Are those 50,000 future Hamas babies about to shoot RPGs any time soon? That Hamas spokesman quote was amusingly Nazi-esque. They were also obsessed with a baby to sociopathic murderer pipeline. The somewhat older child soldiers Hamas has filled its ranks with after losing 21,000 well trained and armed combatants are portrayed by foreign leftists with no combat experience as a “see, Hamas can’t be defeated”. That forgets the historical reality that by the time an army is forced to fill its ranks with old men and young teens it has definitely lost the war. WW2 ended with the Nazis doing the same thing in desperation and it did fuck all for their genocidal cause. Hamas isn’t doing well, only people with a need to sell “Israel shouldn’t be allowed to fight back against Hamas” claim otherwise.
As for hitting Hamas leadership, Israel is actually using a Gam v’Gam approach - rolling up the territory Hamas is alive in, which also forces leadership into the open to be killed. That’s what happened to Yahya Sinwar, and it will continue to happen to the diminishing number of Hamas leaders. Without a leadership that has a clue about how to get money and arms and training and control over new, barely trained child soldiers Hamas will collapse as Hezbollah did. A leadership vacuum does that.
Last thing - can we stop comparing Gaza to Vietnam? Absolutely nothing in common between the wars.
> "Last thing - can we stop comparing Gaza to Vietnam? Absolutely nothing in common between the wars."
Can you outline the key differences you would see? The Gazans don't have supply lines and backing from the Soviet Union, certainly, but they're hardly psychologically equivalent to 1940s Germans either.
1. North Vietnam/Vietcong didn't invade the continental USA. Hamas invaded what's been sovereign territory of Israel since 1948.
2. North Vietnam/Vietcong didn't torture, rape, wound, murder US citizens on US soil. Hamas did all of those to thousands of Israeli citizens. Very different level of motivation for US and IDF soldiers.
3. North Vietnam/Vietcong didn't abduct US citizens from inside territorial USA. Hamas abducted 251 Israeli citizens, most of them civilians from inside Israel into Gaza.
4. Vietnam is 7746 miles from California, 6268 miles from Hawaii. Gaza is 2.5-4 miles from Israel.
5. The US military had to institute a draft for the Vietnam War. Israel already has a draft, a reserve duty system. While both have seen extended service periods, it isn't new in any way.
6. The US military could retreat from Vietnam without any risk to civilians inside the USA. This is absolutely not the case for Israel. Israeli civilians are at a far lower risk than on October 6 2023, but if Israel didn't press ahead with destroying Hamas leadership, combatants, ammunition depots, arms manufacturing, the risk to its civilians would mount once again. The less time Israel spends hitting Hamas, the faster it can recover to commit more atrocities against Israeli civilians.
7. Vietnam never made threats against US civilians; its war wasn't part of a genocidal campaign against Americans. Hamas in its founding covenant has the genocide and ethnic cleansing as its goal. It has murdered and injured thousands of Israeli civilians. October 7 was the biggest single day massacre of Jews since the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen. Hamas has openly stated it will commit many more October 7 style atrocities as soon as it can. It signed its own death warrant.
8. Any US civilians living and working in Vietnam had the safety of the US to return to. Most Israelis aren't dual citizens of any country. Israeli Jews have nowhere to "go back to", and will therefore fight tenaciously against Islamist terrorism in ways the US has thankfully never needed to - Israelis have no such luxury.
9. North Vietnam had massive supply lines from China and Russia into the country and through North Vietnam to the Vietcong. Hamas is now cut off with no supply lines.
10. North Vietnam never suffered a massive loss of military and civilian leadership. Hamas is nearing Hezbollah levels of leadership wipeout.
Not sure on what basis you claim that Gazans are psychologically unlike the Germans during Nazi rule. They're extremely similar, just as "pro Palestinians" around the world are extremely like Nazi sympathizers.
Most of this is pertaining to the justification for the war (which I'm not really disputing), not the tactical particulars or likelihood of victory.
> "North Vietnam had massive supply lines from China and Russia into the country and through North Vietnam to the Vietcong. Hamas is now cut off with no supply lines... ...North Vietnam never suffered a massive loss of military and civilian leadership. Hamas is nearing Hezbollah levels of leadership wipeout"
I hope you're right, but other writers seem to be extremely skeptical on this topic (I was going to raise the issue that Hamas fighters have never been terribly well-trained or equipped compared to the IDF, so they've always relied entirely on stalling and attrition tactics. They win by not losing, and there are still a lot of leftover rockets and weapons caches in the strip that were never identified.)
There's certainly no meaningful end-game here that doesn't involve either a long-term Israeli occupation or some other coalition force (maybe put together by Arab countries or- hilariously- the Irish labour party), which is necessarily going to be costly in terms of lives and funding for whoever decides to take over management instead. There's certainly no point to just 'declaring victory' and leaving a power vacuum for Hamas (or whatever domestic jihadist org comes to power) to fill again, with or without reconstruction.
I'd suggest you follow Andrew Fox and John Spencer. The Hamas fighters of October 7 were well trained and extremely heavily armed - Israeli special forces were shocked by just how much RPGs, machine guns and sniper rifles Nukhba units had. These were heavily armed assault troops. The only person trying to portray them as badly equipped recently is Netanyahu and he got heaps of derision for claiming they came in with AK-47s and flip-flops. Nobody was in flip-flops - it was a heavily armed division of assault troops. There were no stalling and attrition tactics the first few days of the war. That's the kind of operation Hamas cannot carry out any more after being stomped. The harder Israel hits Hamas, the longer (hopefully if ever) for them to regain that operational capacity. The more Israel rolls up Hamas territorially and forces them to fight, the more combatants, and more importantly commanders at all levels are killed, losing quality and operational knowledge.
"They win by not losing" is bullshit invented by leftists who look for any way to justify why Israel shouldn't be fighting Hamas and Hezbollah because "behold, some guys in fatigues and green headbands are still alive". That's cosplay, not a military. I'm sure you know that many gun nuts love to play dress-up, but that does not determine their quality as a fighting force.
I don't care if a massively degraded force without a knowledgable leadership, quality training, manufacturing and storage of arms and ammunitions (such as rocket artillery) returns calling itself Hamas - that's like the difference between Nazi Germany and the Neo Nazi Atomwaffen Division. Someone can also claim that the Nazis won by still having retards waving a Swastika and murdering people, but the two are not the same.
Yes, the aid distribution and policing of Gaza is going to be expensive. WW2 was incredibly expensive as well, but fighting it wasn't an option (let's put aside the opinions of the fascists and communists in the America First Committee). The Gaza war wasn't an option after October 7, except for delusional leftists who want to find some way, any way, to have Israel destroyed. Hamas started the war, Hamas must be ground to dust, and it's expensive and hard, but so be it. You can't treat cancer with vitamins and meditation.
> "Yes, the aid distribution and policing of Gaza is going to be expensive. WW2 was incredibly expensive as well, but [not] fighting it wasn't an option"
Israel already spends about 9% of GDP on its military budget, which is shockingly high by western standards, and while of course this figure could theoretically be increased Netanyahu is stuck in this trap of needing Haredi support to stay in power while also needing Haredi recruits to increase manpower (who of course don't want to serve in the military or work actual jobs.)
I'm not saying the laws of physics forbid an IDF occupation per se, but I also think comparisons with post-war Germany are misplaced (Israel would be blessed if contemporary Palestinians were as rational and civilised), and that military spending will have to be scaled more-or-less continuously with the size of the Palestinian population, which of course is growing exponentially over time. So what is the plan, here?
Israel can't afford to be delusional like the Europeans, who took 3 years into the invasion of Ukraine before noticing that oh shit, they need to spend a lot more of their GDP on their military. Israel spends a large part of GDP on military because it can dream a two state peace all it wants, the Palestinians don't want that, they want a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Israelis, and that isn't an option one can adopt, other than antizionist douche Jews living in the diaspora. Israel can't imagine October 7 never happened, or that Hamas doesn't exist. It isn't an organization that can be negotiated with any more than the Nazis. It needs to be destroyed, and the costs be the costs. I'm not going to argue that Netanyahu isn't an incompetent fool, or that the Haredi don't need to be recruited into the army. Both of those have a political solution - Netanyahu can be voted out of office, and the Haredi can be recruited or chose to either be sanctioned (jail, fines, withdrawal of state funds for Yeshivas real and fictitious) or they can leave the country, and save Israel a whole lot of taxpayer funds. The thing that has no political solution is Hamas. They need to be destroyed, arrested and/or exiled. The Palestinians are sociopaths, but with Hamas destroyed they may become more sedate.
This "what is the plan, here" question always confuses me. When a deranged person attacks you, do you stop to figure out what was the cause and what can be done about their medication intake or involuntary commitment, or do you defend yourself? Did the US start WW2 with the Marshal Plan figured out in detail? Was that ever a precondition for a nation defending itself in a war thrust upon it by an genocidal enemy? Why is this Israel's burden? October 7 happened because the Iranian proxy axis was freaked out about Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords normalization, and Yahya Sinwar pulled the trigger prematurely on the plan crafted for two decades by Iran to surprise Israel with multiple simultaneous ground invasions, where Islamist terror armies commit massacres, abduct huge numbers of Israeli citizens and hold as much ground as they can. This plan came along after both the Israeli left, Netanyahu and multiple US administrations urged restraint, restraint, restraint. "We'll stand with you! Just show restraint". The US and the EU didn't stand with Israel to the extent it needed, at all. Restraint was a dangerous illusion, sold to Israelis and diaspora Jews by failed strategist Netanyahu with his Qatari funds and day worker visa appeasement. "We will defend you" is another lie. If Hezbollah joined on October 7 and Iranian militias invaded from Syria, Israel would have been existentially fucked and this thing would have turned into a nuclear exchange. That's how retarded the "ceasefire now" and "restraint" camps are - who do they think they can still convince with calls for restraint? We already are dealing with the biggest massacre of Jews by Islamists *ever* and were moments away from a massively worse, existential threat.
Smashing Hamas has been delayed by a hesitant, spineless Netanyahu, and a shitty US administration with conflicting domestic and foreign priorities that Israel cannot abide by. It should have happened harder and faster, but reality is that it needs to happen now. I don't care if they first do a hostage for prisoner exchange, as long as Israel continues to drive to destroy Hamas right after - any treaties with Hamas, Qatar, Iran, and frankly the US are not worth the ink they're printed with. Hamas the military organization needs to be torn apart limb from limb, and later some rabble of shabab can call themselves "Hamas" and cosplay militants, after Hamas leadership from the few remaining mid-level leaders to the company commanders need to be dead, arrested or exiled.
How about the goddamn Palestinians figure out a plan of how to not be genocidal sociopaths? They had 105 years of trying that track and it hasn't gone well for them. This grand gesture of October 7 caused their own collapse, the collapse of their ally Assad, and their big brothers Hezbollah are being disarmed, of all people by the dickless LAF and spineless UNIFIL. All these people blabbing about how the war isn't going well for Israel, I'm curious how they think it's going for Hamas and the rest of Iran's cannon fodder morons. If the answer is "they win by not all dying" I can't take such analysts military or political seriously. Nobody shouldn't.
Arrr Bee - you’re welcome to express your disagreements as freely as you want, but if you use ad hominems like “deeply retarded” to describe people, then I’m blocking you.
Alex you must have noticed that Mascil Binah's title is "Right Wing Zionism is retarded and cracked in the head" - while hilarious, and I agree to a large extent, it's odd to pearl clutch when referring to that person with their favorite term. You've read the NonZionism substack, right? Then you've noticed how much the word "retarded" is used by the author.
Yeah but my point is that this is my substack so my rules, which include not calling people retarded. If you want to call his ideas retarded, fine (although I still think there are better ways of making the point that you disagree with him).
Exactly the article I was looking to read about how this never-ending war will end: insightful, balanced, and sober.
This war is kinda like Covid - in 2021 it felt like the pandemic would never end, but then it did.
Thanks!
Are those 50,000 future Hamas babies about to shoot RPGs any time soon? That Hamas spokesman quote was amusingly Nazi-esque. They were also obsessed with a baby to sociopathic murderer pipeline. The somewhat older child soldiers Hamas has filled its ranks with after losing 21,000 well trained and armed combatants are portrayed by foreign leftists with no combat experience as a “see, Hamas can’t be defeated”. That forgets the historical reality that by the time an army is forced to fill its ranks with old men and young teens it has definitely lost the war. WW2 ended with the Nazis doing the same thing in desperation and it did fuck all for their genocidal cause. Hamas isn’t doing well, only people with a need to sell “Israel shouldn’t be allowed to fight back against Hamas” claim otherwise.
As for hitting Hamas leadership, Israel is actually using a Gam v’Gam approach - rolling up the territory Hamas is alive in, which also forces leadership into the open to be killed. That’s what happened to Yahya Sinwar, and it will continue to happen to the diminishing number of Hamas leaders. Without a leadership that has a clue about how to get money and arms and training and control over new, barely trained child soldiers Hamas will collapse as Hezbollah did. A leadership vacuum does that.
Last thing - can we stop comparing Gaza to Vietnam? Absolutely nothing in common between the wars.
> "Last thing - can we stop comparing Gaza to Vietnam? Absolutely nothing in common between the wars."
Can you outline the key differences you would see? The Gazans don't have supply lines and backing from the Soviet Union, certainly, but they're hardly psychologically equivalent to 1940s Germans either.
To name a few key differences:
1. North Vietnam/Vietcong didn't invade the continental USA. Hamas invaded what's been sovereign territory of Israel since 1948.
2. North Vietnam/Vietcong didn't torture, rape, wound, murder US citizens on US soil. Hamas did all of those to thousands of Israeli citizens. Very different level of motivation for US and IDF soldiers.
3. North Vietnam/Vietcong didn't abduct US citizens from inside territorial USA. Hamas abducted 251 Israeli citizens, most of them civilians from inside Israel into Gaza.
4. Vietnam is 7746 miles from California, 6268 miles from Hawaii. Gaza is 2.5-4 miles from Israel.
5. The US military had to institute a draft for the Vietnam War. Israel already has a draft, a reserve duty system. While both have seen extended service periods, it isn't new in any way.
6. The US military could retreat from Vietnam without any risk to civilians inside the USA. This is absolutely not the case for Israel. Israeli civilians are at a far lower risk than on October 6 2023, but if Israel didn't press ahead with destroying Hamas leadership, combatants, ammunition depots, arms manufacturing, the risk to its civilians would mount once again. The less time Israel spends hitting Hamas, the faster it can recover to commit more atrocities against Israeli civilians.
7. Vietnam never made threats against US civilians; its war wasn't part of a genocidal campaign against Americans. Hamas in its founding covenant has the genocide and ethnic cleansing as its goal. It has murdered and injured thousands of Israeli civilians. October 7 was the biggest single day massacre of Jews since the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen. Hamas has openly stated it will commit many more October 7 style atrocities as soon as it can. It signed its own death warrant.
8. Any US civilians living and working in Vietnam had the safety of the US to return to. Most Israelis aren't dual citizens of any country. Israeli Jews have nowhere to "go back to", and will therefore fight tenaciously against Islamist terrorism in ways the US has thankfully never needed to - Israelis have no such luxury.
9. North Vietnam had massive supply lines from China and Russia into the country and through North Vietnam to the Vietcong. Hamas is now cut off with no supply lines.
10. North Vietnam never suffered a massive loss of military and civilian leadership. Hamas is nearing Hezbollah levels of leadership wipeout.
Not sure on what basis you claim that Gazans are psychologically unlike the Germans during Nazi rule. They're extremely similar, just as "pro Palestinians" around the world are extremely like Nazi sympathizers.
Most of this is pertaining to the justification for the war (which I'm not really disputing), not the tactical particulars or likelihood of victory.
> "North Vietnam had massive supply lines from China and Russia into the country and through North Vietnam to the Vietcong. Hamas is now cut off with no supply lines... ...North Vietnam never suffered a massive loss of military and civilian leadership. Hamas is nearing Hezbollah levels of leadership wipeout"
I hope you're right, but other writers seem to be extremely skeptical on this topic (I was going to raise the issue that Hamas fighters have never been terribly well-trained or equipped compared to the IDF, so they've always relied entirely on stalling and attrition tactics. They win by not losing, and there are still a lot of leftover rockets and weapons caches in the strip that were never identified.)
https://cotd.substack.com/p/swords-of-iron-is-the-status-still
https://cotd.substack.com/p/operation-gideons-chariots-a-poor
There's certainly no meaningful end-game here that doesn't involve either a long-term Israeli occupation or some other coalition force (maybe put together by Arab countries or- hilariously- the Irish labour party), which is necessarily going to be costly in terms of lives and funding for whoever decides to take over management instead. There's certainly no point to just 'declaring victory' and leaving a power vacuum for Hamas (or whatever domestic jihadist org comes to power) to fill again, with or without reconstruction.
I'd suggest you follow Andrew Fox and John Spencer. The Hamas fighters of October 7 were well trained and extremely heavily armed - Israeli special forces were shocked by just how much RPGs, machine guns and sniper rifles Nukhba units had. These were heavily armed assault troops. The only person trying to portray them as badly equipped recently is Netanyahu and he got heaps of derision for claiming they came in with AK-47s and flip-flops. Nobody was in flip-flops - it was a heavily armed division of assault troops. There were no stalling and attrition tactics the first few days of the war. That's the kind of operation Hamas cannot carry out any more after being stomped. The harder Israel hits Hamas, the longer (hopefully if ever) for them to regain that operational capacity. The more Israel rolls up Hamas territorially and forces them to fight, the more combatants, and more importantly commanders at all levels are killed, losing quality and operational knowledge.
"They win by not losing" is bullshit invented by leftists who look for any way to justify why Israel shouldn't be fighting Hamas and Hezbollah because "behold, some guys in fatigues and green headbands are still alive". That's cosplay, not a military. I'm sure you know that many gun nuts love to play dress-up, but that does not determine their quality as a fighting force.
I don't care if a massively degraded force without a knowledgable leadership, quality training, manufacturing and storage of arms and ammunitions (such as rocket artillery) returns calling itself Hamas - that's like the difference between Nazi Germany and the Neo Nazi Atomwaffen Division. Someone can also claim that the Nazis won by still having retards waving a Swastika and murdering people, but the two are not the same.
https://open.substack.com/pub/arrrbee/p/hamas-the-greatest-military-victory
Yes, the aid distribution and policing of Gaza is going to be expensive. WW2 was incredibly expensive as well, but fighting it wasn't an option (let's put aside the opinions of the fascists and communists in the America First Committee). The Gaza war wasn't an option after October 7, except for delusional leftists who want to find some way, any way, to have Israel destroyed. Hamas started the war, Hamas must be ground to dust, and it's expensive and hard, but so be it. You can't treat cancer with vitamins and meditation.
> "Yes, the aid distribution and policing of Gaza is going to be expensive. WW2 was incredibly expensive as well, but [not] fighting it wasn't an option"
Again, I'm getting mixed messages on this topic:
https://loveoftheland.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-situation-c70/comment/120134584
Israel already spends about 9% of GDP on its military budget, which is shockingly high by western standards, and while of course this figure could theoretically be increased Netanyahu is stuck in this trap of needing Haredi support to stay in power while also needing Haredi recruits to increase manpower (who of course don't want to serve in the military or work actual jobs.)
I'm not saying the laws of physics forbid an IDF occupation per se, but I also think comparisons with post-war Germany are misplaced (Israel would be blessed if contemporary Palestinians were as rational and civilised), and that military spending will have to be scaled more-or-less continuously with the size of the Palestinian population, which of course is growing exponentially over time. So what is the plan, here?
Israel can't afford to be delusional like the Europeans, who took 3 years into the invasion of Ukraine before noticing that oh shit, they need to spend a lot more of their GDP on their military. Israel spends a large part of GDP on military because it can dream a two state peace all it wants, the Palestinians don't want that, they want a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Israelis, and that isn't an option one can adopt, other than antizionist douche Jews living in the diaspora. Israel can't imagine October 7 never happened, or that Hamas doesn't exist. It isn't an organization that can be negotiated with any more than the Nazis. It needs to be destroyed, and the costs be the costs. I'm not going to argue that Netanyahu isn't an incompetent fool, or that the Haredi don't need to be recruited into the army. Both of those have a political solution - Netanyahu can be voted out of office, and the Haredi can be recruited or chose to either be sanctioned (jail, fines, withdrawal of state funds for Yeshivas real and fictitious) or they can leave the country, and save Israel a whole lot of taxpayer funds. The thing that has no political solution is Hamas. They need to be destroyed, arrested and/or exiled. The Palestinians are sociopaths, but with Hamas destroyed they may become more sedate.
This "what is the plan, here" question always confuses me. When a deranged person attacks you, do you stop to figure out what was the cause and what can be done about their medication intake or involuntary commitment, or do you defend yourself? Did the US start WW2 with the Marshal Plan figured out in detail? Was that ever a precondition for a nation defending itself in a war thrust upon it by an genocidal enemy? Why is this Israel's burden? October 7 happened because the Iranian proxy axis was freaked out about Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords normalization, and Yahya Sinwar pulled the trigger prematurely on the plan crafted for two decades by Iran to surprise Israel with multiple simultaneous ground invasions, where Islamist terror armies commit massacres, abduct huge numbers of Israeli citizens and hold as much ground as they can. This plan came along after both the Israeli left, Netanyahu and multiple US administrations urged restraint, restraint, restraint. "We'll stand with you! Just show restraint". The US and the EU didn't stand with Israel to the extent it needed, at all. Restraint was a dangerous illusion, sold to Israelis and diaspora Jews by failed strategist Netanyahu with his Qatari funds and day worker visa appeasement. "We will defend you" is another lie. If Hezbollah joined on October 7 and Iranian militias invaded from Syria, Israel would have been existentially fucked and this thing would have turned into a nuclear exchange. That's how retarded the "ceasefire now" and "restraint" camps are - who do they think they can still convince with calls for restraint? We already are dealing with the biggest massacre of Jews by Islamists *ever* and were moments away from a massively worse, existential threat.
Smashing Hamas has been delayed by a hesitant, spineless Netanyahu, and a shitty US administration with conflicting domestic and foreign priorities that Israel cannot abide by. It should have happened harder and faster, but reality is that it needs to happen now. I don't care if they first do a hostage for prisoner exchange, as long as Israel continues to drive to destroy Hamas right after - any treaties with Hamas, Qatar, Iran, and frankly the US are not worth the ink they're printed with. Hamas the military organization needs to be torn apart limb from limb, and later some rabble of shabab can call themselves "Hamas" and cosplay militants, after Hamas leadership from the few remaining mid-level leaders to the company commanders need to be dead, arrested or exiled.
How about the goddamn Palestinians figure out a plan of how to not be genocidal sociopaths? They had 105 years of trying that track and it hasn't gone well for them. This grand gesture of October 7 caused their own collapse, the collapse of their ally Assad, and their big brothers Hezbollah are being disarmed, of all people by the dickless LAF and spineless UNIFIL. All these people blabbing about how the war isn't going well for Israel, I'm curious how they think it's going for Hamas and the rest of Iran's cannon fodder morons. If the answer is "they win by not all dying" I can't take such analysts military or political seriously. Nobody shouldn't.
Arrr Bee - you’re welcome to express your disagreements as freely as you want, but if you use ad hominems like “deeply retarded” to describe people, then I’m blocking you.
Alex you must have noticed that Mascil Binah's title is "Right Wing Zionism is retarded and cracked in the head" - while hilarious, and I agree to a large extent, it's odd to pearl clutch when referring to that person with their favorite term. You've read the NonZionism substack, right? Then you've noticed how much the word "retarded" is used by the author.
Yeah but my point is that this is my substack so my rules, which include not calling people retarded. If you want to call his ideas retarded, fine (although I still think there are better ways of making the point that you disagree with him).
One day hamas will disappear.
Good riddance
https://open.substack.com/pub/marlowe1/p/have-a-great-shavuos-holiday-extra?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=sllf3
It’s basically over