naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I think there’s a case to be made that they didn’t think they’d get as far as they did, but in any case, how far did they think they’d get? Locations of military bases near Gaza are public information and well known to Hamas, if they had wanted to limit themselves to military targets only, they could have.
On the other hand, the degree of organization raises more questions. If it’s just “the elite troops trained by Iran opened the fence and stormed the border posts, then random 17 year olds with guns drove through and began killing civilians” that doesn’t square with operatives who landed by paraglided and started killing civilians, who would presumably be in the former category and who would have needed some training. And beyond a handful of border posts, there doesn’t seem to have been a concerted effort to target military sites deeper into the country.
My guess is that instructions post-breach, other than the targeting of the very nearest IDF and possibly police facilities, were pretty limited but involved capturing hostages (to use in negotiations) and maybe weapons and armor. Beyond that, they’ve obviously had no issues with terrorism in the past, so it’s hard to see why civilian casualties would be a problem.
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
I don't fully agree with it, but there's an argument that society has physical limits to how moral it 'can' be at maximum: slavery went from common-place world-wide to detestable with automation and wage manpower (and having literally any other option with war slaves), lowering infant mortality and mass-production of household necessities made it possible for women to have a place outside of the home, so on. At the extreme end, sufficient outside stressors can drive people to cannibalism surprisingly quickly. That doesn't mean that these limits make people more moral, just that they can't be better.
One of the commonly-cited examples is that mass bombing campaigns could only fall out of military necessity with the development of computerized guided missiles. And this is pretty applicable for Gazans: their artillery not only can't be more precise, it's often not even precise enough to distinguish its own launcher site from its 'target'. Leaving that weapon aside requires leaving a tremendous tactical and strategic space.
There are equivalents examples for other laws of war, including some relevant for these attacks. There are a lot of indiscriminate Biblical atrocities, after all. But they fell out of favor before the New Testament; the technology that obviated them wasn't microchips, but roads. The closest I've seen to a tactical or strategic argument is this one (cw: advocacy of outright evil, absolutely not condoned), and that's damning with faint praise: it's the logic of a tantrum, not a military plan.
In this framework, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is ambivalent in the sense that you're accepting the risk to civilian lives as part of a military plan that has not other comparable options; less ambivalent, and more accepting the costs. Maybe there's something that required the baby-murdering rapists, or Hamas was so low on armed adults that they couldn't pick and choose (but it's not like America's dabbling with baby-murdering rapists found them able to turn it off when they went home!), but it looks more like -- at best! -- absolute indifference.
I saw a retrieved dashcam video today from someone who was shot in their car. There's about a dozen Hamas fighters in it shooting up vehicles on the road. They're uniformed and look to have at least a basic level of coordination - so from that clip at least it looked more like an actual military action than a bunch of random teenagers with guns.
Some of them have uniforms (seemingly both their own and some stolen or copied IDF style uniforms), but others in the festival footage seem to be wearing civilian clothes.
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Notes -
I think there’s a case to be made that they didn’t think they’d get as far as they did, but in any case, how far did they think they’d get? Locations of military bases near Gaza are public information and well known to Hamas, if they had wanted to limit themselves to military targets only, they could have.
On the other hand, the degree of organization raises more questions. If it’s just “the elite troops trained by Iran opened the fence and stormed the border posts, then random 17 year olds with guns drove through and began killing civilians” that doesn’t square with operatives who landed by paraglided and started killing civilians, who would presumably be in the former category and who would have needed some training. And beyond a handful of border posts, there doesn’t seem to have been a concerted effort to target military sites deeper into the country.
My guess is that instructions post-breach, other than the targeting of the very nearest IDF and possibly police facilities, were pretty limited but involved capturing hostages (to use in negotiations) and maybe weapons and armor. Beyond that, they’ve obviously had no issues with terrorism in the past, so it’s hard to see why civilian casualties would be a problem.
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
I don't fully agree with it, but there's an argument that society has physical limits to how moral it 'can' be at maximum: slavery went from common-place world-wide to detestable with automation and wage manpower (and having literally any other option with war slaves), lowering infant mortality and mass-production of household necessities made it possible for women to have a place outside of the home, so on. At the extreme end, sufficient outside stressors can drive people to cannibalism surprisingly quickly. That doesn't mean that these limits make people more moral, just that they can't be better.
One of the commonly-cited examples is that mass bombing campaigns could only fall out of military necessity with the development of computerized guided missiles. And this is pretty applicable for Gazans: their artillery not only can't be more precise, it's often not even precise enough to distinguish its own launcher site from its 'target'. Leaving that weapon aside requires leaving a tremendous tactical and strategic space.
There are equivalents examples for other laws of war, including some relevant for these attacks. There are a lot of indiscriminate Biblical atrocities, after all. But they fell out of favor before the New Testament; the technology that obviated them wasn't microchips, but roads. The closest I've seen to a tactical or strategic argument is this one (cw: advocacy of outright evil, absolutely not condoned), and that's damning with faint praise: it's the logic of a tantrum, not a military plan.
In this framework, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is ambivalent in the sense that you're accepting the risk to civilian lives as part of a military plan that has not other comparable options; less ambivalent, and more accepting the costs. Maybe there's something that required the baby-murdering rapists, or Hamas was so low on armed adults that they couldn't pick and choose (but it's not like America's dabbling with baby-murdering rapists found them able to turn it off when they went home!), but it looks more like -- at best! -- absolute indifference.
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I saw a retrieved dashcam video today from someone who was shot in their car. There's about a dozen Hamas fighters in it shooting up vehicles on the road. They're uniformed and look to have at least a basic level of coordination - so from that clip at least it looked more like an actual military action than a bunch of random teenagers with guns.
Some of them have uniforms (seemingly both their own and some stolen or copied IDF style uniforms), but others in the festival footage seem to be wearing civilian clothes.
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