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ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire

(apnews.com)
517 points xbar | 16 comments | 26 Jan 24 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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locallost ◴[26 Jan 24 21:36 UTC] No.39148816[source]▶
My views on the situation aside, the clearest I saw anyone communicate the issues from a global angle was the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin

Translated here: https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1718201487132885246

Viewed from the angle of the West, I think the message it needs to avoid isolating itself from the world is very unusual for Western media and important.

Quote:

"Westerners must open their eyes to the extent of the historical drama unfolding before us to find the right answers."

And

"This Palestinian question will not fade. And so we must address it and find an answer. This is where we need courage. The use of force is a dead end. The moral condemnation of what Hamas did - and there's no "but" in my words regarding the moral condemnation of this horror - must not prevent us from moving forward politically and diplomatically in an enlightened manner. The law of retaliation is a never-ending cycle."

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pgeorgi ◴[26 Jan 24 21:43 UTC] No.39148909[source]▶
All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their campaign. And then?

Spend tons of money on iron dome to shoot down the rockets and hope that Hamas won't manage to conduct another massacre, even if "only" half the scope of October 7?

This mess features not one but two parties who currently reject the concept of a cease fire.

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anon84873628 ◴[26 Jan 24 22:43 UTC] No.39149812[source]▶
>All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their campaign. And then?

And then everyone who wants peace invests lots of money and expertise over a long time to build a modern, prosperous, stable Palestinian society, despite whatever setbacks, attacks, and sabotage occur from within and without.

The only way to have peace is to give people a better option than becoming terrorists.

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reissbaker ◴[27 Jan 24 01:38 UTC] No.39151448[source]▶
This is not the approach the West took with ISIS, which involved similarly one-sided fights against terrorist forces [1], nor do I think it's an approach that would have worked. When "everyone who wants peace" doesn't include the people in control of the guns and rockets, who instead want to kill their enemies by any means necessary (and themselves do not respect international law), you can't simply dialogue your way out of it any more than Ukraine could have dialogued their way out of getting invaded by Russia.

The ICJ ruled that Hamas return the hostages unconditionally, but everyone knows that won't happen — Hamas is simply unaccountable. "Everyone who wants peace" can't even get the Red Cross access to the hostages, let alone get them returned. Vague calls for diplomacy with terrorist groups doesn't solve much, which is why people are asking you for specific solutions — it's easy to say Israel should stop fighting, but then: what should it do? How would you actually ensure it doesn't keep getting attacked, repeatedly, as Hamas continues to insist they plan to do?

1: Mosul alone had ~10,000 civilian casualties and that was less densely populated than Gaza City and didn't have tunnels: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/thousands-more-civilia...

And it similarly had about 1MM civilians displaced: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/middleeast/mosul-ir...

And that wasn't the end of the fight against ISIS!

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1. SirSavary ◴[27 Jan 24 01:51 UTC] No.39151559[source]▶
Note: ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east; Hamas is homegrown and was democratically elected by the people of the region.
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2. reissbaker ◴[27 Jan 24 02:06 UTC] No.39151657[source]▶
No, ISIS wasn't "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State
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3. Jochim ◴[27 Jan 24 02:08 UTC] No.39151677[source]▶
> ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east;

The prevalence of British and American accents whenever the IDF is interviewed was certainly surprising.

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4. SirSavary ◴[27 Jan 24 02:19 UTC] No.39151752[source]▶
Marauding terrorist force that lays claim to an area != the people who inhabit that area*

* I understand that they also recruited locally; that doesn't change the fact that there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities.

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5. yieldcrv ◴[27 Jan 24 02:36 UTC] No.39151854[source]▶
Democratically elected by plurality, where the only competition was incompetent, and still only won by plurality… and hasnt had an election in 18 years, which means 50% of the population has never had a democratically exercised opinion because they werent born yet, and of the other 50% not even 50% of the ones that voted had voted for Hamas

people really act like thats a “gotcha”

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6. mathieuh ◴[27 Jan 24 04:35 UTC] No.39152604[source]▶
They were trying to present a certain image, I would imagine they put the German terrorists in front of the German TV cameras, the French in front of the French cameras etc.
7. Sabinus ◴[27 Jan 24 04:44 UTC] No.39152662{3}[source]▶
>ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east

>there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities

Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged? Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not?

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8. IlikeMadison ◴[27 Jan 24 05:56 UTC] No.39153007[source]▶
ISIS is 95% of people of African and Middle-Eastern origins. Then maybe a bit of crazies from Indonesia, Chechnya, etc. As well, ISIS was founded in Iraq itself. How is it a "bunch of European"?
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9. SirSavary ◴[27 Jan 24 06:15 UTC] No.39153097[source]▶
Your 95% figure is incorrect -- approximately 45% of fighters hailed from Africa and the Middle East, with ~31% originating from Europe (East and West combined).

Here's a BBC article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-47286935 and the report that it sources its data from https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Women-in-ISIS-r... if you care to learn more.

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10. SirSavary ◴[27 Jan 24 06:18 UTC] No.39153112{4}[source]▶
> Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged?

There's no retreating in my comment -- it's a fact that they sourced people from everywhere. I threw an asterisk on there at the last second because I wanted to show good faith; there's nothing nefarious about it.

> Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not?

It was definitely a bunch of European guys, and Asian guys, and American guys, etc... my point was that ISIS was a group of people from around the globe and not an ideology endemic to the region.

See my other comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39153097

11. SirSavary ◴[27 Jan 24 06:20 UTC] No.39153120[source]▶
It's not a "gotcha", it's a factual statement. You can disagree with the mechanisms that brought them to power but it was still a legitimate election.
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12. yieldcrv ◴[27 Jan 24 06:33 UTC] No.39153188{3}[source]▶
yes it is accurate and a rhetorical dog whistle for extremist approaches to making Palestinian civilians inseparable from Hamas

it is also accurate that it was 18 years ago

empathy shouldnt be that hard

13. spidersenses ◴[27 Jan 24 10:44 UTC] No.39154452{3}[source]▶
>with ~31% originating from Europe (East and West combined).

I think the parent comment was referring to the idea that the overwhelmingy majority of those "Europeans" we're rather people of MENA/Turkish immigrant background, not "ethnically" European.

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14. aoeusnth1 ◴[27 Jan 24 16:58 UTC] No.39157249{3}[source]▶
I looked at the source. Are you confusing “women and minors as % of total” from a country with % of fighters in IS originating from that country?
15. SirSavary ◴[27 Jan 24 21:28 UTC] No.39160019{4}[source]▶
Even if that's what the parent comment was implying it still wouldn't be correct; much more than 5% of ISIS' fighters were "crazies" from "Indonesia, Chechnya, etc".
16. reissbaker ◴[28 Jan 24 03:13 UTC] No.39162196{3}[source]▶
That's not what the article says at all. It says 45% of the foreign fighters hailed from Africa and the Middle East. The foreign fighters numbered ~42k total. It's unknown how many total fighters ISIS had, but estimates range into 200k total, which would imply that the vast majority of ISIS was native; more conservative estimates are that half of the fighters were "foreign fighters," which would mean that ~75% of the fighters were MENA-native (since the foreign fighters were about half MENA-native). [1] The strongest claim you could make regarding European contributions is that ISIS was around 16% European, including fighters from Chechnya. (The weakest country-of-origin claim is it was about 7% European including Chechnya, although given that Chechen ISIS fighters nearly outnumbered all other European ISIS fighters combined — and that Chechnya is a majority-Sunni-Muslim semi-autonomous region of Russia, and ISIS was attempting to form a Sunni Muslim caliphate — I think the least-European claim might point out that trying to bundle that into a pan-European identity group is probably mistaken, and the most-accurate depiction is "ISIS was a bunch of radicalized Sunni Muslims, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa.")

TL;DR: ISIS was not "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized." It was mostly people from the Middle East and North Africa: somewhere between 75-93%. 95% MENA is probably not correct either, but it's much closer to correct than your original claim.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State