothing holed up in a hospital, then you can return fire in that specific occasion, but you may not start to indiscriminately fire upon people in civilian clothing or hospitals.
(Also, you are not required to wear a uniform. You are required to distinguish yourself from the civpop by at least openly wearing arms and/or wearing a distinctive sign. Keep in mind not everyone in a uniform is a combatant, and not all combatants are armed.)
If group of villagers resists you, maybe you have no right to be there.
Yes, because Hamas uses human shields and hospitals as bases.
Still civilians, obviously. Cheering something does not make you lose civilian status. Only actively engaging in combat in some capacity does.
Does compulsory military service and being a reserve make you a valid military target?
People can justify killing in all sorts of ways.
No.
> People can justify killing in all sorts of ways.
Which is why we have international laws, in which smart people sat down and codified how this all works.
And yet it is ignored in every war. It’s almost as though encouraging killing people leads to problems.
I think the answer to all these questions entirely depends on which side of the conflict you support, those who see Palestinians as hapless victims who have been abused by the evil Jews will say of course none of this is combat and attacking those innocent people is the highest war crime; on the other hand those who see Jews just trying to live in peace in their homeland being attacked by bedeviled Palestinians will argue that assisting soldiers in war makes you an active combatant, and thus a legitimate (though possibly regrettable) military target.
There are international laws that define these things. Sure, some of it is a judgement call, like all laws, but those laws do exist.
I'm not a lawyer or very knowledgable about international law, but I'll try to answer to my best understanding:
> There were many people who streamed over the fence with Hamas, is invasion engaging in active combat?
Yes, if they are actively attacking civilians. If they "streamed over the fence" to rob and loot (which many did), I'm not quite sure.
> There were many people who spit on, hit, or otherwise assaulted the kidnapped civilians, is that actively engaging in combat?
Spit on? I don't think so, not if they weren't the ones who captured the kidnapped civilians and they were just "passing through" as in the infamous videos. Other forms of assault? Depends on that context.
> does jailing civilians against their will count as actively engaging in combat?
Yes, I'm fairly sure that keeping a hostage makes you an active combatant (and committing a war crime).
> IDF soldiers report many children and women acting as spotters for Hamas, is that active combat?
Yes, spotters are quite clearly combatants.
> I think the answer to all these questions entirely depends on which side of the conflict you support,
It shouldn't, really. That's what international law is for (and in general, our principles shouldn't depend on which side we support).
My main disagreement with most people, I find, is a disagreement on the base facts. Most people are ignorant of most of the base facts of what is going on in this conflict. Though yes, sometimes people do agree on the facts and interpret them differently.
It is also a war crime, and doesn't even have the fig leaf of an active war to justify it.
> Displacement of civilian populations in occupied areas, and mass settlement of occupier civilian populations into the West Bank also needs to be up there.
There was a UN resolution in I think 1973 that deemed Israeli settlements in the West Bank "illegal" without stating what law was being transgressed. There is a law that governments can not move their populations into occupied territories (as the Germans did to Poland, and the law exists specifically in response to that) but no law against the population getting up and moving itself (as the Germans did to France) because international law applies to States, not Persons.
The term "no legal basis" is often thrown around referring to Israeli settlements but that is quite the red herring - anything is legal if there is no law forbidding it. And specifically in this case, actually, there in fact _is_ a law saying that anyone can build a house in the West Bank - the Ottoman law that nobody today has any legal jurisdiction to change.
A final argument against Israeli settlements is that Israel must "give back" the land to the Arabs. It is true that the Israelis occupy the West Bank, but the "give back" part is not. The last state to rule this area that was not an occupation was Great Britian, and even that only under UN Mandate that has since ended (remember, the Jordanian rule was occupation as well). And the ruler before that, the Ottoman Empire, no longer exists and the successor state (Turkey) is not interested in ruling the area (interesting how that might play out, actually).
I actually have been looking for some solid basis of denying the Jews the right to live in the West Bank for about a year and a half now, but I simply can not find such a base. Unless one considers the UN resolutions to be a solid base, but the basis of those resolutions is completely missing - they just seem to be decisions not based on any existing laws in the best case and willfully misinterpreted in the worst case. I'm reading them, and other related documents, in English because I don't speak Chinese, French, or Spanish and my Arabic and Russian are very poor.
"The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49, last paragraph.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
That is the same as a transfer under IHL.
Thank you.
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/israeli-settlements-in-t...
Legal Framework, 11:
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, construction began for approximately 1,280 housing units in the first half of 2023 in Area C.
All of these Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, because they amount to the transfer by Israel of its population into an occupied territory.
For another, that document specifically mentions that the new buildings are in Area C, which has been recinded by the PA (for purpose of discussion, the details are far more complicated than that).
You asked for "something official", "[not] a blog post", "an official declaration".
I took up the challenge and found for you an official document of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights declaring " All of these Israeli settlements are illegal under international law".
> not a statement of what law is being broken.
From the linked document:
International human rights law and international humanitarian law apply concurrently in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of Gaza, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan. This includes the obligations contained in the international human rights treaties to which Israel is a State party,[4] as well as the Regulations respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land of 1907 (Hague Regulations) and the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (Fourth Geneva Convention), which are binding upon Israel as the occupying Power under international humanitarian law
I have no stance on the matter.
You're welcome.
This has been pointed out multiple times now. I'll repeat it once more:
"The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
▶Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49, last paragraph.◀
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
Out of context you are trying to use that quote to protect some land from people living on it. But if you read the entire article, the article clearly protects people from forced transfer - both the residents of the occupied territory and the citizens of the occupying power.
I added emphasis to the quote in the comment you're replying to since you missed it the first time.
And brought up yet again in peer replies while I've been asleep.
You've oft mentioned your repeated failure despite your best efforts to find out which laws are being violated here .. it may have something to do with your demonstrated habit of simply not reading closely.
As mentioned I myself have no stance here other than someone who took an interest in the question and sought a reference.
You appear to be either arguing in bad faith or someone troubled by a reading disorder.
> It's been repeatedly mentioned.
> And brought up yet again in peer replies while I've been asleep.
> You've oft mentioned your repeated failure despite your best efforts to find out which laws are being violated here .. it may have something to do with your demonstrated habit of simply not reading closely.
> As mentioned I myself have no stance here other than someone who took an interest in the question and sought a reference.
> You appear to be either arguing in bad faith or someone troubled by a reading disorder.
You should take up your case for why this is wrong with the lawyers who proof read the Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
> In any case, repeating something does not make it correct.
Indeed. This entire thread is repleat with comments by yourself repeating the claim that you have debunked this interpretation.
> You might not have a stance, but you seem to be affected by the "it's repeated often, so it must be true" thought process - you even defend it.
Read more carefully - I have stated an official position in an official report and referenced it.
This is exactly how we reported such things in the mineral intelligence and energy intelligence companies we launched and later sold on, one to Standard and Poor (of the S&P index).
> The laws are actually quite clear.
Indeed.
You can easily see how the UN Human Rights lawyers read and applied the convention in the case where an occupying country failed to contain their citizens, and went further to support them.
That is the inaction and the action of the state at fault.
Though formally a non-governmental organization, it is funded by the Israeli government and leases lands from the Civil Administration to settle in the West Bank."
This is false.
West Bank settlement is funded by the Israeli government through the World Zionist Organization.
EDIT: downvoters, please understand, the above statement is true. The government of Israel supports settlement via the WZO, which has a division (named "Settlement Division") with the specific purpose of making settlement possible through whatever loopholes can be exploited.
The downvotes are an attempt to obfuscate this fact.
"One of the mechanisms used by the government to favor the Jewish local authorities in the West Bank, in comparison with local authorities inside Israel, is to channel funding through the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization. Although the entire budget of the Settlement Division comes from state funds, as a non-governmental body it is not subject to the rules applying to government ministries in Israel."
https://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/200205_land_g...
In the sense of Article 49 -- "transfer" obviously means any form of actively supported migration (not the coerced transfer) of these peoples into the OT.
In fact, in this specific case, there exists a pre-occupation law that specifically allows for it.
Which "law"? Something from the time of the Mandate?
> In the sense of Article 49 -- "transfer" obviously means any form of actively supported migration (not the coerced transfer) of these peoples into the OT.
> Which "law"? Something from the time of the Mandate?
It protects civilians in occupied territories. Not the supposed "rights" of persons from an Occupying country to settle into these territories under the protection of the Occupier's armed forces and civil administration (as is the current situation in the West Bank).
This is plainly obvious from the language of the GCIV; and it is the overwhelming consensus interpretation of legal scholars on in regard to this section.
This flies in the face of most of what I've heard/read on the subject. Israel is considered an occupying power (in WB and Gaza), and occupying powers in general aren't allowed to build settlements in occupied territories, no?
I'm not sure how the Ottoman law is connected to this at all? Why is that the reigning law of that land, the Ottomans haven't had ownership of it since 1918. Isn't it considered Jordanian land, since they annexed it after 1948?
> This flies in the face of most of what I've heard/read on the subject. Israel is considered an occupying power (in WB and Gaza), and occupying powers in general aren't allowed to build settlements in occupied territories, no?
First I've heard of this interpretation of international law, interesting.
How does incentivizing civilians financially to move there fit into this? How does protecting civilians via the military fit into this?
> Wait, you're saying that because Israel isn't moving citizens into the WB, and it's being done voluntarily, then that makes it legal?
> How does incentivizing civilians financially to move there fit into this? How does protecting civilians via the military fit into this?
Do you know of a good place to read about this?
> There is no financial incentive, other than far more general financial considerations such as the expense of living in e.g. Tel Aviv
This seems false to me. I don't know many details, but it's pretty often discussed that there are different incentives. I can link you to a B'Tselem report about this, but I assume you dislike them as much as I do. So here's instead a CBS story about there being financial incentives to encourage settlers (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-govt-offers-incentives-...).
And if that doesn't work for you, here's a Hebrew-language source about why there's been a rise in home purchases in the WB: https://bizreef.co.il/%D7%94%D7%96%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A7-%...
I'll quote a few relevant sentences (translated to English):
> For example, the government eased the rules for obtaining loans to purchase properties in the area. Additionally, it lowered the taxes on property purchases. Moreover, the government created incentives for entrepreneurs to build in the area.
> As for the military protecting civilians, does not every military protecting it's civilians?
Of course, but the specific accusation against settlers is that they go and build settlements, sometimes purposefully to disrupt Palestinian villages, and then the army has to go surround them and protect them, disrupting the villages more.
There have been numerous terrible incidents, since October 7th, of settlers using various forms of intimidation to drive out Palestinians, e.g. setting houses on fire, sometimes while being protected (but not stopped) by the IDF.
Establishment of settlements is also at least tacitly, and in some cases explicitly, supported by the government, which undercuts the claim that this is citizens acting solely of their own accord.
> None of this addresses the resettlement or removal of existing people, which is plainly a violation of article 49.
If you have specific incidents of displacement that you word like me to address, I'll do that. The recent Sheik Jarrah incident that made international headlines was a property dispute - in fact a terrific example if you want to discuss it as the Jordanian occupation displaced the Jewish family living there.
"The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
Anybody interesting in this should look a bit further up in the thread for my response to the same comment by the same poster. I've continued the conversation only there.
There is much noise me about the settlements, but after a year and a half of researching this I come up empty searching for any solid arguments against them.
False. It directly funds organizations which promote settlement.
> Isn't it considered Jordanian land, since they annexed it after 1948?
Everything in this conflict is a war of words and changing one's interpretation of past events to suit current goals.
You don't need to bring the Ottoman empire back to reverse the expulsion of Palestinians from settlement areas.
> Indeed, it's not clear why the parent poster is talking about countries, when war crimes are crimes against people.
> I'm not sure how the Ottoman law is connected to this at all? Why is that the reigning law of that land, the Ottomans haven't had ownership of it since 1918.
The Israeli occupation can not change the laws of the West Bank. An occupation can pass temporary orders, which are usually limited to (and often renewed after) three years.
Neither could the Jordanian occupation changed the laws of the West Bank, for the same reason.
The British Mandate was allowed to changed laws, and they did change many laws. However Ottoman property laws are very, very complicated and they decided that there was no reason to mess with it. So during the British Mandate the Ottoman property laws remained.
So the land in question has been through a UN mandate and two occupations (one still ongoing), without the property laws being changed. Those Ottoman laws still stand.
If Netanyahu is punished for this, then GWB must face a more severe punishments for his actions in Iraq and Afghanistan which saw far more collateral damage.
> It has to happen in a place where the ICC has jurisdiction.
> Palestine has ratified the Rome Statue
In any case, The Palestinian Authority does not rule the Gaza strip. Then were overthrown in a very bloody coup, 2005 or 2006, in which Hamas threw some 100 PA members off the top of the buildings.
The gist of the argument can be gleaned from its sub-headings:
Palestine is a State for the purposes of the Statute under relevant principles and rules of international law...... 25
C.1. The Montevideo criteria have been less restrictively applied in certain cases........ 25
C.2. It is appropriate to apply the Montevideo criteria less restrictively to Palestine, for the purposes of the Rome Statute ..... 29
C.2.a. The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and it has been recognised that this implies a right to an independent and sovereign State of Palestine... 30
C.2.b. The exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination is being obstructed by practices contrary to international law................... 32
C.2.c. Palestine has been recognised by a significant number of States.............. 34
C.2.d. No other State has sovereignty over the Occupied Palestinian Territory............ 35
C.2.e. Palestine’s status as a State Party must be given effect........ 36
C.2.f. The Prosecution’s alternative position is consistent with international law ........ 39
C.2.g. Participants’ arguments regarding a possible referral by the Security Council are unclear.......... 40
D. The Oslo Accords do not Bar the Exercise of the Court’s Jurisdiction........ 40
D.1. The Oslo Accords regulated a gradual transfer of power to the Palestinian Authority over most of the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) and Gaza.............. 40
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230609070357/http://www.icc-cp...
Coincidentally, Josep Borrell, the foreign policy chief of the EU, announced earlier in the month that several of the bloc's member states intend to recognise Palestinian statehood on the 21st of May - today.
See: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/spain-ireland-reco....
You would be incorrect [0]. The UN recognizes a "State of Palestine" independent of the specific government, which includes both Gaza and the West Bank. This entity, the state of Palestine, not the PLA (that would be weird, like saying the Tory party is signatory to the Rome statute), is signatory to the Rome statute. The state of Palestine is a non-member observer state in the UN.
You're correct that it's good to be precise here, so you should do so around the specific political entity of Palestine when that is what is being discussed.
[0]: Depositary notification of Accession to the Rome Statute by the State of Palestine; https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CN/2015/CN.13.2015-E...
> Hamas threw some 100 PA members off the top of the buildings
Also you should support this, because this seems 1) ridiculous given the total number of casualties and nature of the fighting 2) I can only find claim of 2 persons being thrown off building, 1 from Fatah and 1 from Hamas.
Eg. hundred page report from PCHR named "Report on Bloody Fighting in the Gaza Strip from 7 to 14 June 2007" doesn't mention 100 PA thrown off the rooftops.
The fact that Hamas attack was so successful under his watch has not disappeared.
His career is full of scandals and corruption. He is still going to have domestic charges in near future.
His war cabinet is going to collapse soon if he continues without any plans for the future of Gaza.
https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/artic...
(grain of salt)Think it is easy in the US to think Israeli public opinion somehow mirrors the US but the vast majority of people in Israel right now are pro-war (similar to the US post-9/11) and anti-two state
Israel has a multi-party legislature. Netanyahu can be outflanked on the right.
He was outflanked by the right in 2019 when Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu and Lapid's Yamina withdrew it's support for Likud and joined Bennett's and Lapid's anti-Netanyahu coalition in 2021, but Bibi was able to leverage fringe Kahanist and Mizrahi parties to reclaim the top seat.
Hell, Bibi would make a coalition with the Arab List/Ra'am (the Islamist Party in Israel) if it meant remaining PM (and thus retaining immunity)
Traditionally, the hard right Jewish parties would always win around 20 seats in Knesset but would never be a major part of any coalition - but Bibi has alienated just about every single faction in Israel at this point trying to extend his rule.
Yeah but part of that half probably supports Gallant, who has split with Netanyahu, but is also charged alongside him.
The only major countries/blocs that are ICC members are the EU/EFTA/EU ascension candidates, UK, Canada, Mercusor (lowkey surprised Venezuela's still a signatory), Mexico, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NZ.
Edit:
Yes. 124 nations did initially sign the Rome Statute.
I meant regional powers/countries that matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...
> The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Act authorizes the president of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody.
It was introduced in 2002 when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and hasn't been rescinded. So if the US ever committed war crimes in those countries, or any other ones; too bad. The US so totally and completely doesn't recognise the ICC's jurisdiction that it will literally invade the Netherlands in order to not be bound by it in any way, shape or form.
The "Hague Invasion Act" is performative silliness enacted in the immediate wake of September 11. The truth is that no major European country is going to arrest an American, Indian, Philipino or Israeli politician. There's kind of a deus ex machina thing happening with the ICC; you still have to do standard-issue diplomacy.
No, it wasn't; the ICC (which the US had a lead role in negotiating and initially signed despite never ratifying it) was never going to have retroactive authority, and the US knew that was not an issue long before it “unsigned” the Rome Statute.
Both the unsigning and the “Hague invasion act” were in 2002, during the runup to the 2003 Iraq War; it was about protecting people then in office from consequences in the war of aggression they were about to launch, to the extent it was about protecting specific people and not just the broad idea of American exceptionalism and opposition of the US government of the time to the idea of international institutions not fully subordinated to the US.
The ICC was formed out of the ICJ, to tackle matters that rose beyond 'dispute' between states. The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials, which defined war crimes and crimes against humanity for the first time, so it would not have been really retroactive. These things were already crimes, there just wasn't a body capable of prosecuting them.
No, it wasn't. In any sense.
It was a permanent successor to ad hoc criminal tribunals like the International Military Tribunal, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
> The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials
No, it didn't, it was the UN system's successor to the League of Nations system's Permanent International Court of Justice (the ICJ statute is modelled on that of the PICJ, the PICJ transferred irs assets and archives to the ICJ on its dissolution, the ICJ was headquartered in the Peace Palace that had held the HQ of the PICJ, and the ICJ even adopted the PICJ seal.)
The ICJ—like the PICJ, a court for disputes between nations—was in no respect a successor to International Military Tribunal, which dealt with crimes by individuals (and, indeed had most of its lifespan during that of the ICJ, starting work only a few months before the ICJ.)
Wikipedia says there are 124 states party to the Rome Statute and there are 193 sovereign states that are members of the united nations. Thats 64%, which is most countries.
Non-signatories are overwhelmingly represented by a handful of countries with very large populations. None of the 5 most populated countries in the world are signatories, and out of the 10 most populated, only 4 are signatories (Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Mexico). Out of the top 20 most populated countries, 10 are signatories.
Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey have all previously expressed intentions of signing the Rome Statute, if only these countries would do so, it would bring over 60% of the world’s population under it.
The standard semantics of ‘most countries’ counts countries, not the people in them. Of course the related claim that the majority of /people/ do not live in state parties to the Rome Statute has different truth conditions.
This isn’t a guerilla war either, it’s the actual official government party. One who has actively promised sequels of the attack.
What would you do in such a situation?
> What would you do in such a situation?
The situation is that Israel is an oppressor and an occupier, so what should it do? Well, first of all it should have made different choices in the past, honest and fair and peaceful choices. Which it didn't make, and it's its fault. But it's never too late. It should have made honest, fair and peaceful choices also in this occasion- mourned its deads, vowed to bring those responsible to justice, and engaged with Palestinian counterparts to withdraw within the 1967 borders and promote the birth of a Palestinian state.
Of course, it didn't do any of those things. It did exactly what Hamas expected.
Yes: Israel did exactly what Hamas expected. The problem for Hamas is twofold:
* Hamas thought the urban combat to root them out of Gaza City and Khan Younis would be a Vietnam-scale bloodbath that would tie the IDF up indefinitely until they were forced to make a truce.
* Hamas's messianic nutbag leader genuinely believed that he was ushering in the end of days, and that the IRGC's other assets would immediately commit to full scale combat operations against the IDF. Instead: Hezbollah noped the hell out, and Iran launched a large scale drone attack that ended up providing a Boeing and Lockheed-style fireworks display in which other Arab states, even as Israel was massacring Palestinian civilians, pitched in to help. Then Iran "declared the matter resolved". Gulp.
Sometimes, if only strategically, it makes sense to do what your enemy wants you to, because your enemy is stupid.
This is more or less why Israel has so much support between Evangelical Christians. A relatively large number of these people actually want the world to end because they really believe in the Rapture and that they’ll be saved.
That said, a lot of evangelicals do believe the world is about to end and are willing to pay to hasten the process.
No, the real news here is of course the news: the ICC seeks to arrest Israeli top leaders as much as the Hamas leaders. The subject that is going from being everyone's darling to international pariah is Israel, absolutely no doubt about this. This is a massive win for Palestine and those who claim to fight for it, including Hamas- with the potential for historical consequences.
My take is that this was the intention behind the October 7th attack- to drive Israel to such a violent retaliation as to force the world to take notice and to condemn Israel. I might be wrong and the victory might be entirely an unintended consequence. However your interpretation essentially requires Hamas to have zero knowledge of the real ratio of military force between Hamas/ Iran and Israel, and zero knowledge of the fact that the US have always been ready to commit their entire military for Israel. And even your imagined "win" scenario for Hamas is Israel committing to "a truce"- which is what they already had before Oct 7.
* Iran's fireworks display is the result of Israel, not Hamas, trying to drag Iran into the war.
I see very strong parallels between this and the Dublin 1916 rising. I don't believe the leaders of the Irish rebels could beat the British - it was seen as a "blood sacrifice" and a way to show the world the brutality of British colonial power. The Brits duly obliged and brutally put down the rising and set the wheels of an independent Ireland in motion.
I have to say though, that the 1916 rebels didn't go out of their way to kill civilians like Hamas clearly did on the 7th ...
You're missing an important part about tens of thousands of rockets and mortars being fired from Gaza at Israel and terrorism originating from Gaza at Israel. Israel didn't just randomly attack Gaza.
Here's what really happened in Gaza: Israel completely withdrew in 2005 and was not occupying Gaza any more. It handed the entire Gaza strip to the Palestinian Authority. There was even an agreement for safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_freedom_of_movemen...
Not to mention that even before 2005 Israel handed control of most of the Gaza strip to the PA as part of the Oslo accords (and agreement to hand Gaza and Jericho over to the Palestinians predates the Oslo accords).
In 2007 following Palestinian elections Hamas took control of the Gaza strip by force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007) Israel only imposed a full blockade of Gaza as a result of this change because Hamas' stated goal is/was the destruction of Israel. Despite Israel's blockade Gaza has a border with Egypt and had no shortage of goods (and weaponry) through smuggling and other means. There was also plenty of travel in and out of the Gaza strip (both towards Israel and the West Bank and towards Egypt) and there were plenty of good going into Gaza through Israel. Gazans also worked in Israel. Gaza also had a power station and a water desalination plant. It has billions of dollars of aid and investment flowing into it (Ismail Hanyah needs to be a billionaire after all).
So Israel was neither an oppressor nor an occupier in Gaza. It took actions to try and prevent Hamas from arming itself.
The other part wrong with your premise is that Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel within the 1967 borders. They do not. Maybe some of them do. But many do not. When the Oslo peace process was accelerating towards that goal Palestinians started a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians which results in the killing of Rabin, the rise of the right, and the termination of the peace process.
EDIT:
Bombings by Hamas starting 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
Rabin's assassination 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin
1993: Oslo accords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
2007: Blockade of Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip
2005: Disengagement from Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaz...
Rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...
Gaza-Israel barrier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_barrier
Netanyahu has supported Hamas long before 2005 as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The elections were pushed by Bush at a time when PA were seen as corrupt. When they lost Bush tried to get them to coup and Hamas took over and kicked them out as a reaction to that.
>In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin"
Should tell is everything we need to know about the people in power now.
Maybe the Palestinians were not happy with the deal, them losing their land. Not to forget previous atrocities perpetrated by Jewish terrorists and the nakba.
> Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt controls the crossing but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval.
Doubly untrue today; Israel took complete control of it on May 6.
Factually this was never Palestinian land. This was Ottoman land, then British land, then Israel. Many Palestinians are not native (e.g. El-Masri, "The Egyptian", is a common family name in Gaza, because they are Egyptians) and the Jewish people have as much of a claim on the land as they do. Parts of the land were also under Egyptian and Jordanian control for some time (ask them why they didn't establish a Palestinian State over these lands while they had them by the way). Jewish refugees immigrated to the region before 1948 because they had nowhere else to go. Many Israeli Jews have been expelled from Arab countries under violence and their assets stolen. The Arab behavior toward Jews in the region is purely racist, there's no other way to look at it.
Also factually what pushed the Israeli right wing to demonstrate was Hamas' suicide bombing attacks. I was there and I know this first hand. You're not going to rewrite history by referring to some random fact.
Israel blockaded Gaza. Blockades are legal. Gaza still had a border with Egypt which Egypt chose to blockade as well. Gaza was effectively a polity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polity) and was at war with Israel. What should amaze you is that Israel supplied Gaza with electricity (Gaza also had their own power station) and with water (Gaza has wells and a desalination plant) and allowed good in all while being enemy territory under the control of Hamas. Hamas stole the aid flowing into Gaza to buy weapons and build tunnels.
> The Nakba was an outcome of Arabs deciding to attack Israel in 1948, they wanted to wipe it off the map, and they lost. They rejected the partition plan.
The "partition plan" was a plan to give part of Palestine to Israel. It's pretty natural that one side refused and the other accepted- the action is the same but the outcome is the opposite for the two parties. Trying to spin it like "they both got the same generous offer" is propaganda.
But even more important is that the partition plan assigned to a "Jewish state" a territory whose population was 45% Palestinian. This means that either
a) they thought it was possible to create a Jewish democratic state with a 45% of the population non-Jewish, or
b) the plan was to enforce apartheid from the beginning, or
c) the plan was ethnic cleansing from the beginning.
And- lo and behold- ethnic cleansing is exactly what happened one minute after the creation of Israel. How convenient that it was the Palestinian's fault.
But this "Nakba" stuff appears invariably to be coded appeals to a "one-state solution". Israel is a nuclear-armed state with one of the world's best trained military and a strong economy that, contrary to activist opinion, stands on its own two feet. There is only one outcome in a "one-state solution" and it's not the one you (or I) want.
It's worth pushing back on existential arguments against Israel as it's currently construed. "Mass murder of Israeli civilians is unprovoked because Nakba" is one of those. The correct response is "no, things are much more complicated than that."
Gaza is considered an occupied territory by all international bodies with the power and authority to make such a determination, for excellent reasons that you can look up. End of the story. What you do (and Israel does, for propaganda purposes) is to confuse the civilian settlement with the military occupation, or to pretend that since soldiers are not inside Gaza but just all around its borders, Gaza is free. Which is like saying that a prison camp is free if the guards are all outside the fence.
I've been saying, only kind of jokingly, that a more likely outcome than arrest or Israel-directed assassination of Sinwar is Haniya (or his successor) taking him out to a field to talk about the alfalfa they're going to plant, and how Sinwar will get to feed the rabbits. Sinwar really fucked Hamas over here. Easy to lose sight of how good a thing they had going! It had tacit Israeli government support and was making a bunch of Hamas people fairly rich.
Anyways, from that point of view: yes, killing tens of thousands of civilians is certainly going to radicalize people and drive them into militant groups. But those groups might look more like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades than the Al-Qassam Brigades.
(I'll say again though that Hamas in 2018 is a different entity than Hamas in 2016. They're both very bad organizations, but only one of them was literally working to bring about the end of days.)
It's hard to look at October 7th and its aftermath as anything but a setback for literally every party in the region. Even Iran seems to have been caught flat footed.
It would have probably ended in a civil war type situation but at least you wouldn't have widespread famine or the bombing of hospitals or further civilian atrocities. Also forcing regional states to allocate their own resources to the conflict means there's a direct incentive to wind it down since their resources are a lot smaller than the resources of the US. Israel would eventually face domestic pushback over wartime spending and the autocratic states in the region would have to balance their funding of the proxy conflict against their own ambitions and budgets. Iran is somewhat democratic and they too could only fund Hamas so far before looking after their own affairs. A civil war would also create a generation fatigued by conflict and more open to compromise. The unilateral nature of this conflict will guarantee that Palestinians and dissidents in the region will hold this as a grudge over Israel and the US for decades and might even open the possibility of further terrorism against the US.
The US's own nation building efforts in the Middle East after 9/11 flagged due to outrageous spending that materialized in minimal results. The same effect with poorer governments would naturally circumscribe the conflict in the area.
Some millions from Qatar with no political engagement towards 2SS isn't good by any measure. It was most certainly good for the Israelis: the Abraham Accords and recognition of the Western Golan Heights + Jerusalem by the US, with practically no opposition.
Sinwar may be a lunatic, but we'd be lunatics just the same to assume Hamas were happy with the status quo. They are not PA for a reason.
Can you tell me more about the difference here?
Funded and trained by Mossad and others too, at times. In fact, Netanyahu was approving tens of millions a month to Hamas to stay militant and provide a more extremist opposition to Arafat and the PLO who were calming down and more peaceable in their old age.
This is the thing that really gets frustrating.
Israel's hard right is as opposed to a two state system as Hamas is. People point to "from the river to the sea" as "proof" of Hamas' genocidal intent (and I won't pretend they haven't said other things to that end, either), ignoring that it was literally Likud's platform slogan since the 1970s.
With respect to your proposal. Can you be more specific about how Israel is supposed to target Hamas leadership when they are in tunnels underground below civilian populations and holding hostages? That Hamas leadership is not dead is not due to lack of Israel trying to target them specifically. I don't think it's possible to get at Hamas without taking over the entire Gaza strip which leads me to repeat the OP's question of what would you do. Another question is whether you're suggesting to give free pass to the Oct 7'th attackers and kidnappers (which seems to be implied by saying "focus on Hamas leadership").
Heh this is funny because this was an explicit concern for the US after WWII. This is the reason behind the creation of the Marshal Plan and directly the reason why the US occupied both Germany and Japan and assisted in nation building there. The idea that losing a war leads to radicalism is as old as WWII, but probably even older, as the UK came to a similar conclusion when divesting its colonies in South Asia.
For more recent cases on how political instability and sectarian conflict leads to a rise in terrorism, look at what happened in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the dissolution of the Baathist party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A
If you've never seen "Your Job In Germany", bookmark and it and make sure you do at some point. It is pretty unreal.
Of course, the counterpoint here is: the reason we worried about German terrorism but didn't see it is because we trained our forces with videos like this, and we were the nice guys about it compared to the Soviets.
Note: there hasn't been a "generation of motivated terrorists" coming out of Japan and Germany after WWII, those populations were entirely subdued.
But again, Japanese and Germans aren’t blowing up Americans and Indians aren’t blowing up London. Claiming this will create more terrorists is saying the Palestinians are irredeemably violent. I don’t think that’s right.
Unfortunately I don't see it as very likely that Israel will give back all the territory in Gaza and provide aid to the Palestinians to rebuild.
Gaza was quite beautiful! And given its prime location on the mediterranean sea, I don't see why it couldn't be built up again.
https://twitter.com/InsiderWorld_1/status/178854608101537840...
But of course the massive mistake was not eradicating the evil terrorist genocidal mentality of its nominal leadership, Hamas. Israel (and the world) shouldn't make that mistake again.
Gazan Palestinians don't even have limited local rule the way Chinese autonomous regions or Puerto Rico do.
Note that despite aid and the occupation, Japan had significant unrest following the war. The Communist Party of Japan's candidate Inejirou Asanuma was assassinated by an imperial revanchist on Oct 12, 1960 [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Inejir%C5%8D_...
The Palestinians are taught from primary school to hate Jews[1] (books paid with western money). They couldn't possibly hate Jews more.
[1]: https://www.cfr.org/blog/teaching-palestinian-children-value...
Unprovoked is a stretch.
Settlers have been given free rein to commit terror acts all throughout the Palestinian Territories.
And Hamas has been propped up by the Netanyahu government for years.
What was the total number of Palestinians killed by Settler terrorist attacks in 2022? Do you have that handy? What was the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorist attacks during that time?
167 Palestinians and 12 Israelis in the west bank. All deaths, not just by settlers etc.
If a Palestinian attempts to stab someone and is shot that's not the same situation as "settler" terrorist attacks.
I think you should answer my question.
Also please count Israelis in Israel killed by Palestinians from the west bank.
Maybe by "is" you mean since Oct 7th. But again that's not provocation, that's after the fact. If you think Gaza was occupied how come the IDF needs to re-occupy it?
Killing people and children along the border is NOT a characteristic of occupation. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230513-gaza-israel-confe...
Counting calories of food consumed by Gazans is not occupation : https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE89G0NM/
Restricting water supply is most definitely not an act of occupying power : https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occu...
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/2021-0...
All these are before the Oct 7.
Not quite:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_G...
This is not to say that Israel permitted Gaza to have any reasonable sort of economic development (as a simple example, it’s effectively a country with two not-very-open land borders and no port, which surely made trade rather challenging).
If you want an analogy, imagine roughly the population of San Francisco plus San Mateo County, but with under half the land area, hostile relations and extremely limited travel across the land border with Santa Clara County and points South, with no bridges and no port. Throw in a near-complete dependency on Santa Clara for water and electricity, and nowhere near enough agriculture. (At least San Mateo County has a decent amount of farming to the West.) Take out the hot tech scene as well, and the economic situation would not be awesome.
That's a ridiculously high number. It's comparable to the number of civilians killed through the entirety of the Bosnian War which lasted over 4 years. Not just the widely-recognized genocidal part of it (Srebrenica), but all of it.
Secondarily, what do you when the enemy is using that expectation as piece of leverage to make it practically impossible to strike more surgically.
I’m not the smartest, but I seems like you’re saying that if one side uses their population as attack deterrents and shields that it’s incumbent on the other side to comply?
It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member.
That is a ridiculously high figure in my opinion. I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect to witness something on such scale somewhere in the world during my lifetime, but I certainly didn't expect a modern-day "western" "democracy" to get away with it.
Before the war in Yemen? (>300k deaths and I think >20k civilians just from Saudi coalition air strikes)
Before the Russia-Ukraine war? (>25k civilians killed just in the siege of Mariupol according to Ukraine)
Before the US war with Afghanistan? (>46k civilians killed)
There are supposedly 30,000-40,000 Hamas combatants. The IDF said in December that it has killed 8000 Hamas combatants. In February it said 12,000 were killed. I don't know where you're getting your 1:20 ratio. Hamas certainly does not differentiate combatants from other casualties and at any rate you should have zero trust in their numbers. There were probably certain situations where a specific target was attacked with that or even higher ratios but the overall civilian to combatant casualty ratio, while unknown, is almost certainly nothing close to that.
What is your reference to "Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member"? I've never heard of that.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
It's been pretty widely reported; I've seen it repeated in every publication I follow.
(Don't forget that Israel triple-tapped an aid convoy because someone thought that a Hamas militant might have contacted them.)
What you said: "It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member."
Let's look at the quote from your article: "In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants."
There are a few problems here:
- This is not sourced and we shouldn't treat it as fact. If other publications you read repeated that it doesn't change this. It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
- This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
- It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio. It just says that in certain circumstances a combatant was targeted even if there are civilians present. That's something that happens in all wars. We don't have any information on the totality of strikes and which strikes met this exact threshold. I'm not sure what numbers other western armies use. The quote refers compares with previous situations which were not an outright war (and show that at least in the past Israel was a lot more careful about collateral damage).
Anyways, if you were more precise in your wording I wouldn't take issue, but I think the casual reader can read something different into what you've said. We can debate the morality of any particular collateral damage under conditions of dense urban environment, human shields, major war etc. but this is something that happens in all wars likely with somewhat different numbers.
> It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
It's consistent with what has been observed all throughout this war--Israel has had rather looser rules of engagement than many people would expect, and that has had the rather predictable effect of rather high incidents of accidents, such as Israeli soldiers killing 3 of the hostages or the attack on the aid convoy.
> This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
20 civilian combatants for 1 enemy combatant is a pretty high threshold, especially for low-level members. According to an Economist article I read, that's the level the US is comfortable with only for essentially enemy heads of state (think Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden). (Reportedly, Israel feels 1:100 is acceptable in this kind of scenario.)
> It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio.
No, it's not. But it's evidence that Israel isn't doing a good job of minimizing civilian casualties. And the actual numbers we have here aren't good. In the best case scenario (taking Israel's probably somewhat-inflated figures for combatants killed and the lowest numbers of civilians killed), it's about 1 combatant to 2 civilians, roughly comparable to the war in Donbass before Russia invaded Ukraine for reals (we don't have good estimates post 2022 because Russia hasn't released anything in the areas it occupies). I suspect the real numbers are probably closer to 1-to-4. By contrast, the US-led battles of Fallujah and Mosul--both urban fights against terrorist-held cities--had casualty rates around (and perhaps better than) 1-to-1.
I wouldn't be so incensed about this if Israeli generals weren't prancing around boasting that no one has done as good a job as Israel has in minimizing civilian casualties when it is so transparently false.
When you look at civilian to combatant ratios you have to take into account the battlefield. You can't compare the war in Donbass to the war in Gaza. What's the population density in Donbass? Were combatants fighting in civilian clothes? Was there a human shield strategy at play? Tunnels? Booby traps?
I've heard experts give much higher civilian to casualty ratios than 1:2 for dense urban combat under these conditions. I've heard numbers like 1:8 (which I think is more or less the ratio for the war in Chechnya). I think the battle for Mariupol has fairly high rates if we want to use another comparison. There's this US Urban warfare expert (John Spencer) from West Point that goes around saying how Israel is doing a great job. So I'm not sure I agree with your transparently false observation. We need something more directly comparable. IIRC in the Battle of Mosul most civilians evacuated, also the number for dead civilians in that battle vary widely. Where I would tend to agree is that in the beginning of the war Israel pounded Gaza very heavily and likely at that phase with less care about collateral damage vs. damage to Hamas.
Incidents like friendly fire are fairly common in wars. I don't have any way of gauging how this one compares. Wikipedia says: "accounting for an estimated 2% to 20% of all casualties in battle".
Do you have comparable examples of armies warning civilians to evacuate, by dropping leaflets, sending text messages, and giving them time to do so like the IDF does (maybe not 100% of the time but certainly has done a lot during this war)? I think that's fairly unusual in comparable situations. I don't recall the US ever doing that in its wars.
Could Israel do a better job avoiding civilians. Likely yes. Is it possible to completely eliminate this under the circumstances (30,000 combatants, in civilian clothes, fighting from population centers) - I don't think so. I also agree the "boasting" about avoiding civilians is at the very least in poor taste. We should feel sorry for civilians killed regardless of the "ratio".
https://airwars.org/news/raqqa-a-city-destroyed-then-forgott...
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/92961/pdf/
No ICC arrest warrants. No encampments. Crickets. How many westerners did ISIS kill? 100? The US, UK, Australia and Russia (+ others?) blitzed the heck out of anything that moved in a place far away that presented no direct existential threat to any of them. Under significantly more favorable conditions on the battlefield than the IDF is facing in Gaza (how many casualties did western powers take in this blitz? zero?)
"In total, these claims allege more than 26,000 non combatant fatalities. Airwars presently assesses that at a minimum, between 6,300 and 9,700 civilians are likely to have died in Coalition actions overall – approximately 40 percent during the recent battles for Mosul and Raqqa"
"Much of the Old City of Mosul and almost 70% of Raqqa’s entirety have been rendered uninhabitable, according to the United Nations."
The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
Yes, if their explanations were accepted as conclusive by the prosecutor there wouldn't be a court case, but the prosecutor isn't the final decisionmaker for the court.
> The UN just made a huge change to their accounting blaming "the fog of war" which puts their numbers much more in line with what Israel was saying.
While the details of the charges asked for, beyond their titles, have not been laid out, I don't think the numerical counts that have been adjusted have much bearing on any of them.
They totally do. They halved the number of children and women killed which completely changes the combatant/civilian ratio.
> The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
It's hard to see what sort of evidence will be accepted by the court. Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants. What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted? Is there some sort of uninvolved party that can give us the truth here?
There's quite a history of ICC cases (and they build on a history of ad hoc tribunals like those for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.)
The kinds of evidence that are acceptable are... not particularly mysterious.
> Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants.
Yeah, if the ICC operated on the level of these kinds of claims it wouldn't take months of evidence gathering before referrals to get to warrants.
> What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted?
Once there are actual charges with specifics (right now, we just have the names of crimes for which warrants are being sought, not the specific charges) the kinds of evidence that would tend to disprove the specific charges against specific individuals will be more clear.
Bosnia's pre-war population (4.2 million) is far more comparable to Gaza's (2.4 million), that's why I picked it.
Can you find me a better comparison?
They involved large numbers of deaths on both sides of the equation which isn't the case here.
The current best estimates are for 15 to 20 thousand civilians. When you write 35 thousand you are showing you believe Hamas propaganda.
To me, the more powerful argument is just that any meaningful military purpose to massed attacks in Gaza have now been used up; much of Hamas' infrastructure, along with the majority of their leadership cadre, have been destroyed. Hamas still "exists", and it could re-form, but so could any other militant organization at this point. The losses Hamas have taken probably exceed those of other state military actors who have decisively lost wars in the past.
Further large-scale strikes look increasingly performative. It was hard to justify a lot of what Israel did even when Hamas had 15 combat-ready brigades and was vowing to repeat October 7th. It seems impossible to justify it now.
(People definitely disagree with me on this point! It's what I believe but fuck if I know with any certainty how true it is.)
Israel is not doing large scale strikes in most of Gaza, except Raffa. It was in the news a few weeks ago that Israel withdrew most of their troops from Gaza.
They have in fact switched to limited strikes. But they're going to finish the job in Raffa first, in particular they want to destroy tunnels - especially tunnels going into Egypt.
After that the PA is going to try to take over. And Israel will "protest" the whole time like the Br'er Rabbit. The PA can't look like Israel helped them take the area. Both the PA and Israel want the PA in Gaza, but neither can say it out loud.
The whole "Israel has no day after plan" thing is just a show. There's a reason Biden stopped complaining about it.
> The following are among the deadliest incidents reported between 16 and 19 May:
> - On 16 May, at about 14:50, four Palestinians, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, were reportedly killed when a house was hit in Jabalya Refugee Camp.
> - On 17 May, at about 0:55, six Palestinians were reportedly killed when a house was hit on Al Falouja Street in Jabalya.
> - On 18 May, at about 10:00, 15 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured while trying to return to their homes in areas of Jabaliya Refugee Camp from which Israeli forces withdrew.
> - On 18 May, at about 12:30, 28 Palestinians, including ten women and ten children, were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential square was hit in Mashrou’ Beit Lahiya near Kamal Adwan Hospital, in North Gaza.
> - On 18 May, at about 11:00, 12 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured when Iqra’ Library was hit in central Jabalya Refugee Camp.
> - On 18 May, at about 14:00, four Palestinian men were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit in Khuza'a area, in Khan Younis.
> - On 19 May, at about 1:00, 31 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit in the New Camp of An Nuseirat, in Deir al Balah.
The bombardment is in fact escalating all over the Gaza strip. There may have been more limited strikes in March and April, but the Rafah offensive started, we can no longer claim so. Israel is doing large scale strikes in most of Gaza, including Rafah.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-i...
On May 20th Israeli jets struck around 70 targets, according to the Israeli military on Twitter. Their post admitted hitting targets across Gaza, including Jabalia, Central Gaza, and Rafah. At least 85 people were killed and 200 injured in total on May 20th.
If May 20th was a uniquely bad day with noticeably more strikes than before, and wouldn’t be repeated for months, if ever, than you could argue the strikes are limited. However, May 20th was not unique, it followed the same patterns as May 16th, May 17th, May 18th, and May 19th. May 21st looks like it is also gonna have as many strikes, and destruction:
Between midnight on May 21st and 7 AM, reported a residential building in Rafa being destroyed, killing at least 8, and 3 Palestinians being killed in an explosion Jabalia. Jabalia is still under intense shelling, in particular al-Awda Hospital where these 3 were stuck and unable to evacuate. Bait Lahia in Northern Gaza is also under heavy artillery shelling, including the gates of Kamil Adwan Hospital, which was also raided last December. Around 2 PM footage was released of the aftermath of another airstrike in Gaza City, where a residential home belonging to the Shobaki family was targeted and completely destroyed. A child no older than 2 year old was martyred in that airstrike.
No, the strikes are not “limited” by any definition of limited. Yesterday I went on a Wikipedia stroll to see examples of other urban warfare, and nowhere do we see this pattern of dozens of strikes, day after day, with 2-3 mass casualty events every day. Where several houses are leveled every single day. This very much describes e.g. the siege of Aleppo during the worst days of the fighting, in the neighborhoods which were worst affected.
If that’s the plan, I can tell you with certainty it won’t work.
There isn't any other way to exterminate Hamas which is a goal that helps everyone, including Palestinians.
Israel does not have the right to exterminate Hamas by any means necessary. If Israel is unable to do so without mass atrocities, they simply shouldn’t. There are alternatives to war. The IRA was not eliminated by mass starvation in Northern Ireland. Rather they were given a Political avenue for their fight, and so their tactics changed from terrorism to political advocacy.
They don't say that. Your entire premise is based on some random quotes from an individual?
> Israel does not have the right to exterminate Hamas by any means necessary.
Actually, yes they do. And you forget that Palestinians have no interest in any other avenue, so your suggestion isn't possible anyway.
Among genocide and ethnic cleansing peddling, over 500: https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...
And it not just some individual, but a member of the Israeli government. Mind you, this government is under orders from the ICJ to do everything in its power to prevent genocide. A government which allows one of its members to speak like this, and doesn’t kick them out of the government (let alone after repeated offense) is at least sympathetic to this speech. But given that he is by no means the only member of the government which repeatedly incites genocide or ethnic cleansing, I think it is more likely that the whole government supports this speech, and is aiming for these prospects.
The mask slips
Seriously, STFU.
35,000 civilians is not an unreasonable estimate. I would personally put a lower bound at 60% of 35,000 = 21,000 civilians, which is the assuming every adult man is a combatant (which we know is not true; there are plenty of civilian adult men among the victims) and extrapolating the percentage of fully identified victims to the confirmed death count.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-i...
You seem to be doing a good job of trying to understand both sides, so I think it would behoove you compare these casualty rates with other urban wars.
> extraordinarily bad position (one in part of their own making
What other options did they have?
This attitude reminds me of the Start Trek: Voyager episode Equinox where Captain Janeway insists that Captain Ransom “leaves her no choice” than to go after the Equinox no matter the cost.
Janeway was wrong, there were other options, and the cost she was willing to pay was too high.
And I assume you know that TV shows are fictional? First they write the dilemma for Janeway, then they figure out how to get there. In the real world it's the other way around.
Data for Mariupol is the fuzziest with a lower (reliable) estimate of 8000 civilian deaths, but a more realistic estimate of at least 25,000 civilian deaths. The highest estimate for soldiers dead is around 12,000 but 4,000 is more realistic. I’m not gonna compute the proportion here because the estimates are too fuzzy. Mariupol had a pre-war population of about 425,000. The siege of Mariupol is certainly one of the worst human rights disaster of our century, which justifiably put some of the Russian perpetrators on an ICC list of war criminals under investigation. It lasted for almost 3 months and left 90% of Mariupol’s high rise residential housing were damaged or destroyed. I’m sure Russian generals and political leaders have their excuses and reasons for causing this horror. They still belong in the Hague for causing this tragedy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol#Civilian_cas...
The Siege of Sarajevo (pre-war population of 525,980 [incl. surrounding area]) has been thoroughly investigated and has much more reliable numbers:
- 5,434 civilians killed
- 5,829 soldiers killed
The horrors of this siege are not to be understated. 40% of the children living in the city were directly shot at by snipers, 51% had seen someone killed, 39% had had at least one family member killed, 73% had their home attacked or shelled. Over 100,000 residential buildings were damaged or destroyed and almost every non-residential building was damaged or destroyed. The horrors lasted 4 years, with the wor The ICC was not shy about prosecuting Serbian (both from Serbia and Srpska) generals and politicians for their crimes against humanity. These generals and politicians all claimed they had their reasons. However, they did not, and were correctly found guilty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo#Casualties
The Battle of Aleppo (pre-war population of about 2.5 million) is probably the closest condition you’ll get to Gaza in terms of urban warfare in a dense civilian area. Like Gaza, Aleppo was the largest city in Syria. The Siege lasted for four years and left at least 31,273 people dead, of which 73% were adult men. 23,604 or 76% of all fatalities were civilians. Almost every neighborhood in Aleppo was targeted with indiscriminate shelling. More than 33,500 damaged residential buildings in the city. Everybody agrees (except maybe Syrian generals and leaders) that the human cost of this 4 year long siege was too great. The UN security council voted for the ICC to investigate the many war crimes committed in the siege but Russia and China vetoed it. History has already condemned them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aleppo_(2012%E2%80%9...
The Gaza strip is an urbanized area that fits between Seattle and Tacoma with a pre-war population of 2.4 million. The Gaza Genocide has so far lasted 7 months and no end in sight. 35,000 people are confirmed dead, most of them civilians. Over 90% of all residential housing has been damaged or destroyed in Gaza city. Almost everybody in Gaza knows someone that has died. Nearly everyone in the Gaza strip has been displaced, most people multiple times.
The horrors of Gaza seem no less then those in other examples of dense urban warfare. I know Israeli officials claim they have a reason to cause this horror, however, they do not. And they deserve the Hague as much as the war criminals mentioned above.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17p7mfx/bett...
60% of homes destroyed, 80% of schools, all universities, 31/35 hospitals.
What Israel [0] could have done was to not create this situation in the first place, but their goal was never solve it anyway.
[0] I mean the current government in power and right wing extremist settlers
Israel withdrew from Gaza. Is your proposal that Israel should not have withdrawn to "not create the situation in the first place"? Or re-taken Gaza when Hamas took it over from Fatah by force in 2007 after winning the elections?
Not to mention the continuation of apartheid in Israel itself and expansion of settlements in the west bank.
This situation was created because Netanyahu has supported Hamas for a long time, even before 2005, as a classic divide and conquer strategy, to not allow PA to control both territories. But the US also helped as Bush forced elections early when PA had a reputation of being corrupt, and when they lost the election they tried to get PA to do a coup and Hamas kicked them out from Gaza.
There's no apartheid in Israel itself but let's not get into that.
Expansion of settlements in the west bank. True. I don't understand how that's a provocation to Gazans to rape and murder random Israeli civilians. It's also true that Netanyahu pursued a divide and conquer approach. Again you're trying to claim that Israel's support of Hamas' rule in Gaza is provocation for Hamas to launch attacks on Israel civilians which makes no sense.
EDIT: To be fair the legal question of "when does an occupation end" is complicated. Gaza was occupied from Egypt and Egypt does not want it back. The uni-lateral withdrawal of Israel without a peace agreement left Gaza in a weird legal situation. This is why despite Gaza being under Palestinian control and not occupied the legal state of occupation is perhaps not fully resolved. There's reality on the ground though (not occupied) and international law status (debated).
No apartheid? I guess Palestinians enjoy the right to return then? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
The west bank is part of the whole situation, of course it matters to Gaza what happens there. It also shows exactly what would happen if Hamas did not exist, Israel would continue to allow settlers to take land and homes. I'm not saying that Hamas should exist, but its very much a situation created by Israel themselves and Hamas has support from Palestinians because of Israels actions.
May the hasbara be strong in you.
Does this make the Czech Republic an Apartheid state?
Is Russia an Apartheid state? Can Ukranian refugees return to their homes? What about the millions of other refugees from random places?
There is zero connection between the right of return (which does not exist, refugees have no right to return after they lost a war) and Apartheid.
It's not "Hasbara" (which means explaining in Hebrew, so yes, I'm explaining). It's just common sense.
With both the Cezchs and the Germans being in the EU, they very much do, yes.
> Is Russia an Apartheid state?
Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechnya, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagestan, etc. are explicitly set up as ethnostates within Russia.
Really? The entire point of the Aliyah for return to Israel is that they lost against Romans, and they expelled them. Or is it selective injustice to the Palestinians?
Are you denying Nakba with 'unprovoked'? I recommend you read through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba_denial
I think the US would not comment on the matter. Candidates for Office (Trump) would loudly comment about it.
The US has deep political and geopolitical ties with Israel. It will never go agaisnt Israel (the country) when it matters.
What even is his plan anymore? Keep beating the "im better than Trump" drum and hope for the best?
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/31/63percent-of-workers-are-una...
There is an argument to be made that the country is not thinking about any of this stuff at all and they will base their vote on how they feel come election time.
On the flipside, there is also evidence to indicate that Trump has completely lost the independent vote which you need to win the election.
You know what would help save the country? If Biden did not seek re-election. After all, he originally called himself a 'transition' president in 2020. His selfish behavior is the reason we are even having a discussion. There still might be time to swap him out at the convention if things get really bad but there is an argument to be made that the large Muslim community in Michigan would rather punish him for Israel/Palestine and accept Trump than give him the satisfaction that he so desires of being a two term president.
Thats all Biden seems to really care about and by making him the president that lost the country to Trump, it will be a greater way to get payback than anything else they can try.
In general I don't see why the Israel situation should be laid at Biden's feet specifically, as opposed to the Israeli lobby that has had a stranglehold on US politics for quite some time. Short of waiting for generational change, the only way to sidestep that would be to paralyze the US government's foreign policy, but that also means the end of US hegemony, USD as a reserve currency, and the generally high standard of living we take for granted. Frankly it's odd to attack such conservatism as a "privileged" position, when the fact of the matter is that people with wealth will be generally fine regardless of what happens.
As for Biden, his personal aspirations, and internal party jockeying, I've got little opinion. Swap in another not-Trump candidate and I'll vote for them instead. Personally at this point I'd likely support someone even if they were a blue-flavored extremist, because the incumbent power structure would be inherently set to resist them, whereas at this point a reelection of criminal Trump would essentially be throwing in the towel on our system of government. But obviously another extremist would turn a lot of people off, and let so called "conservatives" maintain their cognitive dissonance that Trumpism is about conserving anything at all.
Ultimately I think if we want to throw off the chains of the military industrial surveillance complex, we've got to take that bottom-up from the grassroots (eg decentralized communications tech) rather than thinking a power vacuum at the top will lead to anything good.
>Statement from President Joe Biden on the Warrant Applications by the International Criminal Court
>The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.
This is the hypocrisy of the West, when the same court issued a warrant for Putin, it was praised but when it involves a U.S. ally, it's labeled as "outrageous". This only fuels the sentiment prevalent in many Global South countries about us (the west) "rules for thee but not for me".
Seems unlikely that Israel would be causing this much destruction if the group that they were seeking to retaliate against wasn't using civilians as shields (which is a war crime in itself).
Seems weird to put all responsibility on Israel here.
But in general I agree that a world government criminal court is a political joke that nobody takes seriously
Sitting US officials, up to and including the President, have already strongly condemned the pursuit of the warrants.
> The US has deep political and geopolitical ties with Israel.
Which is fine as a basis for opposing things like this as long as the US doesn't ever want anyone to believe any of its claims that its policies are based on principals beyond bloc interest.
A majority of Israelis voted for this government's representatives, including Netanyahu, some specifically voting for him (his party has almost x2 as many votes as the second-biggest voted party).
Democracy doesn't work only when the representatives that you like are elected.
Needless to say, they're backing him, and the ICC can't arrest Netanyahu. At worst, the U.S. government will sanction ICC officials as they did under the Trump administration.
I personally can't believe the ICC is equating the actions of Hamas and the Israeli government. What a shameful organization.
1- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
2- https://www.state.gov/warrant-applications-by-the-internatio...
First things first: neither the Polizio di Stato, the Garda, nor the RCMP are actually going to arrest Sinwar or Netanyahu. The practical impact of the warrants will be (at least in the near term) negligible.
Concurrently: unlike the ICC Genocide case, which is difficult and unlikely to succeed, the ICC war crimes warrants are probably broadly going to be seen as strong and compelling. Reporting has Biden and his team maneuvering for months to keep any kind of supply lines open to Gaza; he knows firsthand that some of these charges have validity.
But the USA is Israel's most important ally; further, reporting suggests that Biden's team has been the only thing between the current situation and abyss that would kill 3-5x as many civilians. That pushback only functions because of soft power (Israel would not depend on US arms suppliers for indiscriminate bulk bombing, massed land incursions, or supply blockades).
What else can Biden say in this situation? He cannot both assent to the validity of the ICC charges and continue negotiating with Israel for things like US-built supply piers on Gaza's seafront. You can't really do diplomacy wth a world leader while at the same time saying (or implying) that they belong in the Hague.
There's a general vibe where people want international justice to work in simple moral terms, where everyone just lays the truth as they understand it out, a tribunal sorts out the details, and the chips fall as they may. But international law absolutely doesn't work that way; for similar reasons, Assad won't be charged by the ICC for killing half a million Syrians (Syria is not a signatory to the ICC).
Once you accept that the court is fundamentally political, you're left asking: are the politics of this move effective? Will they hasten an end to the conflict, or save lives?
Either way: once the warrants were announced, I think you could have taken bets on what Biden (or literally any other American president in the last 50 years, or any major party candidate for the presidency) would have said, and all the money would be on exactly this. We're not signatories to the ICC to begin with!
(I think Netanyahu is a criminal; the Hague is fine with me, though I think it's more likely he'll do his time in Maasiyahu after the Israelis convict him once his coalition falls apart).
However, Israel is not the USA's most important ally.
The US is not really an ally of Israel at all. The NATO countries are. Japan and South Korea are. They have US troops and bases. The US does not send troops to fight in Israel's wars. The US just sends money.
That's what Ukraine is begging for.
The US is really in a bad position now.
But of course this is politically impossible for the US. Near half of the US population would throw an absolute fit.
But a large chunk of the population is already throwing a fit, and given the spread in views among different age groups, that's a growing chunk of the population.
I think the best way to sum up public opinion from what we know given polling and on-the-ground numbers is that Americans just don't much care about this. We care. But as is so often the case, caring about this issue makes us the weird ones.
I don't know if it'll actually happen, but this is probably the most likely path towards it, if there is one.
I suspect you don't know what Zionism is, because otherwise your message makes no sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_ethnostate#New_Zealand
And I'm not picking on them - tons of countries are like that, and that's fine as long as they ensure equality of all citizens, which Ireland, New Zealand, and Israel have all done.
I assume you chose the word “citizen” carefully, so let’s just imagine that in a hypothetical Palestinian state — whether alongside or unified with Israel — Palestinians would enjoy the same rights as Israelis, unlike today.
Anyway, obviously you aren’t picking on them for any of that, and I’m not super interested in debating it. I’m just answering your question about what “opposition to Zionism” means.
If/when there is a Palestinian state, there is no basis to assume that they would enjoy the same rights as Israelis. It would be their own state, and their rights are determined by them. For example, Syrians do not have the same rights of Israelis, and Israelis do not have the same rights as Syrians.
Currently, Israeli Palestinians (Israeli Arabs) have the same rights of Israeli Jews.Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza do not have those same rights.
Regardless, you have correctly identified one of the core things that anti-Zionism opposes: in Israeli occupied territory, there is currently de jure discrimination against an indigenous ethnic minority population.
I also do not understand what this has to do with anti-Zionism in that Zionism is the notion that the Jews have a right to a homeland, and not be relegated as a people to the hims of others. Yes, there is an occupation of West Bank/Gaza, however, I would not deny the right of the Persians to have an Iran, even though I am very much against their current government, and they have taken over control and created misery in other countries (Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and are attempting to do so in Iraq and Syria).
You can be against the current government of Israel, you can be against occupation (as many people, including Israeli's are), but to be against the existence of a Jewish state (anti-Zionism) without being against an Egyptian state, a Persian state, a Jordanian state, etc is singling out the Jews, and needs to be called what it is.
"predicated on the dispossession of and discrimination against an indigenous population"
I am unaware of anything like this in Israel's laws. I assume what you mean by this is the Nakba, which happened after Israel's creation, and as a result of a war declared by the Arabs with the stated intent on destroying the new nation. About 650k-700k Arabs fled/forced/chosen to move out due to that war. Those who stayed ended up with lives comparable to that of their fellow Jewish citizens, I do not see much in the way of discrimination for those who stayed.
Also, as a result of that war, 850k-900k Jews fled/forced/chosen to move out of the surrounding nations. These people were forced out of their homes and their lands simply because they were Jews.
Many, many indigenous people were dispossessed during those times, no nation in that area has clean hands. If you want to single out Israel, that is your right and prerogative, but if you want to be fair (which you do not have to be) you should do some research and understand that many middle eastern countries have dispossessed and discriminated against their indigenous populations. Some did it because they were attacked, some did it just "because"
Historically this region suffered from settler colonialism where Britain encourage Protestants to move into the area. If you wanted to make a comparison to anti-Zionism, then the Nationalist‘s fight for civil rights and political representation is much more apt, then Protestant hardliners wanting to keep the demographics in their favor in order for continue suppress the rights of Norther Irish Catholics.
Ironically, the IRA were not afraid to use terrorism to further the nationalistic cause (similar to a certain Palestinian resistance movement), and when the British tried to defeat them militarily (including via occupation) it only made matter worse. What did work however was stopping these policies which stripped Catholics from their civil rights, and granting them a political avenue for their prospects. Turns out that if you have political means for your goals, you are less likely to use terrorism.
Those who actively claim they are opposed to Israel because it is an ethnostate but are not also actively calling for these other states to be dismantled need to explain why that is not anti-semetic.
There is also the related question on those opposed to Israel because it is a "European settler/colonial" state. A significant majority (66%) of Israel consists of brown people. 25% of Israel is not Jewish, and of the rest (the Jewish population), at least half of those are indigenous to that area, and are, from a racial perspective, just as "non-white" as anyone else from that area.
I don’t know why you think the current demographics of Israel preclude it from being a settler/colonial state. There is a formal effort to attract Jewish settlers. Just a few months ago, there was literally an event in my hometown advertising property in the West Bank to Jewish prospective residents.
On what happens in Israel, all Israeli citizens have equal rights. All countries have rules on who can become citizens. Yes, Israel is unique (I think) in the reasons for citizenship. Israel is also unique in its needs for survival. I am not sure if there are other differences, there could very well be.
On the settler/colonial issue: What I find most interesting about this is how vehement many people are in my country (US) on Israel being a settler/colonial state, when, almost without exceptions, they are the ones living on Native land, using Native resources, and participate in a conspiracy to eradicate Native culture (this is anyone in the US who is not a Native American), and are therefor themselves settler/colonists, while it is the Jews who are native to the middle east, whether the 50% who are Mizrahi or the other 50% who are returning to the land their ancestors were kicked out of.
And the Palestinians are also native to that area. The fundamental issue is: Can there be a compromise where each of these peoples get a land of their own, or is the idea of a Jewish state anywhere is what at some point of time was Dar A-Islam unacceptable.
The US is undeniably a settler culture. I am outraged at the actions of my ancestors [1] who played a part in that culture. Just because I'm descended from reprehensible people doesn't mean I'm precluded from complaining about reprehensible people today.
> and participate in a conspiracy to eradicate Native culture (this is anyone in the US who is not a Native American), and are therefor themselves settler/colonists
Not saying that the US in the past hasn't been genocidal, but many of the people complaining about Israeli settler culture today are also broadly supportive of current Native American rights issues, which is the opposite of participating in a conspiracy to eradicate their culture.
> while it is the Jews who are native to the middle east, whether the 50% who are Mizrahi or the other 50% who are returning to the land their ancestors were kicked out of.
And here comes the special pleading. What Israel is doing in the West Bank is seizing land from extant landowners, transferring it to a favored landowners, and turning the former landowners into second-class citizens. This is exactly the kind of policy that people complain about in settler colonies. Claims of it's-our-ancestors'-land-from-centuries-ago don't fly in international law (see also Russia's diplomatic failure to assert this vis-a-vis its invasion of Ukraine), and it certainly doesn't justify forcible expropriation of land from current landowners.
[1] Indeed, my great-x-I-don't-remember-how-many grandfather participated in the Cherokee Strip land rush, so this is literally personal ancestry in play here, rather than vague reference to historical US ancestry.
The subtext here (clear from the invocation of the Mizrahim) is existential arguments against the the state of Israel as construed in its conventionally recognized borders. In that sense, the "settler colonial" notion is complicated and unavailing.
But you and the preceding commenter would seem to agree with the common argument that settlements in the West Bank are a direct, probative, and actionable instance of unjust settler colonialism.
this is a practical matter - both Palestinians and the Jews have claims going back a long way to all that land (rivertosea), but (during the Palestinian Mandate) they just kept massacring each other, so the governing power gave up and there was a roughly even split of the land (1/2 of the 30% left after 70% went to Jordan), and that just needs to be good enough for either side, even if neither are satisfied
Wars have consequences. 13 centuries of Islamic rule came to an end in 1917, and the Ottoman Empire lost and was dismantled. Land was given back roughly along the lines of past histories, not perfectly, but nothing is.
right of return ? well, at least as many Mizrahi Jews in Israel and other countries could claim that from the nearby countries, but that is about as likely and practical to happen as reversing the Nakba. Wars have consequences.
Why stop at reversing 1948 ? Why not just go back another 30 years and reassemble the Ottoman Empire ? I am sure that would make everyone happy.
I don’t see how this is more fundamentally complicated than other settler-colonial enterprises. The inclusion of the Mizrahim is no different from e.g. when the British did settler colonialism in Northern Ireland (then Ulster) by granting very favorable land deals and work to Scots. No doubt many (if not most) of the Scots were of Gaelic ancestry. That fact doesn’t change the dynamic at all. The Ulster Plantation is a schoolbook settler colonial project, which was wrong and evil in every way possible. What mattered is that the English demanded a certain culture would come up on top, that the Scottish immigrants were not Catholic, spoke English (not Scottish Gaelic; and certainly not Irish), and that they behaved like the English when after they settled stolen land.
Who is the guarantor that this new Israel will not simply turn into another Lebanon/Syria/etc where the minority (Jews) are oppressed ?
Regarding the right of return for the Jewish people displaced from the countries surrounding Israel, sure, I’m in favor. As far as I know, the discriminatory laws which pushed a lot of the exodus have long since been repealed and families who fled to Israel don’t face nearly the same level of discrimination as Palestinians wanting to return to their homeland. (Reparations still need to be payed and Iraq could probably step up their game and re-issue citizenships to their emigrants).
That said, the tit-for-tat mentality is not helpful here. Yes, the Jewish emigrants (particularly from Iraq) deserve reparations for passed wrongs, but whether they get that or not should not affect whether Palestinians are granted their basic right of return, and the dismantling of all Israels’ ethnocratic policies.
Is Israel an ethnostate (or an ethno-religious state, if that's your jam)? It rhymes with one, for sure. But if that's the case, so is Japan. I have never once seen a protest in North America against Japanese ethnocentrism. At least I understand why Israel is structured this way (it was founded within 1-2 Kendrick Lamar album release dates of the liberation of the concentration camps).
There's some innuendo in your post --- "what does that say about you" --- are you prepared to field the same kind of innuendo directed back at you? Because Israelis and Jewish supporters of Israel in the west notice and point out that Israel is held to a different standard.
A reasonable answer to that is that Israel has spent 20 years working to prevent a 2-state solution, and effectively occupying Gaza while slowly colonizing the West Bank. That's fair! But criticism of Israel's modern day activities have a tendency --- as they did here --- to bleed into critiques of the premise of Israel itself.
The demographic policies of Israel are way worse than any other democracy, which is why people criticize Israel harder, and why anti-Zionism is a global political movement. People protested Apartheid South Africa for the same reasons, and is the reason why anti-Apartheid became a global political movement.
Understanding why Israel maintains their ethnocratic policies is no justification for it. I’m sure you can also understand why F.D. Roosevelt ethnically cleansed the West Coast of Japanese Americans during World War 2. But that was still a human rights disaster. Thankfully, that policy was reversed and the victims were given the right of return. Palestinians were not so lucky. Anti-Zionists like my self want Palestinians to get that minimum level of justice. If there was still a Japanese exclusion zone on the West Coast, I would for sure be protesting that.
There is a Palestinian American living in my community, she would like to at least visit the birthplace of her grandparents. But she cannot, Israel’s ethnocratic policies won’t let her. If Israelis are uncomfortable living in a place which gives her racial group equal rights, then I’m just gonna say it, they are racists, and they should not be given an ethnostate to keep their comforts.
There's nothing practical to be said about this stuff. Everybody in the world is racist. It is a strength of the west, and of the US in particular, that we pay so much attention to it. There's no "should" about Israel, only "is". Israel is a nuclear-armed state with a thriving, self-sustaining economy and one of the world's better regarded militaries. If you want to call it an ethnostate, that's fine (I will then call Japan an ethnostate as well). I don't like ethnostates either. But it is what it is: the history and purpose to which Israel --- which, unlike Japan, at least nominally proscribes racism! --- is designed is profound. It's not going anywhere.
I'm fond of pointing out that you'd have a stronger argument that Texas be returned to the Coahuiltecans. Texan settlers hadn't just survived the Holocaust. There was no large scale exchange of populations, with Tamaulipecan tribes somehow finding reservoirs of Germans and Czechs to expel from Nuevo Leon. But, again: nobody is protesting this.
I would say my position is this: to litigate the existence of Israel itself is to surrender any hope, at least rhetorically, of self-determination for Palestinians on any Palestinian land.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the minimal requirements of Anti-Zionists is that the Palestinians which were displaced in the Nakba be granted the right of return. I personally don’t care if there are two states, one called Israel and the other Palestine. But for the state which ends up being called Israel should grant those it displaced the right of return. Texas does not exclude Coahuiltecans from visiting Texas. Texas does not control its demographics with racialized exclusions (I know some Texas politicians would like that, but they are not allowed; and if they were allowed, there would be riots).
I know Japan has a lot of problems with racism. Japan also has a history of being settler colonialist. They’ve even committed a couple of genocides in the past. What sets Israel apart though is they continue and maintain their policies of racialized demography. Japan used to do that (particularly in Korea, but also in Ryukyu), but they don’t any more. Today Japan recognizes the Ainu as a distinct indigenous minority group. They recognize the Ryukyu people as a subgroup (though honestly they need to recognize them as a minority group). They don’t exclude the Ainu nor the Ryukyu from any parts of Japan. They don’t have a policy prevents them from gaining political influence. etc. Stating that Japan has ethnocratic policies similar to those of Israel is lying at best.
For Israel to exist as an independent democratic country besides Palestine in a two state world which meets the minimal requirements of anti-Zionism, they need to relinquish these ethnocratic policies. A good start would be to sign and ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (like Japan has). They don’t have to grant citizenship to every Palestinians, but they must at the very least allow free travel between the two states, and they must allow those which were displaced in the Nakba to have the option of dual citizenship. Recognizing that Israel did settler colonialism and apologize for it would be appreciated as well (Japan has yet to do that).
A non-viable path forward is demand the repatriation of millions of non-Jewish people to right one half of a wrong (not that it would matter if you could somehow right the other half) done in the 1940s and 1950s. Israel will not allow it to happen. No imaginable Israeli leadership of any ideology or party would allow it. Israel's allies won't allow it to happen, but that doesn't matter.
The Arab world was (is, really) in the verge of normalizing relations with Israel, premised on the viable solution I outlined above. It is not in fact a requirement of the Arab world that Israel accept a Palestinian/Arab majority in its 1967 borders.
What's frustrating about this is not the concern that Palestinians might somehow succeed in the non-viable cause (I don't like ethnostates either?) but rather a certainty that it can't happen, any more than Mexicans will gain as-of-right dual citizenship and free travel into their original Texan lands, and the knowledge that the pursuit of that doomed cause comes at the cost of generations of Palestinian lives deprived of self-determination on any terms because western philosophizers oppose what they see as half-measures.
If they would have the foresight to include guaranteed civil rights for Arabs living in Israel and a Political avenue for the unification of Palestine which could be executed in a couple of generations, perhaps the worst of the mistakes of the Anglo-Irish treaty could be averted.
What made the Anglo-Irish treaty so disastrous for Northern Ireland were in fact racialized policies and discriminatory practices which denied civil rights and political representation for one group so that the other group could exert their dominance. If a two state solution repeats that, all I can say, is “I told you so”.
> The Arab world was (is, really) in the verge of normalizing relations with Israel, premised on the viable solution I outlined above.
The political class in most of the Arab world is not Anti-Zionist.
I understand and can take seriously a narrower "anti-Zionist" definition that pushes back on "Greater Israel" ideology that impedes Palestinian self-determination.
But what we're talking about here is basically: "I reject the premise of the state of Israel". To which, and I mean this respectfully, the only reasonable response I can see is "it's good to want things, I guess".
(It's fine if we just intractably disagree; it would be weird if any two people here never did.)
The goal here is social justice for Palestinians, as of now, they don’t have civil rights, political recognition, nor any non-violent avenues of resistance. So I get your sense that, yes, these are urgent issues which needs addressed. But the anti-Zionist will not stop until full justice is achieved. Maybe you are looking at an anti-racist while slavery is still a thing, or a land-back activist during the trial of tears. Perhaps you are a reformist being presented with a radical (i.e. looking at the root of the issue) solution.
For me the root of the issue is the settler colonial prospect of Israel, while Israel wants to maintain any ethnocratic policies (i.e. zionism) it will have to come at the cost of civil rights for Palestinians. My solution is to not grant Israel the right of ethnocratic policies.
I think the only thing I'd put on the table here past just recognizing that we're working from incompatible premises (at least, when we get past a Palestinian state and self-determination, and probably Netanyahu in a prison cell somewhere) is to try to stay cognizant of whether the standards you're setting for Israel are the same as those of other countries or other people or other ethnicities or whatever. because there's a whole grim history of people pretty much everywhere in the world singling Jewish people out as moral "others". But if you're being consistent about stuff, I don't have much to push back on.
If I had to guess, I suspect they might mean "opposition to Zionist control of American foreign policy" rather than "opposition to Zionism".
It absolutely does not - and it is not anti-Israel sentiment to say so; it's just geopolitics. For the the US, Israel is optional.
Meanwhile if Israel ever decides to pretend it doesn't need the US -- well, you know what would happen.
That's not really true. The reason are complicated and involve the cold war. I touched on some of the highlights here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425327
> well, you know what would happen.
Nothing would happen. Israel has defended itself from multiple wars without US help, if anything Israel's enemies are weaker than they were in the past.
Weirdly enough it's actually Israel's enemies that benefit from the US - without the US Israel would just do what it needed to to stay safe, and never mind if the other country is hurt. Israel would not care, because their own security comes first.
With the US Israel is like "fine, we'll do the bare minimum".
This is also why all those people who what the US to stop helping Israel are so incredibly foolish. If Israel felt less secure they would fight with even greater ferocity. If you want Israel to stand down make them feel very very secure.
This obviously wrong, and on multiple levels.
First, there's $330b of financial support since 1946. Access to advanced weapon systems since 1962. Crucial intelligence + diplomatic support in all the big wars (56/67/73); crucial munitions support, and an offer to send a large numbers of ground troops in 73. Solid and almost unquestioning diplomatic support (or acquiescence) of essentially every action Israel has taken since 67 (no matter how provocative or ultimately detrimental to its own interests), backed by the assurance of automatic UNSC veto of course.
In the current operation, you've got 2 carriers parked offshore along with other assets in the region; special access to fuel depots and arms caches (that even Ukraine doesn't get); technical support from U.S. companies like Google, etc.
The idea that Israel fights its wars "without US help" just ludicrous.
Meanwhile, in return -- Israel just doesn't provide all that much. The U.S. supports Israel mostly for ideological regions (such as the kindling that it provides to the apocalyptic fantasies of the Christian Right) and to please other domestic political constituencies; and yes, out of a legitimate sense of moral responsibility since the Holocaust -- but not because it really needs Israel to be around (in the sense that it needs the UK, Germany, Japan, etc). It objectively needs countries like Sweden and Turkey more than it needs Israel.
Completely cut off from U.S. aid -- it would survive of course, but under significantly diminished circumstances. In particular it would have to give up the Greater Israel project -- which it of course needs to do anyway, but it would have to do so much sooner, and in an abrupt, violatile way leaving it in a much less secure position than it would like to find itself shunted into.
If you want Israel to stand down make them feel very very secure.
This is of course the mantra we've hearing since 67. And which brought us to the place we're in now.
Even in the (ill-conceived and disastrous) Iraq and Afghanistan wars other ME nations produced a lot more help than Israel did.
More complex answers involve having an allied county in an area with a lot of Russian influence.
The history is long and complex, but keep in mind Israel ran all by itself for decades, and defended itself in multiple wars, without any US help. It was when Russia started helping Egypt that the US recruited Israel. It was not the other way around.
For a while when Russia seemed powerless people started questioning the relationship, but after Ukraine it was re-energized.
Other answers are cultural: Israel is very similar to the US and Europe, same equal rights for citzens, same democracy, same culture of freedom. And the US is allied with all countries that are similar to it.
What concrete, specific advantages from having an allied country in a distant region?
“Controls American foreign policy” is hyperbolic; I don’t think support for Israel would just collapse if those orgs vanished. But come on, comparing Zionism to “motherhood” and “apple pie” is disingenuous.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/aipac-jamaal-bowman-atta...
Huh, I see strong and increasingly growing public opposition to Israeli influence on American politics.
The gist of the idea is that zionism is a "dead" ideology already, since it has reached its goal of creating a state. The remaining question about it is whether Israel should adhere to post-zionism or to neo-zionism.
Most people in the west opposing the current situation would probably fall in the post-zionist category if they were told about the concept.
I.. think I disagree. In a sense, Trump technically laid a foundation for that with a rather clever MAGA phrase. Regardless of what you think about him, his policy or his stance on anything, he showed that there are phrases could be utilized to tap into that section with little effort and are not as easily dismissed.
Now.. those could be attacked as overly nationalistic, but that is a separate discussion.
<< No lasting and significant opposition to Zionism will ever take root.
I think I agree despite (n)'ever' being a really long time. A year is eternity in politics and this year is already pretty crazy. I honestly can't say it is impossible.
He doesn't have to do diplomacy with them. He could call their bluff. He could unilaterally start delivering food and dare anyone to stop him. If Israel starts killing "3-5x as many civilians" he could declare war on Israel.
All of these are things he could do. Won't. But could.
My point is that the US could "assent to the validity of the ICC charges". The "fantasy" is several unlikely escalations away after that, and even that scenario is something that the US could deal with.
So ruling out that they go against the ICC because they have to, we can conclude that they go against the ICC because they want to.
Something like half the world's population doesn't acknowledge the ICC. And the ICC hasn't covered itself in glory over the last 20 years --- the Darfur fiasco being the most obvious example.
All this just brings me back to: the ICC charges are a political act (fair enough! politics matter!) and should be evaluated on their political effectiveness. The predictable result of the charges: the leader of the only political party in the US that even ostensibly cares about Palestine disavowed the charges. How'd that help?
Um. What?
Biden's team vetoed UN calls for a ceasefire three times.
Biden's team has delivered how many billions of dollars of weapons in the last 8 months?
Biden's team has consistently and repeatedly lied in front of the whole world, saying that they see "no evidence" of genocide. This, during the most documented mass murder in all history. This, despite clear and unequivocal genocidal statements from Israeli leadership, media, and populace.
How many people have resigned from his team now, saying they can't have this much Palestinian blood on their hands any more? To claim that Biden has prevented deaths in the last 8 months is breathtaking. At every juncture he and the team he still has have been complicit.
I think domestic politics are certainly a factor, but not a big one in an ICC case, because Americans, to a first approximation, do not give a shit about the ICC; further, we aren't a party to the ICC, so it's not as if the administration is being asked to do something or help adjudicate.
I want to say again that I think this particular case is well-founded. But an ICC warrant against the leader of a non-signatory is fundamentally a political act, and while I don't take issue with the stated intent of that act, I don't get the theory of change behind it.
I put it to you directly: what good comes of this while Netanyahu remains in power?
It would if Israel has any sense of self preservation at all. They need the support of the American government more than they need Gazan land.
(I also think it's not at all clear that serious policymakers in Israel "want Gazan land", let alone need it; the messianic nutballs bolstering Netanyahu's coalition are, to put it mildly, not representative of mainstream Israel policy thinking.)
A reminder that we're just talking about this stuff here; this is HN, not the UN Security Council. If we're going to have threads like this here, we're going to have to accept that we're having curious conversations, not high-stakes deliberations. So: I can be wrong about all of this stuff, and I'm glad to hear why. But we're not going to solve Israel/Gaza on a thread.
(You didn't say anything to prompt that disclaimer, it's just a stress reaction from previous threads).
Being able to purchase weapons from the US also gives them significant political latitude internally. When a significant amount of your economy and government spending goes to making weapons, you're going to affect domestic budgets, which will make coalition building much harder especially in a country with as many small parties as Israel. We see this in Russia as well but because Russia is not democratic when it comes to defense allocation, it simply throws its dissidents in jail or encourages them to leave.
Or just make them themselves. That seems fully within their capabilities if push comes to shove. After all, we are talking about bombs not fighter jets.
And yet are regularly re-elected. And have been for decades.
Reagan did it with a single phone call: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-...
(I kind of like Bush 1, at least as a competent operator with some discernible principles, and think Israeli settlement of the West Bank is abhorrent).
Which of the facts I stated do you disagree with? I'm sure I can find you a source for any of them.
Biden, in _theory_, could say to Israel that "continued arms supplies are contingent on surrendering Netanyahu and Gallant to The Hague immediately", but a) it's not at all clear that that would work, b) in the near term it probably causes Israel to make the situation on the ground in Gaza even worse, and c) it would come with serious domestic political repercussions in an election year.
I hate all of that too, and it doesn't speak well of us as a society or species, but what _should_ happen and what _would_ happen are two very different things.
Tptacek is demonstrating this well by editing the part of the comment I quoted, then acting confused. However, I don't subscribe to the idea that facts are not material to discussions involving claims of fact.
The claim Biden is preventing deaths in Gaza while sending the bombs that are killing them and vetoing ceasefire resolutions left right and center, even against the will of his own voters, would require stronger evidence than has been provided.
Also, international law, including the Genocide Convention, is binding on all signatory states. 'Realpolitik' is not a defense for complicity in genocide.
However, let's look at your abc points, ignoring international law for the moment:
a) it's not at all clear that that would work
We've skipped past the issue, which is that we shouldn't be sending arms at all at this point. We also have other leverage which hasn't been used yet - sanctions, trade restrictions, etc.
b) in the near term it probably causes Israel to make the situation on the ground in Gaza even worse
This has merit - Israel did threaten to use more unguided bombs if the arms flow stopped. Too bad Biden's people vetoed the UN ceasefire resolutions three times, against the will of basically the entire planet. What about the realpolitik of that loss in our global standing?
c) it would come with serious domestic political repercussions in an election year.
Believe it or not, and despite tptacek's claims above that most people don't care, polls in fact show that significantly more registered Democrats disapprove of Biden's handling of the situation in Gaza (sending arms) than approve, and that this is affecting their vote [0].
> "This issue is a stone-cold loser for Biden," said Douglas Schoen, a pollster and strategist who reviewed the Reuters/Ipsos poll results. "He's losing votes from the left, right and center."
0 - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democratic-divide-gaza-war-...
Bigger picture - this disagreement seems fundamentally rooted in conflicting political philosophies, as alluded to above. More facts are not going to change that.
An example... "'Realpolitik' is not a defense complicity in genocide." Says who? I mean I agree with you on the face of things, but who gets to decide what genocide means? And what does it mean for international law to be "binding on all signatory states"? Some view overconfidence in this notion as Wilson's great and lasting mistake.
Unfortunately, there is no compiler that can adjudicate these types of questions for us.
0 - https://www.natesilver.net/p/your-friends-are-not-a-represen...
Maybe your court of carrier strike group says the ICC judges are committing war crimes, issues a warrant for their arrest, the SEAL team executes the warrant against the fugitives from justice, and tries, convicts and executes them.
If you still think realpolitik isn't a defense, look at a practitioner of it like Kissinger, ask yourself why Pinochet, et al, were tried, but say Kissinger was not for Operation Condor.
Outside of a courtroom, and ignoring all international law and externalities, sure. Within the Hague, or the parts of the world where international justice is respected, not so much.
> the court of the carrier strike group is superior to the court of the ICC.
Until your 10 carrier strike group gets fucked up by Yemeni drones, or Iranian swarms. Or no country wants to trade with you any more, because you can't be trusted and their citizens are furious.
Or until China utterly dominates you economically and geopolitically, because they invested in growth instead of carrier groups. Or until you're stretched too thin on too many fronts and no one wants to help any more, or any of the other unintended (possibly world-ending) consequences of our wilful and belligerent disrespect of long established international law.
... But the claim that "Biden actually saved lots of Palestinians from dying" because of the "realpolitik" of the situation is silly. The claim that Kissinger actually saved lives by coordinating assassinations so that South America didn't need to be bombed into submission would be farcical, and so is this.
Realpolitik, in the sense Morgenthau and Kissinger understood it, absolutely takes into account management of public opinion and risks related to violation of international standards. It just does not only take those into account in decisions related to national interests.
> But the claim that "Biden actually saved lots of Palestinians from dying" because of the "realpolitik" of the situation is silly. The claim that Kissinger actually saved lives by coordinating assassinations so that South America didn't need to be bombed into submission would be farcical, and so is this.
This is stated as a fact and dismissed on the basis of a tacit moral argument rather than reasoning. Why would the claim be silly? I see no reason for those statements to be cast aside as un-addressable or 'farcical'.
On the other hand...
> 10 carrier strike group gets fucked up by Yemeni drones, or Iranian swarms
If this were possible Houthi drones would have done it already (against a single carrier).
> because they [China] invested in growth instead of carrier groups
China has been investing heavily in their military for three decades [0]. And we will see about that growth part... it is not looking so rosy for Xi currently.
0 - https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CHN/chi...
Last time I checked when the US attacked Iran its response was to shoot down its own plane full of its war criminals. I relish the thought of a Yemeni single drone getting through to a CSG, I see a 'proportionate' response.
South America is wonderful, very few communists here, I wonder what happened, when I go to the football stadium I smile, and thank them for their help building the stadiums, truly a stadium of the people they built for us capitalists to watch our football games.
I'm glad that Kissinger found Che who enslaved millions and he was brought to justice in Bolivia.
This is an extremely racist opinion. And I would go so far as call it genocidal speech. This post needs to be removed from HN.
I don't understand the preceding comment well enough to defend it or to see the racism in it; there is context I am probably missing.
In it’s most favorable interpretation is a call to keep Palestinians subjugated and stripped of political and civil rights. This speech has been used to promote a Jewish ethnostate, which is in fact racist, and in the worst cases this speech is used to advocate for the expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
At best this is an advocacy for a racist policy, at worst this is genocidal speech.
> Well, the IDF is executing lots of war criminals, even future ones in Gaza ;)
I can’t take this any other way then the author is stating that killing of innocent civilians in Gaza is justified because otherwise they were destined to become war criminals.
This kind of speech was very common among people justifying police brutality and neighborhood crackdown against black people in the USA. It is extremely racist as it stipulates that Palestinians, by merit of being Palestinians, are inherently bad people and deserve to die.
The real question is if everyone loves the peace loving Gazans so much, why has Egypt built a wall to keep the peaceful refugees out?
Perhaps maybe they don't want the Gazans to start a civil war in their country like in Jordan, Lebanon, etc. Realpolitik.
It was the precious reference (backed by a smiley no less) to how the good the current operation is at killing "future" war criminals -- obviously referring to minors. Who are also just as obviously being collectively subject to air strikes for the crime of being you-know-what.
It was a truly disgusting comment, actually. Unfortunately "frank" and deeply revelatory expressions of this sort are by no means unusual in the sphere of public discourse that supports the current operation in Gaza. From the highest levels down.
Sometimes it sucks when your apartment is in the same town as a ball bearing factory.
The Air Force didn’t give anyone a weeks heads up either, what the IDF is doing is so far from a war crime it’s not even funny.
Juries in and of themselves are realpolitik, it's why most countries don't use them, because they deliver verdicts the legal professions dislike.
"Calls for ceasefire" that didn't include "calls to release the hostages", to say nothing of the fact that Hamas leadership had already been shouting they would "repeat October 7th again and again until the final destruction of Israel" and so on.
He didn't have to say anything about the substance. He could even use them as leverage in negotiations without publicly saying anything about the substance, by conditioning US efforts to get the UNSC to hold them in abeyance (which it explictly can!) conditioned on a cease-fire and concrete steps on aid.
Would it work? Probably not. Would it be better for the US interestd broadly than getting nothing at all while undermining the credibility of an institution that the US, while not a member of, has found practically and diplomatically useful in a number of past cases? Absolutely yes.
> We're not signatories to the ICC to begin with!
We have shut up about, or actively supported, the ICC in many cases, and given the US public nominal goal of a two-state solution demonstrating that international institutions are willing to take on abused on both sides of the conflict without ignoring the legitimate interests or rights of people on either side is something the US ought to be backing rather than burning down.
Certainly it is not my contention that the US is consistent with respect to the ICC.
It's a bad situation. I genuinely think that the administration is playing the best it can with the cards it was dealt. I think we're all clear what the counterfactual other administration would be doing.
Israel has three alternatives:
Option 1: Do a real siege (never tried. Gaza has less malnutrition deaths than Cali according to their own figures, and besides everything would have been over months ago if it did. That's the real weakness with the ICC case).
Option 2: Provide aid yourself (expensive).
Option 3: Let other people do it for you and not pay for it.
Obviously the optimal choice is the last one. The real differences between US and Israel are elsewhere (e.g. delusional postwar planning by both sides).
Everything else is domestic politics, and personal convictions for Biden. But Israel will not continue this war if the USA tells them to stop it. They are far too dependent on USA aid for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/reagan-demands-end-...
Edit: here is the full quote about the events in 1982:
2 P.M. (8 A.M., New York time) -The Israeli Cabinet meets. A message from President Reagan arrives, expressing ''outrage'' and, reportedly threatening to halt the Habib mission. The Cabinet decides to end the raids and order new ones only if they are ''essential.''
4 P.M. (10 A.M., New York time) -President Reagan tries for hour to call Mr. Begin but cannot get through. 4:50 P.M. (10:50 A.M., New York time) - King Fahd of Saudi Arabia calls Mr. Reagan. 5 P.M. (11 A.M., New York time) -A new cease-fire goes into effect in west Beirut. 5:10 P.M. (11:10 A.M., New York time) - Mr. Reagan reaches Mr. Begin for 10-minute telephone call. 5:40 P.M. (11:40 A.M., New York time) - Mr. Begin calls President Reagan to say that a ''complete cease-fire'' had been ordered.
> Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein said that when he was on Capitol Hill last week, he told all of his interlocutors that the aid “is extremely urgent.”
> “This is aid for immediate needs, not for something we’ll use in a matter of years,” he emphasized to JI on Thursday.
The clear reality is that Israel, while extremely high tech, just doesn't have anywhere near the necessary production of ammunitions and weapons to act in this war without US aid. Especially if the USA and EU countries were to prohibit weapons shipments entirely (as they clearly should for any country currently engaging in a genocide).
Even the recent successful defense against the Iranian retaliation required direct US and French assistance, it wasn't possible with Israeli forces and equipment alone.
[0] https://jewishinsider.com/2024/02/israel-u-s-military-aid-ga...
None of this is going to happen, because everybody involved is aware that Israel would be sustainable after a realignment away from the west. Everything gets worse for everybody (except China) after that occurs, so it won't be allowed to occur.
(It's further mooted by the fact that opposition to Israel is largely an Internet phenomenon; Israel enjoys broad, bipartisan popular support in the US, Gaza is at the very bottom of polled issues in order of importance to the electorate, and a very significant chunk (possibly more than half) of people rating Gaza as important support Israel.)
Also, you are grossly misrepresenting public opinion in the USA and the EU. In the USA there is a significant and extremely vocal minority, especially among the Democratic party base, that deeply care for the genocide in Gaza. This has been visible in the major student protests, and in the significant protest votes in Democratic primaries (>10% undecided in some states!). And given the extremely tight election, this is very likely to cause issues for Biden. Now, whether reversing support for the genocide would cause larger issues is debatable, but I think unlikely - as most of the avid Israel-can-do-no-wrong supporters are not going to vote against Trump anyway.
In Europe the situation is even more difficult for the pro-genocide camp, as the population, especially in Western Europe, and doubly especially among the significant Arab, Pakistani, Indian, Turkish, and North African immigrants, is much more sensitive to the issue of colonial genocide.
The "10% undecided" thing is a statistical null result, mirroring the last Democratic reelection campaign (Obama's, against Romney), which didn't include any attempted organized effort to lodge protest votes with "undecided" and still ran up those counts.
Polling --- Pew is a good place to start --- shows Israel below every other "major" issue, even among 18-29 year olds --- except (ironically) student debt. The issue gets less important as you go up in age brackets into cohorts that actually turn out and vote.
The groundswell of support for Palestine in America is, I believe, largely an Internet phenomenon. It's easy to forget that we're the weird people who tune in to this stuff. Most people just live their lives, and, for reasons that are straightforward to understand, care a lot more that a 12 pack of Diet Coke got weirdly expensive than about whatever is happening across the world. We have the same problem marshaling support for Ukraine!
I think that is an unfair statement. Just because they asked for a warrant to be issued for both does not imply that they think both are the same.
This may be how things played out after the second world war, but it's a horrible standard to live by. If the ICC has any integrity, they won't take "but they started it" as an excuse.
Aren't you? I thought the Geneva convention and similar treaties all require reciprocity.
The Rome Statute does allow foe the ICC to convict according to the Geneva conventions as well, but the exemptions therein don't necessarily apply.
Second, both Israel and Palestine have signed the main conventions. Israel with reservations, and have not signed AP I and II. Palestine have signed all of them, unconditionally.
Since both are signatories, they are both bound by the conventions even if the other party breaks them.
No, i don't think so.
To quote the fourth geneva convention (fourth convention is the part related to treatment of civilians):
> Although one of the Powers in conflict may not be a party to the present Convention, the Powers who are parties thereto shall remain bound by it in their mutual relations.
The fact that it didn't tell you all you need to know about how legitimate this "court" is.
Short of going full "one world government" or the next best thing, "team america world police" you can't really violate state sovereignty even if someone is doing atrocities so instead you need to convince key players or a critical mass that something should be done. If successful, you can then tighten the screws on that person as fast as you can get all the relevant bureaucracies moving.
There were no "screws needed" to issue an arrest warrant against Hamas months ago. Yet they didn't.
They should have issued arrest warrants years ago against Hamas for deliberately firing into civilian territory. It's an easy case to make, no one at all claims Hamas didn't do that.
But, nope, they did not issue any warrant.
No, they only issued a warrant against Hamas to pretend like they have some balance in trying to issue a warrant against Netanyahu.
It's no longer Netanyahu on trial, it's actually now ICC that is on trial. If the ICC actually grants the warrant against Netanyahu they have proven themselves to be a bunch of clowns with no legitimacy.
We shall see.
In 2019, the ICC got involved following the 2014 Gaza war and concluded that war crimes were taking place (on both sides, in different ways), but they concluded that they lacked jurisdiction. Investigations has been ongoing ever since.
Things like what Milosevic or what Janjaweed leaders do are identifiable.
They clearly not the same. One is a modern state and one is not.
The actions of both are not so different. Killing civilians is not good. Whether it be guerilla terrorism or bombs and troops
International law looks at this differently. There's a huge difference between targeting civilians and striking genuine military targets that have civilian human shields, especially after issuing a warning and taking reasonable precautions. The first is a war crime, the second is actually allowed by Geneva conventions. The phrase “killing civilians” throws these differences out of the window and simply shouldn't be used in intelligent conversion about this topic.
Even in the latter case, the cost to civilian lives has to be proportional to the the military value/lives saved long-term by ending the threat. This is not proportional: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
But unfortunately, the latter case does not account for all that we've seen in the last few months and years. There's been plenty of "targeting civilians" too
Additionally they werent charged on the basis of unporportionality afaik, i think all the charges are based around failing to let in enough food aid, causing a famine.
No, starvation is only one of the alleged offences: "the use of starvation as a method of warfare, together with other attacks and collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza"
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-...
> The Prosecutor seeks arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Minister of Defense, on the basis that they committed the war crime of ‘intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare’ under article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the ICC Statute. The Prosecutor also seeks to charge the two suspects with various other war crimes and crimes against humanity associated with the use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare under articles 7 and 8 of the ICC Statute
I think that is a distinction without a difference
If your siblings are killed or maimed in their home or at a party, do you care?
Killing people is a bad thing
But there is version of this where weapons at the hospital are removed by force, without bombing it.
The air force can hit the targets required around the hospital to allow an easier time for ground forces. Reach the hospital, and use those ground forces to secure it.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/15/middleeast/idf-accidentally-k...
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1D9Zaet2ypKD7H6gyxYtU...
One source of many about targeting journalists for over two decades
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/09/middleeast/israel-military-jo...
One source on IDF killing indiscriminately
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/02/middleeast/israel-bo...
And for some extra flavor have a few sources on the IDF posting videos of their abuse of Palestinians
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-09/ty-article-ma...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/idf-posting-abuse-foota...
Are these actions that of the "most moral army"?
These things are easily googlable yet you haven't bothered to do the slightest bit of reading before dismissing the claims outright. Even the US president had said that the attack on the Liberty was 100% intentional while knowing it was a US vessel
Are you fine with Israel knowingly and purposefully attacking and killing US naval officers?
First you said I was spewing bullshit which implies falsehoods, but now the things I claim are true but they're just fine? That's nuts
You say they share western values, does that include freedom of the press? Do we kill journalists purposefully in the western world? Which values, precisely, are you referring to? Because I don't see them
Unless you mean to say that they aren't Muslim, which is what I see from a lot of the Zionist crowd
Not to mention, it isn't about the values of Hamas but the value of the lives of the Palestinian peoples. Israel has been oppressing and killing them for decades
Also learn something about the history of the region and not just from the students parroting what they've seen on Tik Tok.
Here's a video based on US government documentation about the liberty and some of the history of Israeli lobbyists going back to the 1960s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CfABflKvFzk
On the topic of people cheering on death and slaughter, how about Israelis?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-crowds-chant-raci...
Is that the kind of value that you align with? People cheering on the oppression and slaughter within an apartheid state funded by your and my tax dollars
https://www.btselem.org/apartheid
We can wax poetic all we want about history but we need to live in the present and not fund ethnic cleansing
Version A (what happens now): Israel calls everybody in the vicinity of the hospital, gives them time to evacuate. Then Israel strikes the hospital with a missile without a warhead. Then Israel actually bombs it.
Version B (what you suggest): IDF storms in with guns blazing.
What version, in your opinion, will result in more civilian deaths?
1. In many cases whole Gazen families have bee killed in their homes.
2. I always blame those giving orders. On both sides.
Maybe you could argue Israel is not accidentally doing this, but collateral damage of civilians will almost always happen regardless of how careful attacks are planned. I don't think there has ever been a war that occurred in such a densely packed area that has had no civilian causalities.
I think there is an element in glee at civilian casualties on both sides
You can personally think international law is wrong, but that probably won't affect what the ICC does very much.
There are videos of them celebrating on Oct 7 and crowds attacking the hostages when they're brought into Gaza.
Did they think killing is a bad thing?
I do not know, but not on the face of it
But we can all do better than justify our actions on the basis of "they did it too"
That is school yard logic, and nation states can do better
Silly me, tho. The nation states involved all seem to be devoid of principals
Or to put it more broadly what distinguishes a soldier who has killed dozens of enemy soldiers from a school shooter who killed dozens of his peers?
According to your statement they are morally equivalent, society at large would vehemently disagree with you.
Ahh, yes, like when the IDF told Gazan civilians by evacuation order to move to the south of Gaza because they were going to intensify bombing in the north.
And then increased bombing of southern Gaza by 85% in the next 10 days...
Source: https://news.sky.com/story/gaza-war-satellite-data-shows-isr...
But media, PR and politics don’t play by these rules. Mention two things together and the messages will go through.
A similar example would be Whataboutism, a logical fallacy, but it seems to work very well in politics.
I have my issues with the ICC, but they are supposed to enforce international law impartially.
Issues warrants for both sides at the same time is utterly repugnant and calls the entire court into question.
Why?
Hamas is illegal, and members are already subject to arrest and/or summary execution without trial.
Here we're getting an attempt to issue warrants to arrest (not execute) the perpetrators of an ongoing intentional genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of an occupied country that have been held in ghettos, with limited access to food and medical care for decades.
If what Israel is doing is legal, then they can be arrested, go to trial, and be let go, presumably in doing so the ICC will be required to overturn the prosecution of the many nazis that were prosecuted post-ww2 as well, because they were convicted of doing exactly what the Israeli government is doing as well.
Alternatively, you know that what is happening is morally repugnant and allowing it to happen again is a catastrophic failing and completely undermines any "never again" rhetoric that followed the holocaust, and so they would be found guilty and you don't want them imprisoned, because you feel that Palestinians desire to have had their homeland invaded, stolen, and then be exterminated as a solution to Israel's problems.
I agree 100%! Over the past year, Israel has caused orders of magnitude more innocent deaths by terrorist actions (as outlined in the warranted issued here), has a much higher civilian death rate during military operations (Oct 7 was around 60%, while IDF's battles have been higher, with both sides hiding military targets within civilian areas) and should be taken far more seriously, as their support from other national aggressors like the US makes them far more dangerous.
First, that Biden admin and others can't escape culpability for any such claim if it's considered credible. Second, the dubious factual basis (trucks were allowed in all the time; temporary port and air supply obviously with Israel's approval; the very low malnutrition death count according to Gaza health ministry's own reports).
The first made the admin's reply inevitable. The second made it even more likely, but it's a too complex point for PR I guess, so they went with 'equating'.
Almost certainly
ICC warrant will likely just be ignored.
I am not an expert, but I am under impression that he will be jailed in Israel too once/if loses power.
As for how far will the US go, well in 2002, Congress passed (and Bush signed) the American Service Members Protection Act, more colloquially known as the Hage Invasion Act. It authorizes the president to use all necessary force including invading the Netherlands if an American servicemember or appointed official is ever taken into ICC custody. This includes officials and servicemen of key allies, including Israel.
So will Betanyahu or Gallant actually be arrested? Almost certainly not. The practical effect of this is political not legal.
The goal of protests, boycotting, ICJ applications, ICC warrants, UN (GA and SC) motions, "Undecided" voting in Democratic primaries and so on are to incrementally pressure the two key players here: Israel and, more importantly, the US. Why? Because the US could end the conflict with a phone call. They could end it with a press release.
BDS (Boycott, divest, sanction) movements were considered successful in isolating and ultimately toppling the Apartheid South African regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Given this success, an awful lot of lobbying has been directed at US politicans to pass so-called "anti-BDS" laws that are laws in ~37 states. For example, to be a teacher in Texas, you need to sign a contract agreeing to never participate in a BDS movement against Israel.
So the practical effect of ICC warrants is just to incrementally isolate and pressure Israel.
There is no easy solution … from camp David to now.
Everyone from the Hague to UC Berkeley administrators is learning one hard truth: agreements with some polities in that part of the world and their ambassadors are not worth very much. But if you pretend that they are then it seems like there are easy solutions.
To Israel. The modern state of Israel simply cannot exist without the largesse and political cover the US provides.
> There is no easy solution
Yes and no. End the genocide. End the apartheid. Nuremberg-like trials to deal with war criminals on both sides. Reconstruction of a single state. 750,000 settlers has made a two-state solution impossible.
We've been here before: post-US civil war and post-apartheid South Africa.
There is the idea that the currently oppressed population will rise up in vilence against their former oppressors. History doesn't back up this view. Our modern examples such as Reconstruction showed the opposite: the rise of the KKK and the rise of violence against former slaves by their former oppressors.
Afghanistan has been described as the graveyard of empires. This region may be vying for that title.
Couldn't you say the same about whites in apartheid South Africa?
And really the only way we are resolving this is by actually solving the underlying issue, which is that there are a set of people essentially locked up in a prison for 30 years and/or slowly being shot by settlers in the West Bank.
I agree about solving the underlying issues and the injustices that have historically taken place but the above is intended to answer the question and engage in analysis rather than arguing the merits, which is likely an unproductive conversation.
[1]: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PP410_INVES...
You also forget that Israel has fought all its major wars without the US.
Economic measures could be a different story, but pulling that lever on an an ally of 75+ years would damage the US's credibility. Not too mention to the domestic impact in the US. I don't think any decision makers weighing national interest would go there.
Plus, if the US successfully isolated Israel, it's highly likely the whole region would be at war in short time. Hard to imagine the West not getting involved again at that point, except now in a significantly worse position.
- '2000 Camp David Summit offer
- '2001 Taba Summit offer
- '2007 Olmert offer
In fact, during the peace talks between '2000 and '2001, the Palestinian leader at the time, Arafat, with control over the main armed faction in PLO at the time, Fatah, has failed to thwart the waves of violence against Israeli citizens, for the following 4-5 years, known as the Second Intifada.
Iron Dome simply allows Israel to do more offense. Without it, they would need to be more cautious.
https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/fs_2203_at...
If they lose the support of the US they might actually have to play nice.
US funding of Israel is used to buy votes in the US, and to buy some influence in Israel, it will not change the military situation much.
- Giving up Sinai for a peace treaty with Egypt
- Giving up access to the Temple Mount for a peace treaty with Jordan
- Repeatedly offering peace deals to the Palestinian leadership following the Oslo Accords ('2000 Camp David Summit, '2001 Taba Summit, '2007 Olmert offers etc.)
[1]
> Shlomo Ben-Ami, then Israel's Minister of Foreign Relations who participated in the talks, stated that the Palestinians wanted the immediate withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and only subsequently the Palestinian authority would dismantle the Palestinian organizations. The Israeli response was "we can't accept the demand for a return to the borders of June 1967 as a pre-condition for the negotiation." In 2006, Shlomo Ben-Ami stated on Democracy Now! that "Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well."
Multiple members of Clinton's negotiating team also dispute that interpretation:
> Robert Malley, part of the Clinton administration and present at the summit, wrote to dispel three "myths" regarding the summit's failure. First myth, Malley says, was "Camp David was an ideal test of Mr. Arafat's intentions". Malley recalls that Arafat didn't think that Israeli and Palestinian diplomats had sufficiently narrowed issues in preparation for the summit and that the Summit happened at a "low point" in the relations between Arafat and Barak.
> The second myth was "Israel's offer met most if not all of the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations". According to Malley, Arafat was told that Israel would not only retain sovereignty over some Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, but Haram al Sharif too, and Arafat was also asked to accept an unfavorable 9-to-1 ratio in land swaps.
> The third myth was that "The Palestinians made no concession of their own". Malley pointed out that the Palestinians starting position was at the 1967 borders, but they were ready to give up Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and parts of the West Bank with Israeli settlements. Further, the Palestinians were willing to implement the right of return in a way that guaranteed Israel's demographic interests. He argues that Arafat was far more compromising in his negotiations with Israel than Anwar el-Sadat or King Hussein of Jordan had been when they negotiated with Israel.
---
2001 Taba Summit
[2]
> A new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made.
[1] Camp David wiki page
[2] Carter - Peace Not Apartheid
These are unconstitutional laws that unfortunately are easy to pass but difficult to remove. There needs to be more legal challenges to remove these laws. There have been positive efforts to remove these laws although the states find new ways to keep amended versions of the laws on the books which requires further lawsuits to challenge.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Constitutional_c...
A high profile Islamic terrorist attacks would shift the narrative, for example. On the other side, if the war cools down a bit people will gradually lose interest in the same way that no one cares about Modi's past actions.
For perspective, I'm with Israel. Though, I'm for saving as many Palestinian lives as humanly possible. Which should be all of them, should the clerics and State Actors stop abusing them via radicalization and the Islamic World works with Israel toward offering appropriate options.
But what I'm speaking about, in terms of prediction, isn't the way that the wind blows. What I'm speaking about is high level State intention.
No one today can seriously believe that State political orientation is a grassroots effect. The reality is that, with the exception of extremely unstable States that are de facto puppets of other Nations, the broad political orientation of modern States is an effect of the allowable movements, opinions, revolutions, propaganda, and migrations that are facilitated by the agencies over decades. Ergo, the eventual orientation of any State toward or away from Israel has to be assumed to be in that State's geopolitical interest as dictated at the highest level.
As we can easily observe, if there was an event and the resultant popular effect was not in the State's interest than, no matter what, the event would be minimized into oblivion by State Press.
Conversely, the Press will manufacture events out of virtual non-events if that assists the State's interest.
Only the State or God will determine whether or not it supports Israel, in any future. That's my starting point for prediction.
Seems like in most cases the state is more pro-israel than the population.
And God killed that Turkish guy so apparently he's pro-Israel too.
In some cases. But like I said, Western Nations are now factional at a high level (in my observation, and whether or not this is an intentional result - in my view, it might be). And the short to medium term may not predict the long term. What is also possible is that what the State says, in any period, may not predict its long-term strategy.
Not really. Go check the results of the popular vote for Eurovision. Israel came in second.
There's a huge quiet population that is pro-Israel. They don't make noise with protests though, so some people don't realize they exist.
The fact that Israel didn't win the popular vote suggests that the support for them is not particularly strong in Europe.
They came in second place. How is that "not particularly strong"?
And the difference between the popular vote and the jury vote was especially dramatic for Israel. No one expected anything else though......
And there is already a precedent for strong popular support. In 2022, Ukraine won the popular vote with 439 points, with 239 points for the next country. This year, Israel lost with 323 points vs. 337 points for the winner. Ukraine, which came in third, also got pretty close with 307 points.
Similar forms of activism, such as petitions and protests, are supposed to demonstrate support for something, but they often end up showing the opposite. Because the absolute number of supporters rarely matters. What's more important is the number of supporters as a fraction of the total, or relative to the expectations.
Once upon a time, I was involved in something controversial. There was a petition opposing us, with a very large number of signatures for that context. But the petition ended up strengthening our case, because it showed that the opposition to our plans was no more widespread than what we had assumed. The next elections proved us correct. A large number of people with a particular opinion didn't matter, because they were a small enough fraction of the total.
This sounds exactly like the scam that the right wing runs in America regarding the "Best Selling Book lists". There are a number of right wing books on the list each year but it turns out those books are purchased in large bulk by right leaning groups funded by billionaire donors and are then handed out for free at events or dumped on the clearance channels. It gives a fake impression that the books are more popular than they really are and is in effect a way to blunt the effectiveness of left wing thinking.
This is also done via channels such as PragerU. Right leaning groups funded by billionaires produce white papers describing their thesis which are then sent out to groups such as PragerU and Ben Shapiro in the form of talking points to be inserted into the narrative of their videos.
There is a huge quiet population that is OKAY with 40k Palestinian bombed by Israeli regime.
I had no idea on Eurovision result and to see Israel to be second, I guess people are blind to the genocide
So you can certainly make a case for 7K dead civilians. That's a lot - multiple times what the US lost in 9/11. No need to inflate numbers and loose credibility.
>They showed 24,686 dead which appeared to be a downward revision from the figure of about 35,000 which had been reported earlier in May, with 7,797 children and 4,959 women confirmed dead, about half the toll cited in previous reports. But the UN said on Monday that estimated overall death toll remained about 35,000.
>Farhan Haq, a UN spokesperson, said the new smaller numbers reflected those bodies which had been fully identified. The bigger figures included corpses for whom identification has so far not been completed. Haq said it was expected that, as the process of identification continued, the official tolls among women and children would also rise.
You live in a bubble if you think social media represents people. Social media represents the highly motivated ones. It does not reward quiet thinkers, it rewards "useful idiots" who have brainless slogans.
The normal people who actually think about things don't participate because they have better things to do than useful idiots.
And then you have people like me who also have better things to do, but feel obligated to post occasionally to at least try to reduce the amount of misinformation.
So the ICC already decided on this? No? Well, then I wouldn't be so sure about this if I where you. Because starving a population, denying them water, fuel and medicine amounts to genocide in all but name.
Actually, "normal" people should thing about these things if their tax dollar is funding the genocide against the Palestinians.
To be quiet on the killing is to be complicit.
> there is no genocide
One better thing for you to do is not spread lies.
Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, Gabor Mate aren't "noisy activists", I don't think.
I was concluding the same thing at the start of this Israel/Palestine conflict but then I saw amazing amounts of resistance to Israel, the likes which I have not seen before. People taking the time to protest in real life gives a more reliable indicator of the internet support. There has definitely been a step change in favor of Palestine. I predicted that i'd see this in my lifetime but I honestly thought it would have taken another 20+ years as more Pro israel older generations died off. The fact that it is happening now and that the rich Israel supporters are freaking out and doing whatever they can to "suppress" the narrative makes me think we are seeing some sort of slow moving shift.
Honestly it could go either way, there is a lot of astroturfing on both sides to make the noise level so absurd that its hard to see a clear picture.
I have never seen such a large physical response to Israel in my life though, that really leads me to believe that this may be a step change from past incidents regarding Israel/Palestine.
Also the fact that the rich Pro Israeli donors are freaking out more than in the past seems to indicate something has changed.
Yes, definitely, that's what they did.
The main reason I can think of would be that they didn't need to 'astroturf' that many, due to europeans generally being conservative and anti-arab or anti-muslim. But they ran a campaign to get votes, and exactly how efficient it was is very hard to pinpoint.
Zionists have quite extensive tooling and robust parasocial networks for running propaganda campaigns. Why wouldn't they use that to try and become the next host of the Eurovision pop tournament?
"“My colleagues and I look forward to make sure neither Khan, his associates nor their families will ever set foot again in the United States,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton wrote on X."
"The ICC is the world’s first permanent international war crimes court and its 124 member states are obliged to immediately arrest the wanted person if they are on a member state’s territory."
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/21/no-equivalence-bide...
I don't understand how the US and many other EU governments can be so extremely critical of a court which as far as I know has been considered legitimate by all of them (except the US which apparently removed its signature... anyone knows why?), and whose decisions have always been applauded by all of them (including Putin's arrest [1]), except for this last one.
Quoting from the linked article [1]: "British journalist George Monbiot wrote in a Guardian op-ed that the ICC targeting Putin was an example of the organization's bias in favor of prosecuting crimes by non-Westerners, ...".
Looks like that's the real issue here, doesn't it?
Imagine a leader of a country saying that the judiciary's decision is wrong and that the judge won't be allowed to travel freely anymore because of that. That would be the end of the rule of law. Why is it different in this case?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_a...
Tom Cotton is a clown senator that is an symbol of the dysfunction of the US government of the last few decades. He along with a few frequent imbeciles are the reason there is so much dysfunction. If there was any redeeming factor of the current US system, he would be impeached and removed a long time ago.
A) I'm told warrant approval is almost always a rubberstamp.
B) There will be a discrediting campaign, but ICC's future is the least interesting thing to me.
C) I'm not sure this leads to a conviction, but actual trials will probably take years by which time Bibi and co will be out of office. Again not so interesting.
D) Bibi was already done for. But paradoxically this strengthens him domestically temporarily and massively strengths the Right next elections. I'll expand on this below since this is IMHO interesting.
E) It makes attacking Israel a bit more 'legitimate', but in the ME legitimacy for that was already sky-high. War with Lebanon was very high likelihood anyway.
F) Saudi normalization is DOA for this term (always was, but admin was blind to everyone's interests. Qatar would have had to be nuts not to put every possible roadblock here, and Biden admin could never see what was in front of its eyes).
G) Hamas has not so simple problems here. The various ideas for reintegration has hit serious roadblocks, and later on I believe this will cause them bigger problems than Israel which can always change leaders.
---
D is not 'rally around the flag'. It has to do with the opposition is built: its deep links with the 'security state'. The security state is outraged and itself vulnerable to possible warrants. The same logic could have easily justified adding Gantz.
An Israeli Left opposition which can't claim the world likes them more (due to warrant risk) and loses its security credentials (security state links to pre and post Oct failures, warrant risk again) is dead in the water. Which means it needs more time before an election to find its footing again... But on the other hand, it wouldn't like possible ICC isolation either. So a temporary delay before losing in the elections.
Its pretty similar to an indictment in the US (to judges rather than a grand jury); its an unopposed process where the prosecutor knows the standards and chooses when to bring a case to that step based on confidence in being ready to meet the standards. There's not a lot of probability of surprises if the basic work is done competently and in good faith and not with an intent to push the envelope.
> I'm not sure this leads to a conviction, but actual trials will probably take years by which time Bibi and co will be out of office.
Trials won't take start until the individuals being tried are in custody for trial. (They don't have to be at the same time.)
It's a tiny bit higher since IMHO he pushed the envelope on starvation (the reported malnutrition death count is 32 out of over two million people), and on not engaging with Israel (was due to a trip to the country before issuing indictments), but given unopposed nature, his advantage is so large I don't see odds of this being rejected.
>Trials won't take start until the individuals being tried are in custody for trial. (They don't have to be at the same time.)
Yeah, the other comment slagged me on this. The essential 'this isn't resolved for years, by which time they are out of office' is right.
After the arrest warrant goes out, everything stops until people charged are in custody. It's very unlikely that Gallant or Netanyahu will ever be arrested. Their travel will be just limited for the rest of their lives.
My other point - ICC can issue secret warrants, and no denial would be credible due to its very nature... This is poison to Gantz's political career and same for any active general who would want to join the current opposition following service. The current Israeli opposition is just not competitive without generals, and all they've left are certain people who are very... outspoken to put it mildly.
Do you have a source for that? This doesn't make sense to me since it relies on more than a hundred different countries to enforce them, it'd be impossible to keep anything they do a secret
Yeah, in practice any such warrant will eventually leak, but it's still a risk for anyone who might be on the other end which de facto creates limits to anyone who might fall under suspicion.
If that's the case then they are defacto banned from travelling. Still these secret warrants will be shared with the respective countries, right? So they should know?
On the other hand, it defuses the situation away from an world war wannabe into something Israel fights alone.
If warrants are issued, I’d bet at least the House votes to sanction the ICC [1]. If Trump wins, I’d bet it passes. (Which is ironic, since every moment of attention on Israel and Palestine is a win for Trump. This war is Biden’s abortion debate. He’s checkmated, with massive vote losses regardless of what he does.)
[1] https://www.axios.com/2024/05/20/icc-netanyahu-arrest-warran...
That is not to say I think Trump would have handled the situation any better. I’m sure it would have been fuel on the fire.
Can we all agree on one single thing though:
The Governments of USA, Germany, UK and Israel would be best informing the world of their definition of genocide as there is definitely a massive difference in opinion of what genocide is. It is super important. If they can explain why and how what is happening doesn’t match the definition of genocide agreed upon in the Genocide Convention of 1948 then maybe the world will stop using the word. But until they can change everyone’s minds, people are going to keep believing it. I think that would solve a lot of this back and forward.
There is no definition of Genocide but only of what you can get away with. These countries are engaged in a proxy war via Israel. They can't replace Israel right now, heck they can't even replace the current leadership. So they just have to explain away and launder the reputation of the operation.
They absolutely are. Really everyone with a non-cynical opinion in this whole mess, on both sides, is deeply unserious. There are no solutions here, at all. Everyone wants something terrible. Push one side and you eventually get to "The Palestinians Deserve What They Get". Push the other and you get to "Jews are Colonizers Who Need to be Driven Out". And BOTH SIDES use the term "genocide", largely incorrectly, to describe those horrors and are SHOCKED AND OFFENDED that anyone would describe their own opinions so.
I've just given up. My general political feelings align mostly with the Palestinians here, if for no other reason than it stops the immediate bleeding faster. But there will be no peace here, not within our lifetimes.
This is like the Flat Earth equivalent in geopolitics — and getting people to explain why they think things is fascinating.
I also like irony — so seeing Israel “prosecuted” for the lowest civilian casualty rate in modern history is hilarious.
The Gaza Ministry of Health says as of today that 35,562 people have been killed [0]. The Israeli Ministry of Defense in March said it has killed 13,000 Hamas operatives [1].
Leaving aside the two month gap between these figures, the civilian casualty ratio is 1:1.7.
I tried to find a source for what a "typical" casualty ratio is in urban conflicts. This source [2] claims that 90% of overall casualties is a typical number. That would be a ratio of 1:9.
John Spencer, who chairs the Modern Warfare Institute at USMA, and seems to be an authority on the subject, has a tweet addressing this specifically [3], in which he cites the Battles of Mosul, and Manila as having casualty rates of 1:2.5, 1:6 respectively.
I don't think proving the negative of "lowest civilian casualty rate in modern history" is feasible, but a nearly 5x improvement in civilian casualties compared to the assumed norm, and lower civilian casualties than Spencer's comparisons seems to indicate that the claim is not without merit.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-ham... [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamas-says-gaza... [2] https://civiliansinconflict.org/our-work/conflict-trends/urb... [3] https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1786612914117349769
The source you provided says "for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians". This is clearly an upper bound, and makes no claim about how close to this they actually come.
In the same way, I might offer my customers an SLA of two nines in their contract, but never drop below three in practice. Part of effective planning is describing the worst case scenario, but that doesn't imply it will actually happen.
For what is worth, the UN estimates are significantly lower with less than 8’000 children (and 5’000 women) out of the 25’000 identified casualties. Maybe there are indeed 10’000 additional victims as Hamas claims (the UN take that number at face value, Israel estimated are slightly lower) but it seems unlikely that 75% of them are children. It’s not physically imposible though.
And there will still be many more starving to death each day, thanks for aid trucks being attacked and burned (with IDF collusion apparently).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/21/israel...
The thing is, there is a definition of Genocide and while I think what Hamas did in October was absolutely monstrous I just can’t logically conclude they committed Genocide. So anyone saying that is just ‘saying it’ if you catch my drift. But for what is happening in Gaza, I just want my Government to explain why so I can know for sure that I am mistaken about it and it isn’t genocide. The definition shows it is, but my Govt are saying that it isn’t. It just feels like a whole load of double think to me. Y’know what I mean? If there’s a definition of what it is, then why is the world seeing with their eyes it is genocide and a few powerful allies of Israel saying it isn’t.
Why does logic need to be so controversial eh? A definition is right there yet ‘opinions’ are taken more than fact in this age.
Feeling the same as you - won’t be any peace in the middle east at this rate.
...is not all of what Hamas is responsible for, nor a limited statement of its goals or desires. Nor frankly does it even reflect the limits of what non-palestinians like you are calling for. All the kids in NYC chanting "From the River to the Sea" are embracing a genocidal frame (that the expulsion of an existing population from its home is an OK thing to do). And... you don't really care, and choose to excuse that while you condemn the other side.
And so you (yes, you personally) are making things worse and not better. Because when Hamas or whoever finally gets to the line with an army capable of marching across it, they'll think they have your support.
Like I said, there will be no peace here. And the reason is opinions like yours that choose to excuse one evil while you rail against another.
I read and then re-read the parent. It does not not appear that he has been discussing the totality of both 'sides' actions ( and there is a loooong history there ), but rather focused on most recent Hamas action and Israel's response to it.
From where I sit, OP is not wrong. It is tiring - it is especially tiring when it is couched in moralistic 'you should support <my side>' with the undertone of 'because we are the good guys'. I am starting to seriously doubt there are good guys here.
<< And so you (yes, you personally) are making things worse and not better. Because when Hamas or whoever finally gets to the line with an army capable of marching across it, they'll think they have your support.
And I guess this is the weirdest part. There is really one army in this conflict. An army with technology, training, supplies and knowledge seemingly to do whatever is needed -- some of it courtesy of American taxpayer -- and still managing to fail so hard across the board against seemingly inferior enemy, who adopted guerrilla warfare.
<< And the reason is opinions like yours that choose to excuse one evil while you rail against another.
I remain unconvinced. OP is not excusing anything. Personally, I can easily say Hamas is bad.
Can you openly say Israel's response is bad? Can you even openly state its response is 'over the top'?
No? Then the discussion will remain fruitless and the issue will remain as-is for and will not be solved within our lifetimes. Might as well check out and keep US semi-safe.
Israel's response is bad. Israel's response is 'over the top'.
Can you state that responses to that which embrace eliminationist goals are likewise bad? Do you condemn not just "Hamas" but Palestinian nationalist aims (oft-parroted by activist westerners who don't really understand what it means) of retaking the 1948 land? Or do you just look the other way and figure The Jews Have It Coming? You're picking a side here, whether you admit it or not. And picking a side means that someone loses.
Sure, elimanationist goals are likewise bad. I will go even further, it is a really bad idea for the humanity to go down that path, because, if history taught us anything, it is really, really hard to stop violence once it starts.
<< Do you condemn not just "Hamas" but Palestinian nationalist aims?
Can you define those a little more closely? I am hedging, because it is already moving way past the discussion at play and if want to evaluate all nations nationalist aims, I am not sure we should be limiting ourselves to just Palestinians.
<< You're picking a side here, whether you admit it or not.
I worry that you may have chosen a side and are not arguing in good faith ( whether you admit it or not ). Based on your statement, no matter what I say, you have already made a determination about me and my views. That is fine. I am ok with stopping this conversation here. I am not expecting to change minds. I was, however, expecting more.
<< And picking a side means that someone loses.
Does it really have to be that way? Is it truly a zero-sum game? It is not a rhetorical question. I am curious if you can imagine a non-binary world.
Which side do you think I've picked? What can I say to convince you that I haven't? There are no solutions here. There can be no Palestinian homeland within the 1948 borders without terrible violence. There will be no peace within Gaza and the West Bank without it. At best we can achieve a detent for a while and an end to the immediate violence, with a pie-in-the-sky best case of some kind of end to the west bank settlement activity and maybe a little clawing back of recently-taken territory.
If you're asking for more than that, on either side, you're perpetuating the conflict and making things worse. Because eventually we'll get to a stage where one side isn't dominant, and what happens then is an actual shooting war with millions of civilian casualties.
Zero disagreement. This is an HN thread. It is not even intended for a solution. The fact that is even discussed here is an indicator how unusual a conflict it is.
I am not a dignitary. I hold zero to no real world power. Frankly, if I did, I assume I would not be discussing stuff online for practical reasons. As it stands, its just two humans talking.
<< There can be no Palestinian homeland within the 1948 borders without terrible violence.
I will ignore for a moment the 1948 restriction.
I look at this from an outsider point of view so when I see words like this, I can't help but respond with 'but there already is terrible violence; how exactly do you want to escalate it?'
<< actual shooting war with millions of civilian casualties.
There already is a shooting war with all the horrors war can bring. The only thing missing is millions of civilian casualties. And it does not look like it ( war ) is being contained. If anything, there is a growing risk of expanding and moving beyond ME region.
<< If you're asking for more than that
Best I can ask for is a plea that both sides stop. Right now, this is probably the only reasonable way to stop immediate violence. And I suppose we can worry about 'day after' then. But as I mentioned before, once the violence starts, it may be hard to stop.
<< Because eventually we'll get to a stage where one side isn't dominant
Because it worked so well now with a dominant party?
<< pie-in-the-sky best case of some kind of end to the west bank settlement activity and maybe a little clawing back of recently-taken territory
So what do we do? Nothing? It goes full circle to 'there are no solutions here'.
edit:
I think I will be removing myself from the remainder of this conversation. It was genuinely interesting to me so I thank you for your answers. It looks like it is going to be a long week here as I am starting to get half panicky dms.
Demanding people leave their homes doesn't work. They fight. They kill. They'll starve. They'll die. This is exactly the problem we're seeing in Gaza, and it's just amazing to me that you don't understand it's symmetric.
It doesn't matter who you think "should" be living there, Israelis actually are. Homes are homes. People in the western pro-palestinian movement have fooled themselves into thinking that Israelis will just move to The Bronx or Palo Alto or whatever, and that's not remotely how it works.
> Because it worked so well now with a dominant party?
It's working comparatively well, yes. Both Israeli and Gazan casualties are bad, but low relative to total population. That's not the way real ethnic wars work, usually. If a Palestinian army thinks they can actually win, they'll invade and kill everyone. Because to their worldview it's their land and the Jews are invaders, and that's what you do with invaders. It shocks me the extent to which people don't understand this.
Hmm, are you suggesting that the moment Palestinian settler is able to eke out a piece of land he/she is able to defend from Israel, it is automatically acceptable ( in a might is right kind of way )? Is this really an argument we should be putting forward? Does it not clash with your previous statements somewhat?
<< it's just amazing to me that you don't understand it's symmetric.
Do I really though? Is it possible you are trying to force me into a particular convenient label? It makes no practical difference, but I would like you to note that most of the people here are used to 'internet argumentation tactics'.
<< It doesn't matter who you think "should" be living there
My friend, this is the reason we are unable to keep this conversation going. You are putting words in my mouth.
<< It shocks me the extent to which people don't understand this.
What is there to understand? Violence begets violence.
My apologies, I took your evasion of the homeland border issue as evidence that you didn't want to treat with the fact that it's completely unresolvable. If that's not the case, I'm happy. But you're still not giving ground here and unless you do, you're basically siding with and supporting the aims of the folks who want to ethnically cleanse the levant.
Once more, to repeat: Israel's actions in and administration of the West Bank and Gaza are terrible injustices. But they're stable injustices and just "turning off" Israeli dominance in the region, which seems to be your goal, is going to hurt things very badly.
No worries. It was an evasion guided by trying not to muddy the waters further. I am not sure, bringing border issue into the mix would make anything clearer. It would likely force us down the history lane along with all the distractions associated with it, discussing sources, whether they are valid, biased, accurate and so on.. and while I am sure it would be a really interesting conversation to have, I do not think I am the right person to discuss it.
<< you're basically siding with and supporting the aims of the folks who want to ethnically cleanse the levant.
I purposefully choose not to align myself with either. I am, as it were, neutral, partially because I have no direct stake in outcome ( although I am open to argumentation on this front -- would you be able to make a case for it being useful to US interests ). If it makes you feel any better, I approach question of Ukraine in roughly the same way ( and I technically have a bigger stake in outcome there ).
<< But they're stable injustices and just "turning off" Israeli dominance in the region, which seems to be your goal, is going to hurt things very badly.
I find the phrase 'stable injustices' interesting and I suppose it does speak to something deep within us when as long we know something bad is coming, it is not as bad, because it is just the way life ( currently ) is. All of a sudden, its all ok, because it is, what it is. Might as well complain about the weather really. Pointless.
Do you not find it mildly depressing that you have effectively excused 'terrible injustices' by saying they are at least stable ( and predictable I suppose )?
As for goals, I am not sure I have actual goals here. If I did, I think this conversation would be more structured. But it isn't. I chat with you in this manner precisely, because my mind is not made up and, if it helps, you do offer interesting counter-arguments.
With that in mind, can you elaborate on how 'turning off' Israeli dominance would 'hurt things very badly'? I am a sucker for balance so it is possible I am missing something.
Assume that October 7 is what Hamas and Hezbollah would do on a much larger scale if Israel were militarily weaker than them. (You could, for example, take the Hamas charter as reason to think that.)
In that process nine million people get killed or displaced, with "killed" being a significant fraction. That's orders of magnitude worse than the status quo. Note that "who's right" has nothing to do with that evaluation - it's just based on the body count.
That I think is the case that the current "stable balance" is better. Even though it is tragic, brutal, and deadly, it still is far better than what could happen if the equilibrium were destroyed.
But this argument is totally dependent on whether you believe that Hamas and Hezbollah would do that. Personally, after October 7, I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but you may see it differently.
More than mildly so. But it remains the best option.
> With that in mind, can you elaborate on how 'turning off' Israeli dominance would 'hurt things very badly'? I am a sucker for balance so it is possible I am missing something.
When you want to kill someone else, but they are overwhelmingly superior, you can't. So you won't try, for the most part. When their power wanes and yours grows, there comes a point where you think you can win. And that's when you roll the tanks.
"Balance" is about stability, not equality. Fuck with Israeli dominance and eventually Iran sneaks enough weapons into Gaza that we see Hamas start to take and hold territory. How is that better?
Well that is incorrect and to put words in my mouth and then personally attack based on said words is kind of pointless.
My argument is about genocide. Words don’t equate genocide, but certain actions are. I don’t think you’ll be winning any nobel peace prizes for figuring out the difference.
And my argument is that your "genocide argument" is overnarrow and has the effect of picking a side in a conflict that cannot and will not end unless people stop perpetuate it like that. Stopping your particular favorite enemy has the effect of empowering and emboldening their enemies, who are just as bad.
You've put my thoughts into words better than I could.
I'm not seeing a happy ending to this story, ever. I keep thinking about the turf war storyline in The Last of Us II (which was clearly written as an allegory for the Israel-Palestine conflict), and I think the storyline's conclusion was apt. There is only death and misery ahead. Get out if and while you can, and don't look back.
If this goes through every western leader past and present can have a warrant out for them at any minute, it really doesn't take much to find 1 suspected violation and a need to arrest and stand trial to see if they are guilty.
You do nothing. Which is why all of hand-wringing around this ICC decision is for pointless. There is no such thing as "international law" in any practical sense.
Curious: What's "Western" about this particular democracy?