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Both. They might as well have come to the speech in a gimp suit.
Israel is fighting with a genocidal level of brutality.
Why would the Palestinians not put up armed resistance? I find it amazing that Americans talk about gun rights yet don't expect others to fight when they are being occupied.
Less than 2% of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza has died, that’s not a genocidal war on any level.
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Id disagree with that characterization of Israeli war efforts. They are being meek and timid from my POV.
Palestinians are not like Americans. They are like Amerindians. They had their go at it and lost. They can accept their loss gracefully or get good. I have no interest in the continued terrorism where their goal is to engender sympathy with losers in the West who think being bad at life is an indication of virtue.
Compare Israels fighting with the British in northern Ireland. The Brits weren't bombing tens of thousands of people to death. Levelling an entire city while not letting people flee is beyond absurd.
The Irish had their go many times before they won. The Algerians had their go on and off for a century before they won. There is nothing that says they won't win in the end. Israel is an infeasible nation and the Palestinian population is booming compared to the Israeli population. Combined with better tech such as drones and rockets, it is fully possible to turn Israel into a Rhodesia. If the Palestinians simply gave up, they would be genocided and removed from the area. Their best bet is to learn from the Iraqis that kicked their occupiers out.
The Palestinians appeal to us who don't want christians ethnically cleansed from the Holy land and those who don't want a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. Israel's lobby is directly damaging the west. Palestinians appeal to us who want to see people live by the spirit of the second amendment.
#1. Why would you compare an anti-terrorism operation with a war against a state's military and police forces?
#2. Israel has repeatedly informed civilians far ahead of time of their planned incursions (again, strong evidence against genocidal intent) it is Hamas police forces that prevent them from fleeing. Because, again, "civilian" deaths are the core strategy of Hamas.
No, if the Gazans gave up they would be a thing called the "Free State of Gaza" and would have open ports and free trade with the world. We need just go back to October 6, 2023. If on that day they had not been planning a wide ranging military incursion into Israel, Gazans would be much freer today. Indeed. If instead of launching the Oct 7 attack, they had instead went a whole year without launching rockets into Israel, I daresay they would be well on the way to being a respected member of the international community.
Palestinian co-ethnics are the ones who have ethnically cleansed Christians from the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Giving them an additional territory will not improve the lives of Christians in the region. In addition, they are the force in the area ensuring there will be a refugee crisis. If they lose, apparently they threaten to flood Europe as some sort of blackmail. But if they win there will be 7 million Jews in desperate need of relocation as well.
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The most recent story I've seen about the war is US doctors talking about how many Palestinian children have been shot in the head by sniper fire, and the parents of those children say they were shot when playing, outside or inside. The story before that was the killing of Mohammad Bhar, where an intellectually disabled man was attacked by an Israeli military dog before they kicked his family out and made sure he died without receiving medical treatment (which the family discovered when they were finally allowed back to their house to see his maggot-ridden corpse).
Most people I know in real life consider those stories and the countless others like them barbaric and disgusting - we think members of our own armed forces who do those things deserve to go to prison for the rest of their life and lose all their honours and awards in the process. If that's what qualifies as meek and timid from your POV, I'd hate to see what it would take for you to actually criticise them.
Anecdotes that I am sure some of which happened (although one must be clear that "US doctor in Palestine" is an entirely self-selected group of pro-Hamas partisans). But that is not data.
I'd hope not if they are isolated incidents caused by fog of war and genuine mistakes, as I suspect is the case.
Given the urban nature of the conflict and known Hamas tactics of hiding their military targets in civilian areas, we'd expect a lot of objective carnage, in the numbers. PLO numbers (almost certainly inflated) have total casualties at 39k. That is 20x less than what we'd expect if Israel was conducting the conflict with a "genocidal level of brutality". 39k is the total casualty number from a particularly bad year for the Army of South Vietnam, a theater where most of the conflict was not conducted in cities.
Even if Israel was acting without genocidal intent, but merely a casual disregard for civilian casualties total death would be far FAR higher. There aren't many places in Gaza that aren't legitimate military targets (on account of Hamas storing all their munitions in hospitals, schools, and apartments), if Israel just dropped dumb bombs on every building that they had good intel had weapons or Hamas agents in, there wouldn't be any buildings over 2 stories tall left in Gaza.
I don't think Israel is guilty of genocide, but casual disregard for human life seems to fit the bill. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
That is not what I get from the article at all (despite its author's obvious bias). What we have here is a military equivalent of comstat + incorporation of tracking of specific individuals. The very act of doing this is the opposite of casual disregard for human life, because by making targets, they are necessarily excluding targets, which in this sort of conflict is a demonstration of judiciousness. There is a good case for, instead, simply engaging in creeping artillery fire and leveling every building that is a possible Hamas fortification. And that is simply a military case. Far before you would be engaged in intentional targeting of civilians.
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War is brutal. Israel has done many bad things, perhaps more than necessary, but that's how war goes. America was hardly polite and soft on Japan in WW2.
If Native Americans started randomly suicide bombing American cafes and launched roughly one attack every twenty years that would kill hundreds, how many Native American civilian casualties would you max out at before saying "no, the cost is too high to keep bombing reservations"?
This was in response to claims that the Israelis were being meek and timid - you can absolutely play the "people do bad things during war" card, but you also just wiped out the claim I was arguing against in the process.
That situation and history are so different as to make the comparison moot - and if this was an attempt at emotional appeal, I'm also not American.
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