Israel Palestine Conflict 2023

[Soulman]

B-b-b-b-but Hamas is forcing their hand! They HAVE TO murder babies!!!

Hi, we’re a democracy and we’re pretty great! Give us weapons.

[LouisCyphre]

I believe that’s the same hospital where the IDF shot at obvious civilians waving white flags and trying to leave.

[otatop]

That Hamas underground complex video reminds me of this

[LouisCyphre]

I found the video but this tweet claims it was Hamas doing the shooting.

https://x.com/Samylevy594856/status/1722967442144530602?s=20

[LouisCyphre]

MSF doesn’t specify who does the shooting but they are calling for a stop to the IDF attacks on the hospital.

https://x.com/MSF_canada/status/1723331612719370436?s=20

https://x.com/MSF_canada/status/1723450373745062057?s=20

https://x.com/MSF_canada/status/1723406050676641840?s=20

https://x.com/MSF_canada/status/1723399213105521030?s=20

[pvn]

@Soulman

B-b-b-b-but Hamas is forcing their hand! They HAVE TO murder babies!!!

I don’t understand how they think “we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want us to do” is a convincing argument

[pvn]

@DrChesspain

The 1000 massacred Israelis ask “Was killing us worth the all of the destruction you now brought upon your miserable society?”

Are they asking the patients in this hospital? The premature babies?

[DrChesspain]

No, they’re asking all of their Hamas relatives and sympathizers.

[Surf]

Thing that makes me feel most pessimistic about this is I’m sure Israel feels from a strategic standpoint they can’t agree to any eventual agreement that is better for Hamas than whatever the status quo was going to be or else that would incentivize further terror attacks and Hamas obviously not interested in giving up their power so feels like there no end in sight

[goofy]

@DrChesspain

The 1000 massacred Israelis ask “Was killing us worth the all of the destruction you now brought upon your miserable society?”

@DrChesspain

No, they’re asking all of their Hamas relatives and sympathizers.

I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt, but these posts feel like they have some gross undertones of chest-thumping and “how do you like us now” in response to Israel’s fairly indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians, which feels particularly hollow when this kind of violent response is probably exactly what Hamas wanted out of this (so their answer to your question is, yes, they’re fucking thrilled). And ordinary Palestinians, who mostly do not approve of Hamas, are the ones paying the price.

[DrChesspain]

It’s not chest-thumping. It’s human nature to strike back at terrorists who massacre your citizens, and it’s pretty ballsy to call out Israel for the fact the some innocent Palestinians are going to die precisely due to the actions of what passes as their government.

Hamas still has the power to end all of this by freeing the hostages and surrendering. But they’re vicious cowards who hide out in hospitals and dare the IDF to strike them. I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, although I haven’t heard you say what actions you think a sovereign nation should take when viciously attacked by an objectively weaker neighbor.

[pvn]

@DrChesspain

No, they’re asking all of their Hamas relatives and sympathizers.

yeah do they realize the kids in the hospital aren’t hamas operatives

[goofy]

@DrChesspain

It’s human nature to strike back at terrorists who massacre your citizens, and it’s pretty ballsy to call out Israel for the fact the some innocent Palestinians are going to die precisely due to the actions of what passes as their government.

It really is not ballsy. Like, most of the world looks at what Israel is doing with horror; the people who are in the minority, and are taking the ballsier position, are the ones who look at this like “welp, what are you gonna do, seems like they deserve it for not picking a better government”. Granted, the United States is not very representative:

https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonchi/status/1723362538597880043

@DrChesspain

But they’re vicious cowards who hide out in hospitals and dare the IDF to strike them.

Again, the ballsy position here is that “welp, no other choice but to take their bait and kill tens of thousands of civilians” is the logical consequence that follows from this.

@DrChesspain

I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, although I haven’t heard you say what actions you think a sovereign nation should take when viciously attacked by an objectively weaker neighbor.

This episode had some good ideas:

Opinion | If Not This, Then What Should Israel Do?

[pvn]

@DrChesspain

It’s not chest-thumping. It’s human nature to strike back at terrorists who massacre your citizens

sure but “Hamas is bad” doesn’t give you license to kill unlimited babies

[pvn]

I mean, I get it, Hamas doesn’t fight fair and they use human shields or whatever, tough shit. the Bibi regime wants to claim some sort of moral high ground, well sorry shitheads, you lose that the instant you start bombing civilians (they already lost it a long time ago, but ignoring all that and just looking at current events, they absolutely are not any better).

[Surf]

@goofy

This episode had some good ideas:

I haven’t listened but read the Vox article and seems like a lot of stuff that sounds good in theory but how does it translate to the actual conditions there? Like how are you supposed to do what they propose below without civilian deaths when the tunnels/etc are specifically made to be under residential areas/mosques/etc?

“ “Go in for a few weeks or less, trying to find Hamas leaders and destroying tunnels, weapons caches, etc,” says [Dan Byman] a professor at Georgetown who studies Israeli counterterrorism.”

[goofy]

There’s a transcript at the link as well, here’s one example:

ZB: And the latter option is what I come to think of as a counterterrorism operation. And it has a few very nitty-gritty parts to it. One of them is minimizing your ground invasion. Israel shouldn’t try to just conquer the whole territory, but rather target specifically, in any ground initiatives that it does, Hamas leadership and the people who perpetrated the Oct. 7 attack and anyone else who might be in a position to plan or organize a similar kind of attack.

So that may mean ground incursions. It might not. It’s hard for me to say without access to a lot of classified intelligence that the Israelis aren’t sharing with me. But one thing it probably does entail are significant special forces raids inside Gaza. They’re not omnipotent, but they can be much more discriminate in the way that they fight than regular military can be. It means — I mean, this is gruesome to talk about, but an extended assassination campaign targeting Hamas leaders, both in Gaza and elsewhere.

EK: Which they have done before.

AB: Correct. Right. So at the end of the Second Intifada, which is in the roughly early mid-2000s, Israel engaged in this concerted effort to kill anyone who it seemed was the Hamas leader. At one point, this had proven so successful that Hamas didn’t want to name whoever their next leader was. They said, we have a new leader, but we won’t tell you who it is because they were so afraid that that person would also be killed by an Israeli bomb or an Israeli bullet. And that did seem to have an effect on Hamas’s violence at that point in time.

Basically, there are only so many people who have the skills to plan a terrorist attack. There are only so many people who know how to build bombs. There’s only so many people who are charismatic enough to inspire effective support from underlings. So if you really engage in a significant extended campaign to kill those people, it can have an effect on the ability of that group to plan and execute attacks. It can’t end the group.

But here, another good example is what the U.S. actually did do right in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is a shadow of itself right now than it was beforehand. The group is not eliminated, but its capacity to pose a threat to the U.S. homeland is dramatically diminished, even with the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan.

You can say the same thing about ISIS after the International counterterrorism campaign against them. They don’t really control the territory that they controlled in Iraq and Syria in the past. This can work even if it can’t destroy the group. But what it does — what it really is is a containment strategy rather than actually we’re going to destroy, in the literal sense of destroy, the organization.

Another thing this episode really illuminated is that Israel has no strategy here. All the Palestinians they’re killing right now are not in some service of an end goal - they’re doing this out of revenge, and because they have no other ideas. Let’s say they “destroy Hamas”, whatever that means (they talk about that ambiguity a bit). What’s next?

EK: Let’s say they execute a ground invasion, and let’s say that they can do a fair amount. They’re able to degrade a lot of Hamas’s military capabilities. They’re able to kill a number of Hamas’s top leadership, a number of its foot soldiers. Then what?

ZB: So that is the million dollar question. And it is the question that no one I have spoken to and I don’t think anyone in the Israeli government actually has a plan for. I’d really recommend reading a piece in “The Financial Times” on this where they got a bunch of senior Israeli sources on record talking about the planning. It turns out they’re still planning it. This piece was like — at the time we’re recording, it was like a day or two ago.

There’s one fantastic quote in there that says, “The Americans went ballistic when they heard that Israel had no plan for what to do in the event after Hamas.” Basically, I think there’s three options, and of them only one of them is really feasible if what you really want to do is destroy Hamas.

So the first one is that you just go in, you wreck the place and you leave. And if that happens, well, Hamas probably just reconstitutes itself. We know, from pretty bitter experience on the American side, that you can’t take out a terrorist organization in one fell swoop. A second option would be to install some kind of collaborationist Palestinian government and then leave. The problem with that is if you don’t back it with armed force, Hamas or some other kind of Palestinian militant — there are a lot of them in the Gaza Strip — end up toppling this government and you’re right back where you started.

So the third option, and the one that strikes me as most likely based on my own conversations with Israelis, is an extended occupation of Gaza. If you really want to destroy the entity that calls itself Hamas, the most literal definition, that’s what you have to do.

You go to Gaza. You occupy it for a long period of time. You engage in a pretty lengthy counterinsurgency campaign designed to topple the government, designed to ensure that Hamas — that its support is entirely stamped out among the population and it lacks its ability to rebuild. And then, only then, after a very long period of fighting, do you try to create a government that can operate without Israeli forces on the ground.

This, to me, seems like a nightmarish option for any number of reasons. But right now I’m worried, based on what’s coming out of the Israeli government, that that’s what they’re sort of sleepwalking towards.

EK: Why is that a nightmarish option? They occupied Gaza for a long time. And I don’t think right now the pullout — and I think it’s strange language because it kept the blockade and a lot of control over it — but they did not occupy Gaza in the way they had. They did not try to govern it in the way they had. And I don’t think right now they look at that as a success.

ZB: No, I mean, look, Hamas built itself while Israel was occupying Gaza, right? That’s when the organization really came to prominence in the 1990s when it conducted a series of terrorist attacks inside Israel that were very explicitly designed to disrupt the Israeli-Palestinian peace process at that time. And this was Israel was still occupying Gaza. So that’s one thing, right, is that doesn’t really work if you look at the historical record.

The other thing is looking at different kinds of historical records, namely the experience of countries occupying what are essentially foreign countries in a counterinsurgency campaign. And it’s quite bad. These very often fail to accomplish their goal of creating a peaceful post-war environment. They create a situation where these terrorist groups can reconstitute themselves often in worse forms. That’s the origin story of ISIS. It really grew out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was itself not very strong until the U.S. invaded Iraq.

This discussion goes on for a bit and gets quite detailed, but one important point it makes is that when reconstituting a government as an occupying force, you need some group of people who will work with you, and no such thing exists in Gaza:

The first is something that Marc Lynch, who’s an expert on Arab politics, told me when I was talking to him, is he’s like, look, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, there were some real constituencies — Shia, Kurds, who hated Saddam Hussein and had some interest in cooperating with the invaders. There’s nothing like that in Gaza. Nothing. Everyone hates Israel. They hate Israel because of the years of occupation prior to Hamas. They hate Israel because of the blockade. They hate Israel because of all the bombing campaigns. There’s no group in Gaza that would welcome or cooperate with an Israeli counterinsurgency campaign, which means you’re in there with Israeli forces who are getting shot at by Hamas partisans who are hiding among the population all the time. It’s the nightmare scenario for any effort to try to impose governance on a society. Who’s going to cooperate with you? Who are you going to get to run the government when you can’t do it? It’s just — there’s no plausible, to me, end game for how you bring peace to such an environment.

[jmakin]

it is the children who are wrong

[Surf]

@goofy

Another thing this episode really illuminated is that Israel has no strategy here. All the Palestinians they’re killing right now are not in some service of an end goal - they’re doing this out of revenge, and because they have no other ideas. Let’s say they “destroy Hamas”, whatever that means (they talk about that ambiguity a bit). What’s next?

Thanks that does have a lot more info than the article. My initial reaction after Oct attack was thinking seems like special forces/intelligence campaign to assassinate the relevant Hamas leadership seemed logical. I kinda wonder if my propensity to thinking that is seeing how Obama approached getting Bin Laden and maybe seeing that go so “well” gives me unrealistic expectations for what could be done. Hell even Trump droning Solemaini looks clean and measured in this context. I’m sure both these assassination violated who knows how many international laws but better than urban war if “something has to be done”. But does seems Israel just wanted to do something without having a plan

[bbb7979]

@DrChesspain

Hamas still has the power to end all of this by freeing the hostages and surrendering. But they’re vicious cowards who hide out in hospitals and dare the IDF to strike them.

Bibi and the LIKUD also have the power to end it. And they’re also vicious. And they’re also cowards. And they have, in their own way, provoked the Palestinians to strike Israel.

@DrChesspain

I haven’t heard you say what actions you think a sovereign nation should take when viciously attacked by an objectively weaker neighbor.

I imagine the Germans and Austro-Hungarians were saying similar things after the Archduke was murdered by a terrorist. The US certainly was saying it in the 2001-2005. Neither of those powers gained much from their subsequent actions. So while it’s easy to understand the course of action Israel is taking, we know it doesn’t lead to good things.