Yeah, that Israel! Sheesh, it just sent the army in to kill Palestinians, out of the blue.

It’s not as though there was, say, some provoking incident like, for instance, an enormous and brutal mass murder, involving torture, rape, and dismemberment, attacking family homes and a music festival in Israel, massacring civilians of all ages, etc., while the attackers boasted about it and livestreamed videos of their atrocities.

And it’s not as though some of the victims were taken away and held as hostages to be rescued, was it?

And it’s not as though Hamas had made a huge network of tunnels in which they could hide from the Israeli incursions they deliberately provoked, but which they did not allow any Palestinian civilians to enter, since to them the deaths of their own people are a benefit if they can use it to whip up worldwide sentiment against Israel.

And it’s not as though they took the further step of violating international law countless times by using civilian infrastructure, including private homes, schools, and hospitals, as combat bases and weapons storage, which makes it practically impossible for the country where one has just perpetrated the largest pogrom since the Holocaust to respond without killing some civilians that Hamas deliberately put and kept in harm’s way.

Oh, right, all those things *did* happen! But, idiotically, many of us forgot all about those basic facts or failed to learn them at all before mouthing off.

Justin, this is incredible. During the early days, you could pretend you had simply not seen the genocide in Gaza or it didn’t mount to one, mention proportional response, etc. It’s become clear since all the time you spent here justifying Israel’s actions that entire communities in Gaza simply no longer exist, the tiny strip of land has become a tent-city, and 100,000 people have possibly been killed. You don’t get to then bring up Oct 7 and (discredited) claims of rape or dismemberment or torture.

…which makes it practically impossible … to respond without killing some civilians that Hamas deliberately put and kept in harm’s way.

This is an argument for terrorism, Justin. Any side can use it to justify any atrocity. Even the attacks that you discuss in the first part of your post can be justified on these grounds: “It was practically impossible to respond without killing some civilians; the State of Israel put and kept them in harm’s way.” It is grotesque self-exonerating nonsense, and you know it.

…since to them the deaths of their own people are a benefit if they can use it to whip up worldwide sentiment against Israel.

This is an argument that could be made for (and against) any side. It could even be said of your comment; that you regard the suffering and death caused by the attacks you reference as “a benefit” that you can “use to whip up worldwide sentiment” against Palestinians. It’s absurd.

Oh, right, all those things *did* happen! But, idiotically, many of us forgot all about those basic facts or failed to learn them at all before mouthing off.

I genuinely cannot fathom how you are not embarrassed to post such philosophically empty arguments on a philosophy blog under your real name.

Aside from the issues with your framing, which are touched on above, the substantive point you are making here is that things happened. Yes, they did. They happened before the attacks you referenced, and they happened after them. And they continue to happen. The difference is that you do not care for their happening to Palestinians or, worse, you see it happening to them as justified.

Ah, right, the ‘genocide’ that Israel has been carrying out for so long as the Palestinian population in the area… has steadily increased!

But it’s useful to try to change the meanings of important words to confuse issues.

I don’t think you are writing in good faith here. Even if we call it a war, say that atrocities were committed by the State of Israel, say that its actions amount to collective punishment and the immiseration of entire communities, say that the systems of oppression that state has set in place need to be dismantled, you would still take issue with what’s being said—the absence of the word “genocide” in that description would not assuage you. Because you are not here to reason about it, and cannot be reasoned with regarding it.

I don’t understand the reasoning here–Yazan said “before October” in 2023. And this comment seems to be referring to October 7th, right? If so, how is it addressing Yazan’s claim? Or am I missing something?

Hi, Bilingual. Taking you at your word that you are asking this question sincerely. Assuming that you are, and assuming that what you presented here as your best understanding of a charitable view of what Israel is attempting, given what you have heard, it’s all the more important to try to articulate these things!

So: how do I “characterize Israel’s goals in Gaza, if not in terms of the displacement of the Arab population”?

I characterize Israel’s goals in that conflict, while Israel was fighting it, as an attempt to fight back against the regime that not only engineered a large-scale, brutal massacre against Israeli civilians (and indeed against many non-Israeli civilians that just happened to be there at the time, some to attend the Nova music festival) — and that also openly vowed to repeat that massacre over and over and over again, with the aim of the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. And also to either rescue the hostages Hamas had captured or else to bring Hamas to the point where it would negotiate on more favorable terms for the return of those hostages.

I do not think that the displacement of the Palestinian people in Gaza was any aim at all of the Israeli fighting.

In fact, though this is somehow not widely discussed, Israel voluntarily left Gaza in 2005! Up to that time, Gaza was under Israeli occupation. But as a part of negotiations that were not reciprocated, Israel forcibly removed its own settlements from Gaza and ceded that territory to the Palestinians who lived there. There was some hope that this would lead to state-building along lines that could entail eventual peace with Israel. but Hamas is not dedicated to the improvement of the lives of Palestinians: it is dedicated to the permanent eradication of Israel. Hence, the October 7th massacre was not all that surprising as an outcome, depressing though that is.

If Israel’s goal had been to displace the Palestinians from Gaza, why would Israel have ceded that territory to them and pulled out all the settlements, against the protests of the settlers there?

What makes far more sense is that, as in fact happened, Israel needed to fight against an enemy that (as Hamas always does) hides itself among the civilian population in Gaza. Gazans who will not comply with this (by allowing Hamas to use their homes, etc. for warfare, putting the civilians at risk) do so at their own risk from Hamas.

This forced a choice on the IDF: either carpet-bomb the area to keep the IDF soldiers safe (which Israel did not do), or inanely do nothing as Hamas fulfills its threat to repeat the October 7th massacres again and again, while letting the hostages rot away, or else send in ground troops. And the IDF chose the third option.

Since Hamas insists on violating international law by fighting in heavily populated urban areas and using civilian homes, schools, hospitals, etc. in warfare, the only way Israel could avoid terrible civilian casualties was to announce to the local population where the fighting was going to take place, and where they could flee to.

Of course, this greatly impedes the military aims of the IDF, since it also telegraphs to Hamas where the IDF are moving next, which meant that the Hamas leadership that the IDF targeted could also get out of the way in time. But Israel chose to do that anyway, to reduce civilian casualties in the urban environment Hamas chooses to work in.

And yet, precisely because of this, deeply cynical people are able to portray this to you as ‘the forcible removal of populations’. One can’t win against unprincipled propagandists, like the Hamas-controlled sources whose reports on the war were trusted by so much of the western media.

So: no, Israel did not carpet-bomb Gaza (even though Israel easily had the power to carpet-bomb all of Gaza and destroy all the infrastructure and kill the inhabitants); no, the inhabitants that were moved were not pushed out of Gaza (where were they pushed to, exactly?); no, Israel not only has not created any settlements in the area, or moved any Israeli settlers into the area, but in fact had already moved all the settlements *out* of Gaza twenty years ago; and no, Israel did not attempt to starve the people of Gaza through food and water blockades. In fact, Israel repeatedly sent people in to deliver food and water in Gaza (which is pretty strange on the ‘attempted genocide’ account), even though Hamas exploited that to have its own fighters attack the aid-deliverers after getting close on the pretext that they were in fact Gazans seeking aid, etc.

One last thing: many people seem to be under the impression that the roads in and out of Gaza are entirely controlled by Israel, or even that Gaza is somehow encircled by Israel. But this is not true: Egypt has a 12-kilometer border with Gaza. Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza are so radical that Egypt built a security wall to keep its country and soldiers safe, some years after Israel had dismantled its settlements and yielded Gaza to the Palestinians. Egypt controls a border crossing with Gaza and could easily have supplemented the civilian aid provided by Israel and others to whatever extent it chose to. Is Egypt therefore also guilty of immoral treatment of the Palestinians, on your view?

I, too, am asking sincerely!

My pleasure, Bilingual — and thank you in turn for what I take to be genuine curiosity and a spirit of fair inquiry on your part, whatever you happen to believe now or at the end of your inquiries.

More specifically:

1. “One follow up question I would ask: You reject outright the claim that the Netanyahu government is engaging in ethnic cleansing, or that their ambition is to resettle the strip. I don’t feel qualified to take a stand on the factual details here, but can we at least agree that, conditionally, IF Israel (or any nation, for that matter) were to carry out such a campaign, THEN it would be abhorrent?”

This is a great question. I had an instinctive answer to it, which is yes, it would be abhorrent, but on second thought I think we need more details.

Let me try to explain my reasons for hesitating.

First, I want to stress that I think the best possible result would be an outcome in which the Arab (and almost entirely Muslim) neighbors of Israel, including the Gazans, live in their own states side-by-side with Israel in mutual peace. And of course, the Arab Muslims who have chosen instead to be Israeli citizens — it may surprise you to hear that about 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab Muslims, and that they have full rights of citizenship, hold prominent positions in the country, and serve in the IDF like their Jewish and other fellow citizens — continue to live in peace within Israel, as they have generally done so far.

Second: however, I do think that in certain very limited circumstances (though in my opinion not now) it is justifiable to transfer populations from one place to another. For instance, I do not think that it was abhorrent for Israel to remove Israeli settlements from Gaza in order to turn the land over to the Arab Muslims in 2005, though this meant removing all the Jewish residents and their homes from there, often under strong protest from the residents. Other plausible examples that come to mind include the forced shifting of populations in India and Pakistan during the formation of those countries, and all sorts of shifts around the world in the wake of World War II. Many of these transfers involved the forced removal of people who had, personally, done nothing to ‘deserve’ that, even if overall the result leads to greater peace or stability. So I suppose I would say that, ceteris paribus, it is wrong to transfer populations from a geographic area, and in those rare occasions when it does become necessary, the badness of doing that is only justified in light of an even worse badness that plausibly seems to result from leaving people where they are.

Third: there is no way that a nation should be required to endure not only constant bombardments by missiles, and terrorist attacks, but also major pogroms of the sort perpetrated on October 7th, 2023, and explicitly promised in perpetuity by Hamas. This may be hard to grapple with in a big country like the USA, but Israel is very small — about the size of New Jersey in area and population — and so everyone there lives fairly close to the border. If a neighbor of a country is determined to attack again and again, slaughtering civilians, and is openly sworn to annihilate that nation and its citizens, then it does not seem in principle unreasonable to me that at some point, after enough alternative approaches are tried, some sort of buffer zone is enforced, even if that does involve population transfer.

Still, I think that should be seen as something like a last resort, and that the attacked country should first try all reasonable (and maybe even somewhat unreasonable) efforts to reach a peaceful resolution. Since before Israel became a nation, there have been violent attempts by its neighbors and by some radicalized Arabs to prevent the existence of any Jewish homeland in the area, under any circumstances and with whatever concessions in mind. The full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 is part of a long line of offers and concessions Israel has made in the hope that, somehow, it can make peace with its neighbors and that everyone can move on. Unfortunately, through the UNRWA schools, the children of Gaza, etc. continue to be radicalized to see their main aim in life as the destruction of Israel, and to value this negative aim as more important than any positive life they could live side-by-side with Israel. Does the intense indoctrination work on all the children? No, there are always some who nonetheless grow up to desire peace and prosperity, sooner or later. But there are enough who are devoted to the ultimate goal of Israel’s destruction to make the prospects of peace difficult to be optimistic about. This is not just a pro-Israel view, by the way: the children who go through the UNRWA schools are so radicalized that most of the neighboring Muslim countries are leery of welcoming them in, and there are of course reasons why Egypt insisted on building a massive security wall against Gaza. Besides, Hamas really doesn’t care about the Palestinian civilians or their welfare or future: it, too, is entirely devoted to Israel’s destruction. With Hamas or other Iran-supported terrorist groups in strength in the region, even a less radicalized Palestinian citizenry may not be sufficient to solve the problem.

All this makes the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Gaza quite gloomy. But, given the cost to Palestinian civilians of a population transfer, etc., I think it is reasonable for Israel to continue to try to find a path to peaceful coexistence.

2. “must we not then condemn those elements of Israeli society which promote Israel’s expansion beyond its existing borders? I’m speaking here of ultranationalist Zionism, the Greater Israel Movement, settlements in Golan, the West Bank, etc. These are well-documented forces both among the Israeli population, and certain members of the Netanyahu cabinet, and they strike me as very troubling.”

There are always radicals in any movement, and I think the way the rest of the movement deals with them is quite illustrative. If the rest of the movement does not keep the extremists in check, or at least call them out, then the whole movement becomes dubious.

I don’t know as much about some of the specific individuals and groups you’re talking about, but if there are any Israelis or Zionists or Netanyahu cabinet members who favor invading the neighboring countries (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon), I’m against that.

The so-called ‘occupied territories’ — the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and (until 2005) Gaza — seem to me to be somewhat different. These were a part of countries that attacked Israel in 1967 with the aim to destroy it. In the ensuing conflict, Israel seized these territories. Was it abhorrent for Israel to do this? Should the territories have been returned after the fighting ended? Israel claimed, reasonably it seems to me, that the countries that previously held those territories had repeatedly made clear (ultimately, with a large-scale, co-ordinated military attack) that they aimed at Israel’s destruction. It is hard for me to see why a small and vulnerable nation that has actually been attacked by its neighbors must, after somehow surviving those attacks, return all the territories to its attackers and wait for the attackers to try again and again to destroy it. What reasonable moral or political principle requires that?

So, if you’re talking here about decisions concerning those ‘occupied territories’, I think it’s unclear that these should be seen as independent nations in the way that Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon are. (I’m not including Gaza here, since Israel has removed itself and its citizens from Gaza).

Still, that doesn’t entail that Israel may do what it pleases with the civilians living in those places or their descendants, since it seems plausible that many of them had no say in whether their former countries attacked Israel in 1967. If they are willing to live in peace with Israel, then I think Israel owes them humane treatment.

And if many of those people are not willing to live in peace with Israel? Then I think Israel should still take reasonable steps to promote peaceful coexistence with them — and yes, that means denouncing and reigning in the excesses of the more radicalized settlers there.

Hi, Louis. Thank you for your thoughtful and nuanced responses, and for moving the conversation forward by making them.

1. “…the way the political and military leadership of Israel chose to respond to the Oct. 7 attack was grossly disproportionate, in the sense that the military advantage obtained by many strikes did not outweigh the harm to civilians, and the IDF campaign clearly violated the law of armed conflict repeatedly.”

I can’t assess these claims until I see what supports them. Could you please spell it out and/or direct me to your sources for this?

2. “About 80 percent of buildings in the Gaza strip were damaged or destroyed, mostly by IDF ordinance (Hamas lacked the weaponry required to do that kind of damage to structures even had it wanted to), and the civilian infrastructure has been shredded. That, plus the scale of civilian casualties and suffering, shows that the IDF campaign violated the law of armed conflict.”

I’d be glad to hear this legal argument out. But there’s something here I don’t yet understand. Yes, there are excellent reasons for laws and norms of combat that prohibit the targeting of civilians, and that aim to keep civilians out of harm’s way. Those laws and other norms should certainly not be violated lightly, I agree. But what is to be done when confronted with an enemy that exploits your concern about those considerations to gain an advantage over you?

For instance, consider a situation in which a criminal has ten buttons that, when pressed, remotely kill a thousand people each. He has set them up in a private family home, with the family tied up in the closet. He has other civilian hostages, which he pulls along with him as he moves through the house from one button to the next, pressing each one in turn. To save the ten thousand people, you must stop him; but there is no way to shoot him without almost certainly killing one or more hostages. You could also blow up the house with a bomb, which would shut down the machines with the buttons, but that would kill the civilians whose home it is.

Are you compelled to passively allow him to press all ten of the buttons because of the prohibition against killing innocent civilians? I know that a few philosophers hold that you are, but this is not clear to me. Are you saying that it should be?

As I see it, we should take great care to protect civilians and to honor the combatant/noncombatant distinction. But if someone exploits our concern for that distinction in order to manipulate us into allowing him to perpetrate an even greater evil, we may be morally compelled to make the best of the terrible choice he has left us and attack him even in the knowledge that our doing so will kill the civilians that *he* deliberately placed in harm’s way, to prevent him from killing even more civilians, etc.

Naturally, we should also try to prevent ourselves from getting into that situation in the first place. But it may not always be possible.

3. “After the Israeli govt withdrew Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, it retained tight control, along with Egypt, over the movement of goods and people into and out of the territory. That evidently did not prevent Hamas from smuggling in weapons but what it did do was create various hardships for people living there, thus probably making many of them more inclined to continue to see Israel as the enemy than perhaps they otherwise would have been.”

Fair enough, but what was Israel (or Egypt) to do instead?

Hamas openly has the ongoing intention of destroying Israel, come what may, even at the sacrifice of any number of the Palestinian civilians. Israel and Egypt did not prevent Hamas from using the aid to create the ‘terror tunnel’ network and from creating weapons to use against Israel, but it did at least prevent far worse weapons from making their way into Gaza. I suspect you will agree that if Gaza had more powerful weapons, it would have used the worst of them against Israeli civilians.

And yes, the result of all this — the blockades of Israel and Egypt, and Hamas’s confiscation of Israeli and other international aid from the Palestinians, etc. — is that the Palestinian civilians are left much worse off, and Hamas naturally uses this immiseration as a way to cast further blame on Israel among the Palestinians (and internationally, through the mass media). And that is bad.

But what are you saying should have been done instead? Again, this seems to be a situation in which Hamas and its supporters are deliberately leaving Israel in a situation in which every choice is bad, and it must choose the least bad.

that clears it up. Iran is fighting jewish lunatics – I mean the current Jewish regime and its supporters.