Unrwa Remarks on the Situation in the Gaza Strip | Hacker News Reader

Unrwa Remarks on the Situation in the Gaza Strip

unrwa.org

21 pointsmegous12 comments

It's been astonishing to watch most of the western world's leaders shrug their shoulders at what Israel has been doing. It's very easy to condemn both Hamas, and Israel's response in terms of the siege, forced evacuation etc. They don't need to pick a side. If it continues to escalate, history will not judge them kindly.

>and Israel's response in terms of the siege, forced evacuation etc.

i saw interesting "exercise" on reddit. i suggest to repeat it here.

you are in charge of country that been bombarded for 20 years. last weekend "they" blew up holes in fences, killed 300 policeman/soldier. murdered/burned/tortured/raped/etc 1300 civilians (it's like 30000 if we extrapolate it to US population) and took 150 (probably 2000 if we scale to usa size) hostages and run away to hide in tunnels below cities and continue to shoot rockets into all cities that they can .

what are your actions ?

Fortunately I don't have to make that decision and don't pretend to know what the right decision is. But I don't need to know the right to decision to know the unethical ones when I see them.

you avoiding "the game". it's easy to say that it's not ethical decision (given the circumstances, how much ethics could be in play). could you please write 5 bullet points about how this state should have reacted. You can make those 5 bullets also ethical, if you think that it's a must

Small detail: Palestine didn't attack Israel, because as Israel frequently insists, Palestine is not a country. Hamas attacked Israel.

Israel shouldn't bomb civilians, it should use their vast intelligence and military capabilities to hunt Hamas, a de facto terrorist group, and a pathetic one at that. It's very unlikely Israel didn't have intelligence on the impending attack, given they're next door, and it was reported that Hamas was openly digging up water pipes to make rockets. It gave a good reason to a disproportionate retaliation, though.

I don't like that they've served a narrative where they're the victims, and the media is distributing it with gusto. They're comparing themselves with Ukraine! Does that mean Palestine is Russia? I'd prefer that their leaders were more straight with their intentions, the cognitive dissonance between their discourse and their actions is hard to digest.

we play the game of "what would you do" not "what you wouldn't do". it's easy to have high moral ground and list all the wrong things. it's hard to actually make decision. Even in this "game"

And actually Ukraine compares itself to Israel. There were Israeli flags all over Ukraine and Zelensky want to arrive to Israel.

PS. this pathetic terrorist group has 20000-40000 thousands fighters.it shot 5k rockets in 1 week. Unknown how many people raided Israel, but there are around 1000-1500 bodies left behind

Small detail: They had the chance for a country numerous times but rejected it and demanded Israels destruction.

Second: Th UNRWA was caught creating worse propaganda than the PA (and that is a high bar already). It should be dissolved and leaders should be held accountable and face trial. There are UN documents about that, you can look it up.

Of course I kill and injure millions (just extrapolating to US size) and put the whole country under siege to make everyone drink unfit water, get diarrhea, to force them to need even more unfit water to stay alive, so that everyone dies. I'd also disable all their wastewater treatment plants. I'll also bomb their hospitals, so if some innocents try to shelter there, I kill them by thousands, especially those that are already injured and can't do anything. I'd also demonize them in the media, attack everyone that tries to protect them or provide them aid. Because fuck them all.

That's what I'd do if I were Israel. /s

it's interesting how nobody wants to play this game.

Ponting out real suffering of Palestinian people via sarcasm is a game to you. Ok.

water back. food/medicine is still sufficient and will be allowed in soon. in IDF there is a dedicated team that monitors situation to make sure that it doesn't degrades to humanitarian crisis. there is also dedicated legal team to vet that everything that is done according to international law/statues/etc

unrwa employs hamas and islamic jihad members and doesn't care.

one of the things that needed to resolve conflict (in broader sense) it's to disband unrwa and rescind inherited refugee status (which exists only in this case) .

This comments section is going to be a no man's land in a few hours, so I'll try to keep any judgement completely out of this text field.

I'm not going to go over the last hundred or so years of stroke/counterstroke/countercounterstroke in the western Med - you can look that up yourselves. Hopefully you will use reputable scholarship to do so, and realize - like with Russia-Ukraine - that nothing happens for no reason . . or because the devil . . or because literally Hitler.

A lot of what I say would have applied to 9/11 as well; it would behoove anyone speaking heatedly to perhaps review the aftereffects of decisions[1] in those days.

So you're fighting this bunch of guys. They injected some yahoos into your country. They killed a bunch of your people, but are not trying nor able to hold territory. They are unable to expand their borders in your direction at any point in the future, because you have nuclear weapons, and conventional superiority besides. Now, why do you think they went around doing their killing so very splashingly? OK, good. Are you going to do the thing they want you to do? I think the current answer is, "yes", and that's fascinating to me.

Both fundamentalist and new reactionaries of our current era share a goal: the reduction of the post-Enlightenment secular state, in favor of either a theocracy or a neo-feudal plutocracy, with lots of technological spice. Although these two forces are sometimes deadly enemies, they - like Fascism and Stalinism before them - work together to create a much more dangerous environment than either could accomplish alone. Serious People remaining in power should probably acknowledge this, and either throw in with the techno-feudalists, or re-energize the secular social powers that created and maintains the Modern world. I suppose Option C, "Make Your Own Ethnonatalist Blood God", is also an option, but I like nice things and don't decorate my carpet with skulls.

[1] We took the option of thinking the rest of the world wanted to live on the set of the latest season of MILF Manor, but we also started shooting before the sewer line was put in. Another option is treating it like an international law enforcement problem - which it very much was, but the American resistance to international law obstructed that path. The final path was to go down hot: every nationality represented on the attacks to be regarded as hostile, and each hostile power will put forth an unconditional surrender, WW2-style. As a nuclear power, America would have had to only make one or two ghastly examples before everyone else took the knee. This is horrifying, probably would have damaged our reputation even more than the real reaction did, and - most importantly - brutalizes our populace to mass death. However, the net bloodshed would have probably been less. Virtually everyone I know reminds me of this fact fairly regularly, and I need to remind them of how hard it is to fill up your truck on radioactive gasoline.

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