To be completely honest I was on the fence about the conflict and even leaned towards Israel's side (I grew up Muslim and Jerusalem is like the third or second holiest site in Islam, whereas in Judaism it is the holiest, so it seemed pretty straightforward) but the way things have be going recently, I just cannot rationalize the deaths that have been taking place in any shape or form. The lives on 200 Israeli hostages are not in any shape or form worth more than the lives of 200 Palestinians. So I feel like the natural reaction should be to not support Israel and TikTok should not be held responsible for that.
> The lives on 200 Israeli hostages are not in any shape or form worth more than the lives of 200 Palestinians.
Ok, this sounds bad, but maybe you meant something else? Like not that Hamas can kill/kidnap with impunity, use their own people as human shields, and Israel should just suck it up?
If these were Americans, I wouldn’t fault my government for going all out. It would just set a bad precedent to do otherwise.
Why does it sound bad? Civilian casualties are civilian casualties, and attempts to justify them only lead to more casualties. As long as people on both sides support their governments, despite the civilian casualties, the violence will continue from generation to generation.
(And yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization, but it's also the legitimate government of Gaza. It may not be the de jure government, because the Palestinian National Authority ceased to have one in the aftermath of Hamas winning the 2006 elections.)
Civilian casualties always suck, but total war means they are unavoidable. Think of how many Germans were killed during WW2 just because Hitler wanted to take over Europe? War is never clean, and insurgencies will always use civilians as human shields, so civilian casualties are unavoidable if you do anything but surrender.
Also, if you don’t want to be invaded, don’t elect leaders that think kidnapping people across the border is a good idea. Ya, it’s rarely this simple, since these places are rarely so democratic, but people have some responsibility for their governments even in the case of autocracies.
Civilian casualties may be unavoidable, but a necessary evil is still evil. And, because I'm an outsider who doesn't identify with either party, I don't see the difference between Israeli and Palestinian casualties. Civilian casualties are civilian casualties.
Justifications similar to yours have been used to support the actions of Hamas. Many Palestinians, maybe even most of them, genuinely believe so. If the same arguments can be used in good faith to support both sides, such arguments must be worthless. They can only lead to more violence and more deaths.
WW2 was a rare war, because it was so conclusive. The Allies didn't only defeat the Axis, but they also had a plan for the aftermath. A plan how to reorganize the states on the losing side and how to win over the people and make them support the new regime. Without such a plan, a war today can only lead to another war tomorrow.
If the choice is between your own people getting kidnapped and killed by Hamas periodically, and total war, most countries will choose total war. Gaza will simply never be able to survive if its goal is the eradication of Israel, because Israel will simply not roll over and take that. Which country would?
The Taliban and Hussein were telling us repeatedly that they had nothing to do with 9-11, and we had no real intelligence that said otherwise.
No one is denying that Hamas went into Israel and kidnapped a bunch of people. Maybe Hamas was relying on American pacifists and isolationists to get away with it?
Here's one way to put it: Suppose people in the Northern US had, since the end of WWII, been using a mix of economic and military tactics to force Canadians near the border out of their homes, declaring the new territory part of a New England-centric ethnostate where only people of New England descent were welcome, to the point where the only remaining Canadian areas were completely surrounded by American settlements with militarized borders. Suppose between last January-October of last year alone, Canada lost 100-500 or so children directly due to military action and thousands more civilians due to inadequate healthcare and nutrition resulting from the military blockades.
And then, suppose that a militant group of, at most, 100-1000 of those Canadians, out of 5M or so total Canadians, did a parallel to Oct. 7.
By the time we'd killed 20,000 unrelated civilians, I'd be pretty upset. I would be upset at seeing rhetoric on TV saying that Canadians were "animals" or "grass that needed to be mowed." As a Southern American, I'd be upset that my tax dollars were funding this.
It's also worth noting that this really parallels 9/11 quite well. I was slower to be upset at our tactics in Afghanistan/Iraq then, but having seen it all now, Israel's attack is clearly the same fruitless-for-workers, military-industrial-complex-feeding meat grinder as it's evidently always been.
And to be more "objective" about that comparison: 9/11 killed more Americans than Oct. 7 killed Israelis. As of 2023, Afghan civilian deaths from our war on Al Quaeda (the entire period from 2001-2023) number [1] "more than 70,000." In half a year alone, 30-35,000 Palestinians have been killed.
But I'd say that measuring human lives against one another is kinda gross, focused on hindsight, and ineffective. To do the best thing we can in the present, we need to make the choices that maximally preserve human life. And selling/giving them weapons just ain't it.
The issue is that Hamas is both completely morally bankrupt and also intractable, and Netanyahu equally so. When the war first broke out, and all these so-called "leftists" where chanting "from river to sea," and advocating for Hamas, of course I had to support Israel, because at least Israel was still democratic, and many of those IDF soldiers being sent in were muslim themselves.
Well, look at things now. It's a bloodbath. The most radical solution of them all, that the people themselves must rise up and organize and fight back against both Hamas and the Israeli government, is increasingly the only rational solution and the only end to the conflict. But that would also require an international movement and an international struggle. But why should we ask for any less, global warming will come for us all anyway if we don't change the order of the world.
That isn't entirely Israel's fault, history shows that urban warfare has always been a destructive tragedy. It's why we invented rules like clearly separating military and civilian installations. Unfortunately, Hamas turned that on its head by deliberately mixing everything so civvies can't be ignored even moreso than usual.
When you have military (FSVO military) infrastructure located underneath hospitals and UN installations among others, of fucking course it's going to be a bloodbath. It's not like Israel can just not respond to the October attack that triggered this war either.
Moral is that there are reasons why the west has adopted ways to try and be somewhat civilized if we wage war, the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet.
>Moral is that there are reasons why the west has adopted ways to try and be somewhat civilized if we wage war, the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet.
The situation was depraved from the start, as Israel and the US created Hamas in order to control the Gaza strip way back in 2006, thinking that they would never pose a substantial threat like the PLO. Of course the Israelis think its their sovreign right to decimate the territory. They built those bunkers under the hospitals, they created the very conditions which they are fighting in. They will kill as many people as needed to make up for it.
IMO it comes down to: is/was hamas the de-facto legitimate government of Gaza? They attacked a sovereign nation, and now hopelessly loosing the war they started refuse to surrender.
You could argue that by putting military installments among civilian infrastructure, Hamas has adopted a policy of Total War, effectively committing their entire population to the effort of war with Israel.
How do you fight a country that is determined to kill you even if it costs them every man, woman and child?
Of course people will disagree that Hamas is actually willing to commit every resource to the fight, but I dunno. They seem pretty ok using them as shields or bait or suicide bombers...
