Ed General Israel/Palestine discussion thread - Part 3

[JoeMorgue]

I have noticed the "Aggressor has nukes! Everyone immediately roll over and show your bellies and give them everything they want so we don't make them mad" argument rife in the Ukraine/Russian discussion is absent here.

Funny... that.

 

[lobosrul5]

I have noticed the "Aggressor has nukes! Everyone immediately roll over and show your bellies and give them everything they want so we don't make them mad" argument rife in the Ukraine/Russian discussion is absent here.

Funny... that.

Imagine a world in which we let Iran get nukes

 

[dudalb]

Imagine a world in which we let Iran get nukes

Oh, I have seen people argue that would be a good stablizing thing.
We have been lucky though, bad as some of them have been, the countries that have gotten Nukes have a certain amount of rationalty invovled. I am not very confident you have that ratinalsity with the Aytalloahs..who still call the shots in Iran.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

In a barfight, I don't HAVE TO kill the other guy if there are so many more options.
and not killing him is not the same as giving in.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Imagine a world in which we let Iran get nukes

not really a question of "letting".
and not something that can be prevented forever.

The international community would be well advised to come up with a framework that incorporates the reality of Ayatollahs with nukes.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

I have noticed the "Aggressor has nukes! Everyone immediately roll over and show your bellies and give them everything they want so we don't make them mad" argument rife in the Ukraine/Russian discussion is absent here.

Funny... that.

where have you been?

that argument is being made ALL THE TIME.
It's the reason why NATO isn't just bombing the **** out of every Russian asset in Ukraine, plus all the airfields in Russia.

 

[JoeMorgue]

In a barfight, I don't HAVE TO kill the other guy if there are so many more options.
and not killing him is not the same as giving in.

Then don't ask "Okay but what if the only way to stop the guy was to kill him" hypotheticals.

Again I will NOT let you dishonestly twist a hypothetical YOU ASKED into someone's real world opinion.

 

[JoeMorgue]

where have you been?

that argument is being made ALL THE TIME.
It's the reason why NATO isn't just bombing the **** out of every Russian asset in Ukraine, plus all the airfields in Russia.

*Very slowly*

And Israel has nukes. And yet people have zero problem telling Hamas to fight back against their evil oppressors.

Nobody is suggesting Israel just gets whatever it wants because it has nukes.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Then don't ask "Okay but what if the only way to stop the guy was to kill him" hypotheticals.

Again I will NOT let you dishonestly twist a hypothetical YOU ASKED into someone's real world opinion.

i didn't.
I said it was an option, and you said it was a legitimate one.

And I don't think it is

that's all we disagree on here

 

[lobosrul5]

not really a question of "letting".
and not something that can be prevented forever.
The international community would be well advised to come up with a framework that incorporates the reality of Ayatollahs with nukes.

Sure we can. We can seek out and destroy enrichment plants. We have the technology I assure you.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

*Very slowly*

And Israel has nukes. And yet people have zero problem telling Hamas to fight back against their evil oppressors. Nobody is suggesting Israel just gets whatever it wants because it has nukes.

who?
I really think that you are mostly fighting windmills here

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Sure we can. We can seek out and destroy enrichment plants. We have the technology I assure you.

maybe.

but I don't think so.

 

[uke2se]

thanks for making your position so clear.

this is a point where we definitely will have to agree to disagree.

Most definitely me as well. I can't even fathom that people would contemplate that being acceptable.

Just so that understand correctly, the people arguing for Israel in this exchange, would you consider a genocide of the Palestinian people acceptable in order to stop Hamas?

 

[lobosrul5]

Most definitely me as well. I can't even fathom that people would contemplate that being acceptable.

Just so that understand correctly, the people arguing for Israel in this exchange, would you consider a genocide of the Palestinian people acceptable in order to stop Hamas?

No.

 

[JoeMorgue]

So yeah exactly what I said. We were asked a hypothetical and now people are going "OMG so you're saying we should do this thing?"

 

[theprestige]

It would be a limit that is exceeded. Nukes should only be allowed to be used in 2 situations IMO:

1) A response to WMD.
2) An existential threat. Like Hezbollah has overrun Israel's positions in the north and they are coming to exterminate everyone.

Why? Because it unnecessarily kills a whole bunch of innocent people. Israeli's goals can be accomplished by killing far less. And, it raises world tension remarkably. Now Russia can think about getting away with a nuke, Iran might try some form of WMD attack on Israel.

And by "allowed" I mean allowed by the democracies of the world without the most severe of economic sanctions.

My current guideline is the section on "international humanitarian law" in the Wikipedia article on Collateral Damage.

Its three essential points are:

1. If you place your military forces within a civiilian population, you're committing a war crime. Your enemy is not committing a war crime when they attack you there.

2. There must be a valid military target of an attack. Spamming bombs into a civilian population in the hope of "getting" a few insurgents is a war crime.

3. The risk to civilians from the attack must be proportional to the military value of the attack if it succeeds. Overkill is not a war crime. Overkill of civilians when attacking a low-value target is a war crime. (Corollary: If the only weapon available to a commander in his moment of need is an overkill weapon, it is not a war crime to use that weapon to accomplish a valid military objective.)

That said, I don't think nuking Gaza is the right solution. Certainly not the kind of mass destruction of the entire strip that TGZ seems to have in mind. But even targeted use of precision high explosives against specific hardened Hamas positions would cause a lot of collateral damage.

What I find interesting is that TGZ stipulates that it would be right for Israel to end Hamas, but offers no opinions on how Israel might go about achieving that righteous goal, in a way that satisfies TGZ's sense of morality.

Obviously he thinks nuking the Strip is right out. Presumably he thinks that Israel shouldn't just lie there and take it, even though he thinks it's their fault Hamas exists and has grievances in the first place.

So what's TGZ's idea for how Israel should do the right thing and end Hamas, in a way that maximizes harm to Hamas while minimizing the risk of harm to the Israelis carrying out the work, and minimizes the risk of harm to innocent bystanders?

 

[theprestige]

Most definitely me as well. I can't even fathom that people would contemplate that being acceptable.

Just so that understand correctly, the people arguing for Israel in this exchange, would you consider a genocide of the Palestinian people acceptable in order to stop Hamas?

A genocide of the Palestinian people? Where does that idea come from? There's Palestinians all over the Middle East. Jordan's got a lot of them, for example. Eradication of the Palestinians as a people group is neither practical nor necessary, to defeat Hamas

That said, at this point I'd be willing to consider an ethnic cleansing of Gaza, to defeat Hamas. In the sense of "Palestinians don't get to live here anymore, and anyone who's not ready to exit Gaza for a refugee camp within the next week will be considered a pro-Hamas partisan and dealt with accordingly." And then sweep the Strip thoroughly and ruthlessly.

 

[uke2se]

So yeah exactly what I said. We were asked a hypothetical and now people are going "OMG so you're saying we should do this thing?"

You are being so sarcastic that I cannot understand what you are actually arguing for. When you are asked a direct question you fly off the handle.

The position I think most people you would label Hamas apologists have is that Israel, while having the right to defend themselves and attacking Hamas targets, need to act proportionally and within international law. Flattening the Gaza strip will result in the deaths of potentially millions of people. It would be genocide.

Hamas is a monstrous organization that is rightfully considered terrorists. They are islamo-fascists who oppress their own people and murder foreigners. They are also a product of 75 years of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

 

[lobosrul5]

You are being so sarcastic that I cannot understand what you are actually arguing for. When you are asked a direct question you fly off the handle.

The position I think most people you would label Hamas apologists have is that Israel, while having the right to defend themselves and attacking Hamas targets, need to act proportionally and within international law. Flattening the Gaza strip will result in the deaths of potentially millions of people. It would be genocide.

Hamas is a monstrous organization that is rightfully considered terrorists. They are islamo-fascists who oppress their own people and murder foreigners. They are also a product of 75 years of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Their roots were actually formed while Egypt controlled that part of Palestine.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Hamas is a monstrous organization that is rightfully considered terrorists. They are islamo-fascists who oppress their own people and murder foreigners. They are also a product of 75 years of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Again a core disagreement here is whether you choose to frame it as "Big strong Israel against widdle ole' Palestine" or "The tiny Jewish country of Israel against the entire rest of the Middle East who openly and proudly want to wipe it off the map."

Again the Palestinians could get everything they pretend to want by just going to one of the other dozen Muslim Arabic Speaking countries in the general area.

But they don't want that. They want to live where the Jews live because they don't want the Jews to be there.

The core difference is whether or not you believe this is really about some actual meaningful subset of Muslims pining for some long lost homeland that by pure coincidence is exactly where the people they hate are at.

Nobody here is stupid. "What's the moral complexity of someone being given a technically valid reason for violence against a group you've always hated and wanted to destroy anyway" is in the discussion.