• sailingbythelee@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    No, read the thread. I was responding to a comment that said Israel can’t fight an ideology. My point is that you can fight an ideology and we have many times. You cannot entirely eliminate an ideology, but you can destroy governments that are based on an ideology. My examples included the Nazi government.

    Hamas is a popularly-supported state actor espousing and ACTING on an obnoxious, violent ideology that started a war with a much more powerful state by literally killing civilians. Civilian casualties on the Gaza side are unfortunate, but also expected as a natural consequence of war. The other argument in this thread is that the ratio of civilian casualties shows that Israel is purposely genociding Gazans, which is belied by the fact that the ratio of civilian casualties is about the same on both sides (while admitting that precise figures are hard to verify).

    And, no, I don’t think that Gazans should be massacred. Nor do I think that German civilians should have been massacred when the Allies invaded Germany. However, the German people surrendered and repudiated the Nazi ideology. If they had not, perhaps Germany would still be occupied by the Allies and it would look a bit like Gaza today.