War between Hamas and Israel

[N.E. Brigand]

I do expect the good guys to do everything they resaonably can to uphold humanitarian standards.

Meanwhile in the U.S., a Republican representative* has "Introduce(d) (A) Bill to Expel Palestinians from the United States."

That's not my mischaracterization but the actual announcement and headline directly from the senator, Ryan Zinke of Montana.

*Edited to identify Zinke as a representative rather than a senator. I would add that he was also a member of Donald Trump's cabinet.

[N.E. Brigand]

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, today gave a long and reportedly blustery speech in which he nonetheless seemed to distance Hezbollah from Hamas.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new poll of Israelis finds they believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should:

47% -- resign after the war
29% -- resign immediately
18% -- remain as P.M.

So that's 76% who think Netanyahu should (eventually) go.

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Fox News was filming outside an elementary school in Israel when a Hamas rocket struck. Lots of shrapnel but no casulaties.

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CNN: Israel says it bombed an ambulance because it was actually being driven by Hamas soldiers (violating international law), but the Red Cross says it was not.

[Frelga]

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, today gave a long and reportedly blustery speech in which he nonetheless seemed to distance Hezbollah from Hamas.

There is possibly overly hopeful chatter over it, as it's becoming clear that none of Hamas's so called allies is going to wage war in their support.

Also, Nasrallah means "she pooped here" in Russian, and I twitch every time I hear the name.

[Alatar]

Not to be argumentative but who exactly are the good guys in this case? It seems to have been definitively decided in the US Media but not so much outside of the US

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Right now, I don't really think there are any "good guys," just bad actors and a lot of innocent victims on both sides.

[Frelga]

This is not high fantasy, you don't get orcs on one side and noble heroes on the other.

However, I would venture to say that the side that methodically massacred its way through 1400 people, gang raping teenagers in front of their grandparents, burning babies alive, kidnapping children as young as 2, is probably not good guys. The side that spent 2 years planning that raid, using a well-equipped network of tunnels, and had done nothing to protect their own people - no bomb shelters, evacuation routes, stockpiles of food and medicine, agreements with the allies that supply their weapons to take refugees, nothing except massing civilians around its military installations to be human shields and preventing them from escaping, is probably not good guys. The side that places rocket batteries in hospitals, mosques, youth centers play grounds, the side whose billionaire leaders live in luxury in Qatar while international aid disappears into their pockets and from that safety threaten to repeat the attack again and again , that somehow never runs out of fuel and ammo, the side that knew they would need images of Gazan children dying to take the world's eyes of the images of the victims of October 6 attack - those are not good guys.

Netanyahu is also not a good guy, and he carries a great deal of blame for how this war started. But if you put a good guy in charge of that war now, what would they do? Sit down and let Hamas keep shelling Tel Aviv with impunity from behind their human wall, abandon hostages, and wait for them to come over murdering again? Send your soldiers door to door, losing them by the thousand?

This is war. It is imperative for both sides to minimize civilian casualties. One side is doing everything it can to rack them up on both sides at once. The other should do more to protect Gazan civilians, but I have no idea how, when their own government won't.

It was nice for Aragorn, there were no civilians in Mordor. Or may that was just Gondorian propaganda.

[N.E. Brigand]

Columnist Matthew Gertz observes something about the leading responses to these two tweets from Sen. Elizabeth Warren:



The first visible reply to Warren opposing Islamophobia is "A Jewish man was murdered in L.A. today and this is your statement?"

The first visible reply to Warren opposing Antisemitism is "and what about the 4,000 dead Palestinian kids?"

In both cases, most of the other top replies are in the same vein as the responses I've cited.

Where are all the people who criticizing Warren for one post when she makes the other? Shouldn't we at least see the first respondent cheering the second post and the second respondent supporting the first post? (Of course, it would be better still if everyone supported both messages.) Social media is encouraging the worst in human nature.

[N.E. Brigand]

[3] Netanyahu is also not a good guy, and he carries a great deal of blame for how this war started. But if you put a good guy in charge of that war now, what would they do? Sit down and let Hamas keep shelling Tel Aviv with impunity from behind their human wall, abandon hostages, and wait for them to come over murdering again? Send your soldiers door to door, losing them by the thousand?

[2] This is war. It is imperative for both sides to minimize civilian casualties. One side is doing everything it can to rack them up on both sides at once. The other should do more to protect Gazan civilians, but I have no idea how, when their own government won't.

[1] It was nice for Aragorn, there were no civilians in Mordor. Or maybe that was just Gondorian propaganda.

(1) Tolkien himself in letters says the world is more complicated now than it was in The Lord of the Rings. I can't say whether he really believed the world once featured more clear-cut battles between good and evil (nor can I say whether that's actually true), or whether he made a conscious choice to simplify certain matters so he could focus on others, as all artists do, or both. But in the story as presented, the civilian population in Mordor -- apparently a mostly enslaved populace in a society perhaps structured along the lines of the antebellum south in the U.S. -- lives far to the south of its armed borders, out of the way of conflict. Furthermore, Aragorn's army confronts the enemy outside of Mordor. All he does inside Mordor, as far as we are told, is some clean-up, including freeing the aforementioned slaves and ceding to them the land where they live. There is mention in the appendices of Aragorn and Éomer leading the armies of Gondor and Rohan against later enemies in the south and east. That probably got messier. In the main text of The Lord of the Rings, the only civilian populations under fire seem to be those whose cause is just.

(2) Is there even a real government in Gaza? Is there anything that the civilian population could even overthrow, if they were so inclined?

(3) New editorial in Haaretz: "Just leave, Netanyahu." First sentence: "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to his evil ways, inciting and sowing destruction."

[Frelga]

I think the only thing everyone in the world can agree on right now is that Netanyahu has to go. Preferably to jail.

Technically, Hamas is the government. They got elected in 2006, and violently kicked out Fatah from Gaza in 2007. I have no idea how day to day life gets managed, but Hamas leaders have recently said that they do not feel responsibility for the lives of the population in Gaza.

Here is the video of the Egyptian TV Host Ibrahim Eissa going on a rant about this. I find myself in agreement with most of what he said.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Washington Post cites experts who say that Israel's military apparently "a tolerance for civilian casualties which is orders of magnitude greater" than the U.S. military did when attacking ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

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Edited to add: Last night Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel would have to occupy Gaza. The Biden Administration is not pleased.

[Sunsilver]

I think the only thing everyone in the world can agree on right now is that Netanyahu has to go. Preferably to jail.

Technically, Hamas is the government. They got elected in 2006, and violently kicked out Fatah from Gaza in 2007. I have no idea how day to day life gets managed, but Hamas leaders have recently said that they do not feel responsibility for the lives of the population in Gaza.

It seems that neither Israel nor Hamas has any regard for the civilian population of Gaza!

[Alatar]

I don't think anyone's claiming that Hamas are "good guys". Its more that the circumstances which breeds people like Hamas are of Israeli making. Nobody thought the IRA were "good guys" but they existed and thrived because of the appalling discrimination in Northern Ireland. This is probably why Irish people tend to sympathise with the Palestinians in Gaza.

I genuinely don't know enough about the circumstances to have an informed opinion, but there's definitely a sense here that there are parallels to be seen.

Note: Disagreeing with Israeli policy does not make one anti-Semitic.

[RoseMorninStar]

I have avoided responding in this topic because I can barely keep up with what is happening in our own country and I find what has happened in Gaza/Israel (and other places around the globe) so overwhelmingly sad. However, I found it interesting that that Alatar has made the same comparison, in regards to the conflict in Northern Ireland, that a video I watched yesterday made.

[Frelga]

Meanwhile, Hamas rockets have hit Israel’s Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon for the 3rd time in the last month.

This was widely reported and condemned... I mean completely ignored by the media.

[Sunsilver]

I have often thought of Canada's problems with the FLQ in Quebec during the 1960's, in relation to the current crisis, though it's not a great parallel. After many bombings, mostly mailbox bombs, during the 1960s, the FLQ kidnapped two men, and murdered one of them, prompting Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures act to bring them to justice.

There were definitely legitimate grievances - Quebec's distinct culture and language were being pushed out by the country's Anglo majority. Things calmed down when the Parti de Liberation Quebecois came to power, and passed laws that made sure Quebec's language and culture were preserved and protected.

What I see happening with Israel and the Palestinians is that the Israelis fear Hamas wants to destroy them. Past persecution has amplified this fear. I've seen this from Jewish friends on FB - they are really frightened, and some have family members that were kidnapped by Hamas. And the current rise in anti-Semitic incidents, especially in America has amplified their fear.

And the Palestinians also fear Israel wants to destroy THEM.

I think the only true way to get a lasting peace is for each side to say to the other: "You have right to exist. You have a right to your language and culture. We do not want to destroy you."

It seems impossible at the moment, but history shows it can happen. South Africa put an end to apartheid. The discrimination in Northern Ireland is mostly a thing of the past. And Quebec has managed to preserve its identity by passing laws that protect its language and culture, while still remaining part of Canada.

(Resisting the strong temptation to delete this as a bunch of totally naïve B.S. from someone who's too far removed from the situation to remotely understand it...but what the heck, maybe there's some truth to it. )

[N.E. Brigand]

The New York Times has new reporting on "Hamas' Bloody Gambit to Create a 'Permanent' State of War," which was to kill so many Israeli civilians so brutally that the Israeli government will respond with such overwhelming force that (1) a new generation of Palestinians will give up on peace and (2) the world will rally against Israel. In other words, Hamas wants Israel to kill many thousands of civilians in Gaza.

Of course, for the gambit to work, Israel has to fall for the trap. Unfortunately, Israel currently appears to doing just that.



It's not that close a parallel, though.

More from the story:

The assault was so devastating that it served one of the plotters’ main objectives: It broke a longstanding tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state?

With the attack, the group’s leaders in Gaza — including Yahya Sinwar, who had spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons, and Mohammed Deif, a shadowy military commander whom Israel had repeatedly tried to assassinate — answered that question. They doubled down on military confrontation.

[N.E. Brigand]

The IDF claims it has destroyed a Hamas tunnel whose entrance was in a United Nations refugee camp in Gaza.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Not to be argumentative but who exactly are the good guys in this case? It seems to have been definitively decided in the US Media but not so much outside of the US

I don't think there is widespread agreement in the U.S. either.

[River]

I am not a fan of Netanyahu and what he's turned Israel into in his desperate quest to cling to power and avoid jail.

That said, the more I look at Hamas, the less I understand how anyone with a firing synapse could possibly sympathize with this particular organization. With Palestinian people, yes, I can sympathize but Hamas? No. The last election Gaza ever had was when they voted in Hamas over a decade ago and the leaders of Hamas recently stated they feel no obligation to protect the people that elected them. Instead, they're shifting that responsibility to the UN and US because reasons. But, even aside from that, Hamas is the reason that, despite all the talk of brotherhood among Muslim nations, no one's taking Palestinian refugees (and that's been the case for a long time now). Hamas is the reason the Palestinian Authority supports the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza. Hamas is the reason Egypt is squirrely about opening the Rafa border crossing. Hamas is the reason Gaza got walled off in the first place. And now they've upped the ante with this war which is, frankly, analogous to suicide by police but on a national scale.