With all sorts of partisan nonsense flying around let's keep things accurate

...accidentally fired rockets at their own hospital. If deliberate the Israelis would be the first to claim it and shout it from the rooftops. Currently they claim to have and have released audio to support the misfire/accident theory.

It doesn't make it any better, but an accident is not the same as a deliberate act of self-destruction, massacring ones own population holed up in a hospital, which is what you're inferring.

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

I would contend that I am not so much pro-Israel or anti-Palestine. I am pro-west (in a cultural/Liberal/democracy sense), pro-enlightenment and pro-human. Israel is just a better steward of these lands than any arab or muslim country would be. The saying, "if the arabs put down their weapons there would be peace, and if the jews put down their weapons there would be genocide" is just simply true. This is the world we live in. A world of historical consequences ranging from the end of the Ottoman Empire at WWI, the end of WWII, the holocaust and so forth.

Just as an individual can do whatever he wants until he intrudes on the rights or interests of others, countries should be left alone as long as they mind their own business. But states are often run by leaders who achieve and maintain power by violating the rights of others. Maybe there is a practical or utilitarian case for applying the principle of sovereign equality to a state like North Korea and declaring Kim Jung Un the ultimate representative of the people he imprisons and starves, but there certainly isn’t a straightforward deontological case for it.

In the area of geopolitics, we often find ourselves falling back to utilitarianism, and dispensing with talk of rights all together. All states are inherently suspect as moral entities, with some being better or worse than others. And individuals generally have zero control over what policies their governments adopt, making the doctrine of collective responsibility just as pernicious here as it is in the frameworks of wokes and Marxists.

That brings us to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Some will talk of the “right” of Israel to defend itself, or the “right” of Palestinian self-determination. But Israel’s right to defend itself means killing a lot of innocent people. And the Palestinian right to self-determination is just a fancy way of saying men with guns telling other people what to do because of where they happen to live, which given the record of Arabs I’m sure they would screw up much more than most other states have.

With utilitarianism, we might at least hope to make some progress, unlike what tends to happen when we engage in endless debates about who has the right to do what.

All reasonable people agree that Hamas is a bad actor, and both sides would be better off if they no longer had power. The problem is that they hide among civilians, and there’s no way to eliminate them without causing a lot of pain to innocent third parties. There’s also the question of what comes afterwards, and who exactly ends up governing Gaza.

The recent attack has in any event shown that the status quo is untenable, by making it impossible to deny the ultimate ambitions of Hamas, while reminding us that their capabilities are likely to only increase over time. Israel has tried the path of seeking to ensure that Gazans suffer as little as possible for the actions of their government, based on the theory that they are not responsible for what Hamas does. This moral intuition is correct, but it does not give guidance regarding how to go forward.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Israel should accept casualties that high. But what is missing from current discussions is that getting rid of Hamas has potentially massive benefits down the line for future generations of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Killing civilians is something that Israel, on the whole, does by accident and that Hamas, on the whole, does on purpose.

I'm not seeing that myself.

In my view money and a rather extreme over representative presence in powerful positions might have far more to do with that.

It's far more trouble than any worth otherwise.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

Nope

'When they knew that it was an accident'

I mean, do you know that in the immediate aftermath they knew this for certain? Unless their commanders were the ones firing the rocket I think it unlikely. They undoubtably know it by now. Or maybe those that did fire it off are still denying it to save their own skin?

My take would be that considering how fast they rushed to claim the strike, and the complete chaos and confusion of the situation, the higher ups would not have known either way, and just gone hard on it immediately to try and gain an advantage.

It pays to be the first mover in communications. Also highly unlikely they'd have expected it to be their own side... I can see why they'd want to pounce on it straight away.

If it's proven (or at least made it hard to think otherwise)to have been them, I wouldn't want to be the person that fired the trigger. Don't think they'll be around for long.

Despite all that, Hamas will never admit to it. In the same way I'd think it would be very hard for the Israelis to do so if they were responsible.

Edited by SW19 CPFC (18 Oct 2023 6.18pm)

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

So what were the events of last Saturday - more Hamas 'accidents'?