You registered just to respond to this thread? Shill?
Yeah right, that’s probably the reason why its a massacre.
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Rabbi Yaacov
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Interesting way to put it, because their actions here do not even save Israeli lives if you count them all. In 2013-14 the rocket attacks have killed one person and injured sixteen. That means even on the short term more Israelis have been harmed by going into Gaza, only they happen not to be the civilians; though of course such actions actually tend to increase rocket attacks and so do risk civilian lives too.
That’s not even to mention, because I assume you don’t care, that several times more Palestinian civilians have been killed in bombardments this last week than people have been in rocket attacks this last decade. Which in the long term does not serve to protect Israeli lives either, it just reinforces the sway of terrorists like Hamas.
Countries have an obligation to protect their civilians. That’s what the missile shield does, and one could debate that some portion of the blockade is justified by it. Israel’s actions in expeditions like this are not in that category; they are putting Israelis in harm’s way while causing much greater death among other civilians.
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I’m a regular BB reader, yet this was the first time I felt like I had something to contribute to the discussion. Don’t see a problem here.
That’s not the reason why it’s a massacre, the reason, IMO, is that Hamas hides behind civilians by firing from civilian neighborhoods, hospitals, schools and mosques, and demands that people remain in those areas, knowing that the Israeli army would have to either not respond at all (thus allowing them to keep firing) or retaliate and risk the lives of civilians.
That Rabbi can suck a duck. Everyone’s equal in my book, but some are more fortunate than others.
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I’d rather see a peaceful resolution of this conflict. It’s possible, the West Bank under president Abbas is a great example of that. However, sitting around waiting for Hamas to kidnap and kill more civilians or soldiers is not the way to go. Also, rockets have been fired at southern Israel in the last two years repeatedly, with no response, since there were no casualties, but I know people living in that area - my own family. Let me tell you, it’s a hard way to live.
Israel has always existed with the memory of the holocaust, meaning we’ve learned our lesson - better to be on the safe side than be killed. The armed tunnels extending from Gazza into southern Israeli kibbutzim show that plans were made to try to kill many civilians, so I totally understand the need for this operation.
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Or, you know, not to fucking do that to other people.
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I don’t think you guys learned the whole lesson … and that’s what got you into this mess.
Hint: Don’t repeat what was done. Putting people into ghettos and demonstrating a superiority-complex and treating those living in squalor as less valuable/deserving is a sure sign that you’re the bad guy this time.
Learn from history and Don’t fucking repeat the errors.
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Certainly. I expect few people will object to real attempts to alleviate that - like the missile shield, or truces like the one in 2008, during which rocket fire nearly stopped. Ending when Israel invaded and the rockets returned in full force, which is the sort of thing we’re talking about here.
I wonder, too, if you realize that living under the threat of random death is also a good description of the people in Gaza, except they are dozens of times more likely to actually die, and live more in want in the mean time. So they too prone to wanting to “defend” themselves in insensible ways that only reinforce the hostility.
I mean, people recognize that Israelis are individuals who don’t deserve collective punishment for things like the Dahiya doctrine. But at the same they’ll say that if Palestinians didn’t want to suffer these things, they shouldn’t have collectively voted in a terrorist government. Well, they shouldn’t, but there is lots of that going around.
At any rate I think you might notice that there are enough examples like 2008 to show that invasions and mass killings of civilians are not protecting Israelis, but only renewing the conflict while crushing lives. At this point the hatred of Palestinians is something Israel will suffer for generations, and as terrible as waiting that out is, prolonging it is worse still.
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So because they suck at terrorism they should be ignored/get a free pass?
ETA - I’m at the point where if I were Israel I’d load everyone up on to buses with full tanks of gas and send them as far into Jordan and Egypt and they will go.
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Oops… Wait… Wrong side? I’m so confused.
Which is the whole point of the Occupation & Gaza siege–making the Palestinians leave.
More right than you might think in a way since Goliath was a Philistine tribe. This of course leads to the name of the territory given by the Roman Empire as “Palestine” as the Romans believed everyone in the region to be as uneducated as they perceived the Philistines to be. This derogative nomenclature is still with us in English where the word philistine means “a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them”.
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I’ve always thought that it’s weird that jews represent about 7% of semetic peoples, but anti-semetic is about them.
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the comment you deleted was 100% original, I can say, I wrote it :-) here it is, back to the blog, with the same facts - though as you know, numbers change a-day 
so we should now add seven more kids to the toll, killed while playing in the street, for the sake of security … in anycase, hope it stays:
If Boing boing was your only source of information about the ongoing
hostilities, you would think there was a sort of even fight between two
equally armed forces: you say that “More than 1,000 people have now died
in battles between Israeli forces and Hamas, most of them civilians”,
so you are trying to convey that massive attacks by the 4th most
powerful Army in the world are equivalent to a few hundred home-made
rockets, most of which explode in no-mans land - and you are also
trying to suggest that both sides are facing more or less the same
deadly consequences… However, WE DO have other sources, so WE KNOW
that the overwhelming majority of victims are Palestinian civilians
killed by massive attacks on their land by occuping forces (according to
UN figures, at the height of the attacks, [one child was being killed
every hour][1] by attacks of Israeli forces), while the vast majority of
Israeli victims (1 out of 30 of the total toll, more or less) are
soldiers that find death while invading someone else`s land. So you see,
there’s no need to say one word about the reality of the occupation -
just pointing to the plain objective facts about the present agression
shows how dramatically one sided is the “photo essay” you propose today
… and how ill informed would be anyone who decided to trust this blog
as a primary source of information … Suggestion: try [Overcoming the
Media Blockade in Gaza][2], by Amy Goodman, for some clever insight into
(much needed) media deintoxication …
[1]: http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_sitrep_23_07_2014.pdf
[2]: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/7/24/overcoming_the_media_blockade_in_gaza
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Everyone here’s rooting for the poor widdle Hamas who just happen to have the destruction of Israel as their primary goal, and are apparently setting off fireworks and not weapons that would cause plenty of destruction had there been no Iron Dome.
This Israeli blogger says it best.
I didn’t mean to be an ambassador for Israel here, just to give my personal perspective. I support peace and I wish the Israeli government would have found a way to settle this diplomatically before it became, AGAIN, a bloodbath. But that didn’t happen yet and I can’t change it. Here’s how myself, a typical Israeli, views things, for what it’s worth:
I’m 35, married and a father of a 1 yo baby girl. I work as a software developer in a startup and live about 20 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. It pains me to see children die, Palestinians included, it really does.
We’ve been living with sirens for the last 22 days, meaning that several times a day we have to take the baby (which had a high fever in the middle of all this due to an infection) to a safe room, day and night. We decided to leave the house as seldom as possible, so as not to risk her. Even so, when we drove to visit friends on Friday, there was a siren on the freeway, and exactly as I stopped the car and we were taking the baby out of her chair, there was an explosion right above us, of the Iron Dome intercepting the Hamas rocket. My wife and I shielded our daughter with our bodies, for fear of shrapnel, which thankfully didn’t hit us.
My mom’s car got hit by part of a missle and was partially smashed (thankfully she was in a bomb shelter at the time).
Even so, I want peace and I want quiet for us and the Palestinians. However, I fully expect my government to protect us, by any means necessary. Since the Hamas doesn’t honor any kind of cease fire (Israel respected three cease-fires which the Hamas didn’t), the Israeli army has to continue the fight to stop this by force. Now, since Hamas hides behind civilians, Palestinian civilians are regretfully killed, and it’s a tragedy.
So, Israel may be in an unfortunate situation, but it’s not evil. Comparing the systematical slaughter of innocent people, by the millions, to a country defending its citizens from rocket fire, that’s incredibly misinformed, if not terribly cynical.
I do hope that once the fight stops the two sides can diplomatically find a solution for this conflict once and for all, but first it has to stop.
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Has anyone cheered for Hamas, who as far as I am concerned deserve the same contempt as their Israeli counterparts calling for the destruction of the Palestinians? Because it seems to me that people have been condemning Israel for killing large numbers of civilians, many more than them, which is not the same at all.
Indeed. You speak eloquently at length about the suffering from the sirens and rockets, but for the bombardment of Palestinians - which again is many times worse - all you have is that it’s a tragedy but it’s on them, you’ve washed your hands, so what are you gonna do.
Well, sorry, but I can’t care about your suffering and not also care about Palestinians facing the same on a larger scale. Hamas are despicable for using human shields, but that doesn’t excuse people who would simply shoot through dozens of them on the off chance it might someday save a life of someone on the right team.
And like I said, incursions like this are a bad way to protect Israelis, that only serve to keep the hatred warm. It’s fighting a hydra by cutting off heads and stabbing hundreds of villagers on the way. Israel should protect its citizens, but that is not what is happening here.
So you brought up whether Israel is evil, but I think that’s a bad way to look at it. Like everyone else, Israelis are individual people, and they each do good things and bad things. But the ones who are calling for the deaths of children above are doing something bad, the people who say any means necessary are doing something bad, and the military killing mass numbers of civilians is doing something bad, in fact war crimes.
Whereas the Israelis opposing such things are doing something good, and given what a political disaster Palestine is, I think they are the best real chance to someday come up with a resolution and end the perpetual sirens. So I’m sorry if it’s true as you say that they aren’t the typical ones.
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As far as I can tell, Israel pulled out of Gaza a decade ago, both ‘settlers’ and IDF, and left them to their own devices. Since then it’s Hamas that continues to fire rockets at them, and it’s Hamas whose charter and openly stated goal is to exterminate Jews from the world and destroy the Israeli state. You don’t get to talk or negotiate with someone like that.
Well, sorry, but I can’t care about your suffering and not also care about Palestinians
facing the same on a larger scale. Hamas are despicable for using human
shields, but that doesn’t excuse people who would simply shoot through
dozens of them on the off chance it might someday save a life of someone
on the right team.
So what do you expect Israel to do, sit on their hands while rockets keep coming in by the dozens? These aren’t firework rockets either and Iron Dome isn’t going to save them from a zerg rush barrage of rockets from the other side. This is war, and civilians die, as they have since the dawn of human history. If today’s liberal media had been around 70 years ago, we’d never have won against Hitler either, in fact they’d probably dismiss Auschwitz as a conspiracy theory and howl about German/Japanese civilians dying in bomb attacks.
Why in holy hell should Israel alone have to play by the rules and minimize civilian casualty count when Hamas has no such intention (and when they offer fair warning for people to evacuate before the counter attack)? Blame Hamas, and only Hamas for what the Palestinians have to face. Hamas doesn’t give a shit about the welfare of Palestinians, they will simply use them as cannon fodder to achieve their goal - the destruction of Israel. Ask them why they use schools and hospitals as rocket launch sites. It’s not as simplistic as the stupid angry flower comic.
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I expect Israel to take what measures it can to protect its citizens. The iron dome is a good part of that. The blockade has been a humanitarian crisis but I could see arguing some portion of it is valuable here. You dismiss the idea of talking to people out of hand, but in the past it’s also been a very helpful measure; like I noted the 2008 truce saw an almost complete cessation of rockets until they decided to go with an incursion instead.
I would hope they would build on such successes instead of on failures. Again, my main point is that incursions like this aren’t really part of helping protect civilians. They undermine anyone who would ever work toward peace, they reinforce the sway of terrorists like Hamas, and they renew efforts to pummel Israel with rockets, in addition to killing far more civilians than Hamas has ever managed on their own.
If the only options are sitting on your hands and making things worse, you sit on your hands; but I think that’s a false dichotomy brought by people who would like to excuse masses of deaths as unavoidable.
Because human lives are worth preserving wherever possible. This is both sensible strategy, in that killing Palestinian children is why groups like Hamas find support, and basic ethics that ought to guide all our actions. It’s ridiculous to claim Israel isn’t evil and that it should fight with just as much disregard for lives as terrorists.
Contrary to what is sometimes implied, Israel is not fighting for its existence here. It has in other conflicts, but in this one the question is over the lives of Israeli and Palestinian people. I care a lot about those, and I would like to see whatever actions possibly taken to preserve them. As I keep saying, incursions like this do not fall into that category at all.
But hey, it’s war and civilians die and always have, so nobody should care. I wonder if a war crime something that even makes sense in that philosophy, or if the Geneva convention can all just be written off as some idiotic suicide pact. Maybe it’s just another thing the “liberal media” made up? I wouldn’t know, because the media aren’t actually so liberal in any country I’ve visited.
Are you actually getting your information from sources that think they are?
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You were the one who started comparing the situation and got the argument slapped back into your face!
The whole “but they shoot rockets at us” is an hollow excuse for the massacre. Yeah they shoot rockets and it’s a crime but the response is an overreaction. Thats the point here. 1 Israeli got killed by rockets … thousands palestinians die. It looks like the rockets/murders were an wished for excuse to start another war against a whole ethnic group.
It’s still an occupied territory by international law. Israel controls the access by air, land and sea. It’s not a war by international law. I suggest you watch the video of the lecture by Norman Finkelstein Ashen_Victor posted.
Pay close attention to the part where israeli ex-ministers (as recently as 2000) admit that a) apart from the war for independence no war by Israel was a war of necessity b) Israel is culpable for ethnic cleansing.
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Israeli war supporters chase peace protesters, try to beat them up & mace them:
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