How many Palestinians have to die to make up for the deaths on Oct. 7? How long must this war go on?

It will continue until Hamas surrenders, or is rendered incapable of armed action or exercising civil authority in Gaza.

How many civilian deaths would you think would be too much to achieve those goals? Is there a number that would make you think that the ends do not justify the means?

I didn't ask you the question but now I will. How many civilian deaths would you think would be too much to achieve those goals?

The government of Israel, and enough of its population to sustain the effort, are of the view that Hamas must be destroyed as an armed body capable of governance. I agree with that objective, and in fact fail to understand why anyone outside Hamas would urge an outcome which did leave Hamas capable of governing Gaza and conducting further attacks of any scale on Israel. Ceasefires simply kick the can down the road, and if Hamas emerges from this with any gain to show, a ceasefire guarantees repetition of what commenced this bout of bloodletting, and further Israeli military action in consequence. That those deaths wouldn't occur tomorrow, or next week, is something, certainly, but they will just be postponed, if things continue as usual in the longstanding conflict.

Hamas cannot preserve itself by military means; its sole weapon with any potential impact at all is the revulsion of people at the bystanders killed owing to their refusal to accept their circumstances. You might as well ask Sinwar how many dead Palestinians are enough to secure his objective of killing or driving out the Jews of Israel. It's a question worth asking. Would you consider surrender by Hamas an acceptable end to the killing? What do you think Hamas ought to do to end the killing?

Even though you did not answer my questions I will do so for you in the hopes that you will reciprocate.
Would you consider surrender by Hamas an acceptable end to the killing? Absolutely.
What do you think Hamas ought to do to end the killing? Surrender.
I'll go even further, I have no problem with killing all of hamas who were involved in the attack. So I ask again.
How many civilian deaths would you think would be too much to achieve those goals? Is there a number that would make you think that the ends do not justify the means?

Sinwar, in negotiations some years ago, agreed that one Israeli soldier's being set free was worth a thousand Palestinian convicts released from Israeli jails. So we have an exchange rate established, one which is acceptable to Hamas leadership: one Israeli Jew is equivalent to a thousand Palestinian Arabs. By Mr. Sinwar's standard, a thousand Israelis killed is worth a million of his countrymen translated to Paradise....


"I don't make the rules, I just draw up the lists."

I didn't ask you what hamas thinks. Ill give you a number and then you can answer. If it took 100k Palestinians to kill hamas would you think that was a fair trade?

No one starts a war without being of the view that the objective to be attained by it is worth the human and material cost of the attempt, and when war is commenced, each party to it signs a blank check drawn on the people and social material of both sides, payable in quantities of suffering to be filled in later by events. From the point of view of Hamas, killing or driving out the Jews of Israel seems worth any number of dead and maimed Palestinians: from the point of view of Israel, wrecking Hamas as an armed body seems worth any number of dead or maimed Palestinians. This is the reality of the situation, and it is that which shapes, and will continue to shape, its course.

Personally, I support only my country's present leadership. Should their view not accord with mine, that will alter neither my support for Mr. Biden's policies, nor my own views of the matter. It seems that the goal of our government's policy is to convince Arab powers in the region to eschew material support for Hamas, to cease turning a blind eye to its procurement of arms and otherwise tolerating, if not facilitating, its activities. One tool in this is the hostility between Iran, the chief sponsor of Hamas, and the Sunni states neighboring Israel. Another is the longstanding antipathy between Egypt's military and the old Moslem Brotherhood, from which Hamas sprang, and the longstanding dislike of the Jordanian monarchy for the bodies which are at the root of the Palestine Authority in the Jordan valley. I hope they succeed, diplomatic persuasion, and money, can be effective in achieving the goal of neutralizing an armed body dependent on the tolerance of established states.

But absent sufficient diplomatic and economic persuasion being brought to bear by neighboring states on Hamas, or the intervention of a military powerful enough to enforce its will on Israel, Israel will continue to attempt achievement of its objective in this war by military means.


"This is the best world possible everything in it is a necessary evil."

Which is that your question is meaningless, and I have not bothered to form an opinon on something so irrelevant to the matter under discussion.

That the question was one that you couldn't answer or would not like to answer at this time or even that you didn't know and I would have accepted those. It's a hard question and one that entails quite a few levels of morality on multiple sides. The question was intended to get you to think and have a honest conversation as this entails actual human lives that have been lost on both sides, quite a few that are innocent and what justice is and what that has and should cost. It's all good though. Thanks for the conversation.

I think the difficulty is that you seem of the view morality has some place in war. It does not, moral judgements are beside the point. War is the forcing of another to bend to your will, and this is itself the quintessence of moral wrong. Nothing done in war is moral, no act of war displays virtue. A party at war may conclude its interests are best served by behaving in a manner which appears virtuous: treating prisoners well encourages surrenders rather than last stands, and refraining from undue harm to bystanders may be of value in cultivating allies and diplomatic support. But a party may make the opposite calculation, that its interests are best served by a policy of frightfulness, so that people are loathe to risk fighting at all, and come to see capitulation as the only way to avoid greater suffering. Neither choice is moral, or immoral: both are expedient, and may even be wholly unrelated to the moral character of the person who, in the world stripped of moral concern which is war, conceives one or the other best suited to attaining victory.


"They say war is an art but it's not. It mostly consists in outwitting people, robbing widows and orphans, and inflicting suffering on the helpless for one's own ends, and that's not art: That's business."

No. So yes you can make moral judgements.

If moral concerns do not exist in the matter, and they do not, there's no point to using moral standards in discussing it, not beyond the fact that war is itself immoral, and remains so even if one agrees with the objective sought by it. Of course, it is a great temptation, if one disapproves the objective seemingly sought by one side or the other, to denounce as immoral any acts by the side you disfavor in furtherance of it, and to view as moral any acts that further an objective sought by a side you favor instead. But it's just wielding a rhetorical cudgel to do so, and nothing to take seriously.



"Terrorism, n.: Violence intended to advance a political cause the utterer of the word disapproves of."

The Germans were not morally wrong in their treatment of Jewish people in WW2? Mai Lai was not morally wrong? I could keep going on.

I can assure you many agreed that was a proper and moral course, and many continue to do so. If you do want to press on with morality as a subject, you will need to wrestle with the fact that there is no uniform standard of morality across places and times, and what one person considers the height of moral virtue, another may see as damnable corruption and there is no neutral ground outside humanity by which to judge which is or is not actually moral: there is only one's personals tastes.

That's just one reason I don't often indulge in the stuff....

I asked you. For your personal opinion. If you don't engage in morality then fine. Everything done in every war is fine from what you have said. The conversation is over, I have learned from you what I asked for, the ends do justify the means.

That's a shame.

But I don't mind seeing you off, I do have other interests, and intentions for my evening. It has been fun, though.

I came to the conversation with a question, I leave with it unanswered since you have no opinions on morality other than many people have different ones so you dont.