• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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    6 months ago

    I keep asking pro-Israel people here on Lemmy what the maximum number of children that they feel it is necessary to sacrifice in this war.

    I get two answers, usually both together:

    1. Hamas is the one killing the children.
    2. If this was your country, you would kill lots of children too.

    And they expect me to accept those answers as if they were true.

    • ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      They’re not really engaging with you, just like Israel isn’t really interested in a dialogue about the situation. They just need you to think there’s a civil dialogue being had so that we don’t realize the need to stop them by force.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I keep asking pro-Israel people here on Lemmy what the maximum number of children that they feel it is necessary to sacrifice in this war.

      You’ve got to see this from the Israeli perspective: An inside look at a terrorist group’s summer camp for kids

      This is quite literally how they see the world. Every child in Rafa is this child. Every adult is a terrorist cell leader. Every refugee is going to want revenge. Every survivor is going to join the next revolt.

      Its the same logic American colonists used on First Nations people, as they carved their way westward. Its the logic Serbians used as they butchered their way through Bosnia. Its the logic American soldiers used in Hadditha and Kandahar. Children are just tiny future evil adults and killing them is right because they are incapable of doing anything but wrong.

    • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’m neither pro-Israel nor pro-Hamas, but I believe the correct answer is “same as in every other war”.

      In other words, the maximum rate of Gazan casualties you will accept depends on the maximum rate of Axis casualties you would have accepted in WW2. That might be zero or it might be fairly high.

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          from 2019 through 2022

          That’s cherry picking.

          The civilian casualty rate in Gaza is about the same as the Second Chechen War and less than on the East Front, in North Korea, or in Vietnam.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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            6 months ago

            Since I asked how many children and not the rate of children, I’m pretty sure a count of children is not cherry picking.

            But I guess your answer is that any amount of children killed in a war is acceptable and nothing to be complaining about.

            • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              I didn’t say it was acceptable. It is no more acceptable than civilian deaths in Germany, Japan, or Chechnya.

              People are often more concerned about the rate of deaths because Gaza is relatively small. But if you really are counting how many and not the rate, then the vast majority of wars were worse than Gaza. The number of civilian deaths in Dresden alone is comparable to those in Gaza. Over 150,000 civilians have died in Iraq.

              And as I said, some people find one civilian death to be unacceptable, others are willing to accept more than one. I’ve never met anyone who is willing to accept “any amount”.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                6 months ago

                Interesting that you keep saying ‘civilian death’ and not ‘child.’ Seems like we’re talking about two very different things.

                I’ve never met anyone who is willing to accept “any amount”.

                Then see the person who replied to me who says it’s worth killing any amount to get rid of Hamas.

                • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Interesting that you keep saying ‘civilian death’ and not ‘child.’ Seems like we’re talking about two very different things.

                  Maybe so. But personally, I believe that all civilian deaths are equally tragic whether of a child, an old man, or a mother. In fact, I would object if someone said “X dead women is acceptable, but X dead children is unacceptable”, because personally I believe that whatever X you choose should be age-independent. YMMV

      • Gluten6970@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        I’m neither pro-Israel nor pro-Hamas

        What worm ate your brain and made you think that is the choice of sides here?? Fighting for Palestinian emancipation has nothing to do with being pro-Hamas you dingus.

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Those are the two sides that are currently at war. They are both religiously motivated right-wing regimes, and I support neither one.

          I’m also not fighting for Palestinian “emancipation”, for the same reason I’m not fighting to “emancipate” Istanbul from Turks or New York from Americans.

          • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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            6 months ago

            If Israel were ONLY attacking Hamas, you’d be correct.

            The problem is they are insistant on attacking, bombing, killing, and displacing all of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza as well, because they have been at war with Palestine, not Hamas, for generations now.

        • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          You’re right, Israel should not get a free pass for genocide or ethnic cleansing.

          Hamas began twenty years into the occupation during the first Intifada, with the goal of ending the occupation. Collective punishment has been a deliberate Israeli tactic for decades with the Dahiya doctrine. Violence such as suicide bombings and rockets escalated in response to Israeli enforcement of the occupation and apartheid.

          Hamas 1988 Charter and Revised 2017 Charter

          The 1988 Charter, which is certainly unreasonable in its fundamentalism with Sharia Law and is antisemitic, does not call for the extermination of all Jewish People. Hamas wants an end to Israel as an Apartheid State, not an extermination of all Israelis. Under Ahmed Yassin in the 1990’s, truces were offered in exchange for Israeli to withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank to the 1967 borders. The 2017 Revised charter explicitly accepts a Two-State Solution of the 1967 Borders. Check Article 7 and 13 of the 1988 Charter to see yourself, compare it to Article 20 and 24-26 in the revised charter.

          The slogan From the River to the Sea is about Palestinian liberation that started in the 60s by the PLO for a democratic secular state, not Genocide. The Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad in 1966 maybe, but he’s not Palestinian.

          History of Hamas supported by Netanyahu since 2012

          No I don’t support Hamas as a ruling party, I want Palestinians to be able to have free fair elections.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            I want Palestinians to be able to have free fair elections.

            Okay, but what if they vote for the wrong people. Can we go back to genocide then?

            • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              What are you talking about? A free and fair election is impossible under an apartheid regime

              Edit: oh I think your comment was sarcasm lol, i can be hard to tell without the /s

              • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Okay, but maybe we just take a poll and if too many Palestinians support Hamas we can use that as an excuse not to hold elections.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Every arab country in the region was clensed of Jews.

              Primarily a consequence of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the mass movement mainly transpired from 1948 to the early 1970s, with one final exodus of Iranian Jews occurring shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979–1980.

              The civil war began the day after the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine on 29 November 1947 – which planned to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and the Special International Regime encompassing the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. At the end of a series of offensives that began April 1948, in which Zionist forces had conquered cities and territories in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state, Zionist leaders announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948

              Hmm…

              Israel had genocide commuted against it on the 7th of October.

              Israeli inquiry finds Oct 7 hostage likely killed by friendly fire

              Israel’s military has nominated a new chief rabbi who seemed to imply in a past religious commentary that its soldiers are allowed to rape non-Jewish women in wartime. He responded that in the interests of maintaining warriors’ morale and fighting fitness during armed conflict, it was permitted to “satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will”.

              Israeli police break up ultra-Orthodox Jews’ military service protest

              Christians in the Holy Land say they’re under attack as Israeli-Palestinian violence soars: Church officials and Christian leaders in Israel blame a minority of Jewish extremists for the attacks. They say Israel’s far-right government has fostered a culture of impunity.

              An Israeli police raid on the Al-Aqsa Mosque triggers a spate of violence

              The IDF is out of control. I don’t know if I’d call these acts “genocidal”, but its clear that Netanyahu’s war has turned inward on any Israeli resident who resists his dictatorial decree.

            • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.

              Forced expulsion of Palestinians has been central to Zionism since the 1880’s

              There are a lot of factors of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, but your conflating of the two as justification or minimization of the Nakba doesn’t work; unless you somehow think all Arabs or Muslims are the same. But it’s pretty clear your racist towards Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims when your argument boils down to ‘they are violent primitives and deserve to die,’ just going straight to dehumanization and ignoring all material conditions of Apartheid

              Iraqi-born Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, speaking of the wave of Iraqi Jewish migration to Israel, concludes that, even though Iraqi Jews were “victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict”, Iraqi Jews aren’t refugees, saying “nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted.” He restated that case in a review of Martin Gilbert’s book, In Ishmael’s House.

              Yehuda Shenhav has criticized the analogy between Jewish emigration from Arab countries and the Palestinian exodus. He also says “The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation.” He has stated that “the campaign’s proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a ‘right of return’ on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of ‘lost’ assets.”

              Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath has rejected the comparison, arguing that while there is a superficial similarity, the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are entirely different. Porath points out that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was the “fulfilment of a national dream”. He also argues that the achievement of this Zionist goal was only made possible through the endeavors of the Jewish Agency’s agents, teachers, and instructors working in various Arab countries since the 1930s. Porath contrasts this with the Palestinian Arabs’ flight of 1948 as completely different. He describes the outcome of the Palestinian’s flight as an “unwanted national calamity” that was accompanied by “unending personal tragedies”. The result was "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Israel let hamas stay in power

          Worse than that. For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces.

          The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from

          The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

          Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

          Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.

          Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm.

          This was a deliberate strategy of divide-and-conquer by the Israeli government.

          Hamas must be plucked from the root, condemned and thrown away!

          It’ll never be enough, so long as a single living Palestinian still knows about the Nakba and claims a right of return. For Israelis, its not just about Hamas. The only solution to the Palestinian Question is a final one.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      The going rate is 1:30 Israelis to Palestinians in revenge killing. For killing each Hamas militant they’re allowed to kill around 20 as collateral damage. 50% in Gaza are children so 10 kids per Hamas militant is okay according to the Israeli government.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        6 months ago

        According to some people here, infinite kids per militant is okay to maintain Israeli security.

        And I have no idea why they think a state that believes killing large numbers of children is acceptable is worth securing.

      • Tiefling IRL
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        6 months ago

        What is the maximum number of children who need to die before hamas(Isis) surrender?

        “What is the maximum number of hostages police are allowed to kill before they negotiate with the bank robber?”

        This isn’t a game where the IDF has to grind kids for XP before attacking a final boss, asshole. The answer is “as few as possible, ideally zero”, but the IDF has shown that they are either stupidly or maliciously indiscriminate in who they kill.

          • goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org
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            6 months ago

            All the videos of idf soldiers looking happy and excited to either mow the grass or show off all the destruction.

            Neither side should be doing it but the trained side should you know actually act trained

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        6 months ago

        If you ask me, I would sacrifice every last one of them in order to eradicating hamas(Isis). Western civilization/values are worth more than the children killed in the hands of hamas(Isis).

        I sincerely hope you aren’t a parent with that attitude about children.

        Now I will direct this question back at you, What is the maximum number of children who need to die before hamas(Isis) surrender?

        Zero. Israel should not kill one single child. If they can’t defeat Hamas without killing children, then maybe Hamas has a point.

        • AmosBurton@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Amazing how hamas can go into Israel, murder children, then get asylum by hiding among its own children.

          By your logic I can grab a couple of babies, shoot up school, and I should be untouchable as long as I have a baby vest?

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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            6 months ago

            Are you honestly suggesting that the IDF has absolutely no culpability when it comes to killing children? All dead children in Gaza are Hamas’ fault?

            Because otherwise, you don’t understand what you are calling my logic.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                6 months ago

                So you’re saying that even if an IDF soldier shoots a child in the face, it’s Hamas’ fault? Really?

                  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                    6 months ago

                    That’s an interesting way to excuse virtually any war crime imaginable if Israel chooses to commit it. “It’s Hamas’ fault that Israel covered Gaza in anthrax spores, they’re the reason Israel did it.”

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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      6 months ago

      As per item 2: If the enemy was using them as hostages I sure as shit wouldn’t just bomb the building and kill everyone. I’d prefer to use special forces to go in on foot and secure the building with minimal casualties. And only when diplomacy fails.

      The enemy was using them as shields because they didn’t think you’d be that fucking stupid to just bomb everyone; they assumed you had some empathy.