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If you ran the IDF, how would you fight Hamas in a chivalrous manner? The Israelis would like nothing more than to fight Hamas ”honorably”, mano a mano, on the open battlefield, with civilians safely miles away in refugee camps run by the Red Cross. Alas, that is not Hamas’ preferred strategy.
You can’t honourably duel a guy who refuses to duel you.
I have read that there are voices within Israel itself which are critical of the current approach because it is, in a sense, cowardly: It seeks not to maximize the effectiveness of the operation, but rather to minimize the Israeli casualties, relying too much on airstrikes and not enough on outright occupation.
Don't have enough knowledge of either Israeli politics or warfare to know if the claim is real or true, though.
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First off, occupying a large population that fundamentally doesn't have anything to gain from the current setup is futile. Trying to force the Palestinians to accept only having a tiny fraction of the land with an awful arrangement won't work. The only times counter insurgency has worked, it has been with political concessions.
The arrangement is awful for gazans largely because they dump resources into poking the bear next door instead of developing themselves.
Israel explicitly forbids them from developing themselves, to the point of making it illegal to harvest rainwater because they consider the rain to be their property.
I don't know how they can be forbidden from developing themselves when they got $4B in aid between 2014 to 2020 for things like schools, infrastructure, hospitals, etc etc.
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Why should they lay flat and accept defeat? They were pushed into a tiny area after their villages were destroyed and many of their kin were killed. They are put in a small camp with awful natural resources and have constantly been attacked by the Israelis who have bombed them repeatedly since start. Israel started the war when they attacked the Al Aqsa mosque and had already taken thousands of Palestinian hostages.
If you don't want to get smoked while crying in a bathroom in an IDF outpost don't move to Palestine and don't join the IDF. They have no reason to be there and have only themselves to blame for the constant headache which they will face.
Jarvis pull up the gazan death toll in the latest war
I again remind you that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, evicted settlers, exhumed Jewish graves, and in return gazans elected Hamas to eradicate the Jews.
Could say the same thing about you "crying" about gazans "getting smoked" - don't shoot rockets at the militarily superior neighbor and they won't kill you. As simple as that, yet you only apply the standard one way.
Lower than what the Vietnamese, Algerians or Afghans paid.
So they took all the land except for a tiny sliver with minimal natural resources and no connection to the west bank and then put it under blockade.
Because there is absolutely no reason for the IDF to be there. The idea that a God gave them the land in exchange for parts of babies penises is absurd as a legal argument. The Palestinians did not start the fight, people who managed to get all of Eastern Europe to hate them and then decided to move to Palestine started the conflict.
I'm pretty sure there were Jews in the middle-east (and in Israel specifically) long before Eastern Europe hated the Jews.
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This is a dead giveaway that you're actually attacking Jews, not Israel.
(Also, Muslims practice circumcision as well, so you could say the same thing about Gazans.)
Are you serious? Are you applying any charity to that comment at all? There's very obviously a religious factor to the existence of Israel and their claim to the land and they will proudly tell you that they are taking this land because God promised it to them. I don't think there's any point to litigating this kind of argument on the motte because Israel and Jewishness are so tightly linked that the only point to saying something like this is to uncharitably attack somebody.
How many Israelis have told you this?
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Really? Because I don't recall anyone griping about a Vietnamese "genocide". And none of those conflicts were existential for the other side. But you already know this, because you've been told this repeatedly and failed to address it.
Singapore also has no natural resources. Gaza has access to the ocean. The blockade is entirely a result of Gazan aggression after the unilateral withdrawal.
Possession is nine tenths of the law. There's no reason for Hamas to be outside Gaza. Your argument about Jews getting killed is entirely based on force and who is stronger. If we're talking who is stronger, then let's see who's stronger. It's beyond ridiculous to be "might makes right" when it comes to Hamas shooting up Israeli towns and then gnashing your teeth about the eternal Jew when Israel bombs Gaza. Pick an argument, you don't get both.
If you think it's Jews' own fault when they get killed then what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
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When the enemy hates you for deep-set religious and ethnic reasons, what concessions are possible? This isn’t Northern Ireland, where the end of the troubles coincided magnificently with both the Protestants and (especially) Catholics embracing secularism, with extreme economic growth in the Republic etc. The only concession the enemy will accept is a shared state, which all but the most optimistic critics accept means becoming both (a) just another third world shithole and (b) jewish subjugation and eventually expulsion in alliance with other Arab states and groups.
The analogy to the troubles is somewhat limited, but there is one part that is very true. The troubles largely stopped following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the flow of communist money to IRA and other terrorist groups.
If the west cut off aid and let Israel cut off the Iranian pipelines to their hearts' content, Gaza would change quite rapidly methinks.
Unfortunately, the troubles stopped after cutting off American funding to the IRA.
Tony Blair’s ambassador to America describes in his biography how much of his job was persuading influential Irish-Americans that passing money to the IRA was funding Irish-on-Irish atrocities rather than being a convenient way of giving Britain the finger and keeping in touch with the old country.
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The area is majority Palestinian. You can't have an area where the majority of people are second class citizens in their own home and nobody except Israel wants a massive refugee crisis. This is question for the people who thought building a jewish state in a densely populate area to answer.
Why not? That is the way it is in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab countries today, and in a wider sense that is the way things have been for various native and non-native populations for states that have lasted centuries countless times across human history.
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Right, once the religion died down, so did the ethnic strife, so religion was the dominant factor. I don’t think arab christians care all that much about which worldly ruler owns Jerusalem. It’s 99% religious-islamic reasons. Only islam provides palestinians with generational deep hatred through all the defeats and humiliations, and against every rational consideration. Even SS and functor would at some point, after yet another lost battle, surrender, lay down their arms and let their children live in peace and comfort.
Therefore Israel’s best chance is to destroy or weaken Islam before it destoys Israel. If the saudis can export wahhabism, the jews with their very particular skills can get apostasy going. Of course this eminently justified and thoroughly beneficial endeavour will be viewed in a negative light by morally confused people, but then there is nothing the jews could do that would not be.
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