[RD] War in Gaza: News Thread

How so? 'The West' are many nations of which the majority have called for a ceasefire in Gaza for months.

Wait til you find out who's been arming and funding Israel and her attempts to wipe out the Palestinians, for decades
 
How so? 'The West' are many nations of which the majority have called for a ceasefire in Gaza for months.
The UK hasn't. It hopped on the train recently. The US hasn't. It's only barely gotten to that kind of language in the past week or two.

Which countries have? Canada was one of the earlier ones that called for some kind of ceasefire, and I believe Australia at some point?

How much do you think the needle was going to move without US support (or in this case, abstention)? How much material support is the US still providing to Israel?

Can we answer any of these questions, or is this just an attempt at semantics in the event someone wants to raise Ireland's support for Palestine or something (which, while good, has generally been ignored by most Western powers because it's Ireland, and thus, not a "power" in relative terms).
 

In 2014 Israel launched Operation Protective Edge against Gaza. Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, observed after touring the ravaged Strip, “I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.” According to the vagrant seated next to Professor Morris, “I think Protective Edge was 2014, but I’m just saying that the coordination in the military is pretty tight.” Was this destruction then the result of “pretty tight” precision attacks directed at military targets? An unimpeachable source definitively answers this question. Eyewitness accounts by Israeli combatants were compiled in a large dossier by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli non-governmental organization comprising former Israeli soldiers (“This is How We Fought in Gaza,” 2014). None of the hundreds of testimonies collected by this organization over more than a decade has ever been proven false, and all of them were approved for publication by the IDF censor. The leadership of Breaking the Silence is not conventionally leftist—it does not support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, opposes criminal prosecution of Israeli officers, and prudently fudges its own findings—while most of the soldier-witnesses themselves do not even appear contrite. Here’s a tiny sample of the “pretty tight” precision attacks directed exclusively at military targets:
 
It would be important to know whether an order was transmitted so that it was unambiguous to the recipient as to its intent by the government, not by individual actors. And certainly a German might be interested to recognize whether there is any equivalent of the Wannsee Conference here. Spokesperson just indignantly blows it off and says "Do you think there was any such orders in Rwanda"? Well...was there? I don't know. Perhaps there was a Hutu lieutenant who told his people "go here and kill Tutsi". She then goes on to say it is reasonable to conclude that genocide might be happening albeit dressed up in military language e.g. evacuations. Okay, but assume a juror who doesn't know anything about this conflict sees that: would they undoubtedly think "evacuation means killing people"?.
 
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The Irish government has been pretty critical of the Israeli government from the outset.
 
It is known that Siege warfare has existed for thousands of years,
and it has generally been regarded as a perfectly legitimate tactic.

I am unaware that recent conventions define siege as genocide.

If Hamas surrendered, the Israeli-Hamas war would end.

If the Israeli government then continued blocking food supplies to Gaza,
it would be out of the context of an ongoing war siege, and guilty of genocide.

Thing is as long as (i) Hamas is determined to fight on and (ii) most Palestinians
are supporting them and (iii) Israel is prepared to let those Palestinians who don't
support Hamas go to Egypt or Jordan etc; I have difficulty seeing a siege as genocidal.
 
Thing is as long as (i) Hamas is determined to fight on and (ii) most Palestinians
are supporting them
Gosh I wonder why

(iii) Israel is prepared to let those Palestinians who don't
support Hamas go to Egypt or Jordan etc; I have difficulty seeing a siege as genocidal.
So was the Russian Empire prepared to let the Circassians go to the Ottoman Empire, that's the point of a genocide, to remove people
 
So we are going into historical analogues:

Letting people in Gaza who want to relocate is not the same as exterminating those people.

The Jews who were not at war with Germany thought they were being forcibly relocated.
They were mistaken, it was the German government's intention to exterminate them.

At the end of WW2 many german civilians were forcibly deported from lands where German had been
the spoken language for over a thousand years; that relocation was not generally regarded as genocide.

A question to me; is what is the purpose of the siege in Gaza? Is it to starve Hamas with starvation of the
palestinian civilian populations and the Israeli hostages merely as unwanted collateral damage OR is it
simply to starve the Palestinian people out of existence. To me the former is not genocide, while the latter is.
 
I imagine much of the discussion of genocide is part an internal political discussion on the part of outside countries going on, to impose some sort of restriction on Israel when there otherwise wouldn't be. I.e. no one would act if someone didn't declare a genocide and so we must declare that there is one...

Perhaps that UN spokesperson should be equally aware of how language can be used to certain desired effects.
 
I imagine much of the discussion of genocide is part an internal political discussion on the part of outside countries going on, to impose some sort of restriction on Israel when there otherwise wouldn't be. I.e. no one would act if someone didn't declare a genocide and so we must declare that there is one...

Perhaps that UN spokesperson should be equally aware of how language can be used to certain desired effects.
Alternatively, as per the Hague, Israel is on track to commit one.

You really don't need to wrap yourself in semantic riddles, or like Edward, attempt to justify why genocidal actions aren't genocidal using a different form of semantics. Both of these are "using language to achieve certain desired effects".
 
Forced expulsion via warfare and making life impossible in a group of people's homeland has frequently been a method of genocide from the Americas and Australia to the Circassians and Armenians to the Balkans. Astonishing this needs to be explained.

Generally speaking, when your posts start echoing an Ottoman Pasha circa 1915 it's probably a good idea to dial it back a bit.

All the expansionist and fascist elements in Israel would be stoked if the starvation and violence campaign made everyone in Gaza and West Bank flee to other countries. That's kind of a large part of the point of the current campaigns here. Finish the job of the nakba.
 
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Hey let's cross the made up hypothetical bridge fifteen steps down the path of causation, when we've resolved the actually occurring current real nowtime genocide first.

"The people being destroyed now might try to do genocide back to the regional superpower given utterly different circumstances" is really an extraordinarily weak argument against stopping what's happening now.

I'm all on board with preventing the Palestinian population from colonising and destroying the native people in some other part of the world once they're liberated here, though!
 
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If Hamas surrendered, the Israeli-Hamas war would end.

If the Israeli government then continued blocking food supplies to Gaza,
it would be out of the context of an ongoing war siege, and guilty of genocide.

Thing is as long as (i) Hamas is determined to fight on and (ii) most Palestinians
are supporting them and (iii) Israel is prepared to let those Palestinians who don't
support Hamas go to Egypt or Jordan etc; I have difficulty seeing a siege as genocidal.

No "news" but someone ought to adress the "if only Hamas surrendered" because that is the last refuge of the soundrels trying to make up an excuse for this genocide.

Hamas fighting an occupying power is within the rights of an occupied people. They have a right to fight back against the occupier. Which Israel is. Israel trying to surpess a rebellion in the occupied territores is not per se genocide. It is the way it is doing so that is genocide. There is a long history of conquests and occupations of territories. Only in a few very rare cases has genocide been planned and inflicted on the population of those territores. This is one such case.

There is no "siege warfare" there. Gaza had been under siege for many years and Israel could have just sat back and continued that siege, after beating back the incursion it seemingly enabled by pulling out its regular army units from their barracks around Gaza. But they decided otherwise. Instead of continung the siege they were going to conquer the territory and then enact a final solution to the problem of palestinian resistance.

What is hapenning in Gaza is not a siege, it is an extermination plan. You and @Narz are being disingenous calling it a "siege". Or drinking from very shoddy israeri propapganda. In the old thread, before Israel stepped into Gaza, I tild the single israeli there: "do nothing". That was the obvious alternative Israel had, keep the status quo.

The issue was that the israelis were pissed at appearing militarily weak in October 7. So they decided to do a genocide to prove they're big nasty guys. They didn't have the weapons and capability to do that (the plan is foolish), but have been counting on uncle Biden to provide. And on the UK also, much of the output of the UK's remaining mmunitions industry is going there.
 
Quoted ICJ tweet:
PRESS RELEASE: the #ICJ indicates additional provisional measures following South Africa’s request of 6 March 2024 in the case #SouthAfrica v. Israel https://bit.ly/3IVfOjp
Embedded screenshot (link is to full PDF):
1711708950777.png
 
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Famine is now probably present in Gaza, US says

State department assessment comes after world’s top court ordered Israel to admit food aid into territory

Famine is already probably present in at least some areas of northern Gaza, while other areas are in danger of falling into conditions of starvation, the US state department said on Friday a day after the world’s top court ordered Israel to admit food aid into the territory.

“While we can say with confidence that famine is a significant risk in the south and centre but not present, in the north, it is both a risk and quite possibly is present in at least some areas,” a state department official told Reuters.

[...]
 
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