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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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