Israel has been carrying out precision strikes on Gaza.
In case you ever wondered what “precision strikes” look like, here’s a view of the aftermath.
You can also take a tour of Gaza from the safety of your home. You sure wouldn’t want to do it for real.
I’m sure our resident war crimes apologists colnago80 / StevoR / whoever else will be happy to tell us why we should all marvel at evidence of Israel’s restraint and how it was all justified – why, maybe there was terrorist activity in all those buildings! Oh and oh em gee human shields!
/awful mode disengage
You don’t get it: it IS precision strikes: every underage bystander buried in rubble had been Precisely targeted for Very Complex Strategic Reasons your limited leftist untermensch’s brain cannot grasp
When your target is as large as an entire population, how can you miss?
Our tax dollars at work. Makes me proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m helping to pay for war crimes.
In related news, Israel is claiming 1000 acres of West Bank land.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/world/middleeast/israel-claims-nearly-1000-acres-of-west-bank-land-near-bethlehem.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
What purpose is there in bombing the rubble of previous bombings?
WTF is Israel doing?
Oh, right ! Land grab!
The conservative counterargument is that there was allegedly a terrorist living somewhere in amongst those thirty or so obliterated buildings!
@mickll It’s not only conservatives who support this.
PZ, I have read you blog for years and have agreed with your stance on virtually all issues. On this one, not at all. So do you suggest that Israel should have ignored the 4,000 rockets that Hamas fired into their sovereign territory and what, to set out welcome mats for the fanatics who came through the terror tunnels? It seems that you have spent the last month or so vilifying Israel for defending itself to the (near) total exclusion of the Disasters/war/killings going on in: Nigeria, Iraq/Syria, Libya, Ukraine, North Korea, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Mexico . It’s a war and they are always ugly. I will admit my bias (as is Israel’s) towards: Democracy, Diplomacy, Peace, Negotiation and Recognition. Hamas, IS and the rest of the Muslin Fanatics represent the opposite and I know that you believe the same as I do. So why just Israel? Did you notice that Israel stopped the bombing when Hamas stopped, every single time? Let me share my personal experience with these fanatics. I live in an average suburb in a minor capital city in Australia. I have a German/Jewish surname much the same way Myers can be either. While away on business my wife received a phone call – “Jewish pig, we are outside your home with guns and we are coming to kill you”. To cut a long story short it turned out to be computer generated and many people of the same name were targeted, even though in one particular case I know of they happened to be of German/Lutheran origin. This is terrorism, not physical but terrorism just the same. The message is quite clear, if you are Jewish we know where you are and we can get to you, even as far away as Australia. They are not just against Israel they are against all Jews, religious or not. It’s an ideological and cultural war and has now gone far beyond just about land, as Benyamin Netanyahu did say.
@dravid,
Then why is it that it seems to be the Palestinians that are getting wiped out? Why is it that Israel keeps grabbing more and more land out of the west bank and gaza and giving it to Israeli settlers?
Israel’s long term plan is to take all of the Palestinian’s land and remove them via ethnic cleansing and/or genocide. See http://www.fosna.org/content/mapcards
Who’s sovereign territory?
News like this makes me glad Stev0r is gone. In fact we’ve now passed the one year anniversary of their departure.
Anyways as for Dravid’s frenetic posting @9
So the only options are “Absolute surrender” and “Massive overwhelming collateral damage with heavy civilian casualties and immense suffering”?
Quick! Look somewhere else in the world! There’s trouble in other parts of the world so why can’t you overlook this one little human rights violation!?
And it’s because Israel portends to support Democracy, Diplomacy, Peace, Negotation, and Recognition that it gets such a drubbing from this particular blog. Because they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth. What this video shows is Israel’s Dahiya doctrine in action, a doctrine that calls for asymmetric warfare against civilian infrastructure, collateral damage is a feature to this bombing and not a bug. An officially sanctioned doctrine that calls for repeatedly attacking the Palestinians and causing as much wanton destruction as possible is not in line with Democracy, Diplomacy, Peace, Negotiation, and Recognition.
I do oppose the militant goals of Hamas, however, as you’ve unsuccessfully tried to occlude, the Palestinians are not the same as Hamas. The people in Gaza are not all hardline, hardcore, diehard Jihadis. Palestinians cling to Hamas because Hamas is keeping them alive, Hamas is providing the basic necessities for life in occupied Gaza, and even that’s not enough. I’ve heard the line about Hamas wanting to “Drive the Jews into the sea”, but a UN report suggests that Gaza will be completely unlivable by 2020. Who is driving who into the sea?
And in this most recent instance it was The Israeli Government that caused this recent conflict. Indeed your line about “Israel stopped when Hamas stopped” is wrong, it’s the other way around
I cannot speak to your harassment, and I will not condone anti-semitism, but if you truly do claim Jewish heritage then it is frustrating you utterly lack empathy to the Palestinians. Their plight mirrors that of the Jewish peoples, they’ve been driven from their homes, forced into ghettos, and made into a depressed and despised minority. For some thousands of years that was the plight of the Jews. That’s one of the reasons why I come down so harshly on the state of Israel, after being downtrodden and oppressed for centuries they turn right around and commit the same atrocities inflicted on them.
I beat my wife but my neighbor rape his kids so either you allow me to keep punching my wife in the groin or your a child rapist apologist.
***
A country were you can be beaten up in the street by fascist thugs acting as the de facto political police of the ruling parties or lose your jobs simply for dissenting with the ruling class, where inbreeding fetichists can harass newlyweds and their guests with the authorities’ approval, where a notorious mobster can become vice prime minister and get away with it because the trial that should have sent him in prison was openly, blatantly, shamelessly sabotaged by the fucking Attorney General is as much a democracy as the antebellum south.
***
Hamas is an offshot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
ISIS is a salafist organization
The Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood hate each other: each one accusing the other of being nothing but a bunch of impostors devoids of any sincere religious devotion and motivated only by a lust for power, riches, and privileges.
But no matter, let’s pretend that these two groups who hate each other guts, don’t follow the same ideology and don’t behave the same way toward the people under their control, are interchangeable: after all: both gourps members are Muslims, and more importantly, both groups members are brown skinned people from countries who used to be part of european colonials empire: and what epitomize enlightened western values more than holding this bipedal cattle in contempt and not doing the intellectual effort to distinguish between them, huh?
/sarcasm
***
At least they provided the world with an answer to this question:
“Give the children of slaves the estates of a patrician: how long before they forget where they’re from?”
Answer: less than a human lifespan.
omnicrom and laurentweppe, you know perfectly well that I didn’t mean look the other way. So the other don’t rate a mention?
Thank you laurentweppe, I had no idea of the difference. I thought that Muslims were all friends. That clears up one msiconception I had. I thought that Hamas and the PA would welcome IS into its territory as saviours and that Saudi Arabia was sending them love letters.
Dravid @15
No actually I don’t know perfectly well you didn’t mean to look the other way. You’re not the first person who has brought up “There are terrible tragedies in the world that you aren’t discussing” during talk on an unrelated terrible tragedy, and those people use it as a dodge and a club to try and curtail discussion they don’t like. How was I to know you were any different? I mean you inserted “There are terrible tragedies in the world you aren’t discussing” during talk on an unrelated terrible tragedy, and you seemed to use it as a dodge and a club while trying to curtail discussion you didn’t like. Intent is not magic, so if you didn’t intend to try and deflect criticism of Israel during your post trying to deflect criticism of Israel you should have made it absolutely clear which parts of your post about deflecting criticism of Israel were about deflecting criticism of Israel.
And while I’m at it were you intending to come across as arguing in bad faith? Because when you say things like
You come across as arguing in bad faith. Using mocking sarcasm while responding to no substantive points comes across as as acting in bad faith. Or maybe you intended this to be a good faith argument and your intent didn’t follow through and you didn’t really intend to a dismissive, substance-less counterattack.
What can’t be as readily explained away is the way you’re confusing “Muslim” with “Terrorist”. The sleight of hand to move from “Muslims” in one sentence to “Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and IS” is a familiar and telling dishonesty.
omnicrom, Being sarcastic, yes, guilty as charged. Just don’t like being talked down to. About the rest, over-analysis, read what you like in it.
When I see a Hamas spokesman how do I know he is lying? ………………………..
dravid @17
I see you’re still not actually discussing the substance of anything either I or laurentweppe said.
Because he’s one of them Brown-Skinned A-Rabs?
Such an interesting phenomenon: actions no other contry or group – beheadings (Saudi Arabia, IS), public executions (Iran), genocide (Sudan), occupation (Russia, Turkey, Morocco) – ever trigger this level of hatred, revulsion, disgust and derision.
@19
Yes they do, but those travesties are less angering to me at least, because no one in mainstream press is bending over backwards to give ISIL for example a free pass on their actions. When I see reports of their crucifixions, I have the snall comfort that at least the rest of the world is being sensible in decrying that shit. Yet when the news turns to the Israel / Palestinian violence, vast numbers of war crimes apologists crawl out of the woodwork to defend precious precious Israel and that shit is infuriating.
I make it habit not to get into discussions with most people about Israel.
I once got into a very long argument with someone because I said it was basically an argument over religion. It took over an hour but he finally said it that god had given the land called Israel to the jews where upon I said that is what I said, “it is an argument about religion nothing more”.
I am not going to do that all over again and again.
uncle frogy
@ Holms
I do wonder how you came to the conclusion that Israel gets free pass. Maybe from UNHRC resolutions (overwhelming majority are condemnations of Israel, the rest of the world is left almost without any mentioning); Amnesty International’s condemnations which are disproportionately directed against Israel; or maybe Human Right Watch which even try to explain that a disproportionatel many young men of fighting age killed in Gaza during recent fighting was caused by Israel targeting young male civilians? Or maybe during “Israel Apartheid Week” this absurd accusation was in reality “giving a free pass” to Israel? Or the whole BDS movement directed towards just one state among many miscreants in the world? U.K. decision to stop supplying arms to Israel in case Hamas starts to shot rockets at Israel again, lest Israel might answer – was this which gave you the idea that Israel is getting a free pass? Or so many headings in the newspapers always starting with “Israel raid on Gaza” and in the last paragraph a tiny sentence “in answer to rockets incoming from Gaza”?
Małgorzata Koraszewska #22
You do realise how extremely recent this kind-of-almost-sort-of-universal condemnation of Israel is, yes? The Palestinians (you know: the people whose land it is) have been getting the shitty end of the stick since 1948; but you wouldn’t have known it from the mainstream media.
@Daz
Recent? 1948: announcement of total boycott of Israel by Arab League. 1950s and on: campaign by USRR against Israel with arming of Egypt and Syria and a culmination in UN Resolution “Zionism=racism” (rescinded after the fall of USRR). And since 1970 more and more condemnations from the West. I wouldn’t call it recent.
And BTW, through centuries Jews were living in this land (and in the whole Middle East. The Jewish refugees from Arab countries – some 900,000 – were more numerous than Palestinian refugees from Israel). According to estimates when Arabs invaded the Levant in the 7th century there were 300 – 4000 thousand Jews living on the land which today is Israel and the West Bank. Arabs did their best to reduce this number and Turks continued after that. Of course, since 7th century Arabs live there as well as Jews and the solution to the problem of two nations with the right to the same piece of land is to divide it. If only Arabs deigned to agree to that…
omnicrom, so now I’m a racist. That accusation really shows bad form.
No, I know the Hamas spokesman is lying because his lips are moving. Nothing about race.
Yes, dravid, Israel MUST defend itself from the evil that it created.
https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/the-monster-that-israel-helped-create/
@ sc_numbers-numbers-numbers:
Intelligence officiers are not the only ones making that claim:
In 1981: the Prime Minister was Menachem Begin: saying that Hamas is Israel’s creation is not entirely accurate: it’s the Likud’s creation: a foolish attempt by far-right politicians to instrumentalize fundies in order to weaken the local ruling class’ secular opponents
But I came to no such conclusion. I made two observations: 1) that there is no widespread defense of e.g. ISIL, only condemnation; and 2) that discussions of Israel / Palestine are different to that norm, as there are many Israeli defenders in almost every conversation on the topic. These are not contradictory, and that difference – the fact that there are so many apologists for Israeli war crimes in comment threads everywhere, even here – is what makes conversations about Israeli conduct so damn obnoxious.
Also, noting that Israel / Palestine have alarming similarities to apartheid South Africa is not at all absurd, so I suspect you are precisely the sort of apologist referred to.
You are being disingenuous. People are not saying there there was zero condemnation of Israel before recent events, but rather that recent events have caused something of a surge.
None of which excuses Israel’s current conduct, but rather, shows that there appears to be an element of revenge in their actions, at least in the eyes of their apologists such as yourself.
@ Holms
1. What a strange apartheid where people of all ethnic origins have the same rights; where people from the minority are members of parliament, judges, teachers, doctors – whatever they want to be; where the state is fighting existing in society discrimination through legislation and judicial system. Not much in common with the real apartheid which was a despicable system in South Africa.
2. The “surge” of condemnation is visible exclusively in the West. USRR and its block (among other my country, Poland) was condemning Israel in the strongest terms (and boycotting it) untill the fall of communism. Arab countries and the most of the Third World countries followed suit. The predecessor of UN Human Right Council was disbanded 2006 because of its bias against Israel
3. The argument that Jews are on the land of Palestinians who are the rightful owners of it was raised by “Daz”. This false statement needed a correction. It was not meant as any excuse for anything. I do not think Israel needs excuse for trying to stop thousands of projectiles consisting of steel and explosives raining on its territory.
I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation of all of the diehard apologists for the Israeli apartheid system. Your blatant lies and laughable “arguments” help to generate more and more contempt for your position and therefore hasten the day when the Israeli right will no longer have a stranglehold on US policy. Thanks for all you do.
@Małgorzata Koraszewska, #29:
Of course not, but Israel damn sure needs an excuse for blowing up civilians in schools and hospitals [especially, but not only, when this is the location which the UN and Israel have jointly agreed is the location to which noncombatants are to flee when they get word that fighting has started or is about to start] – which is a bit different from ballistic missile/rocket defense or police actions to interdict supplies of rockets.
Way to fail to specify what “trying to stop” can ethically and morally entail. It’s this, “Whoopsie! Forgot to specify the difference between arresting terrorists and bombing children!” crap that makes the right-wing defenses of Israel’s current military tactics so desperately loathsome.
@unclefrogy #21
Yah, more specifically a religion-based political ideology. Good point.
@MK
Surely we can agree that Zionism is a racist ideology! Or are you saying Zionists don’t push for race-based policies or use racial rhetoric?
Well I think that settles it. If our two sides can’t agree, and there seems to be no common ground on the issue, then what hope do Israel and the Palestinians have for peace? In their case it is life and death, in our case just a bit of verbal sparring.
Steve, Israel doesn’t need me to be an apologist, they are quite good at defending themselves both verbally and militarily. How can a people of only 15 million influence US policy? intellect.
=8)-DX
I surely agree that Zionism was a Jewish national liberation movement. I surely agree that today it means that Jews, like other nations, have a right to live in their own state and that this state is Israel. I surely deeply disagree with the nothing concocted a long time ago by the KGB and their Disinformation Department that Zionism is a rasistic ideology.
Małgorzata Koraszewska #34
FTFY.
Look, I don’t condone HAMAS bombing Israeli civilians. I can also see why they feel they have no choice. I could moralise all day about their use of violence, but at the end of the day, all I could really say is that I hope to hell I’m never put in a position where I’m faced with the choices they, and Palestinians in general, have had to face.
If you steal people’s land, treat them as less than human, and force them into ghettos, don’t be surprised when they resist violently.
One of the biggest lies I have ever read.
Firstly, I’ll note that your phrasing implicitly acknowledges that there truly is a surge in western condemnation of Israel lately.
Secondly, you accidentally touch on precisely why the some regions have been so reticent in coming out openly in condemning Israel, while others have not: political affiliation. The communist bloc was opposed to the politics of western democracies, and were not allied with Israel; hence, they had no reason to be reticent. You even note that that stance changed in those nations coinciding with the fall of communism, switching from ‘condemning Israel in the strongest terms (and boycotting it)” to… well, not condemning it. Because now they were repairing relations with western democracies, and thus had a vested interest in not criticising their very touchy ally.
But it wasn’t a false statement, and you didn’t correct it. In the 19th and 20 centuries, the people now known as Palestinians were the owners of the land, and had been for over a thousand years. That pre-arab ownership of the middle-east is literally ancient history, or at least classical. I consider such distant past to be irrelevant to modern claims of ownership.
And now in the present day, the houses that they legitimately own are still being bulldozed, and the people are still being forcibly relocated into ever shrinking space. None of this is excused by the historical footnote you raise, other than to highlight the aspect of revenge in this saga of awful treatment.
YEAH GEE GOOD POINT MAN, I GUESS WE HAD ALL BETTER STOP VOICING OUR DISAPPROVAL OF INHUMANE BUTCHERY AND JUST PRETEND IT’S ALL COOL AMIRITE? SOME UTTERLY CONTEMPTIBLE PEOPLE ARE FINE WITH WARCRIMES SO I GUESS WE JUST AGREE TO DISAGREE AFTER ALL WE AREN’T THE ONES DYING LULZ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fuck that noise.
Alternatively, the politics of religious ideology. Yes, even christian ideology is cool with the idea of jewish zionism.
@Daz
What a strange method to quote my comment and pretend that I wrote something else by inserting your own words into the comment. The idea that Jews have stolen the land is a lie from Arab propaganda, Gaza is not occcupied and there was no blockade from 2005 (when Israel left Gaza) to 2007 (when all too many rockets and wepon were delivered by hostile countries to Gaza and used against Israel). 95% of Palestinians from West Bank live under the rule of Palestinian Authority since 1994 as a result of Oslo Agreement.
Maybe some other opinions and some facts:
What an Egyptian writer think about Hamas leaders who garner sympathy : sympathy over children’s corpses
A horrifying bombing of an ambulance: bombing of ambulence by Israel.
Dravid @25
I’ll stop calling you a racist when you stop saying racist things. As long as you continue to confuse “Muslim” with “Terrorist” and unflinchingly march alongside Israel at its most Jingoistic I will continue to believe you are being racist. As for showing Bad Form? Well I think it would be rather bad form to poison the well by saying something like “No, I know the Hamas spokesman is lying because his lips are moving”, thereby dismissing one part of the conflict as inherently dishonest, untrustworthy, and evil.
Oh wait, you did. Gee, that almost seems to fit my idea you’re a touch racist against the Palestinians.
Let me tell you why, apologists, I am more condemnatory of Israel than whatever other “but they all do it” you bring up. I am Jewish. My uncle has lived on a Kibbutz for as long as I have known him. Everything you’re doing, you do in my name, saying it’s for my benefit, to defend my people.
If someone walked up to me with a severed head, saying “I killed this person for your benefit, even though you’ve never met them, but they’re related to someone who lives next door to a violent racist, so I’m just trying to make the world safer for you by reducing the number of violent racists” I would obviously take issue with that.
Do not. Ever. Claim to be “defending the Jewish people.” Do not lump me in with your violent apologetics. I want no part of you. I support the existence of the Jewish state, but as it is implemented, as an apartheid? It is both fundamentally immoral and fundamentally anti-Jewish.
Well, technically, in the 19th century, the owners of the land were Ottoman absentee landlords. “The owner of the land are the people living on the land” is a rather recent concept, one that has yet to be universally accepted, even in the western hemisphere, as the ongoing raging anti-immigrant rhetoric shows.
And when it comes to the local population, establishing a dichotomy between Palestinian and Jews is a fallacy: Palestinian Jews have always existed (as evidenced by the fact that they paid a heavy price when they fought alongside their muslim neighbors against the crusaders): the israeli establishment keeps ethnicizing nation and religion, claiming that there’s no palestinian nation, just a bunch of Arabs, and heavily implying that all of them are Muslims (hence why the israeli bureaucracy treat druze and christian Palestinians communities as if they were completely separate from their muslim compatriots) because such simplistic fiction fuels their brand of white supremacism, and there’s no reason to play along with them.
***
Israel counts 8 million citizens.
Some people can’t help it: they have to annex diasporas even thought a growing number among it don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore.
***
A revealing thing is that the Likud apologists never complain about the fact that the number Kibbutzes are shrinking and being replaced by monopolistic conglomerates which take advantage of their situation to establish very profitable rackets. 95% of the milk and over 70% of all dairy food are produced by the same former-cooperative-turned-conglomerate, thus driving prices through the roof and driving nearly one million israeli citizens into starvation and twice as many in poverty? Nope: nothing to see here folks, let’s just keep complaining about Hamas makeshift rockets: who care about hundreds of thousands of israeli plebeians going hungry when we can cry rivers of crocodile tears to half a dozen israeli plebeians being killed during the last offensive against the Gazans?
FIFY.
Why am I not surprised!
Roflcopter. Israel is being used by the Christian fundamentalists in the US who can’t wait for the end of the world and believe Israel will speed things up!
Video Shows IDF Snipers Shooting Palestinian Children For Fun, But Facebook Won’t Let You Share It
I really don’t know what all the fuss is about. Those strikes are actually extremely precise. Each and every bomb or missile struck within a nanometer of the exact spot it hit. Let’s face it – you can hardly get more precise than that with a weapon weighing in excess of 200kg and dropped from a height in excess of the length of the bomb itself.
So why are you criticizing the Israeli’s? Just because they left their “homeland” (there is no detectable trace of much of what the Bible – or Hebrew scripture – says happened, such as the Exodus, etc.) and some squatters moved in and occupied the place for several hundred years doesn’t mean that they can’t summarily evict the aforesaid squatters…
Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne will be delighted.
Dude…
Philadelphia is a beautiful city. Gritty, old, and in some places in disrepair, but it’s BEAUTIFUL. And it has more character than any other place in this twisted excuse for a country.
Otherwise, word to this.