I knew that in advance but not as bad as someone who is not sympathetic to both sides as much as possible, while being equally disappointed in their behavior.
>you're recalling incorrectly.
OK it wasn't a complete stalemate, once the suicide bombings were better prevented, jihadists continued to terrorize by shooting rockets at Israel.
Try and point out any decade of the 70's, 80's, 90's and on when there have been no hate crimes committed by jihadists. And the response from Israel has amounted to gradually tightening the screws to protect their citizens, ending up with a more deplorable situation for Palestinians overall every time. Not without fatalities either. In a cruel tit-for-tat that has been easily followed over these last 6 decades for me.
That's all Israel's fault, and the need for tightening their security is due to the fault of Hamas these days.
Now there's war crimes on both sides.
I don't mean peace-loving civilians at all, it's the bloodthirsty killers on both sides who are the evildoers.
That's a clear enough line for me, I'm not willing to paint those who are "less evil" with the same broad brush as the real killers.
And everybody can recognize that the number of killers in the IDF has skyrocketed over the last year, but can anybody be sure when this matches or exceeds the number of Palestinians who are fully dedicated to killing Israelis?
One thing's for sure, the number of Palestinian casualties is the biggest tragedy and they should have stopped shooting way before it got this far.
That's what this article is all about and I believe these doctors and their first-hand accounts.
> One thing's for sure, the number of Palestinian casualties is the biggest tragedy and they should have stopped shooting way before it got this far.
again - "if only the victims would stop resisting, then we could have peace."
> And everybody can recognize that the number of killers in the IDF has skyrocketed over the last year, but can anybody be sure when this matches or exceeds the number of Palestinians who are fully dedicated to killing Israelis?
how does someone engage with this question? here's my attempt: "everyone can recognize that there's a lot of violence on both sides, but how can we be sure that the IDF isn't actually doing this because they're super duper evil?"
You have a number of good points.
Not me, people don't expect it, but I admit I actually don't have a point.
Except maybe world peace, but people aren't trying for that any more.
Still just observing, not truly involved. For decades.
Since there are abundant haters on both sides, I can't expect to go unhated ;) Perhaps worse than if I favored one or the other :\
That doesn't mean it's "pointless" to consider what the current destruction is about and what led up to it.
Whether it's a political initiative or the actions of certain military members only, the outcome looks the same.
Good terminology does help. Super-duper evil may be the most accurate description of the IDF if it is carrying out genocide as a political policy. Which would be expected to be handed down from politicians of some type. Which could be happening. OTOH policy may be to avoid casualties as completely as possible, but if too many members of IDF defy that the outcome could trend in the same direction anyway. Still genocide, or bent on genocide, when they try to completely destroy an opposing population either way, whether they are innocent civilians or not. Sounds like something for war crime investigators which may happen someday.
I'm the first to admit it looks like genocide to me before the doctors report adds its own information.
That's why I comment on this article to begin with.
In response, Hamas I would say is not committing genocide. Nope. Not at all from what I see.
It's no secret that Hamas wishes they could, and prays for it, but they are not actually committing genocide at this point.
Certainly there are more than zero Israelis who pray for compete elimination of their adversaries in kind too.
Whenever any of these type prayers come true, that's when it's certainly been the worst, whether in prehistoric times or right now.
There's a lot of vengeance on both sides that goes back stupidly too far into the past any way you look at it.
There's bound to be Arabs & Jews who have never even been to the Mideast who hate each other religiously just for traditional reasons or spite.
Lots of people call it "human nature". I'm no George Carlin but to me it looks like inhuman nature.
There is not supposed to be a subtle difference but one passes for the other all the time, there's got to be some kind of disconnect here.
Or wherever.
After all this I haven't really answered your points very much, mostly adding more of my observations which may be appreciated.
Edit: well added another big comment "below" which will be a different post if it's too long to fit.
There's no need to rebuff anything because you make sense, but here's what I've got.
I may go back too far into the past in an additional comment coming soon, look for it, while also trying to focus most on this exact generation and what is happening now.
Proud jihadists is an accurate description of religious fanatics who relish doing damage to Israel, is it not? Nobody denies that Israel has its own equivalent on every level of hate in the opposite direction. Perhaps embodied in today's IDF. So it's theoretically like a two-way street between Israel & Palestine. Too bad for Israel that there's always been jihadists on all sides in addition to Palestine within. This has never been handled well once modern destructivity fell into the hands of those retaining prehistoric low-humanity religious motivation.
I better explain this.
By prehistoric I mean anything before almost all things started to get written down, almost anywhere, any time. Like when accurate records had already existed for a millennium or more, but the vast majority of a community was still illiterate, and/or everything about their past beyond a certain point, or even sometimes during a certain period in the distant enough past, has been completely lost.
I think it can be accepted that the further you go back with prehistoric cultures, the more likely their activities would be dominated by superstition. You know, where they don't need an earthly reason to hate anybody who does not share the same superstition. So that's what they do, they hate for no "earthly" reason. These were not cavemen, this is modern man, no different than us with the same level of intellect, whenever they would act uncivilized it was usually because they actually were not civilized. They may or may not have had widely different respect for humanity than we would recognize today. Yes there are some records that exist from such early times in different areas but they are almost completely incomplete. People are going to work with what they got anyway.
I would say the evildoers are the ones who actually carry out the destruction, that's not very nuanced but it is a judgment that people know when they see it even if they've never seen it before. Could be anybody doing the damage, not one side or the other, although IIRC this is the exact terminology used by these same two parties in previous decades.
So evildoers involved in this conflict come from either side, whenever destructive action is actually taken.
With everything I've seen over the decades, it's my own fault when I don't have enough awareness that for a while I've been looking back much further than the period of many younger peoples' lifetimes, so they haven't seen what I have in real time. I guess it's too easy to get the idea that people already know all the precipitating events that have been recorded. There's a lot of smart people around. And I must apologize for giving the impression that I don't think the history is important when the opposite has been true for most of my life. Which makes me put different weights on different epochs, but I can't help it.
When you get a wrong idea like that, this is a valid response:
>the hate came from nowhere and they have so much of it that it's ingrained in their DNA.
Good call, which is absurd as it should be so it can't be real. But wait a minute, if something like that is ingrained in some other way could the same type present situation be arrived at? Remember, I'm not talking about one-sided hate here, there's more than enough to go around for thousands of miles. From any of the sources, whichever you may prefer. It doesn't have to be DNA to be passed down from previous decades or millennia, sometimes with mutation, sometimes not. When the root goes back to when nobody living was ever born, it could be hard to tell the difference.
You got me thinking, uh oh, what if there was an unfortunate mutation in the distant past which introduced an evil component?
With DNA they're getting better all the time at locating the most probable time or place for it to have occurred, even in the prehistoric past. With history, technology won't help much, plus the further back you go the more blurry. And of course disinformation can arise for many reasons, usually more over time, and is a factor not shared by DNA.
So I think we've come to a little bit of common terms here, almost nobody has ever justified extermination, but "almost" is not zero so it can occur, and that really is super-duper evil. That's why I don't think it's human nature at all, even though it has surely occurred more times than records exist for. You can't paper over this, too much inhumanity has taken place. People need to emphasize how much of a complete non-killing culture there needs to be for this to be avoided forever. Perhaps because extermination has surely occurred some time or another without any of the perpetrators thinking about any kind of justification one way or the other. Not exactly accidentally but if it can occur without extreme intention, everybody needs to really watch it more than they think.
Imagine how bad it could it get when a single perpetrator escalates to super-duper? You don't want to start the ball rolling, but it could happen and I think it depends on a hierarchy and the position that individual plays in that hierarchy.
I suppose you assumed I was imploring Hamas to stop returning fire at Israeli aggression. Not an accurate assumption when I think everyone should stop shooting (never start actually) and whoever is shooting most should stop the most. But that's just me.
This is so bad there are victims all over the place, thousands of miles away on occasion.
But the genocide risk is right there in Gaza, could be getting worse, and distorted information is proliferating.
When you say this:
"everyone can recognize that there's a lot of violence on both sides, but how can we be sure that the IDF isn't actually doing this because they're super duper evil?"
Right now I would say I 100% agree :)
So I'm not sure who was terrorising who
Isn't this the bloodiest year since Hamas took over Palestine?
There are definitely different epochs.
I think over the centuries they occasionally take turns terrorizing, but most of the time they don't bug each other even if they are not the least bit fond of such a dissimilar culture.
We just happen to be 3/4 of the way into a century that started when the world halted (but failed to reverse) the direct expressway to total destruction. The first time the human race ever had that happen and the lessons are supposed to be a gift only obtainable from a generation who grew up before that level of total human extermination was possible.
It quit mattering who the enemy was any more.
No more enemies were supposed to be allowed.
And nobody will ever grow up like that any more either.
Who wants to squander that gift which can never be replaced?
And why?
What are the odds of a second chance?
The Gaza situation is more akin to Vietnam, where also the civilian population was actively integrated with the military and helped them in more ways direct than indirect. The key difference here being that Vietnam was invaded by France and then the US, while Hamas were the ones who stirred up the hornet's nest in Israel.
Doesn’t this depend on when you define the conflict as starting? When do you think it started?
There is not much point in arguing about what kicked it off either - that won’t fix it.
What's tops on the list of things "you can't fix" anyway?
You've got to draw the line somewhere, recent past or way back, you've got to declare peace, give & accept forgiveness, starting some number of years back and going forward from there. You could even start right now. Forget everything bad that came before. That's got to be the most meaningful blessing any faithful or spiritual person could have. All blessing and no cursing makes Jack a real holy man. When he grows up.
Look at how the relationship between Vietnam and the rest of the world is now, compared to how it was at its worst. There was a time when it was under consideration for annihilation. "The dogs of war won't negotiate."
The only thing left in the toolbox is to visualize world peace and quit running the other way.
Almost the whole world tried this after World War II, under the worst of conditions, and it really worked. Almost everywhere for a very long time.
Tragic operators in leadership positions do so much damage because they can't visualize anything that could lead them anywhere good, but people follow them anyway. This seems hard to fix too.
After thousands of years, and everything in the 20th century, why are there still kings being unceremoniously overthrown at the same time armies massing in the desert, building "bravery" in the face of potential extermination themselves, in the same old "holy land", in biblical proportions relative to the known world today?
Is that too much of a coincidence? Why can't people get over it?
Doesn't that make it the longest running conflict zone anywhere, coincidentally one that is more likely to exterminate a population within their "known world" when much less of it was known the further you go back? Since it was more cutthroat when civilization was not very advanced -- ancient times it looks like? Surely over that much period of time and that far back.
Is that the holiest land this planet is ever going to have, or what? That's as embarrassing as can be, surely we could have done better. Hell, it's been done before, same shit different century. How does that represent us in the universe anyway?
We know there were times people failed to try hard enough to prevent extermination, not nearly as far back as biblical times so I guess it's always been a lurking possibility, for how many centuries nobody knows.
What? Since the dawn of time?
There was no humanity whatsoever back then . . .
OTOH I remember a significant leap in humanity when Vietnam ended, and for the country as a whole, since then saw no equivalent step downward, just a gradual grinding away. With occasional off-ramps on the road to prosperity, but nothing to refuel on or any way to continue meaningfully toward a receding destination that has never been completed yet, and not open for full occupancy at all. This is what people feel and I can't put it into words very well.
Nothing like my father had after World War II ended, he said it was great afterwards like nobody had ever seen. Not for everybody everywhere I know, but almost everywhere people were so much better off not having such a military burden. It was like a roll of the dice though, which hadn't really ended right when the major powers quit shooting. You had to make the best of what you got and go from there. Nobody who had been through WWII, soldier or not, was going to roll those dice again. The stakes were too high, and unfortunately have gotten higher since then.
Who wants to take the chance of it coming up snake eyes and you lose everything because you started WWIII. Shouldn't give anybody ideas I guess :\
Of course the US had confiscated gold from Americans not that many years before the war, and all but the very few high-rollers had recovered financially that quickly. Then there was war and people were really ready for it to be over, so they could utilize the same level of effort, on something that's not destructive and it would be great.
Anything has got to be great after you've faced Kamikazes too, so there is that.
Also looks like to stop the madness some people will use enough force to make the power of suicide missions seem insignificant by comparison, if there is no other way.
And stop the madness instantly. In "biblical proportion" to the known world today. Not much differrent than god was widely reported to do. This should not be necessary.
Too bad almost no fighters in the whole Middle East any more even have grandfathers who went through WWII, much less fought in it as teenagers. For some it's not even in their great-grandfather's generation.
The history of ancient times is now more vivid in some cultures than what remains of the lessons of a truly planet scale war, where there are just now almost no veterans remaining anywhere. Not only in the Middle East, or related to this conflict, but scattered all around and none of the total hesitation was supposed to be allowed to fade. People on a group basis are not as wary as they used to be. Even some of the same people who once were more cautious.
Go back a thousand years or two, and there were bound to be a couple adversaries who exterminated each other "as much as they could" while still being there centuries later. Otherwise at least one of them wouldn't be there centuries later. What about focusing on exterminations that did happen, but were never recorded whether they happened in the holy land or not? That would be the "regular kind" of extermination, since very few things were recorded that far back anyway, or those records don't exist because even if they did, almost all records are always completely lost. You know it, without a record of course. You never know, from time to time there might be a tendency to cover up something like this. History is more of a mystery than anything else after you go back different amounts in different places.
The more powerful the force, the more rapidly extermination could take place. Sounds pretty final to me.
Who would want that?
Wait, it's the 21st century, probably somebody by now?
Have you seen what some people do to get attention on Twitter? And that was when it was Twitter :\
But could it even happen unintentionally, or completely accidentally, which are two different things themselves?
What if there was just a little bit of intention?
Not quite. Indochina was a French colony which rebelled and escalated into open conflict. The rebellion was successful, the French were expelled, and Vietnam was formed.
However conflict in the area continued as a civil war between the two dominant factions in Vietnam (communist vs capitalist) for control of the new country.
The US intervention was a failed attempt at suppressing the communist faction.
Gaza is different in that it was conquered by Israel during their war with Egypt. The Israelies even started building settlements there.
Israel then got out of Gaza and removed all their settlers as part of a peace accord (if memory serves).
However Gaza never really accepted peace with Israel and kept on attacking them, culminating in the Oct 7th attack that got us in this mess.
"We pulled the settlements, therefore it's all good and people don't know what they're complaining about" is just the government's spin.
I find this IoW report of the situation a compelling expansion of that line of thinking[1], for anyone interested; excerpt:
> Hamas’ long-term effort to embed itself in Palestinian society and politics makes defeating and replacing it very difficult, but not impossible. Hamas’ combination of social services and outreach with coercive measures have ensured that Hamas retains significant support in Gaza relative to the very limited number of other entities that could replace it, despite the extremely destructive war that Hamas initiated. Hamas’ coercive apparatus makes it extremely difficult for possible Hamas alternatives in the Gaza Strip to begin to build their own governance system because to do so while Hamas remains militarily active risks near-certain death. It is not impossible to destroy Hamas’ political and military system, but doing so will require Hamas’ military defeat and a long transition to a new Palestinian-led government in the Gaza Strip.
[1]: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/hamas%E2%80%99...
> IIRC the oppression started decades ago as a security measure to regain a stalemate after excessive bombings from proudly hateful genocidal jihadists
you're recalling incorrectly.
> Exactly as you say, the sons & grandsons of those evildoers have followed in the footsteps and drawn greater oppression
we're talking about civilians, not combatants, not "evildoers" - normal human beings living their lives and being oppressed and murdered by an occupying force.
separating humans into "evil" and "good" is how we get into nation-states targeting children with precision weapons. unfortunately it's not that clear-cut.