Israel - Hamas War October 2023

If “break up protests immediately once one person does something wrong” were the standard, a perverse incentive is created for opponents of the protesters to do something wrong in order to stop the protest.

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So what then? Let Hamas keep attacking and going back to the status quo ante after some combat? Just keep letting the cycle continue?

That’s certain to fix nothing and lead to more decades of misery. Mostly for the Palestinians but also the Israelis who get rocket attacks aimed at them.

It will still hurt Biden but most of these voters will just not vote rather than vote for Trump.

Same. I stated publicly on the AO that if my state was close I was voting Clinton.

What if the entire group is chanting those things? As there is video evidence of happening, posted in this thread.

I said repeatedly “no good way out”. Hamas will settle for nothing less than the complete end of Israel and Israel is only slightly more willing to compromise. Both sides will settle for nothing less than having all of Jerusalem it seems.

I don’t see a peaceful solution. I wish I did. If I was running for President I would push for a two-state solution. But I don’t honestly see it working.

Eisenhower tried
Kennedy tried
Johnson tried
Nixon tried
Ford tried
Carter tried
Reagan tried
Bush Sr tried
Clinton tried
Bush II tried
Obama tried
Trump tried
Biden is trying

If there was a peaceful solution I think it would have been tried by now.

No, I hate the idea of just letting them annihilate each other. I hate the idea of Palestinians picking off random Israelis until Israel is provoked to respond with brute force.

I’m not sure what will actually work though. Everything already tried or proposed seems doomed to fail.

I debated whether to include Truman, BTW. He was the first world leader to recognize Israel, 11 minutes after it was formed, Google tells me. And he was pretty pro-Israel (many say just to court the Jewish vote because he was actually pretty antisemitic, but regardless of his inward feelings his outward policies were pro-Israel). I’m not sure the extent to which he tried to appease the Palestinians. Maybe he belongs on the list too.

And I should add that the Palestinians were dealt a REALLY lousy hand, no question. But if they’re not willing to compromise then I don’t see a solution. And they seem pretty damn adamant about not compromising.

If the US started getting serious about limiting the military munitions and weaponry they send Israel, they would be at the negotiating table in about 5 minutes flat.

Israel is a small country with very limited economic resources. They cannot afford to lose that US link to any appreciable degree. Their economy is already damaged from the conflict.

So lets not sugarcoat this:

The US is enabling the conflict (this is why the students are protesting). It has been doing this for years while trying to find a “solution” which simply does not exist given the boundary conditions of the Palestinian scenario.

All of this became completely obvious to the world when the US started sending Israel 2,000lb bombs (which Israel does not have and cannot produce), and the indiscriminate targeting of people and infrastructure began (so far killed about 70% civilians c25,000 out.of 35,000). That “attempted genocide”(ICJ) would not have been possible without US help.

The US did put Israel under an arms embargo (1982) during a War (because the IDF misused US weapons) so there is precedent for doing the same now. Absolutely no offensive weapons should be sent to Israel. Defensive only.

And here is “why” this is also possible (this was a formal US review):

Yeah, Israel could be persuaded, sure. What about Hamas?

Some might view it as the US preventing the genocide of Israeli Jews. :woman_shrugging:

I do not discount your point that Israel is dependent on the U.S. If we’d been more forceful about stopping the new settlements maybe October 7 would have been postponed by a few years.

also Nixon and Trump

The entire group? Like there are 200 student protestors at a college campus, and every single one of them, including the Jewish students, are chanting death to Israel?

Maybe there were 150 originally, 50 assholes joined, the original 150 mostly left, all that was left was the 50, and a video of them chanting things was posted in the thread. That seems entirely plausible, and i think the campus security would know this is not a student group now, and they could be broken up. That seems fine.

Wow, what do you know… the UN revised its estimates for how many women and children died in Gaza, cutting the number almost in half.

considering Hamas posts the death counts 30 seconds after each incident only a fool word put any value to them

I’m not saying it happened at every single protest, but yes, there were campus protests where people were chanting slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel. Obviously I have no clue how many of the protesters were students. Maybe very few, not sure. But those types of protests should be broken up is what I’m saying and it sounds like you agree.

Whether they are mostly students or not IMO.

No need to insult Polymath!

Not sure what your point is here.

You have “reported” casualties, and then you have “verified (identified)” casualties.

Reported Casualties (May 6th):

Reported and Verified casualties by UN based on Reported (May 8th)

In a war zone, that gap will be big at first and then reduce in size as NGOs on the ground identify the casualties (this takes time as a lot of people are buried under rubble and communications are patchy).

Its nothing more complicated than that. Its a bit surprising that this needs to be explained to a former Actuary.

Didn’t want to be a ghoul and comment on the development pattern of those graphs…but

Its running at about 70% (25k / 35k) which doesn’t strike me as “someone is telling big porkies on the ground”.

The larger issue is that 50% of those reported and identified as dead are women & children.

Thats horrendous and simply not defensible.

Or, it’s just fake reporting.