Not every decision by the US government is made democratically. Sometimes a delegate is voted upon. In this case last year a new commander and chief of the US military was voted in who has this power.
It's not eInk but a transflective LCD, so in fact, completely different technology-wise. While it has faster refresh rate, it is not bi-stable, has lower contrast, worse viewing angles, etc. The main thing it has in common with eInk is that it works without a backlight.
‘Quite high’ is still not what you’d think of as ‘quite high’ if you’d never experienced earlier versions of eink though.
LTT on YouTube has some video reviews of Dasung’s displays. I know tastes vary when it comes to LTT - and they focus on some ridiculous things in the reviews (Can you game on them? Obviously, no.) but if you get past that I do think the videos do a a good job of showing how the monitors feel.
If anyone has pointers to how this mode works I'd be interested. It's 160dpi, which is lower than some eInk displays but faster refresh rate is good. Not using PWM to manage brightness is also good.
Philosophically, one could argue that the distinction between organic and inorganic matter is somewhat arbitrary since, at the most fundamental level, everything is simply matter. If you wanted to go in that direction, it would probably be fair to say something like it deteriorated, simply because it's programmed to.
It would also make sense evolution would choose not to change this programming.
I don't think you need to constrain that question to organic matter. Entropy applies to all forms of information including the information that organizes all known biological life out of mostly water and carbon.
Is it destroyed? does matter some how disappear or is it just it transformed from one form to another?
Why did consciousness arise from matter at all, does it disappear or is it transformed.
If you only limit yourself to what you can see then existence is rather dull and seemingly mechanically. Every time we look we see little more, and so is there really anything to suggest there is not more beyond what we can or will ever see.
There is a ton of ink on the topic, but the core problem is that executives get fired for failures more frequently than they get expanded upside for hits.
“Executives get fired” makes it sound like being fired is a natural consequence of a box office failure. Who is firing the executives in such a way that they incentivize mediocre performance? Maybe they should quit doing that?
I genuinely don’t understand this opinion. Israel was viscously attacked unprovoked (regardless what you think of the history of the two orgs) by the organization that governs the province. They’re states goal is to demilitarize the area while their enemy insists on playing out the war in highly populated urban areas.
This isn’t a guerilla war either, it’s the actual official government party. One who has actively promised sequels of the attack.
I don't understand why you say "unprovoked". Gaza has been under occupation for decades (yes, it's technically an occupation, regardless of whether there are settlers or not). It's been periodically bombed, each time with as many victims as an October 7th. It's been under a complete blockade for 16 years. The fact that everything was fine in Israel on October 6th doesn't mean that there was a peace- it just means that they weren't expecting their victims to be able to fight back.
> What would you do in such a situation?
The situation is that Israel is an oppressor and an occupier, so what should it do? Well, first of all it should have made different choices in the past, honest and fair and peaceful choices. Which it didn't make, and it's its fault. But it's never too late. It should have made honest, fair and peaceful choices also in this occasion- mourned its deads, vowed to bring those responsible to justice, and engaged with Palestinian counterparts to withdraw within the 1967 borders and promote the birth of a Palestinian state.
Of course, it didn't do any of those things. It did exactly what Hamas expected.
And, as a result, Hamas has been gone from a rent-extracting governing authority with 16 combat-effective brigades, deep connections to the IRGC, and ongoing funding not just from the Gulf States but from Israel itself(!) to an international pariah with military leadership hiding in tunnels and its last 2 allegedly combat-effective brigades preparing to make a valiant last stand behind a wall of civilian refugees in Rafah.
Yes: Israel did exactly what Hamas expected. The problem for Hamas is twofold:
* Hamas thought the urban combat to root them out of Gaza City and Khan Younis would be a Vietnam-scale bloodbath that would tie the IDF up indefinitely until they were forced to make a truce.
* Hamas's messianic nutbag leader genuinely believed that he was ushering in the end of days, and that the IRGC's other assets would immediately commit to full scale combat operations against the IDF. Instead: Hezbollah noped the hell out, and Iran launched a large scale drone attack that ended up providing a Boeing and Lockheed-style fireworks display in which other Arab states, even as Israel was massacring Palestinian civilians, pitched in to help. Then Iran "declared the matter resolved". Gulp.
Sometimes, if only strategically, it makes sense to do what your enemy wants you to, because your enemy is stupid.
Hamas was designated a terrorist organisation and the Gaza strip was subject to a total blockade since 18 years because of Hamas having won regular elections (at the time). So much for becoming an international pariah.
No, the real news here is of course the news: the ICC seeks to arrest Israeli top leaders as much as the Hamas leaders. The subject that is going from being everyone's darling to international pariah is Israel, absolutely no doubt about this. This is a massive win for Palestine and those who claim to fight for it, including Hamas- with the potential for historical consequences.
My take is that this was the intention behind the October 7th attack- to drive Israel to such a violent retaliation as to force the world to take notice and to condemn Israel. I might be wrong and the victory might be entirely an unintended consequence. However your interpretation essentially requires Hamas to have zero knowledge of the real ratio of military force between Hamas/ Iran and Israel, and zero knowledge of the fact that the US have always been ready to commit their entire military for Israel. And even your imagined "win" scenario for Hamas is Israel committing to "a truce"- which is what they already had before Oct 7.
* Iran's fireworks display is the result of Israel, not Hamas, trying to drag Iran into the war.
> My take is that this was the intention behind the October 7th attack
I see very strong parallels between this and the Dublin 1916 rising. I don't believe the leaders of the Irish rebels could beat the British - it was seen as a "blood sacrifice" and a way to show the world the brutality of British colonial power. The Brits duly obliged and brutally put down the rising and set the wheels of an independent Ireland in motion.
I have to say though, that the 1916 rebels didn't go out of their way to kill civilians like Hamas clearly did on the 7th ...
> Hamas's messianic nutbag leader genuinely believed that he was ushering in the end of days
This is more or less why Israel has so much support between Evangelical Christians. A relatively large number of these people actually want the world to end because they really believe in the Rapture and that they’ll be saved.
People overindex on this. Israel enjoys overwhelming support in both parties, and, for those unfamiliar with US politics, evangelicals belong overwhelmingly to just one of them.
Telling a pollster you support Israel isn't political suicide, and Americans consistently do that. It's political suicide for a politician to oppose Israel, because Americans like Israel.
There’s an immense gap between supporting Israel and a two-state solution and supporting Netanyahu and those positions should be confused. I fully support the two-state solution, but I don’t support Netanyahu and his genocidal policies.
It has not been "technically" occupied. There's no such thing. Either a place is occupied, or it's not, and Gaza was not. What is true is that most in the international community refused to accept Israel's withdrawal from Gaza as the end of Israel's occupation. That's a political statement.
You're missing an important part about tens of thousands of rockets and mortars being fired from Gaza at Israel and terrorism originating from Gaza at Israel. Israel didn't just randomly attack Gaza.
Here's what really happened in Gaza: Israel completely withdrew in 2005 and was not occupying Gaza any more. It handed the entire Gaza strip to the Palestinian Authority. There was even an agreement for safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_freedom_of_movemen...
Not to mention that even before 2005 Israel handed control of most of the Gaza strip to the PA as part of the Oslo accords (and agreement to hand Gaza and Jericho over to the Palestinians predates the Oslo accords).
In 2007 following Palestinian elections Hamas took control of the Gaza strip by force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007) Israel only imposed a full blockade of Gaza as a result of this change because Hamas' stated goal is/was the destruction of Israel. Despite Israel's blockade Gaza has a border with Egypt and had no shortage of goods (and weaponry) through smuggling and other means. There was also plenty of travel in and out of the Gaza strip (both towards Israel and the West Bank and towards Egypt) and there were plenty of good going into Gaza through Israel. Gazans also worked in Israel. Gaza also had a power station and a water desalination plant. It has billions of dollars of aid and investment flowing into it (Ismail Hanyah needs to be a billionaire after all).
So Israel was neither an oppressor nor an occupier in Gaza. It took actions to try and prevent Hamas from arming itself.
The other part wrong with your premise is that Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel within the 1967 borders. They do not. Maybe some of them do. But many do not. When the Oslo peace process was accelerating towards that goal Palestinians started a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians which results in the killing of Rabin, the rise of the right, and the termination of the peace process.
> It has not been "technically" occupied. There's no such thing. Either a place is occupied, or it's not, and Gaza was not.
Gaza is considered an occupied territory by all international bodies with the power and authority to make such a determination, for excellent reasons that you can look up. End of the story. What you do (and Israel does, for propaganda purposes) is to confuse the civilian settlement with the military occupation, or to pretend that since soldiers are not inside Gaza but just all around its borders, Gaza is free. Which is like saying that a prison camp is free if the guards are all outside the fence.
It's not technically occupied. Israel just controls their border with Gaza. And their coastline. And their airspace, also bombed their airport. Oh and the border to Egypt as nobody can visit Gaza without Israels approval.
Israels continued denial of a Palestinian state and the basic rights of statehood, like the control of their own borders, is what makes it an occupation.
Netanyahu has supported Hamas long before 2005 as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The elections were pushed by Bush at a time when PA were seen as corrupt. When they lost Bush tried to get them to coup and Hamas took over and kicked them out as a reaction to that.
>In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin"
Should tell is everything we need to know about the people in power now.
Maybe the Palestinians were not happy with the deal, them losing their land. Not to forget previous atrocities perpetrated by Jewish terrorists and the nakba.
Israel does not control the Egypt border and almost all of this is opinion through implication not fact. This type of post does not belong on this message board.
This is Egypt's choice. Egypt has the control. If they choose to let Israel have a say it's their choice. Their making an agreement with Israel != Israel controls the border. Plenty of tunnels too but that's besides the point.
> The Nakba was an outcome of Arabs deciding to attack Israel in 1948, they wanted to wipe it off the map, and they lost. They rejected the partition plan.
The "partition plan" was a plan to give part of Palestine to Israel. It's pretty natural that one side refused and the other accepted- the action is the same but the outcome is the opposite for the two parties. Trying to spin it like "they both got the same generous offer" is propaganda.
But even more important is that the partition plan assigned to a "Jewish state" a territory whose population was 45% Palestinian. This means that either
a) they thought it was possible to create a Jewish democratic state with a 45% of the population non-Jewish, or
b) the plan was to enforce apartheid from the beginning, or
c) the plan was ethnic cleansing from the beginning.
And- lo and behold- ethnic cleansing is exactly what happened one minute after the creation of Israel. How convenient that it was the Palestinian's fault.
The problem trying to tie everything back to the Nakba is that the same thing happened in reverse in all the other MENA countries: they ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations in response, which emigrated wholesale to Israel.
I'm not supporting Israel's actions. I think Israel is justified in killing every Hamas member it can get a bead on, but not in inflicting mass civilian casualties on a population that is supermajority too young even to have voted for Hamas in the first place, at least not without extraordinarily clear military proportionality claims (arguably present early on, now clearly absent).
But this "Nakba" stuff appears invariably to be coded appeals to a "one-state solution". Israel is a nuclear-armed state with one of the world's best trained military and a strong economy that, contrary to activist opinion, stands on its own two feet. There is only one outcome in a "one-state solution" and it's not the one you (or I) want.
It's worth pushing back on existential arguments against Israel as it's currently construed. "Mass murder of Israeli civilians is unprovoked because Nakba" is one of those. The correct response is "no, things are much more complicated than that."
As a fairly emotionally disinterested party: greater specificity of strikes, focus on Hamas leadership. It seems to me that Israel (and the west more generally) will be facing a generation of motivated terrorists in about 15-20 years, as the young people who went through this come of age.
People say this a lot, for obvious and fair reasons, but it's worth noting that a rational policy person in Israel could look at Hamas as a distinct and unlikely form of militant nationalism: overtly Islamist, funded and trained by the IRGC, and led (since 2017) by a messianic lunatic.
I've been saying, only kind of jokingly, that a more likely outcome than arrest or Israel-directed assassination of Sinwar is Haniya (or his successor) taking him out to a field to talk about the alfalfa they're going to plant, and how Sinwar will get to feed the rabbits. Sinwar really fucked Hamas over here. Easy to lose sight of how good a thing they had going! It had tacit Israeli government support and was making a bunch of Hamas people fairly rich.
Anyways, from that point of view: yes, killing tens of thousands of civilians is certainly going to radicalize people and drive them into militant groups. But those groups might look more like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades than the Al-Qassam Brigades.
After having signed the Abraham Accords, Israel could have gone a long way to keeping their hands clean by pursuing Hamas through a joint effort with Egypt, UAE, KSA, and other states in the region. Israel has a long history working with Egypt regarding Gaza. Several actors in the region that already receive tacit US support are opposed to perceived Islamic dictatorships due to various complicated reasons. There are complicated reasons why Israel didn't and continue not to, a lot of which comes down to having a direct line to US support, but this option was something they could have done and chose not to. Though full disclosure, I'm not an unbiased party here, but I can view this situation from a realpolitik lens as well.
I mean, I agree. I'm a 2-stater. Netanyahu and his governing coalition have for a decade now been redlining "culpability" as far as I'm concerned!
(I'll say again though that Hamas in 2018 is a different entity than Hamas in 2016. They're both very bad organizations, but only one of them was literally working to bring about the end of days.)
IMO Israel is digging its own grave in the region by being so unwilling to work with their neighbors. KSA and UAE are brutal to opponents and KSA's own meddling in the region shows that they'd do anything to keep militant Islamism from gaining a larger foothold in the region. All they had to do was to open up a dialogue with their neighbors, it would have stopped Muslims from unifying around this issue, probably normalized relations even further between these states, and would have given Israel significant leverage in the region as a bulwark of diplomatic stewardship. Now even though the US is doing everything they can to tow the line between supporting Israel and stopping a bloodbath, Israel itself has probably lost any and all support from its neighbors sans maybe Egypt, and the US will be hard-pressed to offer support in further instances of aggression against Israel.
I'm less sure. I think the most salient conflict in MENA is between the Arab states and Iran, not Israel and Palestine (look no further than the grim track record of the surrounding states at actually helping Palestinians for evidence).
It's hard to look at October 7th and its aftermath as anything but a setback for literally every party in the region. Even Iran seems to have been caught flat footed.
In one respect, October 7th was a success for Hamas. Before then, it looked likely that most of the Arab countries would have made peace with Israel without Israel having to concede an iota on the Palestinian issue. After the attack and Israel's response, Israel probably has to make visible progress on the issue before the current holdouts would move forward, or at least wait 10, 15 years before everything is forgotten.
It's a victory for militant Islam that didn't need to happen. KSA, UAE, Oman, and Turkey could have been great examples of Muslim countries with high standards of living that engaged in the international diplomatic process, as opposed to the pariah states of Iran and the wartorn Yemen and Syria. Since the decline of ISIL Islamists have achieved little save the Taliban taking Baghdad in Afghanistan. But with this new round of aggression in Palestine, Islamist movements once more have a grievance to look at.
It would end up in a proxy war, surely. Iran would back Hamas and a coalition of KSA, UAE, Egypt, and Israel would spearhead the Gaza situation from the other side. It's still a shitty outcome but IMO a better one. For one, regional actors are incentivized to deal with the situation in a way that spillover doesn't affect them (Lebanon and Egypt have both been vocal about not accepting refugees), but most importantly it wouldn't be as affected by the US political news cycle and the heart-rending imperialism that creates (essentially American domestic interests and politics affecting regional politics in the Middle East, meaning Palestinians have no say over their own politics in any meaningful way, unlike American college students.) The biggest risk would probably be Russian and Chinese interests coming into the region which would surely prompt a US reaction, but I'm not sure how much Russia or China would have to gain here if the US were not involved.
It would have probably ended in a civil war type situation but at least you wouldn't have widespread famine or the bombing of hospitals or further civilian atrocities. Also forcing regional states to allocate their own resources to the conflict means there's a direct incentive to wind it down since their resources are a lot smaller than the resources of the US. Israel would eventually face domestic pushback over wartime spending and the autocratic states in the region would have to balance their funding of the proxy conflict against their own ambitions and budgets. Iran is somewhat democratic and they too could only fund Hamas so far before looking after their own affairs. A civil war would also create a generation fatigued by conflict and more open to compromise. The unilateral nature of this conflict will guarantee that Palestinians and dissidents in the region will hold this as a grudge over Israel and the US for decades and might even open the possibility of further terrorism against the US.
The US's own nation building efforts in the Middle East after 9/11 flagged due to outrageous spending that materialized in minimal results. The same effect with poorer governments would naturally circumscribe the conflict in the area.
> Easy to lose sight of how good a thing they had going!
Some millions from Qatar with no political engagement towards 2SS isn't good by any measure. It was most certainly good for the Israelis: the Abraham Accords and recognition of the Western Golan Heights + Jerusalem by the US, with practically no opposition.
Sinwar may be a lunatic, but we'd be lunatics just the same to assume Hamas were happy with the status quo. They are not PA for a reason.
> but it's worth noting that a rational policy person in Israel could look at Hamas as a distinct and unlikely form of militant nationalism: overtly Islamist, funded and trained by the IRGC, and led (since 2017) by a messianic lunatic.
Funded and trained by Mossad and others too, at times. In fact, Netanyahu was approving tens of millions a month to Hamas to stay militant and provide a more extremist opposition to Arafat and the PLO who were calming down and more peaceable in their old age.
This is the thing that really gets frustrating.
Israel's hard right is as opposed to a two state system as Hamas is. People point to "from the river to the sea" as "proof" of Hamas' genocidal intent (and I won't pretend they haven't said other things to that end, either), ignoring that it was literally Likud's platform slogan since the 1970s.
The former is the former armed wing of Fatah, the latter of Hamas. Fatah is a (notoriously corrupt) secular nationalist organization. The story goes that Netanyahu tacitly supported and helped fund Hamas for many years as a check against Fatah consolidating power into a coherent Palestinian state.
The first is Fatah/PLO, who are in many ways much closer to, eg, the IRA (also nominally religiously inspired) than what we understand as modern Islamist terrorist groups.
Yea,but the thing that changed was Saudi flipping more western recently. It meant that directionally the region was going have a much bigger problem with this kind of behavior in the future and it seems like (as an amateur) they saw the writing on the wall and thought the more messy the region gets the longer it would take to move toward a capitalist ideals motivated region.
This statement about Israel creating a new generation of terrorists is said a lot but I think we have pretty strong counterexamples. Germans didn't become motivated terrorists after WW-II despite great devastation and killing of civilians by the Allies. Neither did Japan. I'm sure there are similar WW-I examples. One might argue that not fighting this war until the enemy surrenders is a much stronger motivation for terrorism. A more recent example might be Russia's campaign against Chechnya or Sri Lanka's campaign against the Tamil Tigers, both fought until the enemy was crushed and both seemingly have for now resolved the terrorism issue.
With respect to your proposal. Can you be more specific about how Israel is supposed to target Hamas leadership when they are in tunnels underground below civilian populations and holding hostages? That Hamas leadership is not dead is not due to lack of Israel trying to target them specifically. I don't think it's possible to get at Hamas without taking over the entire Gaza strip which leads me to repeat the OP's question of what would you do. Another question is whether you're suggesting to give free pass to the Oct 7'th attackers and kidnappers (which seems to be implied by saying "focus on Hamas leadership").
> Germans didn't become motivated terrorists after WW-II despite great devastation and killing of civilians by the Allies. Neither did Japan. I'm sure there are similar WW-I examples.
Heh this is funny because this was an explicit concern for the US after WWII. This is the reason behind the creation of the Marshal Plan and directly the reason why the US occupied both Germany and Japan and assisted in nation building there. The idea that losing a war leads to radicalism is as old as WWII, but probably even older, as the UK came to a similar conclusion when divesting its colonies in South Asia.
For more recent cases on how political instability and sectarian conflict leads to a rise in terrorism, look at what happened in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the dissolution of the Baathist party.
If you've never seen "Your Job In Germany", bookmark and it and make sure you do at some point. It is pretty unreal.
Of course, the counterpoint here is: the reason we worried about German terrorism but didn't see it is because we trained our forces with videos like this, and we were the nice guys about it compared to the Soviets.
Germans were hung from streetlamps after the war in some places. I think you're referring to after the Germans were defeated? We're not at that stage yet.
Right. But first the Germans were defeated totally. They were forced to surrender. Imagine if the war was halted with massive German casualties but with the Nazis still in power. Which option results in more radicalization?
> Having your parents, or your children, “eradicated” by someone is a powerful motivator
But again, Japanese and Germans aren’t blowing up Americans and Indians aren’t blowing up London. Claiming this will create more terrorists is saying the Palestinians are irredeemably violent. I don’t think that’s right.
Both Japan and Germany were left with their home countries and were given substantial aid to rebuild after the war. That aid was given by their former enemies.
Unfortunately I don't see it as very likely that Israel will give back all the territory in Gaza and provide aid to the Palestinians to rebuild.
But of course the massive mistake was not eradicating the evil terrorist genocidal mentality of its nominal leadership, Hamas. Israel (and the world) shouldn't make that mistake again.
Israel was financing Gaza but not providing Gazan Palestinians political representation. Germans and Japanese were "given" a state where they had full rights as citizens. Political representation is an important way to defuse tensions and provide political legitimacy to a new regime. Even autocratic governments like China or Iran are beholden to the whims of their people, even if they can afford to ignore some. Israelis don't have to care about Palestinians at all. They can turn the strip into a tourist destination and no matter how much the Palestinians protest they have no representation to affect the government's course.
Gazan Palestinians don't even have limited local rule the way Chinese autonomous regions or Puerto Rico do.
Note that despite aid and the occupation, Japan had significant unrest following the war. The Communist Party of Japan's candidate Inejirou Asanuma was assassinated by an imperial revanchist on Oct 12, 1960 [1].
I promise you, Israel does plenty of targeted assassinations in Palestine. For instance [0] (mildly graphic, shots are fired by Israeli assassination squad into car) - stuff like this is very common in WB and now Gaza.
This is not to say that Israel permitted Gaza to have any reasonable sort of economic development (as a simple example, it’s effectively a country with two not-very-open land borders and no port, which surely made trade rather challenging).
If you want an analogy, imagine roughly the population of San Francisco plus San Mateo County, but with under half the land area, hostile relations and extremely limited travel across the land border with Santa Clara County and points South, with no bridges and no port. Throw in a near-complete dependency on Santa Clara for water and electricity, and nowhere near enough agriculture. (At least San Mateo County has a decent amount of farming to the West.) Take out the hot tech scene as well, and the economic situation would not be awesome.
Palestinians in Gaza were not provoked and there were no settlers in the Gaza strip. Not sure about your last statement there, Hamas being propped up by Netanyahu was how Israel provoked them to attack?
What was the total number of Palestinians killed by Settler terrorist attacks in 2022? Do you have that handy? What was the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorist attacks during that time?
Gaza was not under military occupation by any definition. That is a fact that anyone can verify for themselves. Gaza was put under a blockade in 2007 after Hamas came to power (still has a border with Egypt, maybe Egypt is actually occupying Gaza by your definition). A blockade is not an occupation.
Maybe by "is" you mean since Oct 7th. But again that's not provocation, that's after the fact. If you think Gaza was occupied how come the IDF needs to re-occupy it?
I believe we're talking about the provocation for the Oct 7th attacks and you are giving us the outcome of the war that was a result of that attack? Is there time travel involved here?
Israel withdrew from Gaza. Is your proposal that Israel should not have withdrawn to "not create the situation in the first place"? Or re-taken Gaza when Hamas took it over from Fatah by force in 2007 after winning the elections?
The provocation is the continued blockade and military occupation of Gaza, as that is what most consider it to be. With the exception of the US and Israel of course.
Not to mention the continuation of apartheid in Israel itself and expansion of settlements in the west bank.
This situation was created because Netanyahu has supported Hamas for a long time, even before 2005, as a classic divide and conquer strategy, to not allow PA to control both territories. But the US also helped as Bush forced elections early when PA had a reputation of being corrupt, and when they lost the election they tried to get PA to do a coup and Hamas kicked them out from Gaza.
You're mixing stuff up. Why are you looking at "what most consider it to be"? How can you be military occupying a place where your military is not and you are not. There is no way there was a military occupation of Gaza by any normal definition of this term. Gaza was under the authority and control of the government of Hamas. Not of Israel. The rest is politics.
There's no apartheid in Israel itself but let's not get into that.
Expansion of settlements in the west bank. True. I don't understand how that's a provocation to Gazans to rape and murder random Israeli civilians. It's also true that Netanyahu pursued a divide and conquer approach. Again you're trying to claim that Israel's support of Hamas' rule in Gaza is provocation for Hamas to launch attacks on Israel civilians which makes no sense.
EDIT: To be fair the legal question of "when does an occupation end" is complicated. Gaza was occupied from Egypt and Egypt does not want it back. The uni-lateral withdrawal of Israel without a peace agreement left Gaza in a weird legal situation. This is why despite Gaza being under Palestinian control and not occupied the legal state of occupation is perhaps not fully resolved. There's reality on the ground though (not occupied) and international law status (debated).
I mean the UN, Amnesty, other organizations like them. Israel has controlled their land borders, even the one to Egypt, their water and airspace. They control what goes in and out, people and goods. They might have left but Gaza is not free.
The west bank is part of the whole situation, of course it matters to Gaza what happens there. It also shows exactly what would happen if Hamas did not exist, Israel would continue to allow settlers to take land and homes. I'm not saying that Hamas should exist, but its very much a situation created by Israel themselves and Hamas has support from Palestinians because of Israels actions.
>which does not exist, refugees have no right to return after they lost a war
Really? The entire point of the Aliyah for return to Israel is that they lost against Romans, and they expelled them. Or is it selective injustice to the Palestinians?
They killed and raped kids at a concert. If calling that unprovoked terror is too far across the aisle, it’s hard to imagine an intellectually honest conversation, no?
What? They targeted innocents at a music festival, the people you’re talking about are dying during war time in the actual theatre of war. Can you seriously not agree that the target and method of killing is very different?
Thanks for responding. The numbers were halved and the total number dosent account the enlistment age is 15.
Secondarily, what do you when the enemy is using that expectation as piece of leverage to make it practically impossible to strike more surgically.
I’m not the smartest, but I seems like you’re saying that if one side uses their population as attack deterrents and shields that it’s incumbent on the other side to comply?
Perhaps reduce the number of acceptable civilian casualties per target?
It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member.
That is a ridiculously high figure in my opinion. I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect to witness something on such scale somewhere in the world during my lifetime, but I certainly didn't expect a modern-day "western" "democracy" to get away with it.
Were you born before the civil war in Syria? (>300k civilian deaths)
Before the war in Yemen? (>300k deaths and I think >20k civilians just from Saudi coalition air strikes)
Before the Russia-Ukraine war? (>25k civilians killed just in the siege of Mariupol according to Ukraine)
Before the US war with Afghanistan? (>46k civilians killed)
There are supposedly 30,000-40,000 Hamas combatants. The IDF said in December that it has killed 8000 Hamas combatants. In February it said 12,000 were killed. I don't know where you're getting your 1:20 ratio. Hamas certainly does not differentiate combatants from other casualties and at any rate you should have zero trust in their numbers. There were probably certain situations where a specific target was attacked with that or even higher ratios but the overall civilian to combatant casualty ratio, while unknown, is almost certainly nothing close to that.
What is your reference to "Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member"? I've never heard of that.
What you said: "It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member."
Let's look at the quote from your article: "In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants."
There are a few problems here:
- This is not sourced and we shouldn't treat it as fact. If other publications you read repeated that it doesn't change this. It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
- This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
- It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio. It just says that in certain circumstances a combatant was targeted even if there are civilians present. That's something that happens in all wars. We don't have any information on the totality of strikes and which strikes met this exact threshold. I'm not sure what numbers other western armies use. The quote refers compares with previous situations which were not an outright war (and show that at least in the past Israel was a lot more careful about collateral damage).
Anyways, if you were more precise in your wording I wouldn't take issue, but I think the casual reader can read something different into what you've said. We can debate the morality of any particular collateral damage under conditions of dense urban environment, human shields, major war etc. but this is something that happens in all wars likely with somewhat different numbers.
I didn't say that quote, that was input_sh. Please pay more attention to people, especially if you're going to be calling out sources for information.
> It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
It's consistent with what has been observed all throughout this war--Israel has had rather looser rules of engagement than many people would expect, and that has had the rather predictable effect of rather high incidents of accidents, such as Israeli soldiers killing 3 of the hostages or the attack on the aid convoy.
> This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
20 civilian combatants for 1 enemy combatant is a pretty high threshold, especially for low-level members. According to an Economist article I read, that's the level the US is comfortable with only for essentially enemy heads of state (think Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden). (Reportedly, Israel feels 1:100 is acceptable in this kind of scenario.)
> It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio.
No, it's not. But it's evidence that Israel isn't doing a good job of minimizing civilian casualties. And the actual numbers we have here aren't good. In the best case scenario (taking Israel's probably somewhat-inflated figures for combatants killed and the lowest numbers of civilians killed), it's about 1 combatant to 2 civilians, roughly comparable to the war in Donbass before Russia invaded Ukraine for reals (we don't have good estimates post 2022 because Russia hasn't released anything in the areas it occupies). I suspect the real numbers are probably closer to 1-to-4. By contrast, the US-led battles of Fallujah and Mosul--both urban fights against terrorist-held cities--had casualty rates around (and perhaps better than) 1-to-1.
I wouldn't be so incensed about this if Israeli generals weren't prancing around boasting that no one has done as good a job as Israel has in minimizing civilian casualties when it is so transparently false.
Apologies for the mis-attribution. Lost the thread there.
When you look at civilian to combatant ratios you have to take into account the battlefield. You can't compare the war in Donbass to the war in Gaza. What's the population density in Donbass? Were combatants fighting in civilian clothes? Was there a human shield strategy at play? Tunnels? Booby traps?
I've heard experts give much higher civilian to casualty ratios than 1:2 for dense urban combat under these conditions. I've heard numbers like 1:8 (which I think is more or less the ratio for the war in Chechnya). I think the battle for Mariupol has fairly high rates if we want to use another comparison. There's this US Urban warfare expert (John Spencer) from West Point that goes around saying how Israel is doing a great job. So I'm not sure I agree with your transparently false observation. We need something more directly comparable. IIRC in the Battle of Mosul most civilians evacuated, also the number for dead civilians in that battle vary widely. Where I would tend to agree is that in the beginning of the war Israel pounded Gaza very heavily and likely at that phase with less care about collateral damage vs. damage to Hamas.
Incidents like friendly fire are fairly common in wars. I don't have any way of gauging how this one compares. Wikipedia says: "accounting for an estimated 2% to 20% of all casualties in battle".
Do you have comparable examples of armies warning civilians to evacuate, by dropping leaflets, sending text messages, and giving them time to do so like the IDF does (maybe not 100% of the time but certainly has done a lot during this war)? I think that's fairly unusual in comparable situations. I don't recall the US ever doing that in its wars.
Could Israel do a better job avoiding civilians. Likely yes. Is it possible to completely eliminate this under the circumstances (30,000 combatants, in civilian clothes, fighting from population centers) - I don't think so. I also agree the "boasting" about avoiding civilians is at the very least in poor taste. We should feel sorry for civilians killed regardless of the "ratio".
No ICC arrest warrants. No encampments. Crickets. How many westerners did ISIS kill? 100? The US, UK, Australia and Russia (+ others?) blitzed the heck out of anything that moved in a place far away that presented no direct existential threat to any of them. Under significantly more favorable conditions on the battlefield than the IDF is facing in Gaza (how many casualties did western powers take in this blitz? zero?)
"In total, these claims allege more than 26,000 non combatant fatalities. Airwars
presently assesses that at a minimum, between 6,300 and 9,700 civilians are likely to have died in Coalition actions overall – approximately 40 percent during the recent battles for Mosul and Raqqa"
"Much of the Old City of Mosul and almost 70% of Raqqa’s entirety have been rendered uninhabitable,
according to the United Nations."
I think, if what you are saying is true, then Israeli leadership can simply explain themselves as such in court (surrender themselves to the ICC warrant) and be proclaimed not guilty.
If Israel's explanations were accepted then there wouldn't be a court case. It's unclear how justice can be done here and what's the standard of evidence. The UN just made a huge change to their accounting blaming "the fog of war" which puts their numbers much more in line with what Israel was saying. There is no independent body reporting numbers, they're either coming from the government of Gaza, i.e. Hamas, or they're coming from Israel. It's just a political circus/war of public opinion.
> If Israel's explanations were accepted then there wouldn't be a court case
The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
Yes, if their explanations were accepted as conclusive by the prosecutor there wouldn't be a court case, but the prosecutor isn't the final decisionmaker for the court.
> The UN just made a huge change to their accounting blaming "the fog of war" which puts their numbers much more in line with what Israel was saying.
While the details of the charges asked for, beyond their titles, have not been laid out, I don't think the numerical counts that have been adjusted have much bearing on any of them.
> I don't think the numerical counts that have been adjusted have much bearing on any of them.
They totally do. They halved the number of children and women killed which completely changes the combatant/civilian ratio.
> The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
It's hard to see what sort of evidence will be accepted by the court. Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants. What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted? Is there some sort of uninvolved party that can give us the truth here?
> It's hard to see what sort of evidence will be accepted by the court.
There's quite a history of ICC cases (and they build on a history of ad hoc tribunals like those for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.)
The kinds of evidence that are acceptable are... not particularly mysterious.
> Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants.
Yeah, if the ICC operated on the level of these kinds of claims it wouldn't take months of evidence gathering before referrals to get to warrants.
> What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted?
Once there are actual charges with specifics (right now, we just have the names of crimes for which warrants are being sought, not the specific charges) the kinds of evidence that would tend to disprove the specific charges against specific individuals will be more clear.
All sides in the Bosnian war (3-4 of them) did their best to save the lives of their civilians (not so much the civilians from the other sides, but Bosnia is sparsely populated). Hamas aims to get as many as possible civilians killed.
Don't you think that it's strange that Hamas, aiming to kill as many civilians as possible, on October 7th killed exactly the same proportion of civilians to military as Israel is doing in Gaza?
Those are not the current best estimates. I think you are referring here to last week’s news about OCHA revising their figures and now only reporting half of previous figures. If so than you are talking about 24,686 confirmed dead and fully identified victims of the Israeli military as of April 30th 2024. Of which 14,600 are women, children, or the elderly. The 35,000+ figure is actually 35,562 confirmed dead as of May 20th 2024 (including 10,876 confirmed dead and not yet identified). Yet not included is the 10,000+ believed dead who are missing e.g. under the rubble or in undiscovered mass graves, or unreported burials, etc. This makes the believed total number of victims killed by Israeli aggression in Gaza around 45,000 of which we know 14,000 are woman, children and the elderly.
35,000 civilians is not an unreasonable estimate. I would personally put a lower bound at 60% of 35,000 = 21,000 civilians, which is the assuming every adult man is a combatant (which we know is not true; there are plenty of civilian adult men among the victims) and extrapolating the percentage of fully identified victims to the confirmed death count.
Seems reasonable and worth adding that we've long since blown past any point where the numbers would be tolerable. About the best you can say for Israel is that they're in an extraordinarily bad position (one in part of their own making!) where their only moves involve modern dense urban combat, the worst possible thing.
> we've long since blown past any point where the numbers would be tolerable.
You seem to be doing a good job of trying to understand both sides, so I think it would behoove you compare these casualty rates with other urban wars.
> extraordinarily bad position (one in part of their own making
I was curious about dense urban warfare and three modern battles came to mind. The Siege of Sarajevo 1992-1996, the Siege of Mariupol 2022, and the Battle of Aleppo 2012-2016. I got the numbers from Wikipedia:
Data for Mariupol is the fuzziest with a lower (reliable) estimate of 8000 civilian deaths, but a more realistic estimate of at least 25,000 civilian deaths. The highest estimate for soldiers dead is around 12,000 but 4,000 is more realistic. I’m not gonna compute the proportion here because the estimates are too fuzzy. Mariupol had a pre-war population of about 425,000. The siege of Mariupol is certainly one of the worst human rights disaster of our century, which justifiably put some of the Russian perpetrators on an ICC list of war criminals under investigation. It lasted for almost 3 months and left 90% of Mariupol’s high rise residential housing were damaged or destroyed. I’m sure Russian generals and political leaders have their excuses and reasons for causing this horror. They still belong in the Hague for causing this tragedy.
The Siege of Sarajevo (pre-war population of 525,980 [incl. surrounding area]) has been thoroughly investigated and has much more reliable numbers:
- 5,434 civilians killed
- 5,829 soldiers killed
The horrors of this siege are not to be understated. 40% of the children living in the city were directly shot at by snipers, 51% had seen someone killed, 39% had had at least one family member killed, 73% had their home attacked or shelled. Over 100,000 residential buildings were damaged or destroyed and almost every non-residential building was damaged or destroyed. The horrors lasted 4 years, with the wor The ICC was not shy about prosecuting Serbian (both from Serbia and Srpska) generals and politicians for their crimes against humanity. These generals and politicians all claimed they had their reasons. However, they did not, and were correctly found guilty.
The Battle of Aleppo (pre-war population of about 2.5 million) is probably the closest condition you’ll get to Gaza in terms of urban warfare in a dense civilian area. Like Gaza, Aleppo was the largest city in Syria. The Siege lasted for four years and left at least 31,273 people dead, of which 73% were adult men. 23,604 or 76% of all fatalities were civilians. Almost every neighborhood in Aleppo was targeted with indiscriminate shelling. More than 33,500 damaged residential buildings in the city. Everybody agrees (except maybe Syrian generals and leaders) that the human cost of this 4 year long siege was too great. The UN security council voted for the ICC to investigate the many war crimes committed in the siege but Russia and China vetoed it. History has already condemned them.
The Gaza strip is an urbanized area that fits between Seattle and Tacoma with a pre-war population of 2.4 million. The Gaza Genocide has so far lasted 7 months and no end in sight. 35,000 people are confirmed dead, most of them civilians. Over 90% of all residential housing has been damaged or destroyed in Gaza city. Almost everybody in Gaza knows someone that has died. Nearly everyone in the Gaza strip has been displaced, most people multiple times.
The horrors of Gaza seem no less then those in other examples of dense urban warfare. I know Israeli officials claim they have a reason to cause this horror, however, they do not. And they deserve the Hague as much as the war criminals mentioned above.
This attitude reminds me of the Start Trek: Voyager episode Equinox where Captain Janeway insists that Captain Ransom “leaves her no choice” than to go after the Equinox no matter the cost.
Janeway was wrong, there were other options, and the cost she was willing to pay was too high.
Linking to a TV show does not actually describe other options for Israel.
And I assume you know that TV shows are fictional? First they write the dilemma for Janeway, then they figure out how to get there. In the real world it's the other way around.
Does that make it any better!? That's still comparable to a small town or a large arena completely wiped away from the face of the earth. Not because they were Hamas, but because they were near Hamas.
Reasonable people will point out that this "near Hamas" thing is the result of a deliberate strategy by Hamas to ensure that reprisal strikes preferentially spill the blood of the civilians Hamas ostensibly represents, while shielding and supplying the Hamas combatants who provoked the strikes in the first place.
To me, the more powerful argument is just that any meaningful military purpose to massed attacks in Gaza have now been used up; much of Hamas' infrastructure, along with the majority of their leadership cadre, have been destroyed. Hamas still "exists", and it could re-form, but so could any other militant organization at this point. The losses Hamas have taken probably exceed those of other state military actors who have decisively lost wars in the past.
Further large-scale strikes look increasingly performative. It was hard to justify a lot of what Israel did even when Hamas had 15 combat-ready brigades and was vowing to repeat October 7th. It seems impossible to justify it now.
(People definitely disagree with me on this point! It's what I believe but fuck if I know with any certainty how true it is.)
> Further large-scale strikes look increasingly performative.
Israel is not doing large scale strikes in most of Gaza, except Raffa. It was in the news a few weeks ago that Israel withdrew most of their troops from Gaza.
They have in fact switched to limited strikes. But they're going to finish the job in Raffa first, in particular they want to destroy tunnels - especially tunnels going into Egypt.
After that the PA is going to try to take over. And Israel will "protest" the whole time like the Br'er Rabbit. The PA can't look like Israel helped them take the area. Both the PA and Israel want the PA in Gaza, but neither can say it out loud.
The whole "Israel has no day after plan" thing is just a show. There's a reason Biden stopped complaining about it.
> Israeli bombardment from the air, land, and sea continues to be reported across much of the Gaza Strip, resulting in further civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction of houses and other civilian infrastructure. Ground incursions and heavy fighting also continue to be reported, especially in Jabalya and eastern Rafah.
> The following are among the deadliest incidents reported between 16 and 19 May:
> - On 16 May, at about 14:50, four Palestinians, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, were reportedly killed when a house was hit in Jabalya Refugee Camp.
> - On 17 May, at about 0:55, six Palestinians were reportedly killed when a house was hit on Al Falouja Street in Jabalya.
> - On 18 May, at about 10:00, 15 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured while trying to return to their homes in areas of Jabaliya Refugee Camp from which Israeli forces withdrew.
> - On 18 May, at about 12:30, 28 Palestinians, including ten women and ten children, were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential square was hit in Mashrou’ Beit Lahiya near Kamal Adwan Hospital, in North Gaza.
> - On 18 May, at about 11:00, 12 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured when Iqra’ Library was hit in central Jabalya Refugee Camp.
> - On 18 May, at about 14:00, four Palestinian men were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit in Khuza'a area, in Khan Younis.
> - On 19 May, at about 1:00, 31 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit in the New Camp of An Nuseirat, in Deir al Balah.
The bombardment is in fact escalating all over the Gaza strip. There may have been more limited strikes in March and April, but the Rafah offensive started, we can no longer claim so. Israel is doing large scale strikes in most of Gaza, including Rafah.
> > The following are among the deadliest incidents reported between 16 and 19 May (emphasis added).
On May 20th Israeli jets struck around 70 targets, according to the Israeli military on Twitter. Their post admitted hitting targets across Gaza, including Jabalia, Central Gaza, and Rafah. At least 85 people were killed and 200 injured in total on May 20th.
If May 20th was a uniquely bad day with noticeably more strikes than before, and wouldn’t be repeated for months, if ever, than you could argue the strikes are limited. However, May 20th was not unique, it followed the same patterns as May 16th, May 17th, May 18th, and May 19th. May 21st looks like it is also gonna have as many strikes, and destruction:
Between midnight on May 21st and 7 AM, reported a residential building in Rafa being destroyed, killing at least 8, and 3 Palestinians being killed in an explosion Jabalia. Jabalia is still under intense shelling, in particular al-Awda Hospital where these 3 were stuck and unable to evacuate. Bait Lahia in Northern Gaza is also under heavy artillery shelling, including the gates of Kamil Adwan Hospital, which was also raided last December. Around 2 PM footage was released of the aftermath of another airstrike in Gaza City, where a residential home belonging to the Shobaki family was targeted and completely destroyed. A child no older than 2 year old was martyred in that airstrike.
No, the strikes are not “limited” by any definition of limited. Yesterday I went on a Wikipedia stroll to see examples of other urban warfare, and nowhere do we see this pattern of dozens of strikes, day after day, with 2-3 mass casualty events every day. Where several houses are leveled every single day. This very much describes e.g. the siege of Aleppo during the worst days of the fighting, in the neighborhoods which were worst affected.
> After that the PA is going to try to take over. And Israel will "protest" the whole time like the Br'er Rabbit. The PA can't look like Israel helped them take the area. Both the PA and Israel want the PA in Gaza, but neither can say it out loud.
If that’s the plan, I can tell you with certainty it won’t work.
Yes, it makes it better. This is a war, I assume you are too young to have experienced any others, but this what war is like. It sucks for everyone, and innocents die.
There isn't any other way to exterminate Hamas which is a goal that helps everyone, including Palestinians.
Indigenous resistance has been used as an excuse for their extermination since 1492. When Israeli leadership says they want Palestinians out of Gaza, we should believe them. The behavior of stripping Palestinians from their land has been consistent since 1947, and has only been escalating in the past decade. For all we know, the Israeli leadership has been waiting for the excuse to conduct these atrocities for a long time.
Israel does not have the right to exterminate Hamas by any means necessary. If Israel is unable to do so without mass atrocities, they simply shouldn’t. There are alternatives to war. The IRA was not eliminated by mass starvation in Northern Ireland. Rather they were given a Political avenue for their fight, and so their tactics changed from terrorism to political advocacy.
And it not just some individual, but a member of the Israeli government. Mind you, this government is under orders from the ICJ to do everything in its power to prevent genocide. A government which allows one of its members to speak like this, and doesn’t kick them out of the government (let alone after repeated offense) is at least sympathetic to this speech. But given that he is by no means the only member of the government which repeatedly incites genocide or ethnic cleansing, I think it is more likely that the whole government supports this speech, and is aiming for these prospects.
Yes, I'm far too young. It's not like I carry the name of my uncle who died in one, or that some of my earliest memories are about sleeping in a bomb shelter, or that I now live in a city that was completely under siege not that long ago.
You're correct, they only killed maybe 10000 children instead of 20000. I guess the bar is at like 15000 children? If Israel goes above that then they are bad, until the goalpost is moved again.
The pub was failing and the CEO took an innovation risk that in its near outcome changes the economics of a dying business. He should be admired not fired.
That depends entirely upon one's definition of "admirable". Personally, if the act requires one to be deceitful (eg, lying about the fact that your writers aren't writers), then that's not very admirable at all to me. If that's what you find admirable, well... alrighty then.
If you think making a profit is the one and only thing that deserves admiration, sure. I'm certain you're smart enough to see the flaws in that viewpoint.
The good/unique passwords stuff is crazy. Almost all of these happen because of a system backdoor or spoofing an admin. I can’t recall any big breaks we’re adding more $! To a password would have changed the outcome.
I’m pretty sure that “bad passwords” hurt in the 23AndMe case. IIRC the story is they have a service that finds your “dna relatives,” and some people had bad passwords, which meant that attackers could get into their accounts, and also discover information about anyone who’d been matched to them via this “dna relatives” service.
Maybe this sort of “dna relative” service shouldn’t exist, because anyone who opts into it is implicitly putting faith in the password safety of everybody they’ve been matched with. But, I dunno, at least I don’t see this as explicitly evil on 23AndMe’s part.
