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Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Israel is a borderline failed state
2025-08-01
[NonZionism] Many IDF soldiers on the ground believe that the goal of the Gaza war is to destroy as much stuff as possible so that the population has to leave and it can be annexed and settled.
How many is many? And how does the writer know?
That's not what it is? I sure thought it was. Israel cannot live next to such people. The entire 7 million population
…actually somewhere around 1.1 million in Gaza, though they claim something like 2 million — the number keeps changing on the upside. Where did the non-Zionist (whatever that means) get such an outlandish number?
must be relocated. Turning their homes into bouncing rubble ensures they have nothing to come back to.
Between the tunnels and Hamas thoroughly wiring the buildings above with mines to kill IDF troops coming through, Israel hasn’t had to do much to set off the explosions bouncing Gazan rubble. Had Hamas not started the war, none of it would have been discovered.
This is a minority position among Israelis overall, but not a tiny minority, and it is the majority position among religious Zionists, who are disproportionately represented among those still showing up for miluim combat roles. We do not need to speculate as to how they got this idea into their head because it has been repeatedly stated by government ministers, including last week.

The IDF cannot enforce discipline violations by its soldiers or junior generals. The purpose of the riot at Sdei Teiman - which included coalition MKs as participants - was to raise the costs of army discipline to the degree that no enforcement of IDF rules will happen even under the most extreme circumstances. Therefore, de facto the IDF is no longer even an army in the commonly accepted use of the term in modern times, but a collection of militias, analogous to (though not as far gone as) the Syrian army.
Oh dear, ohdear, ohdear.
If units in Gaza think their job is to depopulate Gaza, that is what they are going to do.

The Religious Zionists in the government are not per se running military strategy, but they are able to do two things. The first is to block any alternative military strategy in Gaza by threatening to bolt the coalition. The second is to push for ’more’ or ’stronger’ military action. In combination, this allows them to effectively drive policy by default, and the simplest explanation for their repeated statements that they are in the process of emptying out Gaza is that they believe they are successfully doing so.

On the very first day that Gazans died while trying to receive food at GHF aid-distribution sites,
…murdered by Hamas shooters for daring to pick up the free 95 million meals GHF has been giving away since they started in May— cutting the UN and Hamas out of the loop and taking away the billions of dollars they’ve taken in selling donated food at wartime profits…
it was very obvious that - even completely ignoring all moral considerations whatsoever - Israel had an urgent and overriding strategic interest in finding out what happened and preventing it. There has now been more than a month of almost daily incidents, if anything increasing in their awfulness. It may be that there is still some kind of explanation that exonerates IDF generals of war crimes that would justifiably incur the death penalty, but there is no theoretically possible explanation that could exonerate the Israeli state as a whole of complete dysfunctionality.
Because Israel bears the burden of Hamas murdering its own people? Go fuck yourself, you lying Jew-hater.
The centre-Left IDF leadership has consistently refused to present a coherent military strategy of its own. Instead, they have spent two years trying to shirk as much responsibility as possible while half-heartedly implementing policies they know make no sense. We can understand their predicament, but if they believe they have been placed in an impossible situation, the morally responsible thing for them to do is resign.

The only part of the Israeli army that really works is the airforce.1 In addition, use of airpower is far less likely to lead to military casualties than any other form of military action. These two factors leads to extreme over-reliance on the IAF to achieve tactical and strategic objectives. This is all understandable, but it doesn’t change the reality that the range of military goals that can be achieved by airpower is actually very limited. This was evident even in Iran after a week, but it is far more so the case in Gaza. What over-reliance on airpower does guarantee is a constant stream of mass-casualty events.

These are accidental when divided up into each individual case, but they are deliberate when considered in the aggregate because there is no way that you can do so many airstrikes without it happening. If Israel wants to enforce a successful military occupation of Gaza, planes would play a very small role in that. What it needs is a well-disciplined army with lots of fluent Arabic speakers, and good local intelligence.

The military goal of eliminating Hamas can only happen if there is a replacement regime to take over. Israel has consistently refused to identify such a regime, and so the military goal is in a basic sense unachievable. Israel lacks not only the military capabilities to enforce regime change on Gaza, but even the desire to do so. At earlier stages in the war, there were other comprehensible military goals, namely deterrence, and degradation of Hamas’ military capacity to strike Israel.

Presently, though, Israel is doing whatever it is doing for no purpose that can be articulated. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense from the perspective of driving Palestinians out of Gaza, since the obstacle to that now is not that they have yet to be sufficiently immiserated, but that no-one is willing to take them. Israel is flooding the world media with images of malnourished children for no reason at all, just as a result of systemic state malfunction.
Israel is flooding?? The writer is clearly hallucinating.
Hamas has employed for much of its history a human shield policy and a human sacrifice policy. In this war, the human shield part is basically irrelevant: except in very extreme circumstances, Israel decided to shoot through them. However, the human sacrifice policy is very much in effect. Hamas’ goal is to provoke and manoeuvre Israel into committing atrocities that halt or reverse regional normalisation, undermine international support, and incur diplomatic and economic sanctions.

The IDF today, instead of being an instrument for the Israeli state to pursue its long-term strategic goals, has effectively become an instrument for Hamas to pursue its strategic goals.

Hamas is not purely an ideological organisation - it has many leaders and employees who want to live and live comfortably - but, in so far as it can be modelled ideologically, it is now directing large parts of the Israeli state to do its bidding.

Gaza is a big pile of rubble; its people live in tents, with lives of relentless misery, periodically punctuated by mortars or airstrikes. They live this way because they allowed (or, in many cases, eagerly assisted) the absolute worst, most loathsome and vile elements of their society to take command and steer them towards disaster in the service of ethnic narcissism, wounded pride, pathological brooding over historical grievances, revenge, and bullshit counterfeit religion.

In as much as collective responsibility can ever make sense as a moral doctrine, they have merited what has happened to them. And so will we.

Strictly speaking, there is also the navy and some other strategically irrelevant sections.


Posted by:Elmomoter Mussolini9149

#9  its clear that they are a problem no one else wants

A problem elsewhere and an asset where they are - you don't really think Arabs have given up their war against Israel?
Posted by: Grom the Affective   2025-08-01 17:02  

#8  When the Arab and islamic world refuses to help the refugees, its clear that they are a problem no one else wants.
Posted by: 49 Pan   2025-08-01 15:59  

#7  #4 If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
Posted by: Grom the Affective   2025-08-01 14:42  

#6  IDF soldiers on the ground believe that the goal of the Gaza war is to destroy as much stuff as possible.

According to anonymous sources, there *is* an IDF soldier who believes this. But in fairness to Pvt Moshe Pyle, he is part of an artillery unit and his job is basically to destroy as much stuff as he can from a distance.
Posted by: SteveS   2025-08-01 14:07  

#5  Which Democrat wrote this?
Posted by: Matt   2025-08-01 13:17  

#4  LoLz: IDF soldiers on the ground believe that the goal of the Gaza war is to destroy as much stuff as possible.

First sentence is an utter disaster. Everything that follows will be tripe garbage. No further reading is necessitated. Author is a clown.
Posted by: mossomo   2025-08-01 12:46  

#3  #2 Right
Evolution of emotional contagion in group-living animals
Posted by: Grom the Affective   2025-08-01 10:34  

#2  ^ good point but a caveat

There are people who have basically made a career or a second income in being anti Israel.

However, there are probably fewer than a thousand who have done that. The remaining hundreds of thousands of anti Israel zealots have a mental condition which gives them a shot of dopamine whenever they say something they think is important.
Posted by: Lord Garth   2025-08-01 09:22  

#1  Gazans are vermin - and so is everyone who supports them: from secretary general of UN and down to the dumbest (and fattest) African-American freshperson in some US university.
Israel is the most brilliant success in the history of the World.
Anti-Zionist Jews are morally inferior to Jews that collaborated with the Nazis - the latter was motivated by fear for their lives, the former are making a career.
Posted by: Grom the Affective   2025-08-01 01:36  

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