It’s easy to act self-righteous when that has no consequences, but in practice most people on this planet live in countries (including democratic countries) that probably would actually kill the children in an analogous scenario.

If you present me with a trolley problem in which the only way to destroy Hamas also kills a million children, I won’t know what the right answer is. I suppose it would depend on what would happen to Israel if Hamas wasn’t destroyed.

However, the moral calculus for nations is not the same as it is for individuals. The standard established the last time the Western world fought a war it took seriously does seem to be “as many as it takes” and I suspect that this would still be the standard if such a war happened again. (All those nuclear missiles we have ready aren’t precise weapons…) In that context, demanding that Israel should show restraint that other countries haven’t and wouldn’t seems like hypocrisy.

If you trust the casualty numbers that the UN Is using, then they imply approximately 3.7 civilians killed for every combatant (with the assumptions that children make up half the population and that children are never combatants). I don’t trust those numbers but I admit that if I did, I would think they didn’t look good for Israel. I suppose we’ll have a better idea of what the truth is years from now when historians reach a consensus, but until then I’m going to reluctantly trust Biden’s judgement because the US government probably has secret information unavailable to the public. (Biden is biased by his need to be re-elected, but I don’t get reports from the CIA so that’s the best I can do.)

As for justification: Israel should make reasonable efforts to minimize civilian casualties while accomplishing its legitimate military objectives, but Israel should not sacrifice its ability to accomplish those objectives in order to protect civilians. In other words, Hamas doesn’t get to hold Palestinian civilians as hostages against Israel. If they try, then they are to blame for the resulting civilian casualties. The alternative is simply unworkable in practice, because the ability of Hamas to put Palestinian civilians at risk is almost total.

over 2/3 being civilians by their own count

People often bring this up without noting that such a ratio would not be unusual in urban warfare against a well-prepared enemy even when the attacking army is doing what it reasonably can to reduce civilian casualties. Compare it to Mariupol, an example of what happens of the attacking army is unconcerned about civilian casualties: 25/26 of Ukrainians killed were civilians according to Ukrainian estimates. (8/9 were civilians if we use the Ukrainian numbers for how many of their soldiers were killed but the more conservative Human Rights Watch numbers for civilian deaths.)

I know the feeling. I’ve been in the USA for decades, almost my entire life, but as soon as I say anything, everyone can immediately hear that I’m not American. People who ask me about it are well-meaning and curious. I still don’t like it, but I try not to show it.

Guilt.

Uh, how common do you think mail-order brides are?

Is this unusual? I thought wild-caught fish often (usually?) had parasitic worms in it, and that they were generally not dangerous to humans, at least as long as the fish was cooked. There’s a video I saw, which I don’t suggest looking up, in which a chef explains that he knows the fish is fresh if the worms are still moving.

Developing better weapons doesn’t make someone a bad guy, but I don’t want the bad guys (and of course I’m picking a side, I live in the USA and I like it here) to develop better weapons. If the USA and its allies succeed while its opponents fail, that would be great!

You’d better not have a particularly vivid imagination or else you’ll be prosecuted for daydreaming.

Places with traditions of mummification have dry climates in which bodies may mummify naturally, so it’s not something the people just came up with out of nowhere.

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Given the context of a certain other person accused of financial crimes… Average real-estate over-valuation fan vs. average tax-evasion enjoyer.

I’m pretty sure Putin also thinks that Ukraine had nothing to do with it.

My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I’m searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn’t always help.

If you accept the Hamas claim that

The Gaza authorities’ last demographic breakdown from 29 February indicated more than 70% of those killed had been women and children.

but you also think that Israel is getting its 2:1 value by counting corpses rather than by just making it up, that would imply that they’re counting all dead men (and 5% of dead women and children) as Hamas fighters.

However, given that approximately half of the population of Gaza is under 18, 70% would imply that over 93% of Palestinian casualties are civilians (based on the assumption that adult men make up 100% of Hamas fighters but only 25% of the civilian population). That’s 14 civilians killed for every fighter, more than twice as bad as the Russian siege of Mariupol. I don’t believe this because (1) it doesn’t correspond to the level of destruction we’re seeing, (2) I think Biden would act very differently if it were true, and (3) Hamas has a great deal of motivation to lie.

If Israel were killing literally everyone, women and children would be 75% of the dead. This is what Hamas is saying when they say “more than 70%”. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous but it’s what some people apparently believe and what the Western media reports uncritically.

Note that if if we accept the 2:1 casualty ratio Israel claims but believe they’re counting dead Hamas fighters completely accurately, that would mean 50% of casualties would be women and children and 17% of the casualties would be civilian men. If we think Israel is also exaggerating, then 7500 Hamas fighters killed, a 3:1 casualty ratio (pretty bad but not necessarily unjustifiable) would mean 56% of the casualties would be women and children and 19% would be civilian men. So I think the true fraction of women and children among the dead is somewhere between 50% and 56%.

Not a lot of new information in this article. My summary is that there’s no way to verify either Israeli claims about the number of Hamas fighters killed or Hamas claims about the number of Palestinians killed. However, the two groups’ claims are mutually consistent, with Israel reporting approximately 10,000 Hamas fighters killed and Hamas reporting 30,000 Palestinians killed.

In December, [the IDF] described an assessment that it was killing two civilians for every Hamas fighter as “tremendously positive”, given the challenges it faced on the battlefield.

Of course, (30,000 - 10,000) to 10,000 is 2 to 1.

As Arete says in another comment, 2 to 1 is ordinary for urban warfare. It’s better than I expected, actually, given how heavily fortified Gaza is.

There’s an interesting blog post by a military historian here. In his words,

The IDF claims that they are killing one Hamas soldier for every two civilians they kill in Gaza, a ratio of 0.5, which their spokespeople have claimed is ‘unprecedented in the modern history of warfare,’ but which looking at the figures above is not actually a particularly scrupulous or discriminating ratio – though of course one may well argue the vast differences in circumstances. It is still both far from the best and far from the worst performance for armies operating in civilian spaces.

I’m not endorsing everything he says but I think he gives some good context on the topic of civilian deaths during urban warfare. (IMO he’s being somewhat uncharitable to Israel, given that Hamas spent billions of dollars fortifying Gaza in preparation for exactly this and also has an unusual incentive to have civilians on its own side die due to the role of international opinion in this war.)

Yes, that’s my point. Credibility-building worked, and so did brutal repression. This leads me to think that there was some underlying cultural factor present in post-WWII Germany that made it governable by occupiers, by whatever means. The presence of radical Islamist movements appears to correspond to the absence of such a factor. (Sufficiently brutal repression might still work, the way it did for Putin in Chechnya, but it’s not an option for Israel.)

I don’t think that’s actually what the problem is. The historical norm appears to be that even extremely brutal wars do not on their own radicalize the defeated population. Look at eastern Europe after World War II - the Soviet Union was quickly able to subjugate it despite having given so many people there ample reason to hate Soviet rule. A more recent example is Putin’s victory against an Islamist insurgency in Chechnya.

My own impression is that radical Islamism causes wars, rather than the other way around (although I acknowledge that those wars create a feedback loop of more radicalization).

I don’t think it’s that straightforward. The Soviet Union also successfully pacified East Germany and turned it into an ally. The USA spent twenty years and two trillion dollars trying to build credibility in Afghanistan, and that was all for nothing.