Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 28 2025 03:41pm)

It's fair to turn the tables, but I think you're missing the mark here. I do not support ethnic cleansing for the sake of ethnic cleansing. I was willing to tolerate a rather high amount of civilian collateral damage during Israel's Gaza campaign as long as it served a worthwhile goal: neutering Hamas (at least for the time being), which in turn prevents future deaths among Israeli civilians. As soon as I felt like continuing this campaign would make no more meaningful progress toward this goal, my concern for the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians took priority again, so that I now want this campaign to wrap up. (Side note: I disagree that what Israel did here ever qualified as a genoicde or an ethnic cleansing.)



They did go into a lot of those tunnels and destroyed them, though. Israel had to displace the civilian population living on top of those tunnels so that their own ground troops could gain access and go to work.






Gas does not destroy infrastructure. Without a bombing campaign or deploying ground troops to Gaza, the Hamas fighters could just have come out of their tunnels, waited until the chlorine gas had dissipated and then gone back in, with all their facilities and arms factories still intact. Also, you just know that Hamas would have seized the opportunity to shoot clips of children or women suffocating from the gas and thus fueling their propaganda campaign. And this would of course have been a death sentence for most of the hostages...

PR-wise, Israel was already on very thin ice anyway. Actually using a WMD on Gaza would have discredited them with large swaths of the global community once and for all. This is a completely batshit-insane idea the longer I think about it.

Quote (El1te @ 29 Jan 2025 01:36)

It doesn't need to destroy infrastructure. It destroys people. Chlorine gas is almost 3 times as heavy as air, thus will sink & fill the tunnels by itself. Not only that, it displaces air, so gas masks won't save them. And no they couldn't have exited the tunnels, you mean to become sitting ducks for the IDF? Hamas is zero match for the IDF on the field. They have no tanks. The gas would be in addition to the ground assault.

Isn't it clear that destroying infrastructure doesn't do a whole lot? Buildings can be rebuilt, people can't be revived. Hamas from the looks of it is still completely operational because they went and hid in the tunnels where Israel can't attack without being slaughtered in choke points.

If you're thinking about PR you've already lost the war, this was Israel's folly. The allies didn't care about PR when they firebombed Tokyo and Dresden, slaughtering countless civilians, hostages, prisoners, whatever.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 28 2025 04:51pm)

The Allies consisted of all of the world's major powers except for the Axis itself. They had all the natural resources and industrial capacity in the world. Israel doesn't, they depend on foreign arms supplies to defend themselves. Missile defense, ammunition, you name it. So "the rest of the world turning on them" was no threat for the Allies while it was a very real threat for Israel.

Before bombing Gaza and displacing its civilian population, Israel wouldn't have been able to place troops at all the tunnel exit to kill the Hamas fighters trying to flee from the gas. So your argument that using the gas would have prevented the destruction of schools, hospitals etc. in Gaza imho doesn't hold up. The argument that they should have used chlorine gas to smoke out the Hamas fighters hiding in the tunnels hinges on the assumption that most of their fighters did indeed hide down there and that the tunnels Israel entered and/or destroyed only made up a tiny fraction of their network. Tbh I can't really tell if that's true or not.

In any case, the "gas them"-approach would have come with dead hostages, gut-wrenching clips of children suffocating from the gas, and with proving the other side's propaganda right.

Quote (El1te @ 29 Jan 2025 01:55)

The other side's propaganda simply doesn't matter if they're destroyed.

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But it doesn't matter. People have short memories. They'll bark for a couple of years, then forget, like always.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 28 2025 05:32pm)

In this case, 'the other side' doesn't just mean Hamas, it means all radical Muslims who want to destroy Israel. Hamas were just their shock troopers, destroying them would not change the underlying hatred among tens of millions of Muslims. Keep in mind that Israel has kicked their shit in time and time again and they still keep coming back for more. You simply cannot subjugate and occupy the entire Arab world to root out this pernicious ideology the way it was possible to defeat and occupy all of Germany and Japan.


In this conflict, both sides have a very long memory. The Palestinians (and those who sympathize with their cause) still reee about what happened in 1948, just like Israel hasn't forgotten the Yom Kippur War and won't forget the October 7 massacre.

Quote (El1te @ Jan 28 2025 07:59pm)

Those Muslims already hate Israel. They already believe that Israel is mercilessly slaughtering children. This is a simple choice A or B scenario. Choice A, Israel capitulates, leaving their enemy intact. The propaganda continues, Israel kills babies etc. Choice B, Israel gasses the tunnels destroying Hamas, and enslaves the remaining Gaza population. The propaganda still continues, Israel kills babies etc. The propaganda doesn't change. It doesn't require more validation, they have all the validation they want. They already have the videos of mangled children under rubble, schools, hospitals, everything.

I mean short memory only if they're vanquished. There will always be holdouts, but irrelevant holdouts. Spanish civil war: Franco wins and there are still radical holdouts trying to loudspeaker their propaganda. Franco just ignores them and rightfully only refers to them as bandits. They disappear in a few years. None of Israel's enemies have been vanquished (nor has Israel of course). They've been bloodied up in a serious of wars spanning decades, not defeated. Machiavelli wrote about this: if you are to defeat an enemy you should defeat them in whole, or else they only seek vengeance.

Quote (PapaPsych @ Jan 28 2025 06:03pm)

Imagine simping for con artists.
Israel vanquished Germany.

Quote (El1te @ 29 Jan 2025 02:59)

Those Muslims already hate Israel. They already believe that Israel is mercilessly slaughtering children. This is a simple choice A or B scenario. Choice A, Israel capitulates, leaving their enemy intact. The propaganda continues, Israel kills babies etc. Choice B, Israel gasses the tunnels destroying Hamas, and enslaves the remaining Gaza population. The propaganda still continues, Israel kills babies etc. The propaganda doesn't change. It doesn't require more validation, they have all the validation they want. They already have the videos of mangled children under rubble, schools, hospitals, everything.

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I mean short memory only if they're vanquished. There will always be holdouts, but irrelevant holdouts. Spanish civil war: Franco wins and there are still radical holdouts trying to loudspeaker their propaganda. Franco just ignores them and rightfully only refers to them as bandits. They disappear in a few years. None of Israel's enemies have been vanquished (nor has Israel of course). They've been bloodied up in a serious of wars spanning decades, not defeated. Machiavelli wrote about this: if you are to defeat an enemy you should defeat them in whole, or else they only seek vengeance.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 28 2025 06:22pm)

You're conflating two different arguments. 1.) Israel using a WMD would absolutely have made a difference for the Palestinian propaganda efforts in Western countries, countries whose support Israel still needs. 2.) Even if Hamas had been fully destroyed or vanquished, a new terrorist organization espousing the same ideology would have emerged in its place. The same is not true for Germany, Japan or Franco-era Spain.



And that's point I'm trying to make: vanquishing Hamas alone accomplishes almost nothing; Israel would need to vanquish the entire Arab world to have a chance at rooting out the ideology of its opponents in similar fashion to how the Allies pacified Germany and Japan, or to how Franco got Spain under control. And that is very obviously never going to happen. You're pointing to historical examples as a blueprint for what Israel should do while ignoring that the situations cannot be compared.

Quote (El1te @ 29 Jan 2025 05:22)

The whole Arab world doesn't have a robust network of terror tunnels. Israel also fought that war to keep them off the borders. The tunnels are the primary target for destruction here, which can only be accomplished by flooding them out, less you take tens of thousands of casualties. As of right now, the tunnels are intact while Israel is pulling out. And Hamas is about to reap a ton of money for rebuilding, it's almost like they've won a war. They can now lay low and rebuild.