"I'm calling from Israeli intelligence"(bbc.co.uk) |
"I'm calling from Israeli intelligence"(bbc.co.uk) |
The other side is trying to maximise civilian causalities, and is failing to completely achieve that.
I'll let you choose which you think has the moral high ground. Use the up vote button if you think minimisation is good, and down vote if you think maximisation is good.
At that time, for purposes of the war, that was true, as the Nazis controlled Germany, just like Hamas now controls Gaza. That’s not to say innocent people aren’t sadly dying, but that’s the case in any war.
I'd describe it as Hamas trying to get around the IDF so they can kill or kidnap old people, women and children. The IDF is trying to get around old people, women and children so the they can kill Hamas.
Israel has been ethnically cleansing the Palestinians since 1948. They most definitely are not minimizing civilian casualties. They're maximizing them within the parameters that their US backing will allow.
Nothing is "generous", at best it is extremely cynical PR gestures, to be seen as generous by people who only pay attention during the fighting, and not to the broader context in which Israel has spent literal decades deliberately engineering conditions to assure a continued excuse for it.
[0] for the recent part see, e.g., https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.
According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
If Israel didn't try to minimize civilian casualties, this would look very different. To say otherwise is not only cynical PR, it is actively malicious. Towards Israeli and Palestinians both.
I read the article you shared and other than the unconfirmed paraphrasing of Netanyahu at the 2019 meeting, the actual policies come across as something that would work to improve relations. Work permits, more freedom, "turning a blind eye" to sustained rocket attacks.
Rockets also continue to be fired daily from civilian areas of Gaza into Israel. When the rockets stop — whether because Hamas surrenders, runs out of weapons, or otherwise — I’ll be more inclined to think a bombing is presumptively unnecessary.
It's undeniable that Israel lies brazenly and repeatedly about it's attacks.
See their murder of Shireen Abu Aqla last year for example.
The time footage leaked of one of their gunboats shelling four children playing on a beach still stands out for me.
Too bad, because every time I hear that countries name I think of screaming Palestinian children with limbs ripped off and then some guy in a fancy suit saying “of course we try to minimise civilian casualties, but under the law of war bla bla bla “.
And you can kinda see how they can never win that.
We have people referring to the kindness of a military that dropped more bombs in a week than were dropped the first year of the Iraq war.
A military that openly targets children, journalists, and medical personnel.
The unquestioning acceptance that every target struck is a Hamas militant/base.
The leaders of Israel openly referring to all palestinians as non-human animals and invoking bible verses that openly call for their genocide.
The generosity of the IDF was made plain when one of the hostages revealed that they shelled their own villages, killing both Israeli hostages and Hamas indiscriminately.
Is that kind of localized warning available in the US ?
Except we actually «talk about it» very frequently: we are well aware of the presence of informational warfare also after the articles so frequently published about it.
Which is obviously not true. To say otherwise and treat Israelis or Jews as a monolithic block is one of the classic anti-semitic tropes. So why is it different when it's the Palestinians?
And what's funny is that Hamas is the richest in the area. Hamas received more money in the Gaza strip, directly from the Qatar and under the supervision of the Israeli army than all NGO working in both Palestines. They still managed to have less popular support than Fatah. With 30 millions a month.