To my mind, a few things stand out- my analysis is broadly similar to yours I think:
1. It looks like both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes and this should be condemned.
2. It is quite likely that some of the more lurid stories are falsified. This is a common in war. Likely some of the stories will be true, some will be false. One should be careful about speaking about particular allegations of crimes until the dust has settled.
3. It is crucial to be clear about the overall context of this. Gaza is an open air prison, in which people struggle for food and freshwater and cannot leave a fairly small strip of land. It is also crucial to be clear that the media simply does not care as much about these broader and longer term crimes as they do about recent events. A portion of this is the human bias towards the spectacular and unusual, but a lot represents the geopolitical embedding of our news media, and the alliances the western world is embedded in. We should consider these biases carefully.
4. Our moral positions on the conflict as a whole should reflect a sober assessment of the total situation from the point of view of human welfare, and the structures of domination of power, and should not change too much on the basis of day to day events. The correct position is that Gaza must be free, the blockade is wrong, apartheid is wrong and the intentional killing of civilians is always wrong.
I don't have broader views on the conflict on account of being inadequately informed. I do, however, plan on learning about it soon. So I'm sticking to saying things that aren't about the conflict more broadly.
The Martyrmade Podcast series “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem” is an absolutely excellent history from the late 1800s to modern Israel. Widely praised for being accurate and making “both sides” think it’s favoring the other. Extremely high quality, devastatingly sad
Responding with unbridled anger has never worked for me; I doubt it will work for Israel either. It's too late now, but I'd have thought there would be ways to isolate Hamas after such atrocities, especially if they withheld themselves from indiscriminately attacking Gaza, thought about it a bit, gathered some intelligence...
I very much agree with you. I do think it would have been productive to include that the Palestine supporters here view the terrorist attack by Hamas as a direct response to the years of oppression and violence they've endured by Israel without a worldwide anger or response. The attack was an explosion of anger, and some people see it as the beginning of the end to their oppression. It's in this contact that they're saying "resistance is violence." However, an obvious problem with this interpretation is I don't see how an attack that was trying to start a revolution against social oppression could purposefully target innocent civilians and revel in cruelty.
I don't know how people can so confidently defend either country at this point.
I sort of feel the same way, but the most puzzling thing is what I’d do if I were to command Israeli forces. Like, idk what’s the just way to begin with. For Israeli people it seems like your direct neighbour is a real dickhead with terroristic government that hates you for who you are and wishes to shove you into the sea, so doing nothing probably kills some your people but doing some violence either kills more people that would otherwise not be killed or essentially does nothing again
Good point. I think Matthew is criticizing the war crimes Israel is committing, not necessarily the idea of a military operation in general. Israel could invade Gaza without shutting off the water, power and food supplies.
Regarding what they should do, I think the problem fundamentally stems from two things - and I say this in a descriptive sense, not a normative one.
First, Israel is officially an ethnostate. In the late 19th century, Zionism was conceived as an idea to end antisemitic attacks on Jews (pogroms, etc). The Zionists set a goal of creating a country for Jews only (or at least vast majority Jewish). Their thinking was that Jews are being attacked because they live among other peoples, but if they had their own state they'd be in power and live in peace. Israel still tries to maintain its Jewish supermajority. They gave this as the reason for denying Palestinians the right to return (during the Camp David negotiations), and in 2018, they passed a bill making this "basic law" of Israel. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Nation-State_of_the_Jewish_People
The other problem is the Arabs put up an unusual amount of resistance to this. In 1936, for example, they began a revolt against the British over the idea of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. In 1947 they rejected the partition plan. In 1948, after the Israelis, who accepted the plan, declared a independence, 5 Arab countries went to war with them. (During that war many Palestinians were expelled from their homes by the Israeli army. The present day Gaza people are descendant from them.) This went on for the next 75 years.
So today, the Israelis still hold on to their ethnostate and the Palestinians still want to return to their pre-1948 homes. Amidst all this some Palestinians took up terrorism, which further complicates things.
I'm no expert, but I would think the best thing to do at this point might be to invade Gaza (obviously taking all precautions to protect civilians) and occupy it with an attempt to integrate the population into Israel. They would have to be acculturated and the terror organizations would have to be dismantled, but ultimately it might end the 75-year conflict. Unfortunately, Israel probably won't try this because they'd have to give up the original goal of Zionism.
I’m kinda sceptical to the idea of invasions for the sake of acculturation of people and I don’t know many examples where it’d worked as was planned
But I do now some where it didn’t
Also it seems like it’ll cause an enormous amount of harm and deaths due to incredibly dense cities and will probably result in a guerilla war (not sure of the latter), so we better be sure that there’s no other option
(1) Israel is not simply depriving over two million Gazans of food, water, and medicine; they're also dropping thousands of tons of bombs on major population centers, killing hundreds of people (so far).
(2) Hamas' actions will undoubtedly increase US support for Israel, including the illegal settlements in the West Bank. (Even if the Biden administration criticizes the settlements, in practice the US aid will mean more of them get built.) This will make a negotiated peace even harder to achieve. Hamas' actions are thus not only evil, but deeply contrary to the interests of ordinary Palestinians.
“Their siege which involves cutting off food, water, and electricity to literally millions of people, is both flagrantly illegal under international law and ethically appalling.”
Under what circumstances, if any, would you consider the siege ethical? A lot of responses to Israel’s counterattack basically reduce to “Israel can treat this like a police action but not war.” I’m not sure how Israel is supposed to actually be victorious with the conditions others want to impose on how it fights.
This is flatly false. Our most recent data (from September 2023) indicates than only 27% of Palestinians regard Hamas as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people (compared to 24% for Fateh and 44% for neither). Even if we assume that the number in Gaza is higher (with support being lower in the PA-controlled West Bank), it's still nothing close to "universal support." Nonsense like this is going to get people killed. https://pcpsr.org/en/node/955
Not the relevant question. The question is whether it will help them defeat Hamas and reduce harm to Israeli soldiers/citizens. That is Israel's concern.
Also, it is a siege. That is the kind of thing you do in a siege.
Why is it Israel's duty to provide food and electricity to a country that's openly genocidal towards them? This isn't a true siege, Gaza still has a border with Egypt. Egypt or one of the other 21 Arab countries can provide aid.
Israel only controls their own border and immigration policy. Why haven't any of the 22 Arab countries allowed in Gazans who want to escape their hellhole? Why does this duty fall to Israel, even though many of these Gazans would surely commit terrorists attacks if they were in Israel?
Why do so many people criticize Israel without criticizing these 22 countries first? If Israel defends itself and Gazans used as human shields die, who is principally at fault?
The reason why its so difficult for many to condemn hamas is demonstrated by some of the comments on your post saying “i totally agree, and i think israel should invade gaza and end hamas”. Support for palestine is a minority position and they are overwhelmingly the net victims of this conflict. There is a really forceful push in media and culture to legitimise whatever disproportionate response israel takes, and by coming out and condemning hamas or “both sides” we risk lending legitimacy to a genocide. Its not that supporters of palestine en mass love hamas (though there are a small but vocal contingent of psychopaths as you say)
I haven't seen leftists praising Hamas' violence of innocent victims as you claim here. Under international law, Palestine does have a right to armed resistance. Obviously, there are atrocities and human rights violations on both sides and we need stronger enforcement of international laws.
So that’s quite easy to sit back and say something along the lines of “well both sides are probably gonna do horribly bad things blah-blah shame on them”, but what’s the plausible solution here?
Maybe Israel shouldn't exist? It was founded through the brutal Nakba: this was right in the 20th century, a regime that got started that way is illegitimate.
Perhaps more plausible is to end the Gaza apartheid, but that got started because of the plentiful terrorist attacks before they were relocated there. Don't know how many Jews would want to tough it out like that.
But things look grim for Israel, long term. I can imagine an American administration coming around that would cut the legs out from under Israel for running an ethno-nationalist state.
Where should the Israelis go? The majority of them are refugees from Muslim countries.
Muslims and Jews used to be all over the Middle East. Muslims decided they can't live with Jews so there are no more Jews outside of Israel. (Meanwhile Israel still allows Arabs to live with them.)
Obviously it would be best if everyone could live in peace and return to wherever their grandparents lived. But given the situation, how can you suggest that Jews relinquish their tiny slice of the Middle East when their neighbors want them dead?
So good solution is not to make 2kk people lifes somewhat more horrible by doing nothing about their idiotic regime but to make 9kk people lifes vastly worse and also succumb to terrorist state?
"Succumbing to a terrorist state". This is only an issue if you are a legitimate state yourself. Israel should never have existed, it was not a wise or even ethical decision to found it, that country is literally Fitzcarraldo.
It will not last. A graceful shutdown is possible.
To my mind, a few things stand out- my analysis is broadly similar to yours I think:
1. It looks like both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes and this should be condemned.
2. It is quite likely that some of the more lurid stories are falsified. This is a common in war. Likely some of the stories will be true, some will be false. One should be careful about speaking about particular allegations of crimes until the dust has settled.
3. It is crucial to be clear about the overall context of this. Gaza is an open air prison, in which people struggle for food and freshwater and cannot leave a fairly small strip of land. It is also crucial to be clear that the media simply does not care as much about these broader and longer term crimes as they do about recent events. A portion of this is the human bias towards the spectacular and unusual, but a lot represents the geopolitical embedding of our news media, and the alliances the western world is embedded in. We should consider these biases carefully.
4. Our moral positions on the conflict as a whole should reflect a sober assessment of the total situation from the point of view of human welfare, and the structures of domination of power, and should not change too much on the basis of day to day events. The correct position is that Gaza must be free, the blockade is wrong, apartheid is wrong and the intentional killing of civilians is always wrong.
I don't have broader views on the conflict on account of being inadequately informed. I do, however, plan on learning about it soon. So I'm sticking to saying things that aren't about the conflict more broadly.
The Martyrmade Podcast series “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem” is an absolutely excellent history from the late 1800s to modern Israel. Widely praised for being accurate and making “both sides” think it’s favoring the other. Extremely high quality, devastatingly sad
A sad blaming the victim story.
Responding with unbridled anger has never worked for me; I doubt it will work for Israel either. It's too late now, but I'd have thought there would be ways to isolate Hamas after such atrocities, especially if they withheld themselves from indiscriminately attacking Gaza, thought about it a bit, gathered some intelligence...
I very much agree with you. I do think it would have been productive to include that the Palestine supporters here view the terrorist attack by Hamas as a direct response to the years of oppression and violence they've endured by Israel without a worldwide anger or response. The attack was an explosion of anger, and some people see it as the beginning of the end to their oppression. It's in this contact that they're saying "resistance is violence." However, an obvious problem with this interpretation is I don't see how an attack that was trying to start a revolution against social oppression could purposefully target innocent civilians and revel in cruelty.
I don't know how people can so confidently defend either country at this point.
> Palestine supporters here view the terrorist attack by Hamas as a direct response to the years of oppression and violence they've endured by Israel
Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. All the violence has been initiated by Hamas.
I believe that Gazans genuinely think this is Israel's fault. I also believe Germans genuinely believed their problems were the Jews fault too.
I sort of feel the same way, but the most puzzling thing is what I’d do if I were to command Israeli forces. Like, idk what’s the just way to begin with. For Israeli people it seems like your direct neighbour is a real dickhead with terroristic government that hates you for who you are and wishes to shove you into the sea, so doing nothing probably kills some your people but doing some violence either kills more people that would otherwise not be killed or essentially does nothing again
Good point. I think Matthew is criticizing the war crimes Israel is committing, not necessarily the idea of a military operation in general. Israel could invade Gaza without shutting off the water, power and food supplies.
Regarding what they should do, I think the problem fundamentally stems from two things - and I say this in a descriptive sense, not a normative one.
First, Israel is officially an ethnostate. In the late 19th century, Zionism was conceived as an idea to end antisemitic attacks on Jews (pogroms, etc). The Zionists set a goal of creating a country for Jews only (or at least vast majority Jewish). Their thinking was that Jews are being attacked because they live among other peoples, but if they had their own state they'd be in power and live in peace. Israel still tries to maintain its Jewish supermajority. They gave this as the reason for denying Palestinians the right to return (during the Camp David negotiations), and in 2018, they passed a bill making this "basic law" of Israel. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Nation-State_of_the_Jewish_People
The other problem is the Arabs put up an unusual amount of resistance to this. In 1936, for example, they began a revolt against the British over the idea of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. In 1947 they rejected the partition plan. In 1948, after the Israelis, who accepted the plan, declared a independence, 5 Arab countries went to war with them. (During that war many Palestinians were expelled from their homes by the Israeli army. The present day Gaza people are descendant from them.) This went on for the next 75 years.
So today, the Israelis still hold on to their ethnostate and the Palestinians still want to return to their pre-1948 homes. Amidst all this some Palestinians took up terrorism, which further complicates things.
I'm no expert, but I would think the best thing to do at this point might be to invade Gaza (obviously taking all precautions to protect civilians) and occupy it with an attempt to integrate the population into Israel. They would have to be acculturated and the terror organizations would have to be dismantled, but ultimately it might end the 75-year conflict. Unfortunately, Israel probably won't try this because they'd have to give up the original goal of Zionism.
I’m kinda sceptical to the idea of invasions for the sake of acculturation of people and I don’t know many examples where it’d worked as was planned
But I do now some where it didn’t
Also it seems like it’ll cause an enormous amount of harm and deaths due to incredibly dense cities and will probably result in a guerilla war (not sure of the latter), so we better be sure that there’s no other option
> attempt to integrate the population into Israel.
Good luck with that.
I agree with all of this. Two further points:
(1) Israel is not simply depriving over two million Gazans of food, water, and medicine; they're also dropping thousands of tons of bombs on major population centers, killing hundreds of people (so far).
(2) Hamas' actions will undoubtedly increase US support for Israel, including the illegal settlements in the West Bank. (Even if the Biden administration criticizes the settlements, in practice the US aid will mean more of them get built.) This will make a negotiated peace even harder to achieve. Hamas' actions are thus not only evil, but deeply contrary to the interests of ordinary Palestinians.
“Their siege which involves cutting off food, water, and electricity to literally millions of people, is both flagrantly illegal under international law and ethically appalling.”
Under what circumstances, if any, would you consider the siege ethical? A lot of responses to Israel’s counterattack basically reduce to “Israel can treat this like a police action but not war.” I’m not sure how Israel is supposed to actually be victorious with the conditions others want to impose on how it fights.
Is cutting off food, water, and electricity really going to help them fight Hamas more than it will hurt civilians?
Hamas is not something discretely separable from the Gaza population. Hamas enjoys universal support and active assistance from them.
This is flatly false. Our most recent data (from September 2023) indicates than only 27% of Palestinians regard Hamas as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people (compared to 24% for Fateh and 44% for neither). Even if we assume that the number in Gaza is higher (with support being lower in the PA-controlled West Bank), it's still nothing close to "universal support." Nonsense like this is going to get people killed. https://pcpsr.org/en/node/955
Then why do I never see Muslims blame Hamas for what's happening in Gaza?
That's a too-narrow definition of the word "support."
Not the relevant question. The question is whether it will help them defeat Hamas and reduce harm to Israeli soldiers/citizens. That is Israel's concern.
Also, it is a siege. That is the kind of thing you do in a siege.
I agree with your premise. But Israel will do all it can to avoid killing innocent civilians. The problem is you don’t always know who is innocent.
There are 22 glaring omissions in this article.
Why is it Israel's duty to provide food and electricity to a country that's openly genocidal towards them? This isn't a true siege, Gaza still has a border with Egypt. Egypt or one of the other 21 Arab countries can provide aid.
Israel only controls their own border and immigration policy. Why haven't any of the 22 Arab countries allowed in Gazans who want to escape their hellhole? Why does this duty fall to Israel, even though many of these Gazans would surely commit terrorists attacks if they were in Israel?
Why do so many people criticize Israel without criticizing these 22 countries first? If Israel defends itself and Gazans used as human shields die, who is principally at fault?
Imagine the reaction of the politically left if this had happened at Burning Man.
The reason why its so difficult for many to condemn hamas is demonstrated by some of the comments on your post saying “i totally agree, and i think israel should invade gaza and end hamas”. Support for palestine is a minority position and they are overwhelmingly the net victims of this conflict. There is a really forceful push in media and culture to legitimise whatever disproportionate response israel takes, and by coming out and condemning hamas or “both sides” we risk lending legitimacy to a genocide. Its not that supporters of palestine en mass love hamas (though there are a small but vocal contingent of psychopaths as you say)
I haven't seen leftists praising Hamas' violence of innocent victims as you claim here. Under international law, Palestine does have a right to armed resistance. Obviously, there are atrocities and human rights violations on both sides and we need stronger enforcement of international laws.
So that’s quite easy to sit back and say something along the lines of “well both sides are probably gonna do horribly bad things blah-blah shame on them”, but what’s the plausible solution here?
Maybe Israel shouldn't exist? It was founded through the brutal Nakba: this was right in the 20th century, a regime that got started that way is illegitimate.
Perhaps more plausible is to end the Gaza apartheid, but that got started because of the plentiful terrorist attacks before they were relocated there. Don't know how many Jews would want to tough it out like that.
But things look grim for Israel, long term. I can imagine an American administration coming around that would cut the legs out from under Israel for running an ethno-nationalist state.
Where should the Israelis go? The majority of them are refugees from Muslim countries.
Muslims and Jews used to be all over the Middle East. Muslims decided they can't live with Jews so there are no more Jews outside of Israel. (Meanwhile Israel still allows Arabs to live with them.)
Obviously it would be best if everyone could live in peace and return to wherever their grandparents lived. But given the situation, how can you suggest that Jews relinquish their tiny slice of the Middle East when their neighbors want them dead?
So good solution is not to make 2kk people lifes somewhat more horrible by doing nothing about their idiotic regime but to make 9kk people lifes vastly worse and also succumb to terrorist state?
"Succumbing to a terrorist state". This is only an issue if you are a legitimate state yourself. Israel should never have existed, it was not a wise or even ethical decision to found it, that country is literally Fitzcarraldo.
It will not last. A graceful shutdown is possible.