Palestine college student protest megathread

[Landslide Lyndon]

I can't stress enough just how much >90% of employed people despise protests like this. The left has completely failed to appeal to working people and there seems to be no interest in fixing that.

These people aren't the left. These are extremist loons who have more in common with Alex Jones and David Duke than with any mainstream Democrat.

[T'Chenka]

The Palestinians are the bad guys in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

This is not racist, and it is a widely held opinion.  This is no different than saying the Russians are the bad guys in the Russia/Ukraine conflict or that the Americans were good and Germans were bad in WW2.

Palestinian citizens are not Hamas, and Israel has killed over 35 thousand civilians, many of which are children.

Hamas and Israel are the "bad guys". Innocent civilians (in both Palestine and Israel) mostly are not.

If your opinion was as widely held as you claim, Biden wouldn't be taking so much heat for treating Israel with kid gloves.

[Brittain33]

The Palestinians are the bad guys in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Woo boy. You lost me here. Hamas is clearly a bad guy but Netanyahu and his supporters left no route to an enduring peace before Oct. 7 and have been aggressively making things worse.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Hamas are the bad guys, not Palestinians.

The majority of Gazans are children who were born under Hamas’s totalitarian regime and have never had a choice in the matter

[MyLifeIsYours]

I can't stress enough just how much >90% of employed people despise protests like this. The left has completely failed to appeal to working people and there seems to be no interest in fixing that.

These people aren't the left. These are extremist loons who have more in common with Alex Jones and David Duke than with any mainstream Democrat.

"Mainstream Democrats" are center-right to centrist. They are not on the left sphere, at least the way most of them feel about capitalism, where they continue to support the status quo in maintaining the system.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The Palestinians are the bad guys in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

This is not racist, and it is a widely held opinion.  This is no different than saying the Russians are the bad guys in the Russia/Ukraine conflict or that the Americans were good and Germans were bad in WW2.

Palestinian citizens are not Hamas, and Israel has killed over 35 thousand civilians, many of which are children.

Hamas and Israel are the "bad guys". Innocent civilians (in both Palestine and Israel) mostly are not.

If your opinion was as widely held as you claim, Biden wouldn't be taking so much heat for treating Israel with kid gloves.

This is semantic hair-splitting that is not applied to any other armed conflict.

It is not called the "Israel/Hamas" conflict.  It is the "Israel/Palestine" conflict.  Hamas are the current leaders of Palestine, just like the Ba'ath Party was the leadership of Iraq in 2003.  But nobody calls it the "America-Ba'ath War".  It's the Iraq War.  When we say who we fought, it's "the Iraqis."  When American soldiers were killed, it was "Iraq killed those soldiers."  Likewise nobody would say Iraq was at war with "The Republican Party", even though that's who decided to invade Iraq and that's who controlled America and led its armies.  Similarly even in this conflict we do not call it the "Likud invasion of Gaza".  Nobody has any problem saying "Israel" and "the Israelis" are one side of the conflict, even though Israel is governed by Likud and the IDF is an army controlled by Likud-appointed military personnel.

Ultimately this has always come across to me as an attempt to deny the reality of the conflict by pretending Hamas are just some isolated group that is occupying Palestine and holding its people hostage, rather than the reality, which is that Hamas is the leadership of Palestine (well, Gaza anyway) and their military is the armed forces of Palestine and they are conducting this war with Israel on the behalf of Palestine, as the widely-recognized representatives and governors of Palestine.

When you combine that with people accepting the Gaza Health Ministry's refusal to distinguish between military and civilian deaths in their casualty numbers, thus allowing people to say "34,000 people have died" without specifying how many of those were military -- or that any of them were military at all -- you get this weird situation where Israel is simply at war with a Palestine that's totally divorced conceptually from Hamas and constitutes only the innocent civilians and their property/buildings.  And Hamas is just some nebulous other that has no agency and no bearing on the war and exists only to provide Israel with an excuse to kill "Palestinians" -- an entirely distinct and independent concept from killing "Hamas".

[T'Chenka]

It is not called the "Israel/Hamas" conflict.  It is the "Israel/Palestine" conflict.  Hamas are the current leaders of Palestine, just like the Ba'ath Party was the leadership of Iraq in 2003.  But nobody calls it the "America-Ba'ath War".  It's the Iraq War.  When we say who we fought, it's "the Iraqis."  When American soldiers were killed, it was "Iraq killed those soldiers."  Likewise nobody would say Iraq was at war with "The Republican Party", even though that's who decided to invade Iraq and that's who controlled America and led its armies.  Similarly even in this conflict we do not call it the "Likud invasion of Gaza".  Nobody has any problem saying "Israel" and "the Israelis" are one side of the conflict, even though Israel is governed by Likud and the IDF is an army controlled by Likud-appointed military personnel.

Ultimately this has always come across to me as an attempt to deny the reality of the conflict by pretending Hamas are just some isolated group that is occupying Palestine and holding its people hostage, rather than the reality, which is that Hamas is the leadership of Palestine (well, Gaza anyway) and their military is the armed forces of Palestine and they are conducting this war with Israel on the behalf of Palestine, as the widely-recognized representatives and governors of Palestine.

When you combine that with people accepting the Gaza Health Ministry's refusal to distinguish between military and civilian deaths in their casualty numbers, thus allowing people to say "34,000 people have died" without specifying how many of those were military -- or that any of them were military at all -- you get this weird situation where Israel is simply at war with a Palestine that's totally divorced conceptually from Hamas and constitutes only the innocent civilians and their property/buildings.  And Hamas is just some nebulous other that has no agency and no bearing on the war and exists only to provide Israel with an excuse to kill "Palestinians" -- an entirely distinct and independent concept from killing "Hamas".

The last election was almost 2 decades ago and most Palestinians weren't alive to vote in it. It's also not a country with free speech that allows you to speak ill of Hamas without risking your life. It's more or less a dictatorship. Stop justifying little kids getting bombed as if they (as kids) voted Hamas into power in 2022 or something. It's beyond the pale.

[dead0man]

The last election was almost 2 decades ago and most Palestinians weren't alive to vote in it. It's also not a country with free speech that allows you to speak ill of Hamas without risking your life. It's more or less a dictatorship. Stop justifying little kids getting bombed as if they (as kids) voted Hamas into power in 2022 or something. It's beyond the pale.

that's all well and good if you have a solution to that problem, otherwise ONLY blaming Israel comes across as "kind'a effed up" at best and "wow, that's racist" at worst.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The last election was almost 2 decades ago and most Palestinians weren't alive to vote in it. It's also not a country with free speech that allows you to speak ill of Hamas without risking your life.

So?  When was the last time Saddam was elected prior to 2003?  When was the last time the North Koreans had the chance to get rid of Kim Jong Un, or the Iranian people had the chance to get rid of the mullahs?  Even if I accept your contention that the Palestinian people hate Hamas and are no longer accurately represented by them (which I don't), it doesn't matter.  Saddam ran Iraq, so we went to war with "Iraq" and fought with "the Iraqis" and dropped bombs on "Iraq" and unfortunately many Iraqi civilians were killed but that is the nature of war.

Unfortunately it is not possible to separate the two things because this isn't the Napoleonic era where the army representing Austria and the army representing France meet in a field and do battle on behalf of their respective countries without any innocent civilians getting hurt.  Saddam controlled Iraq, so we had to do battle with the state of Iraq, which included all the people of Iraq and all their infrastructure and industry and cities and towns, since all of that was controlled by Saddam and turned into a battlefield.  Hamas controls Palestine, so Israel must similarly do battle with the state of Palestine.

It's more or less a dictatorship. Stop justifying little kids getting bombed as if they (as kids) voted Hamas into power in 2022 or something. It's beyond the pale.

Am I justifying "little kids getting bombed"?  This is just cheap emotional manipulation.  It's insulting and juvenile.  Little kids are getting bombed because there is a war, and in a war innocent people die.  There has never been a war in history where this hasn't been the case.

If I supported the Union in the Civil War, would you say I support "little kids getting killed" and "innocent women being starved to death" and "babies being burnt alive" -- all things that undoubtedly happen in droves during that war?  If I supported the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, would you say I supported "bombing innocent babies and blowing the heads off children", something that undoubtedly happened as a consequence of that bombing?

Drop the bulls--t.  If you want to talk about justifying the war, talk about justifying the war, have a mature and respectful conversation.  Stop pretending you're dumb and don't know what war entails, or pretending this is the first armed conflict you've ever heard of before and you're some naive little baby horrified at seeing innocent civilians become casualties of war for the first time ever.  It's insulting to yourself.  You are degrading yourself to try and score cheap points.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The last election was almost 2 decades ago and most Palestinians weren't alive to vote in it. It's also not a country with free speech that allows you to speak ill of Hamas without risking your life. It's more or less a dictatorship. Stop justifying little kids getting bombed as if they (as kids) voted Hamas into power in 2022 or something. It's beyond the pale.

that's all well and good if you have a solution to that problem, otherwise ONLY blaming Israel comes across as "kind'a effed up" at best and "wow, that's racist" at worst.

Yes, it is basically people saying Israel has no right to go to war with Palestine over the actions of Hamas until the Palestinians hold a new election to make Hamas's control of Palestine officially live up to T'Chenka's standards.  Until then Israel isn't allowed to touch Palestine in the name of defeating Hamas, because Hamas isn't the legitimate ruler of Palestine.  It's a totally unreasonable standard that's totally divorced from the reality of power situations and that has never been applied to any other conflict in the history of the world.

[T'Chenka]

Am I justifying "little kids getting bombed"?  This is just cheap emotional manipulation.  It's insulting and juvenile.  Little kids are getting bombed because there is a war, and in a war innocent people die.  There has never been a war in history where this hasn't been the case.

If I supported the Union in the Civil War, would you say I support "little kids getting killed" and "innocent women being starved to death" and "babies being burnt alive" -- all things that undoubtedly happen in droves during that war?  If I supported the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, would you say I supported "bombing innocent babies and blowing the heads off children", something that undoubtedly happened as a consequence of that bombing?

Drop the bulls--t.  If you want to talk about justifying the war, talk about justifying the war, have a mature and respectful conversation.  Stop pretending you're dumb and don't know what war entails, or pretending this is the first armed conflict you've ever heard of before and you're some naive little baby horrified at seeing innocent civilians become casualties of war for the first time ever.  It's insulting to yourself.  You are degrading yourself to try and score cheap points.

Nations in modern times are required to not commit war crimes, as defined by the Geneva Convention. Carpet bombing civilians and ethnically cleansing geographical areas (note mods: not using the G word) are not "legitimate" war, they're war crimes.

People who dislike and oppose war crimes and ethnic cleansing are not "trying to score cheap points".

[dead0man]

The last election was almost 2 decades ago and most Palestinians weren't alive to vote in it. It's also not a country with free speech that allows you to speak ill of Hamas without risking your life. It's more or less a dictatorship. Stop justifying little kids getting bombed as if they (as kids) voted Hamas into power in 2022 or something. It's beyond the pale.

that's all well and good if you have a solution to that problem, otherwise ONLY blaming Israel comes across as "kind'a effed up" at best and "wow, that's racist" at worst.

Yes, it is basically people saying Israel has no right to go to war with Palestine over the actions of Hamas until the Palestinians hold a new election to make Hamas's control of Palestine officially live up to T'Chenka's standards.  Until then Israel isn't allowed to touch Palestine in the name of defeating Hamas, because Hamas isn't the legitimate ruler of Palestine.  It's a totally unreasonable standard that's totally divorced from the reality of power situations and that has never been applied to any other conflict in the history of the world.

I was going to edit my post, but I'll just drop it here

edit-everybody that claims to care about this problem have known it was a problem for a long time, and they've done nothing to solve it other than blame Israel when they react when "the problem" asks for attention.  A bunch of Palestinians are killed, a bunch of bigots say "OMG, the IDF are monsters", peace breaks out and everybody that claims to care moves back to whinging about whatever is next on the outrage wagon.  None of you give a damn about Palestinians until "the problem" flares up again.  Certainly aren't offering any reasonable solutions.

[T'Chenka]

The last election was almost 2 decades ago and most Palestinians weren't alive to vote in it. It's also not a country with free speech that allows you to speak ill of Hamas without risking your life. It's more or less a dictatorship. Stop justifying little kids getting bombed as if they (as kids) voted Hamas into power in 2022 or something. It's beyond the pale.

that's all well and good if you have a solution to that problem, otherwise ONLY blaming Israel comes across as "kind'a effed up" at best and "wow, that's racist" at worst.

This is Fuzzy "condemn the Grand Mufti" stuff. Most of the posters who are pro-Palestinian have condemned Hamas. We condemn Hamas. We shouldn't need to say it 500 times. After a certain point, it's a strawman if people still pretend you haven't condemned Hamas.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Nations in modern times are required to not commit war crimes, as defined by the Geneva Convention. Carpet bombing civilians and ethnically cleansing geographical areas (note mods: not using the G word) are not "legitimate" war, they're war crimes.

People who dislike and oppose war crimes and ethnic cleansing are not "trying to score cheap points".

Israel is not carpet bombing civilians.  Civilians are dying, but it is not because Israel is "carpet bombing" them.  In fact very few civilians have been killed at all in the last three months, yet people have only gotten more and more upset.

Nor is Israel "ethnically cleansing geographical areas" -- quite the contrary, their current proposal for a Rafah invasion is to let women and children back into northern Gaza, which geographically speaking is the opposite of the evacuation orders that Israel executed to try and limit civilian casualties but which you are dishonestly labeling "ethnic cleansing".

In the quote below, from this morning, you said that Israel had killed "over 35,000 civilians" -- making no distinction between Palestinian civilians and Palestinian Hamas fighters.  That was your objection here that led you to say Israel is a "bad guy" -- that they killed people.  In their war.

By that same reasoning, every single war ever in human history was fought between two bad guys, because innocent people died.  Sorry, actually I will use your active language framing that makes it sound like every civilian death ever was intentional -- because "they killed innocent people."

It is just a ludicrous framing that has never been applied to any other war, and will never be applied to any other war ever again, and which people have only talked themselves into believing because they need to constantly rationalize and re-rationalize their core belief that Israel is bad.

Palestinian citizens are not Hamas, and Israel has killed over 35 thousand civilians, many of which are children.

Hamas and Israel are the "bad guys".

Ultimately, the war has transpired in a very different way from the mass-casualty genocide that people anticipated in the early days of the war.  Back in October/November, people on this very forum promised me that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were going to die.  Now that hasn't happened, so the goalposts have shifted to trying to turn the current lower-than-expected civilian death count into evidence of ethnic cleansing.  And we're reaching the point where people pretend to believe that a single innocent civilian casualty is sufficient to label the army responsible for that casualty as diabolically evil killers.  Something they'll only pretend to believe when the army in question is Israel.

[dead0man]

This is Fuzzy "condemn the Grand Mufti" stuff. Most of the posters who are pro-Palestinian have condemned Hamas. We condemn Hamas. We shouldn't need to say it 500 times. After a certain point, it's a strawman if people still pretend you haven't condemned Hamas.

great you condemn Hamas, and you want to dictate how the immediate victims of the condemned Hamas react to Hamas, but where are the solutions to Hamas?  Like I've been saying for years, a third party needs to go in there and do what needs to be done, but they won't because they know they will face the exact same problems the IDF faces and they don't want to be called the things people call the IDF.

[T'Chenka]

This is Fuzzy "condemn the Grand Mufti" stuff. Most of the posters who are pro-Palestinian have condemned Hamas. We condemn Hamas. We shouldn't need to say it 500 times. After a certain point, it's a strawman if people still pretend you haven't condemned Hamas.

great you condemn Hamas, and you want to dictate how the immediate victims of the condemned Hamas react to Hamas, but where are the solutions to Hamas?

Reactions and solutions are required to be compliant with the Geneva Convention(s). Yes, I want to dictate that.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Concocting some ridiculous eye of the needle that you then demand Israel walk through in order to fight Hamas, without even having the integrity to offer a proposal for how Israel could make it through that needle, is functionally exactly the same as "I do not want Israel to fight Hamas."  This is not a forum full of stupid people and we can all make the logical step.

If you say "I will allow you to log onto Atlas forum, but only if you can type the entire Bible in thirty seconds" and then don't even propose any way for me to do that, that is functionally the same as banning me.  Of course your refusal to propose it is rather beside the point since we can all see that you're demanding the impossible.  Pointing it out is merely illustrative.

Now why you would want to ban me from Atlas, and why you would not want Israel to be able to fight Hamas, I will leave as a question for the reader, since every other post I've made on this subject has gotten deleted by mods so I am trying to make this one as simple as possible.

It's made even worse by your pretending that this is some long-held well-established moral position of yours -- "I do not think anyone should be allowed to log into Atlas unless they can type the Bible in thirty second" -- when we can all clearly see that you don't apply it to any other user and we all have enough common sense to know that you have not and will never apply it in any other situation ever again.

[T'Chenka]

Concocting some ridiculous eye of the needle that you then demand Israel walk through in order to fight Hamas, without even having the integrity to offer a proposal for how Israel could make it through that needle, is functionally exactly the same as "I do not want Israel to fight Hamas."  This is not a forum full of stupid people and we can all make the logical step.

I'm not a military expert, but Israel has money and allies. They could use their resources to try and find a solution that doesn't involve war crimes. I'm a Canadian citizen. If Canada faces complex issues in the future, the Canadian government is required to approach them and solve them without committing war crimes. I apply the same standard to every other country.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

I’m just gonna point out that saying Palestinians/Germans/Iraqis are the bad guys isnt some harmless semantics.

There’s a famous picture from WWII of a Chinese woman at the beach with a massive Chinese flag so she isn’t mistaken for Japanese for her own safety.

Yes people have always generalized wars to the entire populous, but you shouldn’t unless you just want to or don’t care if you perpetuate hate against that group. And lord knows there’s plenty of hate flying around this war.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Concocting some ridiculous eye of the needle that you then demand Israel walk through in order to fight Hamas, without even having the integrity to offer a proposal for how Israel could make it through that needle, is functionally exactly the same as "I do not want Israel to fight Hamas."  This is not a forum full of stupid people and we can all make the logical step.

I'm not a military expert, but Israel has money and allies. They could use their resources to try and find a solution that doesn't involve war crimes. I'm a Canadian citizen. If Canada faces complex issues in the future, the Canadian government is required to approach them and solve them without committing war crimes. I apply the same standard to every other country.

This is an eye-rolling comment.  You think nobody has ever tried to find a solution to simplify urban warfare?  And you and your peace activist buddies are the first to have this brilliant and original idea?  This is literally a top military priority.  West Point has an entire sub-school singularly focused on urban warfare that every single future officer goes through, where they are conducting research constantly on how to improve urban warfare tactics.  Israel also does tons of research on this area and also serves as a sort of testing ground for cutting edge ideas in this space.

Certainly things have improved from the days of Beirut and Mogadishu when it was not even possible to win in urban combat unless you blew everything up.  By the time of Fallujah and Ramadi we were much better at taking out insurgents in urban combat situations without incurring huge civilian penalties or putting soldiers in situations where they would potentially get trapped and only be able to escape by causing lots of damage.  And our campaigns against ISIS 5-6 years ago were even more efficient.

Gaza is a uniquely difficult situation because Hamas has had twenty years and billions of dollars to invest in digging in as much as humanly possible, so Israel is having to deal with a heavily-fortified military compound laden with booby traps and secret tunnel entrances, as opposed to just a bunch of buildings and roadside bombs.

As a side note on "war crimes" I think this is something that has a really broad definition so I want to be clear about what we're talking about here.  I think many Israeli soldier groups have committed small-scale "war crimes" and I of course am opposed to those and hope the soldiers involved face consequences, just as I was opposed to Abu Ghraib and other American war crimes during the Iraq War.  But I do not think the Israeli strategy at large constitutes a war crime, nor do any major elements of it (the way they've conducting the bombings, the raids, the occupation strategy, the restrictions imposed on civilians) constitute war crimes.  When you say "Israel is conducting war crimes" you should be more clear about what you're referring to -- because you make it sound like you think the entire war strategy is "war crimes" like indiscriminate carpet bombing, but I can't just say "Israel isn't doing war crimes" because that's not true, they are, just on a much smaller scale than what you are implying.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

The solution to avoid the war we're seeing now was for the UK and Britain, both of whom suffered serious losses at Hamas' hands in the 10/7 genocide, to get involved in the war directly and lead the invasion into Gaza. It would have had high risks, yes, but it would have both added new resources to the hunt and reined in Netanyahu. I don't recall anyone arguing for that.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I’m just gonna point out that saying Palestinians/Germans/Iraqis are the bad guys isnt some harmless semantics.

There’s a famous picture from WWII of a Chinese woman at the beach with a massive Chinese flag so she isn’t mistaken for Japanese for her own safety.

Yes people have always generalized wars to the entire populous, but you shouldn’t unless you just want to or don’t care if you perpetuate hate against that group. And lord knows there’s plenty of hate flying around this war.

This is arguing against a different thing than what I said above.  I am not in favor of generalizing the war to the entire populace.  However I do think you need to extend the war to the entire country.  Every war in history that has been country-vs-country has had innocent civilians in both countries who did not deserve to die and were not in any way valid military targets.  But we still consider those wars to be country-vs-country and do not think of the armies as being distinct and independent things from the countries on whose behalf they fought.

To put it more simply -- when you are part of a country, that country is entitled to fight wars on your behalf, and whether you agree with the war or not, it was fought on your behalf and you are on one "side" of it by being a member of that country.  That does not mean you deserve to die, or that you should be harmed at all.  But it does mean that you are currently at war, and someone else is at war with you.

This matters because people keep trying to say that "going to war with Hamas" and "going to war with Palestine" are two totally separate things, and that by doing the latter Israel has committed some grave crime.  My contention is that the attempt to delineate between the two is a way to try and condemn Israel for every single consequence of the war suffered by Palestine, by saying Israel should not be at war with Palestine.  My further contention is that "going to war with Hamas" and "going to war with Palestine" are in fact the exact same thing and that Israel should be at war with Palestine, for the exact same reasons that they should be at war with Hamas, since they are both the same war.

[T'Chenka]

I'm not a military expert, but Israel has money and allies. They could use their resources to try and find a solution that doesn't involve war crimes. I'm a Canadian citizen. If Canada faces complex issues in the future, the Canadian government is required to approach them and solve them without committing war crimes. I apply the same standard to every other country.

This is an eye-rolling comment.  You think nobody has ever tried to find a solution to simplify urban warfare?  And you and your peace activist buddies are the first to have this brilliant and original idea?  This is literally a top military priority.  West Point has an entire sub-school singularly focused on urban warfare that every single future officer goes through, where they are conducting research constantly on how to improve urban warfare tactics.  Israel also does tons of research on this area and also serves as a sort of testing ground for cutting edge ideas in this space.

Maybe Israel - or Israel and a multinational anti-terrorism group including USA - should increase the boots on the ground and find a way to fight Hamas that doesn't conflict with the Geneva Convention. "Not committing war crimes" (or as you would characterize it, "not killing oodles of civilians") should be first priority and "arresting or killing Hamas" should be second priority. It's been reported that up to 90% or even higher than that of all casualties have been civilians. That isn't an acceptable or legal way to conduct a war.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I'm not a military expert, but Israel has money and allies. They could use their resources to try and find a solution that doesn't involve war crimes. I'm a Canadian citizen. If Canada faces complex issues in the future, the Canadian government is required to approach them and solve them without committing war crimes. I apply the same standard to every other country.

This is an eye-rolling comment.  You think nobody has ever tried to find a solution to simplify urban warfare?  And you and your peace activist buddies are the first to have this brilliant and original idea?  This is literally a top military priority.  West Point has an entire sub-school singularly focused on urban warfare that every single future officer goes through, where they are conducting research constantly on how to improve urban warfare tactics.  Israel also does tons of research on this area and also serves as a sort of testing ground for cutting edge ideas in this space.

Maybe Israel - or Israel and a multinational anti-terrorism group including USA - should increase the boots on the ground and find a way to fight Hamas that doesn't conflict with the Geneva Convention. "Not committing war crimes" (or as you would characterize it, "not killing oodles of civilians") should be first priority and "arresting or killing Hamas" should be second priority. It's been reported that up to 90% or even higher than that of all casualties have been civilians. That isn't an acceptable or legal way to conduct a war.

One thing I think you and I disagree on is whether ~1.5% of Gaza's population (with unclear military/civilian split -- I do not buy that 90% number at all) constitutes "killing oodles of civilians".  Like I simply don't think oodles of civilians have been killed.  My guess before this war started was that maybe 5% of Gazan civilians would die as a result and that pretty much all of Gaza would be rubble, and that this was the necessary price to pay for eliminating Hamas, which Israel must do.

The other thing you and I disagree on is that you think "killing Hamas" (f--k arresting them) should not be first priority.  I think it should be first priority.  I think Israel should kill Hamas (priority 1) while trying to minimize civilian damage incurred while accomplishing that goal (priority 2).  This is also obviously how Israel sees it.  Hamas proved on 10/7 that they are an existential threat to Israel.  There is no possible outcome to this war where Israel and Hamas both continue to coexist side-by-side.

Nothing in the way they are currently killing Hamas conflicts with the Geneva Convention.  The way they are conducting the subsequent occupation debatably does, and I have much more criticism reserved for that (which I have offered in the main thread).

[Dr. MB]

I can't stress enough just how much >90% of employed people despise protests like this. The left has completely failed to appeal to working people and there seems to be no interest in fixing that.

These people aren't the left. These are extremist loons who have more in common with Alex Jones and David Duke than with any mainstream Democrat.

you're in Greece what do you know about American student organizing