Make the US Politics Thread Great Again

You don’t get a death toll of 60 in a day and hundreds of people needing injuries of sufficent severity to require 6+ month rehab from rubber bullets, sorry. Reporting is pretty much unanimous that live ammunition is being used routinely.

2 Likes

Even ‘Press’ vests aren’t immune from it.

I never said that. There are definitely situations where live ammo is being used.
I have no idea of what situations bring which method for protecting the border.
I can assure you that there is nothing indiscriminate about it. Every possible precaution is being taken to avoid deaths. Israeli has absolutely no benefit from the deaths of the border stormers.

1 Like

How so??

Yeah. It’s a little less funny from our point of view.
When i came here more than 20 years ago, i was hoping there would be peace by the time my kids turned 18 and would be conscripted to the army.
I’m sure we could argue for days about whose fault it is that there is no peace, but here we are and my eldest daughter has her conscription date in a little over a years time.

The guy i sit with at work (Rehovot, Israel) does reserve duty in the unit that does situation simulations.
They consider deaths to Israel forces, Israeli citizens, enemy forces, non-israeli citizens, and positive and negative propaganda outcomes.

After the Mavi Marmara debacle, each potential clash goes through painstaking simulations to find the way to reach the tactical goals while minimizing Israeli and non Israeli civilian casualties.
You will forgive us for not giving too much worry to terrorist casualties.

2 Likes

While MSF does some wonderful work they do have some issues surrounding them that are not good. Not everything their doctors say can be taken to the bank as gospel.

I am not saying that they are lying here or their figures are wrong as I have not seen any evidence saying that they are but just because of who they does not mean they are immune from controversies that can sometimes hamper them.

Who said it was funny?

1 Like

Put it this way - Myanmar put a ban on MSF for its reporting on what was happening in one region. The ban was subsequently lifted.MSF would be unlikely to act as a Hamas stooge.
The Israelis have excellent intelligence networks, if they had evidence that MSF was fabricating stories they would let it be known.

They have in the past.

Oh, I have no doubt you’re right about that.

And that too. But ‘Israel’ =/= ‘some people in Israel’

Israel at the moment reminds me a little of what I’ve read of the US in Vietnam. Stuck in a slow grinding guerilla war with no end remotely in sight, a slow but steady stream of casualties. The longer the war drags on the more entrenched both sides get and the more extreme the rhetoric on both sides. There starts to be political advantage in extremism, on both sides. And on the ground, among the soldiers, a slow wearing away of the soul and a corruption of culture. They’ve probably seen friends killed or have had stones thrown at them or snipers target them, they know even the civilians on the other side hate them and that there’s a desperately fine line between ‘civilian on the other side’ and ‘enemy’. They probably share a unit with cynical hardbitten veterans who’ve been doing this for years and whose souls have been scorched to bedrock, and they learn from these people. They know that it’s vanishingly unlikely that an Israeli soldier who kills a palestinian civilian will be meaningfully punished. Pulling the trigger probably stops being such a big deal. They know that no matter what official policy says, a blind eye will be turned if a bunch of the other lot end up dead, because the people who’ll be turning the blind eye were forged in the same environment and have been in that situation too.

This is the sort of environment that My Lais are made of. it’d be more surprising if Palestinians WEREN’T being routinely shot. And I’ll never know if I would act any different if I was in their situation, but just because My Lai was explainable and even understandable, doesn’t make My Lai right.

Interesting that you equate My Lai to Israel and it’s borders.

I equate a bunch of unarmed people being shot by soldiers, to a bunch of unarmed people being shot by soldiers.

1 Like

My Lai was a group of unarmed civilians living in their homes being attacked by a heavily armed outside foreign force and killing every man woman and child.

Most of the “civilians” involved in these shootings are not completely unarmed, they are not in their village, they are attempting to cross a closed border into another country.

Hardly comparable but it does seem to speak to where your sympathies lie and what you think of the situation as a whole. (which is fine btw, just saying what it seems to reveal)

And btw, I also wish the Israeli’s would work a lot harder at avoiding live fire as much as they possibly can and i don’t think they always do.

1 Like

Really?

Again, over 50 Palestinian deaths and thousands of injuries vs absolutely nothing whatsoever on the Israeli side as far as I’m aware. If these people are armed, or are not ‘civilians’, then they are doing a spectacularly bad job of fighting. This was not a battle against armed dangerous resistance. Battles have casualties on both sides. This was a massacre, like My Lai was a massacre, like Tienanmen Square was a massacre, like the WTC was a massacre, like Myall Creek was a massacre. And it would still be a massacre no matter which country or which side did it.

Utterly disagree with your characterisation of the situation. It is unfair and straight out of the Hamas/PA PR handbook.

1 Like

I’m honestly confused. what’s your characterisation of the situation then? What other explanation fits the facts? I’m not even going to respond to the stufff about ‘straight out of the Hamas handbook’ - i’m getting this straight from major media sources and doctors without Frigging Borders. I even took a look at Haaretz. If all this is Hamas PR, where the hell SHOULD I get my info from?

If you have any source that claims Israeli soldiers came under heavy attack or suffered casualties, then please, show it to me.
If you have any source that claims that the casualty numbers are overblown, please provide it.

The facts as I understand them are that a whole lot of Palestinians staged a march on the wall, at which point Israeli soldiers opened fire with lethal force. If there was any violence at all on the palestinian side, it somehow managed to avoid even causing a single INJURY on the Israeli side, yet the Israelis seem to have dished out live ammunition with a lavish hand.

Either every single Israeli soldier is a military juggernaut straight out of Arnie’s Commando, able to mow down enemies by the dozen while walking untouched between their bullets, or else the Israelis were shooting people who weren’t firing (or even throwing stones) back

I get that there’s history. I get that Hamas are murderous opportunistic scumbags. I get that any Israeli soldier would have zero reason to trust the peaceful intentions of any Palestinian protester. None of that makes any difference to what happened today.

3 Likes

This is an intentional ploy by Hamas to incite civilians to force the border crossing. Probably true.

The state of Israel has responded to this by deliberately and calculatedly committed a massacre of civilians in order to hold that border. You can argue the justification of the massacre, but when you have mass civilian casualties caused by military gunfire, that’s basically the definition of a massacre.

Look, I don’t envy the soldiers on the ground. The army is a blunt weapon, it is not a police force. You ask a heavily armed group of soldiers to do crowd control and this is what happens.

End of the day, this is ■■■■■■ up and nobody should get out of this without a lingering stench.

40,000 people amassed on the border with most trying to cross. I disagree with the characterisation of the use of the word massacre.

Yep. And if you have an army waveringly committed to preventing 40,000 people crossing a line on the ground, a massacre is what happens. There’s no other outcome once the two sides meet. I completely understand why the troops are opening fire, they have been given no alternative. But at the end of the day, a military is killing mass numbers of civilians.

If this wasn’t Israel and it wasn’t Hamas, was any other population in the world, what would we call it?

The only out on this, and it’s a morally weak excuse, is if the killings were necessary. I really struggle to justify that these events were necessary and completely unavoidable.