Too bad militants don't really follow those same rules regarding uniforms etc. Trust was lost long ago, before even the first suicide bomber wearing civilian clothes set themselves off in a crowded market.
I think we could all agree that we shouldn't be sending billions of dollars to a country that uses the same tactics or worse than a militia.
Of course, unless you think state-sponsored terrorism is a good thing, or that it actually works to "fight fire with fire" (hint: fighting fire with water is far more effective).
> Warfare is what happens when negotiations and treaties fail.
In the case of Israel, they are intentionally failing the negotiation part as they commit an active genocide. Their motto has always been "do 10x to your enemy as they've done to you" and at some point it completely fails.
If you're going to clutch pearls about literal war you're missing the point. Anything goes in war... that's the point. The concept of "war crimes" are, again, just part of game-theoretic calculations that agents make when they are deciding what lengths they are willing to go to in order to achieve their goals.
People think war has rules because most wars on television are completely lopsided affairs.
Arguable genocides in war are extremely common in war, and are probably the rule, not the exception. In recent years we've effectively seen an equivalent in the Sri Lankan Civil War, DRC, Darfur, Burma, I could go on. War is fucking terrible, and people should take every reasonable avenue to avoid them.
Do you really think something from 1946, before the current state of Israel was even founded, is really relevant in this discussion? If we judged every country based on its 1946 behavior, we'd have to write off pretty much everyone.
Most particularly given the responses made to similar methods used currently against the party which had executed KDH, as it turns out that there is in fact precedent. The personnel in the KDH event are significant both historically and politically, one later serving as head of state. And I find most people are entirely unaware of the incident, as I was until the past decade or so. (That's "recent" for me.)
I don't recall the specific inspiration for my search in which I'd learned of the event, but I think it was simply looking for what the first modern use of terrorist-type explosive attacks was. There are of course many earlier instances, and the notion of the bomb-throwing anarchist is reduced to cliche. But in terms of a significant planned attack intended to inflict mass casualties against an asymmetric foe, the KDH instance is an exemplar.
As I've said in several recent comments on pager/radio threads, I'm not a partisan to either side, I both condemn actions taken by both, and have a deep sympathy for uninvolved civilians (which is not, of course, all civilians). What I do believe is that a deep understanding is best served by a realistic view, understanding that most hats are at best grey, and that there's more history than many people are aware of. I'm trying to help spread that awareness.
I have no complaint with the idea of spreading more awareness, and think that's a good thing.
That said, you were specifically responding to this comment:
> Too bad militants don't really follow those same rules regarding uniforms etc. Trust was lost long ago, before even the first suicide bomber wearing civilian clothes set themselves off in a crowded market.
My point was that this is long enough ago, and before Israel was even founded, so bringing it up as a counter-example of Israeli behavior, which is what you seemed to do, is very fraught. Israel didn't even exist at that time!
The meta-context is that "suicide bomber" tends now to be strongly associated with Islamist / Palestinian groups. At least in the post-WWII middle-eastern context, that's not where the practice of bombing as a terror tactic began.
Again, it surprised me to learn this, and I find many others are similarly unaware. And again: the situation is complex and nuanced.
That's fair, though there was a lot of violence against Jews before this, things like the Hebron massacre, though they weren't terror attacks.
Also, I'd point out that the attack on the King David Hotel was widely condemned by almost all mainstream Jewish and Zionist organizations, including the official Porto-army of Israel which turned into the IDF, and including by Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister.
Btw, if you want a fact that's sure to wow people - I'm fairly certain that, to date, the KDH bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the Palestinian/Israeli territory. (Excluding October 7th, of course, which I'd personally categorize as an invasion, not as a single terror attack.)
NB: Skimming that article right now, the bombing seems to have pre-dated Hezbollah (generally given to have formed in 1985), though Iran's hand in affairs is fairly likely, and "Islamic Jihad" may have been a label adopted by Hezbollah or a nascent precursor group. The event is somewhat coupled to events in Palestine given the PLO's involvement in Beirut.
