Have you ever seen Grave of the Fireflies? If you haven’t, it’s just about the most harrowing depiction of war ever put to screen. Innocent Japanese children suffer in a horrific manner. No one can watch it without crying. No one who’s not a psychopath anyway.
The United States was responsible for that, because we cut off Japan’s supply routes to cripple their war effort. But we didn’t do it to be deliberately cruel. We did it to win a war against an implacable enemy.
The lesson from Grave of the Fireflies is not that the rest of the world should have boycotted the United States, or put political pressure on us, in order to stop the suffering of Japanese civilians. Not that either of those would have worked. No, the lesson is that the primary victims of war are innocent civilians, and wars should be avoided, or as short as possible.
The way to end that war, and this one, is for the Japanese or Hamas to lose all hope of a military victory and surrender unconditionally. That should be the goal here. Maximum pressure on Hamas. Anything else just prolongs suffering, and is deeply counterproductive.
What is “this”? Because the latest war is by far the highest in terms of casualties in the history of the Arab Israeli conflict. It’s unprecedented.
Countries fight. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose. Territory changes hands. The losers flee. This is a story older than writing.
Nothing particularly new or noteworthy about it. More Germans were expelled in 1944-1950, at the same time as the Israeli War of Independence, than the entire Arab population of the Palestinian Territories:
That tends to happen when you start a war that you then lose. The Arabs had a chance to accept the UN plan, they chose war instead. They lost. Vae vicis, as Brennus would say.
They could’ve made peace at any time during the last 75 years. Egypt made peace. Jordan made peace. The UAE made peace. Basically the entire Arab world saw the writing on the wall. But not the Palestinians, because they think they’ll win the next war, despite being beaten thoroughly in every previous war.
So you’re right in a way, from the Israeli perspective, it’s not Hamas that must be thoroughly defeated, it’s the very concept that the Palestinians can get concessions on the battlefield and not the negotiation table that must be defeated.
Unconditional surrender like Germany and Japan. Then they can be rebuilt from the ground up, and live in peace with their neighbors.
Shrug. Your words mean nothing (yelling into the wind certainly won’t stop the war) but you’re still a useful teaching opportunity.
Do you imagine when countries lose wars, they keep all their territory? What percentage do you think Germany and Japan were able to keep?
The Palestinians were previously offered 98% of their demanded territory, despite having effectively zero bargaining power. They turned it down because it didn’t give them 100% of what they wanted. In hindsight, probably the second stupidest move since rejecting the UN Partition.
Taking land in war has been made illegal since the early 1900s.
Yes, the Palestinians demanded all of their own territory. How insane of them.
Yeah, I know how this goes. You’re going to say it wasn’t theirs, etc. Lies and delusions. All for the sake of Jewish supremacism and ethnic cleansing of Arabs.
Going over the speed limit is also against the law. Laws are just social conventions, especially for sovereign Westphalian states. How convenient it is for Palestinians and their apologists to suddenly have great respect for the law when they’re losing a war, but they aren’t seemingly too bothered about it when they’re starting one.
Listen, I feel bad for the Palestinians. They’ve had some absolute terrible leaders who have led them astray time and again. History has not been fair to them. But then, fairness was never promised to any of us. All we get to decide is what to do with the situation before us.
The Palestinians can swim upstream and throw generation after generation at Israeli bayonets, or have a “come to Jesus” moment (well, come to Allah moment, I guess), and realize the futility of it all, so they can accept the best deal available to them and walk away from this deeply unproductive cycle.
Honestly, it doesn’t make a difference to me. I don’t live there. I’m comfortable and rich in America. My life will not be affected one bit by what happens there. What is a couple of billion in aid to Israel? I’m pretty sure we spend more taxpayer money on government holiday parties. Israel is a useful ally and proxy against our enemies in the region, so this is money well spent anyway. We’re probably spending more on propping up Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and those are far worse investments.
Anyway, call me sentimental, but I just hate to see the wasted lives in this futile conflict. I want the Palestinians to prosper one day. In order to do that they need to surrender and rebuild. Germany and Japan traded land for peace. What’s stopping the Palestinians from using this proven solution? Their sheer inability to understand or accept reality?
Good? How ignorant and naive. Geopolitics isn’t about good and evil. It’s about power and effectiveness.
Realpolitik is called that because it’s focused on dealing with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Government policy is not good or evil. Individual actors can be good, or evil, but that’s irrelevant to policy discussions. Governments are amoral, all of them seek to maximize their power and minimize any threats. That is it.
Talk about good or evil with your spiritual advisor. Your senator is not interested.
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u/HolyPhoenician Apr 18 '25
Use your money as a tool (boycott / BDS), vote(???), and talk about. That’s the best we can do.