naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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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.
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.
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Notes -
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.
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