naraburns nihil supernum
10mo ago
(text post)
30157 thread views
Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I understand your point. I think it's wrong in a profound way, and I really ought to write a big post about it, but so far it's been eluding me. I also should have phrased the paragraph you quoted a bit better, to sharpen why I think there's no moral equivalence in the specific case we're discussing.
The two outcomes you drew up are how we usually thought about it with individual terrorist attacks coming out of Gaza (or out of the West Bank during the 2nd Intifada for that matter). Downgrade the numbers, say from a thousand innocent people to 5-50. E.g. a suicide terrorist blows up a bus in Tel Aviv in 2001, or a particularly lucky rocket out of Gaza kills a few people in Sderot. In response, the army rounds up some Hamas/Fatah higher-ups, and/or a surgical strike is made, some Hamas VP is blown up, some innocent people die too. If we make too many strikes and kill too many innocent people, the world wags its finger at us for a non-proportionate response. Things quiet down until the next incident.
It's different now, but not everyone's caught on to how it's different. Plenty of people still want to see it as the same thing - perhaps a particularly lucky terrorist attack, more than 1000 victims, wow - so we may be "allowed" to punish Hamas more severely, but surely not to the tune of e.g. 10k civilian victims or more, that's entirely non-proportionate. That's your "second example".
The reason it's different is not (just) that 1300 is a really big number, there's a difference in kind. The logic of attack-response works relatively well for a terrorist attack, which is what, fundamentally? A way of shocking the state/public with violence to get them to agree to something we want, to get them to feel that their way of doing things doesn't grant them the safety they think it does. Possibly also to blackmail them into doing something by threatening hostages. A terrorist attack is finite in scope by design. The terrorists choose the target and kill people to make a flashy point. Oct 7 was different. >2k Hamas militants poured out of Gaza and just started indiscriminately massacring everyone in Israel they could get to (besides some hostages). It wasn't finite in scope. If the army got to them 2 hours later than it did, maybe we'd have 1600 victims and not 1300; some more hours later we'd have 3000 victims, and there's no upper bound due to the Hamas itself. The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them. Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
This is felt very keenly by basically everyone here in Israel. And with a war, the rationale behind a comparison of "they killed 1300, we killed whatever" evaporates. That's not how wars work. Discussing "a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident" sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a "response". It's like if you said in 1941, well, the Japanese killed 2.5k American people at Pearl Harbor, and now the countries are at war. But the US should watch it, because once the no. of the civilian victims in Japan rises too much above 2.5k, maybe 25k or more, that's no longer "proportionate" to the Pearl Harbor attack. The analogy is not great because in PH most deaths were military, but you get what I'm saying, right? This whole line of thinking is absurd. Now it doesn't mean that it makes no sense to discuss civilian victims during the war. There're laws of war, and there's an idea of a disproportionate harm to civilians - but the lack of proportionality here is with respect to the military objectives, not the initial PH incident. You can still discuss whether Hiroshima/Nagasaki were necessary or too cruel etc. if you want, but comparing them to the PH deaths is just bizarrely nonsensical.
That's where we are, except it's worse, because Oct 7 was an indiscriminate massacre way more evil than PH, and we have every reason to believe Hamas wants and aches to do more of those whenever it gets a chance. So we're at war to destroy Hamas, and we do get to be judged by how we treat civilians when Hamas uses them as shields, and if, for example, we were to level a city block w/o warning to take out a single Hamas terrorist and 10k civilians with him, that'd be a pretty clear violation of laws of war and a very evil thing to do. So I'm not giving us carte blanche with respect to civilians and I'm not arguing to just flatten Gaza and kill everyone, and we'd never do it, obviously. But comparisons to the initial massacre in terms of no. of victims just completely miss the point of what's going on.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
anatoly 10mo ago
The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them.
Maybe it's more obvious when you live in Israel close to Hamas that an attack that is only about getting a higher kill count before you are inevitably killed is something someone would actually plan an execute, but I can't stop thinking that there were additional reasons behind it, just like 9/11 wasn't just about crashing as many airplanes as possible into as many Americans as possible.
I wrote about it elsewhere in the thread, but my working hypothesis is that it's about disrupting the growing learned helplessness of the Palestinians. "You can't do anything against Israel, it can and will bulldoze your olive or orange trees with impunity if you so much as look askance at its settlements, let alone try to fight against them. I guess the only option is to keep my head down and color inside the lines." And then Hamas goes and shows that Israel is not invincible at all, that you can literally bathe in the blood of the innocents if you try hard enough, that like that heron-strangling frog, you should never give up.
Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
There's a comment by @Kinoite in this thread that explains my position better than I could myself. It's a war that also isn't one against a state that also isn't one, depending on what's more convenient. A special military operation, if you want.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Haven't blogged in English in years.
If the passage was irksome, it's done its job.
I understand your point. I think it's wrong in a profound way, and I really ought to write a big post about it, but so far it's been eluding me. I also should have phrased the paragraph you quoted a bit better, to sharpen why I think there's no moral equivalence in the specific case we're discussing.
The two outcomes you drew up are how we usually thought about it with individual terrorist attacks coming out of Gaza (or out of the West Bank during the 2nd Intifada for that matter). Downgrade the numbers, say from a thousand innocent people to 5-50. E.g. a suicide terrorist blows up a bus in Tel Aviv in 2001, or a particularly lucky rocket out of Gaza kills a few people in Sderot. In response, the army rounds up some Hamas/Fatah higher-ups, and/or a surgical strike is made, some Hamas VP is blown up, some innocent people die too. If we make too many strikes and kill too many innocent people, the world wags its finger at us for a non-proportionate response. Things quiet down until the next incident.
It's different now, but not everyone's caught on to how it's different. Plenty of people still want to see it as the same thing - perhaps a particularly lucky terrorist attack, more than 1000 victims, wow - so we may be "allowed" to punish Hamas more severely, but surely not to the tune of e.g. 10k civilian victims or more, that's entirely non-proportionate. That's your "second example".
The reason it's different is not (just) that 1300 is a really big number, there's a difference in kind. The logic of attack-response works relatively well for a terrorist attack, which is what, fundamentally? A way of shocking the state/public with violence to get them to agree to something we want, to get them to feel that their way of doing things doesn't grant them the safety they think it does. Possibly also to blackmail them into doing something by threatening hostages. A terrorist attack is finite in scope by design. The terrorists choose the target and kill people to make a flashy point. Oct 7 was different. >2k Hamas militants poured out of Gaza and just started indiscriminately massacring everyone in Israel they could get to (besides some hostages). It wasn't finite in scope. If the army got to them 2 hours later than it did, maybe we'd have 1600 victims and not 1300; some more hours later we'd have 3000 victims, and there's no upper bound due to the Hamas itself. The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them. Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
This is felt very keenly by basically everyone here in Israel. And with a war, the rationale behind a comparison of "they killed 1300, we killed whatever" evaporates. That's not how wars work. Discussing "a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident" sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a "response". It's like if you said in 1941, well, the Japanese killed 2.5k American people at Pearl Harbor, and now the countries are at war. But the US should watch it, because once the no. of the civilian victims in Japan rises too much above 2.5k, maybe 25k or more, that's no longer "proportionate" to the Pearl Harbor attack. The analogy is not great because in PH most deaths were military, but you get what I'm saying, right? This whole line of thinking is absurd. Now it doesn't mean that it makes no sense to discuss civilian victims during the war. There're laws of war, and there's an idea of a disproportionate harm to civilians - but the lack of proportionality here is with respect to the military objectives, not the initial PH incident. You can still discuss whether Hiroshima/Nagasaki were necessary or too cruel etc. if you want, but comparing them to the PH deaths is just bizarrely nonsensical.
That's where we are, except it's worse, because Oct 7 was an indiscriminate massacre way more evil than PH, and we have every reason to believe Hamas wants and aches to do more of those whenever it gets a chance. So we're at war to destroy Hamas, and we do get to be judged by how we treat civilians when Hamas uses them as shields, and if, for example, we were to level a city block w/o warning to take out a single Hamas terrorist and 10k civilians with him, that'd be a pretty clear violation of laws of war and a very evil thing to do. So I'm not giving us carte blanche with respect to civilians and I'm not arguing to just flatten Gaza and kill everyone, and we'd never do it, obviously. But comparisons to the initial massacre in terms of no. of victims just completely miss the point of what's going on.
Maybe it's more obvious when you live in Israel close to Hamas that an attack that is only about getting a higher kill count before you are inevitably killed is something someone would actually plan an execute, but I can't stop thinking that there were additional reasons behind it, just like 9/11 wasn't just about crashing as many airplanes as possible into as many Americans as possible.
I wrote about it elsewhere in the thread, but my working hypothesis is that it's about disrupting the growing learned helplessness of the Palestinians. "You can't do anything against Israel, it can and will bulldoze your olive or orange trees with impunity if you so much as look askance at its settlements, let alone try to fight against them. I guess the only option is to keep my head down and color inside the lines." And then Hamas goes and shows that Israel is not invincible at all, that you can literally bathe in the blood of the innocents if you try hard enough, that like that heron-strangling frog, you should never give up.
There's a comment by @Kinoite in this thread that explains my position better than I could myself. It's a war that also isn't one against a state that also isn't one, depending on what's more convenient. A special military operation, if you want.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link