Outside the Middle East there's many areas threatened by combatants with similar cheap missiles. Perhaps Ukraine is an obvious one. We're seeing rises in conflicts across parts of Africa, Cambodia/Thailand, Pakistan/India. Many governments are looking into buying these to protect their countries.
This technology hopefully can protect populations from destabilizing forces funded on the cheap by foreign powers. Machine guns changed warfare [2] and drones have been a similar massive change in warfare making it cheaper and easier to attack and destabalize regions. Though of course there's downsides as well [3].
1: https://www.mideastjournal.org/post/how-many-rockets-fired-a... 2: https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/how... 3: https://claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com/p/iron-dome-part...
Country B has possibly the best missile defense system in the world; mainly because their neighbors shoot unguided rockets into their city. They work to defend their citizens at all costs even with expensive missiles and a protracted military campaign. They design cutting edge laser missile defense to help them alleviate the burden of protecting their citizens. The only reason they do not have to completely annihilate their neighbor who's shooting rockets at them is because they are able to intercept most of them. If those rockets were actually landing and causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties their retaliation would have to be far more deadly.
People on the internet: "actually its the civilians from country A who need defenses"
The reason this doesn't make the discourse, even on communities like Hacker News which are supposed to be "smart", is because of decades of the West being brainwashed to the point where Islamophobia is normalized and ubiquitous.
Genocide accusations:
- Amnesty International - https://zeteo.com/p/amnesty-concludes-israel-genocide-gaza
- Human Rights Watch - https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-exterminat...
- Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) - https://msf.org.uk/issues/gaza-genocide
- University Network for Human Rights - https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/projects/genocide-in-gaza
- B'Tselem - https://zeteo.com/p/israeli-human-rights-group-says-israel
- Al-Haq - https://www.alhaq.org/publications/25781.html
- Palestinian Centre for Human Rights - https://pchrgaza.org/category/genocide-against-gaza/
- Physicians for Human Rights - Israel
- United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied - Palestinian Territory - https://zeteo.com/p/united-nations-un-gaza-genocide-israel
- The International Association of Genocide Scholars - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/israel-committ...
Apartheid accusations:
- Amnesty International - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/israel-opt-is...
- Human Rights Watch - https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
- B'Tselem - https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is...
- Al-Haq - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16183.html
- Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16183.html
- Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/19761.html
- Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/20931.html
- UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk - https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-y...
- UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16324.html
- Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/7207.html
- International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) - Referenced in multiple coalition statements
- BADIL Resource Center - https://badil.org/press-releases/592.html
- Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/17012.html
- Palestinian Coalition of 8 Organizations - https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/20931.html
Apartheid is race based discrimination, not citizenship based like what happens in Israel/Palestine. Making an accusation of genocide does not mean there actually is a genocide.
> Anyone denying that is no different than anyone denying the holocaust - equally vile and reprehensible.
Comparing the holocaust(an actual genocide) as something "equally vile and reprehensible" to the situation in Israel/Palestine is equivalent to a form of holocaust denial IMO.
Claims like these are a rather overt display of antisemitic propaganda.[0]
> Don't take my word for it, list of apartheid and genocide reports below.
There is a long list of organizations that have thrown away their credibility with dubious accusations for various reasons.
> The reason this doesn't make the discourse, even on communities like Hacker News which are supposed to be "smart", is because of decades of the West being brainwashed to the point where Islamophobia is normalized and ubiquitous.
It seems you're trying to downplay the very real threat from Islamic extremists that Israel faces.
[0] https://www.ajc.org/news/the-gaza-auschwitz-comparison-a-mor...
The sign of a brainwashed person is to equate this occupation with Islamic terrorism. Unfortunately, you have fallen to propaganda by even bringing that up. Jews and Muslims have lived together peacefully for hundreds of years prior to 1948. There has been nothing but respect between those two religions going back for as long as one can remember. The change is Zionism. That’s what the problem is, not radical Islam or radical Judaism. Zionism != Judaism.
Why would I blindly trust the conclusions of "international organizations"? Especially ones that have shown themselves to have very little integrity?
> You trust Amnesty and the UN?
The same Amnesty international that has shown to have serious issues with bias across multiple conflicts?[0][1]
The same UN which has thrown away essentially all of their credibility when it comes to anything related to Israel?[2]
Obviously I would never blindly trust these organizations.
> The sign of a brainwashed person is to equate this occupation with Islamic terrorism.
There is an occupation because the Palestinians have refused to negotiate a final peace agreement, Israel clearly can not unilaterally end the occupation as they did in 2005 with Gaza and expect a positive outcome.
> Jews and Muslims have lived together peacefully for hundreds of years prior to 1948.
Where have they lived together peacefully as equals for hundreds of years prior to 1948?
> There has been nothing but respect between those two religions going back for as long as one can remember.
There's a long history of conflict between Jews and Muslims throughout the years, obviously in recent years it has been worse in a lot of ways.[3][4]
> The change is Zionism. That’s what the problem is, not radical Islam or radical Judaism. Zionism != Judaism.
So Jews wanting to have a state where they wouldn't have to live as second class citizens[5] and have a right to self determination was the problem? Why would it be so hard for Muslims to accept the existence of a Jewish majority state when there are plenty of Muslim majority states?
After the holocaust it's entirely reasonable that Jews would reject being forced to live as a minority in a Muslim majority state.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/28/amnesty-intern...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/ngos-anti-...
[2] https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1517_Hebron_attacks
You’re not “effectively” denying it. You’re just denying it.
You stated what Israel is doing is as "equally vile and reprehensible" as the holocaust, this is an absolutely insane comparison.
The Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, they wiped out something like half the worldwide population of Jews...on the other hand during the Israeli occupation the Palestinian population over the years has increased drastically.
The holocaust has very little in common with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and one certainly can't realistically claim Israel doesn't have the military means to exterminate the Palestinians if they wanted to either. Israel clearly doesn't have that sort of genocidal intent towards Palestinians. You can probably make an argument that some of the more extremist elements in Israel want to ethnically cleanse Palestinians but that's not remotely equivalent to the holocaust.
By making this comparison you're effectively denying the holocaust by downplaying it and saying it's somehow equivalent to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Making this comparison is a well known antisemitic trope.
Which is exactly what Israel is. They literally have a term for it: "birthright"
Israel has been committing genocide for 80 years. No amount of tossing around the fake term of "antisemitism" is going to change that.
Ilan Pappé
Avi Shlaim
Simha Flapan
Why would he be one of the New Historians? Norman Finkelstein isn't really even a historian, he's more of a activist/political scientist if anything AFAIU.
> watch their debate hosted by Lex Fridman.
I've seen it, it's pretty clear if you dig into the facts that the accusations of genocide against Israel are not supported by the evidence.
It's also quite clear that people like Norman Finkelstein like to cherry-pick facts(often from books written by Benny Morris) to support a particular narrative. Benny Morris tends to take a more balanced view of the history in general which has a lot of nuance.
The 3 historians he listed were 3 out of the 4 most well known "New Historians", but him leaving out Benny Morris(arguably the most well known of the New Historians and the one who coined the term itself) was a bit of a red flag to me that he's cherry-picking sources to support a particular narrative. Technically the "New Historians" are a subset of "Israeli historians".
> he's probably not reading the people the New Historians were responding to.
Yeah, I'm sure he isn't, although I'm probably also less familiar with those original historians myself as well since I was born after the point in which the "New Historians" had access to the declassified archives.
Even amongst the New Historians there's a lot of disagreements on things like which side has been more of an impediment to peace and a number of other key issues, with Benny Morris often being highly critical of say Ilan Pappé.
My own views of the history of the conflict and Zionism in general are probably broadly in line with those of Benny Morris. It's important to at least try and understand the history/perspectives of both sides of these conflict. At the same time it's worrying that even a lot of otherwise intelligent individuals would fall for rather overt antisemitic propaganda.
Of course Benny Morris takes a more balanced view. He’s trying hard to make up for the imbalance.
Yeah, one is a real historian and the other calls a Holocaust denier "a very good historian"[0].
> Of course Benny Morris takes a more balanced view. He’s trying hard to make up for the imbalance.
Maybe neutral is a better word, Benny Morris is certainly much less of an activist than someone like Norman Finkelstein.
[0] https://www.thejc.com/news/norman-finkelstein-praises-holoca...
Both country's governments are in the wrong and their civilians are suffering because of it.
If Israel used a roof-knocker it's because they believed there was Hamas infrastructure or supplies in the building.
And there's something inherently wrong about a grenade on a tent? Do soldiers not use tents??
As for the firsthand accounts--all reporting from the ground in Gaza is highly suspect. But it doesn't matter anyway--yes, we have clear evidence of civilians killed by long range fire. We have *zero* evidence of the identity of the shooters.
Hits caught on conveniently rolling cameras. Not hidden cameras, anyone picking targets would have known they were there. What possible reason does Israel have for doing that? Absolutely none. What possible reason does Hamas have for doing that? Framing Israel. Those cases make far more sense as Hamas rather than as Israel.
Here's an article from Reuters about the civilian deaths. You can also pull up satellite images and see for yourself that the country is being levelled. That's not something you do if you're seeking specific individuals. There's just no excuse for killing civilians.
- B'tselem is a an Israeli org - https://www.btselem.org/topic/human_shields
- Former Israeli soldiers - https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-arm...
- Even NY Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-g...
As for the "former Israeli soldiers"--how, exactly, are we supposed to know they really are?
NY Times? *ALL* the major news sources do not want to jeopardize access to reporting from Gaza. They'll say what Hamas wants them to say.
Nobody else comes close to Israel in protecting civilians in combat zones.
And let's take a critical eye to that data you linked. I'm having a hard time with the filters but we can see enough without: The fatalities are nearly 90% male. That implies that probably 80% are in some fashion combatants or combatant-adjacent.
And note that the death toll for the recent war includes all deaths. Natural causes, internal combat, rockets falling short (historically, ~25% of Gaza deaths, but probably not this time), combatants and civilians. As well as some that are fake.
And Hamas had the power to end the war at any time--return the hostages, the world would quickly have stopped Israel. Thus we can conclude that Hamas wanted the war despite what it did to their population.
That’s some newspeak right there.
Tell me, given all adult, non-ultra-orthodox, Jewish Israelis, regardless of gender, must mandatorily serve in the military and remain reservists for decades, does this mean most Jewish adults are “combatant adjacent”?
War has a huge logistics tail. That logistics tail is a completely valid target, often considered the primary target in western tactics. (Look at the original Russian attempt to seize Kyiv--Ukraine didn't attack the tanks, it cut them off. The guy driving the fuel truck for those tanks is combatant adjacent.)
"Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war" - https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...
The way they came up with this 83% figure is insane, they are essentially claiming everyone killed that hasn't been identified as a named fighter in one specific Israeli military intelligence database is assumed to be a civilian, this logic is of course blatantly misleading as one would not expect Israel to have the capability to identify the name of each and every enemy combatant in a war zone. On top of that the total number killed is a figure published by the Hamas run Gaza Health Ministry which is well known to have major accuracy issues.
That list was of those both identified to be terrorist and identified to be dead. Thus, not only does it not count the unidentified dead but it also does not count the identified but not established to be terrorist.
When some idiot in the ME decides to shoot something at Israel, the character of the response demanded by the population depends heavily on whether any Israelis die or property is destroyed.
Israel didn't aggressively bomb Gaza till October 7 killed a lot of Israelis, even though they were regularly shooting down Hamas launched rockets with Iron Dome.
There is a practical gulf in political and diplomatic options depending on if an attack lands or does not, so much so that whether or not someone can shoot down incoming weaponry is a factor in some diplomatic decisions (I.e. Iran firing missiles at US bases in Qatar).
I'm not convinced. Responding purely defensively allows your attacker to systematically probe every weakness in your defenses without risk of harm to themselves (e.g. how Russia is playing cat&mouse with the EU).
Real life doesn't break down into simple narratives. The facts in the Middle East are that post-October 7 Israel aggressively bombarded Gaza at a scale and intensity where it did not previously, and a substantial chunk of the population supported that. In particular, it felt compelled to significantly escalate kinetic action against Hamas and Iran where it had not previously.
Post 9/11 the US aggressively invaded 2 sovereign nations it otherwise had little interest in and occupied them for 20 years.
These are all scales and levels of military action which were precipitated by successful attacks that killed civilians. If 9/11 hijackers had been stopped in the planning stage, does the US still invade Afgahnistan? Probably not - it wasn't on anyone's cards. Iraq maybe but the conditions were set by that strike hitting the way it did.
You should watch some Sky News Australia; at least once a week there is a special report on how to prepare for China's invasion - which is never more than two weeks away.
You would have done it if you thought you could get away with it and had sufficient power.
In contrast the Gazan government strategically uses humans shields [2, 3] and despite this the majority of Palestinians still support starting this war by attacking civilians on Oct 7th [1]. Defense technology doesn’t help if you don’t want it unfortunately.
Hamas also has hundreds of miles of tunnels which civilians aren’t allowed to use.
1: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/1000#:~:text=The%20Trump%20Pla... 2: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.... 3: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/01/hamas-officials-admi...
Us $ to israel: https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-u...
Israel defense budget: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-raise-defen...
The US also gives similar levels of military aid to Egypt as well. The EU and US give billions to Ukraine.
Gaza also receives billions in aid; substantial amounts of which has been hihacked and looted. For example this lady summer the UN reported that 88% of their aid trucks in Gaza were looted [1].
1: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/08/05/un-reports-88-percen...
Actually it does? It takes about 1/4 away.
> The US also gives similar levels of military aid to Egypt as well. The EU and US give billions to Ukraine.
Yes, the US uses defense aid to further their own agenda internationally, and funnel public dollars into private hands.
> Gaza also receives billions in aid
Food, medical, and infrastructure aid is not the same thing as weapons.
> 88% of their aid trucks in Gaza were looted
Ok? This tells me that both food and food aid are in short supply, if people are willing to take it by force. If myself and my family was starving, i would hyjack food trucks too. Wouldn’t you?
> Actually it does? It takes about 1/4 away.
It literally does not. The way that every English speaker uses the word "invests" is exactly the opposite of this. If you're going to speak English, you use words as native speakers use them and you don't make up your own definitions.
Israel “invests” ~30b in military spending.
Of that, ~7b is not their own money, and the could not accept that money and spend it another way.
Therefore, israel “invests” about 1/4 less than it would seem.
There is no way any group other than Hamas could be operating at that scale. It's Hams taking the aid to use it to control the population. It's not like they were actually starving--Hamas never managed to find a legitimately starving person to point a camera at. Every single person they paraded in front of the cameras had medical issues that were the cause of their problems. Just go look inside a hospice, should we conclude they are starving people?
Lots of politics at play.
Second, yes there is a war going on - solid data is hard to come by. But that’s a lack of data, not a change in their criteria. You can read their full mortality analysis and reasoning starting on page 24 https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/I...
The conclusion is:
>Considering the available evidence, and in line with the IPC Guidance Note on Famine Classification,64 the FRC infers from the available data that mortality thresholds for Famine have already been exceeded in Gaza Governorate. Based on expert judgement, we also conclude that the Famine thresholds for mortality have not yet been crossed in Deir al-Balah or Khan Younis governorates.
No goalposts moved. Based on the data we have, people are dying of malnutrition.
This is factually incorrect. The amount of money that the US gives Israel is completely and totally irrelevant to whether or not Israel also invests their own money in defense.
The fact that the US has a problem with foreign influence literally does not matter for the statement above.
To be clear, I don't agree with the GP's implied suggestion that Israel is more defensive than offensive, but making objectively incorrect statements is not a valid way to refute that.
The defensive and offensive capabilities of Israel is about 1/4 larger because of american tax dollars not their own spending.
> To say that israel invests in defense is at least 1/4 untrue, since the US sends billions every year.
That statement is completely false, and is very different than what you said just now.
If you're going to walk back your words because you were proven wrong, that's fine, but don't claim you're "rephrasing" when you're actually changing your claim.
> To say that israel invests in defense is at least 1/4 untrue, since the US sends billions every year.
You are clearly claiming that because Israel's defense budget isn't entirely their own spending, that that claim is not entirely true.
Then someone else responded:
> That the US contributes doesn’t take away from the billions Israel did and does invest
If that hadn't been your claim, then you would have agreed with this. But you didn't - you responded and doubled down and made it extremely clear that that was what you were saying[1]:
> Actually it does? It takes about 1/4 away.
Given how incredibly clear you were about your claims, the "revised" statement:
> The defensive and offensive capabilities of Israel is about 1/4 larger because of american tax dollars not their own spending.
...is objectively and factually different.
It's not me who's misunderstanding - given not only the repeated statements that reinforced exactly the same point, and other commentators interpreting it actually the same (because they can read) - it's you who are lying about your original words.
usa aid is typically around $3b-$3.5b . 2024 higher aid is one off due to the war. also (unless i am wrong), good chunk of aid that Israel got from usa during war was in form of loans/guarantees for loans and such
In 2020 their military budget was ~21b. In 2020 the US gave 3.8b - so 21%, or 1/5. My number was based on 2024 budget and spending, which is why i said 1/4, but you’re probably right that pre-war numbers are more accurate if we’re talking about their long term spending trends.
Sources:
Israel military budget: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?end=2020...
US money to israel, page 6: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/RL/PDF/RL3322...
from israeli site:
The 2021 budget framework for the "Ministry of Defense" includes an expenditure budget of NIS 62.357 billion, in addition to NIS 14.972 billion in income-contingent expenditure and authorization to commit in the amount of NIS 36.3 billion.
In 2022, the framework for the budget includes an expenditure budget of NIS 59.833 billion, in addition to NIS 15 billion in income-contingent expenditure and authorization to commit in the amount of NIS 42.9 billion.
Here’s another one that agrees with my number for israel’s military spending: https://www.timesofisrael.com/bennett-gantz-liberman-agree-o...
I do agree the Hamas strategy was explicitly about getting civilians killed, though.
This just means Israel knows they're hitting women and children every time they send a bomb their way.
> the majority of Palestinians still support starting this war
Palestine isn't a democracy with well documented preferences. Israel is though, so why don't you say that a majority of Israelis are fine with the killing of women and children in Gaza?
elcritch, you're beating around the bush but strongly suggesting there's a reasonable justification (not just an explanation) for killing women and children if it suits someone's needs. Does this apply just to Israel killing people in Gaza or universally valid? Because I distinctly remember the US going to war over WMD that never existed. So elcritch, are you saying US women and children are fair game now?
The Law of Armed Conflict specifies exactly when it considers such a reasonable justification to exist, which is not "never". You don't get to plop down women and children in front of military installations and go "neener neener" like you're a child on the school playground.
Sure Eli, and I'm sure you're not biased at all, but when you find so many "reasonable" reasons to kill thousands and thousands of civilians, women and children included, and you never ask yourself any questions, there's nothing more anybody else needs to know about you.
The comparison writes itself and when it doesn't, you make it obvious. You wouldn't be the first person who finds justification for something like this.
Women have been serving in combat roles in the U.S. military for decades now…
2) When human shields get hit we blame the side that put them in harm's way, not the side that harmed them. Just look at the criminal trials in police actions--a hostage dies when SWAT hits a place, the murder rap lands on the person who took the hostage even if it turns out to be a police bullet in the hostage.
And your note about WMD--said WMD existed. On paper. We read the paper, didn't realize it was underlings lying to Saddam.
So they didn't.
> a hostage dies when SWAT hits a place, the murder rap lands on the person who took the hostage even if it turns out to be a police bullet in the hostage.
The murder wrap doesn't fall on the SWAT shooter even when they shoot completely unarmed, innocent people, in their own home. So all your example says is that SWAT gets gets a free pass for murder no matter what. All it takes is for someone to anonymously say "LorenPechtel is a terrorist, he's planning to blow up some children at this address right now" and your chances are slim.
As for drones, they’ll fly lower to the ground to reduce the line of sight.
One could also hope that e.g. Iran starts focusing its economy on the wellbeing of its people versus playing regional cop to America’s world police.
And the people with guns mostly either cheer it on or pretend it's not so bad (until they themselves feature in /r/leopardsatemyface).
Although I will believe there are a few more iterations before this regime falls
There's a reason that's been happening, and it's not technical in nature. Technical solutions are thus unlikely to successfully address the root cause.
Will it solve the "root cause"? Probably not, but that's because there's no single "root cause", but it still might lead to some diplomatic resolution.
We may say that it was unproductive, badly conducted, or a lot of other things, but saying it was unprovoked is like saying that Ukraine has no reasons to attack Iran and/or Belarus. They do have those reasons, because both of those countries directly and materially support their attackers. It just might not be productive to do so (and indeed, Ukraine seems to believe it isn't).
And they didn't provoke a war with Iran. Israel struck those arming Hezbollah. They got somebody high up in the Iranian chain of command. Iran responded with major Geneva violations.
Now I doubt the technology is anywhere close to that now, but in 10-20 years alongside other technological advancements? Who knows.
That you're primarily concerned with disruption to life and financial burden rather than casualties and infrastructure indicates that iron dome is already capable of preventing these rockets from being a serious threat.
The absolute asymmetry of every war they fight is proof enough that the only real solution is a commitment to negotiations and diplomacy. Palestine has under constant siege since long before I was born and they still haven't given up despite having the worst kdr of the last 80 years. They don't care about the laser dome, they will keep fighting.
Also I have doubts about this laser boondoggle, its far more susceptible to atmospheric disturbance and flack than a surface-to-air missile and it relies upon having access to a stable source of electricity during an air raid.
Diplomacy only works if both sides desire peace.
The reality:
Israel desires to avoid a continuation of the Holocaust.
Iran desires stirring up trouble as a means of taking over countries, and uses the conflict with Israel as a justification. It's working fine for Iran, why would they agree to peace? They never have, just some stuff playing us for fools. I don't support The Felon but tearing up the Iran agreement was a stopped clock thing.
The left thinks everything can be solved with enough jaw, jaw. The right thinks everything can be solved with enough war, war. Both are wrong.
Then why the UN-recognized genocide of Palestinians?
You start to have a problem when you try to forcibly alter the demographics of a region to become majority Jewish, in a region where the majority were not Jews. This is quite literally Zionism 101. If you don't think this is the root cause, what pray tell do you believe it is?
No. The attacks were normal, not news. Think Jim Crow.
And the "Nakba" is mostly illusion. Lots of Arabs left at Arab behest, getting out of the way of the intended destruction of Israel. Oops, didn't work. Israel didn't ethnically cleanse Israel, most of it's neighbors did ethnically cleanse their areas.
And where you go wrong is thinking it was forceful. They bought land and moved to it.
And the root cause is that the Jews threw off centuries of oppression and the Muslims can't stand that. They considered the land conquered. As normal, when a victim throws off the abuser the level of violence goes way up.
I would also argue that imposing the jizya/dhimmi status, creating "second class citizen status" for non-Muslims was, in and of itself, a form of Muslim-supremacist society in Palestine before Israel existed. Either convert to being a Muslim, or be stuck as a second-class citizen.
100 percent. I've gotten the impression that this not being the case anymore is extremely irritating to extremist Muslims. This issue alone will fuel the conflict forever.
However even then there were regular pogroms and killing of Jews by the Arabs as there had been for centuries before.
The British Mandate also turned away ships full of Ashkenazi Jews Holocaust survivors as well.
Don’t forget the nearly 850,000 MENA Jews expelled from across every Arab country after Israel was created.
It’s not nearly as cut and dry as many believe.
Quite the record.
But I don't see this as a specifically Jewish thing. There is clearly a cabal of extremely wealthy people who consider themselves above the law. The cabal includes factions of different ethnicities, and they seem to enjoy - and profit from - promoting nationalism and race hate and getting the peasants to wage war on each other.
We seem to be in one of the regular cycles where these crazies get out of control.
I'm sure it's all very entertaining. But no doubt modern PR and astroturfing techniques will make sure no one's opinion becomes so unfavourable that personal accountability becomes a real risk for these criminals.
Even so. It's really not a very satisfactory situation.
You can sell your property, the lease goes along with it but the new owner has no obligation to renew the lease when it's up.
This is silly... what mass migration happens "voluntarily" lol. MENA Jews weren't even Zionists until they force-became Zionists.
But yeah, good-faith debates should steer clear of the "legally purchased" bit, it's kind of absurd to ignore that buying land from absentee rich landlords and evicting the longstanding residents is not going to (rightfully, IMO) create a lot of animosity.
- Jewish flight/migration to Palestine, neglecting the reality to one extent or another that Palestinian Arabs were there and had aspirations to form a state
- Arab /Muslim nations forcibly ejecting their Jews to Israel in the 50s-70s (ashekenazi Jews are a minority in Israel, most are from Arab counties and Iran), thus fueling the Jewish population there. I can't think of a greater strategic failure from the Muslim perspective here, because Israelis from these countries ended up by proportion being the most extreme right-wing of Israelis (see crazy statements by the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel as examples, his family is from Iraq I believe). These folks are not going to relocate to Berlin or Vienna any time soon.
- Muslim leaders using the conflict for their internal political purposes-- think Arab nationalist Egypt or Syria or Iraq, or Islamist Iran. I find it had to believe that the leaders of any of these countries care at all about the plight of the Palestinians, in fact, the more Palestinians suffer, the more these political entities gain. Up to a point though-- it wasn't enough for Asad, and Iran will fall too, because people want more than an enemy to focus on
- Muslim chauvinism. This one is underappreciated in my opinion! But in my opinion, a huge driver of the conflict. Muslims just don't want to let go of Jews, Christians and other minorities not being dhimmis in what used to be Muslim land. Muslims demand to be the top dogs in the levant. That's the reality they want to restore, as much as Jewish religious extremists have similar biases.
- ongoing cycle of violence since the 1920s
- organizations like Hamas that exist to resist peace initiatives and, for example, sabotaged the oslo accords by blowing up buses in Israel. Similar extremists exist on both sides, but Hamas was founded explicitly to resist peace and pursue maximalist goals. NGOs like UNRWA also have a stake in the conflict continuing, sadly.
No other conflict like Israel Palestine exists in the world for a reason. Even Ukraine is willing to cede land unjustly to Russia to end that war. Palestinians have been alternating between euphoria and great tragedy for 80 years now and refuse anything but the most maximalist vision, and suffer as a result because it drives away good faith actors that would otherwise support them (for example, liberal Israelis, many successive US administrations). Palestinians are really bad a picking their battles and strategic thinking. October 7th did not go as they envisioned, and only an irrational person would pretend the illusory gains there were worth it, which was pretty clear to me in real time on October 7th, while many Gazans were inexplicably celebrating in the streets.
I don't think there was any aspirations to form a state in 1880-1900 or at least I haven't seen it.
After 1948 Egypt and Jordan stepped in and annexed Gaza and the West Bank specifically to avoid the formation of a Palestinian state.
lovely quote on this topic from one of PLO commanders that shows actual state of mind of Palestinians
The Palestinian people does not exist … there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of one people, the Arab nation [...] Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. Because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons[...] Once we have acquired all our rights in all of Palestine, we must not delay for a moment the reunification of Jordan and Palestine
What definition are you using that trips for Palestinians but not Israelis (or practically any other group in the Middle East outside e.g. cosmopolitan Gulf cities)?
An even more radical form would be: uses child suicide bombers.
Were the Japanese Kamikaze pilots terrorists? No--their targets were clearly military in nature. Likewise, was the US pilot that kamikaed a terrorist? No. (His plane had no hope of making it back to the carrier, he could have bailed out but the only possible rescue would be from the very fleet he was attacking. No path with a meaningful chance of survival, as soldiers in hopeless situations often do he chose to take as many enemies with him as he could.)
Terrorism is about the target, not the means.
The example of kamikaze pilots also works like suicide bombers to distinguish different groups on those terms.
All in all, what you’ve written has the sense of a rebuttal but is acting as support for my point.
> As of 19 November 2025, over 72,500 people (70,525 Palestinians and 2,109 Israelis) have been reported killed in the Gaza war according to the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including 248 journalists and media workers, 120 academics, and over 224 humanitarian aid workers, a number that includes 179 employees of UNRWA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
How is killing tens of thousands of people less barbaric than killing thousands of people? What kind of twisted morality do you use to excuse mass murder by missiles but not through suicide bombing?
1) It's the total death toll from all causes, including natural causes.
2) The majority of those "journalists and media workers" were Hamas propaganda people.
3) UNRWA had a higher proportion of it's people identified as terrorists than the population at large.
4) It's what Hamas claimed, without any means of verification. Israel showed about 4k were unquestionably false. Hamas also claimed 10,000 buried in the rubble--which never changed. Then when they started digging after the war only some hundreds were found--and Israel caught them planting bodies to be found.
And, fundamentally, the death toll proves nothing. Blame war on the side that chooses to fight, not on the side that is successful at fighting. Typically they are one in the same as most countries will not launch a war they don't expect to win. But when a little guy goes and tries to beat up a big guy and gets pounded it's still the guy who started it that's in the wrong.
2) Source? The only places where I can read about it are in far right Israeli or American communications.
3) Source? It seems like Israel was interested in labelling UNRWA as a terrorist organization at some point, but there is no evidence to back up their claim. After all, the IDF is known to shoot at journalists and humanitarian aid workers in their strategy to starve Gaza, so it makes sense they would try to discredit the org.
4) I can't find what you're talking about.
I think it would be more honest if you simply stated that you are fine with the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, rather that argue about who started what while ignoring the century that Israel's settler-colonial project has existed. This isn't country vs country, this is well-funded colonizer vs colonyzee. More akin to the American expansion over natives territory. Did native American attacks back then justify the US in killing them all? Of course not. Same thing here.
Hamas's existence is at least explainable (if not excusable) in the light of a Palestinian population that feared for its lives, and was vindicated in the last few years in thinking that Israel was out to kill them all. Because it is.
2) Unfortunately, most sources are not willing to report things Hamas does not want reported--reporting things Hamas doesn't like would interfere with their ability to report anything. Thus you're stuck with mostly Israeli sources. But Israel has published lists. And, notably, nobody comes along and shows any problems with the Israeli reporting. It's always dismissed without evidence--and that is pretty strong indication that it's true. In discerning the truth between competing sides look at how each side responds to the claims of the other.
3) Once again, Israel has published lists. And note that you are presuming your conclusion in your argument. You can't claim Israel shoots innocents because Israel shoots innocents. And you also are presenting without evidence the claim that Israel was trying to starve Gaza.
I will not deny that Israel shoots "journalists"--because the propaganda people pretend they are journalists. And, likewise, "humanitarian" aid workers--the aid system was basically controlled by Hamas and used to maintain control over the population. It's the unfortunate reality of almost all "aid" operations--the aid is controlled by the very people who cause the situation and is used to maintain control. Gaza is normal, not an outlier.
4) Israel put out some stuff showing "dead" that weren't. Things like a group of "dead" where the identity numbers were sequential, the names were different, the rest of the details were the same. Really, now, a bunch of people with sequential ID numbers die together???? Especially when sequential ID numbers aren't possible with their system. (The ID numbers have a check digit.)
I am decidedly not fine with ethnic cleansing in Gaza, I just do not think it's going on. Hamas engineered an atrocity to make you think Israel is evil.
You guys have been arguing in good faith and interestingly. You undermine your credibility with insults.
Firstly, I haven’t mentioned terrorism, nor Palestine or Israel in particular (though that was obviously mentioned by others). What I have given is a way - I maintain - that will separate any groups based on how far or deeply they have been propagandised. Using suicide attacks is clearly one way to do that.
It can be used with and without numbers, so referring to the volume of death or the means is not entirely relevant. Firstly, because if we accept that the suicide attacker has been deeply propagandised and radicalised, then there is an argument that they are innocent (at least in the sense that they are also a victim) which only increases they younger they are.
Secondly, it is possible to fire a missile at a group containing only people it would be straightforward to justify using force against (e.g. military targets). That is difficult with suicide attackers given the point about innocence made above, and also given the targets for attacks that suicide bombers often choose or have chosen for them (which is why they are associated with terrorism, to the point that you actually misread my comment to such an extent that you replied with a clumsy straw man).
So, take your time when responding in such situations, it will benefit your response and everyone involved.
War is ugly, I'm not trying to make the Palestinians into saints, but the other guy is advocating the insane position that Israel can do no wrong, and that them using excessive force is completely justified.
I feel like I'm losing my mind, why is it so hard to say "killing tens of thousands of civilians is barbaric"??
Because it’s not true unless we’re just saying war is barbaric. Which I agree with. But it’s not useful when trying to delineate justified versus excessive force.
I agree Israel is using excessive force in Gaza. I also think Hamas is a terrorist organisation that seems committed to continuing to do terrorism. I genuinely haven’t figured out how to balance thsr equation, though I think discussing it without calling someone engaging in good faith a monster/genocider/anti-Semite is a good start.
This doesn't excuse any crime that Hamas has committed, but anyone still not calling for Israel to move out of Gaza, in light of the many exactions committed by the IDF, is not engaging in good faith, in my book.
The continued killings of civilian populations in Gaza is vindicating the Palestinians in their belief that Israel is legitimately out to kill them all. Because they are. This in turn will create a new generation of "terrorists" who see violence as the only escape. This is also how Hamas was created.
Israel is interested in cleansing the Gaza strip. Whatever the solution to this cycle of violence is (two states, one state...) it first involves stopping Israel immediately and getting the IDF out of Gaza. There is no equation to balance here.
Maybe. I’ll admit, on this first day of 2026 I am thoroughly confused as to the boundary between hybrid/guerilla warfare and genocide.
More pointedly, the debate becomes alienating when we’re calling each other genociders and anti-Semites.
> This in turn will create a new generation of "terrorists" who see violence as the only escape. This is also how Hamas was created
This is not a great argument for peace in Palestine. One, lots of oppressed populations don’t resort to terrorism. Two, it suggests an independent Palestine would continue to be a security threat to Israel.
> Israel is interested in cleansing the Gaza strip
Let’s be blunter since “cleansing” has similarly been semantically obliterated. Members of Israel’s leadership have expressed views that sound like they want to exterminate Palestinians. Others want to move them to away places, which is bad, but categorically different from the first. Plenty of others, however, just don’t want their kids kidnapped at raves or are angry and polarised in the face of violence.
We can do the same for Hamas. Exterminating Israelis and Jews is an explicit aim of Hamas. I don’t think that means everyone in Gaza who supports Hamas is bent on genocide. I do think that makes them—like Israelis pushing to keep bombing Gaza—relatively unsympathetic. (Them and them specifically. Not their whole group.)
> it first involves stopping Israel immediately and getting the IDF out of Gaza. There is no equation to balance here
Israel has a security imperative. If getting out of Gaza means Hamas reärms over a population that supports another October 7th attack, withdrawal is not in their interest. (If you aren’t using violence, which to be clear, means people continent away deciding—again—how borders in the Middle East should be drawn because they know better than the folks on the ground, you need a solution that’s in both parties’ interests. I don’t think Likud and Hamas are interested in negotiating. I do think Gazans and Israelis are.)
Look at the person who selects the target. What do they believe is at that point? Civilian--it's terrorism. Military/government, it's war or insurgency. Look at the pattern--taking out a guard post to get to the civilians behind does not make it legitimate.
Note that you need to look at the person who selects the target--a soldier in the field often knows little of what they're shooting at. And what do they *believe* is there? When we hit that Chinese embassy it was an intel failure, not terrorism--the bomb was dropped on what used to be in the building. Being wrong doesn't make it terrorism. Missing doesn't make it terrorism.
But when Iran drops a missile on an Israeli hospital and claims they were shooting at a "nearby" (no, there was nothing military within many CEPs of the impact point) military facility it's either terrorism, or since they are state actors, a Geneva violation. Especially as they did not apologize, nor even admit the hospital was hit.
We rarely have access to or even knowledge of who this person is, let alone their mens rea.
Any metric based solely on intent is (a) impossible to objectively adjudicate and (b) corrupted by the crazy, who will legitimately believe in fantasies if it serves their ends.
I don’t think you’re wrong. Just that this metric is inadequate. (For what it’s worth, I don’t have a good alternative. My takeaways from the last couple years is that the civilian-military boundary has been irretrievably blurred by hybrid war and non-state actors; the term genocide irreversibly blurred by activists; and the term warm crime rendered irrelevant by the world’s great and regions powers—without exception— explicitly rejecting it as a constraint on themselves. All of this means that the vocabulary we once relied on to make sense of the moral aspect of geopolitics no longer works, which makes discussion a bit confusing.
Maybe that's one goal you should add to your 2026 list...
At least we paid for our own damn genocide. It takes a ot of nerve to complain about americans having a "blind spot" on a country whose military receives at least 15% of its revenue from American taxpayers who are compelled against their will.
No. Yes, there were a few attacks on aid trucks. People who saw aid going to those who were holding Israeli hostages. You realize Israel was under no legal obligation to permit the aid? Don't chant "Geneva", it only requires allowing aid to non-combatants. When there is even a reasonable threat of diversion to military purpose the obligation goes away--and there was not only a reasonable threat, but the vast majority was being diverted.
The only appreciable Geneva violation that Israel engaged in is not sending notice of suspected misuse of civilian things--but this is of no actual importance as the rule exists to avoid mistakes. It wasn't written with a situation where civilian cover was used to the greatest extent possible. For them to have simply said "everything is being misused" would have been a pretty good approximation of the truth.
Ok, case closed, let them rot to death! Next problem?
How about next we argue why it was perfectly acceptable to crash 2 planes into 2 civilian buildings. Seems to be in the same ballpark!
1. Just to repeat myself from another comment on this thread, there is no such thing as a defensive weapon. Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.
Let me pose this question to you: if these were purely defensive technologies, why don't we give them to everyone, including the Palestinians? and
2. Israel has already ruled out giving Ukraine the anti-missile (and assumedly anti-drone) defenses [1]; and
3. Many people, yourself included it seems, need to examine these conflicts around the world through the lens of historical materialism.
Take the genocide and conflict in Sudan. The SAF are arguably the ones with the "cheap rockets" here. Should we be giving the RSF anti-drone technology? The RSF are backed by the UAE using US weapons. Why? To loot Sudanese gold.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Territory, access to the Black Sea, resources and to create a land bridge to Crimea that had otherwise become extremely expensive to maintain as a colonial outpost. Like, just look at a map of controlled territory.
But why is it in a stalemate? In part because Russia is a nuclear power but also because the West is unwilling to let Ukraine do the one thing it could do to defend itself properly and that is to attack Russian energy infrastructure. Despite the sanctions, Russia is still allowed to sell oil and gas to places like Hungary, Slovakia, France, Belgium, India and China.
Back to the Middle East, we have Yemen, who was devastated by war and genocide at the hands of another US ally, Saudi Arabia.
The solution to these conflicts isn't more weapons, not even "defensive weapons". It's solving the underlying economic conditions that created that conflict in the first place.
[1]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-rules-out-giving-ukr...
I'm not sure that's true, before Iron Dome, Israel would respond to many rockets from Gaza by firing mortars back at where the rocket was launched from, often the roof of an apartment building or similar, causing civilian casualties.
After Iron Dome, a lot of rockets were simply intercepted and ignored, because there was no longer political pressure from Israelis seeing rockets land in their villages and wanting to hit back.
It would normally be absurd to expect a state with military superiority to tolerate ~30k rocket attacks from its weaker neighbor. That was only tenable because Israel's air defenses mitigated the bulk of the damage.
If Israel's air defenses and bunkers suddenly disappeared, Israel would be forced to respond far more aggressively to each terrorist attack.
'moving from wooden shingles allows society to be negligent when it comes to fire/forestry management and makes the world worse'
Israel build in Ukraine early warning system for missile defense and transferred to Ukraine it's stock of patriot missiles and batteries
Collectivism will not save us. The day after we abolish markets, prices, and capitalism, there will be as many disagreements about resource allocation as there were the day before. Some of those disagreements will spiral into conflict.
Golden Dome is planning large constellations of lasers like this in constant orbit, as well as hypersonic warheads able to target any spot on Earth within 90 seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
It's explicitly an offensive technology (and of course Musk has been involved)
Especially as AI becomes better and cheaper and suicide drones become more nimble and autonomous. If you have seen any of the horrifying footage out of Ukraine you will understand how badly we need more effective and cheaper drone defense as soon as possible.
In Russia/Ukraine, drones have proven to be a very real threat to deal with (arguably also in Iraq).
What this means is wealthy nations will snatch up or recreate this and deploy it. That will stop smaller resistance forces from either defending or attacking. Depending on the nation in question this could both good or bad. Just like drones, guns, or tanks.
Effectively, this puts the status quo back to where it was before mass drone deployments.
Taken to the extreme, I also prefer the current status quo vs. everyone having a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and would welcome a countermeasure if cheap ICBMs became a thing.
Drones could also be equipped with facial recognition and conventional weapons to support targeted removal of "undesirables."
Very much a "Be careful what you wish for" tech.
What Ukraine have found a net launcher is effective and cheap solution against drones and may allow more use of tanks and heavy armor vehicles again in 2026. Then shotguns with a special ammunition is effective. Then against fiber drones a fence with moving wire works surprisingly good to cut the fiber.
Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.
According to Wikipedia [1], Israel has an average GDP per capita of about 60 USD per hour worked, which at 40 hours per week, 50 weeks worked per year over 20 years comes to about 40000 hours of work and ~2.4 million USD of GDP generated. At an income tax of about 30% [2], that means an income for the state of about 800k USD equivalent. If the person dies due to rocket attack, the state would miss out on that. Iron dome interceptors are quite cheap compared to that and the laser intercepts should be an order of magnitude cheaper still.
This doesn't even take into account the sunk costs that industrialized nations incur by every citizen having to attend school for about the first two decades of their lives, mostly funded by the state. That represents a tremendous investment into human capital that would be lost if you let your citizens get shot up in preventable rocket attacks.
So no, human lives are not actually cheap when viewed through the lens of a country, even when completely excluding morals and only looking at it financially. They are in fact quite valuable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Israel#Income_tax
In any case, elderly and disabled are not as useless to the economy as you might suppose. There are many disabled who are economically productive. One of the most capable colleagues I've ever had was a blind programmer. Grandparents often provide things like babysitter services that don't show up in formal GDP measurements but are very valuable nonetheless. Don't count out the contribution of people to society just because they don't have a normal job.
Life in the developing world is very cheap.
No, Putin's threats to Biden and Trump were more along the lines of, 'See the Houthis shooting shipping, imagine that capability spread to rebels and terrorists worldwide'
iranians arent gonna nuke anyone without first toppling their religious government
(Although, notably, Israel destroyed one that was going to fall on The Dome, the very location that Islam is supposedly trying to protect from the Jews.)
Anytime somebody makes a claim about a drone operating a firearm, you should be extremely skeptical. There's a reason everyone uses explosive drones, not "drone with a machine gun". Small flying machines trying to fire off rounds doesn't work out.
> submarine launched drones throwing incendiary munitions at a flotilla
Per the Greek coastguard, someone left a lit joint by a fuel canister. Maybe the Greeks are in on the deep conspiracy.. or potheads are just forgetful.
And what would be Greek coast guard doing in Tunisian waters? And the joint fell spewing fire from the sky, and left behind a grenade casing, right?
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2025/09/10/incendiary-muniti...
You need to learn to lie better.
we're not talking about glocks ductaped to DJIs here, and all of these mysterious engineer efforts that 'just doesn't work out' are hurdles that man has faced and conquered before.
What I would suggest is that if anyone trying to give you a technical reason that ends in "It just doesn't work" they are probably unprepared to accurately brief you on the topic.
Stabilizing moving firing platforms has a fascinating history going back to Bronze Age chariots.
As for planes and helicopters, there is a reason their big guns are mounted into the airframe, and why the biggest cannons in the air are on fixed-wing aircraft.
This is a defensive application of lasers, like CIWS is a defensive application of guns.
“It could be used to hurt people” doesn’t mean much. You at least need “it could be used to hurt people, and it’s better at it in at least one way than what’s already available.”
We have one clear noncombatant child death--killed by the device aimed at her father (who was a valid target). We have a handful of people who are underage, but no details about them. Plenty about the one innocent, nothing about the rest. Are they truly that inept, or would looking into the rest reveal they weren't non-combatants?
The fact that they only managed to find one case to parade in front of the cameras says a lot. The beeper attack is probably the best special operations move pulled off in recent times.
Without it, Lebanon might be looking a lot more like Gaza right now.
Even if your goal is terror, cost effectiveness means you can commit more terror.
The pager attack was incredibly cost effective. It would have cost orders of magnitude more to achieve the same thing by dropping bombs.
Cost isn’t a number subtracted from a bank account. Cost is, how much of this can you actually do?
That’s the whole reason this system exists. Their other systems work fine for shooting stuff down. But they cost too much. That is to say, they can’t shoot enough stuff down. This system can shoot more stuff down.
While not everyday a new defense systems is invented that is targeted at statistical weapon that terrorizes civilians.
Not so much when it comes to drone swarms.
And it's not like there's any need of a fancy weapon to do that. This exists to engage high speed targets. Just because you can use a GBU-28 to kill a gopher doesn't mean anyone ever will.
You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.
That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.
> the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield
This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
I would still say "what about a missile shield?".
If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.
If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.
You’re imagining a world where this kind of tech is equally distributed. It’s not. Israel spends something like $30b/year in defense (in part due to ~$7b/year from the US). Gaza has something like $0.3b to spend. The consequence of that asymmetry is one of them has a missile shield, the other has more than 80,000 dead citizens, famine, and virtually no infrastructure left standing.
We get a really ripping novel from Iain M. Banks, at least.
Isn’t it the other way? With a lot of medicine’s modern advances being rooted in combat medicine?
Triage and ambulances come from battle medicine [1]. (Not sure about communicable-disease prevention.)
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Lunch_Prog...
Lol no, Iran was utterly humiliated in this conflict, and outed as a paper tiger.
That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.
This isn’t an endorsement of corruption or violence; it’s just a recognition that human social organization has long involved the use of force alongside diplomacy, negotiations, trade, and other political instruments. The modern/post-modern/meta-modern isms may change how we fight, but it doesn’t by itself make the underlying dynamics disappear.
"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
100kW laser is nothing to joke about, but seems a good application for anti drone tasks. Fiber lasers are pretty snazzy.
Hamas and Hezbollah MO since the 1990s was based on bombing Israeli towns with statistical rockets and this system is supposed to reverse the cost equation (cheaper than those cheap rockets)
Today this is also used for drones though
https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/apollo/
I think the major difference here is that the Iron Beam is operational, as in finished trials, delivered to an armed force and actually was in active use in the previous war for more than a year
Can't imagine they get a very small spot at multiple km unless they use gigantic lenses or multiple independent laser focused on the same spot
That being said, probably ~10kW/m^2 is enough to overheat or disable a UAV
That would force these laser systems to point each drone until it either visibly goes up in flames or impacts the ground (which means you also need to be able to track them all the way down), otherwise you can't be sure it won't just snap back to life once you started engaging the next drone.
I don't feel like 10kw/m2 would be anywhere near useful. It's gotta be more than that.
* Stadium floodlights aren't going to instantly grill any bird that flies in front of them either, and they reach that ballpark.
If you can target it for a couple seconds with that power then you're not gonna do much, much less if it's not very absorbent
http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DamageFromLaser.php
A few decades ago lasers were dismissed because they involved chemical reagents for high power and explosive capacitors for even low-power applications.
Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier.
The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame
Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades.
Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast.
A 100KW generator is no big deal. It's a truck Diesel engine coupled to a generator. Trailer-mounted, it can be towed with a pickup truck. It's a standard rental item for larger construction projects.
A 100KW laser is a big deal.
The big problem with this as an anti-drone weapon is that, unlike artillery shells or unguided missiles, drones can operate close to the ground, and the laser needs line of sight.
No. Most US homes are on 200 or 100A service. 200A tops out at 48kW
You won't find many home chargers that are more than 60A.
You would need 5 80 amp charger to approach 100kw but with other loads in a large house, I have seen large HVAC systems and elaborate pools with lazy rivers etc that can add up very quickly which is why they had 400 amp service.
100kw isn't really that much, a modern EV can put out 3 times that from its battery pack into the motor for short bursts and easily sustain 100kw until drained.
480v 200 amp 3 phase commercial supply can provide 100kw continuous and would be some thing used in a medium sized office building.
One home actually consuming close to 400a is pretty rare, but it's possible mainly in gas-free builds, if using things like electric tankless water heaters (a bit niche) in addition to multiple EV chargers, a range, dryer, etc.
Maybe a better way to convey that 100kW is “small” is to point out that industrial sites all around us, such as smaller datacenters, are well into the MW range.
The wind up would be if that bank is depleted and they need to recharge. Delivering 100kW for a short period of time is definitely a feat.
It would by amusing to see one of these lasers mounted on an EV, possibly with a small range extender to recharge it on the go.
there is footage of intercepts out there. was released about half an year ago
First wave of drones get targeted, explode into clouds of chaff, second wave of drones penetrates the de-focused laser system.
When you're playing with nukes it actually is rather effective, not from a standpoint of chaff (you don't bring it) but the ionization of the nuke makes a radar blocked zone and the following missile is going very, very fast--makes a bunch of progress while the defenders are blind. It's also why we don't like nuclear anti-sub weapons--the dead zone lasts for hours, there's no way to know if you actually got the target.
But a drone is small and slow. You'll need an awful lot of drones to punch through defenses this way and the whole thing goes out the window when the laser pops drones farther back in line. And chaff only denies a small area and for a short time.
Those materials do not reflect evert frequency.
I think we're talking the second.
You’re right for ambush drones of the sort e.g. Hamas could launch. For the ones that would stream in from Iran, which Israel needed American help defending from last time, I’m not sure that’s the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
can cost about $10k a shot because that thing shoots $30 bullets. That kind of laser can even shoot down artillery shells!
The disadvantage is that the beam is disrupted by poor atmospheric conditions such as clouds and turbulence. If the enemy knows you are using it they will attack when conditions are unfavorable for it. It ought to be backed up by something like "Iron Dome".
An airborne laser can fly above the clouds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
that one was not so practical because it was powered by mixing two kinds of bleach, which is bad enough when you do it on the ground, worse in the air. The targeting system worked great and I think the assumption was that it would come back when fiber lasers got good enough that it could be electrically powered.
For antipersonnel use, guns are perfectly adequate and guns on tracking turrets have been widely deployed (for example, CIWS). The underlying technology is a ballistic calculator and a fast panning turret. Modern ballistic calculators, weather stations (a small device about the size of a cellphone), and good quality ammunition allows for incredible precision with small arms -- hitting something 25cm in diameter at 1000m is something people can do with these tools.
A weapon like this can't really "mass kill" -- it is for point targets -- but we have long had tools that can automatically track and kill. Why don't we employ them to shoot at people? We have the tagging technology, &c, as you mention.
One reason is that positive identification really does matter a lot when designing and developing weapon systems that automatically attack something.
The anti-missile use case is one of the most widespread uses for automatically targeted weapons in part because a missile is easily distinguished from other things that should not be killed: it is small, extremely hot, moves extremely fast, generally up in the air and moves towards the defense system. It is not a bird, a person, or even a friendly aircraft. The worst mistake the targeting system can make is shooting down a friendly missile. If a friendly missile is coming at you, maybe you need to shoot it down anyways...
Drones have a different signature from a missile and recognizing them in a way that doesn't confuse them with a bird, a balloon, &c, is different from recognizing missiles -- but here again, the worse thing that happens is you shoot down a friendly drone.
Range is limited in urban environments because of obstructions -- even the range of CIWS is far too great to be useful.
There hasn't been a real possibility for a long time, I don't think -- it's just not an easy use case.
Are you a male older than 13? You are a combatant and will be killed once you are in sight.
This is exactly the kind of thing that is unworkable.
(A) You don't want to shoot all those people. It's rare if ever the case that even 10% of those males are actually combatants. Even in Germany at the end of the WW2, I doubt it was that high.
(B) What if your own people make a breakthrough and take control of an area, and have all these machines with wildly nonspecific rules shooting at them?
Now, you may think I have the facts wrong, here -- that we haven't had the kind of precise turret before, or that we can't deliver small arms ammunition with great precision -- but you don't come out and say that: you haven't said I have bad facts.
If we accept that the technical capabilities have been there for a while, then we need another explanation for what the hold up is. I have offered an alternative, which is that it comes down to doctrine or operational issues -- it's not easy to see how to deploy a weapon system that automatically targets people without creating huge practical problems. I offered two concrete cases in my earlier comment. Here again, you haven't really spoken to them: you haven't said, for example, A is not a problem and here's why not. You have just ignored them.
It is really starting to look like you have a story and you are sticking to it.
(A) "...bullets move slow, can miss causing obvious damage to surrounding infra..." -- In other words, the precision I say is possible with small arms isn't realistic. This has two consequences:
(A1) The bullets can miss. Consider a bullet on its way to a target 500m way -- it may be in the air for more than half a second. Maybe the target was walking forward at 1m/s and just stops walking forward -- then the bullet will pass 50cm in front of them. This kind of miss is unacceptable can prevents technology like the kind you imagine from being deployed.
(A2) If the bullet misses, it will put a whole in a wall, &c, &c, whereas a laser either (A2A) will not miss or (A2B) won't cause a problem if it misses?
Regarding (A2A) and (A2B), are either or both of them something you had in mind?
(B) "...they are loud..." -- Firearms are loud but it's hard for me to say what you think the contrast or relevance is here. The lasers are silent or nearly so? Or the firearm's sound creates a problem for some other reason?
(C) "...minaturization is important to making this a real trend..." -- Firearms are not small enough. You said earlier that "...I think this is taking a miniaturization turn..." but how small do you think these lasers need to be, for the reality that you're concerned about to come into play?
And the Lavender system was only deployed once it was doing as good as the humans. It isn't 100%, war never is.
Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.
This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.
One of the reasons armed conflict is bad is there is really no justice in it and no time for justice. Justice starts to be possible when security is established, and security is established through armed conflict or a strong norm not to get into it -- as we see presently in Europe, where many countries with meaningful territorial losses and weird borders (exclaves, &c) have elected to just never settle those things.
Now, granted, we've witnessed horrible things in wars that don't match up to order and clarity of my previous sentence. But there were end goals that made sense.
Sorry, genocide, apartheid and the establishment of a religious-fascist state at the behest of Israeli ring-wing fascists that wouldn't put a foot wrong in Hitlers RKF, isn't an end goal I'd say justifies the means, ends or anything in between.
The establishment of security to the denial of all else, isn't the only dish on the table.
Consider an attack for which Israel was blamed for a large number of civilian casualties. Israel had given warning they were going to hit the building, get out. Reality: Hamas ordered all the neighbors to rush to the roof of the building to keep Israel from hitting it. Too slow, they were still inside when the bomb landed.
I'm not going to rehash the war crimes Israel has committed during the last two years. It's likely a waste of time as you already appear to be said apologist. A useful tool to those I don't see as any different to Nazi expansionists ...
Always based on nonsense. The number that matters is civilians per combatant--and for urban combat where there hasn't been an evacuation Israel far outperforms every other country. Every other--they make us look bad.
Got it. Thanks for your input.
Talking of disregarding ...
We have a lot of incidents frame by the press as being wrongful Israeli actions. Most of them turn out to be garbage. And even uncontested casualty numbers show Israel did better than we do.
I'm not an Israeli apologist, but I don't feel that I'm competent to tell the world's best performer that they're wrong.
i expect the iron beam is going to make a lot more deaths, just of people israelis dont consider human. wooo
Israel has never been interested in a peace deal.
It is a settler colonialist project in the finest traditions of such with the aim of conquering the entire region. And the US and friends support it for racist and capitalist reasons.
Israel supported the PA who wanted to postpone the elections due to the obvious Hamas victory yet Bush pressured to have these in order to democratize the middle east.
The end result was a Hamas victory and subsequent blockade policy which was supported by the Quartet
https://ecfr.eu/publication/back-to-democracy-europe-hamas-a...
Some tend to be more introspective:
Shahak's Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel picked up on the theme in explaining its pervasive, destructive influence in Israeli politics, the military and society. He noted that substituting German or Aryan for Jewish and non-Jews for Jews makes it easy to see how a superiority doctrine made an earlier genocide possible and is letting another happen now. Shahak called all forms of bigotry morally reprehensible and said: "Any form of racism, discrimination and xenophobia becomes more potent and politically influential if it is taken for granted by the society which indulges in it." For Israeli Jews, he believed, "The support of democracy and human rights is... meaningless or even harmful and deceitful when it does not begin with self-critique and with support of human rights when they are violated by one's own group. Any support of human rights for non-Jews whose rights are being violated by the 'Jewish state' is as deceitful as the support of human rights by a Stalinist..."
Kook was Israel's first chief rabbi. In his honour, and to continue his teachings, the extremist Merkaz Harav (the Rabbi's Centre) was founded in 1924 as a yeshiva or fundamentalist religious college. It teaches that, "non-Jews living under Jewish law in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) must either be enslaved as water carriers and wood hewers, or banished, or exterminated."
Chief military rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, called Operation Cast Lead a "religious war" in which it was "immoral" to show mercy to an enemy of "murderers". Many others feel the same way, prominently among them graduates of Hesder Yeshivat schools that combine extremist religious indoctrination with military service to defend the Jewish state.
Others in Israel teach the extremist notion that the 10 Commandments don't apply to non-Jews. So killing them in defending the homeland is acceptable, and according to Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council: "There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them... A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."
In June 2009, US Hasidic Rabbi Manis Friedman voiced a similar sentiment in calling on Israel to kill Palestinian "men, women and children". "I don't believe in Western morality, ie don't kill civilians or children, don't destroy holy sites, don't fight during the holiday seasons, don't bomb cemeteries, and don't shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)."
...
Though a minority, Israel's religious community wields considerable influence politically, in the military and society overall.
...
How the future balance of power shifts from one side to the other will greatly influence the makeup of future Israeli governments and determine whether peaceful co- existence can replace over six decades of conflict and repression. So far it hasn't, and nothing suggests it will any time soon; not while extremist Zionists run the government, serve prominently in the Israeli army, and -- according to critics -- are gaining more power incrementally.
Rav Kook was not Israel's first rabbi. He died in 1935 - a full 18 years before Israel's rebirth.
Nor was Kook the founder of Zionism. The belief that Jews should be able to return to our historic homeland has been a belief and conviction for religious and secular Jews for at least two millenia.
That you can find individuals, such as a R. Friedman (not even an Israeli!) with extreme views should not surprise anyone. Nutpicking is easy. Jews, like any other group, have fools and extremists in their rank. Israel is a plural democracy with 2 million Arabs, 7 million Jews, thousands of Christians and Druze, all with representation in the multiparty Knesset.
Hamas's evil, however, is not nutpicking. Hamas' founding charter in its opening paragraphs calls for the destruction of Israel and its conquest of the land in the name of Islam. It is genuinely intrinsic to the organization.
People who are actively endorsing kahanism are in the center of power today.
Your snide tone can’t obscure that the moral issue is straightforward, if you’re aiming at a world where people can be free to live, grow, and flourish. If you want a society that enables builders and engineers to express themselves by creating new things, i.e., on in which people are permitted to think, then you are aligned with Israel’s basic cause.
The central difference is that Israel’s government is essentially secular and free, whereas its enemies — especially Hamas — are essentially theocratic and totalitarian. In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
Last, to clarify the kernel of truth that your point relies on through distortion: while it is true that Israel contains a set of backwards theocratic tribesmen, their importance is marginal. Tel Aviv’s builders and entrepreneurs are the dominant cultural force in Israel, and they are proponents and practitioners of secular modernity.
Do not falsely conflate a marginal group with Hamas’ explicit cause, which is to destroy Israel’s free society and replace it with religious tyranny.
Unless, perhaps, that is what you really regard as moral?
> In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
The Arab Israelis have those same rights on paper but face discrimination in practice. But that's beside the point and you know it. What about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are under Israeli rule but have no rights and no representation in Israel at all? But I guess all seven million of them are "Hamas" and therefore don't count as humans?
Also note that while the secular liberals from Tel Aviv and the deeply religious settlers from the West Bank disagree on lots of things, they have no fundamental disagreement on the occupation.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets before, during and after October 7 massacre is documented[1] by Wikipedia (that does have documented anti-israel bias[2])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
2026 will bring more enlightenment to the masses. Also, Israel loves messing with wikipedia as it has done for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-edit...
> Islam has nothing to do with Palestinian resistance
"Islamic Jihad" is referring to the group "Palestinian Islamic Jihad" which is very real and has claimed responsibility for multiple suicide bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Islamic_Jihad#List...
Can you refute anything the article about thousands of rockets launched by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad says?
As another poster said the name of the terrorist group (that you call palestinian resistance) is Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You can take it up with them why they decided to associate Jihad with Islam and Palestine.
Hamas - an organization designated as terrorist by my country - another entity that you refer to as Palestinian resistance - is an offshoot of Muslim Brotherhood and is a fundamentalist Islamist organization that has documented history of targeting civilians since its inception, including killing hundreds of dancing kids/young adults at the Nova festival on October 7
Please dispute the facts with something more solid that this doesn’t fly
Indeed, Abu Zaydeh is well aware that for the past two years the Hamas leadership had been talking about implementing "the last promise" (alwaed al'akhir) – a divine promise regarding the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam. Sinwar and his circle ascribed an extreme and literal meaning to the notion of "the promise, " a belief that pervaded all their messages: in speeches, sermons, lectures in schools and universities. The cardinal theme was the implementation of the last promise, which included the forced conversion of all heretics to Islam, or their killing.
https://judaic.arizona.edu/sites/judaic.arizona.edu/files/20...
You can lead a horse to water...
A small, fast, autonomous drone flying between trees and buildings, avoiding obstacles and not flying in a straight line could destroy such an expensive system with very little explosive.
Or a cloud of such drones.
Or launch your attack on a foggy/rainy day.
If someone got close enough that a normal FPV drone like what is seen in Ukraine was in play, I don't think these laser stations would survive for long. Nape of the Earth followed by a barrage of very inexpensive exploding drones.
I think they're hoping this will be useful against long range cruise missile style drones, not hyper agile FPVs. Agile FPVs have not been a major threat from Iran vs Israel.
Does israel get a lot of fog and rain? Might this be part of a layered defense?
here is the organization founders Ramy Abdu and Mazen Kahel posing with Ismaeil Haniye the leader of Hamas https://www.facebook.com/DrArafatShoukri/photos/t.1000537951...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/02/middleeast/children-killed-is...
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/10/1166024
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/6/israeli-drone-chase...
I say drone, but you and I know it is the Israeli solders operators behind the drones that are doing these war crimes.
Well that was quickly debunked as a viable source. Israeli's didn't retaliate for Oct 7th until a few days later.
> When some of the residents went out to investigate and tried to help, they were shot at by Israeli quadcopter drones.
And another easy debunk - Israel uses explosive drones. Mounting a firearm to "shoot at" things from a drone is basically a fools errand.
Provide video. That should be trivial.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/nx-s1-5195171/witnesses-say-i...
But let me guess, the only genocide worth committing your verbiage is the one where a certain people belonging to the favorite religion is facing issues after voting in a terrorist organization by the name of Hamas which went in and attacked a community which was persecuted and butchered for close to 2500 years. All provoked by a religious ideology and Arab theocratic pan nationalism.
In that case, the article you linked to is even more off.
(I’m not well-informed enough to comment on the rest, so I won’t.)
How do the surgeons know it was a drone?
The Iron Beam is not relevant against ballistic missiles.
Iran also fired “over 1,000 suicide drones” [1].
And Iron Dome scored on the ballistic missiles, I would assume Iron Beam also could. When it's coming down on it's target it's slowed by the atmosphere and it has no defense other than being fast.
You’d still have to deal with an asymmetric ablative jet.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."
If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.
I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.
(edit: grammar, slight rewording)
And I think Solzhenitsyn is wrong. There are psychopathic people that have no good in their hearts. Sure, with the right upbringing that could be kind and good but at a given moment they are what they are... psychopaths.
This is separate from the argument over whether MAD is philosophically good. MAD is not an argument about technology. "Peace through strength" does indeed require the occasional display of strength, to maintain deterrence. Good and bad (morals) are not the right frame to understand deterrence, rather emotions: fear, confidence, and security.
Solzhenitsyn can be read as either a humanist or an ethicist: either the bridgehead of good is sufficient to redeem everyone from war and morality demands pacifism, or all military doctrines must be submitted to independent review to check that we do not give the "unuprooted small corner of evil" oxygen. Crucially, these are both judgements about ourselves and not about the foes who seek to destroy us, who indeed consider themselves to have "the best of all hearts". In this sense, Solzhenitsyn contributes to the cycle of violence: if both sides are ethicists, and their ethical councils have different conclusions, the result is not just fundamentalism but a fundamentalism justified by ethical review.
Fear, anger, disgust are the ultimate drivers of conflict. Can we conquer them? Of course not, they are the base emotions, part of being human. But can there be a better way of handling them in geopolitics? Yes - if leaders are focused on helping not just themselves feel safe, but their enemies as well. This is the higher level beyond MAD - not mutual fear, but mutual security. This is why USAID was great foreign policy and cheap for its benefits. This is why weapons are sold to allies despite the fact that their interests may not be fully aligned with ours. Weapons are fundamental to security, which at the end of the day is a feeling and not a guarantee against attack or repercussions from an attack, and these feelings of security are what reduces the incidence and frequence of war.
I can both dislike Hamas and want for Palestine to be free.
Is it that hard for you to imagine that people just want to be safe? This is not a football match where you pick a side and then hate on the other side! Stop doing that! These are real people. If groups shoot stuff at Israel of course they're going to try to shoot that stuff out of the sky.
The overwhelming majority of Isealis want to maintain a system of violent apartheid that benefits them explicitly based on their ethnicity, and be insulated from any consequences. Some of them might be sad about the war crimes their army commits in a daily basis, but almost none are doing anything about it. Their victims have been successfully isolated by the world's largest superpower and its network of corrupt client states.
So yes, in that situation, "defensive" warfare technologies for Israel are clearly a bad thing.
https://quincyinst.org/research/u-s-military-aid-and-arms-tr...
For anyone who has worked in Israel or who has just visited it, there is no doubt that Israel is one of the richest countries and it has more than enough of its own resources to ensure that it maintains its military superiority against any neighbors.
Israel certainly does not need a permanent aid for that, though of course they would be fools to refuse the many billions of $ they receive as a gift from USA.
Perhaps this aid might have been justified in the initial years after WWII, but it has been a long time since the initial reason cannot have remained true.
Now USA claims that it may have not obtained benefits commensurate to its expenses in the relations with many other countries, even if it is much less clear which were the benefits obtained by USA for paying this aid to Israel every year.
A part of the money paid to Israel is likely to return to some US companies that are friendly to the US government, so this is an indirect method for giving gifts to those companies too, but in other countries USA has been able to obtain such profitable contracts for well-connected US companies in a much cheaper way, just by bribing or blackmailing the local governments, instead of paying the contracts in full with US money.
Pretty sure you will get similar outcome anywhere else
https://thecjn.ca/news/canadian-jews-overwhelmingly-support-...
In particular, put attention to this:
""" What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return. Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded. """
Source: I was born in Baghdad. Father and other relatives were tortured and murdered there.
> 800k Jews were kicked out of middle eastern countries
As a result of the creation of Israel.
As for Jews killed or terrorized into leaving Baghdad: Israeli historian Avi Schliem (whose family fled Baghdad to Israel after the Baghdad bombings) says Iraqi Zionists were responsible for some of those bombings in his latest book.
Finally, should Jews who had their lands stolen in the name of Zionism have their lands back? In a just world, yes.
The problem with these summaries is everyone can always somewhat legitimately claim a prior offence. The 1967 offense resulted from the shitshow that was the 1948 war [1], which itself resulted from a history of French, British and Ottoman control.
They both suck and they both have legitimate grievances.
They’re also both proxies on like four major axes (Iran vs Saudi Arabia, America vs Russia, America vs China and whatever Turkey is up to) and more minor axes than I’ve seen anyone even bother keeping track of.
It’s a deep and deeply fucked conflict that doesn’t lend well to armchair border drawing from an ocean away from first principles.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that there should be reparations—from Israel but also France, Britain and Turkey—for victims of the Nakbah.
But let’s be clear on a right of return: this logic applies to almost every human in Europe or Asia when it comes to the Middle East if we go back far enough. We’re talking about the closest coast to the cradle of civilisation.
I do too. The contours of how that works with their descendants, and when we draw the line for the living, has been debated in good faith (and bad, increasingly recently) for decades [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
Yes [1]
> Yousef Munayyer, an Israeli citizen and the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, wrote that Palestinians only have varying degrees of limited rights in Israel. He states that although Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel's population, less than 7% of the budget is allocated to Palestinian citizens. He describes the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel as second-class citizens while four million more are not citizens at all. He states that a Jew from any country can move to Israel but a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. Munayyer also described the difficulties he and his wife faced when visiting the country.[301]
Hope over time this changes for the better. If they can start letting people expelled years ago to return too. Maybe not to their old address but work something out.
Easier said than done. The chaos the PLO caused in Jordan and Lebanon [1] raises legitimate security concerns for any country asked to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...
As the russians were not asked about it.
The russian government decided to do so and to supress any oposition.
(But their army is largely made up of volunteers)
How do you do that when dealing with nationalist governments waging nationalist wars? The most generous framing of either side’s ask in the Gaza war is for nationhood.
I do not hold that the firebombing of German cities was an acceptable trade but that there is a point for most people where they will pay the cost.
Extremists count the blood of the enemy as meaningless and see no sin in spilling it and will do any amount of harm without qualm for instance see the words of an extremist after the death of a terrorist
> Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, in paying homage to Goldstein, told mourners that even 1 million Arabs “are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” And angry voices in the congregation shouted, “We are all Goldsteins!” and “Arabs out of Israel!”
Whereas Perrin's doesn't speak for most Israelis the actions of his entire government and society suggest either agreement or willingness to look the other way whilst someone else pays the price in sin and indeed the attitude far from being historically abhorrent it is fairly normal for all societies to account the blood of the enemy civilian or not fairly cheap or valueless.
Looking at the modern genocide in Gaza and our half assed responses to it makes one wonder if the world has really made any progress whatsoever or if our morality is confined almost exclusively to historical analysis and hand wringing that has virtually no impact on current or future actions.
It IS deliberately provocative for a reason.
Voting for war should have consequences.
Or is also immoral to attack disarmed combatants who pose no threat. Civilians aren’t even combatants.
Don't get me wrong. The Nazis were evil to the core. What they did to the victims is unforgivable. But grouping the civilians with them is a convenient and nefarious justification for their massacre. How many of the thousands of kids among them were Nazis according to you?
Now talking about targeting the German civilians, check out the massive allied firebombings of largely undefended Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah) and Dresden. The attacks claimed the lives of 34K and 25K civilians respectively in a dreadful sequence of events. Horrific accounts and photos of the incidents exist to this day. The incidents were so controversial that even Churchill challenged it in the Parliament. See if you can stomach those accounts.
War is inherently immoral. You just don't fight one if you can. But if that's not an option, then both sides may end up committing horrible war atrocities. All you can hope for is the least bad outcome. And once it's over, you should be introspecting about what went wrong and how to avoid that in the future. For that, an honest acceptance of the barbarity of such atrocities is needed. If you glorify them instead, you aren't all that better than your enemies and you're just setting up the stage for a repeat of that horrible past. So yes, all civilians should be protected.
> War is inherently immoral.
That’s not true. War as such is undesirable, but fighting one is not categorically immoral. Just war principles determine when it is morally acceptable or even a duty to wage war. Is it immoral to repel an invading army if you have a reasonable chance of success using licit means? No. Indeed, it might be immoral not to do so.
Do you know one war where either side hasn't resorted to immoral activities? Everywhere from WWI allied power to modern day wars, the western nations have resorted to spine chilling crimes that nobody in the west wants to talk about. Just because the other side commits even bigger crimes doesn't mean that it absolves you of all sin. Even in the modern day wars like in Afghanistan, the allied forces have resorted to killing of unarmed civilians including children. I'm not even going to start with the other crimes.
The western nations have this delusion that they fight some sort of righteous war where they can do no wrong. But go to those countries and ask why they're so hostile towards the west. This is why whenever I talk about Nazism in its historical context, people in here become uncomfortable and downvote even recorded historical facts. They don't want to admit that they were not always the righteous side. I gave the examples of Hamburg and Dresden. And like I said, even Churchill was critical of it. If you say it was moral, then I see the same attitude on both sides of the war. Such activities may have been inevitable during the war. But denying its immorality now is just misguided moral chauvinism.
$1.2B
Source: https://defensescoop.com/2024/04/25/iron-beam-procurement-us...
Also, the amount Israel gets is in the same ballpark as Egypt and Lebanon, but interesting that that is never mentioned?
Source for this estimate?
> then do the same with welfare so we can get UBI
This is nonsense. Federal welfare spending is about $20k per capita [1]. You could get that to $30k by co-opting all state spending [2]. (And only in Alaska, Oregon and Hawaii.)
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-money-does-the-govern...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
Israel unilaterally disengaged from GAZA in 2005 and pulling out generations of Jewish settlement in the process. By 2006 GAZA has zero Jews, and 2007 Gazans elected HAMAS who fired rockets at Israel because they want to free Palestine from the river to the sea, AKA eliminate Israel. October 7 attack is a culmination of that, and between then and now, HAMAS didn't forget to build their military base in the mix of civilians and using civilian targets as shield. So that they can blame Israel for every single Palestinians death, including the death cause by their own firing.
The situation in west Bank is qualitatively the same.
No, protecting your people from terrorist is not apartheid, and Israel has no interest to build iron beam and/or build wall--which the west misinterprete as apartheid-- if the neighbors had no intention to eliminate them.
There are zero Jews in Gaza -- not even just living ones, they had to remove the long-buried dead ones too.
The least important point is technical, which is that I said Palestine lost many homes to Israel over the years, not that every (just many) Palestinian lost their home. For what it's worth to the symmetry argument there were Jews happily living in Palestine before 1900, but let's not get distracted by the question of how good my opinion is when there's an obvious wrong anyone can agree with staring straight at everybody.
Someone's never heard of jizya, or the repeated slaughters of Jewish civilians in the century prior to Israel's creation: https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/pogroms-in-palestine-befor...
Not to mention what some backward, cruel warlord did to much of the Middle Eastern population starting in 622:
"Alongside his campaign against the Quraysh, Muhammad led campaigns against several other tribes of Arabia, most notably the three Arabian Jewish tribes of Medina and the Jewish fortress at Khaybar."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_career_of_Muhammad
And it never ended. It's continuing to this day.
The mental gymnastics required to make a call for freedom into a call for war are astounding. If i say “free tibet” does that mean i want war with china? What part of “free” is a threat to the people of israel?
> despite that they launched the war first every single time
This is such weird playground-like defense - “They started it!!!”. The actions and stated intentions of israel leading up to the 1948 war are pretty easy to see as a declaration of war - claiming other people’s land as part of your state. And then later Oct 7th is often portrayed as hamas “starting it”. But there were over a thousand gazans held by israel without charges on oct 6th. If israel is justified in murdering 80,000 for the hostages taken in oct 7th - is hamas’ attack not justified by their people held by israel?
To be clear, i’d say in both cases the murder of civilians was unjustified, but i don’t see how one can be justified while the other isn’t.
On the meaning of Palestine will be free, don't westplain the Palestinians by reading your interpretation into their mind. Instead, listen to what they actually said.
https://youtu.be/w4iGFT9Yl9o?si=oWKWAUzlMSec4n67
A lot of misunderstanding about Israel stems from people not reading the situation as it is, ie: listening to what both sides actually say, instead, they are listening to their own projections of the Jews and the Palestinians.
And your take that on Oct 6 Israel held thousands of Gaza doesn't explain why Israel would unilaterally pull out from GAZA in 2005, which is just another way of saying that it's likely to be false.
Source for the thousands of palestinians held without charges before oct 7th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinians_in_Israeli_custod...
> In April 2022, there were 4,450 Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli prisons – including 160 children, 32 women, and over 1,000 "administrative detainees" (indefinitely incarcerated without charge)
Source for the data cited in wikipedia: https://www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisoners
There were over a thousand gazans held without charges by the israeli military on oct 7th. That is not what disengagement looks like.
Israel has military bases in cities.
> No, protecting your people from terrorist is not apartheid
I’m quite sure a white south african could have said this same sentence pre-1994.
Israel won't let food into Gaza in reasonable quantities. It has restricted basic things like tent poles and just about any commodity which humans anywhere else in the world would have the luxury of being able to take for granted.
All in violation of international law - that which has lost all meaning in the last three or so years.
Not really relavent. Occupying powers still have the right to self-defense. Certainly they have the right to take defensive measures to prevent attacks on the civilian population of their primary territory, which is what is being discussed here.
> Israel won't let food into Gaza in reasonable quantities
As far as i understand the food situation in Gaza has now stabilized. However even if Israel was illegally restricting food into gaza, that wouldn't have any bearing on the legality of them setting up air defense systems on their own territory.
> All in violation of international law
Being an occupying power is not in and of itself a violation of international law. (The food thing might be. Israel is allowed to put certain restrictions on aid, but groups like the ICC have argued that the restrictions were beyond what was permissible under international law. Personally, even though it is incredibly unlikeky to happen, i hope the issue goes to trial at the ICC so we get a firm answer. However even if true, it does not mean Israel loses every right it has under international law)
(This is distinct from a state’s “right to exist,” which is nonsense. But once a state does exist, it has the right to defend itself by definition.)
[1]: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-7
[2]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assemb...
Yes it can, and it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Russia believes it has the natural right to reclaim what it considers to be Russian territory. Ukraine believes it has the right to be free. So everyone should just put down their weapons and come to an agreement based on these rights?
The fallacy at the heart of your argument is that there is somehow some greater single truth, and that each side agrees that it is the greater single truth, and that everyone will just peaceably agree to follow the single greater truth because it is the single greater truth. Nothing could be less human. What are we, the Borg? We're supposed to follow some hive mind?
> something simple, like tying sanctions to murders of civilians
Not even remotely simple. Define sanctions, murders, civilians. The US bombing "drug" boats in the Caribbean, are those civilians? International law recognizes that collateral damage can legitimately happen during legitimate military operations. Is the collateral damage "murder"? How far should sanctions go? Sanction enemy banks (layer 1)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with the enemy country (layer 2)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with other citizens who do business with the enemy country (layer 3)?
Yes.
>How far should sanctions go? Sanction enemy banks (layer 1)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with the enemy country (layer 2)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with other citizens who do business with the enemy country (layer 3)?
You're doing a great job of writing my policy! To be fair and to show commitment without doing too much harm it should be gradually phased in. The reason it's simple is that Israel does not really need to murder all of those individuals, and there is even an internal political option to not do it, so a firm "no" from everyone else would be sufficient. I doubt the sanctions would ever be implemented. I'm sorry if this sounds glib but there is no honest way to hedge it.
And I also think that most people would disagree with you that the correct first sanction is on a country's banks, the consequences of which fall disproportionately on the innocent civilians of your disfavored country; the disproportionality of which is contrary to international law.
Here's my peace plan: Blow up or starve kids on the other side +1 sanctions. Intercept a drone or rocket +0 sanctions. Say you're sorry and reduce arms by 10% -1 sanctions.
If the US alone did this they'd stop with all the murders in days to weeks.
Of course the state of affairs where random online commenters can think of better answers than the individuals in charge is only due to a lack of a desire for peace at high levels! There is nothing complicated about it at all.
To emphasize, however, per your own source, this is a critical analytical tool and not a testable hypothesis nor even prediction about the world.
But yes, some people will only care if they can find Jewish connections, eg Zelensky being partly Jewish or MBS or Al Sisi allegedly being partly Jewish due to their stances in opposition to Islamic extremism.
There are people who blame influential Jews for everything, and they’ll go so far as to say that Ataturk was Jewish, in order to care about the Armenian genocide. But they won’t care about, say, the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks that took place 20 years earlier because they can’t find any evidence that Sultan Hamid was Jewish.
They blame Israel for Iraqi expulsion of Jews, until they find out the Farhud was 10 years before Israel was formed as a state.
They even finally started to care about what’s happening in Sudan when they realized they can sort of draw a tenuous line between that and Israel through UAE.
As long as influential Jews are involved they will deeply care about a conflict, eg 9/11 dancing Israelis or clean break memo of PNAC. They will ignore that presidents like W Bush called the Iraq invasion a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers”. They also do not like to go back further to, say, bombing of Laos and all throughout southeast Asia because, again, it is hard to blame any Jews for that.
It’s almost as if they have an algorithm: 1) find Jews involved with thing they consider bad, 2) care about that issue but ONLY to the extent they can point out Jewish connections 3) cherrypick and compile lists of Jewish involvement to make it seem that all bad things done by states, corporations, or humanity, is due to Jews. Candace Owens for example recetly said that Stalin was Jewish and that the US slave trade was “not the white man but mostly Jewish”, and that Black lives now really matter to her after years of “White lives Matter” with Ye, now that she found out Jews were behind it.
To what extent are they in the same bucket as those who reflexively blame the CIA or Russia or immigrants or white people for everything?
The way BLM blamed “systemic racism”, various Jews might see “antisemitism“ behind every critique of Israel. It is not just individual but group psychology. The worst scorn is reserved for heaping on defectors, who Black BLM activists would call “uncle Toms” and Jewish Zionist activists would call “self-hating Jews”.
So what’s interesting is the common tactics. I don’t mean to imply it is one sided. Both sides of an ideological conflict (eg abortion, socialism, etc) want to take over a powerful state apparatus to use for their agenda. Both sides want to cynically and hyporcitically exploit millions of people to further their agenda.
For example, antizionists (and more generally revolutionaries / “axis of resistance” supporters who may be either leftist, Islamist or whatever) want to perpetuate statelessness of millions of people in Lebanon, Syria and all over the Middle East, so they can be labeled “Palestinian” because one of their grandfathers was in Palestine circa 1947, so that they can “keep their identity” by essentially forcing on them, and maintain large numbers for “the cause” of removing Jewish majority in any area of the Levant. They oppose giving them citizenship on a jus soli basis even if they and their parents were born in another country. This happens even with Palestinians who themselves got citizenship long ago in Chile, USA, UK, Sweden, Canada etc. It is a similar mentality to “fight to the last Ukrainian” by Ukrainians abroad who left Ukraine an settled in other countries.
Meanwhile, Zionists have a form of that, where many of them constantly play up and almost seem to welcome how badly Jews would be treated among other countries, and downplay the role of their right wing government waging wars in a far more reckless fashion than they could have. Instead of placing the blame on that government for making Jews less safe, they say “you see? This is why you should move to Israel. You’ll be safe here among Jews.”
In short both movements cynically use their own people, almost welcoming hardship for them until they are “forced” to embrace their identity and move back to where they same place both groups are competing to demographically dominate ..
This isn’t unique to Israel. Armenians vs Azerbaijanis for example seek foreign alliances for protection. Serbs vs Albanians. Tamils vs Sri Lanka. Rohingya vs Burma. Uyghurs vs China. And so on. There are horrific proxy wars happening in Sudan now, and Congo throughout. But people don’t tend to focus on any of that because Ashkenazi Jews are famous and successful in the West. And because Abrahamic religions are based on Judaism, so Israel is quite foundational to all their religions. Not so much Sri Lanka…
You can see in Eastern cultures which are not Abrahamic, not Muslim or Christian, the attitude is the same as to any other sectarian conflict. That is proportional. But it is extremely disproportionate in the West! For the reasons I listed above.
but when there is a violence against random jews across the west, somehow israeli government is the guilty one and not antisemitism.
https://babylonbee.com/news/nyc-restaurants-now-require-proo...
I have seen attacks on Asians ramp up during the start of COVID.
I say the same to both Jews and Black people (being Jewish myself): we live in the least racist, least antisemitic time in hundreds of years, maybe in history. Your grandfather had it much worse. These complaints are first-world problems. Yelling “racist” or “antisemite” on a hair trigger only serves to cheapen the actual words, same as yelling “genocide” while ignoring every other more horrific war, even 200 km to Israel’s north in Syria.
The “magarshak ratio” is the amount of outrage about something vs how many people are actually suffering. To be sure, the disproportionate navel gazing at Israel is due to Jews and Judaism. But similarly, the disproportionate navel gazing at attacks on Jews in USA or other countries, where they have been mostly protected and highly respected by eg the entire Evangelical community, is seen by some as “first world problems” while bombs are raining down in Gaza for example.
Both Azeris and Armenians hae engaged in ethnic cleansing back and forth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Azerbaijanis_fr...
Som of the biggest hyporites criticizing Jews for “dual citizenship” and “ethnic cleansing and building an ethnostate” are Armenians like Dan Bilzerian who flew to Armenia with his family to accept citizenship and serve in the Armenian armed forces. People probably just don’t see the symmetries. Or maybe they’re just hypocrite grifters.
AND THERE IS THE INTITUTIONAL LEVEL.
On that level, of governments and corporations, Israel does enjoy an immense amount of support and immunity. Name me another country where every presidential candidate has to go affirm their support at an AIPAC for, say, Italy. As a Jewish person myself, I am uneasy at Jewish participation in PNAC or the military industrial complex and neocon war machine in general. I don’t want Jews to be blamed later for the wars. Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are of course quite supportive of Israel, but I am not thrilled at the endorsements. And so on.
I am a libertarian, I try to criticize Russia, USA, Iran other countries, and yes Israel, proportionally to what they actually have done. The wars are fought by plebs who die, the politicians stay in their ivory towers and bunkers and give speeches even as they get international arrest warrants for them.
But even just from the point of view of an Israeli citizen, or Ukrainian citizen, or Iraqi citizen etc. these politicians are horrible. Netanyahu was actively against the 2 state solution, Rabin’s wife blames him for inciting the PM’s assassination, and he literally released 1000 terrorists for 1 guy, Gilad Shalit who fell asleep and allowed himself to be captured. It included the masterminds of October 7th. Who does that? He personally allowed Qatari money to go to Hamas, ignored Egyptians’ warnings, ignored warnings from Shin Bet, oversaw a drawdown of security, and his army for hours ignored even the female spotters whose only job it was to report the threats, and who were killed while reporting it for hours! Such extreme negligence goes completely unpunished, nevermind the corruption and investigations that have been put off because of the war. You don’t have to be a leftist or a libertarian to appreciate the level of corruption and immunity from consequences and misaligned incentives of these politicians.
And the excuses the government intitutions give for the negligence or the wars are so laughable that it is hard to think they aren’t deliberately trolling us and rubbin their unaccountability in our face:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/surveillance-soldiers-say-oct-...
The current war vs Venzuela is a great example. They aren’t even trying to explain it anymore. (“hasbara” means explanation in Hebrew, but the same is done by other governments to their people - Russian govt when asked what if Russians wont support the invasion said “we will explain it to them”). The US administration now claims Venezuela is the biggest source of drugs (false) and even weren’t afraid to label drugs WMDs, not even concerned that WMDs were famously not actually found in Iraq during our invasion. They don’t even care about your consent - they know they’ll have your support later! Trump openly said we want to take their oil and land. He says the quiet parts out loud.
You’re seeing it happen in real-time. Again. But when it’s us, whether Iraq or Venezuela, most people heavily tone down their criticism that you would have had for the 73% of Russian public supporting THEIR invasion. But it’s all very similar. The symmetries are striking. 73% of US Americans also supported the invasion of Iraq.
Are there people who don’t like Jews? Of course. The most despicable were the people who came out to protest Israel in the days after October 7th, after the largest attack on Jews in Israel probably ever. And among them were rabid antisemites chanting vile things. Yes.
But look around. Are there a lot of mass shootings in USA? Yes. Many of them are not against Jews. You have to look at statistics. And this is miniscule compared to the violence in the world, eg in Mexico with the drug cartels. We have law and order. We also have a lot of homeless druggies and crazies.
But try to see others facing an entire systematic apparatus. The USA has spent decades trying to get people to hate Russians, for example, at an institutional level. First, it was that they’re commies. Then it was that they love Putin. Also Muslims by and large got similar treatment as Communists during McCarthyism and Cointelpro, after the CIA themselves funded the mujahideen and empowered jihadists (mujahideen is Arabic for jihadists, literally).
Once again, they brazenly admit they were responsible, but they are proud of it anyway. Both Democrats and Republicans:
https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ
https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2022/03/01/ukra...
It always goes through the same stages with these governments. First they gaslight you. Then they engage in “special military operations”. Then they draft you. Then they invade. Then they occupy, lose a lot of money and get people killed. Then the next generation of politicians says it was “a big mistake”. Russians can’t explain to their kids why they fought in Afghanistan in the 80s, and Americans can’t explain why they fought in Iraq.
Listen to what this lady from a military family has to say for instance — it is just the latest war du jour: https://x.com/silentlysirs/status/2006133094177218711
So yeah I blame the politicians. And even if you were an Israeli, even if you were a radical right wing Kahanist, you could admit that Netanyahu and his government were negligent and call for an investigation of his handling of Hamas and the threats it posed, leading up of Octobed 7th. Agree?
Also I wonder why it is not common to run interception drones that automatically fly towards incoming drones and captures them mid air. Like a wasp is capturing other insects.
So pretty much like the iron dome but not with single use rockets but reusable drones instead.
What effect would that have? Will nukes start getting used in wars? Will we see deployment of multi ton NEFP[1] warheads that can strike targets with nuclear-propelled kinetics?
[1] <https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.ht...>
Requires a mountain of evidence and argument.
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-pa...
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-pa...
At their terminal phase icbms go at mach 25, which is pretty hard to shine a laser on for an extended period of time.