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So, the Knesset has voted to ban the UNRWA from operating in Israel over claims that 10% of its staff have affiliations to terror organisations.
What is interesting here is the way the votes went.
One of the bills passed 92-10 (with eight MK missing or abstaining), the other 87-9.
The Knesset has ten members representing Israeli Arabs which I assume voted against the bills. Otherwise, it seems that most Israeli parties, even the ones much more moderate than Netanyahu's coalition, voted for it.
I find it a bit reminiscent of the post 9-11 unanimity towards GWB war on terror, were some bills were literally only being opposed by a single representative.
Personally, I think that it is likely that Hamas has infiltrated UNRWA. If your organisation worked in pre-war Gaza where Hamas ruled uncontested, you were not really in the position to tell them to go fuck themselves if they require that you extend paychecks and diplomatic privileges to a few jihadists.
However, I also think that this organisation plays an important role in securing basic humanitarian necessities to the people in Gaza.
The steelman might be that unlike other aid organisations (which will be infiltrated by Hamas in short order once they operate in Gaze), UNRWA has special privileges as a UN organisation. However, if this is the case, I don't get why it would not be sufficient to make a law to take away their privileges, making their activities in Israel fully subject to Israeli interventions (e.g. for passing propaganda material), instead of banning them outright.
This is true, but I read it the other way -- it is impossible to do charitable work in certain places without hiring, funding and aiding the repugnant parties (who are in large part responsible for the mess in the first place) therefore one should not do that work.
I've heard horror stories about MSF and other NGOs that are subject to various extractive schemes -- one spoke about how in a particular African nation they could only hire "licensed" trucking companies and the only licensees happen to be friends with the local President For Life and how the money they spent on trucks invariably ended up funding the very conflict causing the injuries that they were (notionally) there to treat. At some point the ethical principle of neutrality has to take a backseat to the practical effect of their actions.
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The entire point of UNRWA existing, and its very special definition of refugees applicable only to Arabs fleeing the ‘47 and ‘67 wars, is to use humans as a cudgel against the Jews. The whole edifice needs to be defunded and disbanded, and it couldn’t come a minute too soon. For any legitimate refugee grievances there exists the UNHCR - the rest of what they do is what governments and municipalities exist for. Nobody needs the UN to run garbage trucks and elementary schools.
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Hamas regularly hijacks and diverts those shipments to its own use instead of allowing the supplies to go to civilians, and fires at the ones too protected for it to hijack.
UNWRA, consistent with an organization which has been thoroughly suborned by Hamas, denied this was happening.
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I would probably default to trying to prevent international organizations from operating in my country if I didn't have a great reason for believing that their actions would be helpful to my citizens. To put it lightly, UNRWA does not clear that bar for Israelis.
The result of this would be an extremely illiberal society.
The case for (a) being an international organization and (b) doubt about them being helpful to the citizens can be made for a lot of organisations, such as:
If you forbid by default, you get places like Iran or North Korea. In the free world, you have freedom of association, which includes citizens joining international organizations (plus there is a tendency to let foreigners visit, even if they are on business trips). Of course, you want to forbid some organisations for very good reasons (e.g. Daesh, the Mafia), but then it should be up to the state to demonstrate that they are dangerous, not going 'meh, they are probably net-negative for us, verboten!'
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Reminds be of the big fuss Western NGOs made recently about Georgia requiring NGOs to register if they have more than 20% foreign funding.
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It makes sense that Hamas members would be found working at the organization, as the org employs 13k Palestinians. This says nothing about UNRWA really, only about the nature of secretive political movements. Literally any organization that employs 13k in Palestine will have some of its members go on to collude with Hamas. A radicalization rate of 9 out of 13k is insignificant, and actually tells us they UNRWA does a good job vetting its employees. “0.007% of UNRWA were determined by the UN to be working with Hamas”is another way to put this. None of them in leadership position at UNRWA but just working as drivers or teachers. So this seems more like casus belli for cutting aid.
Your own source says that Israel claims that 19 (not 9) of the people who perpetrated the October 7 attacks were UNRWA employees. Nowhere does it claim that Israel claims that these were the only people in the UNRWA who are also Hamas members, or sympathetic to Hamas's goals.
According to the UN, there’s only evidence to warrant the firing of nine UNRWA staff.
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The big trend with the GWB was the abolishment of the rules of war. There were no prisoners of war, only terrorists who can be tortured in any which way. There can be no negotiation because the enemy are terrorists and are just fundamentally evil. Pashtuns can't have any reason to oppose the Afghan government.
Palestinians are completely justified in having armed resistance and participating in an armed conflict. They are not terrorists, they are armed combatants participating in an armed conflict. There is no special terrorist clause in the Geneva convention.
Israel is an occupying force and is responsible for the people they are occupying. Israel is clearly trying to depopulate Gaza in order to steal the land.
Were the people captured while acting as uniformed members of a recognized belligerent state's regular military? If not (and not within a few closely-associated civilian professions like military sutlers and contractors), they're not legally POWs under the Geneva Conventions. And even then, the Convention does not bar prosecution of POWs for acts which contravene the laws of war, such as indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
They absolutely can - they're just not POWs when they're captured fighting out of uniform, or attacking civilians; they're insurgents/terrorists.
Sure, that's a moral claim. They can fight if they want to. But if they choose to fight, they then can't complain about the consequences of the other party fighting too.
They are not fighting in uniform so as to readily distinguish themselves from the civilian population, and are engaging in indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
No, there is a specific definition of who gets protection under the convention as a lawful combatant. Hamas and Hezbollah fighters do not qualify.
Low-effort mindreading.
No? It is an explicit, stated goal in many places and by many officials, including ones who are presently in power. There's no shortage of evidence to support the idea that many high-ranking Israelis believe that their territory ultimately covers the areas laid out in their religious scriptures. This is something that even pro-Israeli partisans will agree is their ultimate goal and something they're actively working towards - you don't need to read somebody's mind when they actively and loudly tell you what they intend and why.
Are you refering to calls from "the river to the sea" (the Jordan and the Mediterranean) respectively?
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And this is why there's always a distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Palestinians might have very good reasons to go to war, but they also break the rules of war seemingly as a hobby.
The question of what makes a terrorist isn't whether they're right to start a war, it's how they conduct themselves in one. Palestine has been breaking pretty much every rule, at every opportunity. Fighting from sanctuaries, fighting without identifiable uniforms, attacking targets with mass civilian casualties being the entire strategic point.
No, but there are clauses for unlawful combatants, which "terrorist" is a normie-comprehensible shorthand propaganda term for. Palestine fights its fights via unlawful combatants all the time. And unlawful combatants have very little in the way of protections, because they undermine everything else in the rules of war.
Not really, they are engaged in classic guerilla warfare. They are far, far more well behaved than the "moderate jihadists" that the US and Israel supported in Syria. They are fighting a cleaner war than Israel.
Under traditional international law, it's illegal to engage in "classic guerrilla warfare" if by that you mean "not wearing uniforms" or "wearing the uniforms of the enemy," which are both traditional guerrilla war tactics. (The latter was a big sticking point during the US Civil War, as Confederates would sometimes wear captured uniforms.)
I'd need to dig more into how this applies in the Israel/Palestine conflict (especially given Palestine's ambiguous status), but the whole "not wearing uniforms" was something which lots of combatants in the GWOT did. There's a reason that, AFAIK, none of the people who were getting waterboarded were surrendered Iraqi POWs was because the people who were getting waterboarded weren't part of a traditional lawful combatant and thus arguably not protected by the laws of war – my understanding is that that was the logic used by the GWB administration.
I'm not saying waterboarding was the correct decision, but there was a legal reasoning behind the decisions the Bush administration made. They didn't just decide "well we don't have to obey the law because our enemies are evil."
NB, there's provisions in the Geneva Convention, IIRC, for spontaneous resistance to an occupying force.
Technically the rule doesn’t say uniforms, does it? It says ‘recognizable emblem’.
I believe the standard is that combatants must "clearly identify themselves as such"
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I believe something like a green cloth armband fits the standard, for pseudo-militaries that can't do better
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Yes, I believe that's the case in modern international law.
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This was notably the case in the Winter War in 1939 when Finland was so poorly resourced that many soldiers couldn't be equipped with proper uniforms. They used their own clothes and were only provided with a belt and a hat with the official emblem sewn on.
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Right, that provision provides as follows:
ART. 4. — A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
...
6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory who, on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
Hamas and Hezbollah emphatically do not qualify under this paragraph, as they are pre-existing organizations which do organize themselves into regular units, e.g. Hamas's "Qassam Brigades" and Hezbollah's various specialized units such as the "Radwan Force," yet still engage in combat without uniforms or otherwise making themselves distinct from civilians, among other violations. Also, they aren't spontaneously taking up arms because they're drawing from long-established and disguised central arms depots, in a conflict they started.
Yeah, it seems like the clear implication here is that such forces are supposed to convert themselves into regular armed units in a timely manner. So in the GWOT context, it seems very clear that insurgents operating 5 years into the war, dressing like civilians, hiding their weapons, and not conducting themselves as a "regular armed unit" aren't conducting themselves as expected by the laws of war.
And from the context of Hamas and Hezbollah, it seems to me that (for the reasons you describe) there's no excuse for their forces not to conduct themselves as regular armed units (to whatever extent that they do so) except that it's inexpedient for them, which isn't a justification under the laws of war.
(I should note that I'm not necessarily claiming the Geneva Convention is 100% aligned with morality – there might be instances were guerrilla warfare, like spying, is morally acceptable. But if you're a spy, and you get caught, and executed, you can't very well complain about it – you knew the risks when you signed up. I'm hardly a fan of Hamas or Hezbollah, but my fact claims about the customs of war are just that.)
Right; the Geneva Conventions aren't meant to turn men into angels. They're supposed to be clear rules of the road so that everyone knows what to expect if they behave in a particular way. If people elect not to behave in the specified ways, they don't get the benefit of those clear rules. It's really simple at root.
Remember also that the Geneva Conventions are from a time when war was still something peer nations did.
The world has changed, as has the ways wars are fought- Hamas operates the way it does to exploit the fact that everyone else in the West adheres to obsolete and incorrect ideas of what modern warfare is and are very uncomfortable with reality (example: are women who make weapons for men legitimate military targets?).
Ironically Hamas has done what liberal Westerners only ever dreamed of- they made the average Palestinian women just as capable a fighter as the average Palestinian man (with respect to how their enemy limits itself).
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Yes, and the traditional penalty for guerillas, francs tireurs, and partisans is summary execution without benefit of trial.
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How do you figure that? Was October 7 a clean act?
Yes, they attacked military outposts engaged in acts of war against them. That a few drugged out hippies were still partying the next day and got blasted by the IDF who started firing indiscriminantly is unfortunate but the civilian casualty rate was still well under what many other military operations have.
"Drugged out hippies" is unnecessarily inflammatory and derogatory, and while you can feel how you feel about your outgroup, you need to inject some civility into how you describe people, whether you feel civil towards them or not.
"Got blasted by the IDF" is a claim that contradicts pretty much all reporting (and my own lying eyes, since I saw the videos) on the events at the Nova music festival. I'm aware there are claims that civilians were accidentally killed by the IDF on October 7, and probably this did happen, but your description is such an extraordinary and inflammatory claim that the requirement to Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be applies here.
Generally, your participation in this thread is bad. It's bad because once again you can't contain your hatred of Jews, which leads you to write inflammatory polemics that contribute nothing but seething and spittle.
Because hating Jews and siding with Hamas is not against the rules, we've given you a lot of slack, but you still do not get to write posts about how your enemies have it coming as you make up fictional narratives, and you have been warned before and last time you were told you'd start earning tempbans.
Banned for three days. When you come back, if you want to write Israel Delenda Est posts, you need to put more effort and a lot more civility into them.
Seeing as how Functor is getting banned and won't be able to provide any evidence, I'd like to share this report which provides evidence for his claims: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-directive-kidnap-hamas-gaza-hostages-idf/104224430
The ABC is a major, mainstream media organisation and this reporting includes quotes from multiple Israeli news sources as well. He's straightforwardly correct when he says "got blasted by the IDF who started firing indiscriminantly" and this is the view of multiple Israelis, not just internet nazis. To be perfectly honest I find it a bit ironic, given that when functor said "is unfortunate but the civilian casualty rate was still well under what many other military operations have." he was actually trying to defend the IDF - only to get accused of hating jews and siding with Hamas even as he tried to defend their actions while stating a view which seems to be common knowledge among Israelis themselves.
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So going door to door and executing civilians is actually "attacking military outposts"? Or was that also the IDF?
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I don't think underaged suicide bombers is anyone's idea of "classic" guerrilla warfare.
That is two attacks in 15 years, both rather small.
Wikipedia reports a lot more than that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_by_Palestinian_militant_groups
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Have they done so yet in this war? All the Wiki examples are from decades ago.
Not that I'm aware of. But I don't think this is to Hamas and co 's credit: I just think the security apparatus Israel installed in response to suicide attacks have been effective enough to essentially nullify it as a tactic. Perhaps they've tried doing it in Gaza to attack IDF troop patrols, but I haven't heard anything to that effect.
This article from December last claims that terrorists have blown themselves up in Gaza to attack the IDF, but doesn't specify the perpetrators' ages.
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Given events, how does an Israel act upon and within Gaza if its goal is its security and not stealing land?
Like the British in Northern Ireland who managed to diffuse the situation. It is the only realistic long term plan for Israel.
I think that’s a bit unrealistic given the size of the area in question. Israel as a whole is the size of New Jersey, so any armed action in that limited space is going to be pretty brutal simply because of the population density and the fact that everything is with missile range. There aren’t even good natural boundaries. Ireland was separated from Britain by a sea, and most of the British and Irish for that matter were well outside the zones where the fighting was happening.
They are locking them in to tiny area and bombing them. They should take in the civilians from the area they are bombing. Also there are far less destructive ways to fight than blasting a city from the air. The UK didn't blast entire districts of Belfast.
And put them where exactly? Again, this is a very small densely populated country with only deserts in between cities. And given that Israel doesn’t trust them to not try to attack their citizens when removed (unless we’re talking camps, which is probably not going to work) there’s not much to do with Gazans.
And why should they leave their homes with no guarantees that they’d ever see them again? Trust is gone here. Even before the bombings started, the dominant idea is that Israel will take their land. Even if given an order to leave, who’s leaving? Who’s going to leave Gaza and expect to take Israel at their word that once Hamas and the tunnels are gone, the Gazans will be allowed to return home?
They were pushed into Gaza by militia groups that ethnically cleansed the towns they came from. They can return to the place they were forced out of.
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The problem here is that the Good Friday Agreement was possible because the IRA was a defined organization with specific demands that could be negotiated with. There existed a stable equilibrium where all parties got enough of what they wanted that they wouldn't break the agreement.
Both sides of this conflict have factions with maximalist goals that are large enough to veto any compromise. One that they have exercised before on numerous occasions (Rabin's assassination, for instance).
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They could pretty easily have stopped october 7th by just paying attention to the border. Hamas pretended to be beaten by not responding to some Israeli provocations and Netanyahu thought they were done.
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From actual Israeli supporters to transparent pro-Israel astroturfing, the insistence on the 'terrorist' angle is striking. Does this really resonate with American normies?
I would think 'terrorism' a discredited label, counterproductive in most cases, especially in the context of distant desert squabbles. Is it not the 'common sense', dominant narrative in the US that the 2000's were a mistake born out of lies and a hysteria? Of course the actual costs to the Americans were miniscule, practically irrelevant, so I don't expect emotional investment, just disinterest and cautious 'this will not work on me twice' attitude.
Do you really think any sort of organized group is interested in astroturfing themotte? No organization is paying people to type up comments to be read by ~200 people max.
It's not. Terrorism is pretty consistently using violence targetted specifically at civilians in order to enact political change. Hamas sometimes acts like a legitimate military force, but they also do things like cafe bombings and parading kidnapped naked women through the streets. And notably the leadership doesn't disavow those actions and put any fighters who commit acts like that on trial.
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America is locked in a constant cycle of “regret war now get excited for the next war”. Vietnam was a tragic and pointless waste of life, but the Global War on Terror is an existential necessity, because Saddam has nukes and the Taliban hate us for our freedom. The Global War on Terror was born out of lies and hysteria, but the Ukraine War is an unambiguously righteous cause that justifies unlimited escalation.
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Maybe? Terrorist is obviously something of a rhetorical term, but not many people view the war in Afghanistan that way anyway, and I don't think many came away with the impression that there were not actually terrorists involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
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Terrorism still probably has purchase among boomers who are Israel's biggest fans in the west anyways. But everyone else can just read about what Israelis say amongst themselves and realize that the distinction is meaningless at this point.
“You entered Gaza (after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught) to take revenge — as much as possible. [Against] women, children — everyone you saw. As much as possible. That’s what you wanted,” said Uriah Ben-Natan, the brother of 22-year-old Sgt. First Class (res.) Shuvael Ben-Natan, from the northern West Bank settlement of Rehelim.
Quotes like this put the Onion out of business:
Yeah Israel has a real problem with all these villainous live quotes. 90% of the time they manage to stick to the approved lines: 'we have a right to defend ourselves' 'counter-terrorism action' 'Iraq Iran Iran WMDs, nukes in 6 months' 'human shields'.
But 10% of the time government officials declare enthusiastic support for torturing prisoners by shoving metal rods up their anuses. Or we see the vigorous anti 'investigating soldiers for rape' protests. Or well-directed music videos where young children sing:
Reminds me a bit of Teufelslied, though it was intended as a marching song and I doubt children got to sing it:
At some point Israel is going to have to take on the villainous role with the face-concealing helmet and the glowing red eyes, accept what they are, what they want and what they'll sacrifice for the path they're on. They can't have it both ways. You can't be both the defender of freedom and justice, the unprovoked righteous who deserves sympathy and aid from others - and also go around burning people's houses down for fun, shooting children in the back as they flee, gunning down unarmed protestors, obliterating your enemies and taking their land.
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Gee, it's almost like the Israelis were angry or something after over a thousand of their countrymen were killed or abducted. Next you're going to tell us U.S. Marines landing on Okinawa had some off-color things to say about Japanese people.
If this is a justification, why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack? There is an obviously truthful reading of the situation, which is that Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out or someone stronger swooping in and separating the combatants, and then there are the two competing narratives that aim to marshal support for one of the sides by selectively word-gaming away the justifications that the other side invokes when turning the ratchet.
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements. Meanwhile the Palestinians continue to refuse to take "yes" for an answer and insist on further fighting. That's not the recipe for "a pox on both their houses."
Settlement expansion, supported by the Israeli state, is essentially enough for me to conclude Israelis were never serious about peace with Palestinians.
Goal always the same - dispossession and/or expulsion. Slowly with settlements, domestic opposition mostly unserious - happy with the end result, only preferring the optics of serious concern and stalwart disapproval. Faster with aerial bombing campaigns.
So the Palestinians get to demand to live in a judenrein society? When did that become a reasonable demand?
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If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7. More were killed by Israel just in 2022, and many more in 2021. I don't think being at a disco festival conveys a uniquely high value to your life, as opposed to, say, just being blown up in your home.
The relevant timeline just around settlements has plenty of evidence to the contrary, including from Israeli sources. Either way, it's easy to offer peace from a position of overwhelming strength.
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework. The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
From your own source:
PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May, attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians, and two Ukrainians. As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed, including journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 3 of those responsible for killings in Israel. On 1 August, Israeli forces arrested the PIJ West Bank leader Bassem al-Saadi. In the aftermath of that operation, amid heightened tensions, roads were closed in the south of Israel by the Israeli-Gaza border wall and reinforcements were sent south after threats of attack were made by PIJ sources in Gaza. The same day, Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown by the military as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Haaretz reported on 2 August that Egyptian intelligence officials "are holding talks with the leaders of the factions in Gaza in order to prevent escalation" and that "all parties told Cairo they aren't looking for escalation." On 3 August, Khaled al-Batsh, head of the politburo of the PIJ in Gaza said: "We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel."
Again, from your own source:
Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip ("joint operations room") would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza.
In each of these incidents, Hamas started the violence. FAFO.
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