Middle Eastern Conflagration, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran

[goofy]

@CaffeineNeeded

Hamas made a purposeful play here to stop Israel from making peace with other countries. … to stop Israel from making peace with another Arab nation

Is there good sourcing on this? The Wikipedia page says nothing about it being a motivation. I recall speculation about this closer to Oct 7 but is it still just speculation?

[CaffeineNeeded]

Just refusing to label it a coincidence and it’s the one strategic benefit Hamas has gained since starting this conflict… other than killing and raping Jews

[goofy]

Just seems weird to harp on it, since it is speculation and it’s not like we need to make up more reasons to condemn Hamas, they’re already bottom of the barrel.

Separately, this article has a little more detail:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-hostages-killed-mistakenly-gaza-were-holding-white-flag-official-says-2023-12-16/

Three Israeli hostages killed mistakenly in Gaza by Israeli forces had been holding up a white flag, a military official said on Saturday, citing an initial inquiry into the incident that has shaken the country.

A soldier saw the hostages emerging tens of metres from Israeli forces on Friday in Shejaiya, an area of intense combat in northern Gaza where Hamas militants operate in civilian attire and use deception tactics, the official said.

“They’re all without shirts and they have a stick with a white cloth on it. The soldier feels threatened and opens fire. He declares that they’re terrorists. They (the Israeli forces) open fire. Two (hostages) are killed immediately,” the official told reporters in a phone briefing.

The third hostage was wounded and retreated into a nearby building where he called for help in Hebrew, the official said.

“Immediately the battalion commander issues a ceasefire order, but again there’s another burst of fire towards the third figure and he also dies,” the official said. “This was against our rules of engagement,” he added.

This is why I called this incident “clarifying”. If this is how this went down, I hope everyone is updating their priors when it comes to estimating how many Palestinian civilians these trigger-happy fucks are gunning down in cold blood (see also: this post).

[kerowo]

“Deception tactics” mean they had likely seen their comrades get shot at or killed by people pretending to surrender recently. War is hell and this is the kind of shit that is going to happen despite no one wanting it to. Nobody is winning, hopefully it will stop soon.

[pvn]

the hostages reached for their waistbands

[jmakin]

Except the person here also absolved the shooting of hostages. You also had the benefit of reading a conversation after the fact that has been since edited by this site’s moderation, and I no longer care to explain words that are in plain sight for anyone to read (even post-edits).

So, I mean cool. I guess we’re semant(redacted)sing now. I guess [personal attack removed by mod] was just identifying with the position of people in a “life or death situation” (totally the same as serving as a well-compensated doctor) and I was mostly reacting to his broader history of posts here that have largely absolved the IDF of any wrongdoing here whatsoever. I guess I’m mostly reacting to that.

If you came to me in 2023 and said trayvon maybe had it coming or tried to mansplain why maybe zimmerman had no other choice I’d have the same reaction. It’s an utterly absurd take especially at this juncture, and when taken with the whole of his opinions on this topic (some of which I’m probably confusing with takes on (site im not allowed to mention)), then my reaction probably makes far more sense.

Hope that clears up any confusion for you.

[personal attacks removed by mod]

[goofy]

They’re losing WaPo:

The case of al-Shifa: Investigating the assault on Gaza’s largest hospital (should be a gift link? lmk if that doesn’t work)

Weeks before Israel sent troops into al-Shifa Hospital, its spokesman began building a public case.

The claims were remarkably specific — that five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities; that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters; and that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards. The assertions were backed by “concrete evidence,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said as he laid out the case in an Oct. 27 briefing.

After storming the complex on Nov. 15, the IDF released a series of photographs and videos that it said proved its central point.
…
But the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials. That raises critical questions, legal and humanitarian experts say, about whether the civilian harm caused by Israel’s military operations against the hospital — encircling, besieging and ultimately raiding the facility and the tunnel beneath it — were proportionate to the assessed threat.

Hours before IDF troops entered the complex, the Biden administration declassified U.S. intelligence assessments that it said bolstered Israel’s claims. In the aftermath of the raid, Israeli and U.S. officials have stood firm behind their initial statements.
“We are absolutely confident in the intelligence … that Hamas was using it as a command and control node,” a senior administration official told The Post last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive findings. “Hamas had been holding the hostages in the hospital compound until shortly before Israel went in.”

The U.S. government has not made any of the declassified material public and the official would not share the intelligence this assessment was based on.
…
“Before, I was convinced that [al-Shifa] was where these operations were taking place,” a senior U.S. member of Congress told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. But now, he said, “I think there has to be a new level of demonstration. They should have more proof at this point.”

The targeting by a U.S. ally of a compound housing hundreds of sick and dying patients and thousands of displaced people has no precedent in recent decades. The march on al-Shifa caused the hospital’s operations to collapse. As Israeli troops closed in and fighting intensified, fuel ran out, supplies could not enter, and ambulances were unable to collect casualties from the streets.

[goofy]

And NYT (gift link):

A Times Investigation Tracked Israel’s Use of One of Its Most Destructive...

During the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians, according to an analysis of visual evidence by The New York Times.

The video investigation focuses on the use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area of southern Gaza where Israel had ordered civilians to move for safety. While bombs of that size are used by several Western militaries, munitions experts say they are almost never dropped by U.S. forces in densely populated areas anymore.

In response to questions about the bomb’s use in south Gaza, an Israeli military spokesman said in a statement to The Times that Israel’s priority was destroying Hamas and “questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.”

[goofy]

Good article:

The Free-Speech Debate Is a Trap

What everyone knows on some level, I think, is that speech has the power to incite action because speech itself is already a material act. Yes, anti-Zionism is an idea, not a rock; but if it were only an idea, without any practical potential, then there would be no point in throwing it. The difference right now is that, given the tremendous political and ideological instability introduced by the war, a number of powerful people in America currently believe that talking about freeing Palestine could actually end up freeing Palestine, and it is this cascade of actions that they are ultimately trying to suppress. This tells us something very important: They are afraid. The question is not whether intifada, which means “uprising” in Arabic and invokes both civil disobedience and violent resistance, is a threatening term; if it were not threatening, the House would never have convened an entire hearing about it. The only question is whether threatened parties — the Israeli apartheid regime, American foreign-policy hawks, all the board members and lobbyists and donors and hedge-fund managers — deserve to be threatened.

They do. For as often as pro-Palestine speech is described as an existential menace to Jews in Israel and across America, our major newspapers are saturated with equally plausible incitements to violence — for that, my friends, is what it means to support a war. The difference is that when the New York Times editorial board defends the bombardment of Gaza or urges lawmakers to send Israel more Hellfire missiles, this may not look like incitement because the violence in question is endorsed by the White House, funded by Congress, and normalized by the media.

One cannot escape the irony that when the liberal begs us to stop shouting each other down and tolerate a diversity of viewpoints, he is essentially calling for a cease-fire in the culture war. This is as far as free speech gets us: It asks us to have greater moral concern for the sanctity of ideas than for the lives of the Palestinian people. Bomb a hospital, and you are making a calculated strike on a military target; but try to kill an idea, and you are betraying democracy. This is why seeking “higher ground,” as the champions of free speech urge us to do, will only perpetuate the illusion that we are in yet another empty argument that can be safely contained by liberal norms; we will become so preoccupied with the integrity of the forest that we forget about the actual trees.

So let the left say that freedom of speech is a public good, like a health-care system: an essential element of a just society that is also regularly subject to abuse, fraud, corruption, and the private interests of the wealthy. When this abuse happens, as it is happening now, we oppose it because we believe that freedom of speech without justice is like a planet without air. We do not protest the war on Gaza because we have an abstract right to do so; we protest it because it is one of the great moral atrocities of our lifetimes and because the widespread refusal to admit this in America is an atrocity in its own right. We are not just speaking; we are fighting with words. And we are fighting to win.

[SensiblePerson]

@goofy

So let the left say that freedom of speech is a public good, like a health-care system: an essential element of a just society that is also regularly subject to abuse, fraud, corruption, and the private interests of the wealthy. When this abuse happens, as it is happening now, we oppose it because we believe that freedom of speech without justice is like a planet without air.

Interesting! I’m not sure that I’m 100% in agreement, but it’s worth thinking about.

[SensiblePerson]

Israel firmly in the wrong at this point, as far as I’m concerned. They’ve killed nearly 1% of the population of Gaza and there are no signs of stopping any time soon.

Strike kills 12 people, mostly children, in Gaza area declared safe zone by...

[goofy]

Lots of Ezra Klein’s episodes over the last few months have been really interesting, and I thought this one stood out:

Opinion | A Different Path Israel Could Have Taken — and Maybe Still Can

The guy is from this group

Commanders for Israel's Security

They’re a group of former defense/intelligence officers, so hardly left-wing, who oppose Israel’s (and especially Netanyahu’s) harsh policy towards Palestine on the grounds that it harms Israel’s security. He mentions a lot of things that have been brought up before like how Israel has taught Palestinians that violence gets them better results than nonviolence, but it was interesting to hear that from an Israeli perspective.

[pvn]

@goofy

They’re a group of former defense/intelligence officers, so hardly left-wing, who oppose Israel’s (and especially Netanyahu’s) harsh policy towards Palestine on the grounds that it harms Israel’s security.

the problem with this analysis is that the assumptions are incorrect. Bibi & Co don’t think security is the number 1 priority and they’re willing to sacrifice it to achieve their actual aims.

[goofy]

I’m not sure if I worded that poorly but I don’t think he makes that assumption. He’s not saying, like, “Bibi betrayed what he told us he’d do”, he’s just saying that for whatever reasons he’s doing it (and he talks at one point about Netanyahu having a conflict of interest in prosecuting the current war, in that he’s very much hoping to get a political victory out of this that saves his own ass and prioritizing that over doing what’s best for Israel & Israelis) the Israeli policy towards Palestine is encouraging violence and making Israel less safe.

[pvn]

@goofy

the Israeli policy towards Palestine is encouraging violence and making Israel less safe.

right, I’m saying thats what bibi wants. Hamas violence enables him to launch violence and justify (take your pick, ethnic cleansing, more aggressive settlements, forced relocation, carpet bombing residential areas of gaza, etc)

[goofy]

In other news

https://twitter.com/TimesofIsrael/status/1742490378438320133

Madagascar Plan

[pvn]

yeah bibi’s plan is all coming together

[SensiblePerson]

This was an interesting read, thanks for posting.

Magic link for podcast transcript, in case anyone’s interested.

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Nimrod Novik

[CaffeineNeeded]

Man these strikes against the Houthis are producing some… takes on Twitter that are Uber bad on the left

[goofy]

I assume you mean stuff like this? (or if not, what?)

https://twitter.com/kuzbarah/status/1745599548167217452

https://twitter.com/me_im_chloe/status/1745627446702219617

https://twitter.com/ItsMatt_Again/status/1745618078900089209

I find this pretty inoffensive.