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Comment by eapressoandcats | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s reasonable to conclude that Israel is more willing to continue to commit atrocities against the Palestinians than the US was against the Japanese.

Like, I genuinely think Netanyahu is perusing a “ Lebensraum” strategy with Palestine. This is evidenced by their support of right wing Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory.

I’ve come to this realization as a Jewish person who was brought up on “Israel has a right to defend itself” during the second intafada. Israel has genuinely changed for the worse in a way that’s hard for a lot of people to see.

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Japan surrendered before the US had the chance to play Israel in Japan. But Japan had the same strategy that Hamas uses - train civilians to attack to put the US in a position of having to decide if that mother is just a mother, or if that mother is gonna pull out a rifle.

I don’t think Israel believes that there is anyone that could “surrender” on behalf of the Palestinians. Also, given the nature of the conflict, surrender would inevitably lead back to the same problems that started it, which is that Israel cannot annex Palestine without either apartheid or genocide, and regime change is unlikely to lead to a stable two state solution since legitimate regimes haven’t been able to reach agreement in the past.

Israel should just start mass deportations of Palestinians to Iran.

That's an odd point of view. With Operation Downfall, the Americans were planning literal genocide against the Japanese. If they hadn't surrendered after the atomic bombs, the projections were as high as 5-10 MILLION Japanese casualties (with several hundred thousand on the Allied side), precisely because Japanese policy had been to arm the citizenry with rakes and hoes if it came to that - i.e., the Japanese refusal to surrender despite there being no possible path to victory was going to cost the lives of many millions of their citizens. And America had little choice but to pursue that.

That America was willing to do this, if the bombs didn't work, seems to contradict your claim. (And I think the Americans had little choice to do so.)

I fully agree that America was very willing to commit atrocities, especially using atomic bombs (obviously) and firebombing civilian centers.

The key difference is that the US recognized that Japan could surrender, accepted that surrender, and instituted regime change with a goal of democratic prosperity.

I’m not convinced Israel would do the same. They certainly haven’t said anything about actual regime change and setting up a legitimate government.

> Operation Downfall, the Americans were planning literal genocide against the Japanese.

If you're at war and your opponent has lost but is foreign to the idea of surrender and fights to the last man, and you oblige him, you are pursuing war not genocide.

Can we apply this to the current conflict in Gaza?

In my humble opinion, yes. Modern genocide law doesn't really account for a government engaging in suicidal sacred war.

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