naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed 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.
It's interesting reading A.Vorobey (old rationalist blogger, Soviet-Israeli Google SWE, epistemic minor league, math, poetry, puns, very much the same Jewish Rationalist stock our community ultimately descends from, except with biological children) these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified (he's not very connected to its more virile, younger side). Here he is from October 13, independently making the comparison to Dresden:
In a nutshell, for those who really want to understand, I don't have time for arguments or careful framing with all the references:
The Israeli army has dropped 6000 bombs since the start of the war, and a report from the army says it's about 4000 tons. I first estimated from at 1000 tons, using a typical 500 lb bomb size I saw somewhere, but I may have been wrong about that. The argument works with both the 1000 ton estimate and the 4000 ton estimate.
According to Wikipedia about 4000 tons were dropped on Dresden Feb 13-15, 1945 and casualties are estimated at 25,000 to 100,000. I believe that the fact that Gaza has less than 2000 casualties shows - in this comparison - that Israel bombs selectively, on buildings and targets known to be Hamas-related. Surely sometimes mistakes and innocent casualties happen. The Dresden development was apparently (can be verified) much less crowded than Gaza.
Further, I have come across the following convincing evidence that we are nevertheless trying to avoid civilian casualties: 1) a general warning at the beginning of the war telling residents of different neighborhoods in Gaza which areas to move to for safety; 2) although we announced that we were eliminating the need to practice "knock on the roof", in some cases it has been documented in recent days, the army seems to be using it according to circumstances; 3) there have been examples of calls/texts to residents of a particular high-rise before a missile 4) we have not just sent a warning to residents of northern Gaza to temporarily move to southern Gaza, but are expending considerable effort to make them aware of it, including thousands of fliers in Arabic printed and dropped from airplanes.
People who find a moral equivalence between thugs entering a peaceful village and killing everyone in the streets and in their homes, women, the elderly and children, and the army bombing terrorist targets in dense urban environment and, despite considerable efforts to avoid it, killing civilians in the process, are scum.
I suppose that with all those qualifiers about density and scum all it will be no great shame indeed if a hospital or two is vaporized. Or, indeed, if any other necessary price is paid. After all,
Shylock may have his pound of flesh but only if he doesn't spill a drop of blood.
Israel may defend itself, but only if no civilian is harmed.
In other words:
Shylock does not get his bond.
Israel may not defend itself.
Only abstract rights for Jews, and no "Christian" love.
these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified
I really appreciated watching him reach his limit of rationality. Seeing his old Ukrainian school bombed by Russian troops affected him emotionally, but he still held on and stuck to "here's what Ukrainian sources say, here's what Russian sources say, here's what I can reasonably discard, here's what's left and that why I on balance support Ukraine". But Hamas has struck (literally) too close to home, so Anatoly switched to "I am an Israeli Jew, of course I support IDF in their heroic struggle against Palestinian terrorism", no rationalization or evaluating if the CTO brings two sides closer to a peaceful resolution needed.
I appreciate this looks like a neat story, but FWIW that's not how it looks from my perspective. I was firmly and openly on Ukraine's side from the beginning (before my school was bombed), I'm even more obviously on Israel's side, but I do try to avoid descending into propaganda on both. In particular, I don't think I affirmed any factual claims favoring "my side" if I didn't feel they were strongly supported by rational standards. This actually didn't work out very well for me so far with Hamas, as the reality turned out to have been worse than I'd assumed, three or four times. E.g. I felt it was very likely that beheaded babies were a throwaway rumor that caught fire and blew up massively for obvious reasons, but after a few days more solid (if not ironclad) support for some beheaded babies appeared (I do not want to go evaluate this more closely).
The degree of emotional involvement is very different, to be sure.
orthoxerox
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anatoly 1yr ago
I think the following passage irked me the most (I don't know if you still blog in English, translation mine):
I consider people that can draw a moral equivalence between thugs that enter a peaceful settlement and kill everyone in the streets and in the homes, women, elders and children, and an army that bombs terrorist targets in a high-density environment and, despite significant efforts to avoid it, kills non-combatants as collateral damage, to be vile scum.
You have to make this comparison at some point. The moral weight of collateral damage might be low, but it's not zero. Sooner or later you have to stop and look at the result:
your enemy has killed a thousand innocent people in a killing spree, you have killed a thousand innocent people in precise surgical strikes because your enemy used them as human shields, but also completely destroyed the enemy
your enemy has killed a thousand innocent people in a killing spree, you have killed ten thousand innocent people in precise surgical strikes because your enemy used them as human shields, wounded another hundred thousand, destroyed the property of another million, but the enemy is still alive, well and plotting retaliation
Drawing moral equivalence in the first example can't be justified, but I don't think that everyone who says "both sides resort to what is effectively terrorism to achieve their goals" in the second example is vile scum, on the contrary, someone who defends the outcome as necessary and inevitable is.
Of course, the real result (both the expected and the actual) will be somewhere between these two.
I understand your point. I think it's wrong in a profound way, and I really ought to write a big post about it, but so far it's been eluding me. I also should have phrased the paragraph you quoted a bit better, to sharpen why I think there's no moral equivalence in the specific case we're discussing.
The two outcomes you drew up are how we usually thought about it with individual terrorist attacks coming out of Gaza (or out of the West Bank during the 2nd Intifada for that matter). Downgrade the numbers, say from a thousand innocent people to 5-50. E.g. a suicide terrorist blows up a bus in Tel Aviv in 2001, or a particularly lucky rocket out of Gaza kills a few people in Sderot. In response, the army rounds up some Hamas/Fatah higher-ups, and/or a surgical strike is made, some Hamas VP is blown up, some innocent people die too. If we make too many strikes and kill too many innocent people, the world wags its finger at us for a non-proportionate response. Things quiet down until the next incident.
It's different now, but not everyone's caught on to how it's different. Plenty of people still want to see it as the same thing - perhaps a particularly lucky terrorist attack, more than 1000 victims, wow - so we may be "allowed" to punish Hamas more severely, but surely not to the tune of e.g. 10k civilian victims or more, that's entirely non-proportionate. That's your "second example".
The reason it's different is not (just) that 1300 is a really big number, there's a difference in kind. The logic of attack-response works relatively well for a terrorist attack, which is what, fundamentally? A way of shocking the state/public with violence to get them to agree to something we want, to get them to feel that their way of doing things doesn't grant them the safety they think it does. Possibly also to blackmail them into doing something by threatening hostages. A terrorist attack is finite in scope by design. The terrorists choose the target and kill people to make a flashy point. Oct 7 was different. >2k Hamas militants poured out of Gaza and just started indiscriminately massacring everyone in Israel they could get to (besides some hostages). It wasn't finite in scope. If the army got to them 2 hours later than it did, maybe we'd have 1600 victims and not 1300; some more hours later we'd have 3000 victims, and there's no upper bound due to the Hamas itself. The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them. Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
This is felt very keenly by basically everyone here in Israel. And with a war, the rationale behind a comparison of "they killed 1300, we killed whatever" evaporates. That's not how wars work. Discussing "a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident" sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a "response". It's like if you said in 1941, well, the Japanese killed 2.5k American people at Pearl Harbor, and now the countries are at war. But the US should watch it, because once the no. of the civilian victims in Japan rises too much above 2.5k, maybe 25k or more, that's no longer "proportionate" to the Pearl Harbor attack. The analogy is not great because in PH most deaths were military, but you get what I'm saying, right? This whole line of thinking is absurd. Now it doesn't mean that it makes no sense to discuss civilian victims during the war. There're laws of war, and there's an idea of a disproportionate harm to civilians - but the lack of proportionality here is with respect to the military objectives, not the initial PH incident. You can still discuss whether Hiroshima/Nagasaki were necessary or too cruel etc. if you want, but comparing them to the PH deaths is just bizarrely nonsensical.
That's where we are, except it's worse, because Oct 7 was an indiscriminate massacre way more evil than PH, and we have every reason to believe Hamas wants and aches to do more of those whenever it gets a chance. So we're at war to destroy Hamas, and we do get to be judged by how we treat civilians when Hamas uses them as shields, and if, for example, we were to level a city block w/o warning to take out a single Hamas terrorist and 10k civilians with him, that'd be a pretty clear violation of laws of war and a very evil thing to do. So I'm not giving us carte blanche with respect to civilians and I'm not arguing to just flatten Gaza and kill everyone, and we'd never do it, obviously. But comparisons to the initial massacre in terms of no. of victims just completely miss the point of what's going on.
orthoxerox
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anatoly 1yr ago
The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them.
Maybe it's more obvious when you live in Israel close to Hamas that an attack that is only about getting a higher kill count before you are inevitably killed is something someone would actually plan an execute, but I can't stop thinking that there were additional reasons behind it, just like 9/11 wasn't just about crashing as many airplanes as possible into as many Americans as possible.
I wrote about it elsewhere in the thread, but my working hypothesis is that it's about disrupting the growing learned helplessness of the Palestinians. "You can't do anything against Israel, it can and will bulldoze your olive or orange trees with impunity if you so much as look askance at its settlements, let alone try to fight against them. I guess the only option is to keep my head down and color inside the lines." And then Hamas goes and shows that Israel is not invincible at all, that you can literally bathe in the blood of the innocents if you try hard enough, that like that heron-strangling frog, you should never give up.
Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
There's a comment by @Kinoite in this thread that explains my position better than I could myself. It's a war that also isn't one against a state that also isn't one, depending on what's more convenient. A special military operation, if you want.
I feel sort of bad about my sneer, Hamas really did an unusually repulsive thing, even by the standards of terrorist acts, and he is still commenting more tepidly than, say, most Ukrainians do wrt Russians. But yes, refreshing to see such clarity.
An interesting coincidence, as I just looked at the Motte for the first time in a year or so, on a whim. Some notes:
obviously I think it'll be a great shame if a hospital or two is vaporized; I am squeamish, as you say.
approximately zero people here in Israel think we bombed a hospital on purpose, even if it was us who did it (and I really don't know). This includes the people who are calling to bomb Gaza into the stone age and at least rhetorically disclaim any concern over any civilian casualties. They, too, don't believe the army would do it even if they, at least rhetorically, would.
given the pattern of bombings and casualties so far, and given the pro/contra incentives on our side (a weaker argument), I tentatively feel a detached rational non-Jewish non-Israeli observer ought to be able to recognize the "Israelis did it on purpose" theory as very unlikely, if not stupid.
if we did it (a big if), it's got to be by mistake. That'd be very tragic, but yeah, consistent with what I wrote on Oct 13, not quite so evil as the Oct 7 massacres. Very different league.
"any other necessary price" is doing a lot of dirty work in your comment, and isn't really how I feel about it, or most Israelis I know. Why would I bother to think about and collect evidence that we're trying to avoid civilian casualties, if I didn't care about it at all and considered whatever happened "a necessary price to be paid"? For brownie points?
On one hand I agree that this event might not even be the IDF's work (in fact this seems more likely now), and if it were IDF, there may be some sort of error (a spectrum of possible error/indifference options). There really isn't a compelling reason for the IDF to vaporize hospitals, from what we know. And on the surface of it, bombarding a mass of civilians is not so nasty as boasting of creatively butchering them… (or is it? Does it make moral sense to feel very differently?)
I wanted to make the comment to the effect that the most bloodthirsty Zniks were/are also uniformly denying Bucha and other more straightforward war crimes of Russia in another war you cover, as if Russian Armed Forces were inherently more squeamish than them; and it'll be ironic to see the same transpire here. But – sure, IDF to Israeli citizens really is not what RAF is to Russian ones.
On the other, I laugh at the handwringing about unwillingness to accept any "necessary" price. Your normal writing reminds me of that piece by Sam Kriss:
Liberal Israelis are obsessed with this idea: of being a normal country, like Denmark, maybe, or New Zealand. A Jewish state, but not a Jew among states, some special case sequestered in its own private ghetto and subject to different rules. A normal country is at peace with its neighbours and itself. In a normal country, you can hang out on the beach and eat falafel and spraypaint angry messages about veganism in a gentrifying downtown neighbourhood. In a normal country, political disputes are about normal things: the tax rate, the health system, the trains. It’s there in the stuff you hear from Israel’s advocates abroad. Why are you singling out this country, when you should be criticising China or Iran instead? How would you expect any other country to respond to Hamas and its rockets? Because that’s what they want to be. Not a messianic hope. Not a light unto the nations. Not a sign of the End Times. Just a normal country, like anywhere else.
[…] Outside Israel, coverage tends to focus on what this new government might mean for the Palestinians. Even for the most committed Zionists in the diaspora, Israel means the opposite of Palestine. But within Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are simply not a political object. All the major parties agree; the occupation will continue indefinitely. Why bother even talking about it? It hardly matters now; Israel hasn’t really depended on Palestinian labour since 1992, and a big chunk of Palestinian capital ends up being invested in Palestine’s only real growth industry, which is the construction of Jewish settlements.
Only echoes survive. I found myself thinking a lot about the last line of that graffitied manifesto. ‘Go VEGAN_._’ So many liberal Israelis have started veering heavily into their veganism. They have the sense that something terrible is happening, that their ordinary consumer lives are structured by a great hidden cruelty, invisible behind concrete walls, unspoken, unacknowledged, something that seems to very faintly mirror the darkest episodes in recent Jewish history. Something is giving them the guilt. And so they decide that it’s the animals. All those harmless cows and sheep, funnelled into the slaughterhouse to meet the shochet’s knife.
But of course you're more self-aware than those NPCs:
мирных палестинцев, которые станут невольными жертвами этой войны, мне жаль, но если нужно выбирать сторону, то для меня выбор очень легкий, мое сердце с израилем. не только потому, что с этой страной меня связывает множество нитей, но и потому что я малодушно стараюсь ставить на победителя, когда он очевиден.
и это как раз тот случай.
I think what repulses me about Kriss (besides his deformed face, his lisp and his molesting a girl on a bus while telling her she should have sex with him because when his parents he would inherit their medium sized house in a nice London suburb) is this annoying, pusillanimous nature to his handwringing. I don’t think it’s particularly Jewish either, it’s not quite Woody Allen neuroticism, it’s more just this general worship of the weak and rejection of any duty or loyalty to the decisions, collective, of his people - even as he identifies with them, and this, this privileged man unwilling to consider what the price of civilization actually is, or has been.
You were discussing some settler shooting at Palestinians a few days ago, I remember the footage was from B’t selem, funded by Soros via the NIF, the charity itself led by an LGBT activist (whose last job was in fact as head of an LGBT group). This may be how gentile whites feel toward Robin DiAngelo or their other DEI types (I dislike them, and to some extent I hate them and am even scared of them, but I don’t feel a visceral disgust in the same way). Maybe you feel this way towards some Russians, I’m not sure, “our people have enough enemies shouting the bailey to your motte, they do not need your help”.
I think that both charity to the weak and the army boot stepping on the unreasonable rabble are the costs of civilization. Both the existence of Soros and the unapologetic violence of IDF.
Israeli settlers are, in my eyes, no better than Chechens expelling Russians from their homes after the fall of local secular religious cult. Brute assabiyah and Bronze Age greed hiding behind the alleged spiritual superiority do not a civilization make. I don't care if they're marginally better behaved than a people on the chopping board of history: it is not their achievement, and I can all too plainly see how any people can be likewise degraded to the point of their victims, becoming «fair game».
At some point whites have alleged that nobody ever is. I think it's a flimsy claim, perhaps just the cry of the guilty consciousness of recent colonizers and genociders. But if there were an objective progression in the ordeal of civility, I suppose it would lie in the direction of the state pretending that this claim is ironclad and its violators are defectors. Even if your state is all based and ethnonationalist as heck.
Han Chinese got Xinjiang all sorted out. Israelis will probably get Palestine all sorted out. As you know, I'm bearish on the former and bullish on the latter. Neither look like the civilization to me. Just alien civilizations on wholly alien trajectories. And those from those civilizations who react to those philosophies like whites do seem more human than the rest.
People who find a moral equivalence between thugs entering a peaceful village and killing everyone in the streets and in their homes, women, the elderly and children, and the army bombing terrorist targets in dense urban environment and, despite considerable efforts to avoid it, killing civilians in the process, are scum
Israelis totally did do massacres of civilians and terrorism way back when, did they moraly improve or do they just no longer need such crude desperate measures? Who knows.
We did it a bit, Deir Yassin is the most famous incident. But: 1) we stopped back in the 50s; 2) it was on the level of "dozens of men in the same village captured by our soldiers during active war", not hundreds or thousands including women and children; 3) people who did it hid it from their superiors and the public, they didn't boast of it proudly. The modality of "go around a village or a town and just indiscriminately murder everyone, sometimes gruesomely" is something different altogether, and I don't think we did it at all after Biblical times.
Israel has the benefit of a working government and strong institutions, which allows them to have an army to do their dirty work and leave the hands of the civilian settlers who enjoy the fruits of conquest and polite, institutionalized slaughter without blood directly on their hands.
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Notes -
It's interesting reading A.Vorobey (old rationalist blogger, Soviet-Israeli Google SWE, epistemic minor league, math, poetry, puns, very much the same Jewish Rationalist stock our community ultimately descends from, except with biological children) these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified (he's not very connected to its more virile, younger side). Here he is from October 13, independently making the comparison to Dresden:
I suppose that with all those qualifiers about density and scum all it will be no great shame indeed if a hospital or two is vaporized. Or, indeed, if any other necessary price is paid. After all,
We can't have that, can we?
I really appreciated watching him reach his limit of rationality. Seeing his old Ukrainian school bombed by Russian troops affected him emotionally, but he still held on and stuck to "here's what Ukrainian sources say, here's what Russian sources say, here's what I can reasonably discard, here's what's left and that why I on balance support Ukraine". But Hamas has struck (literally) too close to home, so Anatoly switched to "I am an Israeli Jew, of course I support IDF in their heroic struggle against Palestinian terrorism", no rationalization or evaluating if the CTO brings two sides closer to a peaceful resolution needed.
I appreciate this looks like a neat story, but FWIW that's not how it looks from my perspective. I was firmly and openly on Ukraine's side from the beginning (before my school was bombed), I'm even more obviously on Israel's side, but I do try to avoid descending into propaganda on both. In particular, I don't think I affirmed any factual claims favoring "my side" if I didn't feel they were strongly supported by rational standards. This actually didn't work out very well for me so far with Hamas, as the reality turned out to have been worse than I'd assumed, three or four times. E.g. I felt it was very likely that beheaded babies were a throwaway rumor that caught fire and blew up massively for obvious reasons, but after a few days more solid (if not ironclad) support for some beheaded babies appeared (I do not want to go evaluate this more closely).
The degree of emotional involvement is very different, to be sure.
I think the following passage irked me the most (I don't know if you still blog in English, translation mine):
You have to make this comparison at some point. The moral weight of collateral damage might be low, but it's not zero. Sooner or later you have to stop and look at the result:
Drawing moral equivalence in the first example can't be justified, but I don't think that everyone who says "both sides resort to what is effectively terrorism to achieve their goals" in the second example is vile scum, on the contrary, someone who defends the outcome as necessary and inevitable is.
Of course, the real result (both the expected and the actual) will be somewhere between these two.
Haven't blogged in English in years.
If the passage was irksome, it's done its job.
I understand your point. I think it's wrong in a profound way, and I really ought to write a big post about it, but so far it's been eluding me. I also should have phrased the paragraph you quoted a bit better, to sharpen why I think there's no moral equivalence in the specific case we're discussing.
The two outcomes you drew up are how we usually thought about it with individual terrorist attacks coming out of Gaza (or out of the West Bank during the 2nd Intifada for that matter). Downgrade the numbers, say from a thousand innocent people to 5-50. E.g. a suicide terrorist blows up a bus in Tel Aviv in 2001, or a particularly lucky rocket out of Gaza kills a few people in Sderot. In response, the army rounds up some Hamas/Fatah higher-ups, and/or a surgical strike is made, some Hamas VP is blown up, some innocent people die too. If we make too many strikes and kill too many innocent people, the world wags its finger at us for a non-proportionate response. Things quiet down until the next incident.
It's different now, but not everyone's caught on to how it's different. Plenty of people still want to see it as the same thing - perhaps a particularly lucky terrorist attack, more than 1000 victims, wow - so we may be "allowed" to punish Hamas more severely, but surely not to the tune of e.g. 10k civilian victims or more, that's entirely non-proportionate. That's your "second example".
The reason it's different is not (just) that 1300 is a really big number, there's a difference in kind. The logic of attack-response works relatively well for a terrorist attack, which is what, fundamentally? A way of shocking the state/public with violence to get them to agree to something we want, to get them to feel that their way of doing things doesn't grant them the safety they think it does. Possibly also to blackmail them into doing something by threatening hostages. A terrorist attack is finite in scope by design. The terrorists choose the target and kill people to make a flashy point. Oct 7 was different. >2k Hamas militants poured out of Gaza and just started indiscriminately massacring everyone in Israel they could get to (besides some hostages). It wasn't finite in scope. If the army got to them 2 hours later than it did, maybe we'd have 1600 victims and not 1300; some more hours later we'd have 3000 victims, and there's no upper bound due to the Hamas itself. The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them. Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
This is felt very keenly by basically everyone here in Israel. And with a war, the rationale behind a comparison of "they killed 1300, we killed whatever" evaporates. That's not how wars work. Discussing "a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident" sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a "response". It's like if you said in 1941, well, the Japanese killed 2.5k American people at Pearl Harbor, and now the countries are at war. But the US should watch it, because once the no. of the civilian victims in Japan rises too much above 2.5k, maybe 25k or more, that's no longer "proportionate" to the Pearl Harbor attack. The analogy is not great because in PH most deaths were military, but you get what I'm saying, right? This whole line of thinking is absurd. Now it doesn't mean that it makes no sense to discuss civilian victims during the war. There're laws of war, and there's an idea of a disproportionate harm to civilians - but the lack of proportionality here is with respect to the military objectives, not the initial PH incident. You can still discuss whether Hiroshima/Nagasaki were necessary or too cruel etc. if you want, but comparing them to the PH deaths is just bizarrely nonsensical.
That's where we are, except it's worse, because Oct 7 was an indiscriminate massacre way more evil than PH, and we have every reason to believe Hamas wants and aches to do more of those whenever it gets a chance. So we're at war to destroy Hamas, and we do get to be judged by how we treat civilians when Hamas uses them as shields, and if, for example, we were to level a city block w/o warning to take out a single Hamas terrorist and 10k civilians with him, that'd be a pretty clear violation of laws of war and a very evil thing to do. So I'm not giving us carte blanche with respect to civilians and I'm not arguing to just flatten Gaza and kill everyone, and we'd never do it, obviously. But comparisons to the initial massacre in terms of no. of victims just completely miss the point of what's going on.
Maybe it's more obvious when you live in Israel close to Hamas that an attack that is only about getting a higher kill count before you are inevitably killed is something someone would actually plan an execute, but I can't stop thinking that there were additional reasons behind it, just like 9/11 wasn't just about crashing as many airplanes as possible into as many Americans as possible.
I wrote about it elsewhere in the thread, but my working hypothesis is that it's about disrupting the growing learned helplessness of the Palestinians. "You can't do anything against Israel, it can and will bulldoze your olive or orange trees with impunity if you so much as look askance at its settlements, let alone try to fight against them. I guess the only option is to keep my head down and color inside the lines." And then Hamas goes and shows that Israel is not invincible at all, that you can literally bathe in the blood of the innocents if you try hard enough, that like that heron-strangling frog, you should never give up.
There's a comment by @Kinoite in this thread that explains my position better than I could myself. It's a war that also isn't one against a state that also isn't one, depending on what's more convenient. A special military operation, if you want.
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I feel sort of bad about my sneer, Hamas really did an unusually repulsive thing, even by the standards of terrorist acts, and he is still commenting more tepidly than, say, most Ukrainians do wrt Russians. But yes, refreshing to see such clarity.
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An interesting coincidence, as I just looked at the Motte for the first time in a year or so, on a whim. Some notes:
On one hand I agree that this event might not even be the IDF's work (in fact this seems more likely now), and if it were IDF, there may be some sort of error (a spectrum of possible error/indifference options). There really isn't a compelling reason for the IDF to vaporize hospitals, from what we know. And on the surface of it, bombarding a mass of civilians is not so nasty as boasting of creatively butchering them… (or is it? Does it make moral sense to feel very differently?)
I wanted to make the comment to the effect that the most bloodthirsty Zniks were/are also uniformly denying Bucha and other more straightforward war crimes of Russia in another war you cover, as if Russian Armed Forces were inherently more squeamish than them; and it'll be ironic to see the same transpire here. But – sure, IDF to Israeli citizens really is not what RAF is to Russian ones.
On the other, I laugh at the handwringing about unwillingness to accept any "necessary" price. Your normal writing reminds me of that piece by Sam Kriss:
But of course you're more self-aware than those NPCs:
I think what repulses me about Kriss (besides his deformed face, his lisp and his molesting a girl on a bus while telling her she should have sex with him because when his parents he would inherit their medium sized house in a nice London suburb) is this annoying, pusillanimous nature to his handwringing. I don’t think it’s particularly Jewish either, it’s not quite Woody Allen neuroticism, it’s more just this general worship of the weak and rejection of any duty or loyalty to the decisions, collective, of his people - even as he identifies with them, and this, this privileged man unwilling to consider what the price of civilization actually is, or has been.
You were discussing some settler shooting at Palestinians a few days ago, I remember the footage was from B’t selem, funded by Soros via the NIF, the charity itself led by an LGBT activist (whose last job was in fact as head of an LGBT group). This may be how gentile whites feel toward Robin DiAngelo or their other DEI types (I dislike them, and to some extent I hate them and am even scared of them, but I don’t feel a visceral disgust in the same way). Maybe you feel this way towards some Russians, I’m not sure, “our people have enough enemies shouting the bailey to your motte, they do not need your help”.
I think that both charity to the weak and the army boot stepping on the unreasonable rabble are the costs of civilization. Both the existence of Soros and the unapologetic violence of IDF.
Israeli settlers are, in my eyes, no better than Chechens expelling Russians from their homes after the fall of local secular religious cult. Brute assabiyah and Bronze Age greed hiding behind the alleged spiritual superiority do not a civilization make. I don't care if they're marginally better behaved than a people on the chopping board of history: it is not their achievement, and I can all too plainly see how any people can be likewise degraded to the point of their victims, becoming «fair game».
At some point whites have alleged that nobody ever is. I think it's a flimsy claim, perhaps just the cry of the guilty consciousness of recent colonizers and genociders. But if there were an objective progression in the ordeal of civility, I suppose it would lie in the direction of the state pretending that this claim is ironclad and its violators are defectors. Even if your state is all based and ethnonationalist as heck.
Han Chinese got Xinjiang all sorted out. Israelis will probably get Palestine all sorted out. As you know, I'm bearish on the former and bullish on the latter. Neither look like the civilization to me. Just alien civilizations on wholly alien trajectories. And those from those civilizations who react to those philosophies like whites do seem more human than the rest.
Then again I'm also bearish on whites.
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Israelis totally did do massacres of civilians and terrorism way back when, did they moraly improve or do they just no longer need such crude desperate measures? Who knows.
We did it a bit, Deir Yassin is the most famous incident. But: 1) we stopped back in the 50s; 2) it was on the level of "dozens of men in the same village captured by our soldiers during active war", not hundreds or thousands including women and children; 3) people who did it hid it from their superiors and the public, they didn't boast of it proudly. The modality of "go around a village or a town and just indiscriminately murder everyone, sometimes gruesomely" is something different altogether, and I don't think we did it at all after Biblical times.
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Israel has the benefit of a working government and strong institutions, which allows them to have an army to do their dirty work and leave the hands of the civilian settlers who enjoy the fruits of conquest and polite, institutionalized slaughter without blood directly on their hands.
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