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Israelis and Palestinians can’t go on like this. Weep for us.

KerimF

Active Member
I'm lost on your meanings, but I'll say....
My shack is indeed on verdant grounds.

Before March 2011, I used having a British friend (also an atheist) with whom we were talking about electronic stuff. This had to stop after his British ruling system had to follow the will of its savior, the American ruling system, that the people among whom I was born should be also saved like the people in Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen for a few are saved. I mean; it is good that we are allowed to talk to each other while the world is divided by very clever tactics. For example, while the international news kept telling the world during the last 10 years that Sunnis and Shiites are destroying each other in Middle East, how do the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and UAE for a few react now while their Sunnis in Palestine are in war with Israelis?!

I mean it is normal, to me in the least, that someone living in the so-called free world cannot see what real happenings in the world are.
After all, it was always safer for the Roman citizens to believe, without questioning, whatever their Caesar approved as being true and real. And I am afraid that the natural rules that define the real material world can never be changed; starting from the jungle's golden rule "Survival of the Strongest" :)
 
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Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
"If there's a choice between protecting our people and protecting the Gazans, we should choose to protect our people." =/= we've already established that it is morally okay to fire at civilians after all, the only thing that counts is "winning".

You insinuate that I believe that Israel should fire at civilians willy-nilly. I do not. The now-ceased debate between @Revoltingest and I was what must be done when one has to make a choice between protecting one's own people and own's enemies. I have clearly not understood his position, but so far it seemed to me that according to him, one may never fire upon civilians. However, in my view, and this is also the view currently held by the government of Israel, were we to never fire upon areas with civilians, we would never be able to stop Hamas, being that they shrewdly and despicably always surround themselves with civilians. Being that that is the case, it is preferable to protects Israelis rather than Gazans. If we are able to minimize their deaths - that's wonderful, and you can bet the media will never talk about that. If we can't - well, believe me, it saddens me greatly, but nonetheless I prefer that my people live rather than Hamas.
I never said "willy nilly". Please do not put words in my mouth. I said that the deaths of enemy civilians are acceptable when they occur in pursuit of a military-political goal. And your current argument - and the policy of the IDF, indeed! - seem to agree with that notion: The military-political goal of "defeating" Hamas (by whatever metric the IDF and its government deem sufficient) takes priority over the safety, or in fact the lives, of non-Israeli civilians in Gaza and West Bank.

I now ask you to recognize that Hamas is operating under the same paradigm: To them, Israeli lives are an acceptable sacrifice in pursuit of their military-political goal of defeating the IDF and the Netanyahu government.

As I hope you are starting to see, under this paradigm, the deaths of civilians cannot be condemned on moral grounds - since in war, the enemy's defeat takes precedence over the lives of ordinary people: As long as the enemy remains undefeated, death and carnage among civilians are justifiable; they may be lamentable, even saddening, but nonetheless are of lesser priority to the military goal of defeating the enemy.
 
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Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
I never said "willy nilly"
I know you didn't. I said you insinuated that that's what I believe.
I now ask you to recognize that Hamas is operating under the same paradigm.
I won't. Hamas strikes at civilians first, and blindly. That is exactly what has been happening until now and that's exactly how this round of fighting started. No distinction drawn. The IDF does its best to distinguish between the two. When that's not possible, then there are also civilian casualties. Hamas also doesn't care that a significant percentage of their missiles fall inside Gaza, killing their fellow people.

By the way, earlier I wrote to @Revoltingest that I thought that the Gazans hadn't been warned this time around. Turns out they were, according to the news.
 

rosends

Well-Known Member
The military-political goal of "defeating" Hamas (by whatever metric the IDF and its government deem sufficient) takes priority over the safety, or in fact the lives, of non-Israeli civilians in Gaza and West Bank.
There are 2 problems with your argument:

1. If the goal took priority, then the IDF would not warn civilians to evacuate or tell them where attacks would be so as to allow them not to be injured.

2. Hamas's paradigm is to target the civilians, not see them as collateral to a larger political/military victory. The death of the civilians IS their victory. Their use of their own people as cover and shelter displays the same goal -- intentionally cause the death of non-combatants.
 

Batya

Always Forward
This is not what I've observed IRL & in the news over many years.
They claim a matter of survival, & even believe it, but it's also driven
by bigotry towards & hatred for Arabs & Muslims in general. Their
sense of superiority & entitlement, coupled with religiosity has robbed
the country of empathy & reason. They say they want peace, but
they pursue continued hostility. Perhaps this even serves their
sense of unity & solidarity? Having a constant enemy is useful.
It's not about bigotry and hatred for Arabs and Muslims, most Israelis don't hate Arabs. In fact I'm sure they'd be more than relieved to live in peace with their neighbors and have peace within Israel. There are Arabs, Muslims, and some Palestinians who are aggressive though, and have made it clear they hate Israel, should we expect Israel to just sit there and do nothing? Is it bigotry and hatred to defend your country? Is it superiority and entitlement? They are up against people who won't be happy until Israel is no longer on the map, it's not like they are concocting this situation to serve their own designs. If you were an Israeli, I'm sure you'd think differently about having a constant enemy.
 
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Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
There are 2 problems with your argument:

1. If the goal took priority, then the IDF would not warn civilians to evacuate or tell them where attacks would be so as to allow them not to be injured.

2. Hamas's paradigm is to target the civilians, not see them as collateral to a larger political/military victory. The death of the civilians IS their victory. Their use of their own people as cover and shelter displays the same goal -- intentionally cause the death of non-combatants.
1) you are assuming that these warnings are detrimental to the military-political goals of the IDF, but they may not be. Further, you are assuming a humanitarian motivation without evidence that this was in fact their primary motivation to begin with - there are multiple possible reasons for the IDF to make a big public show of warning the population of the Gaza strip that are orthogonal to your inferred humanitarian motives, such as psychological warfare, or internal or external propaganda; it certainly serves the political goals of the Netanyahu regime to paint their warfare as "clean" and only directed at the political regime of Hamas.

Fact is that they killed a lot of people regardless of their warnings, and fact is that their supporters deem this justified - after all, if these people didn't want to get killed, they would have left their homes and fled to... where, exactly? The sea? I would consider it mildly farcical to call that the barest extent of humanitarian effort.

2) We often colloquially make a moral distinction between deliberately targeting civilians, and mere "collateral" deaths, but if we examine what "collateral" deaths actually entail in the process of military action, then it looks quite differently: Collateral civilian deaths are deaths that are taken for granted as part of a military action - in other words, a military force inflicting collateral deaths expects to inflict those deaths and yet still goes through with their military operation.

Therefore, from a moralistic or ethical point of view, collateral deaths are inflicted with deliberate intent; the difference between targeting civilians and killing them collaterally does not lie in the intent to inflict death upon them, but in the military logic behind it: If civilians are the target, then inflicting more deaths is a military goal, whereas if they are simply collateral deaths, it is not. But in either way, civilian deaths are being inflicted deliberately as part of a military action.

What you are doing here is infer that Hamas' military goal must have been to inflict as many casualties as possible with no higher military-political goal beyond that, but at the same time we are inferring that inflicting civilian casualties is not the primary goal of the IDF. But the fact of the matter is that both forces are causing civilian deaths far in excess of any possible military targets they might have had at any point during the conflict so far.



In this, we can hold both of them morally culpable;

we can shrug and chalk up the many dead civilians as wartime casualties - after all, we have already established that civilian death fundamentally does not matter morally when victory is at stake;

or we can take one side or the other, saying that one sides' civilian casualties are tragedies and the other sides' are acceptable losses, claiming that one side fights for Good and is therefore inherently Justified in the deaths they inflict, while the other side fights for Evil and is therefore Always Wrong.

(Edit: Wording)
 
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Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
It's not about bigotry and hatred for Arabs and Muslims, most Israelis don't hate Arabs. In fact I'm sure they'd be more than relieved to live in peace with their neighbors and have peace within Israel. There are Arabs, Muslims, and some Palestinians who are aggressive though, and have made it clear they hate Israel, should we expect Israel to just sit there and do nothing? Is it bigotry and hatred to defend your country? Is it superiority and entitlement? They are up against people who won't be happy until Israel is no longer on the map, it's not like they are concocting this situation to serve their own designs. If you were an Israeli, I'm sure you'd think differently about having a constant enemy.
Plenty of Americans have made it clear that they hate LGBT people and want them removed from society, should the US government therefore engage in military action against them? If not, then what measures do you propose to get rid of those people permanently?

This is a bad faith argument, based on prejudice and hypocrisy. In a stable and peaceful society, we can tolerate hatred against minority groups all day long. It is only when oppressed minority groups start getting antsy - and make no mistake, within the borders of Israel and the occupied/annexed territories of West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, Palestinians are an oppressed minority - that the knives come out, and suddenly, one side's tolerable opinion becomes an existential threat when voiced from the other side of the equation.

As for Israel and Hamas, they've been at each other's throats for quite a while, and it's unlikely that this recent round of civilian murder will bring any sort of lasting "solution" to the "problem" of the other side existing. At some point, they will have to sit down and negotiate;
or continue to kill their respective civilian populations, I guess, that seems to work for both sides of the conflict.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
...it seemed to me that according to him, one may never fire upon civilians.
You really believe that?
Defense is never as simple as most believe it is.
Options are imperfect, so one optimizes...imperfectly.
I oppose the balance that Israel chooses as having
too little value for the rights & lives of others.
Don't make this into some simplistic extreme.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
Before March 2011, I used having a British friend (also an atheist) with whom we were talking about electronic stuff. This had to stop after his British ruling system had to follow the will of its savior, the American ruling system, that the people among whom I was born should be also saved like the people in Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen for a few are saved. I mean; it is good that we are allowed to talk to each other while the world is divided by very clever tactics. For example, while the international news kept telling the world during the last 10 years that Sunnis and Shiites are destroying each other in Middle East, how do the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and UAE for a few react now while their Sunnis in Palestine are in war with Israelis?!

I mean it is normal, to me in the least, that someone living in the so-called free world cannot see what real happenings in the world are.
After all, it was always safer for the Roman citizens to believe, without questioning, whatever their Caesar approved as being true and real. And I am afraid that the natural rules that define the real material world can never be changed; starting from the jungle's golden rule "Survival of the Strongest" :)
OK.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
They are up against people who won't be happy until Israel is no longer on the map...
That very common belief characterizes foes in a hyper extreme
manner that justifies never considering a negotiated peace.
It makes Muslims out to be inhuman monsters. If Israel
cannot recover from such bigotry, it will be forever at war.
If you were an Israeli, I'm sure you'd think differently about having a constant enemy.
An Israeli Jew or an Israeli non-Jew?
Opinions vary. Example...
A real estate broker I've worked with emigrated from Russia
to Israel, hoping for a better life. He & his wife found Israel
to be anti non-Jew. So they're here now, all our problems
notwithstanding.
 

rosends

Well-Known Member
1) you are assuming that these warnings are detrimental to the military-political goals of the IDF, but they may not be. Further, you are assuming a humanitarian motivation without evidence that this was in fact their primary motivation to begin with - there are multiple possible reasons for the IDF to make a big public show of warning the population of the Gaza strip that are orthogonal to your inferred humanitarian motives, such as psychological warfare, or internal or external propaganda; it certainly serves the political goals of the Netanyahu regime to paint their warfare as "clean" and only directed at the political regime of Hamas.

Fact is that they killed a lot of people regardless of their warnings, and fact is that their supporters deem this justified - after all, if these people didn't want to get killed, they would have left their homes and fled to... where, exactly? The sea? I would consider it mildly farcical to call that the barest extent of humanitarian effort.

2) We often colloquially make a moral distinction between deliberately targeting civilians, and mere "collateral" deaths, but if we examine what "collateral" deaths actually entail in the process of military action, then it looks quite differently: Collateral civilian deaths are deaths that are taken for granted as part of a military action - in other words, a military force inflicting collateral deaths expects to inflict those deaths and yet still goes through with their military operation.

Therefore, from a moralistic or ethical point of view, collateral deaths are inflicted with deliberate intent; the difference between targeting civilians and killing them collaterally does not lie in the intent to inflict death upon them, but in the military logic behind it: If civilians are the target, then inflicting more deaths is a military goal, whereas if they are simply collateral deaths, it is not. But in either way, civilian deaths are being inflicted deliberately as part of a military action.

What you are doing here is infer that Hamas' military goal must have been to inflict as many casualties as possible with no higher military-political goal beyond that, but at the same time we are inferring that inflicting civilian casualties is not the primary goal of the IDF. But the fact of the matter is that both forces are causing civilian deaths far in excess of any possible military targets they might have had at any point during the conflict so far.



In this, we can hold both of them morally culpable;

we can shrug and chalk up the many dead civilians as wartime casualties - after all, we have already established that civilian death fundamentally does not matter morally when victory is at stake;

or we can take one side or the other, saying that one sides' civilian casualties are tragedies and the other sides' are acceptable losses, claiming that one side fights for Good and is therefore inherently Justified in the deaths they inflict, while the other side fights for Evil and is therefore Always Wrong.

(Edit: Wording)
I don't see your argument as compelling or persuasive. Warning people to vacate an area is an act of mercy, reflecting an attitude towards life. Not warning people reflects something different. The IDF's consistent (and historic) practice of warning people indicates an approach and goal. Collateral deaths are unwanted and unintended. Civilian loss of life is not an intended end nor a desired result. The moral equivalence attempted fails.
 

KerimF

Active Member
What I am sure of is that the side which knew how to create instability in Middle East (its Creative Chaos) to control and steal its natural resources keeps supporting all sides in it to play their roles in various bloody conflicts. Naturally, NO side (Israel included) will be eliminated for good (Isn't it good news?!) from playing its role in the Creative Chaos; including the 'TERROR' (used in the Arab Spring) that was introduced with a great success on 9/11/2001 to replace the previous world's bogeyman 'Communism' in less than 24 hours, by just sacrificing a few thousands of innocent civilians in NYC in daylight and in front of the entire world. Although I know that the truth hurts deeply, but I hear voices here which blame one side or another in this tragic war while all its sides are victims of the one side that is far from all of them and watches them all to know when to put an end of the massacres in both sides to prepare for the next 'Chaos' as planned :( Who has ears will hear.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
I know you didn't. I said you insinuated that that's what I believe.
I simply ask you to stop putting words into my mouth. Thank you.
I won't. Hamas strikes at civilians first, and blindly. That is exactly what has been happening until now and that's exactly how this round of fighting started. No distinction drawn. The IDF does its best to distinguish between the two. When that's not possible, then there are also civilian casualties. Hamas also doesn't care that a significant percentage of their missiles fall inside Gaza, killing their fellow people.
lVqmnA0.png

What would you say was the military purpose behind attacking a hospital?

I have my own theory, but I'd like to hear yours first.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
I don't believe I have so far and I'll continue doing my best not to.

Presumably it was a suspected Hamas base.
But you don't know whether it was, or even it was presumed to be suspected of being a Hamas base, correct?

You simply conclude, based on the plain fact that it was been targeted by an IDF air strike, that it must have likely been a Hamas base, because you assume that only Hamas bases are likely to be targeted by IDF air strikes. Am I correct in this assessment?
 

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
But you don't know whether it was, or even it was presumed to be suspected of being a Hamas base, correct?

You simply conclude, based on the plain fact that it was been targeted by an IDF air strike, that it must have likely been a Hamas base, because you assume that only Hamas bases are likely to be targeted by IDF air strikes. Am I correct in this assessment?
I admit I was tired last night and didn't properly look into the incident. It seems that the damage was an unintended consequence of an attack upon a different building.

However, as a hypothetical, I would stand by what I said, that I would believe that the IDF had good reasons to bomb such a place. This is not merely a political view, but also the view of Judaism for many millennia now: If you know that a certain person usually does things for good reasons, then one day does something extremely out of the ordinary that even looks highly suspicious, you should first infer that this odd action must have a good reason behind it. Only with proper evidence may you go back on the original inference. We already have evidence that Hamas uses human shields and purposefully operates in civilian areas.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
I admit I was tired last night and didn't properly look into the incident. It seems that the damage was an unintended consequence of an attack upon a different building.

However, as a hypothetical, I would stand by what I said, that I would believe that the IDF had good reasons to bomb such a place. This is not merely a political view, but also the view of Judaism for many millennia now: If you know that a certain person usually does things for good reasons, then one day does something extremely out of the ordinary that even looks highly suspicious, you should first infer that this odd action must have a good reason behind it. Only with proper evidence may you go back on the original inference. We already have evidence that Hamas uses human shields and purposefully operates in civilian areas.
If it is indeed integral to your understanding of Judaism to supply the actions of militaries and political agents with uncritical support as long as they pay lip service to your religious or ideological beliefs, then we have nothing to talk about on this subject any more.
 

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
If it is indeed integral to your understanding of Judaism to supply the actions of militaries and political agents with uncritical support as long as they pay lip service to your religious or ideological beliefs, then we have nothing to talk about on this subject any more.
Meh. I don't hide the fact that my worldview is based upon my Jewish identity. If you feel comfortable in convincing yourself that your worldview is "secularistically objective", enjoy yourself.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
Meh. I don't hide the fact that my worldview is based upon my Jewish identity. If you feel comfortable in convincing yourself that your worldview is "secularistically objective", enjoy yourself.
Yes, I feel comfortable being critical of military killings of civilians regardless of where they stand or with what religious belief they seek to justify their atrocities. Hopefully that is not a problem for your identity - but to be fair, even if it was, it wouldn't bother me all too much.
 
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