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Sorry for the below rant, but this simplistic meme really rubbed me the wrong way. Feel free to ignore it if this unasked for, unedited and overlong stream of consciousness if you don't care about this conflict as much as I do.
One problem I've observed with people accusing Israel of war crimes in this conflict is that they are using a term with clear defined meanings for things that aren't. It's purely driven by emotions, not knowledge of international law. They shout "Geneva Conventions!" as if it was a magic spell (and have of course never read them before). They see or hear about dead civilians, which, as terrible as they are, aren't automatically the result of war crimes. They use the term to describe things that most definitely aren't, like (just recently) arresting POWs or stopping the delivery of free electricity and water to the enemy. The latter in particular (even though it's far from the only similarity) reminds me of how Russia tried and failed to create international outrage when Ukraine stopped delivering water to occupied Crimea. Nobody had an issue with that, but for some reason, with Gaza, there are new standards that only apply to this conflict and no other conflict before. It's baffling.
Just to list a few things, no it's not a war crime to attack hospitals, if they are being used for military purposes. Same with schools, kindergartens, residential buildings, etc. The Geneva Conventions explicitly permit this in order to discourage the use of human shields, which they define as a war crime, because if one side does this all the time - and Hamas have openly celebrated the use of human shields - then this might motivate the enemy to assume that behind every group of civilians, there might be fighters. When North Korean soldiers fired at US soldiers out of crowds of refugees during the Korean War, this led to US soldiers driving refugees away with their guns and even killing a number of them, fearing to be ambushed. Fighters not wearing uniforms puts every fighting age male in the combat area at a risk - and guess what, Hamas only wears uniforms during parades, not in combat. Hamas have used human shields successfully to prevent Israel from performing attacks on weapons depots, rocket launch sites, command centers, etc. They were under the impression that they could attack from these positions, from behind civilians with impunity. If the other side doesn't attack, that's a win, the terrorists get to live for another day and can continue what they are doing. If Israel does attack and civilians die, this particular cell might lose a few fighters and equipment, but they can use the innocent civilians they put into the crossfire for propaganda against Israel, both domestically in order to recruit new fighters and internationally to put pressure on Israel. What should Israel do in this situation? Just eat the rockets? The Iron Dome is far from perfect and every alert means people only have seconds to interrupt whatever they are doing and rush to shelter. That's no way to live. Meanwhile, in Gaza, there are no civilian bomb shelters, not even air raid sirens. Gaza is the only place since WW2 that attacked an enemy they know have air power, but provides no shelters nor warnings for civilians. Kind of odd, if you think about it.
You would assume that young left-leaning people in particular would side with the side that was attacked first in this conflict, the side that is the only democracy in the Middle East, the side that has equal rights and protections for women and LGBTQ+ people, the side that is a hub for cutting-edge research and has more startups than almost every other place in the world. All because of a shallow and simply wrong colonizer narrative or even a racial narrative (even though you wouldn't be able to differentiate most Israelis and Palestinians based on their skin color and other physical features). There is a lot of frustrating naivete here. What annoys me by far the most is that they only talk about things Israel shouldn't do, but don't offer any viable alternatives. How should you react to the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust? Is there even a correct way or only a large number of terrible options that some unlucky people have to pick the least worst option out, only to get berated by it from people who will never be in such a situation?
Israel can not not react to such an attack without force. Making concessions would tell terrorists that their tactics work and motivate them and others to try it again and again. That's what they did every single time in the past. When Israel pulled all of their settlers out of Gaza - by force, I might add - Hamas immediately thanked them by launching attacks. The blockade, the border fence that so many people call a grave injustice was the direct result of weekly stabbings, shootings and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians - and it worked, until Israel became complacent, thinking that further economic incentives and aid, that providing work to tens of thousands of Palestinians, free services and resources had placated Hamas and that they were happy with the power that they have over the strip, the billions of foreign aid they could siphon off for their own benefit.
Don't get me wrong, calling the current Israeli government under Netanyahu bastards would be putting it mildly. I have all sorts of issues with this right-wing administration. I detest the settlers in the West Bank with a passion and if it were up to me, they would be evicted in an instant. Their continued presence is the most grave issue I have with the modern Israeli state. There are others, like a discriminatory justice system, the continued democratic backsliding and even such aspects as the nation's poor energy policy, but the settlers are by far the gravest issues. Even in times of relative calm, they continuously inflame the conflict and during wartime in particular, they feel emboldened.
Continued below.
The UN has already condemned Israel for committing war crimes in Gaza.
The UN is just an extension of its member states, not an impartial actor in this conflict. There is no reasonable explanation for why there are more resolutions being passed against Israel than all other nations combined:
https://unwatch.org/2022-2023-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-of-the-world/
This was before the current war.
Because Israel is committing genocide, Apartheid and a whole new, Israel-brand crime against humanity. Usually you don't need to pass this many resolutions against a single problem. Israel's brutal occupation and genocide of Palestine has the whole world's eyes, so they get more international attention. Not to mention it's been going on for 74 years. If you start counting from 1945 when the UN was made, that's the world's longest-lasting series of crimes against humanity and it's not close.
Also even if you disregard the UN, many reputable human rights organizations have condemned Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity for ages. If you think all those are biased against poor old Israel, then you should check your biases.
principal Skinner meme "Is it me who is committing war crimes? No it's the entire world that's wrong!"
The 1949 geneva conventions have been rattified by (afaik exclusively): all UN members, palestine, the holy see and the cook islands. The singning binds the signee to uphold these rules for themselves. How then could the UN, who as you said is "just an extension of its member states", not follow the morals you yourself held as the absolute standard?
Kurdistan is the only democracy in the middle east.
Apartheid and a police state are incompatible with democracy.
Just to list a few things, no it’s not a war crime to attack hospitals, if they are being used for military purposes. Same with schools, kindergartens, residential buildings, etc. The Geneva Conventions explicitly permit this in order to discourage the use of human shields, which they define as a war crime, because if one side does this all the time - and Hamas have openly celebrated the use of human shields - then this might motivate the enemy to assume that behind every group of civilians, there might be fighters. When North Korean soldiers fired at US soldiers out of crowds of refugees during the Korean War, this led to US soldiers driving refugees away with their guns and even killing a number of them, fearing to be ambushed. Fighters not wearing uniforms puts every fighting age male in the combat area at a risk - and guess what, Hamas only wears uniforms during parades, not in combat. Hamas have used human shields successfully to prevent Israel from performing attacks on weapons depots, rocket launch sites, command centers, etc. They were under the impression that they could attack from these positions, from behind civilians with impunity. If the other side doesn’t attack, that’s a win, the terrorists get to live for another day and can continue what they are doing. If Israel does attack and civilians die, this particular cell might lose a few fighters and equipment, but they can use the innocent civilians they put into the crossfire for propaganda against Israel, both domestically in order to recruit new fighters and internationally to put pressure on Israel. What should Israel do in this situation? Just eat the rockets? The Iron Dome is far from perfect and every alert means people only have seconds to interrupt whatever they are doing and rush to shelter. That’s no way to live. Meanwhile, in Gaza, there are no civilian bomb shelters, not even air raid sirens. Gaza is the only place since WW2 that attacked an enemy they know have air power, but provides no shelters nor warnings for civilians. Kind of odd, if you think about it.
Until reading your post and then doing more research, I fell for the "higher civilian casualty rate" headlines. I was aware that it is legal to strike a normally civilian location if it is being used for military purposes, but felt that the IDF was being unusually imprecise during this conflict.
It turns out that the headlines are very misleading. You can't compare a single conflict in a densely-populated urban area to the average of all 20th century conflicts (especially not when the government of said urban area uses human shields). The only really fair comparison points are previous Israeli conflicts in Gaza and a handful of battles against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The civilian casualty rate is about half of what we saw against ISIS.
Part 2:
Having said that, the IDF - a conscription army that is a pretty accurate reflection of the diverse Israeli population, most of which share no love for their current government - is not Netanyahu and their conduct in this war has been exemplary. No other army in the world does more to warn civilians and get them out of harms way. The civilian evacuation corridor they established for example has been a stroke of genius and while a large number of civilians have been killed by them, there is zero proof that any of their deaths have been intentional. Even if we take Hamas' death counts for granted, far fewer than one person dies for each large bomb dropped by Israel. This could only happen if Israel was picking targets carefully and warning civilians. They are not perfect though and I would never claim otherwise. The problem is that they are still humans, humans who make mistakes. There is no doubt that there is an average number of assholes and idiots among the IDF, some of which will abuse their power as soldiers, just like even UN blue helm soldiers do during humanitarian missions. These are in the end, the good ones and the bad ones, just humans who are fighting against the horrific Islamofascist Hamas, an organization that does everything in their power to get the civilian death toll up, even to the point of bombing and shooting their own people. How does one fight such an enemy? We are not yet in the age of scary perfect drones that can only kill terrorists with absolutely no civilians getting harmed.
I've studied this conflict for over 20 years. The more I read about it, the less I understand what's going on. I don't think this current war will solve the conflict or come even close to that. All it will do once it's over is protect Israel from another attack like October 7 for at least a few decades, if not longer. That's the immediate goal of the IDF, nothing more, nothing less. It won't solve the issue of Palestinian statehood, it won't solve the issue with the settlers, it won't solve the issue of decades of indoctrination Palestinian Arabs received, which keeps the conflict alive with generation upon generation even in the face of concessions. When you see a little girl with pigtails going to a UN school talk about how she wants to stab every Jew when she grows up - how does one solve this? Not even the denazification of Germany had to undo this type of indoctrination. At the same time, I don't see the Israeli state take back such injustices as indefinite detention of suspects, with gets almost exclusively applied to Arabs. Every single attack on Israel means the Israeli society scoots further to the right, across the entire political spectrum, which in turn means that compromise and dialogue with the Arab side become less likely.
I think what's frightening to Hamas and Fatah leaders is that they are falling behind and losing in relevance at a rapid pace. They have unguided fertilizer rockets that are only good for mass terror bombings while the other side is widely deploying combat robots - and every day, the gap widens. They will discover (and I suspect they know all too well) that once this current war is over in at most two or three months time, the world will almost immediately forget about them again beyond the occasional declaration of solidarity for civilians. Most of Israel's former enemies have long since made peace with the only Jewish nation in the world, after several costly wars they launched and lost against it. Despite Hamas' frantic calls, nobody came for their aid, except for two Iranian-backed terror groups that can do little more than poke at the Hornets' nest. Russia, China, Syria, North Korea, Hezbollah, Hamas - that is one unholy alliance of awfulness that has nothing to offer to this world other than trying to divide it. The only battlefield where they are shockingly successful is social media, where they flood everything with their divisive dreck in the hope of weakening the West and thereby strengthening their position. It works with GenZ, which worries me a lot, but GenZ don't vote, so for now at least, this doesn't change a thing.
I just hope that this uncaring universe will end this stupid war as soon as possible, for the sake of every innocent caught in it.
P.S.
I apologize once again to anyone who felt like they had to read this unfiltered expression of frustration, sleep-deprivation, self-importance, depression and who knows what else. You could probably write a whole dissertation on my broken mind using this text only. Feel free to discuss any of the points I made with me, but be warned that I might drown you in a similarly long response if you do. Do it at your own risk.
If this is how you really think, you need to study the conflict more. There's plenty of evidence of Israel intentionally targeting civilians in this "war" (genocide is a more appropriate term) alone. And don't get me started how you condemned October 7th as a terrorist attack even though it's perfectly legal to take a military action against a foreign occupier.
And about the Gaza disengagement: The rocket attacks started after the blockade, which BTW started in 2005, not 2007.
You need to take a look at the conflict again, and examine your biases if you actually care about the truth.
Edit: What it feels like reading this is that you're creating nuance where none exists. Not saying there's no nuance in the conflict, but it's generally pretty clear-cut with a clear cause and effect chain dating back to the Nakba, or if we take it further to the Balfour declaration.
There’s plenty of evidence of Israel intentionally targeting civilians in this “war”
Where? Why would they do this if they were intentionally targeting civilians?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67327079
This kind of thing actually hurts them militarily, since it allows Hamas fighters to get away as well.
genocide is a more appropriate term
And there it is again. Nothing about this is like a genocide. Not the numbers, not the intent, not the way Israel conducts itself. 5000 people per day were killed during the Rwandan genocide using nothing but machetes. Israel could easily inflict a death toll higher than that using their high-tech weapons - and yet they didn't. It took Israel, even if we believe the numbers published by Hamas, more than two months to achieve what the Hutu managed in three to four days using primitive weapons. How does that make any sense?
Over a larger period of time, the accusation is just as absurd:
https://i.imgur.com/2ydbdvY.jpg
There are about five times as many Arab Palestinians today as there were in 1960, but less than four times as many Israelis. There has been no genocide in all of human history where the "genocided" population grows faster (not to mention, without any interruption) compared to the "genociders".
Here's what the population graph during an actual genocide looks like:
https://i.imgur.com/gS9HeYU.png
That's from the Holodomor (Source: Cambridge University Press).
The issue I have with calling something that isn't a genocide a genocide is twofold: First of all, this narrative was deliberately designed to hurt Jews in particular, to mock their suffering as the primary victims of the only industrial genocide in human history. It is vile for that reason alone. I'm not accusing you of this, merely of at best unknowingly spreading this hateful lie. Secondly, it is similar to the boy crying wolf. By being this callous with words that have clearly defined meanings, you are making it easier for regimes to commit actual genocide in the future, since people have heard this word so many times by that point, it loses all meanings and they are more inclined to doubt actual genocides, like the ones in China and Myanmar.
And don’t get me started how you condemned October 7th as a terrorist attack even though it’s perfectly legal to take a military action against a foreign occupier.
That is a truly despicable thing to say. Hamas terrorists went from house to house, murdering, torturing, raping and abducting predominately civilians. They killed hundreds of young people at a music festival alone. They raped women and girls so violently that their pelvises broke. Coroners found a black mass that turned out to be an adult and a child bound together by wire and then set on fire while they were still alive. They mutilated girls as they were gangraping them. These terrorists even shot family dogs that came at them with their tails wagging - and worst of all, they filmed and live-streamed these actions for the world to see.
That is not "perfectly legal", that is not "military action" and it is most certainly not the kind of action an actual resistance movement would perform against what you call an "occupier".
Here's the kicker though: In order to enable these atrocities, they performed a highly skilled targeted strike at Israel's border fortifications. They used drones to take out the communications network and automated defenses, they attacked command centers and totally overwhelmed the few defenders that were in place. Yet immediately afterwards, they went on killing sprees through peaceful villages and towns, places that had worked closely with Palestinians on the other side of the border for many years and done everything they could to support them. Many of these were kibbutzes, small communal hamlets that are about as close to real-world Socialism as you can get. North of the Gaza Strip, there's an IAF base that was completely undefended. They could have easily taken that base, seriously hampering the Israeli air force from attacking Gaza in return. They did not and instead chose to go on a rampage against civilians nearby.
If Hamas had only performed this initial stage of their attack, I would have admired them for their cunning and skill. That would have been, even if misguided, a legitimate form of armed resistance. They didn't though, it was merely the prelude, done solely so that they could murder without being disturbed. Captured Hamas fighters have openly admitted that they were instructed to murder and rape as many civilians as possible and abduct the survivors. They even had the locations of nurseries on the maps they carried, of shelters were families would hide.
I really hope that you made this claim out of ignorance and not out of malice. Two days after the massacres, Hamas deleted evidence they had published and celebrated from their social media channels, because they knew they needed naive Westerners to put pressure on Israel. It has been preserved though. Here it is (NSFL):
https://www.hamas-massacre.net/
An interactive map that shows the scale of the massacres as well as the fate of individuals, like the Kapshetar family with their two children, 5 and 8 years old, who were murdered when they tried to flee from the terrorists:
They only found the body of Aline (8 years old) after ten days.
The rocket attacks started after the blockade, which BTW started in 2005, not 2007.
https://i.imgur.com/6ZaCNWi.png
I really, really hope you are just uniformed.
using death tolls as a dick measuring contest to determine what is and isn't a genocide is really disgusting. I hope you know that. I gave you an upvote because I appreciate your take on this and your sources for everything else. But I really hope we can exist in a space without saying "It doesn't count as a genocide because enough people didn't die." Fuck off with that.
I'm not doing that. I'm merely illustrating how absurd the accusations are. The truly disgusting part is the accusation and how callously it's being thrown around. It's a slap in the face into every victim of an actual genocide.
It’s a slap in the face into every victim of an actual genocide.
As opposed to comparing the death rate to the Rwandan genocide? You are literally using dead human beings as a statistic here. The "other side" isn't. C'mon man.
I’m not doing that.
You literally are. You are comparing different genocides and using one statistic to claim that the term "genocide" doesn't apply. Which is especially odd to me considering the term "genocide" has never had a number attached to it. This is why we're able to call the Rohingya Genocide a genocide even though it "only" killed up to 43,000, when the Holocaust killed 6,000,000. The numbers here do not matter.
The other side is constantly touting the numbers published by the Gaza Ministry of Health (run by Hamas). It took Israel weeks to find out how many people were killed in the October 7 pogrom, but somehow, Hamas knows within an hour after every explosion how many people were killed there (see: the hospital parking lot incident, when a rocket fired by a Hamas-aligned group broke up in mid air over Gaza and fell onto the strip). If there is one side using the number of dead human beings for their political gain all the time, it's Hamas and those who are knowingly or unknowingly carrying water for them. It is revolting how they have weaponized outrage. Every dead Palestinian is their doing and on top of that they found a way to benefit from it. That is one awful incentive loop.
The sad reality is that civilians always suffer the worst during wars. I watched a video showing Gaza shortly before the war. It showed vibrant streets filled with stores, it showed brand new cars next to old rust buckets, stylishly dressed women that look right out of Ryad or Istanbul next to street urchins and kids having to work. I think about those homeless kids often. Where are they know? What happened to them? They don't have the support networks that are so important in times like these, they can't wrangle their way through crowds when the few supplies that Hamas doesn't steal make it through. They are out in the open when bombs are falling and incredibly vulnerable to all sorts of violence even during peacetime already.
You are right in the sense that it is all to easy to lose sight of what's actually at stake in this conflict here. In the end, it's less about convoluted political ideas about borders, statehood, identity. It all comes down to what happens to the children, what their future will look like. Us adults are doing a good job of ruining everything for them, that's for sure and this wretched conflict is no different from countless others around the globe and from our many other failings as a species, especially how we are even ruining the entire planet just so that we can drive around in cars, buy cheap clothes and eat food at an unsustainable rate. This conflict is just one of countless symptoms of a species-wide issue that we are unable to address: Our lack of empathy for both our future selves and our descendants.
Where? Why would they do this if they were intentionally targeting civilians?
So there are many examples, but stuff like this has happened a lot in the past 2 months.
Not the numbers, not the intent, not the way Israel conducts itself.
Genocide isn't just killing everyone. The Armenian genocide was a genocide, even though it was "just" forced relocation. And we have this and this, among more, as proof of intent.
That is a truly despicable thing to say. Hamas terrorists went from house to house, murdering, torturing, raping and abducting predominately civilians.
So, you're now taking IDF propaganda at face value. We're not sure of everything that happened on October 7th, but we do know that from 1200 people who died 600-500 were civilians. And those include people who were actually killed by the IDF, intentionally or otherwise (and yes, some were killed intentionally), and those who were killed in the crossfire. Did some Hamas soldiers commit atrocities in October 7th? Yes. Was October 7th one big terrorist attack? Absolutely not. It was a military attack with clear military goals.
I meant rocket attacks as a large-scale Hamas policy. I thought that was obvious, but maybe it wasn't. Rocket attacks as a whole started with the second intifada, went down with the disengagement (which had marked the end of the second Intifada), went up again because of the blockade that happened immediately after and from there it just follows the general trends of the Gaza side of the conflict. I'm, not sure what you wanna prove here. I said the blockade happened immediately after the disengagement, and you didn't offer any evidence stating otherwise.
And those include people who were actually killed by the IDF, intentionally or otherwise (and yes, some were killed intentionally),
That is an outrageous claim that requires hard evidence. So far, the only ones I've seen spread it are Hamas. Where on Earth did you pick it up?
The fact that you are spreading casts a big shadow onto everything else you are writing. It's like being a doctor and then casually mentioning that you don't believe viruses exists. Nobody would trust you with anything after that, so absurd is this and I feel like I would be wasting my time further engaging with you on your other points.
That is an outrageous claim that requires hard evidence. So far, the only ones I’ve seen spread it are Hamas. Where on Earth did you pick it up?
Yeah it's a thing. You can find it if you look it up, but there.
To elaborate on the "intentionally" thing, after the attack itself Hamas soldiers holed up in Israeli homes with the hostages, thinking they'd be able to retreat because of course Israel wouldn't bomb them. Then the IDF bombed Hamas along with the hostages. You'll find this in the article, but just to sum up.
I'm honestly surprised you haven't heard of this; I thought it would be common knowledge on this site by now.
Mondoweiss literally cites Electronic Intifada as one of their sources. That is an unbelievably unreliable and biased source.
Even this article however does at no point support your claim that Israel intentionally killed their own people.
Most recently, Nir Hasson returned to Be’eri and interviewed a local resident named Tuval, who was lucky to be away from the kibbutz at the time of the attack but whose partner was killed. In Hasson’s October 20 Haaretz article, he reports:
“His voice trembles when his partner, who was besieged in her home shelter at the time, comes to mind. According to him, only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages — did the IDF complete the takeover of the kibbutz. The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
I guess you can verify from the Haaretz article whether this is correct or not.
Where in all of this is the IDF intentionally killing their own people? You have not provided anything that supports this claim.
Why on Earth would they be doing that in the first place? That would be comic book level of evil, just utterly absurd for the conscription army of a democracy.
They bombed Hamas soldiers who were holing up in hostages' homes. Intentionally.
According to him, only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages — did the IDF complete the takeover of the kibbutz.
And don't get me started how you condemned October 7th as a terrorist attack even though it's perfectly legal to take a military action against a foreign occupier.
Can you spell that out a little bit more?
How is it legal to commit mass murder on hundreds of civilians? How is mass rape legal? How is murdering children and babies legal? How is kidnapping, torture and sexual violence legal?
Same as it ever was, mate. Just this time you happen to care.
Nobody knows what a war crime is, and nobody cares. This likely includes you aswell
It's not just this time. I've talked and written about North Korean concentration camps, the Chinese genocide against the Uyghurs and their destruction of Hongkong's vibrant civil society. I've ranted about the war in Afghanistan, I went to the streets protesting against the war in Iraq, I've protested against the war in Syria and helped refugees from there and Afghanistan, decried Russia's misinformation game before they invaded Ukraine, tried to bring attention to the conflict in Sudan and the plight of the Rohingya, etc. pp. On top of that, I've been trying to understand war and conflict, genocide and oppression since I was little, inhaled every book on these topics I could find, ever since a TV report on the war in Yugoslavia shook me too the core.
My problem is that I care about way too many things. It's exhausting. This is just the latest - and the worst you can accuse me of is that I'm doing the trendy thing and shifting my focus on one of the smallest armed conflicts on this planet right now. I do feel guilty about that.
Alright, sorry
No problem. I wasn't offended or anything. We have no way of knowing about everything going on in the life of a person.
