Standing With Israel and Condemning Hamas

[erimir]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I don't mean to absolve them of guilt, but the imbalance in degree of guilt is dramatic. What did Hamas do? We're not entirely certain but we know it pales in comparison. Killing civilians and taking hostages are both considered 'war crimes' according to international law, but there is good reason to believe their plan of attack on October 7th was directed at the Israeli security forces, and that the civilians who were killed were "collateral damage". Clearly they planned to take hostages, which is recognized as a war crime, but they did so with the hope of exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, many of whom are held under "administrative detention" without charges, sometimes for years. In other words, hostages.

I find it very hard to believe that Hamas's actions when they apparently merely stumbled upon a music festival full of civilians or a kibbutz full of civilians were collateral damage, and they were really intending to target the IDF exclusively.

This seems irrelevant to the question of Hamas' blameworthiness for the events of October 7th, and even if it's true that most Israeli Jews were born in Israel it is because their parents or grandparents were settlers.

Yes, and?

I think a deal has to acknowledge Palestinian grievances, but I don't think saying "your home isn't really your home because your grandparents weren't from here" is helpful or worth trying to make as a point. In a scenario like French Algeria, perhaps, but the Pieds-Noirs were a much smaller percentage of the population and had a connection with a metropole, which is not the case here.

The relevance is only that there are elements in Hamas and other Palestinian movements that are delusional about how rooted Israelis are in Israel and whether simply moving to another country is considered a realistic alternative for them. Even if we supposed that Ashkenazi Jews or Jews with history in the Americas would be willing to "go back" they simply don't account for a large enough percentage of them. And the elements that believe that Israelis are on the verge of running away and that they could have the entire country to themselves with no, or very few, Jews, will be more interested in escalating the conflict than in coming to a solution. So I think it's relevant to note that part of the intractability are delusions about the other side (Israelis who say "there's no such thing as Palestinian culture/identity" are engaging in a similar delusion).

Yeah, Netanyahu has a lot more blood on his hands than Sinwar. I agree it would be a hard sell to the Israelis though. But they managed to work with Arafat back in the day.

Sure, they worked with Arafat, but he was never even proposed as a leader for both peoples, much less accepted by Israelis as one.

I actually don't think that's true. I think there are a lot of people on both sides who would support a secular, pluralistic democracy, but playing up the religious extremism on both sides serves the interests of those players who benefit from the perception of the situation as intractable.

The situation does seem pretty intractable! It's been going on for decades and it seems to have only gotten worse in the past 30 years!

There are definitely people on both sides who would be amenable to a single secular state with equal rights and democracy. But there are non-trivial portions who are not, and it seems like they're the large majority. A two-state solution is much more popular, and a one-state solution with MY side dominant and THEIR side disenfranchised is more popular than the sort of one-state solution either of us would approve of. That's not something we can handwave away just because the depth of their religious/nationalist feeling is not something we can relate to.

The "other" options in that poll does suggest some flexibility, but I don't think it's useful to pretend that if the US proposed a single-state, either side would currently be amenable or that we're anywhere close to it.

I think if a one-state solution is going to happen, it'll only happen after first trying a two-state solution, where both sides are prospering and becoming more integrated. That's the only way either side will feel comfortable with it, imo.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

was directed at the Israeli security forces, and that the civilians who were killed were "collateral damage".

There's video of the cold blooded murders my man.
Either I missed some sort of sarcasm/parody or we are being told to reject the evidence of ours eyes and ears.
Eitherway I think it's time to get off the internet, that's my current plan.

[viscousmemories]

There is evidence to suggest Hamas' main goal was to attack military installations and take soldiers hostage. Considering they have previously traded one soldier for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, that was an understandable objective. Apparently a bunch of civilians took advantage of the broken barrier and chaos to attack civilian kibbutzim and take civilian hostages. It seems Hamas wanted to make a deal in the first week to send those hostages back, but Netanyahu refused. Of course the IDF also killed an unknown number of civilians themselves, some apparently on purpose to keep them from being taken hostage.

I don't like the term 'collateral damage' either, but if it's going to be used it to justify the dropping a 2,000 lb bomb on an apartment building to kill one suspected Hamas fighter, then it can be used equally in the case of civilians who were not the intended targets of Hamas being killed by gunfire.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

Apparently a bunch of civilians took advantage of the broken barrier and chaos to attack civilian kibbutzim and take civilian hostages.

And you believe this?

[viscousmemories]

I wouldn't say I believe it, but I think it is believable. And even if it was Hamas fighters who killed some of (or many, or most) of those civilians I understand these things happen in armed conflict. Especially when those fighters are from a population you have starved, deprived, tormented, and periodically massacred across decades.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I wouldn't say I believe it, but I think it is believable. And even if it was Hamas fighters who killed some of (or many, or most) of those civilians I understand these things happen in armed conflict.

Hmm, so you either didn't watch the videos of people being murdered, have convinced yourself you don't need to, or that what you saw wasn't really what you saw. I expect the crisis actor stage is coming soon.
This is just sad.

[Ari]

While I would hope I would have been smart enough to not break one of the rules of partying, always invite the neighbors or else the neighbors will invite themselves. As a big psy-party, if I were living in Israel, I would have likely attended if not been working. I almost certainly would have been killed. It's good to know my death would be celebrated here.

[viscousmemories]

I get it. Who wants to live in a world where you can't have a rave a couple miles away from a concentration camp without having to worry about whether the inmates will break out and murder you. It's a tragedy. Maybe take a break from watching Israeli murder porn from October 7th and watch the videos from Gaza of children carrying the parts of their siblings, or the man holding the headless toddler, or the missile strike hitting a schoolyard full of kids playing soccer (that was two days ago), or the remains of the car Hind was in when the IDF murdered her, or any of the other hundreds of hours of video of an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Maybe eventually you'll start seeing Palestinians as humans too and quit whining that I won't condemn Hamas.

[Ari]

No, see, you don't get it. I am not here to argue, I'm not here to fight your little internet battle of pretend justice so you can claim you were in the right and then shrug because it was all for internet points. I am stating the fact that I would have certainly been murdered and you would cheer it as the justice I deserved because winning in the internet means more.

The internet has blackened your heart.

I am dead.
I will not be here again.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by Ari

I will not be here again.

Shit.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Shit.

Yes

[erimir]

Originally Posted by erimir

Yes, and?

I think a deal has to acknowledge Palestinian grievances, but I don't think saying "your home isn't really your home because your grandparents weren't from here" is helpful or worth trying to make as a point. In a scenario like French Algeria, perhaps, but the Pieds-Noirs were a much smaller percentage of the population and had a connection with a metropole, which is not the case here.

The relevance is only that there are elements in Hamas and other Palestinian movements that are delusional about how rooted Israelis are in Israel and whether simply moving to another country is considered a realistic alternative for them. Even if we supposed that Ashkenazi Jews or Jews with history in the Americas would be willing to "go back" they simply don't account for a large enough percentage of them. And the elements that believe that Israelis are on the verge of running away and that they could have the entire country to themselves with no, or very few, Jews, will be more interested in escalating the conflict than in coming to a solution. So I think it's relevant to note that part of the intractability are delusions about the other side (Israelis who say "there's no such thing as Palestinian culture/identity" are engaging in a similar delusion).

To expand on that point a little bit, what would you say to an Israeli Jew with Yemenite Jewish background?

You're a settler? And therefore, what?

Is it just oh, you've been here long enough, we're resigned to you staying. Would it be good for them to "go back" to Yemen, even if you have resigned yourself to thinking they can't be forced to go back?

The place where currently a group currently getting cheered on by many Palestine supporters has a flag that says "a curse on the Jews" (not Israel, the Jews. They also have a line for "a curse on Israel"). Where there are currently no more Jews, for what I'm sure is no particular reason?

Why are they settlers rather than refugees? Is it that they were settlers, but now that they're not welcome in Yemen you wouldn't say they should move back?

Do you think things were great for Jews in Yemen before Israel messed it all up and created all the anti-Semitism in the Arab world?

There is a history of persecutions, of oppression, pogroms and events that I think nowadays would be classified as genocide that goes back centuries.

Which is all to say, this is the type of background that informs how some of these "settlers" would take suggestions that they "really belong" somewhere else, and in particular, implying that's the sort of place they belong? Why would they or their supporters listen to you as if you're trying to be fair to both sides?

[Stephen Maturin]

Hope you reconsider, Ari, but all the best to ya one way or the other.

[viscousmemories]

71 more Palestinians killed in the bombing of a refugee camp last night, but apparently my heart is blackened because I am not more horrified by the hypothetical murder of Ari or the unfortunate murders of some Israelis ten months ago than I am by the actual death, maiming, and starvation of actual human beings in Gaza actually occurring right now.

This is what the dehumanization of Palestinians looks like.

Israel has been actively trying to cleanse the region of Palestinians since 1948, yet nine months into what is only the latest round of massacres and forced starvation I am supposed to be more outraged that some Palestinians murdered some Israelis almost ten months ago.

Literally tens of thousands of men, women and children have been killed and maimed in Palestine in the past ten months, as many as two-hundred thousand by some estimates, yet if my heart wasn't blackened I would still be lamenting the deaths of a few hundred Israelis at a music festival.

This is not me saying those Israelis "deserved" to die, it is me saying yeah, I'm sorry but I am not willing to center real or hypothetical Israeli victims in a discussion about the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Of course what happened on October 7th was a fucking tragedy, but a predictable and avoidable tragedy that happened ten months ago, and there has been an ongoing tragedy unfolding every single day since then that apparently doesn't warrant any concern. And I'm the one with a blackened heart.

[erimir]

The point of contention here was not that you are refusing to "center" Israeli civilian deaths, but that you went out of your way to claim that Hamas didn't even mean to kill those civilians, or even that they weren't responsible at all!

They just happened upon a music festival and opened fire on an unarmed crowd rather than continuing on in search of military targets by accident or something, I guess. Raves and military bases do look similar. It was just some outside agitators anyway.

You said you wanted to reject "both sides are guilty" - but who was saying that both sides are equally guilty?

The reason we're discussing this aspect more is because this is also the area where we disagree more.

And if you're interested in convincing the Israelis to accept a peace deal, then regardless of how much attention you think their grievances deserve, you're going to have to be willing to address them. Unconditional surrenders don't happen without total defeat, and Israel is nowhere near suffering that, and you certainly have to make at a minimum rhetorical concessions absent that.

In the meantime, suggesting that Hamas didn't intend or wasn't even responsible for the worst massacres on October 7th is damaging to your cause, not helpful.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by erimir

In the meantime, suggesting that Hamas didn't intend or wasn't even responsible for the worst massacres on October 7th is damaging to your cause, not helpful.

I'll add that the suggestion that some notable number of Palestinian civilians not associated with Hamas were both armed and murderous enough to spontaneously attack Israeli civilians when the opportunity presented itself is... uh.... problematic? Requires extraordinary evidence? Sounds like something out of an Israeli supremacist fever dream?

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by erimir

[...] you went out of your way to claim that Hamas didn't even mean to kill those civilians, or even that they weren't responsible at all!

No, I did not say that. I said it is believable that they were not targetting civilians.

In this article I linked to in my earlier post, Hamas leadership claims they were targeting the military installations and personnel, while acknowledging that things "may have gotten out of control" resulting in the killings of civilians. Maybe by Hamas fighters, maybe by others. All I have said is that I find it believable that this is true. That is to say that the plan was not to seek out civilians to kill and kidnap, even though Hamas and/or other armed groups did kill and kidnap civilians when they came upon them. That music festival wasn't even supposed to be there, so it is literally impossible that it was a target of Hamas.

There are numerous other armed factions in Gaza besides Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), who were the organizers of this assault, and there is evidence that representatives of other factions took advantage of the opportunity to cross over. There hasn't been a thorough independent investigation because Israel has refused to allow it and we know that they have lied through their teeth about many things from that day.

This is the most thorough investigative report I have seen yet on the events of October 7th:

October 7 | Al Jazeera Investigations - YouTube

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Good thing he didn’t say Final Solution.

[ShottleBop]

A worthwhile read

Excerpt:

By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.


These were issues that I could only discuss with a very small handful of activists, scholars, experts in international law and, not surprisingly, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Beyond this limited circle, such statements on the illegality of Israeli actions in Gaza are anathema in Israel. Even the vast majority of protesters against the government, those calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, will not countenance them.

Since I returned from my visit, I have been trying to place my experiences there into a larger context. The reality on the ground is so devastating, and the future appears so bleak, that I have allowed myself to indulge in some counter-factual history and to entertain some hopeful speculations about a different future. I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? That same declaration which stated that Israel “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”.

What effect would such a constitution have had on the nature of the state? How would it have tempered the transformation of Zionism from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, expansionism and apartheid? During the few hopeful years of the Oslo peace process, people in Israel began speaking of making it into a “state of all its citizens”, Jews and Palestinians alike. The assassination of prime minister Rabin in 1995 put an end to that dream. Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it – as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace?

[viscousmemories]

I literally just came here to share that article. Here's the author bio from Wikipedia:

Omer Bartov (Hebrew: עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב [ʔoˈmeʁ ˈbaʁtov]; born 1954) is an Israeli-American historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide.

[viscousmemories]

I should note that while I'm happy he eventually came to the conclusion that Israel's actions in Gaza are genocidal, I am more aligned with the view that Israel has been engaged in genocide, with varying degrees of overt violence, since 1948.

I also overlooked the subtle indications of the authors pro-Zionist inclinations, but someone pointed them out to me. For example in the last paragraph quoted above: there is very little evidence that Zionism's founders ever "eloquently envisioned it - as a nation based on freedom, justice, and peace", and lots of evidence that the most prominent Zionists going back to the late 19th century were fully cognizant of its being a colonial project that would necessarily displace the Arab population that had lived there for centuries, violently if necessary.

[viscousmemories]

Wikipedia is actually doing a really good job of documenting the many countries, organizations, and scholars that have identified what Israel is doing in Gaza as a genocide.

Israel has been accused by experts, governments, United Nations agencies and non-governmental organisations of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people during its invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the ongoing Israel–Hamas war. By July 2024, after nine months of attacks, Israeli military action had resulted in nearly 40,000 confirmed Palestinian deaths — 1 out of every 59 people in Gaza — averaging 148 deaths per day. Most of the victims are civilians, of whom at least 50% are women and children, and 103 journalists.

Gaza genocide - Wikipedia

[ShottleBop]

And now the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's security agency, has recognized as "terrorism" the atrocities against Palestinians being committed by settlers in the West Bank: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ar...outh-west-bank

Other members of the Israeli government are calling for his dismissal.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

'This is our land, we deserve it': Dozens of Israelis planning to cross border and settle in Gaza | World News | Sky News

When asked what should happen to the Palestinians currently living in the territory, one Israeli woman replied: "We should kill them. Every last one of them."