[dlubarov]

Wars aren't supposed to be even. By this logic, the Nazis were the victims of WWII, and the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War. And if Israel wants to be "better", it should just disable its air defenses to let Hezbollah "catch up".

If we're interested in an actual end to the violence, the focus should be on enforcing UNSC 1701. It's not like Israel can just ignore attacks against it.

[megous]

Actually, wars are not supposed to be driven by "Dahiya doctrine" or "Rafah model" either, if we're talking about what wars are supposed to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

And yeah, if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say. Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this. When Israel kills 1 child or more per every active combatant... then that was apparently violated.

Maybe explain how does killing 20 000+ children and counting help Israel? Or how burning/blowing up entire villages and cities in Lebanon and Gaza help them? They did this to hundreds of villages in 1947-48 and that created the whole problem they have now. Continuing the same strategy is supposed to solve it? Seems like Israel got inspired by the whole Nazi style "preventive security" thing.

Heinrich Himmler: "The best political weapon is the weapon of terror... we do not ask for their love; only for their fear." (looks like Himmler could have coauthored Dahiya doctrine and would be fond of it, if still alive by then)

You're also not supposed to initiate aggressive wars against your neighbors either, like Israel did against Syria, Iran, and many others in the past with its "pre-emptive" strikes.

If Israel wants to be better, maybe they should not intentionally murder 10s of thousands of children as a policy (20-300 allowed killed civilians per strike in a population where half of it is children).

[dlubarov]

You're listing a lot of standard anti-Israel talking points which aren't relevant to the thread. Setting aside all the tangents and returning to the topic at hand -

> if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say

You're not making an argument here. Again, do you think the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War, considering the 1:100 or so ratio there? How about when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, with an "infinitely bad" casualty ratio of 1:0? Does that make NATO infinitely evil?

> Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this.

The principle of proportionality has nothing to do with how many of their own civilians the military in question has lost.

[jasomill]

Germany lost fewer civilians than Poland or the Soviet Union, so not really victims by that logic.

And while it's true that German civilian casualties were a couple orders of magnitude higher than American civilian casualties, the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison.

While not directly relevant to the Israel/Lebanon conflict, it's probably also worth drawing a distinction between casualties of war and state-sanctioned killing outside the scope of combat.

Germany killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.

The Allies tried and executed ten high-ranking Nazi officials, including six civilians.

By that measure, the ratio of civilian killings is at least a million to one.

[dlubarov]

> the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison

What's unfair about it? In both cases, one side suffered less civilian harm because there wasn't much fighting in its own territory.

I think the point stands that "Israel must be bad because it only lost 2 civilians" makes as little sense as "the Nazis must be good because they lost a lot more civilians than Western allies".

If a framework for trying to judge morality penalizes states for effectively protecting their own civilian population, then it's a very bad framework.