Not really sure what that has to do with my point.

I don’t know what the numbers are like for the Lebanon part of the war, obviously, but in almost all modern conflicts we see that between 25 and 80% of casualties are civilians.

Bruh, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Coalition forces were (rightly) condemned for using insufficiently discriminate force, our civilian casualty rate ranged from 15%-30%, with the higher proportion present in Iraq during the initial stages of the ‘shock and awe’ invasion.

Gonna go ahead and say if Israel is getting significantly worse numbers than in Fallujah, with the US in Fallujah having 2004-era tech and intel in a region that we were not well-established in, and Israel having 20 years of development in computerization of the military and a long-standing intelligence presence in the area, something is seriously fucked.

I imagine we’re on the high end here as hezbollah like to fight and hide amongst civilians and use them as shields.

Firing from a populated residential area in order to use civilians as a shield is commonly accepted as a war crime.

Likewise, indiscriminately shelling the residential area in response is also commonly accepted as a war crime.

I struggle to see how you can combat such an organization without heavy civilian casualties, no matter how you go about it. I’m not saying the Israelis are not making mistakes or even being disproportionate at times, but I just can’t see how you’re going to fight hezbollah without heavy collateral damage.

Like I said - I’m not unsympathetic to the fact that collateral damage IS going to happen. But Israel’s actions have been anything but proportionate.

It’s a question of proportionality. I’m generally sympathetic to the impossibility of waging war without civilian collateral damage, but Israel is clearly taking very little care to minimize civilian casualties with indiscriminate artillery fire and air strikes, and on the heels of an already legally questionable attack on Hezbollah just previously.

Civilians die in war. It’s ugly. I get that. But there’s no excuse for any supposedly modern and civilized state to not attempt to minimize civilian casualties proportional to the military objectives targeted.

No, because I am done listening to BS appeals to stuff literally generations in the past.

I love that you began this by appealing to the history of the issue (that Israel, according to your claim, didn’t immediately rev up to genocide), and when the actual history of the issue is brought up, you balk.

No, this is straight up propaganda. Zionism is simply Israel existing peacefully.

Would you like to outline for me the development of the Zionist project in the 20s, 30s, and 40s?

It’s really quite miserable that Israel has chosen to fuck the people of Lebanon over in all of this when Hezbollah is a legitimately shitty terrorist org. But unfortunately, that seems par for the course for Israel.

You do realize Israel didn’t just ‘herpederp, time to genocide’ one day right?

I mean, ethnic cleansing has been part and parcel of the modern Zionist project since it started after WW1 (itself a far cry from the 19th century Zionist project, which was far less ethnonationalist). So, I mean, on one hand, yes. On the other hand, by genocide you probably mean the explicit state action of extermination or removal of a peoples for the crime of being the wrong ethnicity, in which case Israel has been committing genocide ‘only’ since its inception.

And no, “The Arabs did it first!” even if that was correct (it is not, in any meaningful sense; the escalation of tensions was largely mutual in the 20s, 30s, and 40s) is not an excuse to commit fucking genocide.

Anyone else still think it’s a good idea to resort to violence against Israel?

You do realize that wars are only prosecuted solely by violence when one side or the other is willing to go all the way through to genocide, right?

Israel can’t just violence its way into victory. In every war, every conflict, acceptable terms, whether implicit or explicit, must be offered to ensure peace emerges from violence; violence being the means of shifting the balance of power, not useful in and of itself.

If Israel was saving innocents by doing this, that might be a more compelling argument.

Man, we’re watching one side commit genocide in real time, and the other side wishing they could commit genocide.

If one’s primary interest in the region is “No genocide please”, both sides are, indeed, pretty fucking close.

Israeli intelligence is simultaneously precise enough to target high-security enemy individuals, and yet not precise enough to [checks notes] avoid murdering 1-out-of-every-50 Gazans.

Damn. Mossad is in a really tight spot, apparently. /s

Krushchev, and the idiom was a bit lost in translation. As I understand, the meaning was closer to “We will outlast you.”

Not that that worked out either, but it’s less aggressive and more defiant.

Internationally, yes.

By Israel, no.

Iron law of institutions. Institutions do not make decisions by the rational calculus of the institution. Institutions make decisions by the rational calculus of the decision-makers.

Israel has managed to quite thoroughly exploit that little detail in capturing our political system.

“So we’re going to take up violent action then, right?”

“Oh, God, no, we’re just going to sit here and sneer at those who are trying to change the system without violence, or without enough violence.”

Because this was always the plan.

That’s a yes then

I am well-aware that Suffragists used this tactic as well, hence

Only the ones who tried to damage priceless historical artifacts for attention?

Or is your argument that the Suffragists were successful, therefore, every one of their tactics was wise?

May have been misinterpreted as a flat “I would rather someone vote for a party other than Dem or Rep” without “than not vote at all” to contextualize it.

Some people like the challenge. Not her first time on the trail, either.

I’m not condemning them for doing something small, only trying to emphasize that my issue here is not damaging things in general, but damaging, specifically, historical pieces. It’s just seems like throwing soup at paintings is the wrong approach on every level.