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0 pointssomenameforme5mo ago0 comments

Third party observers have observed endless bad behavior from Ukrainian forces. Amnesty International even called them out, in spite of the inevitable blow back it would (and did) receive, for actively locating their military forces in residential areas, launching strikes from civilian areas, turning schools and hospitals into military bases, and more. [1] Ukraine's response was tantamount to saying that rules don't matter for them, because they're the defender and not the aggressor.

Given these behaviors Russian forces would be justified in just carpet bombing these sort of areas that Ukrainian forces are entrenching, but they have chosen not to. By contrast that is precisely what Israel does, and also what the US does not only in WW2 but e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan where killing dozens of civilians to get somebody who might be an enemy is considered a justifiable engagement.

And again this gets back to what I just said about this not even necessarily being about morality or ethics. Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023, and it's unlikely things will be improving for them in the foreseeable future. Behaving good in war is simply in one's own best interest on any sort of timescale beyond the immediate.

[1] - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ukraine-military-e...

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FunnyUsername5mo ago· 2 in thread

> but they have chosen not to

I disagree with this premise. There are many examples of Russia striking civilian gatherings or infrastructure.

For example their Hroza village strike killed 59. If we're trying to be charitable to Russia, it's possible they knew of some important off-duty officer present in Hroza. But with our limited public info, there were no signs of any valid military targets. Can you name any IDF strike that looks worse than that?

> Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023

There was no way Israel could have fought Hamas without significant civilian harm and bad PR. The choice was to fight a very messy war against an enemy that disguises as civilians, or leave them alone to plan the next Oct 7.

As Golda Meir put it: "If we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image."

somenameformeOP5mo ago

Exceptions don't define the rule, the rule does. Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000 members before the war. They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.

In WW2 partisans would intentionally induce brutal retaliations precisely because they thought it would expose the character of the occupier, garner support for themselves, radicalize the population, and generally further their interests. And they were right. It's paradoxical because those retaliations were intended to enforce control, yet they invariably achieve the exact opposite - a recurring theme throughout history. Again getting back to the point I'm making - the reason to behave good in war is because it's in your own best interest.

FunnyUsername5mo ago

> Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000

Where did you see that estimate? Some estimates were ~40k, with many more recruits added during the war. And not everyone attacking the IDF was Hamas-affiliated. PIJ alone had thousands of fighters, and as we saw on Oct 7, sometimes random Gazans join in on fighting too.

> They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.

Hamas themselves claim ~70k, which already includes fighters and non-combat deaths. There are a lot of questionable works trying to embellish the numbers. One of them used garbage data like WhatsApp chats. Another ended up with an estimate of 380k deaths for age 0-5, which is impossible since there were never that many in Gaza.

It's interesting to compare to Ukraine, because we don't see the same desperate attempts to embellish numbers there. Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" were killed in Mariupol, which is one significant digit; he didn't pretend to have more precision than that. He didn't send out a Google form so that they could claim a specific (but dubious) count. We didn't see a bunch of Western academics desperately trying to justify higher death counts.

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