Contents
Preface
This is an article about current events, but I'm burying it here on a static page that few readers will notice so that it'll be unlikely to start a big discussion. :) In , I made a public Facebook post calling out the Ukrainian government for its lies and occasional war crimes in the fight to defend its land against brutal Russian aggression. That post generated immense controversy and led to many days of very interesting but also time-consuming debate. I want to avoid similar situations in the future because political discussions about mainstream topics, while fun and engaging, are generally not the most important use of time. Animal suffering far outweighs human suffering in scale and is generally much easier to reduce per unit of resources deployed.
Political conversations on hot-button topics can be polarizing. Several of my friends who agree with me on the issue of animal suffering strongly disliked my take on Ukraine, and I imagine that this disagreement might make some of them less inclined to work together on other issues, at least for a while until feelings cool off. The same is probably true for the topic of the current piece. So it may increase net suffering in the world for people focused on neglected problems like animal suffering to have divisive political discussions. On the other hand, it also seems like a good norm that you should avoid silencing yourself for fear of what others will think, and in any case, I often feel a need to speak my mind even if people will dislike me for it. That impulse to speak my mind is a large part of why I express unpopular opinions on other topics, such as that it would be more humane to reduce the total number of wild animals in the world.
It's nearly impossible to make any new points regarding hot-button political topics, given the number of voices already participating. What I say here is probably completely unoriginal. Also, I'm not an expert on these complex issues. I didn't bother to cite sources for most of my statements, and I didn't double-check some of my facts, because I wanted to reduce the time spent writing this piece.
Some of the views that I argue against in this piece might seem like strawman positions that no one would actually hold. Unfortunately, every view that I disagree with below is something I've seen at least a few times "in the wild"—on Fox News or in YouTube and Reddit comments. Plausibly some of these comments were trolls or propaganda bots, but probably some were real people. I saw an exchange on YouTube in which one commenter said something like "How many Palestinian civilians have died so far?" and the replying comment said something like: "Not enough." I really hope the reply was a troll or bot, but I have little faith in humanity.
I wrote this piece mainly for myself, to get these feelings off my chest, so the tone is more bitter than would be optimal when aiming to have a constructive dialogue between the best minds on each side of the issue. While I'm obviously upset with Israel (and Hamas), they're not my governments, so most of my displeasure is directed toward the Biden administration and other American elites who endorse his hypocrisy.
Disappointment with Biden
I voted for Biden in the 2020 general election. Often I vote down the Green Party ballot, but Biden's promises on a few issues I care about combined with Trump's authoritarian impulses convinced me to vote for the Democrat in that case. Since then, I've been disappointed with Biden's foreign policy. Following Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal, his administration imposed extreme economic sanctions that arguably led to more total human suffering than continuing the war would have done. There's some reporting that claims the Biden administration and the UK encouraged Ukraine to abandon peace talks with Russia in spring 2022—talks that could have averted over 100,000 deaths had they succeeded. According to the Jack Teixeira leak, Biden's military predicted in early 2023 that Ukraine's summer counteroffensive would involve massive casualties and plausibly would not produce major gains (which is precisely what happened), but rather than encouraging Ukraine to negotiate, the US supported prolonging the bloodshed—while providing cluster bombs to Ukraine that Biden's administration a year earlier had decried as illegal and a threat to civilians. Then, in , Biden gave Israel a green light to perpetrate war crimes against civilians in Gaza, while asking Congress for billions of dollars in additional funding for Israel's military.
The Israel funding is particularly abominable. There are reasonable, compassionate arguments for Ukraine continuing to fight against its invaders rather than compromising with them. There are fewer compassionate arguments for arming an occupier currently engaged in a disproportionate war of revenge that's killing far more civilians than combatants.
Ukrainians and Palestinians
The Israeli-Palestinian dispute has a long, complicated history. Both sides of the dispute have hardline elements that refuse a peaceful solution, and some actors on each side of the conflict have done horrible things to innocent people on the other side. But at a high level, Israel is more like Russia in that conflict: a powerful, nuclear-armed state that is illegally annexing territory from its weaker neighbor. Of course, there are also many ways in which Israel's behavior differs from Russia's. Palestinians as a whole can be seen as more similar to Ukraine, although again there are many big differences. For example, extremist Ukrainians don't murder as many Russian civilians as extremist Palestinians murder Israeli civilians. As far as I'm aware, modern Ukraine has not conducted an atrocity against the Russian people comparable to the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on that spurred Israel's brutal and disproportionate response. On the other hand, most present-day Ukrainians also don't live under occupation (like the Palestinian West Bank) or in an open-air prison (like the Palestinian Gaza Strip). Palestinians in Gaza for years have endured ~45% unemployment, unsanitary water, food insecurity, and recurring Israeli military bombardments. It's not surprising that some of them would be drawn toward hateful ideologies. Religion, culture, international pressure, and other factors likely also play some role in explaining why there are more instances of violence against civilians carried out by bad actors in Palestine compared with bad actors in Ukraine. But merely saying "Some Palestinians are hateful; it's their fault; they make Israel do bad things in response" is too lazy of an answer. The implication that "violence is just in their nature or their religious texts, and there's nothing we can do about it other than continue severely restricting their land area and freedoms" seems implausible. The Quran contains some extremely violent passages, though so does the Hebrew Bible. I suspect that how much people feel inspired by those violent ideas depends a lot on on their living conditions and political situation.
Palestinians are often blamed for rejecting some prior peace proposals. The idea is that it's their fault the conflict is still ongoing, so the Palestinians brought upon themselves all the devastation that Israel inflicts on them. As I mentioned above, Ukraine may have chosen to end peace talks in spring 2022, and it has basically refused peace talks since then unless Russian forces would completely leave its territory. Imagine if people therefore said that the Russia-Ukraine war is Ukraine's fault, so all the devastation being inflicted upon Ukraine is its own doing. In reality, what we observe is that much of the West opposes any concessions by Ukraine whatsoever. When I've proposed that Ukrainians should negotiate with Russia and accept the loss of some of their land in order to end the carnage sooner rather than later (especially given that I doubt Ukraine will be able to take back much of the land it has lost), I've been called pro-Putin. If you dare to understand why some Palestinians were not ok with peace proposals that they saw as insufficient, you may be called pro-Hamas.
[Edited to add on :
On , The New York Times reported that Russia was ready for the third time to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war. The first offer to negotiate was of course shortly after the war broke out in early 2022. Those negotiations almost succeeded on terms that were not too bad for Ukraine, but Boris Johnson and the US helped to prevent a deal from being reached. Russia's war atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere also contributed to the breakdown of negotiations, though it's hard for outsiders to tell how much those atrocities were a real cause of the failure of negotiations and how much they were an excuse fed to the public. The second time Russia offered to negotiate was in fall 2022, according to the New York Times article. And the third time was in late 2023.
As of when I'm writing these additional paragraphs, Ukraine continues to publicly refuse to give away any territory to Russia and is instead considering a new mobilization of up to 500,000 more men. I think Ukraine should negotiate a ceasefire now (and indeed shouldn't have stopped peace talks in early 2022), because the war has essentially been a stalemate since the end of 2022 and is likely to remain that way. But I can understand Ukrainians who feel that they deserve to take back the land that was stolen from them, so they don't want to make peace with Russia. That's indeed the view of much of the US foreign-policy establishment. That same sentiment can apply to Palestinians, many of whom were brutally forced off of their land when Israel was created. It's understandable that many in the Arab world would still resent Israel for taking formerly Arab land in 1948-1949, just as many Ukrainians remain angry with Russia for stealing Crimea almost 10 years ago. Yet a frequent talking point of Israeli propaganda is to portray Palestinians as unreasonable for having refused peace proposals in which they would get some portion of their former land. Russia is offering Ukraine about 82% of its pre-2014 territory, and Ukraine says that's not good enough; indeed, Ukraine says anything less than 100% is not good enough.
Hawks often argue that one reason to refuse a ceasefire with Russia is because Russia isn't to be trusted; Russia might just rearm and then continue taking more territory later. But I can see how Palestinians might feel that Israel also can't be trusted. For example, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is more cooperative and peaceful than Hamas was in the Gaza Strip, yet Israel continues illegally stealing Palestinian land from the West Bank.]
In my Facebook post, I condemned Ukraine-backed murder of Russian civilians and destruction of Russian residential infrastructure. Too many of my fellow Westerners instead cheered on the violence against Russian civilians, saying that finally the illegal occupier is paying the price. I'm consistent in my opposition to attacks on civilians and therefore I obviously decry Hamas's murders and taking of hostages. However, I can see how those Palestinians who cheered on the attack are taking a similar stance as some of my fellow Westerners did. Apparently oblivious to irony, some of those same Westerners are giddy about violence against Palestinian civilians right now. Some commentators believe that Palestinian civilians deserve collective punishment because some of them support Hamas's violence. I wonder if such people are aware that Osama bin Laden gave precisely the same kind of argument to justify 9/11.
I've seen a few people failing to condemn Hamas's brutality by comparing it with the Nat Turner slave rebellion (which murdered 55 to 65 white people including children with "knives, hatchets, and blunt instruments", according to Wikipedia) or war crimes that Native Americans inflicted upon white settlers. These viewpoints too are disgusting. I've always felt that violent slave rebellions that intentionally killed innocent people were immoral. Some readers might hate me for saying that, because a number of people regard Nat Turner as a hero. If Israel as a whole one day comes to regard its current policies toward Palestinians with shame, I suspect that some future Israelis might—with the emotional distance that history provides—feel less angry toward Hamas than they do now. I disagree. Intentional violence against civilians that has no military value beyond terrorizing a population is wrong—whether done by slaves, Native Americans, the Allies during WWII, Ukraine, or Hamas. If we lived in a world where it was impossible to change people's hearts and minds by peaceful means, I might feel differently. However, in our actual world, terrorism usually harms the cause of those who carry it out.
In 2022, there were a few news articles about Ukrainian fighters putting their own civilians at risk by being too near to civilian infrastructure. A few human-rights groups admonished against this, but by and large the Western world shrugged, while continuing to condemn Russia for every gruesome strike on homes, schools, and hospitals. When Hamas fighters hide in civilian infrastructure, forcing the Israeli military to sometimes risk hitting civilian targets, a frequent response is that it's Hamas's fault for using "human shields". To be fair, my impression is that human shields are a standard practice for Hamas, while probably the Ukrainian fighters by and large used them less intentionally and less often? If so, that could explain part of why the West largely gave Ukraine a pass on its civilian-endagering fighting tactics. But the more cynical reason—that the West downplays wrongdoing by its allies and highlights wrongdoing by its enemies—is also surely part of it.
After more than a year and a half of the Biden administration (rightly) condemning Russia's obliteration of residential areas and attempts to cut off electricity and supplies for Ukrainian civilians, I thought it would be hard for Biden to avoid calling out Israel for doing the same things in Gaza. I know the US government is largely captured by the right-wing Israel lobby, but I thought that after all the villification of Russia, the political climate would lead to some amount of official US censure for Israel too. I was wrong. Biden is apparently capable of an astounding degree of doublethink on the issue of war crimes. There is some amount of idealism in US foreign policy, but on the whole, the question of which atrocities the US condemns and which ones it ignores/justifies comes down to Realpolitik.
After all of this, the idea of voting for Biden again makes my skin crawl. I'll likely vote for Cornel West or the Green Party, even though I disagree with a number of their stances too. I live in New York state, where due to the Electoral College, individual presidential votes don't make any difference to who wins and only add to the symbolic popular-vote total, but I would probably do the same even if I lived in a swing state. Biden needs to be hit where it hurts, politically speaking. At the very least people should vote against him in the Democratic primary.
The cycle of violence
Most political issues, including Israel-Palestinians, involve immense nuance, and probably there are reasonable arguments in support of Biden's nearly unconditional backing of Israel's atrocities. There's a perennial debate between hawks and doves about the best way to respond to an attack. Hawks argue that being willing to carry out violence deters future aggression. Doves tend to believe that because each side sees itself as the victim, ever-increasing escalation leads to a never-ending cycle of violence. "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." Emotionally I side much more with the doves, though I'm less confident in this viewpoint from a purely rational perspective, and it depends somewhat on the kind of opponent you're facing.
I think that especially if you're the more powerful side in a conflict, you should respond to aggression by showing restraint and trying to deescalate. Seeking to bring to justice the specific individuals who plotted and carried out terror makes sense, but collective punishment of an entire group of people for the crimes of a few terrorists seems both immoral and counterproductive. You are not forced to stoop to the level of the terrorists by becoming one yourself; if you do so, that's a choice you're making. I thought we already learned these lessons from America's misguidedly vengeful reaction to 9/11, but apparently not.
Humans evolved violent impulses both to protect themselves via deterrence and to motivate aggression that conquers other people and seizes their land, women, and resources. I would encourage the hawks to question how much of their bloodlust is purely based on the need for self-defense and how much those impulses might be an instantiation of primate feelings that seek to subjugate others so as to enhance the propagation of one's own DNA.
Some theorize that Hamas's goal with its attack might have been to lure Israel into extreme retaliation that would damage Israel's image in the Arab world and on the international stage more broadly. Kiley (2023): "It's possible – even probable – that the singular horrors inflicted on so many civilians were intended by Hamas to guarantee a massive Israeli response, no matter the cost to civilians in Gaza." If so, why is Israel's government taking the bait? Of course, it's difficult to know what Hamas's strategy behind the attacks was, and maybe the current Israeli response isn't something Hamas would have wanted (even though it seems predictable). Likewise, some claim that Hamas hopes lots of Palestinian civilians will die from Israel's bombs and blockades as propaganda for Hamas's cause. This again raises the question of why Israel takes the bait by nonetheless killing thousands of civilians.
One could argue that if Israel ends its illegal settlements, curbs its apartheid, and gives Palestinians more land as part of a two-state solution, this would reward Hamas's savagery. I agree it's generally bad to give terrorists some of what they want. At the same time, sometimes you have to "be the bigger man" and be the first one to break the cycle of violence. Two players of an iterated prisoner's dilemma could engage in tit-for-tat defection forever, unless one of them says enough is enough. Hamas could likewise argue that if they stop attacks, they're giving in to Israeli state violence, which has in recent decades killed far more Palestinians than the number of Israelis killed by Hamas and its ilk. In any case, granting Palestinians more land and freedom is just the right thing to do, regardless of whether it helps reduce violence. I've heard the claim that after Israel withdrew from occupying Gaza in 2005, violence against Israel went up rather than down. (Of course, that's in the context of Israel not meaningfully relenting on its many other forms of Palestinian oppression.) But even if better treatment of Palestinians did make Israel less safe, the situation would still probably be an overall improvement in utilitarian terms, i.e., Palestinian suffering would probably be reduced a lot more than Israeli suffering would increase. (Of course, I can understand why if this were the case, it would suck for the Israelis. No one wants to feel less safe. I'm just arguing that even if the right-wing Israeli position is correct that relaxing apartheid and occupation would worsen Israel's safety, doing those things is still probably the morally better option. We can hope that reality is such that there's no tradeoff and that better treatment of Palestinians could also eventually translate into greater safety for Israelis. However, outside of the fantasy world of political speeches, one's preferred policy doesn't always make everyone better off.)
At the very least, it seems like there should be economic ways to improve Palestinian wellbeing without dramatically degrading Israel's safety. It's sometimes claimed that whenever the Gaza Strip has been given more material infrastructure such as water pipelines, Hamas has turned that infrastructure into rockets to fire on Israelis. There's a possibility that all kinds of humanitarian aid delivered to Gaza could be diverted by Hamas to fund terrorism, though international-aid agencies are generally pretty effective at avoiding that, and I imagine that if the West doubled and tripled down on the resources and vigilance devoted to Gaza aid and its delivery (such as by having lots of international workers present to observe), the problem could be kept in check to a reasonable degree. Even if some aid does spill over into terrorism, the utilitarian calculus again suggests that the welfare benefits to ordinary Gazans probably far outweigh the downsides.
Providing high-quality food, medical care, and education in Gaza could show Palestinians and the world that Israel is serious about their welfare and willing to take a few risks to itself in order to help others. Of course, there are already many wonderful Israelis who devote substantial time and resources to helping Palestinians, but I'm referring to what the government overall should do as a matter of policy. In a similar way, the US government should devote a lot more resources to improving living conditions on Native American reservations, where unemployment and poor health are often endemic.
Wokeness
I've heard it claimed that concern for Palestinian suffering in the current conflict is due to "wokeness". If so, then that's a win for wokeness in my book.
I have mixed views on wokeness in general. I think many of the topics it discusses are important to think about, such as police misconduct, sexual harassment, and intolerance for minorities. However, I dislike the authoritarian or closed-minded style by which these problems are sometimes addressed, such as trying to fire people or kick them off platforms merely for uttering a forbidden word or voicing wrongthink, shouting down speakers who hold unpopular opinions, and narrowing the window of acceptable research topics and scientific findings. Some woke activism, especially on social media, feels like trying to achieve personal purity and atone for one's privilege rather than actually helping misfortunate people in the real world. The focus on one's own language, feelings, and identity can seem a bit like navel gazing, although I do plenty of navel gazing myself. (I said at the beginning of this piece that I wrote it primarily to vent my frustrations.) Some social-justice activists seem primarily concerned with the purity of their own community, which can feel to me more like a focus on First World problems than is optimal, although one's own comfort and mental health are very instrumentally important for addressing bigger problems in the world at large.
The agony endured by people in Gaza is the exact opposite of a First World problem. The humanitarian crisis that Israel's government is deliberately inflicting upon Gaza involves millions of people running out of food and water, hospitals with limited electricity, doctors forced to perform surgery without anesthetics, and thousands of civilians crushed or suffocated under rubble. (Hamas's attacks too inflicted some of the worst forms of suffering imaginable on the victims. But adding your own new cruelty doesn't undo past cruelty.) Extreme suffering resulting from excessive use of force during war is the kind of issue that the progressives of my childhood (in the 1990s and early 2000s) focused on. It would be a welcome change if the Woke Left that emerged in full force during roughly 2012 to 2014 spent more of its time on Third World problems like these, rather than trying to cancel everything and everyone that's insufficiently pure for them. ("Third World" is sometimes considered politically incorrect these days, due to the euphemism treadmill. Policing language like this is precisely the kind of wokeness that I'm not interested in.)
Civilian-swapping thought experiments
Ordinarily we see war as being between two sides, such as when we say that Russia is fighting Ukraine. However, when thinking about ethics and the laws of war, it may be more illuminating to divide things up into three groups: Russian fighters, Ukrainian fighters, and a combined pool containing the civilians on both sides. Civilians are not legitimate military targets, and in principle, I think a combatant should be as careful to protect the civilians on the "enemy" side as those on his own side—at least if we take seriously the idea that all civilian lives are equally important.
One way to check whether civilian lives are being valued equally is to imagine swapping the civilian populations between the two sides, e.g., to imagine replacing Palestinian civilians by Israeli civilians and vice versa. This section gives two examples where that civilian-swapping thought experiment is enlightening.
1. Civilian casualties
As of , more than 10,000 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip have died at the Israeli government's hands over the last five weeks. Western defenders of Israel's assault on Gaza might say that this loss of life is tragic, but ultimately it's a price worth paying to destroy Hamas.
A number of points could be made in response to this claim. For example, there are probably more targeted or humane ways to damage Hamas than flattening entire neighborhoods and creating a humanitarian catastrophe for millions of people. Also, military action can destroy particular Hamas fighters and their tunnels, but it doesn't destroy the anti-Israel sentiment that gave rise to Hamas in the first place; indeed, Israel's current actions will plausibly strengthen Islamist extremism against Israel in the long run.
But suppose for the sake of argument that Israel's current actions in Gaza will destroy Hamas for a long time and that it's impossible to accomplish the same goal in a way that kills fewer civilians. Is destroying Hamas worth 10,000 civilian deaths, tens of thousands of injuries, millions of people running out of food and water, intense fear and long-term PTSD, grief for lost family members, widespread property destruction, and all the rest we've seen so far? And the war in Gaza is sadly far from over, so likely these numbers will be multiplied by several times over the coming months.
Imagine if, for some reason, destroying Hamas required Israel to bombard and blockade its own cities. Suppose that once Israel killed tens of thousands of Israeli civilians (40% of them children) and injured several times that number, while cutting off vital supplies to millions more, Hamas would magically poof out of existence. Would Israel think it was worth it? We all know the answer: obviously not.
Between 1993 and 2023, around 2000 to 3000 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian terrorism, including the attacks. Killing tens of thousands of Israeli civilians to destroy Hamas and eliminate one main source of Palestinian terrorism wouldn't seem to pass a cost-benefit analysis. Maybe one could say there are tail risks in which lots more Israeli civilians would die than the 2000 to 3000 in the last 30 years, but those kinds of risks would come from state actors like Iran, not relatively powerless Palestinians. (And the harder Israel pounds Gaza, the more likely a wider war in the Middle East becomes.)
Another argument could be that getting rid of Hamas would also benefit Palestinians, such as because that might persuade Israel and Egypt to ease the blockade they have imposed against the Gaza Strip since 2005. Relaxing that blockade would yield enormous humanitarian benefit, but given the level of devastation from the current war, I'm doubtful the benefit would outweigh the cost.
There are some galaxy-brained reasons one could give why Israeli lives are actually more valuable than Palestinian lives. For example:
- Maybe Israelis on average have a higher quality of life than Palestinians, so the loss of future positive welfare due to their deaths is greater. However, this argument wouldn't apply to the badness of suffering rather than the badness of ceasing to exist, and the war in Gaza is creating immense amounts of suffering in addition to death. Also, this kind of argument would be repugnant to egalitarian-minded thinkers rather than pure utilitarians, since the argument is basically that if you're already better off, you should be made even better off by being protected from danger, while those who are misfortunate don't need as much protection.
- Israelis on average contribute more to the world economy, to science, to academia, and so on than Palestinians.
To overcome these objections, we could modify the thought experiment so that Israel's bombardment of its own cities would focus on homes of the elderly, people with physical and intellectual disabilities, and very poor Israeli children. Presumably those groups have worse quality of life than average and/or contribute less to science and economic growth. Indeed, killing disabled and elderly people might cause a net increase in wealth for the rest of society by reducing the need to care for those people. Given this modified thought experiment, is it now worth killing tens of thousands of these Israelis in order to take out Hamas?
If we still flinch away from biting that bullet (and I hope most people do flinch away), it's worth reflecting on what else might be driving some people's intuition that harming so many Israelis is wrong while harming the same number of Palestinian civilians is an acceptable cost.
The image of bombing one's own cities seems particularly monstrous, and maybe our intuitions about it are biased by the fact that it's not something that would make sense to do in reality. Maybe if there really were magical curses that required countries to bomb themselves in order to win wars, our intuitions on the matter would be different. Perhaps a more fair version of the thought experiment would be to imagine that Israel had to accept tens of thousands of civilian deaths at the hands of Hamas in order to defeat Hamas. Even in this case, it seems almost unimaginable that Israel would accept such a deal, though it's maybe somewhat less absurd than imagining Israel bombing itself. The Israel Defense Forces might end up losing a few thousand troops during the course of this war. However, if Israel would lose tens of thousands of troops, I doubt Israel would go forward.
For comparison, the US as of 2021 lost roughly 4,431 people in the armed forces during the Iraq War that began in 2003. Meanwhile, Iraqi civilian deaths were in the hundreds of thousands. Had those been US civilian deaths, the US would either have never invaded Iraq or would have been vastly more careful to minimize collateral damage. And the US would not have perpetrated as many war crimes as it did.
2. Hostages
Hamas's use of human shields is a war crime. However, even given that fact, Israel has a duty of "proportionality" under the laws of war, meaning that Israel is prohibited from attacking civilian infrastructure when the harm to civilians would be excessive relative to the military benefit obtained. Most of the deaths resulting from Israel's assault on Gaza are civilian deaths, so it seems implausible to me that the Israeli military is meeting that proportionality requirement.
The best counterargument I've heard to the above is that if Israel is forced to reduce the number of targets it can hit due to widespread use of human shields by Hamas, then this incentivizes Hamas to keep using human shields. I agree this is a good point.
We can think of the civilians who are used as human shields as like hostages. When a hostage taker puts a gun to a hostage's head, the hostage taker is basically saying: "If you dare to kill me, I'll kill this innocent person." Likewise, when Hamas puts a military base underneath a hospital, Hamas is basically saying: "If you dare to bomb us, it'll kill innocent people above." So, the argument goes, if Israel backs off from attacking the hospital to avoid civilian deaths, then that amounts to giving in to a hostage demand. We should avoid giving in to hostage demands because doing so would incentivize further hostage taking. So Israel has to attack the hospital despite the civilian carnage that results. (I don't know if the Israeli military themselves would make this argument. In this subsection I'm just replying to a hypothetical person who does hold this view.)
Now imagine that instead of Palestinian civilians, the Gaza hospital is full of Israeli civilians. Would Israel still attack the hospital to kill a few Hamas fighters in the basement? I doubt it, or if Israel did, it would be extremely cautious about minimizing innocent loss of life. So much for the principle of not rewarding hostage taking. (My example in this paragraph of attacking a hospital full of Israeli civilians was partly inspired by a point from Kyle Kulinski. He noted that when there's a violent psycho in a school, we don't respond by bombing the school and killing a lot of civilians along with the bad guy. Kulinski says: "Flip the situation to a domestic scenario to figure out how you feel about it.")
As of , Israel and Hamas are close to finalizing an agreement for the release of at least 50 women and children hostages that Hamas took on , in return for concessions from Israel. When the lives of Israeli civilians are on the line, Israel seems willing to give in to some hostage demands.