> They are conscripts, so I would imagine there's a range of positions when they are killing thousand of women and children alongside with combatants.
Firstly, the majority of the IDF isn't active-duty conscripts, they're reservists. They're still conscripts, and they still have to serve, but it's not exactly difficult to not serve if you choose not to. Not sure this impacts anything else you say, but I thought it's worth mentioning.
> I don't believe the premise that Israeli soldiers were concerned for the lives of their loved ones and killed that many civilians and ar OK with it.
Almost all IDF soldiers are incredibly regretful that any civilians have to be killed. This is true of most armies most of the time, btw, not specifically Israeli soldiers.
But they are absolutely fighting for the fate of their homeland. They might be wrong - but most Israelis believe that Hamas cannot be allowed to continue, because they have promised, multiple times, that they will repeat the October 7th attack again and again. They are literally an hour's drive from many people's homes. Two hours and they can reach the majority of Israel.
Almost every Israeli knows someone, either directly or via one other person, that was killed or taken hostage. Without trying to hard, I can think of about 5 people I know who lost a loved one.
In that way, this isn't similar to something like Iraq or Afghanistan, where for the most part, American soldiers were fighting a real, but vague, threat, which posed almost no immediate danger to anyone they knew.
> Unarmed women and children are not that dangerous, they must have range of thoughts when killing those. Some regret, some glee, some disgust, some joy I would imagine. I wouldn't put the relief of saving their own in the top 10 though.
Unarmed women and children are not targeted intentionally. There's great regret that anyone is killed, and probably majority happiness that the person targeted is killed, usually someone who is directly responsible for deaths.
There's also a lot of mistakes, because it's war, and because Hamas tries hard to cause these mistakes to happen. It's sad, unfortunate, and I doubt anyone feels "glee" or "joy" that civilians ever are killed. I'm sure there's a few psycopaths like in any large group of people, but the IDF tries to weed these people out.
Half of the people they kill are women and children. That’s lots of regret they will have to go through the upcoming years. They won't be known as the "good guys", even if the Prime minister tries to frame this as a fight between good and evil most of the world isn't buying it.
> Half of the people they kill are women and children. That’s lots of regret they will have to go through the upcoming years.
Yes, it is. I think almost all of those deaths are on Hamas, they brought this on their own citizens that they are effectively keeping hostage. But that doesn't make me regret it any less.
> They won't be known as the "good guys", even if the Prime minister tries to frame this as a fight between good and evil most of the world isn't buying it.
Israelis haven't been seen as the "good guys" at any point in my life, really, most people in the world have either been indifferent to Israel or hated us.
(For the record, I don't see many Americans being treated as evil in the same way, despite having caused far, far more casualties than Israel has ever done in the last 20 years.)
It doesn't work like that, you can't transfer the blame of a mass murder to another mass murderer. Anyway, I would suggest you to research the anti-American movements all over the world and you will see that Americans(the state) are actually treated as evil by many people who are affected by the American atrocities or sympathetic with those affected. Americans lost most of their credibility even in UK and Europe.
It's really a sad situation because there's a lot to admire about Israel and its people. They were able to build a progressive and prosperous society in a desert but unfortunately turned into genocidal oppressors. Hamas being Hamas doesn't make this right. Unless Israel manage to exterminate every single Palestinian, they will end up with people that remember what Israel did to them. You should be able to draw conclusions from your experience of a single attack that took lives of thousands Israeli and extrapolate to what those people are going through over the years and this latest fight and think about what will want to do to you and what they think about you.
> Anyway, I would suggest you to research the anti-American movements all over the world and you will see that Americans(the state) are actually treated as evil by many people who are affected by the American atrocities or sympathetic with those affected. Americans lost most of their credibility even in UK and Europe.
I'm well aware. And for sure much of the Muslim world hates the US as much as Israel ("Big Satan to Israel's Little Satan").
That said, mass demonstrations against Israel started on October 7th, before any Israeli response, and while invaders were still within Israel. In Western countries. Can you imagine anything like that happening on September 11th?
> It's really a sad situation because there's a lot to admire about Israel and its people. They were able to build a progressive and prosperous society in a desert but unfortunately turned into genocidal oppressors.
I think it's a sad situation because so many people are dying. This would've been just as sad if Israel hadn't done much.
The said, I highly disagree with your characterization of Israel as "genocidal". That's just not true. There is no intention to cause a genocide against the Palestinians.
> You should be able to draw conclusions from your experience of a single attack that took lives of thousands Israeli and extrapolate to what those people are going through over the years and this latest fight and think about what will want to do to you and what they think about you.
I think it is incredibly sad to think that Palestinians cannot find a way to live in peace, or that Israelis can't. Somehow Germany and Japan suffered far worse in WW2 but this didn't cause an endless cycle of violence against the Allies. Why can't the same be true here?
As for what I want to do to "them" - if you mean Hamas, I'd want to take apart the organization. If we can capture every single member of Hamas, I'd be all for it. If not, we need to kill as many of them as we have to to stop the organization.
If we could do that without a single innocent Gazan dying, we should. No war can be conducted in this way though, and Hamas is making that even harder to do by embedding themselves in civilian areas. I sure as hell don't want any "revenge" that comes at the cost of innocent Gazans, and neither do most people.
Btw, you call this a "single attack". It wasn't, it was an invasion that lasted two days, and a bombing campaign that is ongoing for three months. Including the daily worry of other countries joining and attacking Israel.
> Anyway, %50 women and children causality rate on top of illegal occupation and other atrocities wouldn't convince anyone about it being a "collateral damage".
Gaza isn't occupied any longer, or at least, not in the traditional sense. Israel left Gaza in 2005.
As for the casualty rate - just look at the casualty rate in e.g. the Iraq war. Every civilian death is tragic, but war really does involve a lot of collateral damage - all the more so when groups like Hamas purposefully try to get civilians killed.
> How would you feel if Hamas claimed that all the civilians were a collateral damage? After all they documented the extermination of Israeli soldiers and if there are documented intentional killings of the civilians they can just say it was some bad Apples among them.
I would say they are lying, because there are many videos, uploaded by them!, of them targetting civilians. And not just killing them, brutalizing them and massacring them.
Btw, killing soldiers is also illegal if they are not in a position to fight you. Invading a base and capturing it is a legitimate military tactic. Executing all soldiers in it even if they have no weapons or have surrendered is a war crime.
> I'm sure we can also find some videos of Israeli people saying really bad things about exterminating all the Palestinians. IIRC, there were officials calling to drop an Atomic bomb on Palestine and kill them all and other officials calling for mass extermination. Don't you have a far right government?
Yes, some Israeli say bad things, especially in a time of war. And some fringe members of our government have said horrible things and are rightfully condemned. If the government acted the way some members of the government would want it to act - I'd be completely against it and would consider it immoral.
Luckily for both sides, these are fringe views (though not fringe enough).
> Can you put yourself in the shoes of your opponent? Hamas are horrible but Israeli are no better unfortunately
I can put myself in the shoes of my opponent. But comparing Hamas to the IDF is just wrong. The IDF doesn't target civilians, and would definitely never brutally massacre, rape and torture civilians.
> It's fascinating that you can claim with straight face to be the good guys with over %50 civilian kill rate in the prison you created. Very unfortunate, another blow for the ideals of the "civilised world". Once again a well educated, technologically advanced nation conducting unspeakable horrors and claim that they are victims and are the good ones.
I don't think we're the "good guys" - and I think that's a really simplistic way of thinking about things. I think Israel has a lot to answer for by not advancing peace for the last 15 years, for example.
But I also think that given what happened on October 7th, Israel didn't have any choice but to do what it's doing, and doesn't have any chance now - the only way to get safety for Israel and eventually a peace in place is by destroying Hamas.
You just can't live next to a government that loudly proclaims it is intent on killing your citizens, and carries this out!
> Hamas or any Islamic terrorism with political or religious goals is horrible enough and you are asking us to accept more killing with a bit different political and religious goals.
Israel's goals in this war are to destroy Hamas to make us safe. Period. That's the goal and it's a completely legitimate goal, much as Ukraine is fighting off Russia for legitimate reasons.
I think you're putting in a lot of energy to try to reason with someone who isn't going to be reasoned with, and really it's just not reasonable to expect to resolve one of the world's most complex conflicts in a 20+-message deep HN thread.
I'm just writing this because I'd want someone to write something similar to me if I was locked into a thread like this.
Yes, you're right of course. It's just... the whole "someone is wrong on the internet" thing and this being a personal issue.
Happy new years! We celebrated by being bombed with rockets, no siren where I am but we heard them being shot down outside our window. That was fun. And of course, for Gazan civilians the new year is so much worse right now, so many displaced people barely getting by.
War is just terrible. I wish humanity would grow up and stop all this violence.
Please don't do that on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. Instead, please make your substantive points thoughtfully. This topic raises a lot of strong feelings in everyone. If your feelings prevent you from commenting within the site guidelines, please wait to comment until that's no longer the case.
This is important for preserving the community here, and it's important for another reason as well: to the extent that what you're arguing for is true, by posting aggressively and abusively you end up discrediting the truth that you're arguing for. That's not only not in your interest—it hurts everyone. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this more than once before, so it's clear that this problem is not limited to this topic.
It's a fair point and I don't object with this comment being flagged but please notice that the parent one is calling me unreasonable when I try to be polite and provide thorough reasoning about my position on the issue.
Is that O.K. really? They don't even address me when talking about me, that's why I felt the need to reply with a bit of a sarcasm and emotional tone. I also provided a document by the United Nations to keep this grounded. I don't know how this is less substantive than the parent comment talking about me in a sneering manner.
Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38827758? "Isn't going to be reasoned with" is maybe not the best wording; "isn't likely to be persuaded" might be a better way to put that. But I don't think it was really a personal attack. I can see how it could feel that way in the context of an intense conflict like this one, but from an outside perspective I think it's a stretch to say that the comment "is calling me unreasonable". Moreover the intention was clearly trying to dampen the flamewar, which is a good thing.
Here's a point I've often tried to communicate in situations like this, which I'll repeat here in case it's helpful—but please understand that I'm not talking about you personally; as far as I can tell we all have this bias...
There's a common pattern where people underestimate the provocation in their own comments by (say) 10x and overestimate the provocation in the other person's comments by another 10x. Put those together and you get a 100x distortion in self/other perception. That's a lot of distortion. It's basically "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear". In my experience it's helpful to remember this and try to consciously correct for the distortion. Even if you bend over backwards to do that, you probably won't compensate for the entire 100x but you'll at least be less likely to misgauge the impact of your posts and thereby produce unintentional negative effects. Not that any of this is easy, but it's something we should all be aware of and working on.
Firstly, the majority of the IDF isn't active-duty conscripts, they're reservists. They're still conscripts, and they still have to serve, but it's not exactly difficult to not serve if you choose not to. Not sure this impacts anything else you say, but I thought it's worth mentioning.
> I don't believe the premise that Israeli soldiers were concerned for the lives of their loved ones and killed that many civilians and ar OK with it.
Almost all IDF soldiers are incredibly regretful that any civilians have to be killed. This is true of most armies most of the time, btw, not specifically Israeli soldiers.
But they are absolutely fighting for the fate of their homeland. They might be wrong - but most Israelis believe that Hamas cannot be allowed to continue, because they have promised, multiple times, that they will repeat the October 7th attack again and again. They are literally an hour's drive from many people's homes. Two hours and they can reach the majority of Israel.
Almost every Israeli knows someone, either directly or via one other person, that was killed or taken hostage. Without trying to hard, I can think of about 5 people I know who lost a loved one.
In that way, this isn't similar to something like Iraq or Afghanistan, where for the most part, American soldiers were fighting a real, but vague, threat, which posed almost no immediate danger to anyone they knew.
> Unarmed women and children are not that dangerous, they must have range of thoughts when killing those. Some regret, some glee, some disgust, some joy I would imagine. I wouldn't put the relief of saving their own in the top 10 though.
Unarmed women and children are not targeted intentionally. There's great regret that anyone is killed, and probably majority happiness that the person targeted is killed, usually someone who is directly responsible for deaths.
There's also a lot of mistakes, because it's war, and because Hamas tries hard to cause these mistakes to happen. It's sad, unfortunate, and I doubt anyone feels "glee" or "joy" that civilians ever are killed. I'm sure there's a few psycopaths like in any large group of people, but the IDF tries to weed these people out.