Six Months Into War Against Hamas
how otherwise reasonable people are falling into an obvious trap
Before We Begin: Three Content Notes
First, I do not regard any mainstream media as reliable in general, and certainly not the New York Times or NPR. I link to some of their stories here because they have an obvious and noticeable pro-leftist, anti-Israel bias in their coverage, so these sources reporting that Hamas does things like store weapons in hospitals is noteworthy. If even the NYT and NPR can’t figure out a way to avoid simply admitting this fact, only someone dedicated to believing a falsehood against all known evidence could possibly remain unconvinced.
Second, I am saying “Hamas” to refer to the Palestinian planners, perpetrators, and supporters of the October 7 attacks. There is a tremendous amount of evidence that anti-Semitism is rampant in the Middle East and multiple polls indicate widespread support among Palestinian civilians for what happened then, but I am choosing the charitable interpretation. I have, myself, lied to a pollster for fear of reprisal because other people were around and could hear me—and I didn’t face the potential repercussions of a totalitarian government. Read my choosing to say “Hamas” and not “Palestinians” as a conscious act of charity, not a statement of firm belief. I know that I don’t know what most Palestinians really think.
Finally, this post contains references to violence, including child abuse, in sufficient detail to be distressing to readers who are sensitive to those topics. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Six Months Ago
On October 7, 2023, Hamas violated a ceasefire and launched a barbaric terrorist attack against Israel. The initial estimates were that about 1,500 Israelis were murdered, but Israel revised that estimate downward to about 1,200 in November. Note that, please — compared to Hamas, who had death estimates ready five minutes after a hospital parking lot explosion that was widely shown, including from drone footage, to have done nothing that Hamas claimed it did.
Protests against Israel and calls for restraint started on October 7 and 8, quite literally before some of the raped and murdered bodies were cold.
In the last six months, Western media has turned against Israel more and more, with even some people who were initially speaking up in support of Israel’s right to self-defense and military reprisal backing off and calling for a ceasefire — a return to the same conditions that existed on October 7 and which did not cause Hamas to hesitate for one minute. I am a Senior Data Scientist who is qualified to give an opinion, and I believe this article to do a good job explaining some of how Hamas fakes its numbers for a credulous Western audience.
Indeed, they spent two years planning these attacks, and now that they’ve fucked around and found out, they want to be rewarded with a return to the conditions that enabled them to do so in peace.
FAFO
The acronym FAFO is a popular one online. It stands for “Fuck Around, Find Out.” There are many memes related to it. As a math nerd, this is my favorite:
The meme refers to situations where someone suffers the consequences of their behavior, typically stupid behavior and painful consequences. The emphasis is nearly always, in stories where this meme pops up, on the painful consequences.
But there are two sides to painful consequences—the imposition of them and the suffering of them.
“Genocide” and Caring for Gazan Children
Before I go on, I have two glaring contradictions to point out.
First, the same people who call Israel’s existence an “occupation” and “genocide” against Palestinians (reminder: Israel vacated the Gaza Strip in September 2005) insist that Israel must not continue their war on Hamas, for the sake of protecting civilians—many of whom are children.
People, you have to pick. Either a society is the victim of a genocide, OR it has a moral immunity card to military reprisal for what its elected government does—because it has too many children. The ideas of “victim of genocide” and “too many children” are completely contradictory notions, and they cannot coexist. Choose.
Second, the people who currently claim to be overwhelmed with concern for the children of Gaza and demanding a ceasefire never talk about a crucial aspect of who was killed on October 7. The victims were largely Israelis from the border area. These people were Israel’s version of Woke activists. They spent their time doing things like driving into Gaza to pick up sick children and taking them to hospitals in Israel for treatment they couldn’t get in their own country.
People who gave one single fuck about the children of Gaza would—even if they thought all Jews were scum who deserved to die—have insisted on a pass for these Jews, what with their being literal lifesavers to sick and injured Gazan children. That they were instead the targets tells you exactly what the lives of Gazan children are worth to Hamas.
I have not seen this pointed out by an anti-Israel commentator even one time, but if you have please email me so I can edit this.
Why Using Hospitals and Schools to Store Weapons Is a War Crime
Many sources, including NATO (from 2019) and the New York Times (which initially admitted this in 2014, possibly earlier, and admitted it again more recently) confirm that Hamas deliberately tries to get its civilians killed.
“But it is indisputable that Gaza militants operate in civilian areas, draw return fire to civilian structures, and on some level benefit in the diplomatic arena from the rising casualties. They also have at times encouraged residents not to flee their homes when alerted by Israel to a pending strike and, having prepared extensively for war, did not build civilian bomb shelters.” —from the NYT article linked above
The New York Times wrote in 2014 about how hard the IDF tries to minimize civilian casualties by warning before they strike buildings.
Which brings me to my main point: why is it that using hospitals and schools to store weapons is a war crime?
Is it because it’s inhumane and awful?
Sure, somewhat. But so is war—all war.
Is it because it’s unfair to the hospital’s patients and staff, and to the schoolchildren, to put them in harm’s way?
Of course. But think a little harder.
It’s because when civilians are used as human shields and weapons are stored in hospitals and schools, war looks the way it looks in Gaza—far more bloody and horrifying than it has to be. The trauma is made far worse and more long-lasting, the consequences more severe, the horror more deeply entrenched.
It’s because when a group does what Hamas does, there are only two ways the war ends: one, they surrender. Two, the opposing force decides that it loves the enemy’s children more than the enemy does—enough to face extinction to protect them.
Hamas is not going to surrender, and it is immoral beyond words to expect Israel to face extinction to protect the children of Gaza. No other group on earth, other than Jews, would be expected to face extinction to protect other people’s children.
This is Jew-hatred, often of the conscious variety, but also, I think, of the more unconscious variety. I wrote about how, for many Americans, Jews are simply outside our center of moral concern. So even if we would, reluctantly, do violence to other people’s children to protect our own children, we cannot see that Jews are fully human and have that same right of self-defense.
When a war made this brutal and ugly—by the decisions of Hamas to continue using civilian sites as weapons caches and civilian lives as human shields—goes on and on, many otherwise reasonable people fall into the trap of thinking the people defending themselves are the ones committing a moral wrong.
This was entirely predictable, because we in the West have wholesale swallowed a hierarchy of oppressors and victims in which poor, brown people are excused for acts of barbarism and relatively well-off, Westernized people are regarded as evil for defending themselves against such.
Hamas knew if they kept it up long enough, the tide would turn and the people protesting against Israel before Israel did one single thing in self-defense would gain more allies, as indeed they have.
Why Systems Have to Be Something You Can Live With
Not using schools and hospitals as weapons caches is a minimum standard, and it’s one that we used to all be able to agree on. This matters, because it’s extremely important that systems be something we can live with in a worst case scenario. Otherwise, situations like the one in Gaza — where people who understand why Israel has to defend itself by ending Hamas are losing their nerve and follow-through — give an undisputed right to rule us all to the most psychopathic elements.
If Israel does not end Hamas, then the precedent is set. Any totalitarian government that is prepared to sacrifice its children can do whatever the fuck it wants and the rest of the world will capitulate.
The List on the Refrigerator
Here is a story from my childhood that I have thought about many times in the last six months, as I’ve watched Israel lose support from the few countries that offered it. I bounced this story off a couple of friends before I decided to publish it. The ones who grew up in fundamentalist insanity said things like, “I could totally see that happening in my church, but it’s so bizarre that other people may not be able to understand it” and “oh God, did you just remind me hardcore of what it was like growing up in rural Mississippi with a Bible-thumping preacher whose church we attended living next door.” It’s a difficult, brutal story, but I think it makes the point well. Skip it by scrolling down to the next bold heading if you are sensitive to stories about child abuse.
This is a story about corporal punishment of children. Few topics cause more insanity in comment sections, so I’m going to go into great detail on my own biases and priors. Whether you agree or not, you will at least understand where I’m coming from.
As with most controversial topics, the devil is in the details. I am not categorically opposed to spanking in all cases, but I think it’s inappropriate and destructive most of the time. Also, it’s lazy.
The overwhelming majority of people who defend spanking seem, to me at least, to seriously contradict their conclusion that they “turned out fine.” Why? Because they are highly motivated to spend their time and energy, often expressing enormous amounts of anger, on social media arguing that children need to be hit and cannot become fully functional moral agents without being hit. The irony is often jaw-dropping; I’ve had people spend large segments of their day going into passionate, angry detail about how the problems of the world mostly boil down to very small children not being hit often enough or hard enough and that they, my interlocutor, are proof of how well this method works to produce productive, happy, reasonable citizens. (I am profoundly fucked up, but at least I know that spending all day on social media arguing is a waste of time, ha ha.)
That said, I have heard a few stories from people who say a childhood spanking was a net benefit in their lives—people I believe. What they have in common was this:
1) it was rare; they have at most two or three such stories.
2) it was not a humiliation ritual designed to “put them in their place”.
3) it related to some kind of offense that could have gotten them into much worse and more painful trouble than the spanking, which was typically the point.
Two examples from the people I referred to—when she was 8 years old, a woman I know got her one and only childhood spanking. She ran away from her parents at a crowded fair, and they couldn’t find her for over an hour. Her father used a ping pong paddle to spank her after a long, scary talk about what terrible things can happen to 8 year old girls who run away from their parents and are found by strangers. And a man I know was brought home by the cops at age 16 for shoplifting. His father had spanked him a few times when he was under 6 years old, and not at all in the ten years since. His father whipped him with a belt, which he regards as a crucial and positive turning point in his life, one that probably saved him. He now understands that much worse things happen to 16 year old boys in lock-up, and is grateful that he was scared away from lawbreaking. I am fine with the parents’ decisions in these cases.
Spanking as a way of life, as a first resort discipline method, I regard as abusive and destructive. It is especially destructive in situations like the one prescribed by the fundamentalist church I grew up in, given the social milieu of most of the families. Working class, multiple-job-holding parents are often too busy or tired for much “quality time,” for bedtime stories and prioritizing a lot of one-on-one time with their kids. The pastors were strong advocates of the James Dobson/Focus on the Family formula wherein spanking was followed up by prayers, hugs, and affection. Following the church-prescribed rituals thus meant that for kids in our church, the vast majority of physical affection they experienced was immediately preceded by being embarrassed and physically hurt, which has far-reaching negative consequences.
So that’s where I am—against spanking in the vast majority of cases, but also truly willing to recognize some exceptions—willing enough to put some serious thought into what the exceptions tend to have in common.
Now you know my bias.
To be fair, I need to preface this story—which is fairly horrifying—by saying that the family in question was a good one, to the best of my understanding. I am aware of no verbal, emotional, or sexual abuse. The parents loved their kids, who were typical working-class Mississippi boys. Masculine, rambunctious, and rowdy, but good-hearted. The older one was my age and defended me once when a stranger was inappropriate with me in public (on a youth group trip to an amusement park). He wasn’t my boyfriend or even a particularly close friend, just a good kid—more particularly, a good young man.
Like all the families in our church, this family believed that spanking was the proper, God-ordained method of discipline. Many spanking families consider it a “last resort,” the punishment they resort to when other attempts to get through to their kids have failed. In our sect, this was silly, liberal nonsense. It was regarded as appropriate and normal that every child who lived under a parent-financed roof, including children who were over the legal age of adulthood, be spanked as a first resort when they misbehaved, had an attitude, or otherwise were “in sin.”
The pastors were very prescriptive about some aspects of what God required, but not others. As mentioned, they were strong advocates of the James Dobson/Focus on the Family formula wherein spanking was followed up by prayers, hugs, and affection. And they recommended, when asked, that parents use dowel rods since those (allegedly) sting without inflicting injury. But they also knew—and by their silence, gave tacit approval to—the fact that in the rural South, the use of switches and belts and ritualistic humiliation (kids old enough to be embarrassed by it having to pull their pants down to be hit on bare skin) is common.
The family went through some financial difficulty when the boys were 11 and 13. Reluctantly, the father took a job as a truck driver that would have him gone from Monday morning through Saturday morning.
Just a month or so before this happened, the parents had come to a decision about discipline in their family. Their mother was petite and, now that the boys were bigger, could no longer “apply the rod of correction effectively,” to use their terminology. (That’s Bible-speak for “their mother couldn’t hit them hard enough to hurt them sufficiently”.)
And now the father would be gone most of the time, which presented a problem. The family sat down and came up with a solution, which the boys were permitted to participate in devising. They made a list, which they put on the refrigerator. It was a list of misbehaviors and penalties, all of which were a specified number of “licks” with either a dowel rod or a belt. The only one I remember clearly was the one for Stealing, which was “10 licks with the rod plus a lick for every dollar you steal,” but I’m sure that the others were similarly harsh. Families of this social class and religious fervor were and are huge believers in performative respect. Failure to say “ma’am” or “sir” warranted a stern reprimand the first time and a spanking the second time. Likewise, talking back often warranted a spanking and an episode of mouth-washed-out-with-soap.
The agreement was that the mother would keep a record and the father would discipline the boys when he got home on Saturday morning.
I heard about this from the older boy, who was a friend of mine. I was familiar with something similar to this, in some families — my friend Nevaeh got a spanking for each C, one per day, which meant a bad report card could mean spankings every day for a week. And we had neighbors, both of the public school and fellow church-school varieties, whose parents had strict rules about being paddled at school. (Yes, public schools in the south still paddle. Today, in 2024.) Mostly the rule was that a paddling at school meant a second spanking at home.
So the system my friend, the older boy in this family, described wasn’t something wholly alien. But it still seemed scary and complicated to me. I wondered if they would really stick to it. The obvious risk—that the boys would quite literally write checks their butts couldn’t cash—seemed substantial.
The following Saturday, I was at church helping the children’s pastor organize the storage rooms when he took a phone call from the dad, and I ended up privy to several conversations about what was happening before the day was over.
The boys had gone a bit crazy while their dad was gone, and the “bill” each had run up was substantial. He called the pastor in horror, realizing he would spend his entire day home going from one boy’s bedroom to the other, spanking them over and over, and there would be no way to avoid really hurting them, even if he “applied the rod of correction” to the backs of their legs as well as their backsides. They’d end up with bruises and welts and missing church the next day because they would not be able to sit down.
The pastor told him that this had been a serious mistake and they should ditch the system entirely going forward, but it was imperative that the father follow through this time. Yes, even if they didn’t sit down for a few days. It wouldn’t kill them; the Bible promised this in Proverbs 23:13. Yes, even if it got so bad their mother had to leave the house because she couldn’t bear to hear the crying. It was non-negotiable; the boys knew the consequences. Indeed, they had chosen the consequences in many cases. And now they had to face them.
I didn’t see my friend again until Wednesday. I pretended not to know what had happened, but I watched him carefully. He winced every time he sat down, and walked slowly. I had my own problems as a kid and was mostly grateful that I faced no such “storing up” system in my own home, but I do remember how much this incident normalized for me that parents beating their kids was acceptable if they had a good reason.
The parents ditched the system going forward, and to the best of my memory neither boy misbehaved again for a long time.
The comparison may be a little strained, but I think there’s a reason it’s been on my mind for six months.
Incentives Matter
This was a case of a system being set up for which the consequences were unbearable to both the imposers of consequences and the sufferers of them. Fortunately, it was a system that could be scrapped — even if the parents made the mistake of listening to their pastor and implementing the system as agreed upon before scrapping it.
Hamas is forced to choose between surrendering to Jews or terrible things happening to their children, and it’s not a difficult choice at all — because a credulous West is happy to plead their case. After all, they’re poor. And brown!
Israel is being forced to choose between terrible things happening to other people’s children or to their own children.
That’s a choice that comes with painful duties and responsibilities, but it’s not actually a hard choice.
I would almost certainly be willing to die to protect other people’s children, circumstance-dependent. I can’t say I’d volunteer for rape or torture to protect other people’s children, but death? I think so.
I would not sacrifice the very small group of people I’m sure I love to protect other people’s children. No fucking way.
And I can only imagine that my love for my friends pales in comparison to the love of most parents, including Israelis, for their own children.
This is not a choice the West would expect anyone other than Jews to make, and I’m pretty damn tired of that fact not being acknowledged.
Comments were open for about ten hours; they are now closed. As part of my effort to spend more time offline, I’m experimenting with various approaches to handling the comments. I will be back online Monday morning (April 22) and if someone reminds me on Notes or via email, will open them again.
Amen, Hollycita - well said.
Excellent post.
It makes me very sad that pastor didn’t see the obvious answer to that family’s solution. Either A. Explain that this is a one time scenario and the list will be ignored to show them what God’s grace towards sinners is or B. If the dad really had the courage of his convictions he should’ve had the boys hit him for their list. This only would work if the boys don’t want to hurt their father and would be themselves hurt by doing so but it would have been a powerful object lesson.