[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.