“No one is looking at us or the extent of this disaster or the crimes that we are experiencing in Gaza,” he said. Still holding his microphone, he slid off his flak jacket marked with the word PRESS and unstrapped his helmet.
“These protection jackets and helmets don’t protect us,” he said, flinging the equipment to the ground. “Nothing protects journalists. … We lose our lives for no reason.”
I’m sure this will work about as well as the US attempt to get rid of the Taliban. Or as well as any of the other instances in the past of trying to get rid of an ideological group through violence.
It doesn’t work. It makes everything worse. It radicalizes survivors and kills lots of innocent people.
Some day maybe humanity will collectively abandon these cycles of hatred and violence played out over decades. But I doubt it.
You have a point, but it’s not really the same thing and there’s a very good recent counter-example too. ISIS was effectively dealt with despite being spread out over a much larger area. Taliban won, but it had a whole huge country to work in and was nowhere near as violent as Hamas, so it had more support. Gaza is tiny in comparison, blocked on all sides and neighbors of Israel don’t want anything to do with them either, even if they don’t like Israel. There is also at least some alternative in Fatah, which didn’t lose the 2005 elections by that much.
Imo it’s clearly possible to get rid of Hamas, though I’m not making any claims about the probability that it will happen.
Mostly, I don’t really see an alternative. Some radical action needed to be taken because anything else would be interpreted as a clear proof that large terrorist attacks against civilians work, and Hamas should continue committing them. You cannot appease someone whose reason for existence is violence. And keeping Hamas sort of in check, only killing or capturing the worst terrorists, which is what was being done in the last two decades, clearly did not work either.
You don’t see any alternative to the slaying of people in a 10 to 1 ratio in what is an offensive reprisal attack? I mean Machiavelli would agree with you.