Hamas could have stopped war at any time. It was in their power to save all the lives that were lost in Gaza. They chose not to lay down their arms and not to return the hostages. Israel was not in a position to stop because Hamas was/is not prepared to stop. While the popular understanding of proportionality in war is about numbers, the moral and legal definition is about what you have to do to get peace. Rabbi Friedman makes the moral and practical case in this video. https://youtu.be/0umKB0ckfqk?si=07114iB4NuptvfnY

@Mike Trayler I like this topic.

@Francesco Dell'Anna I’m not really up to date on it. It was something I looked at during my undergrad studies and the use of the terms are heavily contested but nonetheless, I think they have value. I found a 2013 student paper that gives a quick view of the history of the concepts and broadly sketches out some of the uses (and pitfalls) of the terms. The paper does not discuss the complexities in any depth but has a short list of well-regarded references that could be a good starting point. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-historical-sciences/sites/social_historical_sciences/files/Honor_and_Shame--2013__Stewart.pdf

@Francesco Dell'Anna These people did not have a written tradition. Stories with embedded information are/were handed down orally. Hermeneutics and critique are/were handled on strict lines of cultural ownership. Thus, all people might have rights to certain parts of the narrative in, for example, the right through dance and other rituals, to tell a given “story” (which may embody lore and law) but certain other people had rights to critique the information. This is a culture for whom relationship has primacy over technology. They were not without some technology and that served them well enough but this is a culture where information is the traditional currency of survival. The surviving population is small, so cross cousins do marry but the rules around who a person may marry are very strict. They regard westerners as being like dogs. That is, they find our rules for marriage and relationships to be quite permissive and “… like dogs, will mate with anybody”! In their culture, anyone who marries outside their rules is considered to be committing incest and is met with disgust. Independent anthropological studies suggest that in a population as small as theirs, their marriage rules allow for the most effective sharing of the available genetic pool throughout the entire group across about three generations and they derived their group rules without benefit of genetic knowledge or western scientific theory. With the advent of colonisation, some do marry westerners and people from other groups. They will bring people who “marry in” into the group rules by assigning them appropriately within the group so that any children who result from such marriages have clear relationships within the group and can also marry and participate in the ritual life of the group. While today, most are monogamous, the tradition was for men to marry multiple wives who would effectively be “sisters” to each other. This worked well in their hunter/gathering lifestyle. All members of the group foraged successfully but men hunted the larger animals that provided the heavy protein and the sister wives would forage together for vegetables, fruits and smaller prey while simultaneously managing the children and infants as sister wives and sister mothers.

@Carol Brooks When you describe yourself as culturally Jewish, you are using the term in a colloquial sense. I understand your meaning and most Jews would also. It is entirely valid. But when I used the term in my comments, I was using it in an anthropological context and I apologise if that was unclear. I agree that culture, socio-economic groups and religion are not the same thing but cultures have ties that result in shared understandings. One of the parts of those shared understandings consist of the spiritual beliefs of the group. Economics are systems for the distribution of the available resources. Different groups have different solutions. For Jews, we are coming from a common heritage that shapes us as a group. Yes, it is entirely possible to be a Jew who doesn’t believe in G-d (because we are an ethnicity with inherited spiritual beliefs attached and not simply a religion) but if you subscribe to a Jewish ethical system, that set of understandings was derived from the spiritual beliefs of our ancestors. Not all Jews believe in that. I have met many Jews who see themselves as Buddhist or pagan. They carry Jewish dna but subscribe to the traditional views of our people much more loosely, if at all. Culture is a lens through which we interpret and interact with the world, and it is how we find common understanding within a group. In Judaism (the religion), those of us who adhere believe in a set of ethics derived from a transcendent authority. When people move away from religion as a basis for deriving their ethics, they are moving from a transcendent source of derivation to an ascendant source. It is entirely possible to be an ethical person without a belief in religion but sans a transcendent authority, a person is left to derive their own framework for ethics, or choose someone else’s pre-existing system. Some people (Sam Harris is one) assert that right and wrong is obvious. I disagree. I have studied ethnic groups with a history of cannibalism (including a group in the Pacific with whom I spent time) and their historic rationale for cannibalism made sense within the ethical understanding of their ancestors. There were strict rules attached to who could be eaten, which parts and in what circumstances. It was the breaking of those rules that was considered unethical. And to forestall, there are people from their group still living who have tasted human flesh in their childhood, although these people are no longer cannibals today.

Globalism is simply empire building and colonialism under a new name. What we are witnessing are the visible signs of different agencies/groups slogging it out to control the agenda. We see only the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the UN for example, Western liberal democracies are in the minority. Unless issues go to the Security Council where a veto from a single, powerful democratic country can overturn a vote, Western Nations are outnumbered. As more and more Western style countries become corrupted by either flawed ideology or simple corruption at the highest levels, the balance for control in this mighty power struggle falls, most often to the most unethical or the most fanatical. Small, vulnerable States become economically dependent on larger States with globalist agendas. Western liberal democracies become progressively outnumbered. Educational institutions have been corrupted by “the long march”. Consequently, the last few generations in the West do not understand the basic principles of democratic government; things like separation of powers and the long, historic struggle to create institutions that limit despotism and the rule of absolute monarchs and disperse power through multiple hands and agencies, including the general citizenry. Consequently, people are easily manipulated by cynical actors who present arguments based on emotion and dressed up as social justice, when, if their educational foundation was solid, they’d realise that the causes they’ve been recruited to support are undermining the very principles for which they think they stand. Their ignorance deludes them into believing they have the high moral ground. There are so many hidden players competing behind the scenes for global control in so many arenas (e.g. including but not limited to, the UN, the EU, China, Russia, the Islamic States, the World Economic Forum) and other powerful players just competing for a slice of the action that the full picture is almost invisible. Consequently, people try to fill in the gaps with guesswork and conspiracy theories. Thus, you see the rise of antisemitism (blame it on the Jews), Q anon (only a new messiah can save us now), Trump derangement syndrome and blind Trump philo-ism. And somewhere in there are the conspiracy theories with some truth attached. Just enough of them to add spice to the mix. But the overall picture becomes obscured and prevents the “the people” from being a united and effective resistance force.