Ernie wrote: ↑Sun Apr 14, 2024 9:11 am
I'm trying to sort fact from fiction...
What parts of this article are true, what is false, and what is misleading?
Is there any hard evidence that Israel is trying to starve Gazans?
Or
Does Israel simply care more about their military objectives than about the lives of Gazans, so whenever push comes to shove, Gazans end up getting killed or starved?
I think the reason you are having a hard time answering that question is because the answer is both yes and yes.
Like all governments, Israel is not one unitary entity. It is coalition government with people who have a lot of competing objectives. There are no doubt people within the Israeli government who would like to see the Palestinians gone from Gaza by any means necessary and if starving them out is the way to make them go away, then so be it. We know this because people on the Israeli right have been quoted saying as much. We also know there are professional military leaders within Israel who are looking at the situation from a military tactics point of view in which creating food corridors and devoting troops to sheltering food aid is a distraction from the objective at hand.
Every war is no different frankly. Take the US invasion of Iraq. There were Middle East hawks in the government who saw the war primarily in terms of geopolitics and the "great game". That the US needed to get a strategic foothold in that region to assert US geopolitical interests. There were people who saw the war as being about oil, both profits for US oil companies and oil security for the west (Haliburton, Exxon). There were people who saw it as some sort of existential war between radical Islam and the west (war on terror). There were ideologues who thought it was about promoting democracy and free enterprise in the middle east (nation building). There were people who thought it was about things like road construction and cell phone contracts (US business interests). And finally there was the military-industrial complex that needs a good war at least once a decade to refresh their profits. And if it is a permanent war, so much the better.
It's like the parable of the blind man and the elephant.
3 x
A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
The current government of Israel has a track record of using starvation as a tool for control. I personally think this is quite immoral, but that’s how war and subjugation go - many other governments have done the same thing.
What happened to the US dock they were going to build to bring in all the aid needed?
0 x
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Robert wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 8:49 am
What happened to the US dock they were going to build to bring in all the aid needed?
I would assume it is no longer needed in the wake of that accidental aid convoy bombing that Israel did last week. Since then due to more intense US and worldwide pressure, Israel has opened the regular border crossings more wide up and is now letting in more trucks.
0 x
A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
This is not just one person. I have heard several stories like this. This is sick and hate filled.
0 x
Try hard not to offend. Try harder not to be offended.
Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean they are not after you.
I think I am funnier than I really am.
Josh wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 8:39 am
For the underlying question, the best answer is that empires often seem willing to sacrifice lots of ground troops for dubious ends. For some examples, you can look at Russia and Ukraine right now, both of which are sending legions of men into a meat grinder, with neither side really achieving much of significant at all. Or American in Afghanistan; whilst casualties weren't that high, many young men and women did get blown up by IEDs and maimed or killed, and ultimately the invasion was a complete failure.
Israel has now lost 116 soldiers in the ground invasion.
The old woodcutter spoke again. “It is impossible to talk with you. You always draw conclusions. Life is so vast, yet you judge all of life with one page or one word. You see only a fragment. Unless you know the whole story, how can you judge?"
From a strategic viewpoint, I think it would have been better, originally, for Israel to tell Gazans that if they support Hamas and other militants, they should move to the north, and if not, to move to the south. And then put pressure on the people in the south to get the militants to move north.
People would have still been killed, but I think not as many innocent people, and innocent Gazans could have had a better existence the last 6 months.
0 x
The old woodcutter spoke again. “It is impossible to talk with you. You always draw conclusions. Life is so vast, yet you judge all of life with one page or one word. You see only a fragment. Unless you know the whole story, how can you judge?"
Ernie wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2024 10:29 am
From a strategic viewpoint, I think it would have been better, originally, for Israel to tell Gazans that if they support Hamas and other militants, they should move to the north, and if not, to move to the south. And then put pressure on the people in the south to get the militants to move north.
People would have still been killed, but I think not as many innocent people, and innocent Gazans could have had a better existence the last 6 months.
The militants would have moved south then.
0 x
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Ernie wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2024 10:29 am
From a strategic viewpoint, I think it would have been better, originally, for Israel to tell Gazans that if they support Hamas and other militants, they should move to the north, and if not, to move to the south. And then put pressure on the people in the south to get the militants to move north.
People would have still been killed, but I think not as many innocent people, and innocent Gazans could have had a better existence the last 6 months.
The militants would have moved south then.
And I don't think it would have mattered with the kind of overwhelming military force Israel used in a highly dense populated area.
0 x
“It’s easy to make everything a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” — Brandon L. Bradford
