Israel Used AI Machine ‘Lavender’ To Target Hamas
But humans made all the decisions that matter.
The Guardian (“‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets“):
The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war.
In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict.
Their unusually candid testimony provides a rare glimpse into the first-hand experiences of Israeli intelligence officials who have been using machine-learning systems to help identify targets during the six-month war.
Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.
“This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”
The testimony from the six intelligence officers, all who have been involved in using AI systems to identify Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) targets in the war, was given to the journalist Yuval Abraham for a report published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
Their accounts were shared exclusively with the Guardian in advance of publication.
I had never heard of +972 Magazine (which takes its name from the Israel-Palestine telephone exchange) before this morning but it has been in existence since 2010, founded by four young Israeli journalists who had solo blogs of their own. It’s avowedly leftist and written in English to spread a specific view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict to an international audience.
It’s rather clear to me that they have an agenda. Indeed, a scan of their front page shows an almost laughable anti-Israel bias, with headlines like “Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science,” “The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism,” and “Why do Israelis feel so threatened by a ceasefire?” At the same time, I have no reason to believe that they intentionally publish lies, which would damage their credibility.
The report, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” is written by Yuval Abraham, a journalist and activist turned documentary filmmaker best known for “No Other Land,” which won the Best Documentary Film award in February at the Berlin International Film Festival. So, again, he has an obvious agenda but I have no reason to believe he’s intentionally lying to his readers.
The report begins,
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
This idea is not new. The US military is, along with our adversaries, working to do the same thing and has been for at least a decade. We’ve been wrestling with the implications of the concept for even longer. Short story long: it’s complicated if only one side of a conflict has the capability; if both sides have it, moral considerations essentially go out the window because human decisionmakers can’t keep up with machines.
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
On the surface, I see no problem with using AI to keep up with moving targets. I’m considerably more squeamish about targeting the homes—presumably thus including the families—of low-level militants.
The laws of war were, alas, written with conventional force-on-force warfare in mind. In the nearly quarter-century since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has not infrequently targeted the homes of high-level terrorist leaders. How far down the chain of command one must go before that’s unacceptable is not by any means clear.
For that matter, I’ve long assumed that American service members who operated UAVs from domestic bases that killed militants abroad were legitimate military targets even though they weren’t in a combat zone. It’s not a huge stretch to say that remains true when they go home at night.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Honestly, a 90 percent success rate in correctly identifying militants is wildly higher than I would have guessed. My strong sense is that American forces targeting militants in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere got it wrong considerably more often than that, simply because our intelligence was spotty. The Israelis, though, have the advantage of a much closer relationship with Hamas than we did with our GWOT enemies.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
Again—assuming this is true—I’m squeamish about this if it was routine and applied to low-level trigger pullers. Much less so high-level operatives, who are more central to the war effort.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
So, let’s take AI out of this. It’s really a distraction, in that the IDF would have made exactly the same calculation with low-level human operatives making the decisions rather than machines. The implication here is that Hamas fighters are only legitimate targets while they are actively engaged in military operations and somehow transform into noncombatants when they go home. Meanwhile, IDF soldiers are legitimate targets 24/7, because they go “home” to a military compound of some sort. That’s frankly an absurd notion.
I find the sheer level of killing in this war appalling. But I don’t know how one fights a war in an area roughly the size of Detroit with some 2 million people living there without massive casualties. Especially when the enemy intentionally hides among said people and is given sanctuary there.
And, again, the notion that the only time one may target a terrorist is while they are in the act of killing is simply absurd. It flies in the face of any reason.
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
This is quite likely the future of war. As we move further away from traditional force-on-force fights, with key nodes outside what we traditionally think of as a combat zone, traditional notions of “combat zones,” “forward areas,” and the like will go away. Hell, that was becoming a reality when I was a cadet forty years ago, integrated in our AirLand Battle doctrine—which, incidentally, was based on lessons learned from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Obviously, technology has improved vastly since.
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
So, again, awful if true. And not, as I understand it, the American practice anymore. But it was as recently as Vietnam. And it’s not surprising that Israel, which doesn’t have a trillion-dollar defense budget, can’t afford a near-infinite supply of precision weapons.
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
This would be outrageous in a conventional conflict. The IDF is not, however, fighting a conventional conflict. I don’t know what the acceptable ratios should be for those whose primary mode of operation is to use human shields in contravention of the laws of war.
The rest of the report is very long, going into methodologies and such. I commend it to those interested.
Again, though, the more I think about this the big reveal—the use of various AI programs for targeting—is really a distraction. The key decisions—targeting Hamas militants in their homes, the acceptance of rather high collateral damage figures, and the like—were all made by humans and, presumably, rather high-ranking ones at that. Indeed, I’d be shocked if they weren’t approved by the Chief of Defense, the Minister of Defense, and the Prime Minister. That low-level operatives are using a tool that makes carrying out the strategy within those rules of engagement more efficient is largely beside the point.
There are two things in the investigation that warrant particular attention:
Killing 15 to 20 civilians to get one junior combatant when that combatant is firing at your troops may be proportional. (Short answer: it depends.)
When that junior combatant is at home doing shit all, it is clearly not. (Of course, it would be fine if said combatant would be alone at that time, but – in this scenario – we’re killing up to 20 civilians as well.)
What this investigation shows is that Israel systematically engaged in clearly disproportionate strikes.
Another way of putting that would be to say that Israel deliberately and systematically committed war crimes.
Considering the staggering number of Palestinian casualties, this can hardly come as a surprise.
(And this comes in addition to the ethical issue of Israel using an AI tool as an arbiter of human life, rather than using AI as an auxiliary tool providing input to the human decision-making process.)
While I’d love to see this verified by a second source, in particular the rules of engagement aspects that @drj calls out above, the aspect of how AI is being used and the rationals for that use (i.e. the algorithm lacks emotion, etc) is pretty expected for anyone who has been tracking this topic. I even wrote a post years ago that was teasing out some of those topics around algorithmic threat analysis and determination.
To that point, with 20:20 hindsight, the farthest fetched thing about the original Terminator (not to mention the entire franchise) turns out to be not the time travel aspect but the fact that a machine would choose to send back a machine disguised as a human to kill someone. Of course, XKCD got there more than a decade ago.
On that last note about the passage of time, I want to call something out (that I find a bit shocking):
That last phrase caught my eye. For my entire life, Vietnam has been used as a marker of “not that long ago.” I was born near the end of direct US involvement that war (September 1974) and I’m turning 50 this year (where does time go). Passage of time and all that, but we’re now further away from it than I was from WWII when I went through grade school.
Now, I’m off to hyperventilate in a corner of the room.
It’s wild to realize that AI by itself is as sentient and accurate as magician sleight-of-hand tricks enabling them to act psychic.. and con only the people in the audience who don’t know how the game works.
Or full-self-driving.
Or any human behavior that isn’t completely bounded.
AI? Great at chess. Life? Not so much.
Not sure if we can take the article at face value so would like to see some confirmation. That said a lot does ring true. Using AI would make tracking so many Hamas much easier and faster. I dont really have much of a problem with Ai usage. In theory it might be less subject to emotions than human operatives but in reality it’s the people who will set the limits on the error bars that you will tolerate. The people decide on the levels of collateral damage that are acceptable.
If true, the rate of collateral deaths they were willing to accept, around 15, is higher than seen in other conflicts. Just doing the math, with 37,000 identified targets they were theoretically willing to accept 500,000 collateral deaths. In reality, as pointed out they eventually realized that was maybe too much, although according to the anonymous sources they were also worried about running out of bombs if they had to fight Hezbollah. So, I think, if true, this confirms what many of us thought, that very high levels of collateral deaths were OK in the early part of the conflict.
Of course this makes me think about the aid workers killed. It happened in a deconflicted zone, meaning an area that was set up specifically to try to avoid accidental killings of aid workers. Per Andres the IDF confirmed they knew the aid workers were going to deliver aid, had the schedule and they knew the route and number of vehicles. If it was an accident that has to make one question the effectiveness of their IT system (and its users) and maybe that claimed 10% error rate is wrong.
Steve
I have a super busy work day, so I don’t have much time for commenting. Just a couple quick thoughts, this will probably be it for me:
I generally agree with your take James. The AI to me looks like automating what the US has been doing in terms of link and node analysis with software for close to 15 years now with tools that came primarily from Palantir and were instrumental in finding Bin Laden and taking apart other terrorist and criminal networks. Here’s a gist from a 2012 Wired article:
It’s hard to underestimate what a game-changer this was back in the day for analysts like me. Some bad guy would be killed or captured, we’d get his phone, papers, any info he had, and load that into the database. Especially with the phone information – the call history and stored numbers, Palantir allowed us to see relationships between fighters, hierarchies, and command structures in ways that simply weren’t possible before.
To me, Lavender is just taking that to the next level and automating a lot of the link analysis that had to be done manually before. We already know Israel has extensive info on the phone network in Gaza, enough to be able to call individuals in buildings to tell them to evacuate before a strike. They are certainly doing what we did – collecting information on the ground from dead fighters, tunnels, bunkers, etc. that can be added to the link analysis database.
So I agree, that part isn’t controversial per se, as it’s actually a valuable tool to determine who is and isn’t a Hamas fighter when Hamas is often deliberately disguising itself as civilians.
The policies on strikes is, I agree, the more controversial part. This gets back to the reality of warfare in occupied urban terrain that I keep harping on about and that many people cannot seem to accept. There is no historical case of combat in urban terrain with a dense civilian population where the vast majority of killed and wounded were not civilians. And this is especially the case when one combatant is deliberately using civilians as part of its tactical and strategic defense. And – added to this is the fact that civilians cannot flee the battlespace.
As much as people want to believe it was otherwise, there is no known way to counter an enemy who does that given those circumstances. It has never been done before.
So, in this situation, a military that is fighting a force in urban terrain using the tactics Hamas is using has limited choices:
– Attempt to evacuate as many civilians from the combat area before military operations commence.
– Conduct military operations and accept the reality that a high number of civilians will die in the fighting.
– Not fight and give up the urban terrain to the enemy. In this case, that would basically mean not fighting in Gaza at all.
So, I’ll say to the people who keep insisting not only that Israel can but also must fight and destroy Hamas with minimal effects on civilians – what you’re asking for is not possible in the current circumstances described above. The ONLY proven way to spare civilian lives in urban warfare is to allow civilians to leave the battlespace. The historical evidence for this is unequivocal. The various claims that this isn’t true and that civilians can be spared if only a military force is somehow “more careful” is a false delusion. There is zero historical precedent for any military being able to achieve that, and many have tried to various degrees. Me, and Eddie and others keep asking what the magic tactics are, but of course, the people who claim this is possible don’t have an answer.
This cold, hard truth about the nature of urban warfare is why I’ve been banging on the drum that it is a terrible moral crime that the entire world is in agreement that Gazans – unlike any other conflict – should not be allowed to flee this war and seek safe refuge. And even in Rafah, there are apparently people who would rather have civilians stay in place and bear the brunt of an Israeli offensive into Hamas’ last stronghold rather than allow them and help them to move to a safer part of Gaza.
Instead, we get these fantastical demands that one party to the conflict must meet an impossible standard for urban warfare that has never come remotely close to being met in the entire history of warfare, while the other party to the conflict, which is making that standard even more impossible to meet and violating the black letter of every IHL and LOAC, gets barely a mention.
That’s it from me, hope you all have a good day, back to work.
@Andy:
No answer to that, no answer to what happens if Hamas keeps up missile attacks, no forward-looking war-gaming at all. The Left has completely distanced itself from the military which is a mistake. The US military is well-indoctrinated into believing in the Constitution and the rule of law.
At the same time, even as WW2 continued to rage, the Allies started looking seriously at the post-war world and making plans for how to help a shattered Europe rise from the ashes. I have no sense the Israelis have given the aftermath any thought. That is inexcusable. But at the same time, what were our clever plans for Iraq after Saddam? Victory is hollow unless peace follows. How is it we got that in 1944 but advanced societies today either can’t do the work or just can’t be bothered.
It’s not just high, it’s also very round. It probably depends a lot on the definition of “militant”, etc. I have a 90% confidence in that number.
If this is true, then the IDF has been pursuing a strategy that ensures more civilian casualties.
Presumably, militants are going out and doing militant stuff during the day, with their militant coworkers, and it would be better to lob a bomb at them there, where the bystanders are far more likely to be militants.
@Michael Reynolds:
Given that a two state solution is unacceptable, and integrating Palestinians into Israeli society as equals is off the table, I expect that the plan is perpetual occupation — a more aggressive occupation that makes a repeat of 10/7 unlikely (but inevitable with enough time).
I don’t think over 30,000 dead, 1.8M internal refugees, and a man-made famine is a reasonable cost for that.
@Gustopher:
Do you remember the scene in Full Metal Jacket where Joker and his buddy the photographer are in the helicopter and Joker is interviewing the door gunner and the door gunner is just unloading on anyone he sees and he says “the ones who run are VC, the ones who don’t are well-disciplined VC” and Joker asks “how can you shoot women and children” and the door gunner says “easy, you just don’t lead them as much?”
It’s probably something like that.
@Andy:
It’s incredibly clear to everyone that Israel will never let the Palestinians return, so you’re asking countries to 1) accept permanent refugees, and 2) be complicit in ethnic cleansing.
I can see why that would be a hard sell.
So let’s turn that around: why are there no safe areas within Israel that refugees can be allowed to go, temporarily, where they will have access to food and water?
Ignoring the AI babble, the part that leaps out at me is 15-20 civilians is considered appropriate collateral damage for each militant.
A lot is made of the fact that on October 7th, approximately 1150 people died, and I don’t know how many were injured, and hostages were taken, and how relatively speaking, it was like 13 9/11s, and how everyone knows someone who was impacted, and on and on. And how the citizenry were traumatized. On that day, there were approximately 3 civilian casualties for each military casualty.
Accepting all that, and acknowledging that Hamas was responsible for those deaths, at this point, there have been 30,000 Palestinian deaths, give or take. Proportions get tricky here, because which populations do you use, but in pure numbers, that’s 26 October 7ths. Relative to the civilian population of Gaza, that’s, well, depends on who you count as citizens, but over 100 9/11s. If this is an appropriate reaction on the part of Israel, what’s an appropriate reaction on the part of Palestinians? Not only do you know many more people who have died, relatively speaking, your house has been destroyed, and maybe one or more of your children or siblings has starved to death, or died because they couldn’t get medical care because the hospitals were destroyed.
And I’m not saying that Israel shouldn’t have responded. I’m saying that this doesn’t even begin to address the actual problem, and if anything, makes it worse. And if a 3:1 ratio of civilian to military deaths is bad (which it is), why is a 20:1 ratio acceptable? (And Hamas I’m sure would have been happy with a 20:1 ratio, or higher.)
@Mikey: Yes. I have assumed that the IDF has repurposed the old saying, “if it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s Viet Cong”.
I’m suddenly picturing the “the computer did that auto-layoff thingy” scene from Idiocracy…
@Matt Bernius: Oh, for sure on Vietnam. Our official exit was half a century ago now. We’re almost as far away from then as then was from the end of World War I. But the US military leadership of Vietnam was just as professional and trained in LOAC as the current leadership. What’s changed is that we’ve grown accustomed to having access to enough exquisite tech to use it for almost everything; nobody else can afford to do that.
There have been credible analysts who argue that the Israelis are actually taking more precautions to contain civilian casualties than we took as recently as Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m a bit skeptical of that. We were more loosey-goosey in declaring military-age male combatants than I’m comfortable with. But, again, the available of nearly unlimited precision weapons is a huge difference.
@Andy:
You really are wedded to this whiny boo hoo woe is Israel waaaaa strawman argument falsehood, huh?
Yeah, Hamas is barely mentioned. No one has ever heard of them. Lol in what alternate reality?
The reason Israel is the only “democracy” that has to prosecute a war in a densely populated urban area the size of Gaza, is because Israel is the only “democracy” that has kept millions of its displaced population so confined. While simultaneously pursuing the funding and boosting of extremists and terrorists among said population as a matter of policy, in order to sideline and undermine liberals and moderates on either side who have sought a durable, longterm, peaceful solution.
One those liberals, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered for his peace efforts by rightwing Israeli terrorists incited in part by Israel’s current and longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Who helped precipate the current crisis by leaving the liberal/socialist Israeli communities nearest Gaza totally unprotected — distracted as he was with trying to dismantle the Israeli judiciary and with thumbing his nose at allies by promoting Israeli settler terrorism in the West Bank.
Now we’re supposed to believe Netanyahu’s Israel is the world’s #1 super special victim, because these and other stupid, self-defeating, incompetent, and counterproductive policies are blowing up in Israel’s face, just as Israel’s allies and friends (real friends, not the enabling kind) have long warned they would.
When you make your bed with bed bugs, you get up with bug bites. Boo effing hoo.
@DK: The current Israeli government would kill the entire population of Gaza if they thought they could get away with it. They should never get the benefit of the doubt. There are enablers who will always say they are doing the best they can. The same ones who have dismissed West Bank settler violence for decades, claim that Gaza gave Palestinians the chance to be self-governing.
@Kevin McKenzie:
As far as Hamas is concerned, the more martyrs the better. The expendability of Gazan civilians and Israeli hostages is yet another belief Hamas and Likud share.
I’m getting a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that the remaining hostages are never going home. It’s sickening and infuriating. Unbearable.
Why doesn’t Israel just nuke Gaza, sure there would be collateral damage but the success of eradicating Hamas would be 100%. If we assume 1 million people and 20,ooo combatants the ratio is 50:1 which is just double what it is now- so really just the same strategy while modifying the numbers with a slight escalating shift -merely a factor – but with the added advantage of of not a single IDF soldier getting killed. I’m sure then Andy and MR will find ways to talk about the fog of war and that there are no good solutions and so forth and that nobody really understands the situations anyway.
@Andy: Hey since you’re here. I never got to respond to you on the shipping stuff because the last few weeks have been absolutely awful. I was finally recovering from a multi-week serious illness last week when I had a fall that resulted in a severe concussion. Yesterday I had to put down my 15 year companion through thick and thin. She was a better doggo than I deserved.
I’m still recovering so thinking hurts and I just can’t find the motivation to respond in a manner you deserve. If it’s something you do want to hear back about remind me in a week or two once my health has gotten better and I’ve hopefully gotten over this loss.
A passage which surely poses the question: why is the “war” – if that’s what it is, which I question – being fought at all? Was there really no alternative? Has anyone tried to justify Israel’s choice of “must kill every Hamas member no matter what” response to October 7 with arguments more rational than hand-waving about “self-defense”?
Israeli writer Gideon Levy wrote last October that “A ground invasion of Gaza is a disaster foretold”. The World Food Program warned of a “Gaza catastrophe as Israel prepares ground invasion”. Michael Barnett predicted that “If Israel invades Gaza it will be a disaster for both Palestinians and Israelis”. Marc Lynch cried that “An invasion of Gaza would be a disaster for Israel”. Tom Friedman wrote that “Israel is about to make a terrible mistake”.
Israel is fully responsible for the consequences of its decisions. Nobody forced it to invade Gaza. It could end the killing tomorrow, but it chooses not to.
@Raoul: There are some Hamas leaders in Qatar, too. Better nuke Doha as well, just to make sure the phoenix can’t rise from the ashes.
@DK:
You can look through the threads here in the past couple of months and count the criticism of what they are doing vs Israel.
The people of Gaza are not part of Israel’s “displaced population.” And here you are, proving the point about ignoring Hamas by not even mentioning who started this war and blaming it on Israel.
@Gustopher:
Yes, you are repeating the common assumption – always presented as a fact – that Palestinians cannot be allowed to leave because Israel won’t let them return. Well, where is the proof of that? And it seems to me that is something that Israel cannot enforce, even if it wanted to if other nations guaranteed Gaza residents the right to return to Gaza after the war, especially if one of those guarantors was the United States.
But that discussion never even gets started because of the assumption asserted as fact, which conveniently allows you to continue to deny Palestinians in Gaza any agency in the matter. The principles of the inherent right of people to flee violence and persecution somehow don’t apply to Palestinians in Gaza because, in part, “allies” like you take this paternalistic view that Palestinians can’t be allowed to leave because Israel certainly won’t allow them to return. Well, it seems to me if that is actually a real risk, then it should be up to individual Palestinians to decide if it’s worth it or not and not paternalistic outsiders.
I think it is another delusion or lie to mask hard realities, which is that people understand that if Gazans were allowed to flee, many would not want to return, especially if Hamas remains in control there.
You don’t want to allow Palestinians the free will to flee Gaza because Israel would never let them come back because that’s ethnic cleansing, and you are on record here as claiming that Israel is committing genocide. But here you are proposing that the genocidal nation that you believe wants to commit ethnic cleansing should create safe areas on its territory for Palestinian refugees. Sorry, but I don’t think your idea is presented in good faith.
@Matt:
Wow, I’m truly sorry to hear about the fall and the loss of your doggo.
Don’t worry about our debate—real life is much more important than anything that happens here, and getting healthy and recovering from a concussion is a serious priority. I’m sure a thread will come up in the future where we can probably engage on the topic again.