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Notes -
Why Not Simply: Gaza, some more.
As I understand it,
It seems that one way to defuse Hamas' tactic of using a civilian populace as an all-purpose shield and moral justification is to separate Hamas-ans from Gazans, prevent the Gazan class from providing aid to Hamas, prevent the Gazan class from attacking Israel, and then avoid mistreating the Gazan class. In other words, stop-the-world filtration:
(Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now)
I don't understand why Israel isn't doing this, and prefers to do horrific things to civilians and take the international consequences on the chin. Is it just because it's reinventing concentration/filtration camps, and not even Israel can handle the international blowback of that tactic at that scale? Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical? Is the needed bandwidth of processing humans not doable within Israeli manpower constraints? Do they simply not care that much? Do Gazans prefer to live freely in the current war zone that much more than food, board, and light prison regimentation? Is "after combat operations end" too fuzzy of a line to trust? Is there no trust in being released after internment, or good conditions during?
The issue that many commenters face when looking at the Israel/Palestine war is they see what looks like a conflict occurring in 2024 between a first world country and a third world country. That is not what is happening. What they are seeing is a stone-age tribe with nuclear weapons fighting another stone-age tribe without nuclear weapons. The only reason the first tribe hasn't used their nuclear weapons is because there is sufficient international pressure that the stone-age barbarians realize they have to at least pretend to act like a first world nation.
This is a problem. Because a stone-age conflict cannot be solved by a modern "everyone let's just sit down and talk about it" post-World War Two UN-led kumbaya session. The Israelis want a chunk of land that roughly corresponds to Israel. The Palestinians want a chunk of land that roughly corresponds to Israel. This is an intractable difference. It cannot be solved by "well in Area A the Israelis will have control, and in Area B there will be joint control, and in Area C the Palestinians will have control" because neither side wants the other to have any area of control. They want their land, and the other tribe of stone-age barbarians can fuck right off. This exact conflict has played out in the same way time and time again. One group of tribals hits the other group of tribals in the head. The tribals that are a lot closer to modern westerners are much better at organized violence, and so they beat the shit out of the other group of tribals, but are stopped from actually winning the war at the last minute by a bunch of modern humans who are horrified at the idea of stone age barbarism. How uncivilized. How savage. Tsk tsk. Can't have that. No no. Stop that. So instead of actually winning the goddamn war in the way that stone-age barbarians usually win wars (insert Conan quote here), both tribes retire to their homes and gear up for the next try.
Until the Israelis are driven into the sea, or the Palestinians are driven into the desert, this conflict will continue. Frankly, as soon as the Powers That Be are sufficiently distracted by a big enough crisis elsewhere in the world (Russia finally trips over its own dick and gets into a shooting war with NATO, China invades Taiwan, India and Pakistan finally decide they've had enough of the other existing) the Israelis are probably going to drive the Gazans into the Sinai and let the Egyptians deal with that headache. The Egyptians, being another group of stone-age tribal barbarians, will deal with an
invadingmigrating group of stone-age barbarians the same way that stone-age barbarians always deal with migrating groups of other stone-age barbarians. They'll kill the men, integrate the women, and raise the children as their own. The West Bank tribe, seeing what happened to the Gaza tribe, will either decide to go balls to the wall and get massacred and driven into Jordan, or quietly surrender and accept their inevitable destruction. My money is on the former. Israel, as they try to look like a nice modern civilized first-world country instead of a stone-age tribe, will say "sorry" for a few years, maybe pay reparations in a few decades, and that will be that. The other powers in the region will shake their fists and say "curse those fucking jews!" while quietly thanking Allah that they no longer have to pay lip service to Arab Solidarity. Israeli-Arab relations will be set back by about twenty years or so, but eventually everyone will agree that while it's a shame that things happened the way they did there's no point in holding onto old grudges so they might as well normalize relations and start trading again. After all those (Allah-cursed infidel) jews make some really nice toys so might as well buy them.More options
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Israel is not very big. It’s a tiny and densely populated country and concentration camps need a lot of space and manpower that Israel doesn’t have.
It’s also not really doing horrific things to Gazan civilians. Israel isn’t quite as good about treatment of civilians as the US, but it’s clearly in the same ballpark- and considering the region, that’s saying something. Israel will get international criticism no matter what they do, simply because it’s Israel. Setting up concentration camps would also be inaccurately labeled genocide, is my point.
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That's a war crime, you don't get to kill non-combatants who refuse to surrender to you. Their non-combatant status is not suppressed unless the military advantage of killing them is high enough.
Thanks for weighing in. I think I acknowledged this, that's the bit about "Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now". The current Israeli actions also implement war crime criteria pretty well, so clearly they're up for that class of action either covertly or accepting it via negligence. The point of the question is that my proposal seems to be strictly superior in both humanitarian and logistical terms but isn't being taken, so I'm looking for reasons the that seeming isn't correct.
If Israel's outright policy is to commit a war crime, then they're playing a much more dangerous game which could result in the US applying much heavier pressure. It's unlikely they're going to go that route, doubly so when it would give their enemies a PR bonanza.
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Israel tries to bear as little responsibility as possible for the lives of Gazans.
As soon as it starts feeding them or housing them, everyone will consider this their responsibility forever and ever.
As soon as it moves them to a filtration camp somewhere in Israeli-claimed and controlled territory, Gazans will refuse to move out. People all over the world will protest their expulsion, saying, "by filtering them you've proven these people want peace, let them return to their homes in Ashkelon and Sderot".
So the only thing Israel is willing to do is maintain filtration barriers on the territory of Gaza and let Gazans, the UN or fairy unicorns solve any humanitarian issues in whatever way they see fit.
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They are essentially trying to do this, but it takes time to set up.
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I think this. I mean, it's hardly even a reinvention - what you are describing is literally a concentration camp as used by the Spanish in Cuba, the British in the Boer War, and a dozen other places. Historically, the only nation that was ever able to pull something like that off without mass starvation was America with their Japanese internment camps. I very much doubt Israel could do anywhere near as well.
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Outgroup homogenity bias. Iran is Shia, Hamas is Sunni. I think Hamas effectively gets more funding from USA than from Iran.
Thanks for the correction. My understanding was that IRGC more or less supported anything destabilizing Israeli presence, continuation, and competence, lots of casual internet sources seem to back it up. Is that an emphasized element of the total truth, not mutually exclusive with your claim? Is your claimed support from the US leakage from aid efforts, or how's it work? I can't see it being a first-class element of US foreign policy.
Not mutually exclusive. Yes, I mean leakage from aid effort, but US officials knew in advance that it would leak.
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Hamas does get some operational support from the IRGC, but less so than Shia proxies like Hezb and the Houthis, especially after Sunni militias were on the anti-Shiite side in Syria.
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Because your plan is nonsense? The distinction between Hamas and Gazans is thin, at best. More realistically it is nonexistant for most Gazan adults. Plus, the surrendering people will inevitably contain hordes of Hamas agents, even if my position that most Gazans are basically Hamas happens to be wrong. So at best you'd end up doing nothing, more likely youd be exposing your civilian administrators of these camps to endless violence from fake surrenders.
Plus, I argue with some of your premises. Hamas is a highly legitimate government of Gaza. Few governments on earth so tightly hew to their people's political positions.
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The Palestinians and Israelis hate eachother, what you're seeing is hatred. You see these incidents where the Israeli soldiers shoot school children in the back and get acquitted:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
Or when Hamas suicide bombers blow up Israelis. Doing horrific things to civilians is a goal in and of itself. They've been doing this kind of thing for ages, shooting unarmed protestors, pregnant women. It's hatred.
The Palestinians resent getting kicked off their land, they resent getting bombed, gunned down, getting their water stolen/filled with toxic waste, demolished houses... There are these giant lists of complaints they have: https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
Why would Palestinians trust Israel when they've spent decades suppressing and impoverishing them, so as to maintain and expand Israeli territory and control? There is a massive abyss of negative trust between both sides. Furthermore, Israel knows they aren't going to lose US support, America's leaders tout their unconditional love for Israel to anyone who'll listen. Trump was on Truth Social the other day saying he's far more pro-Israeli than Biden, who has himself been sending billions in extra military aid. So what cost does Israel pay for behaving heavy-handedly? The US will clean up the mess, they'll deal with Yemen and anyone else who tries to target Israel.
Plus there've been swirling allegations that Netanyahu helped Qatar to support Hamas - dividing Palestinians between the Authority and Hamas helps prevent them forming a state. Divide and conquer tactics.
Palestinians aren’t impoverished under Israeli rule. For the most part they have a quality of life similar to other Levantine Arabs with their population performance on standardized tests.
What's the source on that?
Median incomes, GDP/capita, life expectancy and so on relative to other non-oil-rich Arab states.
Which states are we comparing to? I don't know what that list you're talking about looks like.
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Palestinians have had very healthy birth rates and population has grown faster than Israel. It’s a very big stretch to say they are impoverished. Impoverished perhaps relative to Western Society. Not impoverished by their ethnic cohort in other nations.
Palestinian GDP PPP is about $5700 https://tradingeconomics.com/palestine/gdp-per-capita-ppp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)_per_capita
Their Arab neighbours in non-oily Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt are on at least twice their income! Palestinians are basically Arabs, it's hard to see how they could be Sub-Saharan tier in HBD terms.
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What sort of argument is this? The correlation between birth rate and affluence is pretty much a straight negative globally. Are you going to argue Nigerians in the US are poorer than Nigerians in Nigeria if the former have lower birth rates?
The correlation between birth rate and affluence is inverted, but in times of genuine famine and starvation birthrates do fall because women’s caloric intake is literally not enough to grow a child. This is widely historically shown, lean years saw fewer births well before contraception, with often greater than 50% falls.
Sure, but how intense does starvation have to get for this effect to overpower the fertility penalty of affluence and stability? Most African countries were outperforming industrial ones even in peak famine conditions.
I think it’s useful to put boundaries on things when people hyperventilate.
“Impoverish” feels to me like it’s doing that.
They were doing nothing close to starvation level fertility decline
They are likely doing as well as any other situated Arab group that isn’t an elite sitting on oil money. Better than many
If Israel never existed I have extreme doubt they would have been wealthier than they were under current arrangements
They are much poorer than they would be if they were Jew loving, eliminated any desire to harm Jews, and worked with the high HBD and foreign money Israel for economic development
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If you take possession of Gazans then you are now seen as responsible for anything that goes wrong. If Hamas is in possession then they are responsible.
I also found this tweet interesting
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has a message for the 'Ceasefire Now' people and its 🔥🔥🔥
“One of the things that I have found somewhat absent from the [media] coverage is that what we are talking about in the first phase is women, elderly, and wounded civilians.
Those who would like to see a ceasefire in Gaza. A ceasefire is on the table today for six weeks to be built on into something more enduring if Hamas would simply release women, wounded, and elderly.“
https://twitter.com/avivaklompas/status/1767692156179726699?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
So when things are real this administration seems to know what a women is?
I believe it’s Hanania who has made comments that if you take a liberal woman and asks her beliefs on a host of woke topics she will answer correctly. But then make a comment about her weight and she will become upset and apparently all women aren’t beautiful, etc.
And for the record I 100% think women should get special treatment in times of war.
Life imitates art: bill_burr_bullets_hurt_me_too.mp4
Hmm, don’t know if it’s Hanania-related or not. But in crimethink-spheres, it’s long been a meme/pasta that liberal women generally aren’t too pleased if you compliment them for being passing transwomen.
I disagree. Rules applied evenly are preferable to rules applied selectively. If women have the rights and status of men, they can #GirlBoss and meatshield on the front-lines alongside men.
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He is talking about the women, elderly and wounded among Israeli citizens being held hostage by Hamas, right? Or so I hope?
Because if he is talking about Palestinian civilians, that's absolutely insane. The women and children living in the Gaza strip live there. Why should Hamas kick them out of their own country, just to make it easier for Israel to massacre the remaining adult male Palestinians (regardless of Hamas affiliation) without looking like the bad guy?
Even talking about hostages it seems like a frankly insane demand to make: “Hey, we want to murder all of you, but if we kill a few hostages in the process, that would make us look like the bad guys. Crazy, right? So can you do us a big favor and release your hostages so we can go ahead and kill you all without any repercussions? Thanks, Hamas! ... Oh, you refuse? How unreasonable of you!”
Israel doesn’t have a mandate to kill Jew loving Palestinians. They would be forced to make peace immediately if Hamas rebranded to Jew loving Palestinians and the first step in that direction would be to release the hostages.
Palestinians don't just want peace, they also want independence. We both know that if Palestinians turned Jew-loving overnight, released their hostages and laid down their arms, what happens next is not that Israel withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territories, but rather that Israel will conquer the entire country (as Netanyahu has already said he intends to), and Palestinians will live under Jewish rule forever.
All armed conflicts can be resolved peacefully if one side is willing to give up all of their claims. But would you suggest this in any other conflict? Should the Ukrainians hand their country to Putin for the sake of peace, at the cost of their freedom? Should Taiwan give their country to the CCP? Should America have accepted British rule instead of establishing their independence?
And let's be clear: the source of the conflict has nothing to do with whether Palestinians love or hate Jews. The inhabitants of all surrounding countries hate the Jews just as much as the Palestinians do, but Israel is not occupying them, because Israel does not want their land.
The reason Israel is occupying territories like Jerusalem and the West Bank is that the Jews consider those part of their God-given holy land. It doesn't matter whether the citizens living in that land love or hate the Jews; the Jews want to conquer that land either way.
Ukrainians lost a lot of freedoms while Ukraine fights Putin's Russia. I heard Ukrainian blogger speculating that Ukrainian males would be never let to travel outside, even if Russia is defeated this year, because once they be allowed out, several or more millions will leave immediately. Ukrainians also don't have freedom to say "Let Putin annex all Ukraine, and then we can oust Putin with less human causalties".
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The first paragraph is false, they have been offered numerous peace deals with self-rule. Turned them down. Everything you have said they want they have been offered.
You are really making it sound like they are just Nazis. Nazis too could have just had Germany but wanted other peoples land and more. Palestinians want Israel not to exists and remove them from the Arab world.
All the people now living in Israel and Palestine weren’t even there when all this started. It was mostly uninhabited land. In 1922 a total of 757k people live in Palestine Mandate of which 78% were Muslim. Nobody living there today can claim ownership on what was essentially abandon land.
Also it’s false that the rest of the Arab world hates them. SA sees them as a key ally in the development of the country and essential to their long term plan of not being just an oil state.
I want Leonardo DiCaprio’s gf, that doesn’t mean I get to kill him and kidnap her and lock her in my basement as a reasonable demand.
As long as Palestinians demand is the removal of Israel then Israel has a valid claim to fully evict Palestinians.
If that demand changes Palestinians have legal claims to reasonable divide of territory.
And you did a lot of bad whataboutism comparing Palestinians to other conflicts. The Palestinian claim to all of Israel is much more like the Russian claims to Ukraine that the people on those lands centuries ago were more like themselves and therefore it’s still their land.
Not true. In Oslo, the Palestinians agreed to recognize Israel and accepted only limited self-governance for Palestine, but it was Israel that reneged on the deal, once they realized that it would require actually withdrawing their occupation forces from Palestinian territories.
Again, see the Oslo accords, where the Palestinian leaders agreed to recognize Israel in exchange for partial autonomy in the Palestinian territories, but Israel reneged since they realized they can just keep occupying Palestinian land indefinitely without any repercussions.
So it's clearly not true that all Palestinians want total destruction of Israel, and aren't willing to compromise. That's just a lie spread by Zionists because it makes it easier to justify occupying Palestinian territories indefinitely.
The comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is a little awkward but there is some truth to what you say: just like Germany could thrive within its 1938 borders, Israel, too, could thrive within the 1947 borders, but just like Hitler felt the Germans were entitled to a larger country, Zionists believed that the Jews had a god-given right to rule Jerusalem and the West Bank, and since they had the military power to take them by force, they decided to just take Palestinian lands by force.
That's more than twice the number of people living in e.g. Iceland today, and I doubt anyone would call Iceland “uninhabited” or “abandoned”. And by your own admission: there was no significant Jewish presence in that area either (166k by your count) so it's not like the Jews have a better claim to the entire territory.
The Oslo Accords ended because of suicide bombings and the start of the Oslo Accord. Obviously Israel stop withdrawing when the bombing started. That was intentional dishonest (there was also a Jewish shooter).
Sorry you are just behaving in bad faith. When your very first paragraph leaves out very key details it’s not worth discussing things at all with you.
I meant the Palestinians as Nazis trying to kill ethnicities they don’t like to remove them from land.
80-100k Jew in Palestinian Mandate. They were both there but both in very low population.
People disagreeing with you, not seeing the world the way you do, even "leaving out key details" that you think are relevant to their argument, does not mean they are behaving in bad faith. Saying someone is "behaving in bad faith" rhymes with "You're lying," and there is a pretty high bar to get away with accusing people of that just because they're taking a position you think is wrong. You are allowed to point out that their arguments are bad or that they "left out key details." You are not allowed to, as you are wont to do, simply fling around accusations that your opponents are liars arguing in bad faith.
Normally a comment like this would just get a warning. As attacks go, "You're arguing in bad faith" isn't that bad. But looking at your record, you have 13 warnings and temp bans, and zero AAQCs. You're just a bad poster who pretty much posts nothing but shitting on your enemies. You contribute nothing useful or insightful, you're not clever, you don't offer an interesting point of view, you're just another pure culture warrior who's here to drop turds in the discourse.
One week ban, expect steep escalation in the future.
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Yes, Hamas tried to frustrate the peace process, but so did Orthodox Jews. You conveniently forget to mention that the PM of Israel was assassinated, not by Hamas, but by a Jewish extremist.
This was the moment where moderates on both sides should have stood their ground and enacted the two-state solution. But Israelis didn't want to do it. They reneged on their promise of withdrawing from Palestinian territories.
This of course completely destroyed the support Palestinian moderates had among the people, because it made it clear to the Palestinians that the Jews cannot be trusted and cannot be bargained with. Israel drove Palestinians into the arms of Hamas. And of course that's exactly how people like Netanyahu like it: the more extreme Palestinians are, and the more they support Hamas, the easier it is to justify killing Palestinians and annexing Palestinian lands.
Don't throw baseless accusations around. I'm arguing in good faith, and if you are too, you should be able to support your position with arguments, instead of personal attacks.
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Given that the public terms of the ceasefire Hamas rejected was predicated on 1) Proof of life for the remaining hostages and 2) releasing the hostages, that is the plain reading of the tweet. Hamas was unable or unwilling to provide proof of life for any of the remaining hostages.
If Hamas agreed to release the hostages, then there would have been a ceasefire for at least six weeks, possibly forever.
Again, how is that supposed to be an enticing offer? “Hey Hamas, we want to murder all of you, but we can't do it while you have hostages! So we propose that you release the hostages, and in return we promise to wait six weeks before we murder you.”
From one perspective, what Hamas would get from a ceasefire is time to rearm, reorganize, and thus, once the ceasefire ends, make it harder for Israel to continue pushing their shit in. We'll never know that counterfactual for sure, though, it seems like.
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I'm pretty certain it's this? I get the sense that mass incarceration + deprogramming + filtering out fifth columnists would be about a million times more expensive than just shooting everyone. And also wouldn't work. Western governments at least try to filter their immigrants for "not psycho killers" but lo and behold, you still get machete beheadings and trucks of peace every other month on the streets of London & Paris.
Say what you want about just making political undesirables dig their own trench and then shooting them en masse in the back of the head a'la Katyn, but that is at least affordable.
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Israel's and Gaza's populations are 9.3 and 2.3 million respectively. There are too many Gazans, relative to Israel's population, for this to be practical. It takes enormous amounts of manpower to receive, process, and attend to so many civilians.
Secondly, by doing this Israel would become liable for the well-being of the Gazans, providing them not only food and shelter but medical attention as needed. At the moment there is widespread deprivation among the Gazans, for which Israel is receiving heavy criticism, but Israel has a range of excuses - we can't physically reach the civilians to help them, or that Hamas is stealing whatever aid we send, etc. These excuses stop working once Israel takes these people into custody. That is not a burden Israel can carry, given their small population and limited resources.
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I think you underestimate the amount of support Hamas has among the regular Gazans. And the groups that are more popular than Hamas are usually other Islamic terrorist groups. And underestimate how much those regular Gazans hate Israel and would be uncooperative in the concentration camps, they wouldn't just be passively grateful for food and shelter, they'd be getting into fights. And those fights would be terrible PR- "Israeli soldiers beat civilian in concentration camp!", regardless about any context of if the guy needed to be beat down.
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My vote is on the similarity to concentration camps. People in general, especially people far away hearing news reports about events in other countries, are not utilitarians. 10000 civilians dead looks pretty similar to 100000 civilians dead, but the words "concentration camp" with some lurid descriptions gets people outraged. I suspect that the amount of international blowback from your plan would be more than the amount of international blowback they're getting now, even if the actual harms were much lesser.
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As far as I can tell this is exactly what Israel is trying to do with the whole "We're going to flatten northern Gaze, so everyone who lives there should grab whatever they can carry and walk south" strategy.
Gaza is dense and Israel is small. I don't think there's physically enough room to sequester the Gazans in isolated reservations. That strategy worked for the Americans with the Indians, but America is huge and full of open space. The most effective tool of separation is a hundred miles of empty land, populated by nothing but rodents and without so much as a shed to hide behind.
If Israel had their own equivalent of Utah in which to banish their problematic religious nuts, they wouldn't have this problem.
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You answer your own question, or at least provide one answer. If the international blowback to putting Gaza civilians in concentration camps would worse than not doing so, there's no reason to do it.
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