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This is not the approach the West took with ISIS, which involved similarly one-sided fights against terrorist forces [1], nor do I think it's an approach that w

This is not the approach the West took with ISIS, which involved similarly one-sided fights against terrorist forces [1], nor do I think it's an approach that would have worked. When "everyone who wants peace" doesn't include the people in control of the guns and rockets, who instead want to kill their enemies by any means necessary (and themselves do not respect international law), you can't simply dialogue your way out of it any more than Ukraine could have dialogued their way out of getting invaded by Russia. The ICJ ruled that Hamas return the hostages unconditionally, but everyone knows that won't happen — Hamas is simply unaccountable. "Everyone who wants peace" can't even get the Red Cross access to the hostages, let alone get them returned. Vague calls for diplomacy with terrorist groups doesn't solve much, which is why people are asking you for specific solutions — it's easy to say Israel should stop fighting, but then: what should it do? How would you actually ensure it doesn't keep getting attacked, repeatedly, as Hamas continues to insist they plan to do? 1: Mosul alone had ~10,000 civilian casualties and that was less densely populated than Gaza City and didn't have tunnels: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/thousands-more-civilians-were-killed-in-mosul-battle-than-official-tally-ap-finds https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/thousands-more-civilia... And it similarly had about 1MM civilians displaced: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/middleeast/mosul-iraq-isis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/middleeast/mosul-ir... And that wasn't the end of the fight against ISIS!

amluto 3y ago
A major problem is that the Gazan people have very legitimate problems with Israel, and this leads to a situation in which enough of them become militant to cause serious problems. Solving that seems like it needs a more wholistic approach than simply trying to get rid of the militants at the cost of causing everyone else to have an even bigger beef with Israel.
- reissbaker 3y ago
  Sure, and the people of Iraq had very legitimate problems with NATO. Nonetheless the West dismantled ISIS. People can have legitimate grievances without committing mass murder and rape, and in fact I think the mass murder and rape committed by Hamas have been very counterproductive for the lives of Gazans. What would you have Israel do, that you think would result in it not getting continually attacked by Hamas? Recall that when Israel dismantled its Gazan settlements and withdrew its own citizens at gunpoint nearly 20 years ago — in the hope that would help solve the problem — that's when Hamas took power...
  - pas 3y ago
    Israel needs to treat Palestinians as equals. This should start with not blockading Gaza, rolling back settlements in the West Bank, and so on. Furthermore, supporting those who oppose Hamas instead of playing the dangerous game that now cost tens of thousands of lives. Also, it's important to note that there are no guarantees. Even if Israel (famous hive mind, of course) did everything right there could have been provocation from/via Iran and whatnot.
    - reissbaker 3y ago
      Israel dismantled all of its Gazan settlements in 2005 and there had never been a blockade at that point, which is exactly what I just referenced in the post you were responding to. Then Hamas took over Gaza, and Israel and Egypt jointly started blockading it. You can't place the blame for Hamas's rule on the blockade — the blockade (and the settlements) didn't exist when they took power.
      - pas 3y ago
        Hamas' rule is the result of many factors over decades. Obviously the blockade and every other security measure was, at best, short-term responses to Hamas' radicalization, but overall simply one more blow to the fragile illusion of peace, and simply more heat under the pressure cooker of Gaza.
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        It is reasonable for adjoining countries to control their borders, e.g. Egypt and Israel's borders with Palestine. Countries get to control their borders. Israel takes it a step further and blockades Palestinian access to Palestinian sea routes, something which isn't just a declaration of war, it's an act of war.
  - ignoramous 3y ago
    > Nonetheless the West dismantled ISIS ISIS-K just carried out the worst terrorist attack in Iran (and it was primarily Iran's Q Solemani who dismantled ISIS; later killed by the US Army). Taliban rules Afghanistan again. > What would you have Israel do, that you think would result in it not getting continually attacked by Hamas? Negotiate, like they did with PLO before? > withdrew its own citizens at gunpoint Yeah, cause settlements are a clear breach of International Law. It was no charity. > that's when Hamas took power... Democratically elected, then subsequently undermined and later blockaded.
- dmix 3y ago
  > Solving that seems like it needs a more wholistic approach than simply trying to get rid of the militants at the cost of causing everyone else to have an even bigger beef with Israel. Like giving NGOs money which get funneled into overt terrorists groups by the corrupt politicians planted by the same terrorists? Aka the status quo for multiple decades well before Netanyahu was ever prime minister. It’s notable none of the surrounding Muslim countries want anything to do with being the neutral power brokers to temporarily help run the state because they know as well as everyone else it’s a never ending hornets nest, that they’ll have as little control of it as Fatah and the various other iterations of “stable” Palestinian governance, who had little ability or interest to quell the extreme violent fringes. Which in every other country in history means control via police, courts, or worst case military… not tacit appeasement and turning a blind eye.
- kilolima 3y ago
  For every Israeli Jewish civilian, there is an equivalent Palestine refugee living in a camp (~7mil). Israeli can only exist as a Jewish majority state as long as the original inhabitants remain displaced. So the Gazans are probably not going to be pro-Israeli any time soon.
  - amluto 3y ago
    I find this argument to be problematic. The world contains an enormous number of descendants of displaced people. I imagine that most of the US population is in this category, for example. (Most people of Native American heritage. The descendants of the Puritans. Most American Jews (displaced from different places, even). The Palestinian-Americans. Descendants of slaves. Many others.) Yet most of these people do not consider themselves to still be displaced! I certainly feel no particular desire to reconquer the (multiple!) places from which my ancestors were displaced. (There’s a lot of nuance here. Plenty of people, for example, think that Native Americans and their descendants should have better treatment, especially in land that remains Native American.) But somehow Palestinian refugees, in particular, have unusual, highly politicized issues. The UN agency involved is a different agency than the one that nominally handles every other refugee situation worldwide. There are multigenerational Palestinian refugee camps in countries that do not grant citizenship to the refugees, and there are people who argue that granting citizenship would do them a disservice. (I don’t know whether the people arguing this are doing so in good faith.) Also… > Israeli can only exist as a Jewish majority state as long as the original inhabitants remain displaced. Stories and written records about the Israel go back a long time. If the stories are all true, essentially all Jews worldwide are the descendants of those displaced from Israel. Control of Jerusalem in particular has changed quite a few times, and there are surely plenty of people around, Jews and otherwise, whose ancestors have been displaced multiple times, hundreds of years apart, from the area. (It’s not just Jews and Arabs. Jesus was killed in Jerusalem. Wars have been fought there repeatedly: the Muslim Conquest of the Levant, the Crusades, etc.) Trying to keep score of the number of living descendants of the various groups who have been displaced from Israel seems unlikely to give any sensible moral answer for who ought to control what part of it, except insofar as maybe the entire place would be better off with a genuine non-religious government, along the lines of how the US nominally works. Good luck!
- jdietrich 3y ago
  I fully accept that many Palestinians are motivated to take up arms against the Israelis by a justifiable sense of grievance, but the issue of anti-Semitism long pre-dates the establishment of Israel and exists far beyond the Palestinian Territories. I really don't want to understate this point - from an outside perspective, it is almost impossible to comprehend the depth of hatred against Jews that exists across the Middle East. Improving the living conditions of Palestinians is almost certainly a necessary precondition to lasting peace, but it is far from sufficient. Unfortunately, we are now stuck in a very stubborn vicious cycle - the Israel-Palestine conflict perpetuates anti-Semitism, which perpetuates the conflict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#Arab_League_as_a_whole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world
  - endominus 3y ago
    >the issue of anti-Semitism long pre-dates the establishment of Israel From your second source that seems to not be the case, at least not in serious degree. "Traditionally, Jews in the Muslim world were considered to be People of the Book and were subjected to dhimmi status. They were afforded relative security against persecution, provided they did not contest the varying inferior social and legal status imposed on them under Islamic rule. While there were antisemitic incidents before the 20th century, during this time antisemitism in the Arab world increased greatly." And later, "The situation of Jews was comparatively better than their European counterparts, though they still suffered persecution." There is more detail at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Musl... Anecdotally, I've heard that before the establishment of Israel, relations between the two groups were much less hostile. Muslims and Jews would, for example, have their Jewish or Muslim neighbors watch over their kids during holy days when they'd have to go to mosque/temple. There is also a long history of Jews being treated fairly well in the Arab/Muslim world - better indeed than they were in Christian lands where pogroms were much more common (it's astonishing how many times Germany, in a state of high fervor, decided that the most appropriate thing to do would be to massacre the Jews again). Again, anecdotally, the "depth of hatred against Jews" in the Arabs I've spoken with has little to do with Jews and much to do with the actions of the state of Israel and what it does in the name of Jews.
- rayiner 3y ago
  Their legitimate problems with Israel stem from their illegitimate problem with Israel: that Arabs rejected a two-state solution at inception and repeatedly tried to wipe Israel off the map. More fundamentally, the whole problem stems from Arabs refusing to want to give up any of the territory they acquired during their wars of conquest in the 700s. Palestine is always going to be a proxy for that. (Which is why Qatar is hosting Hamas leadership.)
  - amluto 3y ago
    Even ignoring whether you’re right or whether you are simplifying in a fair or unfair manner, I think it’s unhelpful to treat people as though they are mere continuations of their predecessors. All living Gazans were born after the 700s. The vast majority were born after 1948. Most were born after 1967. Telling people that their very real problems may stem from the misbehavior of dead, long dead, and extremely long dead people, even if those people are their ancestors, doesn’t change the fact that actual living Gazans have very real problems.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      > I think it’s unhelpful to treat people as though they are mere continuations of their predecessors. Those groups exist, and see themselves as continuations of their predecessors. When October 7 happened, my cousin posted a picture of the Dome of the Rock with the caption that it was the first step in retaking Jerusalem. An aunt posted about the Ummah. They aren’t even Arabs—just wannabes. Zooming out, Arabs who are happy to bomb the shit out of fellow Arabs (like Saudi does to Yemen) lend political and monetary support to the idea of an undivided Palestine (from the river to the sea—without Israel), and to Hamas, because they cling to a notion of territorial integrity of the lands considered by their ancestors in the 700s. In 1947, the Arab League and leaders of the Arab states opposed the UN partition plan and went to war with Israel precisely because of that idea. You can’t hope to understand what’s actually happening in the Middle East by viewing people as individuals. The grievance of the people of Gaza, as a group, isn’t just that their life sucks materially, which is something you could fix. That may be the case for some individuals, but that’s not the case for the group and what the group does collectively. The group’s grievance is that Israel exists on what should be Arab land from the river to the sea.
SirSavary 3y ago
Note: ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east; Hamas is homegrown and was democratically elected by the people of the region.
- reissbaker 3y ago
  No, ISIS wasn't "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State
  - SirSavary 3y ago
    Marauding terrorist force that lays claim to an area != the people who inhabit that area* * I understand that they also recruited locally; that doesn't change the fact that there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities.
    - Sabinus 3y ago
      >ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east >there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged? Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not?
      - SirSavary 3y ago
        > Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged? There's no retreating in my comment -- it's a fact that they sourced people from everywhere. I threw an asterisk on there at the last second because I wanted to show good faith; there's nothing nefarious about it. > Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not? It was definitely a bunch of European guys, and Asian guys, and American guys, etc... my point was that ISIS was a group of people from around the globe and not an ideology endemic to the region. See my other comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39153097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39153097
peterashford 3y ago
Israel needs terms with Palestine, not with Hamas
yyyk 3y ago
Mosul had 40k civilian causalties (more than Hamas totals), the coalition just lied about it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-massacre-battle-isis-iraq-city-civilian-casualties-killed-deaths-fighting-forces-islamic-state-a7848781.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-m...
bawolff 3y ago
> The ICJ ruled that Hamas return the hostages unconditionally To nitpick, the court did not rule that, they just "called" for that. It wasn't an order so its not binding. It was just a symbolic statement. At most it was just a way for the court to acknowledge that the conflict is not one sided.

amluto 3y ago

A major problem is that the Gazan people have very legitimate problems with Israel, and this leads to a situation in which enough of them become militant to cause serious problems. Solving that seems like it needs a more wholistic approach than simply trying to get rid of the militants at the cost of causing everyone else to have an even bigger beef with Israel.

reissbaker 3y ago
Sure, and the people of Iraq had very legitimate problems with NATO. Nonetheless the West dismantled ISIS. People can have legitimate grievances without committing mass murder and rape, and in fact I think the mass murder and rape committed by Hamas have been very counterproductive for the lives of Gazans. What would you have Israel do, that you think would result in it not getting continually attacked by Hamas? Recall that when Israel dismantled its Gazan settlements and withdrew its own citizens at gunpoint nearly 20 years ago — in the hope that would help solve the problem — that's when Hamas took power...
- pas 3y ago
  Israel needs to treat Palestinians as equals. This should start with not blockading Gaza, rolling back settlements in the West Bank, and so on. Furthermore, supporting those who oppose Hamas instead of playing the dangerous game that now cost tens of thousands of lives. Also, it's important to note that there are no guarantees. Even if Israel (famous hive mind, of course) did everything right there could have been provocation from/via Iran and whatnot.
  - reissbaker 3y ago
    Israel dismantled all of its Gazan settlements in 2005 and there had never been a blockade at that point, which is exactly what I just referenced in the post you were responding to. Then Hamas took over Gaza, and Israel and Egypt jointly started blockading it. You can't place the blame for Hamas's rule on the blockade — the blockade (and the settlements) didn't exist when they took power.
    - pas 3y ago
      Hamas' rule is the result of many factors over decades. Obviously the blockade and every other security measure was, at best, short-term responses to Hamas' radicalization, but overall simply one more blow to the fragile illusion of peace, and simply more heat under the pressure cooker of Gaza.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      It is reasonable for adjoining countries to control their borders, e.g. Egypt and Israel's borders with Palestine. Countries get to control their borders. Israel takes it a step further and blockades Palestinian access to Palestinian sea routes, something which isn't just a declaration of war, it's an act of war.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  > Nonetheless the West dismantled ISIS ISIS-K just carried out the worst terrorist attack in Iran (and it was primarily Iran's Q Solemani who dismantled ISIS; later killed by the US Army). Taliban rules Afghanistan again. > What would you have Israel do, that you think would result in it not getting continually attacked by Hamas? Negotiate, like they did with PLO before? > withdrew its own citizens at gunpoint Yeah, cause settlements are a clear breach of International Law. It was no charity. > that's when Hamas took power... Democratically elected, then subsequently undermined and later blockaded.
dmix 3y ago
> Solving that seems like it needs a more wholistic approach than simply trying to get rid of the militants at the cost of causing everyone else to have an even bigger beef with Israel. Like giving NGOs money which get funneled into overt terrorists groups by the corrupt politicians planted by the same terrorists? Aka the status quo for multiple decades well before Netanyahu was ever prime minister. It’s notable none of the surrounding Muslim countries want anything to do with being the neutral power brokers to temporarily help run the state because they know as well as everyone else it’s a never ending hornets nest, that they’ll have as little control of it as Fatah and the various other iterations of “stable” Palestinian governance, who had little ability or interest to quell the extreme violent fringes. Which in every other country in history means control via police, courts, or worst case military… not tacit appeasement and turning a blind eye.
kilolima 3y ago
For every Israeli Jewish civilian, there is an equivalent Palestine refugee living in a camp (~7mil). Israeli can only exist as a Jewish majority state as long as the original inhabitants remain displaced. So the Gazans are probably not going to be pro-Israeli any time soon.
- amluto 3y ago
  I find this argument to be problematic. The world contains an enormous number of descendants of displaced people. I imagine that most of the US population is in this category, for example. (Most people of Native American heritage. The descendants of the Puritans. Most American Jews (displaced from different places, even). The Palestinian-Americans. Descendants of slaves. Many others.) Yet most of these people do not consider themselves to still be displaced! I certainly feel no particular desire to reconquer the (multiple!) places from which my ancestors were displaced. (There’s a lot of nuance here. Plenty of people, for example, think that Native Americans and their descendants should have better treatment, especially in land that remains Native American.) But somehow Palestinian refugees, in particular, have unusual, highly politicized issues. The UN agency involved is a different agency than the one that nominally handles every other refugee situation worldwide. There are multigenerational Palestinian refugee camps in countries that do not grant citizenship to the refugees, and there are people who argue that granting citizenship would do them a disservice. (I don’t know whether the people arguing this are doing so in good faith.) Also… > Israeli can only exist as a Jewish majority state as long as the original inhabitants remain displaced. Stories and written records about the Israel go back a long time. If the stories are all true, essentially all Jews worldwide are the descendants of those displaced from Israel. Control of Jerusalem in particular has changed quite a few times, and there are surely plenty of people around, Jews and otherwise, whose ancestors have been displaced multiple times, hundreds of years apart, from the area. (It’s not just Jews and Arabs. Jesus was killed in Jerusalem. Wars have been fought there repeatedly: the Muslim Conquest of the Levant, the Crusades, etc.) Trying to keep score of the number of living descendants of the various groups who have been displaced from Israel seems unlikely to give any sensible moral answer for who ought to control what part of it, except insofar as maybe the entire place would be better off with a genuine non-religious government, along the lines of how the US nominally works. Good luck!
jdietrich 3y ago
I fully accept that many Palestinians are motivated to take up arms against the Israelis by a justifiable sense of grievance, but the issue of anti-Semitism long pre-dates the establishment of Israel and exists far beyond the Palestinian Territories. I really don't want to understate this point - from an outside perspective, it is almost impossible to comprehend the depth of hatred against Jews that exists across the Middle East. Improving the living conditions of Palestinians is almost certainly a necessary precondition to lasting peace, but it is far from sufficient. Unfortunately, we are now stuck in a very stubborn vicious cycle - the Israel-Palestine conflict perpetuates anti-Semitism, which perpetuates the conflict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#Arab_League_as_a_whole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world
- endominus 3y ago
  >the issue of anti-Semitism long pre-dates the establishment of Israel From your second source that seems to not be the case, at least not in serious degree. "Traditionally, Jews in the Muslim world were considered to be People of the Book and were subjected to dhimmi status. They were afforded relative security against persecution, provided they did not contest the varying inferior social and legal status imposed on them under Islamic rule. While there were antisemitic incidents before the 20th century, during this time antisemitism in the Arab world increased greatly." And later, "The situation of Jews was comparatively better than their European counterparts, though they still suffered persecution." There is more detail at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Musl... Anecdotally, I've heard that before the establishment of Israel, relations between the two groups were much less hostile. Muslims and Jews would, for example, have their Jewish or Muslim neighbors watch over their kids during holy days when they'd have to go to mosque/temple. There is also a long history of Jews being treated fairly well in the Arab/Muslim world - better indeed than they were in Christian lands where pogroms were much more common (it's astonishing how many times Germany, in a state of high fervor, decided that the most appropriate thing to do would be to massacre the Jews again). Again, anecdotally, the "depth of hatred against Jews" in the Arabs I've spoken with has little to do with Jews and much to do with the actions of the state of Israel and what it does in the name of Jews.
rayiner 3y ago
Their legitimate problems with Israel stem from their illegitimate problem with Israel: that Arabs rejected a two-state solution at inception and repeatedly tried to wipe Israel off the map. More fundamentally, the whole problem stems from Arabs refusing to want to give up any of the territory they acquired during their wars of conquest in the 700s. Palestine is always going to be a proxy for that. (Which is why Qatar is hosting Hamas leadership.)
- amluto 3y ago
  Even ignoring whether you’re right or whether you are simplifying in a fair or unfair manner, I think it’s unhelpful to treat people as though they are mere continuations of their predecessors. All living Gazans were born after the 700s. The vast majority were born after 1948. Most were born after 1967. Telling people that their very real problems may stem from the misbehavior of dead, long dead, and extremely long dead people, even if those people are their ancestors, doesn’t change the fact that actual living Gazans have very real problems.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    > I think it’s unhelpful to treat people as though they are mere continuations of their predecessors. Those groups exist, and see themselves as continuations of their predecessors. When October 7 happened, my cousin posted a picture of the Dome of the Rock with the caption that it was the first step in retaking Jerusalem. An aunt posted about the Ummah. They aren’t even Arabs—just wannabes. Zooming out, Arabs who are happy to bomb the shit out of fellow Arabs (like Saudi does to Yemen) lend political and monetary support to the idea of an undivided Palestine (from the river to the sea—without Israel), and to Hamas, because they cling to a notion of territorial integrity of the lands considered by their ancestors in the 700s. In 1947, the Arab League and leaders of the Arab states opposed the UN partition plan and went to war with Israel precisely because of that idea. You can’t hope to understand what’s actually happening in the Middle East by viewing people as individuals. The grievance of the people of Gaza, as a group, isn’t just that their life sucks materially, which is something you could fix. That may be the case for some individuals, but that’s not the case for the group and what the group does collectively. The group’s grievance is that Israel exists on what should be Arab land from the river to the sea.

SirSavary 3y ago

Note: ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east; Hamas is homegrown and was democratically elected by the people of the region.

reissbaker 3y ago
No, ISIS wasn't "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State
- SirSavary 3y ago
  Marauding terrorist force that lays claim to an area != the people who inhabit that area* * I understand that they also recruited locally; that doesn't change the fact that there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities.
  - Sabinus 3y ago
    >ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east >there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged? Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not?
    - SirSavary 3y ago
      > Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged? There's no retreating in my comment -- it's a fact that they sourced people from everywhere. I threw an asterisk on there at the last second because I wanted to show good faith; there's nothing nefarious about it. > Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not? It was definitely a bunch of European guys, and Asian guys, and American guys, etc... my point was that ISIS was a group of people from around the globe and not an ideology endemic to the region. See my other comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39153097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39153097

peterashford 3y ago

Israel needs terms with Palestine, not with Hamas

yyyk 3y ago

Mosul had 40k civilian causalties (more than Hamas totals), the coalition just lied about it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-massacre-battle-isis-iraq-city-civilian-casualties-killed-deaths-fighting-forces-islamic-state-a7848781.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-m...

bawolff 3y ago

> The ICJ ruled that Hamas return the hostages unconditionally To nitpick, the court did not rule that, they just "called" for that. It wasn't an order so its not binding. It was just a symbolic statement. At most it was just a way for the court to acknowledge that the conflict is not one sided.