Deserve each other. Have at it.

The Palestinians are in a position of weakness that Israel is exploiting. Their options are limited to living a hellish life or dying in this never ending conflict. Israel can make it all stop, open peace talks and agree on a two state solution. Israel is happy with the status quo. Ceasefires will continue to be broken and Israel will once again pretend they didn't provoke it and play the victim while dropping the bomb.

Each side has the option to stop utilizing violence or other aggression (settlements). They want to crush each other. If either side had any integrity, their aggression would have ended long ago. If the world would stop taking sides and recognize these are two peas in a pod, maybe something would get done.

By opening peace talks and agreeing on a two state solution? ohhh, is that all it would take?

Honestly I think you are completely ignoring the recent history of this conflict. In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza, dismantling all of their settlements there and removing all the settlers, checkpoints, soldiers and housing (as per their agreement with the PA), while leaving their entire greenhouse infrastructure for the Gazans to utilize. What was the Palestinian response? Rockets. Starting mere hours after the withdrawal ended and increasing exponentially, dwarfing the pre-withdrawal numbers. Following that they elected Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to destroying Israel. Hamas' first order of business was to disregard all treaties between the PA and Israel, and increase the amount of rocket attacks against Israeli civilian towns.

Can you please explain how Israel "provoked" the thousands of rocket attacks they endured after they had JUST made such a large concession towards peace? (Remember that the blockade did not begin until 2007, after Hamas staged a coup against the PA... two years after the 2005 withdrawal.)

What about the second intifada? In that case Israel did exactly what you propose. It made a perfectly reasonable proposal for a two state solution that gave the Palestinians practically everything they asked for. The Palestinian response then? To reject the offer and retreat from negotiations without making any counter-offer. Immediately afterwards Arafat unilaterally broke the standing peace agreement by launching the second intifada, a violent insurrection that ultimately led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians on both sides of the conflict.

How is it that the Palestinians "didn't have a choice" regarding that series of events?

In Gaza perhaps, where constant attacks against Israel have led to constant reprisals and a blockade which has crippled their economy. But what about the west bank where a commitment to peace has led to an ever increasing standard of living, falling rates of unemployment and a sharply expanding economy? Is there something preventing the Gazans from following this same successful strategy?

You can't assume that Pershing was given a pass because he was Gentile.

Certainly most of those on the Left in those days would have denounced Pershing(and this was the era of people like Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and John Reed, so we did have a sizeable Left at that point).

And thankfully, DU's anti-Palestinian posters are here to tell us exactly what those people think and why we should all think like that, too.

There's a difference between "military" and "civilians."


There's a difference between "military" and "civilians."



Not only was it disproportionate, it was a war crime and a crime against humanity.



Both - again, war crimes. "They got away with it!" does not actually make it less of a crime.



Considering it was one of those wars that should have never fucking happened at all? Yes.



Blockading a highway to annihilate a retreating force? Hmmmm. Has the author ever seen footage / photographs of the "Highway of Death"?



How many weddings do we "have to" turn into flying meat before this one sinks in?

What I see here is someone citing historical war crimes and grotesque abuses to defend Israel's own abuses and disproportionate responses. The argument amounts to saying that if someone does something worse, then whatever you do must be okay. That's the argument of a four year old. A dim four year old. But apparently it's the only one the anti-Palestinians seem able to concoct.

With "friends" like that, what need does israel have for enemies?



The director of an institute for Holocaust studies, really just argued that killing a dozen handfuls of Palestinian civilians is okay, because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed (which is also okay, to him.)

That shit just can't be made up.

The point was never to highlight abuses throughout history in order to minimize Israel's own. Nor was it about excusing civilian casualties by showing worse examples.



Maybe not, but it can be misinterpreted, as you demonstrated here.

The OP asks one question, "Judging by the disparity in casualty rates, is Israel's response in Gaza disproportionate?" In other words, we are not looking at how many civilians were killed or what tactics were used. We are exclusively considering the ratio of deaths, comparing one side to the other to determine what counts as "disproportionate."

Far from cherry picking extreme examples of grotesque war crimes, the author merely used the main wars fought in modern history throughout the world as points of reference. If we are going to use terms like "disproportionate" then we are obligated to offer some sort of benchmark to compare our conflict against. If the standard practice of every other state of the planet is to engage in warfare according to a set of principles then we should be judging Israel against these actual events as they happened, not according to some idealized version of warfare. The article shows us that every war fought in the past 100 years exhibits disparities in the ratio of casualties between combatants.

The point is not to excuse war crimes but to point out that Israel's casualty rate that is being decried as "disproportionate" actually falls well below/near to those ratios set by every other state when they have been at war. This is not a case of "they did bad so then I can also do bad" but to ask "what is normal wrt these ratios?" And if Israel's numbers are the equivalent of other nations' then to single them out is unfair.

You try to make it smell better, but a turd is still a turd. Yes, the whole point IS to say "Hey, Israel kills a lot of civilians, but it's not like we nuked a city, so it's not so bad after all! How dare you keep talking about it!" It's dismissive and defensive, and points at worse atrocities to say "hey! Isn't so bad when we do it!"

it's a holocaust scholar, pointing at dead people, and because those dead people are Arabs, he's trying to argue that they "don't matter." Maybe I've got high expectations or something, but I would think someone in a position like that would have a little more empathy and a little less "meh, doesn't matter in the long run."

There are two questions here, very important ones that need to be addressed, more than kill-counts.

1) Is Israel "fighting a war"?

2) if it is, are all those dead Palestinians helping Israel win the war?

First, Israel is not fighting a war. It's fighting criminal activity by a criminal organization. It does make a pretty damn big difference. Israel may use war rhetoric, but then so does the DEA and DHS. Hamas is a gang. A large one, with some political clout and a half-decent arsenal, but still a gang. And you don't blow up Las Vegas to get the Mafia, do you? Bomb Inglewood to get the Crips? Have we invaded Guatemala, to deal with MS-13?

Even if it were an actual war... Does bombing Gaza City help win it? Did the people Israel killed this time around bring Israel that much closer to victory? Looking at the history of the conflict... No. This approach to the problem has never made Israel any safer, any more than destroying Iraq made America safer.

It's not about bean-counting. It's not about tallying the dead and saying "Well, King Leopold racked up worse in the Congo, so we're still good." It's about "Is this needed?" and "is this working?" and the answer to both is a clear and obvious NO.

Name a few other than Israel, if you can.

As to Israel's response to Gaza, the rocket shower has pretty much stopped. They're not getting 100-200 a week like in the days leading up to this latest battle. So what Israel did worked, at least for the short term.

What would you have Israel do instead? Obviously, no other nation would tolerate rockets, so what would should Israel have done instead?

If you're going to sit there and blast Israel for all they do, the least you can do is offer a reasonable alternative.

You really do think killing Palestinians helps Israel out, don't you?

But it is not the point. The OP is trying to judge whether the specific criticism of "disproportionate use of military force" is accurate by making historical comparisons. At no point is anyone suggesting that it is ok for Israel to kill as many civilians as it can as long as it refrains from using nukes. The question is strictly whether the charge of disproportionality is valid.



I'm sorry, but did we read the same article? I believe you are reading into this article a bit more than its author may have intended. According to him the article is about supporting the idea that Israel be judged according to the same standard as other states and not be singled out for special criticism never leveled at anyone else. What section of the OP led to you to the conclusion that he's arguing that the deaths of Arabs do not matter? You even put quote marks around "don't matter" as though you are quoting something he wrote.



Huh. So what kind of reference points are you using to determine something like this? Because I look at this conflict and I see a sovereign state (Israel) having an international military conflict with the elected, internationally accepted government of a sovereign entity who has been engaging in cross border rocket attacks using both locally manufactured AND increasingly sophisticated, imported rockets and artillery. Hamas may be a terrorist organization and they may be guilty of criminal activity, but they were elected, they do run Gaza's government and the criminal activity are actually war crimes. Whether you call it a war or a conflict is a matter of semantics, but you greatly minimize the situation by regarding it solely as "fighting criminal activity." The ongoing conflict certainly meets any definition of war that I have ever read.



That depends entirely on what you consider "winning" doesn't it? The I/P conflict is not the sort of engagement where we can expect either side to be ruled as the definitive winner who then gets to determine the terms of surrender and such. The war will be over if/when a peace treaty is agreed to or one side gets entirely wiped out. Until then each side has their own set of goals and motives. Israel's current goal is security, ie: ending (or at least minimizing) the rocket attacks from Gaza. So you are really asking whether Israel's striking at targets in Gaza (which killed a whole mess of Palestinians), brings them greater security. In the past it certainly has, so yes. Yes it does help Israel achieve their goal.

That said, Israel has always tried to use the least violent method possible to achieve its goals. In this case it tried economic sanctions and then a strict blockade before resorting to a large-scale military engagement. It was only after less deadly methods failed that Israel turned to warfare. If you feel that there are options which were left on the table that would have achieved better results with less casualties then I'd be more than interested in hearing them.



That's simply not true though. Killing Hamas and IJ leaders and destroying their weapon-making infrastructure and shutting down the tunnels used to smuggle armaments in from Egypt OBVIOUSLY reduces Gaza's ability to attack Israel. Using Iraq as a parallel doesn't seem to offer many similarities. Gaza is actively attacking Israel. For Israel to respond militarily is only logical, whereas Iraq hadn't been attacking or even threatening the US. But imagine that they had been. Imagine that Iraq had been sending thousands of rockets and mortars into US cities, blowing up schools and bus stations. In that case wouldn't destroying them have made America safer?



It's fine to ask those questions but they are not the point of the OP which was solely asking whether Israel is being judged by fair standards when it is criticized for disproportionality, (which is very much about bean counting in fact.)

The IRA terrorist campaign lasted from 1967 to 1997

Two very detailed studies of deaths in the Troubles, the CAIN project at the University of Ulster, and Lost Lives,[112] differ slightly on the numbers killed by the IRA, but a rough synthesis gives a figure of 1,800 deaths. Of these, roughly 1,100 were members of the security forces: British Army, Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment; between 600 and 650 were civilians and the remainder were either loyalist or republican paramilitaries (including over 100 IRA members accidentally killed by their own bombs or shot after being exposed as security force agents).


The IRA lost a little under 300 members killed in the Troubles.113] In addition, roughly 50–60 members of Sinn Féin were killed.


As far as I am aware, the British Army never used tanks against the IRA

personally i'm all for disproportion force....one would have to be a complete idiote plus moron and sucidial fool all roled in to one, not to use disproportionate force

or just naive and living in an imaginary world as in "alice in wonderland"

If you're living there, then maybe you're the Queen of Hearts, to judge from your rhetoric.

Last edited Sun Nov 25, 2012, 08:12 AM - Edit history (2)

What a stupid argument.

Only with Israel is a proportionate response ever considered. I know of no other conflict where this numbers game nonsense is brought up.