Comment on In the Hamas/Israel war, why does Palestine have "hostages" but Israel has "prisoners"?
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months agoThose were cobbled together using material stolen from the people of Gaza.
They were bought from Iran, generally. Sometimes from other Iran-backed militants, which is the same thing
nandeEbisu@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Some of it, yes. Along with training. Either way, the only skin in the game I have regarding what Hamas does is as a human being who condemns terrorism against Israelis and the oppression of Gazans, but I’m not materially supporting it.
With Israel my money is directly funding their weapons systems. I think it’s reasonable to demand that they not violate the Geneva convention and if they are going to bomb hospitals and refugee camps they at least have reliable evidence gathered beforehand that doing so will achieve military objectives of an appropriate magnitude that warrants it.
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Your money generally funds the iron dome.
Also this is kind of unrelated but I hate this kind of language because it so misleading:
They’re only called refugee camps because Gaza is not formally a state. They’re modern cities.
en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Palestinian_refugee_camps
I’m not exactly a fan of how Israel is eating this war but engaging with truth is important.
nandeEbisu@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah, for my own sanity I limit how deep I dive into some of this. I don’t think you need to dive super deep though to say the standard for bombing civilian infrastructure is higher than bombing military installations and what Israel has bombed are civilian sreas.
I get that Hamas is coopting a lot of civic locations like schools and hospitals, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to raze cities.
We support Israel is more ways than just military assistance, but even there paying for the Iron Dome just frees up money to spend elsewhere. It’s not like the only effect of our money is building this defensive capacity, it’s all the things enabled by Israel having gotten this infrastructure subsidized.
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Our “paying for the iron dome” is us paying the cost to US weapons manufacturers to send ammunition and terminals for it, mostly. It’s not quite that fungible a concept.
I strongly support our aid for Israel, but I think we should harness our leverage more to rein in how Israel chooses to prosecute their wars.