Kenneth Roth, who was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022 and oversaw production of the report on apartheid, said that Israeli authorities have long insisted that ending discriminatory policies depended on peace negotiations.
But three decades on, with no real peace process in motion, that explanation “lacked credibility,” Roth said.
Israel has continued to support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, constructing “bypass roads” accessible only to the settlers and expanding military checkpoints — moves that Roth and others say all but eliminated the possibility that the West Bank could someday become an independent, contiguous Palestinian state.
“What’s left is Swiss cheese,” he said.
I, for one, do think that the war against Hamas is justified. Israel’s stated goal is to destroy Hamas military capabilities. The paradigm isn’t tit-for-tat until they’re “even”. This isn’t a slap contest. Israel’s paradigm is overwhelming force to destroy the enemy as completely as possible, while also not completely nuking the civilian population. Hamas’s paradigm is terrorism against primarily civilian targets, mainly to prevent Israel and the world from settling into complacency regarding the pre-October 7 state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which is exactly what was happening before October 7.
No one knows when Israel will consider Hamas sufficiently degraded to end the war on their side. Of course, Hamas will never stop fighting Israel, even if there is a ceasefire. It’ll just take another decade or so to build up their military capabilities again for another attack. Or, there may be a Third Intifadah and a return to suicide bombing and similar tactics. It’s a mess (and always has been).
How much of the population is acceptable as collateral damage? We’re over 1%. Will you condemn Israel at 5%? 10%? 50%? 100%?
Murdering 1% of any countries civilians as collateral damage could never be justified.
No collateral damage is acceptable, but it is unrealistic to think that there will be no collateral damage in war. It is also unrealistic to think that Israel would not respond to the October 7 massacre, and unacceptable for Hamas to use the Palestinian people as human shields to avoid retaliation.
What does that boil down to? Israel has every right to strike back at Hamas. Hamas also has every right to fight against Israel. Because of the way Hamas has dug in to the civilian population and infrastructure, civilian casualties are a given. The number of civilian casualties is a function of two things:
In other words, both Israel and Hamas are to blame for civilian casualties. This is the same in every war. Civilians in a war zone always get fucked, no matter who started the war.
You said that Israel is justified in their war on Palestine. If no amount of collateral damage is acceptable, they would be no longer justified after the first civilians were killed, so you obviously do consider some amount of collateral damage as acceptable.
So I’ll repeat my question: what is the percentage of the Palestine civilian population that has to be killed before Israel is no longer justified in their war? You can answer the question, or you can not do so. The implications of either option are hopefully clear to you.
My point is that no civilian should be killed, but that isn’t realistic nor is it the criteria for engaging in warfare. What percentage of civilian casualties is “enough” is not a precisely answerable question. The best you can say is, “as few as reasonably possible given the circumstances”. No war has zero collateral damage, but that doesn’t mean that war is never justified.
In your earlier comment, you said that reaching 1% of the population killed could never be justified. And yet, about 9% of German were killed in WW2, and yet few would argue that the Allies should have stopped fighting once German casualties reached 1% of the population.