I recently saw someone on Lemmy point out that the UK has an emergency plan to move precious artwork to bunkers in the event of a nuclear attack, but no such plans exist for the people. Paintings can be replaced or remade. People cannot. The planet cannot. There are many things in this world far more valuable than art, in part because life is the source of art.
What strikes me is the complete discordance of the realities of Israelis and Palestinians shown in the pictures attached to the article. There’s multiple pictures of a grand funeral with flags, pomp, and circumstance…and compare that to the white sheets and mass graves in Gaza. The Israeli soldier gets a military funeral with honors and fanfare while innumerable Palestinians are interred in barely marked mass graves with little to no ceremony because the number of dead simply does not allow for paying respects to each victim.
I’m asking about your opinion. If Hamas refuses to cooperate, how many Palestinians does the IDF have to kill for it to be too many in your mind? When does the mass murder of Palestinian civilians exceed a reasonable metric for “defense”?
Why does Hamas have insights into your personal opinions and beliefs?
That’s not answering my question. How many Palestinian lives is too many?
The fact that Netanyahu has supported Hamas in the past as a foil to the PA says otherwise to me. To a certain extent, Israel has made its own monster out of Hamas and Gaza through their policies and positions.
I think you are misunderstanding how the demographic shift in Gaza has happened. They didn’t have a baby boom, it’s just that many of them do not survive very far into adulthood because of violence, health and environmental problems, and, when they can manage it, emigration.
Secondarily, I’m interested to hear how you justify calling Hamas genocidal without making the same observation about the Likud and Netanyahu.
So how many is “too many” for Israel to have killed? Or do the citizens of Gaza not count the same way Israelis do?
If the citizens of Gaza aren’t offered anything better, why would they gamble what little they have on overthrowing the local oppressors? They don’t really have anything to gain by overthrowing Hamas and trying to do so would be putting their lives and their families at risk. If Israel and the wider international community can offer them something better than life under Hamas and the Likud, they’d be much more likely to eschew Hamas’ control.
You’re talking about a population with extremely limited resources that is literally 50% (or more) children that has been under two fascist boots for the last decade and a half. There does come a point where a level of desperation combined with a possibility of a better future will instigate a revolution, but right now? They don’t see a possibility of a better future. With Israel’s Likud on the other side of the wall and no resources to rebuild after a coup, what’s the point in gambling everything on maybe being able to overthrow the more local oppression?
Also, education in Gaza is very inconsistent and most political revolutions are started by people with education and nothing to lose.
They took power illegally years before the literal majority of Gaza citizens were even born.
Edit: My apologies, the ones that are almost legal adults would have been infants or toddlers at the time Hamas seized power. They really should have done something about that while they were learning how to walk and speak. /s
Why does “radical action” always mean “radical violence”?
“Radical action” can and should include radical kindness in which past wounds can be forgiven and a cooperative future can be built. Right now, all the violence is doing is ensuring that Hamas will be enumerated and maintained for generations by the people that Israel is considering to be sub-human and disposable. Radical violence creates radical ideologues and only ever begets further violence in the absence of total and absolute annihilation.
It doesn’t matter what the IDF or Netanyahu say at this point; this is entirely indefensible and there is no explanation behind this attack besides cruelty and intentional mass murder.
I hope that everyone involved in dropping those missiles suffers a guilty conscience for the rest of their days, but I know that it probably won’t bother them at all.
I don’t have the time to pull quotes from the articles, but I tried to pull articles from a variety of sources to prevent claims of source bias.
About reallocation of weapons and forces: https://archive.ph/20231021154000/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article/.premium/idf-took-away-weapons-from-gaza-border-towns-and-armed-w-bank-settlers-in-the-thousands/0000018b-4d6d-dbe0-a38b-cdfd0d4f0000
Article from September about Israeli invasion into the West Bank: https://archive.ph/C27qm
Settler attack from the day before the Hamas attack: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-killed-during-settler-assault-west-bank-town-palestinian-officials-2023-10-06/
Ongoing violence from the settlers:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67173344
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-settlers-soldiers-severe-abuse-report
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-west-bank-settlers-riot-shot-abducted
Then perhaps Israel should have maintained their border security with Gaza instead of pulling IDF forces away to assist with the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. If the “settlers” didn’t need IDF protection for their raping and pillaging, the border of Gaza would have been better watched during when the Hamas attack happened.
These aren’t arrests of Hamas. These arrests are happening in the West Bank as part of the massive settler expansion that has been going on in the background.
I never said anything about defending Hamas. If there was a way to extract them and offer them up to the Hague without endangering innocent civilians, I’d be all for it. But we should put Netanyahu and his cabinet on trial as well. There can be more than one monster at a time
Let me try to put this in a different perspective. First: Gaza has an average age of about 19 years old, and a bit more than half of the population is under 18. Second: there was a Reuters report and video yesterday about how the cemeteries are full so people are burying their loved ones in donated vacant lots with cinder blocks and bits of rubble as gravestones.
To emphasize and clarify the point: half the population is children and they’ve run out of space for more graves.
When you’re talking about getting food, fuel, and water to more than 2 million people, air drops are not going to be remotely sufficient. Convoys of full size trucks might not be enough. 2 to 3 liters of water per person per day adds up really fast.
Edit: Just for fun, I looked up the capacity of tanker trucks to see how many they would need to get enough drinking water to the civilians in Gaza at a rate of 3 liters per person per day, assuming a population of 2.3 million and a tanker capacity of 60k liters. (Keep in mind, this does not account for water needed for hygiene or food preparation, etc.) It turns out that they would need to bring in 115 tanker trucks a day to keep the civilian population supplied with adequate drinking water. Or, y’know, Israel could turn the water back on.
I think an important consideration is who gets to decide what knowledge and culture get preserved. For example, I would say that medicine, agriculture, and human language would be much more important to preserve than computer science or economics, but I’m sure someone would disagree.
In general, I think art is very valuable and should be protected when possible (and not just European art), but if the choice is between a painting or a human life… the painting goes every time.