Israel seizes solar panels donated to Palestinians by Dutch government
397 replies, posted
[QUOTE=_Axel;52475319]Doesn't address my point. Would you kill 10 innocent Palestinians to save 1 innocent Israeli? 100 for one ? A million for one?
At some point you have to consider whether decreasing the risk of Israeli death is worth increasing the risk of Palestinian death. Evidently the precautions taken to prevent Palestinian casualties aren't sufficient to reduce that risk to zero. Shouldn't that risk be a decision factor as well?[/QUOTE]
If I could somehow make it that every person killed was an active member of Hamas and deserved it, I would. Optimally, there would be no Palestinians killed other than the ones who are part of Hamas and thus are legitimate combatants.
The best way to calculate if there's too many civilian deaths is to look at the civilian/combatant death ratio. With US drone strikes, on average there's ~28 civilians killed for every 1 enemy combatant. This would be represented as 28:1. In the 2008 Gaza war, the ratio varied compared to who you asked.
[QUOTE]Journalist and commentator Evelyn Gordon writes in Commentary that the civilian casualty ratio in the 2008–09 Gaza War was 39 percent (2:3), using however only the preliminary Israeli estimates, but that 56 or 74 percent were civilians according to B'Tselem's figures, depending on whether 248 Hamas policemen are considered combatants or civilians; and 65 or 83 percent according to the figures of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Gordon says that all of these ratios, even if the worse were correct, are lower than the normal civilian-to-combatant wartime fatality ratio in wars elsewhere, as given by the Red Cross, and states that the comparison shows that the IDF was unusually successful at minimizing civilian casualties. She concludes by charging that terrorists fight from among civilians because they know that the inevitable civilian casualties will result in opprobrium for their victims who dare to fight back, and that this norm will not change as long as this modus operandi remains profitable.[/QUOTE]
I can't say that a Palestinian life is worth X and an Israeli life is worth Y but I can say that Israel has a responsibility to its citizens to keep Israel safe and it's because of Israel acting this way that there's so little Israeli deaths.
let me barge into this shitty thread and spill some truth because there are some hardcore israeli shills here that are doing more harm than good with their shitty circular argumentation
israel does not pursue peace with the palestinians because netanyahu is not interested in peace. his entire fucking government and (non-existent) policy rests upon the continuation of the conflict. it's a common enemy to rally the people around. the increasing terror attacks prove that his actions as the prime minister aren't doing anything to resolve the conflict, and in many ways are only making it worse.
but against all logic, instead of rallying the israeli public against netanyahu's inaction, the public is instead rallying against the palestinians. the line between what constitutes as a legitimate terrorist and a regular palestinian civilian going about his day is blurred with every new attack each [i]week[/i]. the death toll keeps rising, tensions are at all time high, and yet nothing is being done because netanyahu benefits from the status quo. like a lot of corrupt leaders, he relies on an outside common enemy to distract the people from his current ongoing investigation, and the fact that he's led this country 3 times now and did absolutely fucking nothing in almost 20 non-consecutive years of holding office
on the other side, hamas and the PLO are doing the same exact thing. the methods are a bit different obviously, but the goal is the same; profit. both parties greatly benefit from conflict. hamas gets international aid (that never actually reaches the average person living in the territories), and israel gets lucrative arms and research deals from the west. it's all fucking corrupt, i dont know who the fuck you're trying to defend here RzDat, or what joost1120 actually thinks is going on here because both of you are completely missing the point. you bicker about some weird bullshit like death tolls or whether or not israel deliberately kills innocents or not or whatever the fuck else but all that is completely irrelevant. it's a lot less ideological than that. a lot less politically fueled than you might expect.
it's just a bunch of corrupted old men pulling strings to line their pockets. out politics are a complete and utter joke, and as retarded as netanyahu is, he's still being held by the balls by the orthodox leaders. this is why shit like the settlements are still a thing. the orthodox fuckers holding office in our government are a tiny minority, but because of the way our government is built, they hold an incredibly disproportionate amount of power. they too, however, are just another group of old men looking to consolidate power and more importantly, consolidate money.
everything about this conflict is rotten to the core, the leaders, as per usual, are fucking over everyone else in the name of their own selfish interests. but nobody seems to give a shit.
[QUOTE=Svinnik;52475512]The best way to calculate if there's too many civilian deaths is to look at the civilian/combatant death ratio.[/quote]
No, it isn't. Hypothetical situation, but what if you kill 300 enemy combatants and 100 civilians to save 1 of your own citizens? That's a pretty good civilians/combatants death ratio.
Civilian/combatant death ratio is absolutely not a sufficient and representative metric.
[Quote]I can't say that a Palestinian life is worth X and an Israeli life is worth Y but I can say that Israel has a responsibility to its citizens to keep Israel safe and it's because of Israel acting this way that there's so little Israeli deaths.[/QUOTE]
So they should go out of their way to protect their citizens whatever the cost, regardless of how much foreign lives it takes?
[QUOTE=_Axel;52475641]No, it isn't. Hypothetical situation, but what if you kill 300 enemy combatants and 100 civilians to save 1 of your own citizens? That's a pretty good civilians/combatants death ratio.
Civilian/combatant death ratio is absolutely not a sufficient and representative metric.
So they should go out of their way to protect their citizens whatever the cost, regardless of how much foreign lives it takes?[/QUOTE]
Comparing civilian deaths of countries on opposite sides of a war is meaningless. A country has an obligation to do what is necessary to keep its own citizens safe. That's a fundamental, basic, job of any government. If a foreign country is actively trying to harm your citizens, then you do what is required to prevent it.
[QUOTE=sgman91;52475689]Comparing civilian deaths of countries on opposite sides of a war is meaningless. A country has an obligation to do what is necessary to keep its own citizens safe. That's a fundamental, basic, job of any government. If a foreign country is actively trying to harm your citizens, then you do what is required to prevent it.[/QUOTE]
Israel is obligated to protect their own civilians, that's normal. But Israel occupies Gaza (I've made countless posts why, including respectable source that think so too) and an occupying force is obligated to protect the civilians of the land it's occupying.
[QUOTE=sgman91;52475689]Comparing civilian deaths of countries on opposite sides of a war is meaningless. A country has an obligation to do what is necessary to keep its own citizens safe. That's a fundamental, basic, job of any government. If a foreign country is actively trying to harm your citizens, then you do what is required to prevent it.[/QUOTE]
So:
[QUOTE=_Axel;52475641]Hypothetical situation, but what if you kill 300 enemy combatants and 100 civilians to save 1 of your own citizens? That's a pretty good civilians/combatants death ratio.[/QUOTE]
Would be an acceptable act in your eyes?
[QUOTE=_Axel;52475740]So:
Would be an acceptable act in your eyes?[/QUOTE]
It's not a useful question. I can think of no realistic situation in which you would have to kill 300 enemy combatants and 100 citizens in order to save 1 citizen. Threats in which 300 enemy combatants are involved will inherently be a bigger risk than 1 death.
We're talking about what is essentially an ongoing war with a hostile nation. There is a continual threat to every citizen in the country as long as Hamas exists and is given capability to strike.
[editline]16th July 2017[/editline]
There's also a difference between saying that a nation has an obligation to protect it's citizens and a nation is justified in doing anything it wants to protect it's citizens.
My problem is that comparing deaths on it's own isn't useful unless you can also establish that there was a better or more effective way for Israel to eliminate the threat. Allowing a very real and immediate threat to it's citizens is not a realistic solution.
[QUOTE=sgman91;52475795]It's not a useful question. I can think of no realistic situation in which you would have to kill 300 enemy combatants and 100 citizens in order to save 1 citizen. Threats in which 300 enemy combatants are involved will inherently be a bigger risk than 1 death.
We're talking about what is essentially an ongoing war with a hostile nation. There is a continual threat to every citizen in the country as long as Hamas exists and is given capability to strike.[/QUOTE]
In 2014 around 183 Gazans (Combatant and civilians together, civilians outnumbered the combatants 3:1 though) were killed by the IDF for every Israeli citizen killed by Hamas.
There's something very wrong with this war if the IDF is causing more civilian casualties than the terrorists.
I like how it's repeated that the anti-missile systems in Israel are sufficient enough to protect the citizens of Israel from Hamas
Yet return fire that kills innocent Palestinians and destroys their homes is deemed an appropriate response.
[QUOTE=sgman91;52475795]It's not a useful question. I can think of no realistic situation in which you would have to kill 300 enemy combatants and 100 citizens in order to save 1 citizen. Threats in which 300 enemy combatants are involved will inherently be a bigger risk than 1 death.[/QUOTE]
I'm asking you an ethical question, whether it's a realistic situation is irrelevant. Would you say killing 100 civilians is justified if it's necessary to save a single citizen?
[QUOTE]My problem is that comparing deaths on it's own isn't useful unless you can also establish that there was a better or more effective way for Israel to eliminate the threat. Allowing a very real and immediate threat to it's citizens is not a realistic solution.[/QUOTE]
It is a solution if the cost in lives of neutralizing the threat outweight the cost of ignoring it. Is that necessarily not the case?
[QUOTE=joost1120;52475818]In 2014 around 183 Gazans (Combatant and civilians together, civilians outnumbered the combatants 3:1 though) were killed by the IDF for every Israeli citizen killed by Hamas.
There's something very wrong with this war if the IDF is causing more civilian casualties than the terrorists.[/QUOTE]
The US killed more German civilians in WWII than Germany killed US civilians. Does mean they were not justified in that war?
[QUOTE]I'm asking you an ethical question, whether it's a realistic situation is irrelevant. Would you say killing 100 civilians is justified if it's necessary to save a single citizen?[/QUOTE]
I get the question, but I disagree that it's relevant in the slightest. The realistic nature of the question is entirely relevant because we're talking about a real nation, a real war, and the real ethical conclusions surrounding it. Answering a question that has nothing to do with reality is not relevant. Any conclusions about that question will not help us in understanding the Israeli situation.
Note that by unrealistic I'm not saying that it hasn't happened before, but that the entire situation isn't possible in reality. There is no situation in which we know that only one person is at risk, but that that we need to kill hundreds of civilians to prevent it. It doesn't relate to anything we're talking about.
[editline]16th July 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=_Axel;52475913]It is a solution if the cost in lives of neutralizing the threat outweight the cost of ignoring it. Is that necessarily not the case?[/QUOTE]
You act like there's some objective way to measure cost. There isn't. Clearly one of your own citizens is worth more than the citizen of a hostile nation.
[QUOTE=Quark:;52475834]I like how it's repeated that the anti-missile systems in Israel are sufficient enough to protect the citizens of Israel from Hamas
Yet return fire that kills innocent Palestinians and destroys their homes is deemed an appropriate response.[/QUOTE]
So iron dome could have stopped the temple mount shooting? Iron dome is a huge help but it's a band-aid solution, esp when it has an 90 percent chance to hit. That 10 percent is small but when you're dealing with thousands of missiles, that's around a hundred missiles that get by. Considering that Hamas is being forced by iran to play nice with hezbollah, it's very likely that iron dome will have to contend with missiles coming from 2 directions at once. There's also a huge cost to iron dome. The return fire is a more than appropriate response
[QUOTE=sgman91;52476042]I get the question, but I disagree that it's relevant in the slightest. The realistic nature of the question is entirely relevant because we're talking about a real nation, a real war, and the real ethical conclusions surrounding it. Answering a question that has nothing to do with reality is not relevant. Any conclusions about that question will not help us in understanding the Israeli situation.[/QUOTE]
No, the question is in relation to your statement that comparing civilian deaths is irrelevant. Your reluctance to answer it when I use exaggerated examples that point out the problem in that reasoning shows that there is indeed a flaw in your statement.
[QUOTE]You act like there's some objective way to measure cost. There isn't. Clearly one of your own citizens is worth more than the citizen of a hostile nation.[/QUOTE]
Are they?
Is one of your own citizen worth more than 10 citizens of a hostile nation?
Is one of your own citizen worth more than 100 citizens of a hostile nation?
Is one of your own citizen worth more than 1000 citizens of a hostile nation?
Again, where do you draw the line?
[QUOTE=sgman91;52476042]The US killed more German civilians in WWII than Germany killed US civilians. Does mean they were not justified in that war?
I get the question, but I disagree that it's relevant in the slightest. The realistic nature of the question is entirely relevant because we're talking about a real nation, a real war, and the real ethical conclusions surrounding it. Answering a question that has nothing to do with reality is not relevant. Any conclusions about that question will not help us in understanding the Israeli situation.
Note that by unrealistic I'm not saying that it hasn't happened before, but that the entire situation isn't possible in reality. There is no situation in which we know that only one person is at risk, but that that we need to kill hundreds of civilians to prevent it. It doesn't relate to anything we're talking about.
[editline]16th July 2017[/editline]
You act like there's some objective way to measure cost. There isn't. Clearly one of your own citizens is worth more than the citizen of a hostile nation.[/QUOTE]
WW2 was significantly bigger than the US and Germany. Just in the Netherlands alone, 200,000 civilians were killed in the Netherlands alone. Even if the entire population of Germany would've been killed stopping the Nazi's, more civilians would've died to the Nazi's than to the Allies. In this case, it's not really fair to consider just the US, consider the whole picture, the Allies. In which case significantly more civilians died on the Allies' side than on the Axis'.
[QUOTE=Melnek;52475569]let me barge into this shitty thread and spill some truth because there are some hardcore israeli shills here that are doing more harm than good with their shitty circular argumentation
israel does not pursue peace with the palestinians because netanyahu is not interested in peace. his entire fucking government and (non-existent) policy rests upon the continuation of the conflict. it's a common enemy to rally the people around. the increasing terror attacks prove that his actions as the prime minister aren't doing anything to resolve the conflict, and in many ways are only making it worse.
but against all logic, instead of rallying the israeli public against netanyahu's inaction, the public is instead rallying against the palestinians. the line between what constitutes as a legitimate terrorist and a regular palestinian civilian going about his day is blurred with every new attack each [I]week[/I]. the death toll keeps rising, tensions are at all time high, and yet nothing is being done because netanyahu benefits from the status quo. like a lot of corrupt leaders, he relies on an outside common enemy to distract the people from his current ongoing investigation, and the fact that he's led this country 3 times now and did absolutely fucking nothing in almost 20 non-consecutive years of holding office
[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.794292"]Ahem[/URL].
And for the record. Lots and lots of people give a shit, on both sides of the border. Over half of all Israelis still support the two state solution as do over %40 of the Palestinians. But like you said, it takes both sides agreeing to sit down and fucking talk at the same time.
[editline]17th July 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=_Axel;52476114]No, the question is in relation to your statement that comparing civilian deaths is irrelevant. Your reluctance to answer it when I use exaggerated examples that point out the problem in that reasoning shows that there is indeed a flaw in your statement.
Are they?
Is one of your own citizen worth more than 10 citizens of a hostile nation?
Is one of your own citizen worth more than 100 citizens of a hostile nation?
Is one of your own citizen worth more than 1000 citizens of a hostile nation?
Again, where do you draw the line?[/QUOTE]
When you're right there, with a rocket aimed at your house and your family? There's no line. You'd be surprised at how many men, women and children you'll be willing to see burn if it keeps your family safe. We're all selfish assholes. We want to be not dead. We're not willing to play the numbers. We're not willing to be "mostly safe" or "balanced".
The fact of the matter is that for a whole decade millions of Israelis inside Israel proper (as opposed to, say, subhuman setter scums not worthy of human rights amiright) have been contending with hundreds of rocket attacks out of Gaza and into major cities like Sderot every single fucking day. For years. So we contended with the occasional surgical strike on a Hamas training facility. We built public shelters, and a bomb shelter in every single building. We made everyone build one reinforced room in every fucking apartment. We reinforced public schools. We developed and deployed early warning systems that could detect rocket launches in Gaza and Lebanon, figure out where the rockets are headed and sound the alarms there so people can have a few (between 3 and 10 iirc) seconds to run to safety.
And a million people have been living like that for years. Running dozens of times every day to shelter. Panicking about their children in school when the alarm sounds. Going home to see what part of their street got exploded this time. Dealing with the the psychological fallout of dealing with that shit for so long.
So yeah, by the time Israel finally had enough and got to a point we had to step in and punch Gaza in the balls hard enough they had to stop firing all those rockets at us all the time we had a fairly decent anti missile system deployed, one that cost a hefty chunk of our GDP and the best years of the lives of a few thousands of people that deathmarched multiple projects to develop something no one thought possible, and the bomb shelters and early warning systems and everything. And they had thousands of rocket launchers set up in busy streets and schoolyards, ammo caches inside UN facilities and mosques and HQs inside hospitals, and the authorities forcing people to stay in places they knew would get hit.
So of course it hurt them more than it hurt us. Way waaaay more. That was the whole fucking point.
We made a huge, concentrated national effort to protect ourselves, maybe more than any civilian on the planet was ever protected in a time of war, exactly for that eventuality. So when this war comes, or the next one, our people, as in me and my wife and my kids, are SAFE. FROM FUCKING ROCKETS THAT FALL FROM THE SKY AND BLOW YOU THE FUCK UP.
Should we have shut down the iron dome and make people stand outside in the streets every time there's a rocket heading our way so it's more fair?
Should we have just grabbed and executed a random Palestinian for every Israeli hurt in a rocket attack and ignored them the rest of the time?
There was a lot Israel did wrong in the last war in Gaza, and a lot of innocent people died as a result. That's not right and I'm not going to justify that. But to claim the war was wrong because not enough Israelis died? Fuck you. The goal of every civilized nation should be to keep the casualties on their side to 0 civilians in a war. That's the whole point of having a military. And you're faulting us because we succeeded. Because miraculously, against all odds, we managed to survive tens of thousands of rockets being fired straight into crowded cities for years on a daily basis with so few casualties.
You try that. You try spending a few days diving out of your car when you hear the siren and looking for shelter in a bus stop. You try driving past burnt out parked cars wondering if your home is still there when you arrive. You try keeping calm when your coworker shows you the ball bearings he collected on his front porch after tonight's rocket hit his front yard again.
Then you tell me how far you would be able to go to make it stop.
[QUOTE=ScumBunny;52477305][URL="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.794292"]Ahem[/URL].
And for the record. Lots and lots of people give a shit, on both sides of the border. Over half of all Israelis still support the two state solution as do over %40 of the Palestinians. But like you said, it takes both sides agreeing to sit down and fucking talk at the same time.
[editline]17th July 2017[/editline]
When you're right there, with a rocket aimed at your house and your family? There's no line. You'd be surprised at how many men, women and children you'll be willing to see burn if it keeps your family safe. We're all selfish assholes. We want to be not dead. We're not willing to play the numbers. We're not willing to be "mostly safe" or "balanced". [/QUOTE]
i don't think anyone is arguing that there's no emotional cause for the IDF to do what it does
but that emotional argument has literally zero weight in terms of whether or not what is happening is justified (i'm not sure i get your point, you say it doesn't justify it then say that it wasn't wrong: like, if it wasn't justified, it was wrong)
that line of argumentation leads to atrocities
and everything you've just said applies to the other side of the wall, except the death toll is much higher - unless you think that the people on the other side don't want their family safe, or not to be dead
[QUOTE=Cloak Raider;52477665]i don't think anyone is arguing that there's no emotional cause for the IDF to do what it does
but that emotional argument has literally zero weight in terms of whether or not what is happening is justified
that line of argumentation leads to atrocities[/QUOTE]
The emotional argument is claiming that casualties on both sides need to somewhat be balanced.
There's no sense to that. That was never a thing. In wars, the goal has always been to kill more on the enemy's side, and lose less on yours.
Imagine this: pretend that the war in Gaza and the, say, five years preceding it played out exactly the same, except Israel didn't put the effort it did bulletproofing its civilian population: no bomb shelters, no early warning systems, no iron dome.
Now the thousands of rockets fired into Israel each day for those five years cost thousands of Israeli civilian casualties on top of the dozens of IDF soldiers that died in the war.
Does that suddenly make all the thousands of dead Palestinian civilians okay? Does the fact they lost 1-2 civilians for each combatant while we lost 10 (theoretical) civilians to each soldier make us the winner in this war for the moral high ground?
Israel protected its civilians and put its soldiers in the line of fire. The fact we succeeded and kept the number of hurt civilians so low for so long despite, again, hundreds of actual rockets being fired into our cities literally every day is a huge, insane, unimaginable moral victory. Not an atrocity.
Should Israel have fought differently in Gaza? Yes, probably. Were there more ways we could have minimized the civilian casualties there? Yes, I think so. Is there legitimate criticism to be leveled at Israel for the way it handled that entire crisis and let it escalate into a full fledged war, and then for the way it fought that war? Fuck yes.
But suppose only a third of the actual number of Palestinians died in the war? Would you think it was, for lack of a better word, better? Can you imagine any kind of war where the number of Palestinian casualties was anywhere near the number of Israelis?
As far as we're concerned, a decade of doing what you think you're implying didn't work. Anything short of an all out war, from negotiations and truces to blockades and surgical strikes didn't stop Hamas from continuing to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel every day. The war, as horrifying as it was, did.
Just as the last war in Lebanon kept Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel since.
Wars are by definition horrible things. They're one nation killing lots of people from another nation to enforce its will upon it. We enforced our will to not have rockets constantly fired upon us by way of violence.
It worked.
If you think some wars are justified then this justification is as good as any, probably better than many other recent wars. If you think all wars are wrong, well, there really isn't much more than can be said.
[QUOTE=ScumBunny;52477707]The emotional argument is claiming that casualties on both sides need to somewhat be balanced.
There's no sense to that. That was never a thing. In wars, the goal has always been to kill the most on the enemy's side, and lose the least on yours.
Imagine this: pretend that the war in Gaza and the, say, five years preceding it played out exactly the same, except Israel didn't put the effort it did bulletproofing its civilian population: no bomb shelters, no early warning systems, no iron dome.
Now the thousands of rockets fired into Israel each day for those five years cost thousands of Israeli civilian casualties on top of the dozens of IDF soldiers that died in the war.
Does that suddenly make all the thousands of dead Palestinian civilians okay? Does the fact they lost 1-2 civilians for each combatant while we lost 10 (theoretical) civilians to each soldier make us the winner in this war for the moral high ground?
Israel protected its civilians and put its soldiers in the line of fire. The fact we succeeded and kept the number of hurt civilians so low for so long despite, again, hundreds of actual rockets being fired into our cities literally every day is a huge, insane, unimaginable moral victory. Not an atrocity.
Should Israel have fought differently in Gaza? Yes, probably. Were there more ways we could have minimized the civilian casualties there? Yes, I think so. Is there legitimate criticism to be leveled at Israel for the way it handled that entire crisis and let it escalate into a full fledged war, and then for the way it fought that war? Fuck yes.
But suppose only a third of the actual number of Palestinians died in the war? Would you think it was, for lack of a better word, better? Can you imagine any kind of war where the number of Palestinian casualties was anywhere near the number of Israelis?
As far as we're concerned, a decade of doing what you think you're implying didn't work. Anything short of an all out war, from negotiations and truces to blockades and surgical strikes didn't stop Hamas from continuing to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel every day. The war, as horrifying as it was, did.
Just as the last war in Lebanon kept Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel since.
Wars are by definition horrible things. They're one nation killing lots of people from another nation to enforce its will upon it. We enforced our will to not have rockets constantly fired upon us by way of violence.
It worked.
If you think some wars are justified then this justification is as good as any, probably better than many other recent wars. If you think all wars are wrong, well, there really isn't much more than can be said.[/QUOTE]
This is all irrelevant. Israel DOES have the Iron Dome system. I'm going to keep referring to the casualties of 2014 until you get it. 12 Israeli civilians died that year. 2300+ Gazan civilians (And a few hundred combatants) died.
This isn't a case of "If someone points a gun at your family how far would you go?". We're talking about an official army here. There are humanitarian laws you have to follow. FFS, the armies of Europe can't carpet bomb the entire middle east because ISIS killed a hundred European civilians. Interestingly enough there have been more European civilian casualties to ISIS than Israeli civilian casualties to Hamas.
[QUOTE=ScumBunny;52477707]The war, as horrifying as it was, did.
Just as the last war in Lebanon kept Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel since.
Wars are by definition horrible things. They're one nation killing lots of people from another nation to enforce its will upon it. We enforced our will to not have rockets constantly fired upon us by way of violence.
It worked.
If you think some wars are justified then this justification is as good as any, probably better than many other recent wars. If you think all wars are wrong, well, there really isn't much more than can be said.[/QUOTE]
"it was successful" is another line of argumentation used to defend atrocities
the question is not whether or not it was successful, but whether or not what was done was justified or morally right - success factors into it, but it is not a defence on its own
the statistic of palestinian civilians is brought up not because "more israelis should have died", but to demonstrate that the force used was not proportional to the thread, and thousands of civilians suffered as a result
[quote]But suppose only a third of the actual number of Palestinians died in the war? Would you think it was, for lack of a better word, better?[/quote]
surely yes? you'd have to be a psychopath to think that it was a good thing that more died
[QUOTE=Trebgarta;52477807]When did Israel carpet bomb Gaza? 730 Israeli civilians were murdered between 2000 and 2008, in 2008 Gaza war around 800 Gazan civilians died. Does that satisfy your hunger for equal ratios? Why do you have such a hard-on for numbers?
When Hamas decides to engage in armed conflict from built-up civilian areas, do you expect Israel to wait until enough Israelis have died? What do you expect Israel to do? You conflate "there is room for improvement in Israeli policies" with thinking that there was a possibility that hundreds to thousands of Gazan deaths could have been avoided unilaterally by actions of Israel.
Iron Dome is a blessing in self-defense, but it is not an alternative to armed incursion when your adversary will just not stop. If North Korea shoots 5 ballistic missiles to Busan and South Korea successfully intercepts them, SK won't go "mission accomplished, good job" and do nothing; there will be consequences. Let alone thousands of missiles.[/QUOTE]
I never said Israel carpet bombed Gaza, I was using it as an example of indiscriminate bombing.
Good job quoting casualties from a time when the situations were different. Casualty numbers are very, very different these days. As seen in ONCE AGAIN 2014, with a 183:1 casualty rate. 183 Gazan civilians to 1 Israeli civilian.
"When Hamas decides to engage in armed conflict from built-up civilian areas, do you expect Israel to wait until enough Israelis have died?" No. Hamas is breaking international humanitarian laws by hiding weapons in civilian housing, but Israel is breaking the exact same laws by firing upon those buildings.
The Iron Dome protects Israel well. The problem is the munition fired back at Gaza. You intercept their rockets, then fire your own back into one of the most highly populated cities in the world and sit back, saying "Mission accomplished, Good job". As if that would ever even help the situation. It only creates more hate against Israel. Chances are the equipment was already moved from the house and the terrorists already left. Meanwhile you've destroyed a home and pretty much everything a family owned, in a city where 80% of the population is food insecure. Imagine coming home and a rocket fired by Hamas blew up your home and all your possessions. Would you fight back against the people who did this?
[QUOTE]Should we have shut down the iron dome and make people stand outside in the streets every time there's a rocket heading our way so it's more fair?[/QUOTE]
No.
[QUOTE]Should we have just grabbed and executed a random Palestinian for every Israeli hurt in a rocket attack and ignored them the rest of the time?[/QUOTE]
No.
If you actually paid attention to my posts you'd know the answers I would give you. My whole point is that actions should be taken in order to [B]reduce the amount of deaths overall,[/B] something both of your propositions go completely against.
[QUOTE]But to claim the war was wrong because not enough Israelis died? Fuck you.[/QUOTE]
Thank you for flaming me as a result of your utter inability to understand my point. You should take a break and take a few deep breaths, and then come back and actually read what I am saying.
[QUOTE]The goal of every civilized nation should be to keep the casualties on their side to 0 civilians in a war. That's the whole point of having a military. And you're faulting us because we succeeded. Because miraculously, against all odds, we managed to survive tens of thousands of rockets being fired straight into crowded cities for years on a daily basis with so few casualties.[/QUOTE]
If keeping friendly civilian casualties as close to 0 as possible was the sole goal and justification for a war then nuking your opponents would be morally justified. Non-citizen civilian casualties have to weight in on the balance at some point.
Your belief that I'm faulting you for "not dying enough" just goes to show how unwilling to comprehend my point you are being right now. Just stop with this strawman.
[QUOTE=_Axel;52477873]No.
No.
If you actually paid attention to my posts you'd know the answers I would give you. My whole point is that actions should be taken in order to [B]reduce the amount of deaths overall,[/B] something both of your propositions go completely against.
Thank you for flaming me as a result of your utter inability to understand my point. You should take a break and take a few deep breaths, and then come back and actually read what I am saying.
If keeping friendly civilian casualties as close to 0 as possible was the sole goal and justification for a war then nuking your opponents would be morally justified. Non-citizen civilian casualties have to weight in on the balance at some point.
Your belief that I'm faulting you for "not dying enough" just goes to show how unwilling to comprehend my point you are being right now. Just stop with this strawman.[/QUOTE]
Minimizing civilian casualties on the other side is certainly a consideration, and again, one that Israel could have done better in the Gaza war.
But there is a huge gulf between that, and this:
[QUOTE]It is a solution if the cost in lives of neutralizing the threat outweight the cost of ignoring it. Is that necessarily not the case?[/QUOTE]
You're claiming that because it was clear significantly more Palestinians would die than Israelis, the only "balanced", morally valid course of action was to "ignore it". To keep doing what Israel did for the preceding decade.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is that while "ignoring it" may seem like a viable course of action to you, sitting comfortably on your high horse half a continent away, for a million or so very real human Israeli citizens what you're saying is that you prefer they suck it up and learn to live with constant daily rocket attacks.
In the real world that's something no sane human would agree to, let alone a sane nation.
You asked whether 1 Israeli life is worth a 100 Palestinians. I'm saying that is a dishonest question based on false assumption that morality demands some kind of balance.
If Israel managed to protect its citizens so well that only one single Israeli died in the war, then fought the war with such godlike finesse that it took only 300 Palestinian deaths to win the war it would still be 200 dead Palestinians over your imaginary line of balance.
The number of Israelis that died was the result of how well Israel defended its rear. The number of Palestinians who died was the result of a war being fought in the world's most dense urban environment. It could have been smaller. It should have been smaller. But the ratio means nothing.
And again, as someone who actually experienced a few months of concentrated rocket attacks- if that's something that you think anyone should learn to live with? Than yeah. Fuck you.
[QUOTE=ScumBunny;52478025]Minimizing civilian casualties on the other side is certainly a consideration, and again, one that Israel could have done better in the Gaza war.
But there is a huge gulf between that, and this:
You're claiming that because it was clear significantly more Palestinians would die than Israelis, the only "balanced", morally valid course of action was to "ignore it". To keep doing what Israel did for the preceding decade.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is that while "ignoring it" may seem like a viable course of action to you, sitting comfortably on your high horse half a continent away, for a million or so very real human Israeli citizens what you're saying is that you prefer they suck it up and learn to live with constant daily rocket attacks.
In the real world that's something no sane human would agree to, let alone a sane nation.
You asked whether 1 Israeli life is worth a 100 Palestinians. I'm saying that is a dishonest question based on false assumption that morality demands some kind of balance.
If Israel managed to protect its citizens so well that only one single Israeli died in the war, then fought the war with such godlike finesse that it took only 300 Palestinian deaths to win the war it would still be 200 dead Palestinians over your imaginary line of balance.
The number of Israelis that died was the result of how well Israel defended its rear. The number of Palestinians who died was the result of a war being fought in the world's most dense urban environment. It could have been smaller. It should have been smaller. But the ratio means nothing.
And again, as someone who actually experienced a few months of concentrated rocket attacks- if that's something that you think anyone should learn to live with? Than yeah. Fuck you.[/QUOTE]
Again, the issue doesn't lie with Israel managing to protect their own without causing more civilian casualties on the other side. I'm not blaming them for being successful in providing protection through bunkers/iron dome/alarms/etc, quite the contrary. What I'm denouncing is the mentality according to which killing 10 foreigners is worth it if it saves one of your own, which is what people like sgman91 started arguing, the notion that a nation should protect its people whatever the underlying cost.
And then there's also the problem that Israel isn't protecting the people of Gaza at all.
[QUOTE=_Axel;52478078]Again, the issue doesn't lie with Israel managing to protect their own without causing more civilian casualties on the other side. I'm not blaming them for being successful in providing protection through bunkers/iron dome/alarms/etc, quite the contrary. What I'm denouncing is the mentality according to which killing 10 foreigners is worth it if it saves one of your own, which is what people like sgman91 started arguing, the notion that a nation should protect its people whatever the underlying cost.[/QUOTE]
Look, we're not talking hypothetical situations here. This argument is about a real thing that happened. Which is why I keep insisting that you can't argue over theoretical ratios and costs.
I mean this:
[QUOTE]So they should go out of their way to protect their citizens whatever the cost, regardless of how much foreign lives it takes?[/QUOTE]
Should Israel have gone to war over a moderate risk to one old dude who was dying anyway and was an asshole to his neighbors? Probably not. But that's not what actually happened.
Should Israel have gone to war over a concentrated rocket attacks against several major cities, the range and quality of which have been increasing over several years, in addition to multiple terror attacks against Israeli civilians up to and including the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers which triggered the start of the war? That's not the same.
The "mentality" responsible for the war isn't that 1 Israeli life is worth a 10 or a hundred Palestinian ones. It is that the safety and well being of millions of Israelis is worth the lives of too many Israeli soldiers, the even greater threat to so many Israelis while the war continues and, yes, the absolute horrors we'll be unleashing on the other side.
[QUOTE=ScumBunny;52478160]Look, we're not talking hypothetical situations here. This argument is about a real thing that happened. Which is why I keep insisting that you can't argue over theoretical ratios and costs.[/quote]
What is it with you guys requiring 100% realistic examples to answer questions about basic ethics?
sgman91's original statement was a basic principle, not a comment about a specific situation. This is the statement I'm arguing against. You don't get to dismiss an hypothetical situation that challenges that principle simply because it isn't something that happened IRL.
[Quote]I mean this:
Should Israel have gone to war over a moderate risk to one old dude who was dying anyway and was an asshole to his neighbors? Probably not. But that's not what actually happened.
Should Israel have gone to war over a concentrated rocket attacks against several major cities, the range and quality of which have been increasing over several years, in addition to multiple terror attacks against Israeli civilians up to and including the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers which triggered the start of the war? That's not the same.
The "mentality" responsible for the war isn't that 1 Israeli life is worth a 10 or a hundred Palestinian ones. It is that the safety and well being of millions of Israelis is worth the lives of too many Israeli soldiers, the even greater threat to so many Israelis while the war continues and, yes, the absolute horrors we'll be unleashing on the other side.[/QUOTE]
But: [quote]The safety and well being of millions of Israelis is worth [...] the absolute horrors we'll be unleashing on the other side.[/quote]
Can be boiled down to:
[Quote]1 Israeli life is worth X Palestinian ones.[/quote]
X being the amount of collateral casualties that had to be dealt per Israeli life saved.
Safety measures taken by Israel to prevent such casualties, like calling targeted houses, lower that number, which is good. The question is whether it is low enough, and if it is consistent across interventions.
Warning civilians of a bombing is good, but bombing in the first place isn't. For every house bombed, you get a new terrorist. These actions don't go with the idea that Israel wants lasting peace.
[QUOTE=Trebgarta;52478373]Assuming that bombing a house indeed breeds new terrorists, which is a debatable claim. What is the alternative to bombing a house with enemy combatants in a battle scenario?[/QUOTE]
You don't need an alternative to know bombing civilian houses in one of the densest populated cities in the world isn't the answer.
It might not create a terrorist directly, but it does breed hate for Israel. Which fuels terrorism.
[QUOTE=Trebgarta;52478462]What do you do with a house full of enemy combatants? What do you do with a school that enemy combatants store rockets in that they plan to fire on you and your family?
Is the answer nothing? It is a simple question asking you for alternatives, since you object to X while ignore why X is being done.[/QUOTE]
There is no house full of enemy combatants. Period. If there was, Hamas' casualties would be way higher. Period.
What do you do with a school filled with rockets? I don't know, how about you don't blow it up, resulting in millions of dollars in damage and possibly dead civilians.
"Is the answer nothing? It is a simple question asking you for alternatives, since you object to X while ignore why X is being done."
Entering Gaza and shooting every single person you see could lower the amount of killed Israeli citizens but that don't make it right either.
I don't ignore the reasons why they're bombing civilians. I don't agree with them, and neither do humanitarian organizations and the UN.
If you don't blow up the rockets, what do you do? Just sit around and wait for it to be fired at you so Iron dome can probably take it down?
How do you know there's no house full of enemy combatants? You suddenly know more about Hamas operations than the Mossad which has spies in Gaza?
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