Could have said it a week ago, assholes.
How many Palestinian children died while you held your breath?
How does it matter how exactly they kill innocent people, including children of all ages?
Why would you even start to argue about this one specific detail? Because it is the only one where solid proof has not surfaced so far? What is there to gain?
Weird how you people think decapitations outweigh airstrikes.
Yeah, it’s gruesome and you can see the perpetrator, but that’s really it.
Israel constantly gets to hold some high ground in your mind because airstrikes on civilians are ‘civilized’ while shooting civilians is ‘barbaric.’
Killing civilians is killing civilians. Israel is king in that regard.
Shouldn’t you know? Why are people so happy to not know the basic facts of what they have opinions on?
The number, since you don’t know, and it seems you fucking should, is over 550. That’s the count for children, killed by Israel, since Saturday.
Oh, and the number of babies beheaded by Hamas? Zero. Had it happened, media would he all over it. Oh, and the whitehouse would certainly not have to do a correction that in fact Biden had not seen any pictures of it.
It’s ok to think a little bit critically. You should try it.
West: “A little bit of genocide is fine but too much and you might make the rest of us look bad”
Do you really believe that killing every member of hamas will stop the cycle of hate and violence?
Remember when the people of Israel were extremely oppressed by an extremist party?
Your argument won’t hold up. It’s a dumb way to think, be better.
In any given exchange of violence for these actors, it is a pretty reliable bet to say that there will be about a 10:1 ratio of Palestinians versus Israelis killed. I expect that we will see between 10k and 20k Palestinians killed, and probably somewhere less than 2k total Israelis killed. I think there will be fewer people killed by bombs and bullets than by the blockade. I suspect 90% of the casualties will be civilians. I think that all of the people who die in fear and pain while hiding in their homes as well as those who die on the barricades will be forgotten in a year or so.
I also suspect that the remaining checks on Bibi’s already significant power will end, and that Hamas will effectively cease to exist as a political power.
Much like the 2.5 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip, Hamas ain’t going nowhere.
Shelling civilians will definitely make more Hamas members out of people still there as well
I don’t believe so. I think the question will be “What the fuck were they thinking and what did they achieve for this tremendous cost?”
If Hamas had coordinated a simultaneous attack from the West Bank along with air strikes from Syria etc., it would have been something. I personally think they still probably would have lost, especially because the US would surge weapons, but it would show a strategy.
This was just throwing lives away for less than nothing. You cannot deal with Netanyahu. Even the president of the fucking US couldn’t get him to fall in line with a less than far right policy. Hamas just dealt him the best hand he has yet held.
Their existence depended on their existence being more politically palatable than the level of effort necessary for their elimination.
A modern nation-state like Israel or the US relies on a principle of disproportionate response to deter aggression. You have the most far-right, violent, and most corrupt government in the history of the state in charge and, as a result of the scale and targets of the “unprovoked” attack, they have the support of the only countries whose support matters in situations like these. The level of violence executed against Israel was enough to piss it off, but not to hurt it at all. None of their very significant military capacity was diminished. Hamas doesn’t have an Air Force. They don’t have any SAMs to speak of. They are cut off from resupply. They have no armored vehicles nor the ability to defend against them in significant number. Their “artillery” consists of unguided rockets they can fire in a general direction and which inflict so little damage as to be militarily ignorable and which only count as a “terror weapon” because it helps Israeli propaganda. They are politically and geographically isolated. They will not be resupplied. Israel on the other hand has a blank check and supply lines that cannot be interrupted.
If Israel decides to effect a ground incursion, it will be over rubble. They will call in airstrikes from fighter-bombers that the Palestinians will not be able to defend against. This is not Afghanistan. This is not Ireland.
Netanyahu is going to proceed as if he has a mandate to end this, and he is a very hard person. I do not think it gave him enough inertia to do to Gaza what Putin did to Crimea - I don’t think they can simply call it part of Israel now - but there’s going to be a reckoning.
What we are seeing right now is the limited response. I’ve been on the wrong end of irregular infantry. I’ve never been on the wrong end of modern armor, air, and artillery. I don’t recommend either, but the effects of the latter are indescribable. That’s not even touching on intelligence and special services, who I am very certain are being tasked as we speak.
Life in Gaza is about to get intensely worse for civilians. It will remain much worse than it was long after the last shell gets fired.
I honestly cannot see any way that this results in anything but an across the board loss for hamas. I also think it’s going to crush Gaza. Making life in Gaza even worse than it was is really hard, but I think they managed to make sure that comes about.
Their existence depended on their existence being more politically palatable than the level of effort necessary for their elimination.
And, ya know, also Netanyahu/Israel themselves.
The thing is America already tried bombing an idea out of existence twice in Vietnam and Afghanistan and it failed twice. I just don’t see how brutal conflict does anything more then inspire the next generation of extremist. We need to break the cycle of violence.
I’m not saying that the desire for Palestinian autonomy is going to be ended. I’m saying that Hamas-the-organization is going to cease to be an effective factor in it. It will be replaced by another organization, or several. I could certainly see another intifada coming out of this.
But you can most certainly bomb (and buy) an idea out of existence. There was a time when there existed a pan-Arab movement. Partly post-colonial, partly anti-Israel, partly Third World-ism in reaction to the Cold War, it tried to unite the Arab world across the borders drawn by the colonialist countries.
It went down in flames due to
- Their inability to do the one thing they set as their biggest goal, which was the military conquest of Israel.
- US and USSR intelligence operations, diplomatic engagement, and economic and military cooperation
- Internal factionalism and personal greed
That’s actually where politicized Islam has its roots - in the defeat of modern, semi-socialist Arab internationalism. Looking back, we would probably have been better off with the pan-Arab movement becoming an entity that could make peace with Israel (like Egypt did) than have political Islam replace what at the end of the day was basic national aspirations in the post-colonial period.
Historically since 2008 to just before the conflict was 21:1, it’ll be more 100:1 by the end.
I’ve been out of that business for a while and was going off of memory, so I’ll go with your numbers.
I do think the world will pull the plug on this particular situation before there are 100k Palestinians dead unless Iran or Syria gets involved. I think the problem is going to be that the rate of death is going to go vertical, and it won’t be possible to stop before it hits 10k, which could happen in a month or less depending on what they do with electricity and fuel.
It’s what the UN states showed last I checked.
I remain hopeful I just think it’s very unlikely anyone can or will step in.
I’m sure Israel will pay as much attention to that as we paid to the rest of the world when they were all like “no dude there’s no nukes in Iraq what the fuck are you talking about”
