Grave Dohl

After watching this and then reading about David Mamet this morning, I found myself empathizing with the man. It can't be easy feeling so paranoid and persecuted all the time.

I wouldn't be surprised if he writes a 'Yes, it's a genocide' post in a few months (or sooner).

I think we're on the same page regarding the *morality* of razing Gaza, but I disagree that it has anything to do with combat or military tactics. You can't level a town like that unless you have established complete control, in which case you could simply hold it rather than destroy it.

And? Every genocidal act has been justified by its perpetrators.

Besides, destroying aboveground infrastructure does exactly nothing about any tunnels beneath it. The "we had to raze Rafah to the ground because of Hamas tunnels" excuse is so flimsy that it's an insult to one's intelligence.

So no, the destruction of Gaza was not an inevitable consequence of the war between Israel and Hamas, it was a deliberate Israeli policy of erasure.

Satellite images show northern Gaza village leveled Satellite images show the northern Gaza village of Umm al-Nasser destroyed.

You can see this in satellite imagery from Gaza—download Google Earth Pro and you can compare the latest images to pre-Oct 7th. Here's one example of a village (because Gaza isn't all urban) that was erased between March 29 and March 31 of this year. It's not combat, it's explosives and bulldozers.

This aspect of the Israeli campaign distinguishes it from, for example, the battles of Fallujah (2004), Aleppo (2016), Mosul (2017) or Raqqa (2017), where the damage was extensive but there was no systematic attempt to wipe those cities off the map.

It's been devastated primarily by a systematic and deliberate IDF demolition campaign, not by combat.

I'm sure it is casual Israeli talk, but that's an indictment of Israeli society, not an exoneration.

Nonviolence and diplomacy are great. But those aren't what ended the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia or Tutsis in Rwanda.

Military force is what ended those genocides.

The world is so paralyzed when the solution is quite simple. Break the siege by force or watch 2m die a slow, agonizing death.

We should be sending a combined naval force to break the siege and deliver aid.

No country is willing to do it. They're all cowards.

I'm not mad at Bernie because he's been walking the walk in terms of cutting off arms exports.

But the evidence at this point is overwhelming. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

He's technically correct, but also, it is a genocide.

Demanding a demilitarization of Palestine without demanding the same of Israel would, *at best*, set up a situation similar to Syria, in which Israel bombs, invades and takes territory at will just because they can.

"War is hell" say Israel's supporters. But this isn't "war". This is a demolition campaign in which armed Palestinians occasionally shoot back from within the rubble of their destroyed communities.

They send in demolition crews to carefully plant mines in these buildings after the IDF has taken them over. They then detonate the buildings and bulldoze what's left. This isn't combat. This isn't a military operation.

If it wasn't already clear, Israeli policy is to systematically raze Palestinian cities to the ground, without exaggeration, on the basis that every house, school, hospital, mosque and market is "Hamas infrastructure".

*Under Soviet occupation, parts of Eastern Germany were ethnically cleansed, annexed and settled by Russia and Poland. This was bad and gets too little attention in western histories imo. Something like 15 million Germans were expelled and 3 million died in the process.

If the plan was 1) occupy Germany indefinitely, 2) annex it to the victorious powers, 3) settle it with foreign citizens, 4) impose apartheid, then I don't think Germans would've gone along with it, and the outcome for post-war Europe would've been much worse.

Weird argument. Germany WAS a state, it committed genocide, was then occupied by foreign powers. The occupy powers didn't annex and settle it*. They didn't impose apartheid. They rebuilt the country and stood up two rival successor states.

We'll recognize your state on the condition that you pre-emptively surrender its sovereignty 🍁

coexistence between Israel and Palestine. I'm not arguing for demilitarization, I'm arguing for something akin to the post-WWII German Bundesrepublik: the Wehrmacht was dissolved and eventually replaced with the Bundeswehr, a new institution.

This is one reason why, as I've said before, even in a two-state solution I think certain organs of the Israeli state need to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch on fundamentally different principles. That includes the IDF and Mossad, in particular, because neither is conducive to peaceful...

Syria is an instructive example. The new government is more than willing to play ball with the US and Israel (much like Fatah), but Israel nonetheless invades and bombs them at will, despite the complete absence of any tangible threat.

I don't think either demand is very serious at this stage because we are very far from a Palestinian state as it is. That's why I think they're mostly symbolic demands. But when interrogated, either one effectively amounts to a demand for surrender.

When western countries add conditions like this, they're either not serious or they aren't thinking it through. Demilitarization or one-party rule by Fatah are non-starters. Either of these conditions would kill a Palestinian state before it was even born.

It doesn't matter what you or I think of Hamas. They're a major party with a large constituency. If that constituency has no electoral prospects, the PA will remain an illegitimate puppet regime of Israel and the US.

You know what, fair point