[burnerburnito]

What I'm actually describing is how each citizen of a country can be described as supporting any ongoing war efforts, terrorism, etc. -- something which many geneva convention signing nations and their militaries believed in and acted upon not just in ww2 but even in Vietnam and the Iraq war.

Thus I'm suggesting that it can be justifiable to bomb a hospital or school in which enemy combatants are launching attacks from, yet also justifiable to do an act of violence on enemy taxpayers + potential conscripts in general.

By this reasoning, my personal opinion is that if we can use less force to get the same goals, or if we can avoid causing as much collateral damage via longer term planning decisions, it's probably a better choice.

In this case they've had an on-and-off military occupation + extreme restrictions on travel and trade and even foreign aid packages. That's a huge source for anger, and it makes it hard to justify often cutting the strip off from the world as much as possible but then bombing first rather than simply admitting they should either give them agency and self determination or make this occupation total and send boots on the ground to go stop Hamas terrorists in a way that might just kill a few less innocents along the way.

[dbsmith83]

> Thus I'm suggesting that it can be justifiable to bomb a hospital or school in which enemy combatants are launching attacks from, yet also justifiable to do an act of violence on enemy taxpayers + potential conscripts in general.

Sorry, but no. Justified by who? Do you think it is justifiable to attack civilians?

[burnerburnito]

I believe what is "civilian" is something that can become murky, and by justifiable I primarily just mean "logically coherent and able to be justified by a possibly different but not insane ideology"

It's obviously blatantly wrong to kill people who don't want to fight you and wouldn't have resisted. Where things get messy if those same people are providing huge amounts of tax dollars to a government that actives tries to kill or otherwise harm you, doubly so if their government claims to be representative and embrace democratic principles, and thus in theory should be acting per the will of the majority of the population (e.g. mob rule).

And, as noted with the general Human Shield meme that goes around, should you just do nothing, sitting in paralysis if responding would involve even slight harm to civilians? What if that harm will save many more of your own civilians' lives at a cost of many foreign ones' lives? As priorly noted, messy situations are common.

My conclusion is that I was not justifying attacks personally, but stating that people can justify such attacks at least enough to not imo be self-evidently completely absurd.

Moreover, please note that my original messages were in fact describing how military bombings of civilians are easily justifiable in abstract from a distance (regardless of "side"), but the context of reality and the sociopolitical situation of those living in Gaza can make it clearer to us that the Israelis don't ONLY have this option as the least-collateral way to respond, nor a lack of alternatives in general, and so I believe it does become obviously wrong. Much as the 9/11 attacks should obviously be wrong to us, and yet western governments have engaged in active conscious bombings of economic and military targets on a huge scale (and there is a parallel there -- twin towers and the pentagon, economic and military targets after all, and supposedly the capitol too had control of that last plane not been contested and crashed, so a political target too)