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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?
This is in transparently bad faith and you're not even making a pretence of trying to argue to understand rather than win. As an honest question, do you actually think that's what mildly_benis was trying to say? That the Palestinians are just antisemites who want to live in a jew-free society, and THAT is the main reason for their opposition to Israeli settlers coming in and settling on their property without compensation?
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If Jewish settlers agree to become Palestinian citizens, obey Palestinian laws, be policed by the Palestinian police, then the Palestinians don't get to demand that.
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I think in a case where this means keeping Jews from coming to them - not even as refugees, but in a settlement campaign under state umbrella - the answer is an unequivocal 'yes, of course'.
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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.
You are the one who started talking about scale, implicitly suggesting that the scale of the Oct 7th attack was what made it sufficient as a justification for Israel killing 43k Palestinians. I just took this implication, as I understood it, at face value. If this is not the argument you intended, then please explain yourself better.
I'm sure the objective of Hamas could also be described by them as the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Palestinians - the Israeli state - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering any individuals that Israel has locked away. Israel says that its mass killings of completely uninvolved civilians are inevitable because it has no better way to break Palestinian organised resistance (Hamas) specifically without putting more of its own people at risk; I'm sure Hamas also sees no better way to break Israeli organised resistance than to spread terror and attack whatever civilians they can get their hands on. If you think it's unfair to demand that Israel restrict itself to surgical operations against Hamas militants that would probably result in 5-10x the military casualties relative to just levelling whole areas, then surely it's also unfair to demand that Hamas restrict itself to surgical operations against the IDF that would probably result in them just getting gunned down ineffectually.
Those seem pretty cherry-picked from the articles. The 2021 article starts with a description of Israeli police sabotaging a religious observance so that it would not disturb a political speech of their PM, and then later of Israel seizing the homes of some Palestinians, which resulted in protests being violently suppressed during which the first deaths occurred on both sides. You (and partially Wikipedia) are doing the same thing here again at smaller scale, taking a fairly uniformly distributed timeline of alternating incidents of Palestinians killing some Israelis and Israelis killing many more Palestinians - inevitably more civilians than militants on either side - and placing arbitrary cutoff points to break the sequence up into single "incidents" that look like they start with Palestinians killing someone and then Israel engaging in totally justified manifold retaliation.
"He randomly punched me, then I broke his arm. Then he randomly punched me again, and I broke his leg in response. Then he randomly kicked me in the nuts for no reason with his other leg. Of course I stabbed his eye out, I mean, who wouldn't? Being kicked in the nuts can have serious consequences and nobody should have to put up with that. What, you say I started it by stabbing him in 1948? Do you realise how crazy you sound, claiming that he has the right to kick me in the nuts over something from 1948? Besides, his dad who was also beating him all the time back in the 1940s said I was free to do to him whatever I wanted!"
You're right, I allowed myself to be distracted by you - after all, the original discussion was over whether or not some heated statements made by a random Israeli after 10/7 meant the entire post-10/7 conflict in Gaza was a sinister plot for Israelis to expropriate Gazan land. So good job; I got snookered.
But even here you're wrong; the unprovoked nature of the 10/7 attack, as well as its breadth and premeditated objectives to deliberately harm Israeli civilians who had done nothing to Gazans, are what justify the Israeli response and anger. It's not some cold math over how many deaths can be dealt out tit-for-tat, which again is not used by ANYONE in any other conflict because it's manifestly silly and has nothing to do with the actual objectives of either party to the conflict.
Nope. Words have meanings.
This is what they are actually doing, probably to their detriment. See, e.g. the analysis of John Spencer, an instructor in urban warfare at West Point.
"Obeying basic laws and norms of war" is not a demand for "surgical" precision. If Hamas can't measure up to the IDF conventionally, perhaps that's a big sign that armed combat is counterproductive to their political aims.
Not a valid basis to wage war or attack random civilians.
Interesting way to describe the outcome of a lawsuit, but even taking the Palestinian argument at face value it's still not a valid reason to wage war or attack random civilians.
Then you should probably have used a source that actually supported what you're claiming, instead of one that does not.
That's silly only because there is nothing subtle about it. Israel was founded on taking land from the assorted Arabs that lived there before, and has repeatedly expanded by doing that over and over again. With everything it does, it grabs more land. Grabbing and holding land for its privileged ethnic group is its entire purpose.
Italics are not a substitute for an argument. You can't possibly be arguing that Israel did nothing to Palestinians before 10/7, so the only thing your argument can possibly rest on is saying that somehow what it did before is excluded from consideration as a provocation. Have you presented any argument for that, apart from "deaths dealt out tit-for-tat", i.e. saying that the "Palestinians started it", i.e. slicing up a sequence of mutual provocations in a convenient way?
60% of Palestinian fatalities since 10/7 on the first infographic I could find are women, children and the elderly. I have seen plenty of pictures of whole blocks being levelled. If that is surgical precision, i.e. those killings were targeted and deliberate, I think we are deep in genocidal territory, though I'm sure its defenders will have a story about how they vetted everyone in those blocks they levelled and the children were terrorists too.
Note also that per the infographic, something like 2-3% of Israeli 10/7 fatalities are children, to 32% of Palestinian fatalities since then. And then you claim that the Palestinians are the ones killing indiscriminately?
Might be more interesting if it weren't by someone who would almost certainly lose their job if they came to a different conclusion.
Surely having your homeland invaded and occupied is a valid basis to wage war. I will concede that apart from a crazy fringe the Israeli side is not technically arguing that having random civilians on your side attacked is a valid basis to attack random civilians; instead they just engage in gaslighting and Soviet-level denials that they are attacking random civilians, all while continuing to do it. I am genuinely unsure if a greater evil masquerading as good is better than an unapologetic lesser evil.
Israeli court: "seems legit to me"
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