Lester Golden
3 min readJan 25, 2024

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Your legal analysis is as defective as your spelling of both Nazi and Jewish names (Arendt). Like Groucho Marx, you should call your lawyer again as soon as he gets out of law school. And your Nazi analogies are just morally sick anti-semitic Jew-taunting. You could have chosen another more rigorous analogy, such as American bombing in Vietnam or the 2016 siege of ISIS-occupied Mosul, but chose the Nazi one to maximize the pain caused to Jews who'd read it. A 5 second Google search for Hannah Arendt's name would have corrected your misspelling. But since your thinking is as sloppy and lazy as your reasoning, even that was too much to ask.

Under the UN statute what's not morally ok is often legal. Examples:

1. The Allied bombing of Caen and other coastal targets before the Normandy invasion, which killed 50-80000 French civilians. Given the consequences of a failed invasion, "the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated" made the bombings legal.

2. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the conventional bombings of other Japanese cities. The daily death rate in Japanese-occupied China was 3000/day, in Indonesia about half that. We now know that Stalin's plan to invade Hokkaido wasn't canceled until August 22, two weeks after the start of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. This means that "the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated"--ending the war ASAP and preventing the division of Japan like Germany--by these operations was enough to make them legal.

3. The area bombing of German cities that killed 15x the number of German vs the number of British civilians. Putting Allied bombers over German cities kept the Luftwaffe out of the eastern front and off the back of the Red Army. Again, "the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated" was sufficient to legalize the cost in German civilian lives.

Individual Israeli soldiers have undoubtedly killed civilians intentionally. Those are war crimes that have contravened the orders of the Israeli lawyers that give each unit permission to carry out a given operation--the equivalent of the American JAG (Judge Advocate General). But no Israeli soldiers

have orders to commit war crimes as all Hamas units did (reread the captured orders). Therein lies the legal difference.

Hamas' leaders have said that Gaza's civilians are not its responsibility. This is legal nonsense since Hamas has been the defacto governing authority in Gaza since 2007 when it shot or threw all the Fatah officials it could find off Gaza rooftops.

It's also well-documented that the vast majority of UNRWA workers are Hamas members. Go to the 3000 member Telegram channel of UNRWA teachers and read their genocidal propaganda: https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1744883114042658902

Again, an UNRWA school that stores weapons is an armory. If it has a tunnel under it, it is a command post and loses its protected status no matter who else is in that school. That the IDF makes tens of thousands of calls to warn civilians to evacuate before bombing such targets, eliminates the intentionality that is the legal key to defining war crimes.

That's the law under the statute as written. You may morally object to that legal fact. But your moral objections don't change the law.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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