Comment by rbanffy 3 days ago
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government. The people has nothing to do with this - this is all planned and executed under the auspices of the current prime minister and his associates.
Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
The people voted for this government.
I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
Why would you assume this targeted three people? I assume the most likely scenario is that the attackers targeted as many Hezbollah members as they could, and were extremely successful at it.
That's a very good point - if the goal was to disable comms and incapacitate as many targets as possible, then collateral damage numbers are much lower.
It's unknown how many were family members of targeted individuals, and whatever the number actually is, it'll be misreported.
Why would the family members of a Hezbollah operative be carrying a pager tuned to Hezbollah's private communications network? A reminder that Hezbollah operates a parallel phone system, and is in many ways more sophisticated and organized than the de jure government of Lebanon, whose military forces Hezbollah outnumbers.
We know now that at least 2 of the 9 already confirmed dead were children of their intended target. Fatima Jaafar Abdullah a 9 year old daughter of an unnamed Hezbollah member, and Mahdi Ammar the son of MP Ali Ammar (who’s age I haven’t found).
I also want to raise an issue which I’m not sure you personally have, but I have seen elsewhere on this thread and echoed by state department spokesperson Matt Miller that the targets were somehow legitimate because they were members of Hezbollah, which they claim is a terrorist organization.
Hezbollah is a much larger organization with many different functions, including governmental function, but also education and health care. We know that the targets did not only include their military wing, indicating that the targeting was indeed indiscriminate.
If people want to legitimate this terrorist attack by claiming that any member of a group which does terrorism is a legitimate target, that opens the door for all sorts of targets which unambiguously should not be considered military targets, including politicians and workers for governments and their political organizations.
If your country says that the IDF is a terrorist organization (a claim rather easy to make) your country than has the right to target any members of the Knesset that belong to any of the ruling parties is a legitimate target in a terrorist attack, if their family members are hurt in the attack, they become a legitimate collateral damage. Any worker for any ministry in Israel who contributes to the IDF somehow would also become legitimate.
This is of course not true, and the only conclusion we can draw here is this attack is an unambiguously immoral act of terrorism.
Since when did naming a country for their military action signify the opinion or inclination of the majority of civic population? When newspapers report on "country A did X" it almost always means their government did X. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government
I understand your point but synecdoche is the oil on the gears of discourse. This required a lot of people's involvement, from those issuing the orders to technicians at the bottom of the chain of command. It's not Netanyahu's cabinet that did the work of placing explosive charges in thousands of compact devices and then repackaged and shrinkwrapped them.
Obviously once could refer to the 'Netanyahu regime' or some other more specific term, but then someone else would complain that this was a mendacious mischaracterization of the country's political system or suchlike. To the extent that civilians there don't with to be identified with their political leadership or take on the moral responsibility for its decisions, they'd better step up their efforts to topple the government by means of a general strike or some other time-honored method.