Kenneth Roth, who was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022 and oversaw production of the report on apartheid, said that Israeli authorities have long insisted that ending discriminatory policies depended on peace negotiations.
But three decades on, with no real peace process in motion, that explanation “lacked credibility,” Roth said.
Israel has continued to support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, constructing “bypass roads” accessible only to the settlers and expanding military checkpoints — moves that Roth and others say all but eliminated the possibility that the West Bank could someday become an independent, contiguous Palestinian state.
“What’s left is Swiss cheese,” he said.
I’m just curious how many Palestinians need to die, and how much of Gaza needs to be razed to dust before we’re “even” in the minds of proponents that somehow this war is justified. Legitimately and in good faith, when are we “good” here?
I, for one, do think that the war against Hamas is justified. Israel’s stated goal is to destroy Hamas military capabilities. The paradigm isn’t tit-for-tat until they’re “even”. This isn’t a slap contest. Israel’s paradigm is overwhelming force to destroy the enemy as completely as possible, while also not completely nuking the civilian population. Hamas’s paradigm is terrorism against primarily civilian targets, mainly to prevent Israel and the world from settling into complacency regarding the pre-October 7 state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which is exactly what was happening before October 7.
No one knows when Israel will consider Hamas sufficiently degraded to end the war on their side. Of course, Hamas will never stop fighting Israel, even if there is a ceasefire. It’ll just take another decade or so to build up their military capabilities again for another attack. Or, there may be a Third Intifadah and a return to suicide bombing and similar tactics. It’s a mess (and always has been).
How much of the population is acceptable as collateral damage? We’re over 1%. Will you condemn Israel at 5%? 10%? 50%? 100%?
Murdering 1% of any countries civilians as collateral damage could never be justified.
No collateral damage is acceptable, but it is unrealistic to think that there will be no collateral damage in war. It is also unrealistic to think that Israel would not respond to the October 7 massacre, and unacceptable for Hamas to use the Palestinian people as human shields to avoid retaliation.
What does that boil down to? Israel has every right to strike back at Hamas. Hamas also has every right to fight against Israel. Because of the way Hamas has dug in to the civilian population and infrastructure, civilian casualties are a given. The number of civilian casualties is a function of two things:
- How intensively Israel tries to kill Hamas and degrade their capabilities, and,
- How effectively Hamas uses the Palestinian population as human shields.
In other words, both Israel and Hamas are to blame for civilian casualties. This is the same in every war. Civilians in a war zone always get fucked, no matter who started the war.
