It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
> The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.
I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.
It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.
And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"
It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
> While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law.
I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.
Let's suppose it could be demonstrated conclusively that every hospital in Gaza that Israel has bombed had Hamas militants operating out of them, as Israel has claimed. Do you think that'd silence Israel's critics about bombing hospitals? Do you think it should?
The only route Israel has to victory, now, is genocide. They need to stop and make peace before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
>before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
What makes you think Israel cares about a label more than conquest via genocide? Did the Nazis care about being called genocidal? If you want to stop IL you need to do it via force.
Why would the israelis prefer to deal with PIJ through some temporary disarmament?
Anyone who listens for a bit to israeli mass media will soon be convinced that anything but the extermination of the palestinians is not enough. This is why they bulldoze everything archeological that does not play into zionist myth making. This is also why apartheid is common in local politics in Israel, and why the zionist guerillas and later IDF systematically destroyed the homes and property of the people they displaced, long before the appearance of Hamas.
As I usually do, I'd also like to remind that the zionist movement is mainly a movement of christians.
It has been going on for a century or so. It is also a crime of occidental states. One could also argue that Palestine, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen and more places are in interconnected violent processes, where the 'axis' of Israel, the US, UAE, UK and allies are perpetrating heinous crimes without any semblance of accountability.
For much of that time frame, the Soviets were also meddling in the Middle East. That the middle east conflicts were themselves part of the Cold War rather than something unrelated, is knowledge that has gone forgotten in the West, I think.
Less genocidal federation? That is quite the claim.
The Soviets starved millions of people to death, in order to secure their control. All that help was then built on the backs and blood of those victims. At least let's be honest about that much.
If you're going to go pre-20th century, Russia has the dubious distinction of having waged the most "total" recorded genocide in history, the Circassian genocide.
Just because you haven't heard of Russia colonizing doesn't mean it didn't happen just as much. It just wasn't where the other imperial empires were. How else would one city come to a rule a continent-sized territory? A big difference is, they didn't keep records of such things. People picture Siberia as an empty wilderness and have no idea that rich societies once lived there.
War is always terrible and a mess. The problem is that the intention is, very clearly, ethic cleansing. And that, is, not in accordance to international law. That's the reason they target humanitarian workers and journalist. And the reason they block things like baby formula from entering Gaza. Because the worst are the living conditions to the population, the better.
If you think that the main intention of Israel is other than push those million of people that bother them out (or kill them if they don't go), I have a bridge to sell you.
Hell, they even say that themselves. Go to listen to their politicians.
By the way, if you are an European Union citizen, there is request to the commission to stop the EU-Israel commercial agreement. You can sign it here:
Yup, the term ethnic cleansing became popular during the Yugoslavian civil war, so that UN states didn't have a legal obligation to intervene, as they would in the case of genocide.
Ethnic cleansing and genocide are obviously not the same. If Israel's intent were to kill virtually all Gazans, that would be genocide, but it seems very plausible that they would be entirely satisfied if all Gazans just left Gaza, which would be ethnic cleansing.
Look, I remember this being discussed at the time as a euphemism to avoid the necessity for intervention.
The wikipedia article suggests that I'm not alone in this belief:
"Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group,[6][7] or calling it a euphemism for genocide or cultural genocide.[8][9]"
> This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
You seriously need to educate yourself about history, what the nazis did, and what is going on in the middle east, because only a person who has absolutely no idea about either of these subjects could draw this terrible comparison. Unless, of course, you're just interested in spreading disinformation bordering on blood libel.
You're detracting. You made a comparison between Israel and the nazis, which is wrong, and is extremely far reached.
Answering with "all people have the capacity for evil" is once again a subtle misdirection which seems like a recurring theme in your comments. This wasn't what you implied.
Put simply, Israel and nazis are night and day, you are villifying a country and its people with extreme and factually wrong accusations.
Depends on who you ask. People are allowed to see similarities, like Lebensraum & Occupation, as two examples. They don't need anyone's certification or permission. And intimidation, I believe, has stopped working. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_between_Israel_and...
I mean, "Judeo-Nazi" was a term coined by an Israeli polymath Yeshayahu Leibowitz & has been part of the Revisionist discourse for quite some time; ex: Better a Living Judeo-Nazi Than a Dead Saint (1983), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2536162 / https://archive.vn/uX42N
You would be wrong. This happens to have been a propaganda campaign invented decades earlier in the Soviet Union. In fact, it is quite stunning how similar all this is to the modern propaganda Russia uses.
Well, looks like Leibowitz did not coin the term (much to his chagrin perhaps?), but I guess he was one of the more prominent Israelis to never apologize for using it.
May be Leibowitz spoke truth to power; may be he was a Soviet asset.
> quite stunning how similar all this is
Hm.
Michael S: Aren't you exaggerating when you use the term "Judeo- Nazi?" Do you truly believe that we are liable to decline to the level of the Nazis?
Yeshayahu L: When the nation (or in Nazi terminology, the race) and the power of its state become supreme values, human action is no longer inhibited. This mentality is also widespread among us. In the territories under our occupation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon, we are already behaving as the Nazis behaved in the territories under their occupation in Czechoslovakia and the west.
I thought for a bit whether I should reply to this or not. But I noticed one point in here I felt obligated to correct.
If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture. Their atrocities in the east are far beyond anything that has ever taken place on this Earth before or since. There is no comparison whatsoever.
> I noticed one point in here I felt obligated to correct ... If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture ...
You'd be correcting Mr. Leibowitz, not me.
> no comparison whatsoever
It is not up for debate that there isn't any comparison to be made. That said, we can choose to live in our bubbles, yeah; but on the flip side, interactions with the outside world might come as a rude shock.
Given the track record of knowledge of the eastern front beyond the iron curtain, maybe he didn't. I don't know how anyone can read about Operation Barbarossa, the full scope of the plans to wipe out half of the continent, and come away with the impression that anything else, let alone a regional conflict, is even in the same universe.
But this isn't about Leibowitz, who isn't here to try to explain himself. This is about the idea that a falsity is "not up for debate".
> This is about the idea that a falsity is "not up for debate".
Your assertion that there's "no comparison whatsoever" is of course not, when there's ample.
> who isn't here to try to explain himself
Lets just say that social norms & experiences drive much of what people believe in. One of Leibowitz's student goes:
"I hated the notion of occupation since the very beginning. My first memories from after the 67 war are traveling with my children in the occupied territories. There were awnings over groceries stores with Hebrew lettering advertising Osem noodles. I couldn't bear it. I thought that was dreadful because I remembered German lettering in France. I have very strong feelings about Israel as an occupier."
We can guess what their "very strong feelings" might have been having experienced Nazi occupation of France during WW2.
What is ample? Can you provide any evidence that Gaza can be put in the same breath as Leningrad? Russia calls all the West "Nazis", should we just listen to them?
I think you really need to learn more about the eastern front, if you're going to keep making or supporting comparisons based on incomplete knowledge. There is no comparison between the experiences in France and the experiences in Ukraine during WW2. There is a reason why historian Timothy Snyder titled one of his books "Bloodlands".
> making or supporting comparisons based on incomplete knowledge
Comparisons needn't be limited to one event or one atrocity.
> Russia calls all the West "Nazis", should we just listen to them?
All? I doubt that. Even then, unfortunately for you, like Leibowitz, Kahneman (perhaps world's foremost & finest thinker) isn't alive either to explain himself.
> Comparisons needn't be limited to one event or one atrocity.
You can't openly call a group Nazis and then claim you only meant in terms of their behavior on the western front. It misses the whole point, not to mention it makes people forget what the Nazis did.
> You can't openly call a group Nazis and then claim you only meant in terms of their behavior on the western front
Me? As before, in this context, your argument is with Kanheman & Leibowitz. And possibly other prominent Israelis (present or past) who may hold such views.
Then Liebowitz was wrong (and Kanheman, though it seems to me he wasn't trying to make a reasoned argument in that interview). And thus, those who cite him would presumably do better to read other, more historical sources.
