JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of surgery at Gaza’s largest and most advanced hospital held up his phone Saturday to the hammering of gunfire and artillery shelling. “Listen,” said Dr. Marwan Abu Sada as fighting raged around Shifa Hospital.
I wonder if a lot of people’s idea of war has been shaped by the recent American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were wars of choice where at least in theory American soldiers were fighting largely for the benefit of the natives. Countries that believe they actually need to win and don’t have the option of just giving up and going home fight wars in a very different way. Consider for example World War II, the proverbial “good versus evil” war fought by the generation that originally came up with the comic book characters you read about. The Allies certainly didn’t hesitate to kill enormous numbers of Axis civilians in the course of destroying military targets. (IMO the Allies actually went way too far and a lot of the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan served no military purpose, but I suppose they were more worried about bombing too little than they were about bombing too much.)
The total war tactics of WW2 are unthinkable by modern standards, but it’s hard not to sympathize with an outgunned army fighting for their home. They fight because they’d rather die than lose.
Maybe instead of fighting people in that position, you talk to them and work out a peace deal. If they’re willing to be reasonable, end the violence.
Do you think that Hamas will negotiate a peace deal in good faith?
Do you think Israel will?
Yes.
Hamas attacked on October 7th. Not the other way around.
Didn’t happen in a vacuum though, did it.
Do not confuse me saying that with sympathising with Hamas. It is possible to recognise that both sides have bloody hands, and have done for decades.
Can you explain what you mean by “Didn’t happen in a vacuum”?
Best I can figure is that you disagree with the act itself, but agree with their motives or desires. But I really don’t want to assume, and would prefer to understand from you.
If I keep poking you in the eye for decades, wouldn’t you eventually get tired of it and punch me in the face?
Except in this case “poking you in the eye” is killing people, including old and young, journalists and doctors, poets and farmers, cutting off food, water, and electricity, displacing millions, invading homes, destroying farms and infrastructure, and restricting freedom of movement.
Both sides have been punching each other. There needs to be an independent party here, like a two state solution. Guess which side rejected that though?
What about when the Palestinians tried to overthrow the Jordanian government, and when they successfully did it to Lebanon?
Israel attacked, at a minimum, 17 years ago.
Blockading a country is an act of war.
If they’re willing to be reasonable
they’ve shown time and time again, through actions and words, that they are not
Exactly. Netanyahu and his gang of corrupt zealots can’t be reasoned with.
So, in WW2, the vast vast vast majority of the fight against “evil” was done by the USSR, because the Third Reich had, as one of its pillars, the destruction of the workers’ movement and the enslavement of the Slavs. The USSR lost far more than any other party to the war because the Third Reich made the war of choice, dehumanized the Slavs, and engaged in genocidal mass murder as a choice. The USSR defeated 80% of the Third Reich’s forces.
On the flip side, the American and British government and business communities were pro-fascist. They funded the rise of the Third Reich, they funded domestic and international eugenics programs, they were deeply invested in apartheid states and women’s oppression. (By way of contrast, the Brits and Americans used women as prostitutes to support the war effort while the USSR had women all over their military as snipers, tank operators, pilots, machine gunners, etc.)
So given that context, let’s look at the end of the war and what happened after. At the end of the war, the US wanted to make sure that the USSR didn’t liberate the rest of Western Europe from the Third Reich because they were anti-communist. The USA led the Western allies to Germany to create a border with the USSR (also a member of the allies, remember). It was this insistence that divided Germany into East and West Germany. Berlin was in East Germany because the USSR was the predominant victor in the war.
But then what of Japan. Before the USA nuked Japan, the USA and Japan were negotiating terms of surrender. The USA had made a very strict and ultimately untenable set of terms. Japan replied that they needed some domestic face saving in order to prevent their country from descending into violent and bloody internal revolution immediately. The USA received that message, and then chose to nuke 2 civilian cities. There was no emergency. The US wasn’t fighting for survival. Everything had already been secured. The USA was in active negotiations and Japan was participating (albeit through third parties because of the political sensitivity). The USA made an active deliberate choice to nuke civilians unnecessarily.
Why? Because communism was their real enemy. It was the reason they got involved in the war, it was the driving force behind their strategic decisions. They got involved against communism, they went to Germany against communism, they partitioned Germany against communism. And they nuked Japan as a show of force, or to demonstrate how bat shit they were, to create conditions of fear and restraint.
But if that were true, then wouldn’t the USA have just launched a war against communism? They did. They launched wars of choice against Vietnam and Korea. They destroyed Cambodia. They bombed Laos. The most bombed countries in the world were bombed by the USA, with multiple countries having the USA drop more bombs on them than all bombs dropped by all parties in WW2 combined.
They continued their eugenics programs for 20 more years after WW2, they advanced their chemical weapons programs and deployed atrocity after atrocity in these wars of choice, mostly against civilians.
Are people in the USA used to wars of choice? Yes, because in essence all USA wars have been wars of choice, even before the USA existed. Was it a necessity to invade The Phillipines? How about Grenada? Overthrow the Iranian government? Afghanistan in the 80s? Was it an existential necessity to genocide the indigenous peoples of the Americas, poisoning their water, destroying their ecosystems, destroying their agriculture and their sources of food?
The entire Western European project, which became the North Atlantic project, is about wars of choice - brutal wars of choice of genocide through war, through rape, through collective punishment, through environmental devastation, through eugenics, through slavery, through death camps, through occupation and extraction. The number of necessary wars the USA has been in is so vanishingly small that the very few exceptions prove the rule.
