In the same way, do the Hamas attacks justify what Israel is doing? Are the Hamas attacks bringing more recruits to Israel's side?
The justification is in the eyes of the populace, not external observers. When Israel bombs a neighborhood, the people who survive in the rubble are now more sympathetic to any opposition to Israel, including Hamas, regardless of whether Hamas poked the bear.
The second part is a little complicated - probably not in this case, actually, since Israel already has compulsory military service. But in general, yes absolutely it does increase recruitment for the other side. Look at the US back after 9/11 - US military recruitment grew significantly.
But the value of recruitment is just as asymmetrical as the forces involved, and it's not only about direct fighter recruitment. Remember, terrorism (also called "asymmetric warfare") is a PR campaign with violence. The smaller force needs recruitment more than the larger force. The smaller force needs increasing sympathy and support from allies more than the larger force. The smaller force hopes to gain international support in the form of sanctions, possible military intervention, etc. The larger force is already the larger force.
How was Israel oppressing Gaza before the attack that killed thousands of Israeli's?
"Thousands" is misleading.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths:
The final death toll from the attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.
Just over 1000. "Thousands" is is a weasel-word that implies more "balance" in loss between the Hamas attack vs Israel's military action. ~1100 is not the same as 34000+. It's not remotely the same. And let's be
very clear - when you ask "what was Israel to do?", the answer is
most emphatically not to kill 30000+ civilians, mostly women and children, by indiscriminately bombing civilian residences, constantly attacking and rendering inoperative all hospitals, destroying schools, using snipers to shoot clear noncombatants like women and children, etc.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/20/gaza-death-toll-passes-34000-israel-iran:
The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza climbed to more than 34,000 on Saturday, with the majority of victims women and children, including at least six killed by an overnight airstrike on a house in Rafah.
But as for the oppression of Gaza, that depends on where you want to start.
Israel has been oppressing specifically Gaza and the West Bank since the 60s.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/:
n Gaza, more than 2 million Palestinians live under an Israeli blockade which has created a humanitarian crisis. It is near-impossible for Gazans to travel abroad or into the rest of the OPT, and they are effectively segregated from the rest of the world.
quote:
"For Palestinians, the difficulty of travelling within and in and out of the OPT is a constant reminder of their powerlessness. Their every move is subject to the Israeli military’s approval, and the simplest daily task means navigating a web of violent control."
-Agnès Callamard
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129942:
Israel’s occupation is illegal and indistinguishable from a “settler-colonial” situation, which must end, as a pre-condition for Palestinians to exercise their right to self-determination, the UN’s independent expert on the occupied Palestinian territory said on Thursday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip:
A blockade has been imposed on the movement of goods and people in and out of the Gaza Strip since Hamas's takeover in 2007, led by Israel and supported by Egypt.
Israel also has a practice of arresting Palestinians and holding them, typically in brutal conditions, without charges indefinitely. Often Palestinians die in custody...with no investigations or consequences.
That was all before Oct 7 2023. It's far worse now. Sure, it's a "war," but lets just focus on the war
crimes.
I've seen videos of Israeli soldiers laughing as they demolish residential structures.
I've seen videos of Israeli soldiers bragging about raping underaged Gazan girls.
I've seen Israeli's using captured Gazans as literal human shields, tying them to their vehicles.
I've seen videos obviously staged by Israelis where they force Gazans to strip to underwear but for some reason still have them hold IDs and
firearms and then parade them around to "surrender" their weapons.
I've seen Gazans forced to kneel in their underwear and then be executed by bullets to the head. Reminded me of Schindler's List.
I've seen Israeli bulldozers drive over living injured Gazans who were camped outside a hospital, waiting for or recovering from treatment.
I've seen Israeli propaganda claim that a dry-erase board contained some organizational Hamas information....and it was just a literal calendar in Arabic, a schedule for some hospital personnel.
The
full ICJ genocide application/report is well worth the read. The factual section starts on page 9. Remember that this was filed months ago, the situation is worse now.
quote:
By 29 October 2023
alone, it was estimated that 6,000 bombs per week had been dropped on the tiny enclave.50 In just over
two months, Israel’s military attacks had “wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo
between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol, or proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in
World War II.”
quote:
More than half of all homes have been destroyed. Some
80 per cent of the population of 2.2 million has been forcibly displaced, into increasingly
smaller areas
quote:
Until 2005, Gaza — like the West Bank today — was occupied by Israeli military forces on the
ground. However, in 2005, Israel unilaterally ‘disengaged’ from Gaza, dismantling its military bases
and relocating Israeli settlers from settlements in Gaza back to Israel and into the occupied West Bank.85
Notwithstanding its ‘disengagement’, Israel continues to exercise control over the airspace, territorial
waters, land crossings, water, electricity, electromagnetic sphere and civilian infrastructure in Gaza,86
as well as over key governmental functions, such as the management of the Palestinian population
registry for Gaza.87 Given that continuing effective control by Israel over the territory, Gaza is still
considered by the international community to be under belligerent occupation by Israel.88 The near total
control exercised by Israel over access to Gaza, and over its water, fuel, electricity and food supplies,
has been demonstrated starkly since 7 October 2023
quote:
Israel’s parallel implementation of a wide buffer zone inside Gaza’s eastern border fence
(estimated to restrict access to approximately 24 per cent of Gaza) severely impacts internal food
supply, by reducing the main agricultural area for farming.97 Israel also made fishing extremely
hazardous for Palestinians, who have not had full access to the fishing zone of 20 nautical miles
stipulated in the Oslo Accords — interim agreements concluded between the PLO and Israel in the early
1990s. The naval blockade — policed by Israeli forces through the use of force, arrests and the
confiscation of fishing equipment — severely reduced the fishing catchment area for Gaza’s fishermen 16
to polluted waters immediately off the coastline, leading to overfishing impacting sustainability.98 As
long ago as 2015, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (‘UNCTAD’) warned that
the restrictive measures imposed by Israel risked Gaza becoming uninhabitable by 2020.99
quote:
Between 29 September 2000 and 7 October 2023, approximately 7,569 Palestinians,102
including 1,699 children,103 were killed, including in those “four highly asymmetrical wars”, as well as
other smaller military assaults, with tens of thousands of others injured
quote:
The Commission found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers
“intentionally shot” children, knowing them to be children,114 and they also “intentionally shot” health
workers and journalists “despite seeing that they were clearly marked as such”.115 It further found
“reasonable grounds to believe” that Israeli snipers shot disabled demonstrators “intentionally, despite
seeing that they had visible disabilities” and despite them not presenting an imminent threat.
I cant even raise all the highlights. It would be too long. Read the report, seriously. A lot of the actions do not get reported with prominence or at all in common Western media.
So why aren't you as adamant for Palestinians to seek reconciliation?
I am, actually, but the Palestinians right now
have zero power. They have no negotiation leverage outside of pointing out war crimes and death tolls, they have no significant military power, they cannot offer a significant threat to Israel. Meanwhile Israel has effective impunity when it comes to enforcing any amount of control or force over Gaza. Only Israel can stop attacking so that the
prelude for reconciliation can even start.
I brought up Ireland for a lot of reasons. Among them is that the peace is not a
happy one. If peace is ever reached between Israel and Palestine, it will be in a way that makes neither side
happy, but that both sides can
live with. And it will likely require international forces to help hold it together (forces that cannot contain Americans or several other nations) because of the extreme justified distrust on both sides of the conflict. A peace that everybody hates but hates less than
dead babies, and that sets the stage for gradually reduced tensions and eventual reconciliation
decades and generations from now. There is no signature on a piece of paper that will undo generations of violence and fear and hate.
None of this was happening in Gaza. Gaza was under 100% Palestinian rule. In fact, it was against the law in Gaza for an Israeli to even walk the streets in Gaza.
Fiction is not a direct analog to reality. The situations are
similar, not identical. The similarities are around the complexities and nuance around asymmetric warfare, terrorism, freedom fighting, and
what comes after. Not the specifics of the crimes (there was no forced dilithium mining; Hamas doesn't set bombs in Israeli officials' homes, etc...). But it's not uncommon, as I referenced with Sinn Fein in Ireland, for yesterday's terrorist/freedom fighter to be tomorrow's political leader.
There are
reasons that Hamas won elections in Gaza. Those reasons don't excuse war crimes. There is a major difference between a reason and an excuse. There are
reasons Israeli sentiments toward Palestinians are so hateful - some of those reasons are racist, others colonialist, but others are simply the result of decades and generations of mutual violence and fear and propaganda. Reasons are not justifications.
3 out of 4 Palestinians support the Oct. 7 attack that killed thousands of Israeli's.
Sure. Just like the vast majority of Israelis support the intentional war crimes being committed by the Israeli military. Their most popular news station just days ago had a commenter rant about how the Gazans all, down to the children, deserve "hard deaths" and there should be "rivers of blood."
This is what hate does. It makes people support bloody vengeance. It's a
natural reaction that affects everyone involved. It's also an instinct that needs to be resisted.
How does Israel reconcile with a group where 75% support the slaughter of your people?
The same way Palestinians reconcile with a group who support the extermination of theirs.
With difficulty. And mostly with atrocity exhaustion. Things can sometimes get so unbearably bad that there can be a narrow window for enduring peace. That's what happened in Ireland.
So what more was Israel to do? There were no settlements in Gaza. They offered a two state solution multiple times. Israel only retaliated when fired upon. Israel tried it your way, from all appearances.
Israel was
not to commit war crimes. Israel was
not to attack civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Israel had a lot of alternatives available. The
best ones would have been alternative actions
before Oct 7. Afterward, they should have focused on hostage retrieval and offered a path to peace. It
doesnt matter if Israel would have "looked weak" or whatever. It doesnt matter if "the terrorists would have won." Peace would have meant that
everyone could win. Peace meaning a recognition of an actual Palestinian state and good-faith efforts to set the stage for long-term reconciliation.
And if Hamas refused, you still have special forces and other routes to follow that aren't
dropping unguided 2000 pound bombs on civilians. You now have more leverage in the international community and have denied Hamas their real victory - Hamas looks like the unequivocal "bad guys," because at that moment they
were even if the reasons for their crimes are more complex.
When peace offers are rejected, the answer is not to just give up, ramp up rhetoric and get more violent. The answer is to keep going and work in good faith until an agreement is actually reached.
The answer, and this is key, is
never to commit war crimes, never to kill 30,000+ civilians. You might as well say "yeah they committed rape, what else could they do?" Their actual actions are on the same unjustifiable, reprehensible level. And
YES Hamas does things that are just as bad on the scale they're capable of, but the
scale is due to the amount of relative
power each side has, and you'll note that Hamas has
very little. Israel is holding all the cards, and they choose to make Hamas,
who are also in large part bad guys (not all of Hamas are fighters), sympathetic internationally and to the Palestinian people.
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