Isn't the idea of a Turing test whether someone (meaningfully knowledgeable about such things) can determine if they are talking to a machine, not can the machine fool some of the people some of the time? ELIZA passed the latter bar back in the 1960's ... a pretty low bar.
UN peace keepers were assigned to southern Lebanon after the 2006 war. They didnt do anything as Hezbollah remilitarized heavily. Israel cannot trust external peacekeepers.
I am in full support of Israel's actions in Gaza, but think Israel is completely out of line and breaking the law with their settlers actions in the West Bank.
As a Norwegian, it is absolutely baffling how someone can seriously utter the words "I am in full support of Israel's actions in Gaza". Is the media coverage that different in USA than in Europe? How is it possible?
I try very hard to find credible primary and secondary sources of what's true on the ground. For Gaza, but also for Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan, I am basically a nerd about conflict zones. From all of my research, I believe the IDF gets a bad rap but is no worse in Gaza than any Western army would be in the same situation. And indeed we can see that in dug in cities like the coalition forces vs ISIS in Mosul, civilian casulaties happened at quite similar rates to Gaza.
The United States occupation of Iraq was like a trip to an amusement park compared to Gaza. Please don't compare the IDF to the US military. At least the US military and its soldiers had RoE that they respected. Any breaking of those rules did not get ignored like they do in the IDF.
As someone from the USA what I see from media coverage is genocide in Gaza. They would have to be truly ignorant and intentionally uninformed to say something like that or be in favor of genocide.
did you ever consider that media coverage is very selective and biased ?
i remember half an year ago, during ceasefire when gaza was swamped in aid and food was rotting on the streets, laura coates at prime time said that "hundreds of gazans die from starvation daily". never happened. not even dozens.
or when at abby phillips show yesterday, somebody tried to say that presenting images of children with genetic diseases as image of children who are dying from starvation is manipulative, abby phillips stopped this person and said that it's not important.
you must have seen numerous mentions that 500 trucks of food to gaza is minimum (and actually needed even more), because it's the number of trucks that were entering gaza before war ? but did you see even once mention that 500 is total number of trucks that included construction materials, animal feed, etc.. etc.. and maximum of trucks of food that entered gaza in 1 day before war was 72(82?)
Struggle harder to explain how 10's of thousands of civilian deaths out of a population of 2 million and which has been increasing during the "genocide" can possibly be a "genocide".
Well, that's also something they said. We may or may not find the final numbers after the war. Remember the official death count is frozen since March 2024, since they killed the people who were counting the deaths.
Right. In this genocide, it will turn out to be either 20,000 or 500,000 casualties. It's early days, though, so let's just preemptively call it a genocide. Just in case.
I really have no idea what you are talking about. There's a genocide. The people who are doing the genocide told us they were doing a genocide, so there's no need to read the tea leaves. Genocides are bad.
I don’t think that it generally true. At least, I just wait to get to the register to discover how much I’ll be spending. I mean it is usually within 20% or so of the advertised cost.
This, but further more, there are 100s of comments about "the genocide" here, but almost none about what Israel should do. They have a neighbor who just committed a huge act of terror and whos standing installed political party calls for the elimination of the country. They live in a region where their ethnic group has essentially been wiped out systematically in all neighboring countries.
So, "Stop the genocide" and then what? Build a bigger fence? Wait for the next episode? Im generally interested if anyone has an opinion that goes beyond leave Gaza alone and considers Israelis dilema.
Israel should have captured terrorists without destroying the whole city and killing random people. Don't know if it was possible though but it is the obvious answer.
I’m having trouble distilling the essence of your message in a way that leaves us with any common moral ground.
Would you agree that “an eye for an eye” type justice is undesirable? Because it seems like you are advocating for genocide as a response to the oct attack, going well beyond “eye for an eye”!
Boiling it down to a catch phrase does it no justice. The war is being fought in a urban area, with an armed forced who refuses ceasefire and has repeatedly said it wont rest until all isrealis are dead. Again, my comment is, if you want them to stop fighting, what would you have them do next? Im not being rhetorical.
How does this country claim to be any better than Hamas butchers, when they can't conduct a war where their bullets and bombs hit defenseless children? They've been saying "oops, that was a mistake" so many times that it's obvious their operating procedure is "drop the bomb here and we don't care about civilian deaths".
Or they use the excuse that terrorists are hiding under hospitals and schools, so dropping bombs on these things are perfectly acceptable. In my book that's morally indefensible and makes them not very different to Hamas butchers.
Or if you can accept that, maybe crashing planes into the WTC towers is acceptable too (and what about a military target like the Pentagon)...
You would say the same about any group that did the same things to you as the Israeli have done to Palestinians. Answer this: will these actions by Israel decrease or increase the number of people who think that way? Even if they kill all the Palestinians and get rid of the threat in Gaza, they'll just create more, deeper and stronger hate against themselves in the region and the world. If at any point in time they lose the support of the most powerful country on earth, they'll be in huge danger and they can only blame themselves for creating that danger.
What? Outside of like maybe WW2 Germany, no serious country does official press run where they say "The only good x is a dead x". Especially so about private citizens of the enemy country. It constantly feels like Palestine is never held responsible for their actions because theyre getting pummeled so badly on the field.
Defeating your enemy before they can launch another deadly attack is a lot different than genocide or ethnic cleansing. Jesus was talking about personal relationships in that saying, he wasn't running a government or military. Presumably he had a different view on what should happen to the Roman occupiers when the Kingdom of God came, as can be seen in other parts of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
The problem is Israel treated the entire Gaza population as indiscriminately sheltering Hamas, partly because Netanyahu retains power by keeping conflicts going, and party because the right-wing Jewish extremists want to claim all the land.
What moral people want is to give Israel the same leeway the allies had in WW2. Nothing more, nothing less.
The expectation back then was you should kill Nazis and Japanese until they surrender without any conditions. Hamas always puts conditions on releasing hostages.
I agree. That doesn't make the bombing of Tokyo and Dresden moral acts. War is atrocious by definition.
What is different this time is that most of the west has forgotten what it actually means to be at war and they pontificate from their armchair.
Combine that with the fact that it is generally easier to have empathy for the side that you perceive to be the victim or on the side of justice, and most people truly cannot comprehend how so many Israelis would support their right wing war policies.
I don't think one has to justify the killing of innocent civilians in order to at least try to put themselves in the shoes of people who have been born in Israel and have lived their lives punctuated by the fear of their family or friend being blown up in a bus bombing.
Most people in the west will just not entertain the thought exercise. They'll just dismiss it as "well they invaded Palestine and stole their land", as if this is a justification for suicide bomb attacks or raining rockets over Israeli cities.
I think our collective inability to accept the situation on the ground and push for a compromise is fueling the violence.
Hamas has a strategy where they can leverage their population acceptance of martyrdom in order to gain more and more victim points in their master PR strategy.
Israel feels more and more isolated internationally and they react by giving everybody a big F U and doubling down on their own extremism.
I often hear "Jews should just go back to Europe" as if that is an actual solution.
I believe that if this was any other conflict that didn't involve Jews (e.g. Turks and Kurds) most people would be cheering for peace or they'd be indifferent.
But this conflict has the right mix of inflaming ingredients. There is white colonial guilt and guilt of racism, there is the association of Jews with global capitalism, and associating Jews as "being white".
To be clear, my take is not that since there are other wars like in Sudan, Israel can do whatever they want. All wars should end and every day they continue is a tragedy.
My point is that if one wants to help bring this conflict to an end, one should not put Israel in an impossible position and demand that they simply cease to exist because they "are not native to the land" or similar arguments that people make nowadays.
It's much more effective to pressure Israel to avoid war atrocities if one understands their point of view, their condition and what it means to be under existential threat.
In order to do that you don't have to deny the same to Palestinians.
For some reason most people seem to only reason by taking one side
There are numerous reports that IDF does what it can to root out Hamas among the general pop. They call people before strikes, they distribute leaflets
Their actions shows a general disrespect for human life and human rights.
"Numerous reports" might claim what you say, but actual reports of countless genocidal atrocities contradicts them I guess. It is my belief that they don't care and never cared.
This statement and the most of the ones above are the same canned response.
My numerous reports are more numerous than your numerous reports and some version of the solution is stop being evil.
Its disappointing, given even with a direct ask for a considered answer everyone confidently gives one that dosent even respect there is a two sided problem.
>> This, but further more, there are 100s of comments about "the genocide" here, but almost none about what Israel should do.
They should do what all other countries do when they are attacked: defend themselves and not seek to take the attack as an opportunity to invade their neighbours.
You want an example? Look at the recent India and Pakistan crisis, and the Thailand and Cambodia crisis that is only now being resolved. In both cases there was fire exchanged, war was on the brink, then it was held back and reason and peace prevailed. The countries in question won't be best friends, they won't like each other, but they're not bombing the shit out of each other, levelling each other's cities to the ground and ethnically cleansing their populations.
The difference in Israel-Palestine of course is that Israel has the upper hand militarily and by many orders of magnitude so it doesn't have to make peace. It can afford to bomb the Palestinians for as long as it likes, it can afford to ethnically clanse them even at the risk of ethnic cleansing turning into genocide, it can afford to impose a medieval-style siege on Gaza where no food goes in and no Palestinians come out, it can afford to do anything it likes and nobody can stop it, certainly not Hamas with its risible military ... I can't even say "strength"; weakness is more appropriate. The redoubtable Islamist terrorists fight with their grandfathers' hand-me down AK-47's from "terror" tunnels (that have to be called that to sound even vaguely threatening).
The maddening thing is that exactly because Israel has such overwhelming military superiority -and not just against Hamas, but also against Lebanon, Syria, Iran sorta, everyone around it- they can absolutely make peace if they wanted. Its enemies would surely prefer that to having to fight Israel. Even Hamas' founders once resolved to make peace with Israel and what did Israel do? It assassinated them [1].
It is clear that Israel has convinced itself, as a nation, over multiple governments and generations, that its best interests are served by making constant, total war on its neighbours. Israel doesn't want peace.
But, to answer your question: that's exactly what it "should" do; make peace. That's the only way to not make war.
Yassin on several occasions proposed long-term ceasefire agreements, or truces, so called hudnas, in exchange for Israeli concessions. All such offers were rejected by Israel. Following his release from Israeli prison in 1997, he proposed a ten-year truce in exchange for total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza and a stop to Israeli attacks on civilians. In 1999, in an interview with an Egyptian newspaper, he again offered a truce:[41]
We have to be realistic. We are talking about a homeland that was stolen a long time ago in 1948 and again in 1967. My generation today is telling the Israelis, 'Let's solve this problem now, on the basis of the 1967 borders. Let's end this conflict by declaring a temporary ceasefire. Let's leave the bigger issue for future generations to decide.' The Palestinians will decide in the future about the nature of relations with Israel, but it must be a democratic decision.[41]
It was shortly after once such truce offer, in January 2004, that Yassin was assassinated.[42]
His second in command was also assassinated for the same reason. Can't find the article now.
The Cambodia - Thailand conflict is more like Gaza pre-10/7. Cambodia shot some rockets, killed some innocent Thai, and Thailand responded with overwhelming firepower. Same as when Gaza used to shoot rockets and kill civilians, then get destructive counter attacks from Israel.
The equivalent of the current Israeli-Palestine war would be Cambodia breaking a ceasefire to kill, torture and rape 1,000 civilians, and took hundreds back as hostages.
I'm sorry but your argument is defeated by the reality that there was a Hudna on October 7th, and Hamas broke it with a brutal attack killing and kidnapping hundreds of civilians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks)
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