Responsibility for Gaza

A capture (and slight refinement) of a bushy Bluesky discussion starting from Starfish saying:

I think [older Democratic electeds] don’t really get that to people younger than say, shit … 40-50 at this point? Israel as the plucky underdog just kinda doesn’t track on an instinctual level. In some ways, the “Israeli Defense Forces as unstoppable supermen” propaganda worked too well, ironically enough.

70 year-olds: Arab-Israeli wars are when every single neighbor of Israel invades it at once and almost win

50 year-olds: Arab-Israeli wars are when Israeli F-15s shoot down 11,000 Syrian MiGs

30 year-olds: Arab-Israeli wars are when the IDF turns somewhere into the lunar surface

I agree that this generation gap in experience explains a lot about the Discourse.

And Loud Penitent offers a counterpoint which opens up bigger questions. (All the boxed quotes which follow are his.)

I think that applies primarily to Gentiles.

Part of the problem here is that for a lot of Jews 10/7 was a pretty explicit reminder “oh yeah these people would like to butcher and rape you and it will not matter if you want peace.” (“These people” here is referring to Hamas, not Palestinians generally — many of whom behaved far better towards their grieving Jewish neighbors than other Gentiles in the moment who were Alive with the Words.)

And a lot of [those Jews] — us, really, I include myself — were really hoping to use 10/7 as an example of “look, our concerns are not wholly unjustified! People really do want us dead! Hamas are actual monsters!”

And then what felt like the entire rest of the public just shrugged and went “so anyway.”

And a minority, smaller but extremely vocal, basically went, “Actually that’s great, more of that, you’re next Zio. Are you a good Jew or a bad Jew?”

This underlines why a lot of Jews like me who call for Palestinian liberation and vigorously fault Israel say that we must name Hamas’ culpability as well.

This underlines why a lot of Jews like me who recognized Israel’s attack on Gaza as genocidal a few weeks after 10/7 are mortified by the antisemtism implicit in so many people unsatisfied with pointing to the immense real wrongs, adding fantastical misrepresentations — calling it an inevitable consequence of Zionism, claiming it emerges from Israel’s longstanding plan to annex Gaza and expel-or-kill all Gazans, framing common horrors of war as demonstrations of Israel’s unique brutality.

people who don’t recognize “so yeah that’s what happens when a war is fought in a dense urban area & one side utterly refuses to surrender, did we just erase WW2 from memory?”

This underlines why a lot of Jews like me insist that — without diminishing Netanyahu’s & the Likudniks’ moral responsibility — advocacy for Palestinian liberation must also recognize how Hamas chose the rivers of blood shed in the last year and a half, callously disinterested in Palestinians’ lives.

Netanyahu is not motivated by wanting the release of hostages … but Israelis are, and demanding the hostages’ release is not just a rationalization of Israel’s attack. Hamas keeping hostages is both morally and legally unjustified.

The elephant in the room is that the reason the Gaza war has turned so horrific is because Hamas has kept refusing to surrender despite in every other respect than keeping its hostages, being unequivocally and dramatically defeated.

Like, in ways that basically any government that gave a fuck about its people would normally be going “alright time to throw in the towel.”

But Hamas does not, and everyone goes “how brave and plucky of them, glory to the resistance!” and not seeing that Hamas is openly doing the meme of: “Some of you may die but that’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”

[Israel’s] demands are extremely actionable, I’d argue, it’s just that Hamas doesn’t want to do them, because it would constitute their total surrender.

But Hamas’ response is essentially to proclaim that they are entitled to remain free and in power after embarking on a monstrous pogrom, that at most they should be entitled to a return to the status quo, and that they are willing to tolerate any number of Gazan dead to permit this.

They cannot win a war that (in at least its latest phase) they very deliberately started with feverish hopes of total victory, so instead their strategy has essentially become “lose as dramatically and horrifically as possible until the rest of the embarrassed world steps in to stop it.” And the thing is … this isn’t actually how international laws of armed conflict work! Hamas does not actually have a right to expend its people’s lives in perpetuity to preserve their own! There is no “good game, now back to your starting positions!” or “stop! stop! he’s already dead!” clause!

If Hamas is losing a war they started and refuses to give up their (illegally held) hostages or surrender, the international legal response is, bluntly: “Skill issue.”

One can say that at some point the number of Gazan dead has exhausted the moral license for Israel to reclaim its citizens from their illegal, barbaric captivity by force of arms.

But this is a moral appeal. It is not a legal one. And [then one] must honestly admit one is saying it is OK to keep hostages.

Basically the entire basis for negotiations, however necessary, is built on the poisoned foundation of considering the taking of hostages for ransom an acceptable Hamas strategic doctrine, & folks act like they have a right to it.

Like in a classical sense the answer would be “you want to keep holding the hostages, contest them by violence.”

Hamas cannot contest them by violence, because they’re weak, useless cowards who suck at anything other than butchering unarmed or unwary people, so they have civilians do the dying.

Ongoing negotiation is vital, but I cannot imagine it bearing fruit until neither the Likudniks nor Hamas are the agents at the table, since neither of them care to end the bloodshed.