Why did Hamas just launch more rockets, and can Israel be blamed?

[onenote]

32. You are apparently woefully ignorant of the Warsaw Ghetto

The Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto were singularly horrific events and the repeated attempts by some DUers to equate Gaza to Warsaw are ignorant and sick. Period.

That doesn't mean the situation is Gaza is good. Indeed, it is intolerable. But that doesn't make referencing it in the same breath as Warsaw appropriate.

Some facts I'm going to assume you don't know.

Some 400,000 Jewish men, women, and children of Warsaw were forced into an area 1.3 square miles.

In the first two years after the Ghetto was established, 83,000 Jews died of starvation. Then, over a two month period starting in late July 1942 and ending in mid September 1942, the Germans loaded between 250,000 and 300,000 of the Warsaw Ghetto's inhabitants and sent them to the Treblinka death camps where they were put in gas chambers, ovens, or shot. In January 1943, the Germans started the trains again. But the Jews of Warsaw, having learned that the trains were not merely taking their fellow Jews to labor camps, but were taking them to extermination camps, rebelled. The purpose of the rebellion was not to defeat the Germans. The Jews knew that they would die fighting the Germans. They simply wanted to go down fighting. The Germans, initially frustrated in their effort to meet the quota of Warsaw Jews they were able to load onto trains, paused in their efforts for a couple of months. But in April 1943, they responded with an assault on the Ghetto in which they killed 13,000 and captured the remaining 56,000, all of whom were sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz to be exterminated.

Life in Gaza, both before and after the current conflict, was no picnic. It is a terrible place. But by every single measure, comparisons between it and Warsaw are bullshit. Gaza City, the most densely populated part of Gaza, has a population of around 500,000 in a 17 square mile area. It has a positive birth rate. It has an economy, with Gross Domestic Product. A luxury hotel was built in Gaza in 2011. It is listed on TripAdvisor. It is open to reporters. There were no reporters describing what went on in Warsaw. There were no hotels. No commerce. It did not have population growth. It had population decline, due to starvation and systematic murder without even the fig leaf of a military rationale. The Jews of Warsaw, both before and during the Ghetto period, were never a threat to German civilians. Even the resistance posed no threat to German civilians.

So, please, make the point that Gaza is a terrible place with terrible conditions and that Israeli policies must change. Just don't do it with the false meme that Gaza is in any way comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto. What Israel is doing is disproportionate. It also happens to be what armies unfortunately do in every war: kill innocents in the name of an ostensible military action. It is what the British did when they killed 25,000 Germans in Dresden. It is what the US did when it dropped atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing the deaths of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Those actions were horrific and one can debate whether Truman and Churchill were "war criminals." But the actions of the Germans were not merely different from those actions as a matter of degree. What the Germans did was different in kind from what the British did, what the US did, and what Israel has done.