naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
13351 thread views
Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
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.
I never heard of this before. They get points that the objective (destroying incriminating information) was directly related to their overall mission, and some points if their claims about the warning are true. The intent here does not seem orthogonal, and if the warnings are to believed then it was somewhat proportional. Falsifying my position would be either if they tried to destroy the documents by flattening the entire hotel, or if their objective was maximizing civilian casualties. Then it would be a matter of assessing the whole movement to see what the typical tactic was. I really have no current opinion on whether the Jewish insurgency was "worth it" or not now, but that's how I would generally go about it if I was trying to answer it.
Had you heard of the Irgun generally, or read about their other actions prior to the founding of Israel? Have you heard about how the soon-to-be Israelis purged Palestinian villages, systematically bombed homes, raped and murdered indiscriminately, and broadcast their atrocities and their threats of worse to come in an attempt to induce the surrounding natives to flee?
Had you heard of Sabra and Shatila, presided over and actively facilitated by an IDF commander who went on to be elected Prime Minister of Israel?
Are you familiar with the settlers generally, how they're armed, how they operate, the sort of abuse and random violence and murder they've spent decades inflicting on their Palestinian neighbors, including women and children, with the tacit and occasionally explicit cooperation of the Israeli government?
Are you familiar with the concept of a "price tag attack"? What's your estimate of the efficacy of Israeli law-enforcement against the perpetrators of such attacks?
Are you familiar with the long, long history of incidentslike this one? I recall you being somewhat off-put by the results of police procedure in the case of George Floyd; How would you compare those to a policy whereby a 13-year-old girl with a backpack can not only be shot on sight while running away, but can be finished off by point-blank rifle fire, the officer who pulled the trigger can be caught lying about the details of the incident, be charged only with minor offenses, and then be acquitted on all charges by the courts? Have you read enough about the general policies and actions of the Israeli security forces to get a feel for whether this sort of behavior and legal outcomes are representative, or just Chinese cardiologists?
Are you familiar with the history of Israeli involvement in the incubation of Hamas itself, in a bid to play divide-and-conquer against the PLO?
The above is by no means exhaustive. You and a great many others here seem to be operating under the assumption that the story requires there to be a good guy. It does not. Both sides can in fact be completely awful, even if one side is relatively rich and sophisticated and produces fancy microchips and CS papers and has lots of influential supporters. Nor is there any requirement that there be a reasonable solution to the situation. It is, in fact, entirely possible to create a situation where the only sane option remaining is to leave, and those who choose to stay deserve what they get.
I do not care what the Palestinians do to the Israelis, and I do not care what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. I am thankful that I live nowhere near either of them, and wish to have as little as possible to do with either of them. It seems to me that they are best considered a cautionary example, not a problem with a solution. Observe from a distance, and learn from their miseries.
[EDIT] ...If the above comes across as hostile, I apologize. If you managed to get this far in life knowing nothing of significance about the Israel/Palestine conflict, I envy you, and encourage you to attempt to maintain your streak.
Sorry for the late reply! No, I have not heard of many of the examples you cite when I wrote my post.
I agree that expanding upon many subjects you mention ("price tag attacks", lack of scrutiny over how the IDF operates, etc.) would have been useful additional context. While I didn't set out to write a comprehensive history with infinite word count, I never intended to gloss over Israel's actions here. I did mention how the IDF lied about its culpability in the Qana massacre, and did mention the extreme Zionists responsible for vigilante retributive violence.
I did not believe that a history of Irgun or Israel's involvement in creating Hamas was all that relevant. I generally am quite dismissive about how relevant sins from however many decades ago should be, regardless of how well documented they are. I'm not claiming you're making this argument, but I'm reminded of the attempts to tar the United States as indelibly tainted because of its original sin of slavery from 1619. A denunciation of slavery's ills in the past does not require a blanket denunciation of America today.
I'm not trying to wriggle out of the standards I outlined and I encourage you to call me out if you think otherwise. When I offered the scenario of Zionist militias relying on terrorism to achieve their goals, I can still denounce their movement at the time as not worth it. But it would be odd for me to denounce Israel's current existence because of events from 75 years ago. Especially since there's more than enough current behavior to denounce.
I completely agree that nothing requires there to be a "good guy" here, and that both sides indeed can be awful. That said, the reason I included "...if I had to pick" was to avoid a common trap within political discourse that essentially boils down to "we can easily solve this problem if everyone just starts behaving rationally". I also wanted to avoid the nihilism that comes along with concluding that "everyone is equally bad". Even if you "pick" Israel as I do, there's nothing preventing anyone from sharply criticizing any of its policies or actions. Remember that it's a comparative ranking, not an absolute one.
I personally find that actions' relevancy degrades sharply in proportion to their age. I addressed the historical events because 1) that's what people claim is relevant and 2) to argue against their relevance. So Hamas did indeed commit some horrendous shit 20 years ago during the second intifada, which illustrates what motivates it. But much more relevant is using the second intifada to explore whether they are motivated by the same ideology (they are) or interested in changing their behavior (they aren't) today. If Hamas had somehow successfully turned Gaza into Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean in recent years, I'm not going to care as much about what the organization did in the past.
Had you heard of "the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel" by shooting up a crowded mosque with an assault rifle, killing 29 and wounding 125, whose grave was subsequently made into a shrine by his fellow settlers?
From your own link:
The international community and the Israeli government condemned the massacre. Israel arrested followers of Meir Kahane, criminalized the Kach movement and affiliated movements as terrorist, forbidding certain Israeli settlers to enter Palestinian towns, and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued rifles
But refuting every claim you posted would take too much time and effort--that's how a Gish gallop works.
Such vandalism also embraces damaging the property, or injuring members of the Israel Police and the Israel Defense Forces....
The "price tag" concept and violence have been publicly rejected by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,[21][22] who have demanded that those responsible be brought to justice.
The settler leadership have "fiercely condemned" the price tag policy,[27] and the vast majority of Yesha rabbis have expressed their reservations about it.[28] According to Shin Bet, the vast majority of the settlers also reject such actions.
estimates of the extent of the perpetrator group vary: one figure calculates that from several hundred to about 3,000 people implement the price tag policy,[15] while a recent analysis sets the figure at a few dozen individuals, organized in small close-knit and well-organised cells[16] and backed by a few hundred right-wing activists.
It is not. The OP decided to get informed about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict immediately after one of the worst things the Palestinians have ever done, and expressed bewilderment at why some people have limited sympathy for the Israelis. I'm sketching out the part of the picture he's missing: The Israelis, as a matter of fact, have done some extremely awful things themselves.
The casualties seem to belie both the idea that it was narrowly targeted and the idea that there was a warning placed. 91 dead, mostly civilians unrelated to the military occupation, does not equate to a narrowly targeted action. Especially when the target was documents, rather than men or materiel. They blew up a hotel, not a barracks, to target a civilian admin office, not a military command post.
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one, and (allegedly) tried to minimize deaths by calling ahead multiple times -- there's a mix of conspiracy theories about who didn't forward what messages. Which is still bad, but if you want really atrocious early Zionist efforts, the Irgun bombings targeting markets as explicitly retribution and random on Arabs are very worth being aware of and absolutely beyond the pale (see here for a fuller list, though it does mix both terror attacks and pseudomilitary ones).
Most of these ranged from merely non-productive to hilariously counterproductive, and Irgun's claim to pioneer pre-attack warnings was both wildly self-serving and sometimes just a lie. I don't think you can honestly claim that they caused Arab unwillingness to recognize Jewish peoples -- the 1920 immediate reaction to the Balfour declaration and Faisal-Weizmann say a lot, despite predating almost all of the violent riots and having little to no detail about what or wear -- but even contemporaneously Irgun (and Lehi) were well-recognized as having cemented and legitimized that response, for very little gain.
More recently, you have the Duma arson and Abu Khdeir torture-murder, or (while not successful) a number of attempted or encouraged attacks on Peace Now activists (aka other Israelis, sometimes Jewish ones). Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems, but non-fatal incidents pretty regularly result in No Suspects Being Found.
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one
Wikipedia has a few different cites saying that at least one of the goals was to destroy paperwork linking the Jewish Agency to attacks, but even if you're skeptical of that, somewhere between half to two-thirds of the hotel had been used for the British Mandate's administration, which was heavily disrupted by the bombing. Clearly not worth the moral sin (or negative publicity), but very separate from the purpose of changing policy by violence (which they did use elsewhere) or violence for its own sake/'revenge' (ditto).
Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems
Well, of the two I linked... for the Duma arson, Amiram Ben-Uliel was found guilty of the Duma arson and sentenced to life imprisonment, though the minor who assisted in planned only got a short sentence (~10 months plus what had been served during the trial). For Abu Khdeir, Yosef Haim Ben-David got a life sentence-plus, one of the unnamed minors got life(ish) and the other 21 years (... probably will end up closer to ten).
((This complaint about too-short sentences isn't specifically tied to the Israel-Palestine stuff; see Schlissel. But obviously there's both more options and more harm in the context of the West Bank.))
There have been failures to convict (or even try or find) some Israeli civilian murderers of clear homicide, and the environment there makes claims to self-defense extremely difficult to treat fairly, so there's a reason I say usually. And the rules of engagement for the IDF specifically are a very bad joke. But there's a lot of summaries of settler violence that try to give the impression that it's a no-bag-limit hunt, and the presence of any convictions makes that hard to support.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I never heard of this before. They get points that the objective (destroying incriminating information) was directly related to their overall mission, and some points if their claims about the warning are true. The intent here does not seem orthogonal, and if the warnings are to believed then it was somewhat proportional. Falsifying my position would be either if they tried to destroy the documents by flattening the entire hotel, or if their objective was maximizing civilian casualties. Then it would be a matter of assessing the whole movement to see what the typical tactic was. I really have no current opinion on whether the Jewish insurgency was "worth it" or not now, but that's how I would generally go about it if I was trying to answer it.
Had you heard of the Irgun generally, or read about their other actions prior to the founding of Israel? Have you heard about how the soon-to-be Israelis purged Palestinian villages, systematically bombed homes, raped and murdered indiscriminately, and broadcast their atrocities and their threats of worse to come in an attempt to induce the surrounding natives to flee?
Had you heard of Sabra and Shatila, presided over and actively facilitated by an IDF commander who went on to be elected Prime Minister of Israel?
Had you heard of "the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel" by shooting up a crowded mosque with an assault rifle, killing 29 and wounding 125, whose grave was subsequently made into a shrine by his fellow settlers?
Are you familiar with the settlers generally, how they're armed, how they operate, the sort of abuse and random violence and murder they've spent decades inflicting on their Palestinian neighbors, including women and children, with the tacit and occasionally explicit cooperation of the Israeli government?
Are you familiar with the concept of a "price tag attack"? What's your estimate of the efficacy of Israeli law-enforcement against the perpetrators of such attacks?
Are you familiar with the long, long history of incidents like this one? I recall you being somewhat off-put by the results of police procedure in the case of George Floyd; How would you compare those to a policy whereby a 13-year-old girl with a backpack can not only be shot on sight while running away, but can be finished off by point-blank rifle fire, the officer who pulled the trigger can be caught lying about the details of the incident, be charged only with minor offenses, and then be acquitted on all charges by the courts? Have you read enough about the general policies and actions of the Israeli security forces to get a feel for whether this sort of behavior and legal outcomes are representative, or just Chinese cardiologists?
Are you familiar with the history of Israeli involvement in the incubation of Hamas itself, in a bid to play divide-and-conquer against the PLO?
The above is by no means exhaustive. You and a great many others here seem to be operating under the assumption that the story requires there to be a good guy. It does not. Both sides can in fact be completely awful, even if one side is relatively rich and sophisticated and produces fancy microchips and CS papers and has lots of influential supporters. Nor is there any requirement that there be a reasonable solution to the situation. It is, in fact, entirely possible to create a situation where the only sane option remaining is to leave, and those who choose to stay deserve what they get.
I do not care what the Palestinians do to the Israelis, and I do not care what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. I am thankful that I live nowhere near either of them, and wish to have as little as possible to do with either of them. It seems to me that they are best considered a cautionary example, not a problem with a solution. Observe from a distance, and learn from their miseries.
[EDIT] ...If the above comes across as hostile, I apologize. If you managed to get this far in life knowing nothing of significance about the Israel/Palestine conflict, I envy you, and encourage you to attempt to maintain your streak.
Sorry for the late reply! No, I have not heard of many of the examples you cite when I wrote my post.
I agree that expanding upon many subjects you mention ("price tag attacks", lack of scrutiny over how the IDF operates, etc.) would have been useful additional context. While I didn't set out to write a comprehensive history with infinite word count, I never intended to gloss over Israel's actions here. I did mention how the IDF lied about its culpability in the Qana massacre, and did mention the extreme Zionists responsible for vigilante retributive violence.
I did not believe that a history of Irgun or Israel's involvement in creating Hamas was all that relevant. I generally am quite dismissive about how relevant sins from however many decades ago should be, regardless of how well documented they are. I'm not claiming you're making this argument, but I'm reminded of the attempts to tar the United States as indelibly tainted because of its original sin of slavery from 1619. A denunciation of slavery's ills in the past does not require a blanket denunciation of America today.
I'm not trying to wriggle out of the standards I outlined and I encourage you to call me out if you think otherwise. When I offered the scenario of Zionist militias relying on terrorism to achieve their goals, I can still denounce their movement at the time as not worth it. But it would be odd for me to denounce Israel's current existence because of events from 75 years ago. Especially since there's more than enough current behavior to denounce.
I completely agree that nothing requires there to be a "good guy" here, and that both sides indeed can be awful. That said, the reason I included "...if I had to pick" was to avoid a common trap within political discourse that essentially boils down to "we can easily solve this problem if everyone just starts behaving rationally". I also wanted to avoid the nihilism that comes along with concluding that "everyone is equally bad". Even if you "pick" Israel as I do, there's nothing preventing anyone from sharply criticizing any of its policies or actions. Remember that it's a comparative ranking, not an absolute one.
Much of your OP was spent discussing the relevant sins of the Arabs/Palestinians, though.
I personally find that actions' relevancy degrades sharply in proportion to their age. I addressed the historical events because 1) that's what people claim is relevant and 2) to argue against their relevance. So Hamas did indeed commit some horrendous shit 20 years ago during the second intifada, which illustrates what motivates it. But much more relevant is using the second intifada to explore whether they are motivated by the same ideology (they are) or interested in changing their behavior (they aren't) today. If Hamas had somehow successfully turned Gaza into Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean in recent years, I'm not going to care as much about what the organization did in the past.
I was thinking moreso about the list of Arab wars with Israel up to and including the (first) Yom Kippur War.
Historical events are much more relevant when used to analyze the ideologies and culture at play, instead of using them to tally up culpabilities.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This post is a Gish gallop.
From your own link:
But refuting every claim you posted would take too much time and effort--that's how a Gish gallop works.
"Price tag attacks" seem to be a similar herring:
More options
Context Copy link
It is not. The OP decided to get informed about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict immediately after one of the worst things the Palestinians have ever done, and expressed bewilderment at why some people have limited sympathy for the Israelis. I'm sketching out the part of the picture he's missing: The Israelis, as a matter of fact, have done some extremely awful things themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The casualties seem to belie both the idea that it was narrowly targeted and the idea that there was a warning placed. 91 dead, mostly civilians unrelated to the military occupation, does not equate to a narrowly targeted action. Especially when the target was documents, rather than men or materiel. They blew up a hotel, not a barracks, to target a civilian admin office, not a military command post.
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one, and (allegedly) tried to minimize deaths by calling ahead multiple times -- there's a mix of conspiracy theories about who didn't forward what messages. Which is still bad, but if you want really atrocious early Zionist efforts, the Irgun bombings targeting markets as explicitly retribution and random on Arabs are very worth being aware of and absolutely beyond the pale (see here for a fuller list, though it does mix both terror attacks and pseudomilitary ones).
Most of these ranged from merely non-productive to hilariously counterproductive, and Irgun's claim to pioneer pre-attack warnings was both wildly self-serving and sometimes just a lie. I don't think you can honestly claim that they caused Arab unwillingness to recognize Jewish peoples -- the 1920 immediate reaction to the Balfour declaration and Faisal-Weizmann say a lot, despite predating almost all of the violent riots and having little to no detail about what or wear -- but even contemporaneously Irgun (and Lehi) were well-recognized as having cemented and legitimized that response, for very little gain.
More recently, you have the Duma arson and Abu Khdeir torture-murder, or (while not successful) a number of attempted or encouraged attacks on Peace Now activists (aka other Israelis, sometimes Jewish ones). Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems, but non-fatal incidents pretty regularly result in No Suspects Being Found.
Can you provide sources for these claims?
Wikipedia has a few different cites saying that at least one of the goals was to destroy paperwork linking the Jewish Agency to attacks, but even if you're skeptical of that, somewhere between half to two-thirds of the hotel had been used for the British Mandate's administration, which was heavily disrupted by the bombing. Clearly not worth the moral sin (or negative publicity), but very separate from the purpose of changing policy by violence (which they did use elsewhere) or violence for its own sake/'revenge' (ditto).
Well, of the two I linked... for the Duma arson, Amiram Ben-Uliel was found guilty of the Duma arson and sentenced to life imprisonment, though the minor who assisted in planned only got a short sentence (~10 months plus what had been served during the trial). For Abu Khdeir, Yosef Haim Ben-David got a life sentence-plus, one of the unnamed minors got life(ish) and the other 21 years (... probably will end up closer to ten).
((This complaint about too-short sentences isn't specifically tied to the Israel-Palestine stuff; see Schlissel. But obviously there's both more options and more harm in the context of the West Bank.))
There have been failures to convict (or even try or find) some Israeli civilian murderers of clear homicide, and the environment there makes claims to self-defense extremely difficult to treat fairly, so there's a reason I say usually. And the rules of engagement for the IDF specifically are a very bad joke. But there's a lot of summaries of settler violence that try to give the impression that it's a no-bag-limit hunt, and the presence of any convictions makes that hard to support.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link