Am I the only one aware of this? Everyone else seems to be blind in one eye...
I.e. "My family is starving, I have less money than others, so it's ok for me to steal bread" (hat tip to Jean Valjean).
Just curious about your perspective.
But a poor hungry person is a lot more likely to commit a crime of opportunity that feeds them and their family than a well of, well fed person.
Maybe you are actually agreeing with me.
My view, as a neutral observer to the Hamas / IDF debate is they are both wrong and you would ( inclusive you not you specifically ) would probably do the same... Cough Afghanistan etc...
It's easy to say "both sides" committed immoral actions, but that doesn't really get us anywhere useful, other than perhaps some moral superiority.
If we want to actually solve problems, i.e. prevent those bad things from happening in the future, the practical suggestion is to start with those people who have the most power to effect change.
There is ample footage online of fighting between the two, and Hamas fighters don't wear uniforms. Which fits with Hamas fighting right out of the guerilla warfare playbook.
So it can be reframed as "How do you reconcile Israel killing innocent civilians with the fact the the main way to tell if they are innocent is whether or not they had a gun in their hands when killed?"
I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that it's ok for the IDF to kill anyone they see because they cannot assess if they're a threat or not? Was it hard to see that this grandmother¹ with her grandson is not a militant trying to attack the IDF?
¹https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2024/01/25/palestinians-gaz...
Sorry if I wasn't clear, I'm not talking about war crimes like you brought up, I'm talking about general combat between the two sides, like you can see in the gazillions of videos posted (both by Israeli sources and Palestinian sources).
Israel has the intelligence and capability to pin point their targets and deploy high precision targeting, as demonstrated in Lebanon and Iran. After seeing so many war crimes committed by the IDF, I'm convinced that while they can assess and eliminate targets in a precise fashion, thus minimizing civilan casualties, they deliberately _choose_ not to do so.
That's a concept I've believed in since Stan Lee illustrated it so beautifully to me as a child.
I'm not qualified to engage in serious ethics debates, and I'm definitely not qualified to hold an opinion on anything going on in the middle east.
Watching the news and scrolling social media in no way prepares me to understand the deep and complex issues of the region.
I was just curious about your perspective. Thanks for explaining.
I just don't see how that makes it ok to camouflage as civilians. If Hamas cannot take on Israel, then the war is lost and it's better to go to the table and take what you can get rather than let your whole population die while staving off the inevitable.
Japan was in a similar situation in WW2, where they armed the populace (men and women) and gave them basic instruction on how to fight. This was in preparation for a land invasion, and the emperor was ready to sacrifice as many civilians as it took to protect his empire.
But the bombs dropped, they went to the table (knowing they would get bent), and avoided mass death of Japanese civilian "soldiers".