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It seems like that's largely owed to the fact that any amount of striking buildings that house Hamas and also (by Hamas' design) house the helpless is going to look like massacring the helpless. The only way to not massacre any helpless in this case is to stop doing anything, or invent magical weapons like that one scene from Iron Man where he takes out terrorists with micromissiles while sparing every hostage they had.
Granted, but at some point if you have any humanity you have to say, 'the number of helpless people we're massacring is not worth the number of terrorists we're killing".
And what is the equivalent point for non-helpless people, and non-terrorist combatants?
Even people under terrible regimes have agency, which is why 'just following orders' or 'just running train schedules' were dismissed as defenses in notable past examples. Helplessness in turn also implies an inability to defend one's self- but this cannot co-exist with the ability to attack, since the means are the same, and which has certainly been displayed.
Similarly, terrorists are- by almost universal international definitions- actors who conduct unlawful violence. This is not only categorical, but generally morally, distinct from the systemic use of lawful force by a governing entity- particularly when the stated and demonstrated intent is to continue violence as a matter of policy. The categorization is certainly complicated by legalistic disputes, but as far as the moral premise goes the acts which started the war were conducted by the same entity that would be responsible for punishing said acts if they were unlawful.
The Palestinians have many issues, not all of which are their own fault, but treating them as helpless and without agency is neither accurate or humanizing them. There certainly isn't a lack of willingness and ability to fight and die against a hated administrating entity- only a dispute as to who it is. A consequence of that, however, is that arguments of helplessness against the other don't carry the same weight.
I'm not defending the terrorists, as in the people actually firing rockets, I'm defending everyone else. Including, yes, people who hate the Israelis and hope that Hamas wins, which I imagine is just about everybody at this point, as well as the people who pack their lunch boxes.
Incidentally I disagree with this, and discussed it further here. Until WW2, it was almost always understood that those giving orders would be held responsible for the results of those orders being carried out, providing that the actions taken corresponded roughly to the orders given. Like so many load-bearing aspects of our society, we jettisoned this so that we could jump up and down on the Nazis a bit more.
I would dispute that you are actually defending the non-terrorists. (Which- if it seemed otherwise- you weren't being accused of. Apologies if that seemed so.) Rather, I would present that your attempted framing is a form of moral malpractice- not because it defends terrorists, but precisely because it does not defend non-terrorists, and instead leads to greater risk to them.
The question was posed to you with the expectation you'd avoid it, but also to demonstrate its limits: the humanity argument's tolerance for casualties goes up significantly when the populace has agency that they use to support actors, and even higher when the actor in question is the government. Simple humanity is willing to both kill and watch a lot more people get killed when it's a result of an inept aggressor than a helpless bystander. You can see demonstrations of this in everything from fiction, to group social dynamics, to- of course- security politics both domestic and inter-state.
As such, appeals to humanity that imply the former (humanity has a low tolerance limit for violence) is in play rather than the later (humanity has a high tolerance limit for violence against aggressors), appeals which are used by bystanders in rationalizing acceptance of the 'actual terrorists' who use such appeals as the basis of their strategy, are placing more people at risk, rather than a less.
This would be a great deal of wishful projection.
Sadly, most people in the world don't particularly care about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, any more than they could be forced to care about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It wasn't a dominant factor in recent Western democratic elections. It has notably not set the Arabic street ablaze as middle eastern states have not merely maintained neutrality, but even increased cooperation with Israel. It certainly hasn't been a particularly captivating issue in Asia or sub-saharan Africa, where sympathy for far away non-co-religionists is in short supply and where you can often find non-trivial examples of even sympathy for Israel on anti-islamic grounds.
The dominant trend of anti-Israeli international politics over this war is how few of them outside of the normal muslim world religious sympathies are about Israel, and how many of them have American or domestic political motives. Whether it's a low-cost/high-visibility way to raise a middle flick off the US (always popular in Latin America), a way to counter-balance/win some favor with American strategic rivals by signaling partial alignment with them / against the US (often overlapping), a way to discredit international law advocates/bodies that might challenge them (Nicaragua), or a way for electorally unstable ruling parties to try and rally support by appealing to narrative origins (South Africa, Ireland), it quite often has little to do with Israel or Hamas themselves.
People who believe the world is on their side on any issue, let alone this one, are going to be disappointed, much as the Europeans were disappointed when 'the world' and 'the international community' were not particularly on their side in the Ukraine War.
And WW2 was also where the pre-WW2 era of geopolitical dominance by European monarchies and empires was broken, and with it the artificial imposition of European monarchist political norms which tied sovereign immunity to the legal identity of the Sovereign and their enabling actors which helped lead to said world wars.
Whether your post-WW2 political tradition holds more in the individualist western political traditions (in which the individual agency permits guilt, even as it can protect from collective judgements), a familial/clan-centric model (in which membership of the oppressive ethnic-clan group allows guilt), religious-identitarian models (in which case participation in the religious-administrative group permits disposition), class-ideological models (in which case membership to the relevant oppressor classes enables class-based action), or other more collective-responsibility models in general, the pre-WW2 models of European monarchial-sovereign supremacy of responsibility have globally been replaced by traditions that- for various reasons- recognize the agency and culpability of various non-central actors.
Given that one of the enabling factors of WW2 (and even WW1) was precisely how load-bearing 'it's not my responsibility' was on enablers to the wars that (repeatedly) self-destructed the European political system, there was a fair deal more reason to jettisoning that presumption than just Nazi-jumping.
In the nicest possible way, if you would like a discussion I would appreciate it if you made your point simply and clearly.
Not intentionally. I didn't realise what you were getting at. If you avoided gotchas and made your point plainly, it would reduce such misunderstandings. I am not interested in 'winning' and I am not arrogant enough to believe that I'm going to suddenly provoke a flood of introspection in people I'm talking to. I'm just giving my perspective as straightforwardly as I can.
Yes, obviously, if someone is attacking you then you have to defend yourself against them, which may well mean killing them. It's unfortunate. I'm quite capable of feeling pity for the soldiers of an aggressor. And, yes, a little bit for actual Hamas terrorists, depending on exactly how vile they are - I remember the al Qaeda child suicide bombings and whoever set that up deserves to burn in hell. But I hate the insistence that because the Russians/Nazis/Napelonic forces are the enemy then they must be evil monsters with no soul against whom anything is morally justified.
I am not a combatant in a propaganda war, nor a lawyer. I felt that bombing large numbers of innocent Gazans in the service of killing a small number of terrorists and thereby protecting a small number of Israelis was inhumane, and said so.
I meant in Gaza, and that is not my wish. I neither hate the Israelis, nor hope for Hamas to win.
Whereas American geopolitical dominance is natural and snuggly, of course. In any case, you seem to be agreeing with me: the understood laws of moral responsibility were destroyed retroactively to justify what our new overlords wanted. All hail.
You give bad moral framing arguments that, if internalized, gets more people needlessly killed.
As a result, it is not a good defensive argument, since it does not defend (minimize costs to) recipients internalizing it, particularly in the context of the Hamas-Israel War.
There is no insistence that the enemy must be evil monsters with no soul.
The proximate argument regarding souls or lack thereof (lack of humanity) was one that was leveraged unliterally against one side of a conflict, and not even the conflict's aggressor.
You are the former, by virtue of adopting and propagating metaphors and paradigms that are part of the propaganda war. You may not be a witting propaganda war combatant, but this is both a purpose of propaganda and a mechanical means of how propaganda wars work.
The hatred within Gaza for the Israelis has little to do with the post-2023 conflict, far predating it, nor would it have reasonably been expected to decrease from its pre-2023 levels under the governance structure of the aggressors of the October 2023 conflict, who were initially met with significant public and political support both domestically and from many of their current-war-supporters on the success of the October 7 initiation.
Far more relevant factors of anti-Israeli sentiment in Gaza include the decades of ideological shaping, including religious, educational, information, youth-mobilization, and even refugee policies, that were constructed to build and sustain an ethnic conflict. These were factors which substantially contributed to not only the October 7 conflict which has seen a lot of Palestinians killed, but for the Gazan political acceptance of governors like Hamas preceeding it.
You would misunderstand the argument: 'our' new overlords did not retroactively destroy 'our' understood laws of moral responsibilities, the old-overlords were destroyed by the consequence of their self-justifying framing of moral responsibilities, which then led to their inability to continue brutally suppressing subjugated peoples around the globe and arbitrarily impose their model of moral responsibilities onto them.
The culture shock of WW1 and WW2 was that the Europeans were not, in fact, more civilized and moral than the rest of the world they justified imposing their empires and values upon on the basis of cultural and moral superiority. It was a great culture shock, but the trench warfare of WW1 and the industrialized slaughterhouses and eradication camps of WW2 were not the result of quote-unquote 'civilized' peoples, even as they were done by people who both prided themselves and considered each other civilized. It also broke the ability of the European empires to maintain control of their empires, and their increasing reliance on force itself seemed less and less the action of civilized cultures and more banal evils motivated by greed and pride cloaked in sovereignty.
The question of 'how do we never have a war of such scale in Europe again' became the defining political question in Europe for generations, and part of the eventual answer of what led to those tragedies was the role that a lack of moral responsibility- and thus moral duties- of those who not only acted in an immoral sovereign's name, but also those who supported and enabled the immoral sovereign. In order for there to be more duties / responsibilities, however, required the space for consequences for failure to meet those duties / responsibilities- consequences prohibited by prior understandings of sovereign immunity, and which were invoked and had been used to protect the perpetrators of the delusion-shattering world wars.
The sense of cultural superiority and thus appropriateness of normalization was not destroyed retroactively- it was destroyed contemporarily, repeatedly, by the European sovereigns themselves.
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Perhaps if every country or faction that wanted to defend Palestinian citizens sent troops so that there would be enough manpower to force the end of hostilities without bombing the places where the rockets are being fired from, we wouldn't be having that talk. And yes, it is my understanding that Israel can't afford to have that many boots on Palestinian ground, certainly not when they're bound by the need to wear uniforms and Hamas isn't.
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The point of killing terrorists is usually not to kill terrorists for the sake of it, but to protect the helpless people that are close to you.
Perhaps at some point it would be "humane" to give up and let the terrorists do what they want because they have too many human shields. I do not believe that point has been reached, or that Hamas can ever hold that many people hostage.
Yes, of course, that was implicit.
You seem to be saying that the number of people killed in Gaza is well below the number you feel would be worth ensuring that no Israeli is ever again killed by Hamas, and that this number is not de facto reachable given the scale of the current conflict. That, to me, seems to indicate that you believe the appropriate number is greater than the number of helpless civilians remaining in Gaza. And yes, I do find that abhorrent. If I said three decades ago that killing all the Irish would be easily worth it to stop the depredations of the IRA you would think I was a maniac, and rightly so.
The wall basically works. The Iron Dome basically works. What happened on Oct 7th was awful, and I feel sympathy for the Israelis who worry about rocket attacks, but neither of those things justify slaughtering far greater numbers of Gazans.
I do not believe that Israel can indefinitely protect itself from Hamas and its other hostile neighbours with purely defensive tactics, and moreover, I do not believe they are obligated to restrict themselves so.
If you said killing all the Irish was worth it to stop IRA, I would call you a maniac because by all accounts I know of, IRA's goals were not like Hamas', and IRA's tactics were not like Hamas', and IRA's reliance on putting their own citizens under enemy fire for the sake of martyrdom was, if at all existent, not like Hamas'. IRA was not, as far as I'm aware, making the English pick between their own destruction and killing innocent Irish along with IRA soldiers.
If Gazans have any agency, the onus is on them to drive the militants who are martyring them for "free Palestine" out. If they do not have that agency, I find that I cannot feel more sympathy for them than for those who can and will defend themselves [or are defended by their government].
To condone Gaza indefinitely bombing Israel because Israel can (mostly, for now) take it because stopping them would take more Gazan lives than Gaza currently takes Israeli lives is far too close to the concept of utility monsters for me.
"There's a third option: just leave." - yeah, because that worked so well 109 times before. At least, that's the number Israel's opponents cite sometimes.
The IRA wanted to take over Protestant-occupied Northern Ireland, and hated the Protestants who lived there with a hatred that bordered on and frequently surpassed murderous. They planted bombs, killing a considerable number of people, whilst also regularly maiming and brutalising their supposed countrymen. See for example this article from 1996.
They were, as another poster commented recently, aware of the utility that promoting British reprisals on innocent people would produce for their cause, and encouraged violent rioting and stone throwing, though it can't be proved that they intended to get Irish people killed for propaganda purposes.
Now, obviously the situation is not exactly the same. The parties are different, their relations are different, and most importantly, it never occurred to the British or the Northern Irish to round up all the Irish and carpet bomb them until the IRA were dead. Neither partly used artillery or missiles and thus, the use of human shields was less relevant.
I see absolutely no way that Hamas could destroy Israel, who are no slouches themselves and are backed by the most powerful nation in the world. I see no reasons why Gazans would ever, or frankly should ever, side with the people who stole their land and bombed them into paste over the people who are plausibly fighting for them.
Were the IRA utility monsters? Would we have been justified invading Ireland and killing Irish citizens to stop them? We have regular muslim killings of white people in the UK: are we permitted to keep exterminating them until we are sure there are no Islamists left among them? The Chinese suffered terrorism too, I believe, does that render the Xinjiang internment camps justified?
To some extent your beliefs seem to be based on the idea that Israel will sooner or later be destroyed if it's not permitted to bomb Gaza. I disagree, as I said. It's certainly not happening now. If in the future it looks like it's going to happen, then fair enough! That changes the calculus. But it doesn't mean that the Israelis get to massacre vast numbers of Gazans now just in case.
It is my understanding that the British had other, more selective tools and the resources to use them. I don't believe Israel wouldn't pacify Gaza in a less bad-optics way if they thought they could.
Side with? Maybe not. But if they really can't destroy Israel, or secure sufficient independence from Israel (while Israel doesn't exactly have any reason to trust them with independence given the history), then I have all the less sympathy for them. If you want to do terrorism and martyrdom for independence, you'd better win and win fast. Otherwise, I can't blame your enemies for giving you what you seem to be fine with: death. Other nations seem to be able to grudgingly coexist and have cultural/border tensions without constantly being at each other's throats in a suicidal jihad (with various degrees of one-sidedness).
If you have a community of 2nd-3rd generation immigrants and ethnocultural terrorism seems to have root in that community, it is your duty as a government to at the very least increase overwatch and law enforcement over that community. And if you can't or won't enforce the values and laws of the larger country over that diaspora so much that they might as well be a different state - then it's what is usually called "war".
American support is unreliable by definition of being the support of a larger, more powerful state that does not rely on you, and it appears to be growing more unreliable now that the pro-Israel factions have anti-colonialist pro-brown progressives on one side and isolationist DR on the other. I don't believe like some others (wishfully) do that Israel will crumble any moment now. But they have had to take on more of their neighbours than just Hamas before, and they didn't take them on just by turtling up and waiting to be left alone. I believe Israel should be permitted to destroy the fighting capability of their immediate enemies who are currently in a state of open warfare with them.
To some extent. Most notably, we eventually managed to cut off the main source of their funding (American, unfortunately) which I think slowed them down considerably. The thing is, Israel was doing quite well at cutting off Hamas' backing before Oct 7. In fact, if I remember correctly, most of Israel's neighbours had made big steps toward official relations with them, mostly with the intent of opposing Iran. One of the most plausible reasons for Oct 7 was that Hamas needed to split the neighbouring muslim nations off Israel by provoking bloodshed.
That sounds like yes, especially since in practice anything short of Xinjiang levels of overwatch don't seem to work. I'm pretty nativist and I might abide by that if I had to but I wouldn't call it 'moral'.
This seems kind of like:
It's pragmatic, yes, but it seems a weird way to allocate sympathy. Certainly the West would probably be in much better shape now if we'd exterminated all our slaves and colonial subjects rather than merely repress them for a couple of centuries, but again I can't call that moral. Likewise, Israel did essentially steal much of the land and is therefore not starting with a firm moral foundation; you have the settlers, you have clear instances of extremely poor behaviour against both Muslims and Christians, and now you have them massacring Gazans. Two years ago I would have told you I was firmly in the Israeli camp! But frankly I can't condone what's being done, and I get increasingly creeped out as the pro-Israeli contigent (not pointing at you specifically) talk about how necessary all of this is and even sometimes say cheerfully that exterminating the Gazans man woman and child would be best for everyone.
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