Hamas hits Israel in unprecedented attack.

[Sanlmar]

From the 3 Top University Professors thread.

Kalem was sparring with me. Kalem offered most sensible and honest assessment of Israel v Hamas I’ve come across. Kalem changed my mind. (No one has admitted to changing their mind on PFA before - will I get banned?)

The entire population of Israel is only 9 million. The metro area I live in has a lot more people than this. Israel really cant afford to fight a high casualty war.

The population of Gaza is 2 million with somewhere around 30,000 Hamas fighters who have been entrenched for decades with wide popular support.

Israel's military would be absolutely decimated using your strategy, and probably make them extremely vulnerable not just in the South but also from the East and North. I mean, you can argue Israel shouldn't be in Gaza at all because they dont have any way of winning without the collateral damage being too high, but you cant tell them they have to adopt a strategy that would have tremendous casualties on their side and guarantee they lose. That is a non starter.

Anyways, I dont know if it is the correct strategy or not, but for the first time in a long time Israel appears to actually be fighting to win. For a lot of reasons I think they realize time isn't on their side, and if the Palestinian situation continues to fester any longer, it will be intractable and they will most likely lose on the ground.

Thats war? According to who, since when? Whose rules?

You dont seem to have a great grasp of the history of war. The entire idea that your goal should be to minimize the casualties of your enemy is an extremely recent Western idea, that actually hasn't worked out very well, as Western countries dont ever win wars anymore.

We fought WWII to win it, and did what we had to do to win, which included massive bombing of civilians. And since then the wars we have fought have been more or less optional, we have fought to not win, and we generally have not won.

Countries like China, Syria, Russia, Turkey and the Janjaweed in Sudan certainly dont care about limiting enemy casualties, and they are doing just fine comparatively. Also, I would definitely argue the whole Western liberal notion of "thou shall not bomb your enemies cities" would be immediately thrown out the window if we felt it was a war we actually had to win for our own survival.

Israel is fighting this war like they need to win it to survive. Maybe you dont agree with this assessment, but the idea that any country that has the ability to win a war is just going to lose it on purpose and not survive because "those are the rules" is nonsense.

Do any of the countries I mentioned follow the Geneva Convention? It seems it has always been optional, where Western countries have opted into it to some degree, and no one else even bothers.

I am not sure Israel has any path to surviving in the long run anyways. In 100 years when most of Europe is Islamic non-whites due to demographic shift (and the US majority Hispanic and Black?) it seems that is going to be game over.

However, IF they have a chance to survive they have to solve the Palestinian issue, and the Palestinian leaders realize time is on their side so they are never going to make any peace. There is pretty much no reasonable concession Israel could make that the Palestinians would agree to. So Israel would have to unilaterally force peace if it has any chance of surviving. I dont actually know what Israel's long term game plan is (or if they even have one), but I think it is pretty clear if they keep playing by the rules being dictated to them by the Arab and Western world, there is no way to win.

What am I missing here?

Hamas broke the ceasefire on October 7th with a cross border raid that killed hundreds and shot thousands of missiles into Israel. They broke the recent ceasefire by firing rockets into Israel (maybe they knew the writing was on the wall when Israel demanded back all the young women being kept as sex slaves which was a deal breaker, so Hamas was just getting a few shots in preemptively, I dont know). All indications are the Palestinians are fighting back to the best of their abilities, still committed to the destruction of Israel, and promise more October 7ths. The Palestinian people overwhelmingly support Hamas and the fight against Israel.

So it seems the Palestinians want to fight until Israel is destroyed, and are committed to it, but the expectation is Israel should let them? If not let them win, at least let them permanently maintain the status quo ability to threaten and attack Israel at their discretion, until such time in the future until they can win?

Why would Israel follow these rules?

I have no particular interest in Israel or generally this part of the world. I am pretty confident I will never take a single step anywhere in the entire Middle East, and I am ok with that. I can even accept the world would be a much simpler place if there was no Israel. But there is an Israel, that has been around over 75 years with millions of people, that seems like it wants to survive and not be endlessly attacked by Palestinians intent on a generational struggle to conquer Israel.

And given this, the entire dynamic of the Palestinians get to attack Israel when they want and do whatever they can to conquer Israel (which isn't much right now admittedly) and Israel has to just live with it, makes no sense. What other country would put up with this? Certainly not the United States or any Muslim country. So what are we even doing here?