Three years of active war in Gaza prove Florence Nightingale’s theory that humanitarian aid encourages and prolongs war

by philg

It’s the third anniversary of the peaceful unarmed Gazans’ attack on “the Zionist entity” (Gazans don’t recognize the existence or legitimacy of a state of Israel). The Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) refuses to disarm (BBC; this makes sense since we’re informed that Gazans were never armed) and continues to fight despite having suffered some apparent losses.

From Florence Nightingale opposed the Red Cross (2010):

… she rejected the idea of the Red Cross from the outset. “I think its views most absurd just such as would originate in a little state like Geneva, which can never see war,” she said. … How could anyone who sought to reduce human suffering want to make war less costly? By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable.

Without humanitarian aid, eventually one side in a war has to surrender and make the best terms that it can for peace. People have to go back to work or they’ll starve and be unable to feed their children (the latter consideration is especially important for Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian”; they have very nearly the world’s highest population growth rate (even in Gaza right now)). With UNRWA, World Central Kitchen, Doctors Without Borders, etc., however, Gazans can stay at war indefinitely and they seem to know it. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an updated poll asking the same questions, but Ramallah-based AWRAD polled Gazans in the fall of 2023 and they were supportive of their October 7 attack and of Hamas and Palestinian Jihad. From International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result):

The Gazans’ plan was to fight until total victory (“A Palestinian state from the river to the sea”) was achieved:

The new state would be ruled by Hamas and/or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, based on the poll results for which parties were most popular in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas had 75% support and PIJ had 85%.

Israel has fought this war in a radically different way than what the U.S., U.K., and Russians did to win World War II, even though a smaller percentage of Germans and Japanese supported their respective governments than the percentage of Gazans who say that they support Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The US-/UK- approach would have been to drop bombs until the Gazans surrendered. The Russian approach would have been to fire artillery shells until the Gazans surrendered. The Israelis instead sent infantry in to sort through Gazans one by one, kept the aid flowing so that the Gazans could stay at war, and tried to engineer a built environment that would allow the Gazans to stay at war with the Zionist entity for another 78 years but not be able to accomplish another October 7-style attack (tunnels mostly destroyed; significant buffer zone along the border). The Gazans haven’t launched a rocket at Israeli civilians for an entire year so maybe this is working, at least in the short run. However, it is unclear that a drawn-out war is actually better for Gazans than a one-month much more intense war would have been. On the one hand, the Gazans’ happiest day ever was October 7, 2023 (video of ecstatic Gazans celebrating). On the other hand, there are at least some Gazans capable of productive work and a hot war followed by a true peace would enable them to go to work.

Where else are we seeing humanitarian aid and apparently endless war? Yemen. Foreign do-gooders, including the UN, dump food in and the result is that Yemenis can spend all of their time and energy fighting each other.

Related, the peaceful Gazans killed more than 40 Thai Buddhists on October 7, 2023 and then held more than 30 hostage, some for roughly 500 days. If the hot war had been shorter, the Thais could have gone home sooner. BBC:

(It’s interesting that no Gazan “civilian” ever helped a hostage escape, not even a non-Jew such as the above-referenced Thais. All over Europe during the Holocaust there were Christians, including in Germany itself, who helped Jews hide and/or escape. Gazans, however, appear to have been 100% united in their fight against Israeli civilians and, even, Thai Buddhists. Perhaps some of that unity is cracking now, however. Various Hamas affiliates seem to be getting killed as they walk around Gaza. I don’t see how it would be possible for the Zionist entity to kill these folks without at least some snitches on the inside.)

Posted in War

22 thoughts on “Three years of active war in Gaza prove Florence Nightingale’s theory that humanitarian aid encourages and prolongs war”

  1. I thought this was just a shizopost conspiracy theory, but it’s actually a well-recognized and discussed problem. Doctors without Borders has acknowledged the same and this is known as the “humanitarian dilemma” or “aid diversion”:

    Aid can be taxed, hijacked, looted, racketeered. Interventions can be manipulated to build internal or international legitimacy, to freeze military gains, to sustain ethnic cleansing, to enforce population displacements, to support famine policies. Each of these statements brings to mind the likes of the Sudan, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and the Congo, Burundi and so on.

    https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/foreign-and-humanitarian-aid-paradox-and-perspectives

    Apparently Doctors without Borders had to pull out of refugee camps in the 90s after the Rwandan genocide, because aid was being hijacked by warlords.

    Of course in Gaza, Hamas has been found to charge protection money of up to $13k+ per truck, that it uses to fund its operations and pay its employees

    Reply

    • Humanitarian aid doesn’t have to be taxed or hijacked for it to fuel a war. If humanitarian aid is delivered as advertised, it frees a population to engage in war rather than in productive work. Wars throughout human history have ended primarily because people had to go back to work. A society that doesn’t have to work, due to the provision of aid, is a society that can stay at war forever.

    • Apparently, there was some division within MSF over the situation in Rwanda/Congo. MSF France, to its credit, refused to support the perpetrators of the genocide and withdrew. MSF Holland, Belgium, and Spain did not consider it to be beyond the pale and remained. Eventually, it became too dangerous for their own staff, so they all left.

    • Doctors without borders was started by a French civil servant as part of a plot to steal Nigeria’s oil. If you’re a major country setting up a proxy force in the third world, one of the things you needed to supply is medical. MSF gave them a way to do that openly and at scale, since it was much larger than most proxy wars. There’s no such thing as humanitarian aid, it’s all military aid.

    • > I thought this was just a shizopost conspiracy theory

      And I thought your comment was just another buttnugpost, and I was right. I just learned a couple days ago what a “shitpost” was, now I learned a whole new word. Can you say “shitpost” kids? I knew you could.

      You know what *can’t* be taxed or looted? You right…deez nutz. Cuz I pay dat protection money called U.S. Income Tax. Sheeit…

    • @PITiNY, I hate to break it to you, but that video is completely out of context. There is another clip from just moments before the prayer, and, by the way, Muslims are required to pray five times a day, where this same group was singing “America” by Neil Diamond.

    • George, you bring up a good point with these Peaceful Islamic Terrorists, which is that they pray 5 times a day for the death of Jews and Americans. Perhaps that is why they have been responsible for murdering and raping so many Americans. Their sick ideology permeates their entire lives to the extent that their primary mission in life is murdering and raping (children in particular).

      You might find this other video interesting because it’s also in New York yesterday and they are openly waving Hamas flags and chanting Long Live Hamas. Perhaps these same folks just finished one of their five daily “prayers” for the Death of Jews and Americans, or more likely, this is one of their daily prayers.

      https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2107985677489000737

  4. Professor, I wanted to continue our exchange [from Twitter](https://x.com/Laurence1084/status/2108055735829680209), since I see you’ve written about the Gaza war at greater length here. Your point about humanitarian aid is taken, even if I believe you unjustly conflate civilians with militants. I’d like to raise two additional points.

    1) Another Ramallah-based surveyor, the PCPSR, found that support for the concept of the two-state solution among Palestinians was 32% in September 2023, 34% in December after the IDF had decimated Hamas and occupied most of the territory, and [currently sits at 44%](https://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Poll%2097%20English%20press%20release_12%20Aug2026.pdf). That doesn’t seem consistent with a population whose primary motivation is just to kill Jewish people.

    2) I believe, as you likely do, that Israel is a powerful, self-sufficient country that is presently dominating its adversaries. You oppose US aid to Gazan civilians, arguing that it prolongs the conflict. What do you think about the pressure in the Democratic Party — which remains the political home for the large majority of Jewish Americans — to end financial aid to the Israeli government and stop [bearing the brunt](https://archive.is/DPMbf) of its missile defenses in its war with Iran? Aren’t those actions also giving the Israelis an incentive to prolong its many wars?

    Reply

    • Ah, crap. The links won’t embed with the text, and apparently I can’t edit my comments here.

    • “unjustly conflate civilians with militants” by saying that “Gazans did X”? First, there are a wide variety of armed groups within Gaza and, some of the violence perpetrated by Gazans against Israelis and foreigners on October 7 was by Gazans not affiliated with any group (i.e., they were “civilians” until they crossed the border into Israel. Despite a substantial minority that does not support the current government, everything that the IDF does is generally characterized as something that “Israel” has done. Despite nearly all Democrats wanting to surrender to Iran after a few days of fighting, everything that the U.S. military does in Iran is characterized as something “America” has or “Americans” have done. I don’t see a reason to treat the Gazans differently than other societies that have chosen to go to war. After being promised war and conquest by a political party, they elected that party to power in a process rated “free and fair” by the Carter Center and the EU. The majority in opinion polls support that elected party/government. The Gazans have cooperated extensively with their government. No Gazan tried to help a hostage, for example. No mob of Gazan “civilians” got together and pushed a rocket launching team out of their neighborhood. Even in Nazi Germany there were protests by crowds and incidents where people didn’t cooperate. Nobody complained that “Germans” was used as a shorthand for what the majority of Germans either did or supported.

    • Laurence and Tony: I think the American “aid”, 100% of which must be spent back in the U.S. on precision American weapons, has been counterproductive. It enables Democrats to assert that 100% of what the IDF does is funded by U.S. tax dollars (that this isn’t true is irrelevant because Democrats are cheerfully innumerate; see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2026/01/25/when-harvard-graduates-try-to-use-numbers-dan-koh-massachusetts-candidate-for-congress/ ). The high-precision weapons make for a much longer war. Gazans who weren’t active fighters became completely comfortable living alongside Hamas, UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc. fighters and commanders, welcomed them into their hospitals and schools, etc. Being a human shield isn’t something they would likely have signed up for, though, if Israel had been using old-fashioned 155mm artillery shells, which they produce domestically. If every rocket launch from Gaza had been answered by a volley of 155mm shells directed on the launch location, for example, Gazans would have been aggressive about ensuring that no rockets were launched from their residential neighborhoods.

      It doesn’t help either side to promise infinite precision in warfare. If an enemy society launches a rocket at you, you can lob one or more 155mm shells back at them, using your best efforts to make the shells land on whatever the launch location was. If that had been established unapologetically as the norm, the decades of rocket attacks on Israeli civilians (“civilians in the Zionist entity” from a Gazan’s perspective, since the Gazans don’t recognize a state of Israel) almost surely would have been cut short a long time ago, not one year ago. The Gazans ultimately didn’t derive a lot of benefit from their 20 years of active fighting against Israeli civilians (not to mention people from other countries, e.g., the Thais they killed and took hostage). Yes, they’ve got everyone with a nose ring and dyed hair in the West marching on their behalf (go straight from the Jane Doe rally to condemn consensual rape to the pro-Gaza rally to celebrate the rapes that the Gazans perpetrated on October 7), but they don’t seem to be any closer to achieving their goal of destroying the Zionist entity. Israel still has factories to build 155mm guns and rounds. The Gazans had hoped to get a lot of help from fellow Arabs, but the Lebanese and Iranians weren’t as useful as imagined. The Egyptians just kept building higher/better fences to keep Gazans out. The Jordanians and Syrians didn’t invade Israel. Becoming media darlings in the West also doesn’t seem useful. Most of the stories are weepy tales of suffering among the peaceful unarmed Gazans. It is unclear how these help a brave strong people determined to achieve their military goals (e.g., river-to-the-sea rule and the destruction of the Zionist entity). Maybe Western sympathy will keep the aid flowing so they can have more kids and continue to devote 100% of their efforts to military projects, but they were already doing that and 100% of their efforts didn’t prove sufficient to overcome the IDF for more than about 9 hours. It took the U.S. six months to turn things around against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor (Battle of Midway is the generally recognized turning point and mostly that was luck).

    • Laurence: Now that I think about it, all of the current “aid” could be redone as a weapons trade deal with Israel. The U.S. and Israel would exchange their best weapons and expertise. A lot of American computer nerds are too precious to work on AI for U.S. defense (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2026/09/11/9-11-25th-anniversary-reading-project-maven/ ). Israel, which faces an ever-present existential threat (since they’re not willing to simply kill the people who say that they want to destroy Israel), isn’t going to have any qualms about working in this area. The U.S. needs tons more weapons, it seems, and more cost-efficient ones. We can just trade F-35s for Israeli-produced drones, AI software, and other stuff.

    • Dr. Greenspun,

      Have you considered allowing commenters (yourself included) the option to reply to replies? Right now, it’s hard to tell who’s replying to who.

      With reference to your pair of replies to me and then Tony and me, I think there’s a lot of meandering and at times misdirection that you could cut out. I don’t really care what you think about the reopened Cornell rape case (and question your strategy of associating pro-Hamas protesters with the far broader coalition that believes that what happened between Ms. Doe and the seven fraternity men was nonconsensual).

      The bottom line is that you didn’t seem to answer the question. You did suggesting that we weren’t *really* giving the Israelis $3.8 billion a year to spend on weapons because they’re spending it on American weapons. And you did try to change the subject from the US bearing the brunt of Israel’s missile defense to “Democrats wanting to surrender to Iran,” a position shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans (bit.ly/474KjQd) when framed in a less obviously partisan way.

      But you didn’t answer the question.

    • Laurence: Some of the long-term readers got annoyed when I had to briefly add one more level of nesting in the config.

      Thank you for bringing up Cornell for the first time in this post. It is important to remember that the fraternity there committed a genocide. Regarding the “nonconsensual” angle, here’s a fresh take from X: “The Cornell case is funny because they had verbal consent with witnesses and written consent after the fact through text messages and that’s probably more proof of consent than any sexual encounter anyone has ever had yet half the country still thinks they’re rapists.” (source: https://x.com/memeticsisyphus/status/2107833695218680116?s=20 )

      I’m not sure what you’re asking about Israel. I did respond to you saying that I thought the current setup (giving Israel money that they can spend with U.S. defense contractors) should be ended. Consistently on this blog, I’ve posted that the precision weapons Israel has purchased from the U.S. have been negatives for both Israelis and Gazans and that all concerned would have been better off if Israel had answered the Gazan attacks (going back 20 years) with domestically produced 155mm artillery shells. The idea that one can safely share an apartment building, a hospital, or a school with soldiers in an active war sounds good initially (who could oppose “safety”?), just like humanitarian aid (who doesn’t like humans?), but it is an obstacle to a true acceptance of peace. (There hasn’t been any support within German or Japanese society, for example, for returning to militarism. The vast majority of Germans and Japanese found that the cost of war was simply too high.)

    • Laurence, I wanted to put your mind at ease regarding you comment about my rape being “nonconsensual.” Two days after my rape and my group sex with others that same night, I sent the perpetrator a text (included in the link below), telling him that “I don’t think we should feel any shame…our body our choice.” I hope that is helpful.

      https://x.com/mtracey/status/2108265901153788085

    • Thank you, Lucy, for taking time out from what I trust will be a life-changing civil lawsuit against the genocide perpetrators.

  5. How can a two-state solution work when the population of peaceful, unarmed Gazans is growing three times faster than Israel’s? Before you know it, the demographic balance will shift, with Gaza’s population surpassing Israel’s. And even worse, the cost of providing aid and support could skyrocket.

    Reply

    • You are stating the general argument against the one-state solution, and that argument seems to me to be valid. A one-state solution is never going to happen. A two-state solution keeps the sides apart and Palestine could grow at a faster rate than Israel without a realistic chance of becoming a greater military power in the near term. Iran has 90 million people and are militarily inferior to Israel. The fear from Israel, of course, is it puts a probably hostile country that isn’t terribly afraid to invade Israel, even at great cost, right on their border without the geographic barriers their other enemies have.

    • George: It is kind of amazing that Americans and Europeans, who can no longer afford to have children (housing too expensive for them to have what they consider a reasonable quality of life with more than 0-1 child), cheerfully work longer hours every week to ensure that Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” can enjoy unlimited reproductive success. We do the same thing domestically, of course, making sure that the 80-90% of Somali-American families who are on welfare have ample space, food, and health care for however many children they choose to have, but those Somalis are our fellow Americans (they built both Boston and Minneapolis). What did Arabs in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank do for us/Europe that we want to forever fund their families of 6-8 kids per pair of adults? Example: “UNRWA serves 418,000 Palestine Refugees in Syria, 30 per cent of whom remain in a state of protracted displacement. This is a unique, long-lasting state of exile spanning over 75 years, where generations of Palestinian families remain in legal and physical limbo without a permanent home or a political resolution to their right of return.” — https://www.unrwa.org/resources/fact-sheet/unrwa-syria-factsheet

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