Israel/Hamas War Superthread

[Dill]

(02-14-2024, 02:52 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: Let’s say you and your family live in a giant house, and across the street from you is a family of 20 people living in another giant house. Within that family of 20 people are 6 people that want to completely murder you and your family and bulldoze your house so they can build their own house where yours was.

Knowing that there’s people in this house that want to kill you and and tear down your house to put their own house in place of yours, you decide to blockade them and prevent them from moving freely across the street to your house. You don’t prevent their movement completely though, you just severely limit it.
To show their proportional way of thinking, these people decide to spend 20 years shooting over 20,000 rockets at your house, which amounts to around an impressive 1,000 rockets per year.

But luckily for you, you have an Iron Dome system installed in your yard that intercepts most of the missiles that reach your house over these 20 years. Not all of them, but most of them. Unfortunately, some of the missiles have gotten through over the years and killed your wife, your dad, and a couple cousins. Yet, you still decide not to wipe them off the face of the earth.

These people also commit about a hundred or so suicide bombings over these 20 years against your house. Not all of them are successful. But some of them are. Unfortunately, the ones that are successful have killed one of your sons, two more of your cousins and your father. But you still don’t completely wipe them off the face of the earth.

Some additional points are required to square your house analogy with current situation in Gaza.

First, many decades ago, your family took the house you are now living in from the grandparents of the 20 or so people living across the street in the other house, and you killed them in the process, forcing their children to flee for fear of rape and death. 

You have surrounded that other house with walls and barbed wire fencing, and now completely control access to the other house, plus food, water, medicine, electricity and trade with other homeowners in the area. You permit two of them to work for you occasionally, mowing your lawn or cleaning your house. If any try to leave the house across the street without your permission, you arrest or shoot them. You have a prison in your basement in which you keep those arrested. 

Not everyone in the other house is down with the arrangement. Some want their grandparents' house back and are ready to die fighting for it. They take pot shots at your family. You have a helicopter gunship and can respond with overwhelming force, killing 10 of theirs for every one of yours. Others in that house are tired of living in fear of your gunship and armed guards, and would be happy if you just let them have what's left of the house they have now, allow them full ownership and control of it.

But you don't want that because you don't trust the people whose house you took to live peacefully beside you. Best you can do is keep them divided and fighting themselves. Make sure the most militant among them--the "Nazis"--get preferential funding from outside sources.  The rest are "cowards" if they don't fight the Nazis. They have "chosen to live under tyranny."

(02-14-2024, 02:52 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: One day these people decide, "you know what, screw it. We’re gonna paratroop in on their asses and kill and rape as many of the people living in that house as we possibly can. And when they run into the bomb shelter in the basement of the house we’re gonna throw grenades in to get those cowards."
So, with their fair proportional way of thinking, they do just that.
They paratroop in on your house and while your family is watching the Superbowl they're ambushed and murdered and raped.
I say all this because I find it a bit odd when the “proportional” argument is brought up. How exactly do you proportionally respond to this? How do you proportonally respond to attempted genocide?
Let’s be real for a second here people. There have been over 20,000 rockets fired at Israel. The only reason Israel  didn’t invade Gaza sooner is because they have the Iron Dome and because a lot of the missles being fired have been inaccurate. If Israel didn’t have Iron Dome, and the Palestinians had more accurate measures, they would have been pounding Israel into the ground over these last 20 years and decimating their communities.
The best they could do instead was what they did on October 7th and now they're getting what they have been asking for for 20 years. If you decided to stay there and die with Hamas, you chose that.

"Decided to stay."   What?  People walled and fenced in didn't break out of their prison and rush into Israeli guns? 

And we are talking about the 4th invasion of Gaza in the last 20 years, 15th invasion if you go back to '48. 

And now the loss of civilian life has topped that of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon back in '82.