Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Arctish]

Israel Announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Secretary of State Blinkin's visit to discuss the future of Gaza:

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced the seizure of 10 square kilometers (3.8 square miles) of Palestinian territory in the West Bank on Friday. The move marks the single largest land seizure by the Israeli government since the 1993 Oslo accords, according to Peace Now, a settlement watchdog group.

“While there are those in Israel and the world who seek to undermine our right over the Judea and Samaria area and the country in general,” Smotrich said Friday, referring to the territory by its biblical name, “we are promoting settlement through hard work and in a strategic manner all over the country.”

Israelis pulled the same stunt back in 2010 when Biden was Vice President and had come to Israel to lobby for a peace deal the Obama Administration was backing.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Why are they giving food to all those Hamas terrorists?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No. What's your point? Did you see anyone argue that killing Palestinians is okay because Palestinians outside of Hamas committed crimes worthy of death? Do you have evidence that Israelis think Palestinians outside Hamas deserve death and Israel is therefore targeting them for it?

Outside of the choice to engage in tactics that kill at least 4 times as many civilians as terrorists? No. The attitude of "Meh, shit happens in war" is a tacit endorsement of killing civilians.

And you blindly accept the Hamas position as true.

And you continue to have some Hollywood fantasy about what war is like.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What makes it so hard to manage the conflict is precisely that Palestinians do not hate Jews. They hate the people who stole their land, who happened to be Jewish. If Hindus had stolen their land, they would hate them too, while expressing their hatred with anti-Hindu invective.

At bottom this has little to do with religion at all, IMO.

You would like to believe that. Try listening to Hamas--they have repeatedly proclaimed their desire to kill all Jews everywhere. It's just they usually do it in Arabic so western ears can pretend it didn't happen, that it's just the Jews making up stories. You don't need to trust Jewish translations, though--robotranslation is far from perfect and will miss nuances but will get the basic idea most of the time.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No. What's your point? Did you see anyone argue that killing Palestinians is okay because Palestinians outside of Hamas committed crimes worthy of death? Do you have evidence that Israelis think Palestinians outside Hamas deserve death and Israel is therefore targeting them for it?

Outside of the choice to engage in tactics that kill at least 4 times as many civilians as terrorists? No. The attitude of "... happens in war" is a tacit endorsement of killing civilians.

Yes, yes, we're all familiar by now with your limitless ability to conflate collateral damage with the deliberate targeting of noncombatants. But the fact that the distinction is evidently completely immaterial in your mind does not make it at all reasonable for you to incessantly project your own brain malfunction onto your opponents. The distinction is not immaterial in the rest of our minds, and every time you make inferences about others by assuming it's just as unimportant to them as it is to you, you are reasoning fallaciously and thereby reaching idiotic conclusions. So no, the attitude of “It’s war and civilians get killed” is not evidence that the objects of your invective are targeting civilians, or are assuming the civilians deserve it, or are targeting civilians because they think they deserve it.

As I have repeatedly said in many contexts an acceptance that bad things are going to happen is not an endorsement of said bad things. But bad things being inevitable goes contrary to the leftist faith that there are always good solutions.

It's war, and civilians die during wars. Its glory is all moonshine and all that.
Many German civilians, including children, died and suffered during the last stages of WWII as well. That does not mean that the Allied invasion of Germany was "collective punishment". ...

ignoring the inept analogy with WW2, if the justification for death of civilians is “It’s war and civilians get killed”, then why the outcry when Israeli citizens get killed in war?

Because the Israeli civilians were not collateral damage. They were deliberately targeted. Duh! You are not stupid, so why do you write such drivel?

Because when facts contradict faith the strongly faithful twist the facts to correspond with their faith and generally can't comprehend blasphemy. Deities need not be involved, only faith. This looks like stupidity but it is actually an inability to comprehend things that can't be fit into their world view. Hammering the square peg into the round hole, what gets through (into their mind) is round.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

...
The real trouble is that there is a vastly larger number of mouths and stomachs in Gaza than the few trucks allowed to enter through Kerem Shalom every day can feed. So famine is another method of killing innocent Palestinians, and I doubt that those who control the number of trucks going in are unaware of that. It will take about a month for the US to get its temporary aid port built, so it would be appropriate to stop all arms shipments to Israel at least until we can get enough food into the area so that they can survive long enough to be killed and injured by the weapons we supply the Israelis with.

Kerem Shalom is not saturated. And it's meaningless, anyway, because Hamas takes what comes through.

Did I say Kerem Shalom was saturated? As for Hamas taking what comes through, that is simply not true. Israel itself admits that, so why are you exaggerating?

If Kerem Shalom is not saturated then Israel isn't the limiting factor on aid getting through. It is the only chokepoint in the process that Israel controls.

And where do they say that Hamas isn't taking the aid???

And why is the aid getting through fine to the areas under IDF control?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So no, the attitude of “It’s war and civilians get killed” is not evidence that the objects of your invective are targeting civilians, or are assuming the civilians deserve it, or are targeting civilians because they think they deserve it.\

No, of course Israel isn’t targeting civilians. And that’s just in October! It’s much worse now, and now, of course, in addition to targeting civilians, Israel is causing mass starvation among them.

Amnesty International effectively just takes the word of the underdog and claims it to be true. Their voice means nothing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

My point was that the way the Ottomans achieved "things were quiet" and "for four centuries the society was as peaceful as we human beings can usually manage" was by means of extreme brutality. I'm not convinced that qualifies as "what they did well". Take away the brutality and would it still have been quiet and peaceful? It's not clear that the Ottoman Empire has a lot to offer the modern world in the way of positive lessons.

Any country that practices extreme brutality against dissidents will appear quiet to an outside observer. But it tends to explode when the source of that brutality goes away.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Indeed, comparing those massacred in October with collateral damage isn't apples to apples. But when in the heck are we going to address the issue that most Gazans are displaced at the moment... and have been for at least month, and some for months. Having only in their possession what they could carry with them. I can't imagine what it is like to have been a hostage of Hamas or to remain one at this moment... or the families as well. Nor can I imagine how it is to be in an ad hoc refugee camp for months, having escaped any manner of violence around them.

The majority of Gazans believe 10/7 was the right decision. Thus they consider having only what they can carry to be an acceptable price for killing 1,200 Jews. Why do you think their plight is worse than their own evaluation of the situation?

Israel was given an opportunity, effectively no questions asked in their response. The western world looked away for a couple months. Netanyahu didn't achieve much. We are hearing 20% losses for Hamas. That isn't progress. Biden wouldn't be speaking against Netanyahu publicly if the guy indicated there was some viable exit strategy here.

Once again, taking Hamas numbers at face value. 20% is what they have admitted to. Israel has a far better track record on accurate numbers, I'm much more inclined to believe their 40% number. And note that combat degregation is higher than the loss percentage. 40% loss means they're close to useless at present. However, the real objective is Hamas infrastructure. That's harder for them to rebuild than their troops.

Currently the Israelis are living with fear, but at home, with markets, and food, and beds. I'm tiring of dead or starving being the bar used for whether things are humane for the Gazans at this point. How long do you think Gazans should suck it up? Over a thousand Israelis were slaughtered, but now over a one million Gazans are displaced and suffering (and certainly more than one thousand Gazan civilians are dead). The Gazans have no infrastructure in place, no police, no government, no one to tell them what is next.

For how long?

Until they surrender or until the IDF can't find more stuff to break. They knowingly took on a far more powerful opponent and continue to think that's the right thing to have done. Meanwhile they are trying to deploy people like you as a weapon against Israel. You like being a Hamas proxy?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I will rephrase my question in the fading hope of avoiding yet another of your dyspeptic bombastic irrational responses.

Do you realize that the justification of lack of targeting applies to situation of the the complete extirpation of the civilian population of Gaza in the pursuit of eliminating Hamas? A simple yes or no is sufficient.

Rephrasing a falsehood (that intent is irrelevant in determining right/wrong) doesn't make it not false. Get out of your ivory tower and look at the real world where often there are no good choices. In the real world intent is very relevant both at the personal level (murder/manslaughter/justifiable are purely differences in intent) and the state level (collateral damage/war crimes.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Dropping 2,000 pound bombs that completely destroys entire city blocks in one fell swoop is pretty indiscriminant in my book.

Israel at most takes out a building with a bomb, not an entire block. So much is evident from the footage of the strikes. Although, sometimes buildings house weapons caches that cause secondary explosions that lead to further damage. But then it isn't an "indiscriminant"[sic] attack on a civilian target anyway, right?
Besides, you need big bombs to break through to the tunnels. In the early days of the war, there were many cameras that directly captured the strikes from the ground. I recall an amazing shot of an Israeli bomb not hitting a building at all, but the street next to it. What followed are puffs of smoke breaking through the ground in several places as secondary explosions in the tunnel network were triggered. The building collapsed anyway, but not because of the Israeli bomb. Rather, ground was literally taken from under it. Too bad I can't find it.

Yup. I don't recall the exact scene but I've seen multiple shots where you can clearly see the blast pattern is following something unseen. And channeling the blast pattern of a 2000# bomb takes something far beyond typical civilian construction--the only thing that makes sense is that the bomb exploded inside a tunnel.

However, I would not expect secondaries as you describe--I think what you saw was energy coming up through access points to the tunnels. Secondaries at distant locations in tunnels would pretty much only be fuel--and why would there be many fuel stores in the tunnels? Unless some idiot stored armed weapons in a tunnel they're not going to go off without being close to the original blast.

I've also seen stills of Hamas claiming bombing of protected structures--where the only damage to be seen is clearly caused by ground collapse. No blast damage. Clearly the damage to tunnels extends considerably further than the blast and that can only happen if the bomb explodes in a tunnel.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The biggest fear Palestinians seem to have is that Jews will treat them like Muslims often treat religious minorities. But its so far been an irrational fear

Life in the West Bank - is a relatively mild report. And the settler violence is extensively reported. Here are but two reports - 2023 - Worst year for settler violence and Settler violence.

You really need to get some perspective.

How much of that "settler violence" is real?

We have various claims that don't pass the laugh test (acts that would have been pretty much impossible for the settlers to pull off--obviously, blaming settlers for internal things), lots of claims that fail under scrutiny (an awful lot of the pictures of "olive trees" being removed are a similar-looking pest) and lots of suspicious claims (casualty patterns that make more sense if the Palestinians had been the aggressors.)

I'm sure some is real but when the typical reports of something don't stand up to scrutiny I am left with the conclusion that the problem is at most minor. If you want me to care about a problem don't blow it way out of proportion. A real issue can stand on the truth.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I misspoke by calling Hamas a "government". It was only ever a group that was once elected to administer Gaza in 2006. But "popular"? What makes you think that Hamas is popular? Do you have polling data? They don't have popular elections anymore. Maybe you have psychic powers that allow you to know what is in the hearts and minds of people living in that concentrated population of stateless Palestinians.

I wouldn't trust any poll of Gazans about Hamas. Can you imagine what would happen to a Gazan who expressed to a pollster that Hamas should go and Hamas finds out about it?

I would have thought so but the polls are nowhere near 100% for Hamas. Look upthread, I posted a very recent one that contains one question where the majority expressed (although not by name) a sentiment that was negative towards Hamas.

There is also a standard technique for asking unpalatable questions, although they do not have appeared to have used it in this case:

Flip a coin where only you can see it. If it's heads answer "yes", if it's tails truthfully answer whether you have ever raped a woman. You then subtract 50% from the number of "yes" answers to determine the true number of rapists. This considerably increases the costs of doing a poll because half your answers are actually useless and you get an additional source of error due to the coins. (You need to more than double your sample size to get the same error margin.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

None of these people weren't expendable.

"None of these people weren't expendable"? So, all of these people were expendable?
And who is "these people"? The closest antecedent are the three Israeli teens who were murdered by Hamas in 2014.

They're just Jews, they're expendable.

Once you recognize this the leftist position becomes much more understandable.

And yet, Hamas and groups like it are popular in Gaza. Sure, they are not congruent sets, but there is a big ∩. And many of those who do not support Hamas for whatever reason still support groups with similar aims when it comes to Israel. Islamic Jihad is even worse than Hamas on all counts. PFLP may not call for a theocracy, but they also want to abolish Israel and their Abu Mustafa Brigades have participated in the 10/7 massacre.

Hamas can't be defeated. That is a fantasy.

On the contrary. It is fantasy to think of Hamas as some supernatural Hydra-like entity. Of course they can be defeated.
The ideology behind it will be a tougher nut to crack. Ultimately, Gazans must decide to abandon their vainglorious hopes of conquering Israel. And the pipeline of moneys and weapons from the regime in Tehran must be stopped too.

This comes down to the label. "Hamas" is simply the army da jour of Iran. Even a total defeat doesn't take out the body so a new head will regrow.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The point is that sometimes there is no solution acceptable to both parties. That's what we have here: Hamas: the existence of Israel is unacceptable. Israel: the existence of Israel is mandatory. What would be a position both could agree to?

It is up to the involved parties to make the determination that a solution cannot be negotiated, not kibitzers from the peanut gallery . Certainly not based on opening demands.

It's not a matter of opening demands, but of the core of their positions.

And as for negotiation:

Hamas executes Gaza clan 'prince' in message to potential 'collaborators' - JNS.org

Israel has floated the idea of Gazan clans acting as partners in running the internal affairs of the Strip after Hamas's removal.

www.jns.org

Even look like you might actually talk peace, get executed by Hamas.

 

[TomC]

It's not a matter of opening demands, but of the core of their positions.

Really this. Positions that have been held for generations.

Someone here got upset when I mentioned "From the river to the sea!" as an Islamic motto.
Tom

 

[pood]

What makes it so hard to manage the conflict is precisely that Palestinians do not hate Jews. They hate the people who stole their land, who happened to be Jewish. If Hindus had stolen their land, they would hate them too, while expressing their hatred with anti-Hindu invective.

At bottom this has little to do with religion at all, IMO.

You would like to believe that. Try listening to Hamas--they have repeatedly proclaimed their desire to kill all Jews everywhere. It's just they usually do it in Arabic so western ears can pretend it didn't happen, that it's just the Jews making up stories. You don't need to trust Jewish translations, though--robotranslation is far from perfect and will miss nuances but will get the basic idea most of the time.

But that isn’t the point. I am saying that if history were different and HIndus had taken over Palestinian land, Hamas would be calling for death to all Hindus everywhere. In that case they wouldn’t care about Jews at all.

 

[Copernicus]

I misspoke by calling Hamas a "government". It was only ever a group that was once elected to administer Gaza in 2006. But "popular"? What makes you think that Hamas is popular? Do you have polling data? They don't have popular elections anymore. Maybe you have psychic powers that allow you to know what is in the hearts and minds of people living in that concentrated population of stateless Palestinians.

I wouldn't trust any poll of Gazans about Hamas. Can you imagine what would happen to a Gazan who expressed to a pollster that Hamas should go and Hamas finds out about it?

I would have thought so but the polls are nowhere near 100% for Hamas. Look upthread, I posted a very recent one that contains one question where the majority expressed (although not by name) a sentiment that was negative towards Hamas.

There is also a standard technique for asking unpalatable questions, although they do not have appeared to have used it in this case:

Flip a coin where only you can see it. If it's heads answer "yes", if it's tails truthfully answer whether you have ever raped a woman. You then subtract 50% from the number of "yes" answers to determine the true number of rapists. This considerably increases the costs of doing a poll because half your answers are actually useless and you get an additional source of error due to the coins. (You need to more than double your sample size to get the same error margin.)

The few polls available might not look 100% for Hamas, but that doesn't contradict Zipr's point. People who sat down for such interviews would have to worry about speaking out freely against Hamas, yet some were brave enough to do so. The Gaza Strip is a concentration camp ghetto surrounded and cut off by a hostile nation and also ruled over by terrorist thugs. One thing the polls do seem to show is a spike in support for Hamas since Israel's murderous campaign of retaliation started after the brutal sneak attack by Hamas. That should not surprise anyone either. Hamas attacked Israel, not Palestinians living in Gaza. Israel has attacked and killed innocent Palestinians living in Gaza who were not participants in the October 7 rampage, allegedly because they had to do it to get at Hamas. So it would be surprising if Palestinians in general thought "Yeah, we deserved that."

 

[pood]

The few polls available might not look 100% for Hamas, but that doesn't contradict Zipr's point. People who sat down for such interviews would have to worry about speaking out freely against Hamas, yet some were brave enough to do so. The Gaza Strip is a concentration camp ghetto surrounded and cut off by a hostile nation and also ruled over by terrorist thugs. One thing the polls do seem to show is a spike in support for Hamas since Israel's murderous campaign of retaliation started after the brutal sneak attack by Hamas. That should not surprise anyone either. Hamas attacked Israel, not Palestinians living in Gaza. Israel has attacked and killed innocent Palestinians living in Gaza who were not participants in the October 7 rampage, allegedly because they had to do it to get at Hamas. So it would be surprising if Palestinians in general thought "Yeah, we deserved it."

Exactly. All of this is only to going to breed more hatred of Israel and more terrorist violence down the road. It’s a never-ending cycle.

 

[Bomb#20]

... I would take issue with your new claim that the “dominant majority” of Palestinians — I take it, by “dominant majority,” you are referring to Palestinians, or specifically residents of Gaza — are “violently anti-Jewish bigots.” ... I see no evidence whatever that this majority consists of “anti-Jewish bigots,” either. Anti-ISRAEL, maybe, but that’s not the same as “anti-Jewish bigotry,” ...

You're carefully distinguishing between Jews on the one hand and Israel on the other. Good for you -- that's the right thing to do. But what made you do it? How did you learn that it was the right thing to do? Pretty much all of us in the west have learned to make that sort of distinction by growing up in a culture steeped in liberalism. Whether we're individually liberals or not, we've all been heavily exposed to liberal ideas, and we can generally tell they're mostly good ideas -- reality has a liberal bias. Carefully distinguishing between Jews and Israel is just part and parcel with carefully distinguishing between sets and individuals. We can do that sort of mental gymnastics in our sleep. It's baked into our culture.

But if you are proposing that the dominant majority of residents of Gaza make the same sort of mental distinction between Jews and Israel that you make, how do you propose that they learned to do that? Doing that sort of mental gymnastics is not baked into their culture. They grew up in a culture that tells them the right thing to do is throw gays off buildings. It's not a culture steeped in liberalism. As for the specific matter of distinguishing Jews from Israel, we already know how middle-eastern Muslim cultures have historically viewed that distinction: when Israel was set up in 1948, the nearby countries reacted by expelling their own native Jewish populations. The Arab and Iranian street appears to have been dominated by anti-Jewish bigots at that time. That includes the part of Palestine that remained under Arab control, i.e., Jordan, which is one of the countries that expelled its Jews. So, since you're challenging Tom for evidence, do you see any evidence whatever that Palestinian culture has grown substantially more liberal since that time?

First, I do not think that the vast majority of Muslims in the world, and let’s recall that there are vast numbers of them, have any interest whatsoever in throwing gays off of buildings. In fact, I think the vast majority of them want the same things you and I probably want, and most people want, which is live in peace, be productive at some enterprise, have good relations with others, and raise their kids if they have kids.

But that's not what's at issue. Just because throwing gays off buildings isn't a focal point of their lives doesn't mean they don't live in a culture that teaches them it's the right thing to do to gays. Likewise, killing blaspheming Christians isn't a topic of great interest to the average Muslim Pakistani who just wants to live in peace and raise his kids, but that doesn't change the fact that if you poll them on the penalty for blasphemy you'll find 90+% support for execution. And holding down the black man wasn't of any particular interest to most of the antebellum white northerners who just wanted to live in peace and raise their kids, but Lincoln still had to sell the Emancipation Proclamation to them as a military necessity, and reassure them that freeing the slaves didn't mean letting blacks marry white folks and vote. Being an anti-those-people bigot doesn't require interest -- it's the normal default condition of the human species. It's open-mindedly putting yourself in those-people's shoes that takes interest.

Second, I do not think that any Muslims, including Hamas, are actually anti-Jewish bigots as in being anti-Jewish per se. What they are, are anti-people who come in and take over our land. And so if Hindus had occupied Palestinian lands illegally in 1948 and expelled resident Palestinians, you would find today from groups like Hamas plenty of anti-Hindu rhetoric.

I think the biggest factor in this conflict is the Palestinian widespread antisemitism. Irrational antisemitism. Hating Jews is normal among Palestinians. That’s what makes this so difficult for the Jews to manage the conflict.

What makes it so hard to manage the conflict is precisely that Palestinians do not hate Jews. They hate the people who stole their land, who happened to be Jewish. If Hindus had stolen their land, they would hate them too, while expressing their hatred with anti-Hindu invective.

At bottom this has little to do with religion at all, IMO.

You would like to believe that. Try listening to Hamas--they have repeatedly proclaimed their desire to kill all Jews everywhere. It's just they usually do it in Arabic so western ears can pretend it didn't happen, that it's just the Jews making up stories. You don't need to trust Jewish translations, though--robotranslation is far from perfect and will miss nuances but will get the basic idea most of the time.

But that isn’t the point. I am saying that if history were different and HIndus had taken over Palestinian land, Hamas would be calling for death to all Hindus everywhere. In that case they wouldn’t care about Jews at all.

But that isn't the point. Nobody is claiming Palestinians hate Jews "per se", or for reasons having to do with religion. Nobody is saying they'd still hate Jews and not Mormons even if the Jews lived in Utah and the Mormons lived in Israel. Nobody is saying the reason they hate Jews isn't Jews taking their land. The point is that no, they aren't just "anti-people who come in and take over our land". The dominant majority appear to hate Jews in general; they don't hate only the specific Jews who came in and took over their land. They are "anti-people who either come in and take over our land or get lumped in by us with the people who come in and take over our land"; i.e., they are anti a group whom they hate because of historical offenses by individuals in the group, but a group whom they judge membership in by ethnic and religious criteria. That's why Jordanian Palestinians expelled the local native Jordanian Jews who never took over their land when European Jews took land from Palestinians to set up Israel. The Jews were an outgroup to them, and the first rule of tribalism is that the outgroup is made up of interchangeable parts. That is what it is to be an anti-anyone bigot.

If history were different and Hindus had taken over Muslim land, Muslim partisans would be calling for death or exile to all Hindus, including those who never stole Muslim land. Correction: make that if history weren't different -- because that's exactly what happened in Pakistan in 1949. The dominant majority of Pakistani Muslims were just as bigoted as the dominant majority of Palestinian Muslims, and for the same reason: because not to be a bigot is an abnormal condition that seldom arises in a person except as an effect of one of two prior causes: either a multi-sigma degree of personal intelligence, wisdom and empathy, or else extensive exposure to liberalism.