Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
A territory is launching thousands of rocket attacks on your communities for years. You have the means to interdict cargo shipments into the territory. What do you do?
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I need to point that this is the reasoning Israel has used for 16 years to explain the blockade, that it's needed to stop the thing that just happened.
The problem with this logic is that it just totally failed.
The hard line politics did not succeed in protecting civilians, instead creating the circumstances for an attack of unprecedented size and ferocity.
The idea that you can stop the violence by destroying Hamas is extremely misguided, it's like thinking you can stop crime by catching all the criminals.
The extremism and hatred that creates terrorists is not created by Hamas, it's created by the living conditions of young people born into captivity with no hope of a better future.
Bombing "Hamas" will not help IDF "win". It's been tried again and again, bombardment has a very close to 100% failure rate as a strategy when used against a primarily civilian population like in Gaza. All it does is make it absolutely sure that Hamas doesn't need to run any recruitment ads for another generation.
This is the main problem with these kinds of hardline ideas. The morality of these tactics is kind of irrelevant in my books when they just don't work.
The killing will stop under one of two conditions:
- One side is genocided
- People on on both sides feel like they have a future ahead of them and the other side isn't trying to take it away, violently or otherwise.
Hamas isn't special. There are hate-peddlers everywhere, in Helsinki as well as in Gaza, and they will never go away. The reason people in Gaza respond to Hamas in large numbers isn't because they are muslim or stupid or "just animals" like I just heard a very emotional Israeli settler describe them in a news piece.
Yes, IDF needs to fight against terrorists in the moment too, but they have been going at it in a way that's kind of a guaranteed longterm failure. It's the lesson the West learned painfully in the "war on terror", in Afghanistan and in Iraq: as long as you are ready err on the side of killing civilians to get to your target, you will always create a new terrorist for every one you kill.