Could have said it a week ago, assholes.
How many Palestinian children died while you held your breath?
That’ll work.
Egg them on and support them for 75 years and then tell them to chill out right before they wrap everything up.
In any given exchange of violence for these actors, it is a pretty reliable bet to say that there will be about a 10:1 ratio of Palestinians versus Israelis killed. I expect that we will see between 10k and 20k Palestinians killed, and probably somewhere less than 2k total Israelis killed. I think there will be fewer people killed by bombs and bullets than by the blockade. I suspect 90% of the casualties will be civilians. I think that all of the people who die in fear and pain while hiding in their homes as well as those who die on the barricades will be forgotten in a year or so.
I also suspect that the remaining checks on Bibi’s already significant power will end, and that Hamas will effectively cease to exist as a political power.
Much like the 2.5 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip, Hamas ain’t going nowhere.
Their existence depended on their existence being more politically palatable than the level of effort necessary for their elimination.
A modern nation-state like Israel or the US relies on a principle of disproportionate response to deter aggression. You have the most far-right, violent, and most corrupt government in the history of the state in charge and, as a result of the scale and targets of the “unprovoked” attack, they have the support of the only countries whose support matters in situations like these. The level of violence executed against Israel was enough to piss it off, but not to hurt it at all. None of their very significant military capacity was diminished. Hamas doesn’t have an Air Force. They don’t have any SAMs to speak of. They are cut off from resupply. They have no armored vehicles nor the ability to defend against them in significant number. Their “artillery” consists of unguided rockets they can fire in a general direction and which inflict so little damage as to be militarily ignorable and which only count as a “terror weapon” because it helps Israeli propaganda. They are politically and geographically isolated. They will not be resupplied. Israel on the other hand has a blank check and supply lines that cannot be interrupted.
If Israel decides to effect a ground incursion, it will be over rubble. They will call in airstrikes from fighter-bombers that the Palestinians will not be able to defend against. This is not Afghanistan. This is not Ireland.
Netanyahu is going to proceed as if he has a mandate to end this, and he is a very hard person. I do not think it gave him enough inertia to do to Gaza what Putin did to Crimea - I don’t think they can simply call it part of Israel now - but there’s going to be a reckoning.
What we are seeing right now is the limited response. I’ve been on the wrong end of irregular infantry. I’ve never been on the wrong end of modern armor, air, and artillery. I don’t recommend either, but the effects of the latter are indescribable. That’s not even touching on intelligence and special services, who I am very certain are being tasked as we speak.
Life in Gaza is about to get intensely worse for civilians. It will remain much worse than it was long after the last shell gets fired.
I honestly cannot see any way that this results in anything but an across the board loss for hamas. I also think it’s going to crush Gaza. Making life in Gaza even worse than it was is really hard, but I think they managed to make sure that comes about.
Their existence depended on their existence being more politically palatable than the level of effort necessary for their elimination.
And, ya know, also Netanyahu/Israel themselves.
I agree, but all I am going to say is that it will be interesting to read additional facts as they start to come out in the next several years with leaks and memoirs.
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think Bush did 9/11 and I don’t think FDR did Pearl Harbor. Human failure in war - including intelligence failure - is a constant that has been observed from something as foundational as Clausewitz to the Want of a Horseshoe Nail.
Shelling civilians will definitely make more Hamas members out of people still there as well
I don’t believe so. I think the question will be “What the fuck were they thinking and what did they achieve for this tremendous cost?”
If Hamas had coordinated a simultaneous attack from the West Bank along with air strikes from Syria etc., it would have been something. I personally think they still probably would have lost, especially because the US would surge weapons, but it would show a strategy.
This was just throwing lives away for less than nothing. You cannot deal with Netanyahu. Even the president of the fucking US couldn’t get him to fall in line with a less than far right policy. Hamas just dealt him the best hand he has yet held.
People don’t join terrorist groups because they think they can win, they do it because they’re so pissed off at the target they want to strike back.
People do think they can win. I do not consider the Taliban a terrorist group, but they were irregular forces that fought a war, and they won, in a limited sense. The IRA won, in a sense, both with the creation of the Free State and with the end of the Troubles. Mandela won, although the ANC was designated as a terrorist organization. Vietnam won.
The Black Panthers were an actual threat to the racist institutions in the US. The Weathermen were not. The Panthers had a strategy. The Weathermen were angry college students without training.
Didn’t the Weathermen reveal COINTELPRO?
The thing is America already tried bombing an idea out of existence twice in Vietnam and Afghanistan and it failed twice. I just don’t see how brutal conflict does anything more then inspire the next generation of extremist. We need to break the cycle of violence.
I’m not saying that the desire for Palestinian autonomy is going to be ended. I’m saying that Hamas-the-organization is going to cease to be an effective factor in it. It will be replaced by another organization, or several. I could certainly see another intifada coming out of this.
But you can most certainly bomb (and buy) an idea out of existence. There was a time when there existed a pan-Arab movement. Partly post-colonial, partly anti-Israel, partly Third World-ism in reaction to the Cold War, it tried to unite the Arab world across the borders drawn by the colonialist countries.
It went down in flames due to
- Their inability to do the one thing they set as their biggest goal, which was the military conquest of Israel.
- US and USSR intelligence operations, diplomatic engagement, and economic and military cooperation
- Internal factionalism and personal greed
That’s actually where politicized Islam has its roots - in the defeat of modern, semi-socialist Arab internationalism. Looking back, we would probably have been better off with the pan-Arab movement becoming an entity that could make peace with Israel (like Egypt did) than have political Islam replace what at the end of the day was basic national aspirations in the post-colonial period.
What a useless statement. There is no way to break the cycle while Hamas exists. You know that.
Escalation? Didn’t they already bomb the shit out of that country’s innocent civilian population as literally nothing but cold blooded revenge and hatred? (And this is just talking about this month, not even talking about the past…).
Man, fuck those guys. Religion and politics of the region aside, I don’t know how any people or nation can support governments who take these official actions of mass murder and genocide right before our very eyes.
They might as well be Russia for all the evil they’re doing, except they’re not even pretending they’re doing it to help the Palestinians. They’re just gleefully bombing and starving women, boys, children, babies, en masse.
And no, just because they were also attacked horribly doesn’t give them the right to murder civilians like savages.
They’re supposedly a functional developed nation, they should understand basic things like rules of engagement, proportional and measured response, and, you know… not officially and happily committing unforgivable war crimes :-/
Man, fuck those guys.
West: “A little bit of genocide is fine but too much and you might make the rest of us look bad”
6000 bombs dropped on gaza already. little late there
edit: and some white phosphorous, jesus christ
Not too late given what they’re going to try to do next
Or currently in the process of doing: cutting electricity, fuel, etc from entering Gaza.
This whole situation is fucked
As a Jew, I’m glad that world leaders saying something and standing up for the protection of innocents.
On an unrelated note - why do we care what Yanis tweets about this? So weird to have that in this article.
I’m sure Israel will pay as much attention to that as we paid to the rest of the world when they were all like “no dude there’s no nukes in Iraq what the fuck are you talking about”
Israel does not give a single shit about warnings from Europe as they were smart enough to not make their existence dependent on us.
Why would they? Any criticism of anything they do can be called antisemitism and made illegal.
It is antisemitism when people cannot separate Israel from “jews” and keep screaming “death to the jews” while trying to protest against Israel. And there are many people who criticize Israel’s way of handling this without it being made illegal. So I suspect you belong to that group that just cannot help themselves when trying to protest Israel.
It cuts both ways, on the one hand you have legit antisemites hiding behind the fig leaf of Israel critique, on the other Israeli rightoids to fascists deliberately confusing being against them with being antisemitic. It shouldn’t be particularly surprising that Kahanites and the like call anything they don’t like antisemitic same as Nazis call anything they don’t like anti-German, they are, after all, the same shit with a different coat of paint.
But there’s generally an easy solution to that: Be precise. Both sides of the conflict aren’t uniform hive-minds and pretty much whatever position you hold, you’ll find it reflected in either or (preferably!) both, somewhere. Worst thing that could happen is that you do some research and learn something about the local politics :)
