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.
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Notes -
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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