Izraelsko-palestinský konflikt

[qnx]

Petr.Kubik: Je to smutné, ale to je válka a součástí jsou i vedlejší škody. Proto chcimíři chtějí mír, vítej v klubu.

[davkol]

Ne, není to válka, nýbrž masakr. Piráti se rozhodují podle dat, nebo jak bylo to krédo?

What’s Happening in Gaza Is Not a War. It’s a Massacre.

The genocide hearings will take years to reach a verdict, but as social scientists, we can assess the violence in Israel and Gaza based on other objective criteria.

…

As scholars of conflict and political violence, it is our job to seek clear and consistent ways to understand concepts like war, terrorism, and coercion with sufficient empiricism to avoid being confused or disoriented by the passions of the moment. To that end, we will discuss three objective elements of the violence in Israel and Gaza in service of appropriately defining the conflict: the types of political actors involved in the fighting, the numbers of fatalities, and the dynamics between combatants and civilians.

Based on these three elements, it is difficult to characterize the Israeli military campaign as war. In fact, applying objective criteria used by the Correlates of War project (COW), a widely used resource on historical armed conflicts, it’s debatable whether any of the violence between Israel and Palestinian groups in the past two decades could be classified as war. Technically speaking, the more appropriate classification is colonial massacre.

…

Israel is a sovereign state. The Gaza Strip is a territory outside the recognized territory of Israel but with borders, airspace, and economic regulations that are directly controlled by Israel, making it definitionally a “protectorate” or “dependency.” Hamas is a non-state organization that governs Gaza by force but without sovereignty or full recognition in the international system. Based on the COW criteria, if the current conflict were to be classified as a war it would be an extra-state war, specifically a colonial war – the same way COW coded the years-long “al-Aqsa Intifada” (also known as the “Second Intifada”) that started in 2000.

If the conflict in Gaza is a war, COW criteria would classify it as a “colonial war,” but does it meet the criteria for war in the first place?

The conflict clearly meets the first requirement of at least 1,000 combat fatalities within a year. However, the COW typology includes another important criterion of war: both sides must have the military capacity to mount “effective resistance,” assessed in terms of the relative fatalities inflicted by both sides. The weaker opponent must be able to inflict at least 5% of the combat fatalities that it sustains. Conflicts in which the stronger side sustains any less than 5% of the deaths that it inflicts are not considered wars, but are instead called “massacres” or “one-sided state killings.”

…

The present scale of death and destruction in Gaza is far greater than any violence between Israelis and Palestinians since the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. However, in terms of the proportion of fatalities on either side, the current fighting is fairly consistent with previous episodes of conflict between Israel and Hamas since Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documents casualty data for Israelis and Palestinians from 2008, the first major fighting following Hamas’ ascent in Gaza, until 2023 just prior to the Oct. 7 attack. Looking at the fatalities on both sides from 2008 to pre- Oct. 7 2023, the total number of Israeli deaths (308) amounts to 4.8% of the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel (6,407). Narrowing the data to only include deaths from fighting in Gaza, the number of Israelis killed (52) is less than 1% of Gazans killed (5,365) during this 15-year period.

The OCHA data marks four periods of “major hostilities” between Israel and the Palestinians: 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Two of these conflicts involved more than 1,000 total deaths, and none of them came close to the threshold for effective resistance. Although these episodes were widely termed “wars” in the media, by the numbers they were massacres.

…

The effective resistance requirement is significant because it emphasizes that in conflict, power disparities matter tremendously. The term “war” implies a contest of arms between roughly comparable armed forces. If the killing is so one-sided that it fails this minimum test of effective resistance, it doesn’t qualify as a war, and is likely the sort of state violence that could justify international intervention under the responsibility to protect civilians.

Wars involving non-state actors can be especially difficult to research. In some cases, governments have simply not counted deaths from non-state groups, making information about their casualties too unreliable or inconsistent for social scientific verification. For this reason, the original COW typology only considered fatalities among state forces, excluding those suffered by civilians and non-state groups (like Hamas). Other major datasets, such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, do not define war, but instead separately categorize “armed conflicts” and “one-sided violence.” The major distinction drawn between the two is whether fatalities were armed combatants or civilians.

Clearly, the conflict between Israel and Hamas – and conflicts in general – should be assessed based on both civilian and combatant deaths on all sides if at all possible. That is because systematically ignoring them would entirely misrepresent the dynamics and human costs of state violence. And in the case of Israel and Gaza, we have reliable enough data on overall fatalities for all sides. In fact, the ongoing violence in Gaza constitutes one of the most well-documented mass killings in history.

However, it is not just the disparity in casualties, but the particular dynamic between the belligerents that makes this conflict more massacre than war.

Israel controls Gaza’s borders, coastline, and airspace. Hamas was able to kill hundreds of Israeli civilians in the Oct. 7 attack, shocking the Israel Defense Forces and wounding the Israeli national psyche, but in general Hamas has little ability to significantly damage Israel militarily. The Israeli civilian population is protected by now-secured borders, a modern conventional military, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, and security guarantees from the strongest military in the world.

Hamas, on the other hand, has no ability to protect Palestinian territory or civilians from Israeli airpower. And with the entire Gaza Strip exposed and its borders closed, Hamas has no ability to provide aid or move civilians out of harm’s way, even if it had the will to do so. Though often rightly accused of using civilians as human shields, the reality is that Hamas has little choice. It can use tunnels to hide its combat forces and ambush Israeli troops, but Israeli soldiers can kill Palestinian civilians and destroy civil infrastructure at will.

The result is an extraordinarily asymmetric conflict in which a state’s advanced conventional military is fighting an irregular force of violent non-state actors, while civilians on one side only are subjected to indiscriminate bombing and crossfire, all within political borders controlled by the other side.

…

The ICJ will spend the next several years determining whether Israel is guilty of genocide. In the meantime, whatever our personal attachments and opinions on the conflict, we should strive for intellectual honesty and precision in the terms we use to discuss the horrific violence in Israel and Gaza. As the fighting drags on and Palestinian casualties continue to mount, it is increasingly clear that social scientists and historians will not regard what’s happening in Gaza as a war, but as a massacre.

James A. Siebens, Benjamin S. Case
March 5, 2024
Inkstick

[qnx]

davkol: Války jsou na masakrech založené. Nevidím v tom rozpor.

[vilik]

Nějak to tady umlklo.

Zajímalo by mě, proč česká vláda i prezident zastává v konfliktu silně proizraelský postoj. Věcné zdůvonění sem nikdy neslyšel. Co se zahraničních vztahů týče, tak mám obavu, že z dlouhodobého hlediska nám tento postoj spíše škodí

[qnx]

vilik: Naše vláda je proválečná. Jak je někde příležitost podporovat vraždění, tak se toho s chutí ujme.

[Petr.Vileta]

vilik: Naše vláda je proválečná. Jak je někde příležitost podporovat vraždění, tak se toho s chutí ujme.

Naše vláda je proti agresorům, teroristům a bezpráví. Jak jeden začne vraždit jiného, je třeba ho potrestat, a pokud si nedá říci, tak i zabít.

[qnx]

Petr.Vileta: Takže naše vláda bude zabíjet koho vlastně? Ukrajince terorizující ruské obyvatelstvo? Izraelce terorizující obyvatelstvo palestinské? Američany za jejich teror na různých místech světa?

[eladar]

vilik: Naše vláda je proválečná. Jak je někde příležitost podporovat vraždění, tak se toho s chutí ujme.

Naše vláda je proti agresorům, teroristům a bezpráví. Jak jeden začne vraždit jiného, je třeba ho potrestat, a pokud si nedá říci, tak i zabít.

... a proč tedy nezasáhne třeba v Sýrii a nezaútočí na okupanty, když je tak zásadová ...

... na Turecko nebo USA ..?

[MirekS]

... a proč tedy nezasáhne třeba v Sýrii a nezaútočí na okupanty, když je tak zásadová ...

... na Turecko nebo USA ..?

Tímto jako byste prezentoval snahu o dosažení nereálného stavu "české vlády coby četníka a soudce světa" v jedné osobě. Všichni víme, že na to nemá dostatečné lidské, materiální ani finanční prostředky, nehledíc na to, jak by to asi bylo přijímáno mezinárodním společenstvím.

[eladar]

... a proč tedy nezasáhne třeba v Sýrii a nezaútočí na okupanty, když je tak zásadová ...

... na Turecko nebo USA ..?

Tímto jako byste prezentoval snahu o dosažení nereálného stavu "české vlády coby četníka a soudce světa" v jedné osobě. Všichni víme, že na to nemá dostatečné lidské, materiální ani finanční prostředky, nehledíc na to, jak by to asi bylo přijímáno mezinárodním společenstvím.

Reagoval jsem na výrok Petra Vilety, že, cit: "Naše vláda je proti agresorům, teroristům a bezpráví. Jak jeden začne vraždit jiného, je třeba ho potrestat, a pokud si nedá říci, tak i zabít." A poukazuji na pokrytectví a dvojí metr, které se v této oblasti uplatňuje.

A pokud jde o tvrzení, že: "... na to nemá dostatečné lidské, materiální ani finanční prostředky". Domnívám se, že jde o hluboké nepochopení problému. Konflikty se dají řešit i jinak než vojenskými prostředky. Zahraniční politika ČR byla vždycky hodnocena vysoko, protože jako malá země jsme měli spoustu příležitostí utvářet si vztahy na všech stranách a v případě konfliktu hrát roli prostředníka.

Bohužel Lipavský moc nechápe roli Ministerstva zahraničí a plete si roli diplomata a aktivisty. O jeho managerských schopnostech nemluvě. Ten člověk úspěšně ničí to, co před ním vytvářely generace diplomatů. Lipavský je tragédií pro naši zahraniční politiku a pro postavení ČR ve světě.