Of course it matters! If your enemy kills 3 innocent people on your side and you retaliate by killing a million people on their side, it matters a whole fucking lot.
Hamas is bad. Very few people will dispute that. Israel has proven that, at this point in time, it is far worse because it kills far more innocent people.
Discourse on Lemmy is so stupid. It's so stupid. Like Facebook boomer stupid.
Is the IDF counter-attack proportional or is it excessive compared to what Hamas is doing? I would say it's absolutely excessive. How is that excess justified? I would urge you guys to put more thought into any of this discourse beyond "genocide; colonialism; apartheid; imperialism". Please, for the love of god. Try. When you use cheap logic, all you do is give more fodder to IDF --and I'm not a fan of IDF.
If I take your claim and analyze it logically it's not sound at all. The typical numbers game to counter whether the occupation is justified: More civilians dead = IDF bad. Pause. Think about this statement for a second. Do we measure justification for war based on the number of casualties incurred? When the allies bombed Dresden, did we find reason to defeat the Nazis even though many civilian casualties occurred? Yes, a calculated risk was made.
The question is: What ought the IDF do in this scenario with Hamas perpetually shelling them with rockets by planting themselves in civilian areas?
I can see how it's harder for you to argue against war crimes from other nations if you're an apologist for war crimes committed by your own ancestors.
But many of us don't need to jump through those particular rhetorical hoops. The barrage of war crimes in WW2 was part of the impetus for strengthening international law against that shit.
I never said it wasn't horrendous. Clearly the rules of engagement back then were different. That's not what is being discussed though is it? What do you think I'm saying? Can you TRY to steel man my position or do you only like to hear yourself?
@TheFonz I'm sorry but you haven't expressed your position clearly enough for me to summarize and I'm not interested in trying to forensically reconstruct it from your comments as it's too ameliorised.
Like I said above, this conversation isn't some kind of game for points. It's just us talking about our views.
That's right. Because you can't engage with others in good faith. You can't even call out logical fallacy correctly. Why are you posting here anyway? What's your goal?
If you can't even summarize my position, then who are you engaging with at this point?
Hamas launched a barrage of rockets at central Israel on Sunday afternoon, setting off air-raid sirens in the Tel Aviv area for the first time since at least late January Source
Yeah Germany also claimed it was attacked by Poland in 1939. Guess everything after was justified then... The US claimed to have been attacked by North Vietnam. Guess Vietnam was aokay then. Putin claimed to have been attacked by Ukraine before invading. Guess we should consider everything since then as self defense...
You're saying because some countries lied about needing defense no country should be allowed to defend themselves? What exactly is your point here? Is it possible some countries actually need to defend themselves?
Proportionality is simply not dependent on the question of who "started first" and you will always find something that is credibly or uncredibly put forth as "the beginning". This is why Israel tries to claim it all started on Oct. 7. This is why Germany argued Poland started arming and preparing for war first. This one is even technically true, but ignores the context of Germany already announcing its Lebensraum ideology back then.
That is the problem. There is a both a larger context and a direct context to the question of proportionality, where there is no plus points for being "just retaliating". Retaliation can be a legitimate goal, but only in the context of deterring from further attacks, like Iran did after the embassy attack.
Sorry... you're comparing what Israel is doing right now to what allies did to a city in the country that was itself perpetrating the genocide? A country that was also itself invading Allied nations?
I don't even know what you think my logic is beyond "the more innocent people you kill, the less morally justified your position becomes."
Can you give an example of when that is not the case? Because I don't know too many people who think that the bombing of Dresden was morally justified.
If their objective is to destroy Hamas and they determine that the only way to do that is wipe out the Palestinian people from the face of the Earth, you're saying that's justified because it's their necessary military objective?
You can target military objectives like certain infrastructure to disable it, but you're not allowed to target civilians. The rules of war just says when civilian casualties aren't punishable. You have to take measures to ensure attacks are as precise as you can make them and with as little collateral damage as possible.
"eliminate every human because they might be an enemy" is not a valid military objective.
Yet everyone except Israelites can see that it is a cover up excuse to exterminate the people who they have been trying to get rid off for more than half a century
Seems like you need to learn reading comprehension if you can't understand the relevance of an article about proportions in a discussions about proportionality
Going to fight against Nazi Germany for comparison of porportional counter attacks is really dumb when the Nazis killed more civilians than all their enemies during WWII combined. And it is not like the russians did not kill those in retaliation aswell, it was just impossible to catch up (we are going to ignore what Stalin did outside of fighting germany for this comment). Comparing a power capable of subjugating nearly a whole continent in the span of some months (all while planning and executing the murder of millions of civilians) with hamas got to be a bad joke.