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By what definition of genocide?
Geneva Article 2 applies straight-forwardly to the case, imho.
There's no safe areas in Gaza. Starvation, indiscriminate mass killing and territory-scale destruction apply existential pressure to the displaced and Hamas. It also dovetails with Bibi's plainly stated aim of removing Palestinians from Gaza. Genocide makes forced resettlement look like a humanitarian measure.
By what definition of genocide?
Geneva Article 2 applies straight-forwardly to the case, imho.
[From a report in the commie WSJ
https://mishtalk.com/economics/70-pe...-after-images/The war in the Gaza Strip is generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.
By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and s s on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair.
Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.
The destruction resembles that left by Allied bombing of German cities during World War II. “The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden and other famous cities that have been bombed,” said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of a history of aerial bombing. “What you’re seeing in Gaza is in the top 25% of the most intense punishment campaigns in history.”
& -face Biden is heavily complicit, Winestein.
I'm still struggling to see how you're connecting forced exodus with genocide. The video above these posts shows several Palestinian men on the ground in their drawers. If it was a genocide goal, why not just shoot them in the head? It seems Hamas, their leadership, did want to exterminate via genocide the Jews in Israel. They just lacked the wherewithal to do so, but they tried. Since Hamas is interwoven into the population and they use civilian infrastructure as a base of operations, the only way to root them out is to cut out everything around them as well. It's unfortunate, but what would you suggest?
The group that runs Palestine and Gaza massacred 1300 innocent people, brutally, including rape and all sorts of nasty . What did they think was going to happen? What did you expect would happen and what would you like to have seen happen instead?
Isn't this what Hamas did? The ball was in their court, they lit this fire. They ed around, they are finding out. There are a lot of collateral damages and it sucks. It's terrible that some societies have no political power, but are slaves to those with the most force.
First of all, dad, the Jews fell asleep at the wheel & they found out first. tee, hee.
I expected a very violent, very bloody response. I did not expect genocide or ethnic cleansing.
There's a 75 year backstory here, but the bestial pogrom of Oct. 7th was for sure the precipitating event. But I don't buy the idea that Hamas is responsible for everything Israel has done in response to Oct 7th. If I kill your wife, you don't get to burn me down in my house with my family and set fire to my neighborhood. It's totally disproportionate.
Israel will own the genocide and the ethnic cleansing, if the latter happens. The resulting ignominy and estrangement from uninvolved countries will be Israel's fault: Hamas isn't responsible for the killing and destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza, nor for the killing and destruction it still intends. Does being attacked immunize the mass death of civilians and the total destruction of the other country? I don't think so. Not as a matter of morality, nor as a pragmatic one. YMMV.
Last edited by Winehole23; 12-31-2023 at 08:22 AM.
not an isolated voice, but not quite a chorus yet
In passing it deserves to be mentioned that Israel was unprepared for the invasion and failed to protect itself. When the shooting stops, there will be to pay domestically for this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/w...-failures.htmla New York Times investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.
And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil, according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.
“In practice, there wasn’t the right defensive preparation, no practice, and no equipping and building strength for such an operation,” said Yom Tov Samia, a major general in the Israeli reserves and former head of the military’s Southern Command.
“There was no defense plan for a surprise attack such as the kind we have seen on Oct. 7,” said Amir Avivi, a brigadier general in the reserves and a former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, which is responsible for protecting the region.
That lack of preparation is at odds with a founding principle of Israeli military doctrine. From the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, the goal was to always be on the offensive — to anticipate attacks and fight battles in enemy territory.
In response to a series of questions from The Times, including why soldiers and officers alike said there had been no plan, the Israel Defense Forces replied: “The I.D.F. is currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas. Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.”
Israeli security and military agenciesproduced repeated assessments that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching a massive invasion. The authorities clung to that optimistic view even when Israel obtained Hamas battle plans that revealed an invasion was precisely what Hamas was planning.
The decisions, in retrospect, are tinged with hubris. The notion that Hamas could execute an ambitious attack was seen as so unlikely that Israeli intelligence officials even reduced eavesdropping on Hamas radio traffic, concluding that it was a waste of time.
None of the officers interviewed, including those stationed along the border, could recall discussions or training based on a plan to repel such an assault.
“As far as I recall, there was no such plan,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible.”
The Israeli government had determined that the loosely organized civilian guard, known as Kitat Konnenut, would serve as the first line of defense in the towns and villages near the border. But the guardsmen had different standards of training depending on who was in charge. For years, they warned that some of their units were poorly trained and underequipped, according to two Israeli military officials with direct knowledge of the volunteer teams.
Additionally, the Israeli military reservists were not prepared to quickly mobilize and deploy. Some described heading south on their own initiative.
Davidi Ben Zion, 38, a major in the reserves, said reservists never trained to respond at a moment’s notice to an invasion. The training assumed that Israeli intelligence would learn of a looming invasion in advance, giving reservists time to prepare to deploy.
“The procedure states that we have the battalion ready for combat in 24 hours,” he said. “There’s a checklist to authorize the distribution of everything. We practiced this for many years.”
Hamas capitalized on these errors in ways that further delayed the Israeli response. Terrorists blocked key highway intersections, leaving soldiers bogged down in firefights as they tried to enter besieged towns. And the Hamas siege on the military base in southern Israel crippled the regional command post, paralyzing the military response.
Previously undisclosed do ents reviewed by The Times show just how drastically the military misread the situation. Records from early in the day show that, even during the attack, the military still assessed that Hamas, at best, would be able to breach Israel’s border fence in just a few places. A separate intelligence do ent, prepared weeks later, shows that Hamas teams actually breached the fence in more than 30 locations and quickly moved deep into southern Israel.
Hamas fighters poured into Israel with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, land mines and more. They were prepared to fight for days. Israeli commandos apparently believed they would be fighting for just hours; one said he set out that morning without his night-vision goggles.
“The terrorists had a distinct tactical advantage in firepower,” said Yair Ansbacher, 40, a reservist in a counterterrorism unit who fought on Oct. 7. He and his colleagues mainly used pistols, assault rifles and sometimes sniper rifles, he said.
The situation was so dire that at 9 a.m., the head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency, issued a rare order. He told all combat-trained, weapons-carrying employees to go south. Shin Bet does not normally activate with the military. Ten Shin Bet operatives were killed that day.
Last edited by Winehole23; 12-31-2023 at 08:51 AM.
Whether Hamas knew that the military was understaffed is unclear, but it had fatal consequences. When the attacks began, many soldiers were fighting for their lives instead of protecting residents nearby. Hamas stormed one base, Nahal Oz, forcing soldiers to abandon it and leave behind dead friends.
The assault on the Re’im military base left soldiers there fighting for their lives rather than coordinating a response to the invasion.
Re’im is home to the Gaza Division, which oversees all military operations in the region. It is also home to two brigades, northern and southern, dedicated to protecting about 40 miles of the border.
Like other bases, Re’im was understaffed because of the holiday. A brigade commander and key staff were away from the base, according to a senior military officer. They were summoned back before dawn, officials said, as Israeli intelligence officials tried to make sense of unusual Hamas activity just over the border in Gaza.
Many soldiers, though, were allowed to keep sleeping. One told The Times that some did not know they were under attack until Hamas was in their sleeping quarters. Several were killed in their bunks. Others barricaded themselves in safe rooms.
The scope of the catastrophe, if not the attack itself, was preventable, according to records and interviews.
“After they built the fence, they put the headquarters in the middle of the sector,” said General Samia, the former head of the Southern Command. He said the three commanders of the brigades and division never should have been housed together so close to Gaza’s border.
“In the same camp, you all had three of them — in the same location,” he said. “What a mistake. What a mistake.”
The Israeli authorities also knew, years in advance, that Hamas planned to take out Re’im as part of its invasion, do ents previously obtained by The Times showed. They dismissed that plan, like the prospect of overall invasion, as implausible.
Even in May, when intelligence analysts raised alarms about Hamas training exercises, Israeli officials did not increase troop levels in the South.
The assault on Re’im led to a near blackout of communication inside the unit that coordinates troop movements across southern Israel, according to one soldier who was based there on Oct. 7.
The division that was supposed to be directing the battle was trying not to get overrun.
Even at noon, according to another Southern Command official, officers there did not understand what was happening. They assessed that Hamas had sent about 200 gunmen into Israel. They were off by a factor of 10.
It took the military most of the day to retake control of the Re’im base.
“When your division is under fire, you’re focused on clearing it from terrorists,” said General Ibrahim, the commander of the armored corps, which is based in southern Israel. “It distracts from management of the fighting more broadly.” General Ibrahim defended the military’s response, saying there are few modern armies that could have recaptured the region as quickly as Israel did.
But nobody had trained to repel an invasion.
Despite the siege of Re’im, reinforcements were not far away. Thousands of soldiers were less than 40 minutes from the towns that were under attack. But as terrified citizens waited in bunkers or hid from gunmen, Israeli soldiers were hung up on the highway, unable to reach them.
A central highway connects military bases in the center and south of the country to the communities near Gaza. Pockets of Hamas gunmen set up ambushes along the route, videos from Pandora show. Israeli commanders were hesitant to send soldiers into those traps, according to two Israeli military officers who took part in conversations that morning.
“Hamas is all over the roads,” one Israeli soldier reported in a conversation recounted by a participant. “They own the street, not us.”
Major Ben Zion, the reservist, said that his paratrooper unit left its base in central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv, in a convoy at about 1:30 p.m. They mobilized on their own, without a formal call-up order. To save time, they left without night-vision equipment or adequate body armor.
He expected to see the roads packed with soldiers and equipment and armored vehicles heading south.
“The roads were empty!” he recalled in an interview. Roughly seven hours into the fighting, he turned to the reservist next to him and asked: “Where’s the I.D.F.?”
They bear at least some responsibility.
You seem to put that into a small box and set it aside, like it's a distraction instead of the central theme.
No, it was literally the first thing I said. Hamas precipitated the Israeli response. I also called Oct. 7th a "bestial pogrom." Hamas should face war crimes accountability too.
Is more clarity or stronger language needed?
You made it pretty clear. Hamas started it. Then you said they aren't responsible for the outcome. This is why I said you compartmentalized it and set it aside. They have culpability. Rationalizing that away with verbal maneuvering doesn't work. Bestial pogrom vs ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Hamas is now facing the repercussions of their actions in Israel. There may be no one left to prosecute. Besides, Hamas doesn't care about the Geneva convention. They are terrorists, not combatants.
I don't think that is what I said, but perhaps I could have expressed myself more clearly. My problem with the Israeli response is not that they attacked (clearly provoked by Hamas, it makes sense to say Hamas is responsible for this) but the manner of attack (inflicting mass death and starvation on civilians and wantonly destroying cities, which is 100% on Israel.)
Much of the rest of the world does, and Israel will have to live in that world when the shooting stops. I don't share your confidence that Hamas will be destroyed.
Sinn Fein and Nelson Mandela were once considered terrorists by the so-called civilized world, but both were at the negotiating table when it was time for a political settlement. It's not unthinkable that something similar will happen somewhere down the line here, supposing that Israel does not succeed in cleansing the Gaza strip of Arabs.
comparing Hamas to Mandela.
Hamas isn't responsible for the killing and destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza, nor for the killing and destruction it still intends.
This is what you said. That you mentioned above is the direct outcome from the bestial pogrom. I agree with your clarification. The response is decided by the one who was attacked, but it's called a response for a reason. I don't think anyone with even a brief understanding of Israel's history would consider they would do anything other than what they are doing. They are not known as being passive against attacks against their people anywhere in the world, much less on their own soil, at that scale.
I don't think they will be destroyed as an ideology. The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades have relied on suicide bombings and random result rocket fire into populated areas. Their openly stated goal is the eradication of all Jews and the removal of the state of Israel. It seems now the gloves are off.Much of the rest of the world does, and Israel will have to live in that world when the shooting stops. I don't share your confidence that Hamas will be destroyed.
These aren't similar situations.Sinn Fein and Nelson Mandela were once considered terrorists by the so-called civilized world, but both were at the negotiating table when it was time for a political settlement. It's not unthinkable that something similar will happen somewhere down the line here, supposing that Israel does not succeed in cleansing the Gaza strip of Arabs.
Sein Fein is a fairly close analogy imo.
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