Anyway, if Gazan citizens learn the lessons of their mistakes, they still have a future. In Germany about 5 million German soldiers were killed, almost as many as the 6 million Jews they slaughtered. At the time that was a double digit percentage of the entire male population. But Germany rebuilt and is now a thriving country.

1) https://www.axios.com/2023/10/21/palestine-hamas-military-po...

Mistakes?

To be clear, before I continue further: Hamas is a terrorist organization. Hamas also has a lot of support within Palestine.

Now then, scenario 1) how, realistically, do you propose that the regular non-Hamas supporting Palestinian works to eradicate Hamas? Hamas have arms. (Let's not also forget how hard right Israeli leaders also supported Hamas, because a moderate Palestine is not really a true goal of theirs) Israel makes sure that Palestinians do not get access to weapons in general (i.e. Hamas obtains them by smuggling), 2) how do you prevent legions of new Hamas supporters being 'born' every day?

By 2, I mean, if you as a child grow up in the Gaza strip, regularly watching Merkava Israeli tanks cruising up and down your streets, often accompanied by bulldozers demolishing the homes of your friends, how are you likely to react?

Perhaps you pick up a rock and throw it at the tank. Oops. The IDF has on many occasions responded to children, throwing stones and rocks at main battle tanks, with live ammunition.

Good way to foster resentment, that. And maybe you don't support Hamas yet, but you hear of another rocket attack. The Iron Dome takes care of it, but Israel doesn't care - they turn off electricity to the entire strip for a few days in punishment. Not just your home, but your school, your hospital. Or they turn off the internet. Or phone. A few times, they even turn off fresh water.

Maybe now you start thinking you don't agree with Hamas' methods, but they're fighting for your right to survive, something the Israelis don't seem to care overly about, given their attitude to collateral damage.

Any other country on the planet responds like this, these things are considered war crimes. But when it is Israel? Not so much.

Edited to update reference to the tank type per reply.

Fully open the border with Egypt and provide documents usable internationally. Then many educated Gazans would happily leave for better opportunities elsewhere. It would make a dent large enough in Gazans’ demographics that Hamas would not longer be able to extract the same level of material support from the civilian population and camouflage its operations using that population.

Israel haven't closed the border, Egypt did.

What future would that be?

The whole reason this conflict keeps going is because of faulty reasoning like this.

Gazan citizens do not have a say in much of anything, they're either combatants, captives or hostages depending on what your perspective from outside Gaza is.

A future where they stop killing Israeli's and slowly build up the trust to restore normal relations and trade. Gaza was given the chance when Israel decoccupied Gaza in 2005. They decided to vote in Hamas in a democratic election instead.

> Gazan citizens do not have a say in much of anything, they're either combatants, captives or hostages depending on what your perspective from outside Gaza is.

As I have said elsewhere, about 6% to 8% of the entire adult male population are Hamas soldiers. Hamas is a significant percentage of the entire population. Of course they can choose a different path.

It's notable that Hamas doesn't even bother to censor internet access in Gaza, beyond porn. They don't need to. They have enough support without internet censorship.

Israel does a lot of bad things, like the settlements in the West Bank. No question about that. But if Israel were to stop with those tomorrow, I honestly don't think it will make a difference. See e.g. what Israel did with Gaza - it forcibly removed its own citizens, left Gaza entirely, and what we got in return was Hamas.

On the other hand, if the Palestinians agreed to a peace treaty whereby they get some land and give up their right to destroy all of Israel, the war would be over. Period. This was offered to the Palestinians several times, and they refused several times.

I'm not saying Israel is faultless, far from it. But at the end of the day, Israel is in a situation where the other side wants something that Israel can't agree to - they want Israel gone. That's the heart of this conflict and something you just can't negotiate around.

Hamas slaughtered over a thousand Jewish civilians three weeks ago. They've been continuously launching rockets into Israel since then. They have been able to do that because Israel had chosen to partially normalize relations, eg by allowing trucks to import goods into Gaza, allowing the import of concrete and other building supplies, and allowing Gazan's to enter Israel to work. The latter is particularly atrocious, as it appears that many of those cross-border workers used their access to Israel to help Hamas massacre Israeli civilians.

Obviously, normalizing relations prior to Hamas taking steps to reject violence comes at enormous risk. If Israel had instead decided against taking steps to normalize relations with Gaza, 1400 and counting Israeli's would probably still be alive today.

Hamas has given Israel a good reason to strike back but not indiscriminately and in retribution you have to work really hard to not sink to the level of your attacker - or even lower. Note that Israel has zero reasons to keep settling more and more ground and bulldozing more Palestinian homes and that as long as that keeps happening and they overreact to various attacks this conflict will simply never end. And that's exactly how Hamas and the Hawks want it, because it legitimizes their existence, they relish the conflict.

> Hamas has given Israel a good reason to strike back but not indiscriminately and in retribution

I want to argue against your framing here, because that is not how Israelis see things. At least the normal ones don't think of it as "striking back in retribution" or anything like that.

The thing is, Hamas has declared war on Israel. They slaughtered 1400 people, took hostages, and are actively and continually firing rockets at Israel. There's been 3 weeks of rocket attacks. Luckily Israel has lots of defensive capabilities to block these kinds of attacks, but they are actively waging a war in the hopes of killing as many Israelis as possible.

So the situation from Israel's perspective is - we are bordering a semi-state, whose government is intent on destroying Israel, have shown themselves capable of killing many Israelis, and is continuing to wage war. What should Israel do? The only response that most Israelis come to, which is what any other country in the world would do when faced with a similar situation, is to attack the enemy country until it doesn't have the capability to hurt you anymore.

It's not some kind of "tit for tat" terrorist attack. It's literally a bordering country intent on destroying you and actively trying to do so.

And btw, people seem to think that Israel is all-powerful or something here and can just choose whatever response it wants - but several other countries are actively threatening to join the war and attack Israel all at once. It's as if Mexico invaded the States, killed thousands of Americans, was firing rockets at American cities, and Canada was threatening to join in the war. What kind of response would make sense in this context?

I mean that sincerely - what do you think Israel should do given this current situation? Because I sure as hell don't have a better idea than "try to destroy Hamas before they kill me".

I think the answer to that is to first figure out what kind of vision people have a for a long term view of what that part of the world will look like. If the vision is that at some point all these people are going to have to live together and mix freely then we are already on the wrong pathway for 70 years. If the vision is that Israel is forever going to be a state surrounded by enemies that slowly expands by virtue of being a forward post of the West with nukes then that is effectively condemning Israel and its citizens to pawns on the geopolitical chessboard.

It's possible that 'the end of oil' will somehow tip the scales in Israels' favor, but it is also very well possible that at some point the Arab world will become more of a nuclear power than they are today. And in a world where 'might makes right' and proliferation worries dominate a lot of these discussions the current situation is highly unstable.

If Israel doesn't manage to get to the first kind of solution in the foreseeable future I fear that in the longer term is may cease to exist entirely.

By the way: thank you for the respectful discussion on this extremely sensitive subject. Given some of the incredible garbage in this thread it is a welcome relief.

Likewise!

> I think the answer to that is to first figure out what kind of vision people have a for a long term view of what that part of the world will look like.

I think the only viable option is a two or possibly three state solution. For obvious reasons (obvious to Israelis at least), Israel must remain a majority-Jewish state, so a one-state solution is simply impossible. That means a two state solution where the Palestinians have their own state.

But how to get there from here is the problem. There have been many attempts at peace, including several peace deals that the Palestinians walked away from. The common line is that Israel has agreed to every compromise peace deal that's ever been put forward, which I'm sure isn't accurate, but is largely true; I fully believe that if the Palestinians had a decent leadership that would try to negotiate with Israel today and offer a deal, Israel would accept it.

But as long as the Palestinians insist on things that are unrealistic - with Hamas obviously being the worst example, insisting that Israel stop existing! - as long as that's the demand, I just don't see how we get to a peace deal. And obviously, Israeli leadership has been somewhat between apathetic to the Palestinians and full-on discouraging any kind of deal, so it's not like the Israeli government are exactly saints on this topic.

The only possible hope I have is that the current war is so bad, it forces Israel to actually wipe out Hamas, but then help get a more decent leadership on the Palestinian side that will actually help get to peace. I'm very doubtful that will happen, because I don't really trust either side to acutally pursue peace.

Note that the IRA wasn't 'wiped out' (in spite of many years of trying to do just that, but less visibly aggressive), they simply ran out of support and that was that. Something like that might work. But Israel would have to commit to some kind of compromise, for instance to halt any kind of settlement program, hand back land taken by settlers and to vow to stick to some kind of well defined border. And that's the bit that I don't see happening and every time someone gets murdered it will simply escalate right back to where we are today only then with more chance of really spiraling out of control.

Hardliners thrive on conflict, and as long as - on either side - hardliners are major players the conflict will be prolonged and possibly expanded. And each side has the capability to do something about their hardliners.

edit: this is the sort of thing that will come back to haunt Netanyahu no matter how the current fight unfolds:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

You don't play 'divide and conquer' with what is effectively a terrorist organization just because you think that you've got them bottled up and they serve your goals of destabilizing any attempt at normalization and/or paths that would force you to compromise.

The cynical side of me wonders if the hardliners and the right wingers aren't still quietly (privately) cheering on Hamas just so they can strike back that much harder and impose more restrictions on Gaza and possibly the West bank because that is what they really have set their sights on and the occupants of those areas are seen as best removed in some way or other.

I worry about that too. At least in terms of the world opinion. In terms of Gazans, I don't think it matters much - Hamas is effectively a dictatorship that's ruling Gaza.

I have no idea if we can actually take out Hamas. I don't know if we can do it in terms of an "acceptable" amount of collateral damage, or an "acceptable" amount of Israeli soldiers killed. Acceptable at least to the Israeli public. A few months into this, if we have dozens/hundreds of dead soldiers (and dead Palestinians, which some people do care about), will the public continue supporting something open-ended? I don't know.

Still, I honestly don't see an alternative. We've had, what, 10 ceasefires in the 20 years they've been in power and they've used them to restock and re-attack. I don't see much of a choice for Israel to actually stay safe that doesn't involve destroying Hamas.

> You don't play 'divide and conquer' with what is effectively a terrorist organization just because you think that you've got them bottled up and they serve your goals of destabilizing any attempt at normalization and/or paths that would force you to compromise.

That's true, though not sure what alternative Bibi had. There's lots of criticism from within Israel about Bibi effectively helping prop up Hamas, but like, the alternative that most people suggest is that Israel should've gone harder after them in the past, not accepted ceasefires, not compromised on allowing in aid and resources, etc. Not sure what was the other alternative.

> The cynical side of me wonders if the hardliners and the right wingers aren't still quietly (privately) cheering on Hamas just so they can strike back that much harder and impose more restrictions on Gaza and possibly the West bank because that is what they really have set their sights on and the occupants of those areas are seen as best removed in some way or other.

Some right-wingers are already using this situation to do what they want. E.g. lots of settlers are doing horrific things, like threatening close-by Arab villages, under I guess the assumption that no one will stop them right now. I hope they're wrong. I fear they're not, and the government will just ignore it (if not actively encourage it, at least parts of the government).

Just speaking for myself, obviously: if it were me living with my family in Israel I'd move out. Simply because too many deeds are being done for which I would not want to be fractionally responsible, besides the safety issues. At scale that would result in Israel disappearing but this isn't happening at all, instead the population of Israel is growing and quite rapidly so. As a result there will be ever more pressure to continue to expand and that sets the stage for an interminable confrontation, unless all parties are willing to significantly compromise on their current positions.

But religion and various non-public agendas seem to stop any such compromise from happening.

The thought has occurred to me.

But here's a few things worth remembering:

1. Would you be comfortable leaving all your family to go to another country? Most of my family is here.

2. It's not like I can necessarily leave, other countries usually don't just allow anyone to move there and become a citizen. I'm lucky in that I work in high tech and can probably get a job working in most countries, but many people aren't so lucky.

3. I do genuinely think a Jewish state needs to exist, because while I don't particularly care about being Jewish, much of the world most emphatically does care that I am and has tried to kill the Jewish people throughout most of history, and antisemitism definitely appears to be on the rise.

4. Almost any country I move to will be doing deeds that I don't love. It's not like the US or any other country has exactly clean hands.

5. If I and others like me leave, while it wouldn't cause Israel to disappear as you said, it will only push Israel to being even more extreme as the populace will be ever more extreme. The population of Israel is rising, but it's largely driven by the religious population, not by secular leftists.

I already did that (several times, in fact, Poland, Canada, Romania). I eventually returned to the country where I was born but it was for very practical reasons family hardly figured in to it. I have a lot of family but we're not all that close.

> It's not like I can necessarily leave, other countries usually don't just allow anyone to move there and become a citizen. I'm lucky in that I work in high tech and can probably get a job working in most countries, but many people aren't so lucky.

True, there are all kinds of obstacles to emigration. But I figure that being an educated person there are at least some options. Not all places are equally easy to get into though.

> I do genuinely think a Jewish state needs to exist, because while I don't particularly care about being Jewish, much of the world most emphatically does care that I am and has tried to kill the Jewish people throughout most of history, and antisemitism definitely appears to be on the rise.

I think so too. But: does it need to exist where it currently exists? Does it need to exist in the way it currently exists? Does the Jewish state need to behave like it currently does?

Those are all open questions to me and not all of them have easy answers. There are all kinds of arguments thrown around to answer each of these and I have problems with almost every one of those arguments, including the argument of 'now it is so so it should stay so' (the argument by default).

> Almost any country I move to will be doing deeds that I don't love. It's not like the US or any other country has exactly clean hands.

True, but at least that would not intimately affect your personal identity. By living in Israel and effectively refusing to vote with your feet you are fractionally responsible for what your government does (just like I am responsible for mine). That's all good if your government is doing good stuff but if they start murdering people with very little effort at discriminating combatants from citizens then that can cause all kinds of problems for people who have some degree of personal ethics. Just like the Arab world kills Israelis the Israelis seem - from my perspective at least - to have very little restraint when it comes to killing Arabs/Palestinians. What is happening in Gaza right now is utterly disproportional and merely a reflection of how much the Israeli government values Palestinian lives. Ironically it will only cause more Israeli lives lost, a detail that they seem to have forgotten in their zeal for revenge. It won't make anybody safer, that's for sure and any gains on that front will be temporary. It may be good for the votes within Israel though, but in the best case it will result in the symptom to be treated, the root causes remain utterly unaddressed.

> If I and others like me leave, while it wouldn't cause Israel to disappear as you said, it will only push Israel to being even more extreme as the populace will be ever more extreme. The population of Israel is rising, but it's largely driven by the religious population, not by secular leftists.

I'm aware of that. And given that religious zealots do not care much for reality that would be a real problem, but it would be their problem, not yours. And I suspect that if enough people turned their backs on the current state of affairs that it would send a powerful message. Note that religion is the only reason Israel is where it is today, and that the location was known from day #1 to be problematic, even before the official recognition of the state of Israel there was growing strife between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews. I've read myself silly about this conflict and my main take-aways are:

- The parties with the biggest stake in the outcome were not consulted.

- Israel was established only by breaking promises made to Arabs already living there (the argument that it wasn't that many of them doesn't really matter to me).

- Israel has been continuously at war pretty much since a scant few years after its founding, either 'hot' wars or low key continuous streams of attacks and this likely will not ever stop, it simply comes as a price of the location chosen.

- Israel was mostly established as a result of the Holocaust: the Western countries, especially the USA felt that they had failed the Jews in pretty much every way possible and to assuage some of this guilt effectively gave away a lot of land that wasn't theirs to give and on top of that gained a powerful ally in a place that they knew was not overly friendly to the West. Zionism had been slowly but surely working towards the establishment of a Jewish state for a long time and the aftermath of WWII is what sealed it, not exactly something that the then inhabitants of the region had much of anything to do with. It would have been far more justified to take a chunk of Germany instead, but obviously that didn't happen and on top of that the Zionists really wanted 'the Holy Land' to be Israel.

- Without the continuous backing of the United States both in the UN (the large number of vetos) and in various deeds and subsidies Israel would likely not have managed to survive or survive in its present form. It's such a precarious situation that should the USA ever turn inward - of which there is substantial risk - or become distracted enough then Israel could suffer tremendously. I don't think it is safe to count on the USA for stability on the time-frame of centuries, it is itself still a young country and it has substantial inner fractions.

The religious population of Israel - the outgoing part of it, anyway - is spoiling it for everybody else and the militant Arabs are spoiling it for everybody else as well. As long as either one of these groups has a way of getting at the other this won't stop. Until then personal decisions - even very hard ones - are the only way to affect the outcome for you and your family and I totally understand that this may not be a feasible option for you. But for me it would be: I'd rather have my kids grow up in safety than in a place where two sets of unhinged religious fanatics are going to duke it out for the foreseeable future and if the family ties are that strong that simply translates into a budget for a lot of traveling. Again, I can only speak for myself.

(For that matter: Jewish people in Europe also fled pogroms, even after World War 2; by way of example, 40 Jewish people were beaten to death with iron pipes in Kielce after a child and his father spread a blood libel story.)

One reason Jewish people get prickly about rhetorical attempts to illegitimize the entire existence of Israel (the "river to the sea" stuff) is that all of the surrounding countries have comparable legitimacy. Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, all drawn up by European powers. Jewish supporters of Israel notice that it only seems to be the Jewish people whose residency is so questioned, and not, say, the Alawites who run Syria.

I wasn't even aware of that myth so I wonder how popular it really is. Israel consists of original inhabitants of the extended region around present day Israel, population expansion and immigration (about 3 million immigrants). The part that is most visible to Europeans though is the fraction of the latter that stems from Europe because of continuous family ties between Jewish people living here and their family in Israel.

> In fact, a majority of Israeli Jewish people are Mizrahim, all of them of middle eastern origin, and themselves victims of a series of counter-Nakbas that took place during and in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war. Yemen, for instance, was once a center of middle eastern Judaism, but the Yemenite Jewish community fled pogroms there en masse.

Exactly.

> (For that matter: Jewish people in Europe also fled pogroms, even after World War 2; by way of example, 40 Jewish people were beaten to death with iron pipes in Kielce after a child and his father spread a blood libel story.)

Poland is - to this day - quite antisemitic, a shockingly large percentage of the population would qualify for that label. There are big variations depending on which region of Poland you are looking at but overall the picture is quite horrible. I blame the clergy for some of this.

> One reason Jewish people get prickly about rhetorical attempts to illegitimize the entire existence of Israel (the "river to the sea" stuff) is that all of the surrounding countries have comparable legitimacy.

Yes, and that's why the whole region has been an almost eternal source of conflict. The only reasons the West appears to be even remotely interested are oil and Israel, and maybe the latter because of the former.

You'll often literally hear opponents of Israel use the term "European settler colonialism", which lays the misapprehension bare.

This most recent conflict has been resplendent with what aboutism and false narratives and accusations that certain groups aren’t represented.

I'm (sincerely) interested to know what you consider the "predictable" take on the situation for a white blue state liberal.

If it were up to me, no! I think it was a huge mistake to have Israel where it is. Granted I basically don't care about religion, nor do I care about "historical ties" to the land. For sure I don't care about them more than all the deaths that have occurred.

That said...

> [...] I have problems with almost every one of those arguments, including the argument of 'now it is so so it should stay so' (the argument by default).

I mean, what's the alternative? Almost every country in the world was founded in a way that is, shall we say, not ideal. It's not like Israel can up and move at this point. Advocating for Israel to no longer exist is like advocating for the Native Americans to take back the United States.

The only realistic way out of this mess is a compromise between Palestinians and Israelis. It's shitty that the world works this way, but it does, in every case.

> Just like the Arab world kills Israelis the Israelis seem - from my perspective at least - to have very little restraint when it comes to killing Arabs/Palestinians. What is happening in Gaza right now is utterly disproportional and merely a reflection of how much the Israeli government values Palestinian lives.

I will note that while I have a lot of problems with the Israeli government, I don't agree with you on this. I don't even think "proportionality" is the correct frame here - it's a war, the object is to win. It's not a "they did this attack so we'll do that attack" situation, it's a "we have an enemy on our border that is legit trying to kill us, we need to stop them" situation. People (in the West) have forgotten what wars our like, but this is what a war is like.

Specifically, I don't think it's true that Israel indiscrimnately kill civilians. I think Israel takes great pains to not kill civilians, more than most armies. The situation is made far worse because Hamas uses human shields, on purpose, in order to have them killed. It's hard to believe that Israel is trying not to kill people indiscriminately given the amount of dead, but I'm comparing Israel vs. how other countries behaved in similar situation, and I honestly don't think Israel is different, and in many ways behaves better, than in similar situations. (Again, just compare to the States attacking Afghanistan and Iraq.)

>> > If I and others like me leave, while it wouldn't cause Israel to disappear as you said, it will only push Israel to being even more extreme as the populace will be ever more extreme. The population of Israel is rising, but it's largely driven by the religious population, not by secular leftists.

> I'm aware of that.

Well I'm not sure about the morality here, but even if I leave Israel, I don't think I'll ever not feel responsible for what it does. For one thing, despite everything else, it will always be the only true "safe haven" for me as a Jew. It's sad that the world works this way, but it's not my fault - it's the fault of the fact that the world has decided to blame and kill Jews over and over again throughout history.

> I've read myself silly about this conflict and my main take-aways are:

I don't disagree with you on all these points, but I think you are giving the Zionist movement more blame than it necessarily deserves. It really is true that there was never a Palestinian state, and that large amounts of the land of Israel were undeveloped. The first Jews that moved in did so completely legally by buying up the land and being granted entry by the existing owners of the land (the Ottomans, then the British).

So it's not like they found a full functioning country and decided to conquer it, not at all.

Also, there really were strong Jewish ties to that land, including Jews having continuously lived in that land for the last 2000 years. (I'm not saying you, but some people think this is only a religious belief - it's really not, it's historical fact that the Jews lived in that land and were scattered, and always had some presence there.)

That said, yes, there was strife for a big part of the time, and as I said before, especially given what we know today, I would've much preferred a different location for Israel.

> The religious population of Israel - the outgoing part of it, anyway - is spoiling it for everybody else and the militant Arabs are spoiling it for everybody else as well.

Agreed. Though I don't even think it's fair to say "the religious population of Israel", it's not just them - there are plenty of secular people with pretty terrible views on this conflict too. Many, but not all settlers are religious. etc.

> If it were up to me, no! I think it was a huge mistake to have Israel where it is. Granted I basically don't care about religion, nor do I care about "historical ties" to the land. For sure I don't care about them more than all the deaths that have occurred.

Ok.

> That said...

> I mean, what's the alternative? Almost every country in the world was founded in a way that is, shall we say, not ideal. It's not like Israel can up and move at this point. Advocating for Israel to no longer exist is like advocating for the Native Americans to take back the United States.

Agreed, and it will likely continue to exist. But unless all parties climb down from their respective religious high horses - and that includes Iran - this isn't going to be resolved. So either we accept the fact that Israel will be forever at war or something will have to change. In some way America shielding Israel from the consequences of each and every action poisons the world against Israel, it's as if only the opinion of the USA and Israel matter. I've seen veto after veto of things that made quite a bit of sense to me whereas if any other country would do things like that it would likely backfire in much more concrete ways.

>

> > Just like the Arab world kills Israelis the Israelis seem - from my perspective at least - to have very little restraint when it comes to killing Arabs/Palestinians. What is happening in Gaza right now is utterly disproportional and merely a reflection of how much the Israeli government values Palestinian lives.

> I will note that while I have a lot of problems with the Israeli government, I don't agree with you on this. I don't even think "proportionality" is the correct frame here - it's a war, the object is to win. It's not a "they did this attack so we'll do that attack" situation, it's a "we have an enemy on our border that is legit trying to kill us, we need to stop them" situation. People (in the West) have forgotten what wars our like, but this is what a war is like.

But what if there is no 'win' possible, and all that can be done is to destroy more and more lives for zero actual gain in the longer term? Because a short-term win could easily translate in a long term bigger loss. That's why you have this Hamas mess in the first place: in the (previous) short term backing Hamas seemed like a great way to keep the other side divided and neutered, but that has now resulted in a massive backfire. There is a pretty good chance that that will happen again with more short term thinking.

> Specifically, I don't think it's true that Israel indiscrimnately kill civilians.

That's not the outward image right now: as long as there is a massive asymmetry between Israeli armed forces casualties and Palestinian civilians that picture will just get worse and worse. Note that from many thousands of kilometers away it is easy for me to pontificate, if it was my house that was in danger I'd probably feel different. And I feel just the same about the way Hamas has been targeting Israeli civilians. It's barbarian.

> Well I'm not sure about the morality here, but even if I leave Israel, I don't think I'll ever not feel responsible for what it does. For one thing, despite everything else, it will always be the only true "safe haven" for me as a Jew.

The quotes are not an accident I take it. Safe as in 'relatively safe' but not perfectly safe in practice due to the number of parties that aim to destroy Israel in toto. And in a way that is the real issue: by making Israel Jewish majority state (at least, in the foreseeable future this will likely hold true) it also paints a huge target on it.

Israel, the Jewish Religion and the Jewish identity are strongly overlapping and given the number of attempts at wiping out the Jews I totally understand that that identity has been re-inforced to the point where self protection of the Jews overrules any other consideration. But no country is an island, and Israel is today surrounded by countries that would like to see it disappear and just like with other security issues they only have to get it right once whereas Israel has to be successful for eternity. That spells to me that a security rooted in violence is eventually going to fail.

> I don't disagree with you on all these points, but I think you are giving the Zionist movement more blame than it necessarily deserves. It really is true that there was never a Palestinian state, and that large amounts of the land of Israel were undeveloped. The first Jews that moved in did so completely legally by buying up the land and being granted entry by the existing owners of the land (the Ottomans, then the British).

> So it's not like they found a full functioning country and decided to conquer it, not at all.

No, that's clear. What conquering was done was after Israel had been founded. But it almost immediately led to the displacement of a large number of people and that alone should have been avoided at all costs.

> It's sad that the world works this way, but it's not my fault - it's the fault of the fact that the world has decided to blame and kill Jews over and over again throughout history.

Indeed. And that should stop.

> Also, there really were strong Jewish ties to that land, including Jews having continuously lived in that land for the last 2000 years. (I'm not saying you, but some people think this is only a religious belief - it's really not, it's historical fact that the Jews lived in that land and were scattered, and always had some presence there.)

Yes, plenty of them, iirc never less than tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands.

> That said, yes, there was strife for a big part of the time, and as I said before, especially given what we know today, I would've much preferred a different location for Israel.

But it's a done deal and moving Israel isn't going to happen. And even if a fraction would want this where would it go and what would happen to the remainder? It would be another exercise in forced migration.

>> The religious population of Israel - the outgoing part of it, anyway - is spoiling it for everybody else and the militant Arabs are spoiling it for everybody else as well.

> Agreed. Though I don't even think it's fair to say "the religious population of Israel", it's not just them - there are plenty of secular people with pretty terrible views on this conflict too. Many, but not all settlers are religious. etc.

Right, that's absolutely true and I should have been more careful there. But from what I know - and feel free to correct me, you are obviously much better informed - it is mostly the religious fanatics that drive the ongoing settlement program.

Agreed.

> No, that's clear. What conquering was done was after Israel had been founded. But it almost immediately led to the displacement of a large number of people and that alone should have been avoided at all costs.

I mean, yes, but it was mostly conquering because Israel was attacked. The UN did decide to partition the land into a "Jewish" part and "Palestinian" part, and the Palestinians are the ones that rejected it, while the Arab world attacked Israel. It's not that Israel decided to go out a-conquering.

> But it's a done deal and moving Israel isn't going to happen. And even if a fraction would want this where would it go and what would happen to the remainder? It would be another exercise in forced migration.

Yes. That's the reality that the Palestinians have to accept if we have any hope of peace.

> Right, that's absolutely true and I should have been more careful there. But from what I know - and feel free to correct me, you are obviously much better informed - it is mostly the religious fanatics that drive the ongoing settlement program.

That's an interesting question. People become settlers for various reasons; partially it's religious, partially it's ideological, but also partially it's an economic decision - living in the territories is much cheaper (both because of less demand, and also because the government gives economic advantages to living in the territories IIRC, which btw is another way the current government of Israel is undermining peace.)

While the main ideological thrust of wanting a "greater Israel" is religious, it certainly isn't enough, and there's the implicit backing of enough of the population for this to continue. This is driven partially because of security concerns after so many years of strife, partially out of apathy, partially out of some form of "racism", partially at this point some people just consider Palestinians to be the enemy, so everything is justified... it's a mix.

I think if the religious component didn't exist, there wouldn't be a settlement program, but I think for sure a large part of the Israeli population is complicit in the ongoing settler situation, unfortunately.

That's true. And I could see how a buffer zone would have made good sense after the six day war, but to turn it into a landgrab was effectively not letting a crisis go to waste and that in itself became a serious problem. And you have to appreciate the level of naivety in the UN and in the USA at the time for thinking that such a massive restructuring of a region where there had already been long term stability issues would not lead to some kind of upheaval.

I wonder if there was even a single person there who didn't see it coming or whether or not there was some other agenda at work (but that's my cynical side). It's clear that the USA didn't have any real friends in the region (not for lack of trying) and Israel may well have been viewed as some kind of forward base or staging area. The Russians too were making plans to invade and they may well have done so if not for United States unequivocal support for Israel. This is pretty ugly especially given that many Russian Jews had fled to Israel by then. It also had the potential to spiral out of control into a nuclear conflict.

> I think if the religious component didn't exist, there wouldn't be a settlement program, but I think for sure a large part of the Israeli population is complicit in the ongoing settler situation, unfortunately.

Interesting, ok, thank you for setting me straight on that. It also explains better why the government doesn't act more forcefully against the settlers, effectively they are executing on an undeclared agenda that suits a much larger swath of the Israeli population than I was aware of. Unfortunately that also makes it a much harder problem to solve.

I mean, I don't want to overstate things. I haven't done statistics on this, and obviously I'm a fairly left/liberal leaning Israeli, so I tend to look on all pro-settlement people fairly critically. I'm giving you my personal sense of things.

> It's clear that the USA didn't have any real friends in the region (not for lack of trying) and Israel may well have been viewed as some kind of forward base or staging area.

I think US support of Israel was far smaller in the 1960s, back then France was a closer ally iirc. But I wasn't alive back then, I'm not sure how accurate this is.

> That's true. And I could see how a buffer zone would have made good sense after the six day war, but to turn it into a landgrab was effectively not letting a crisis go to waste and that in itself became a serious problem.

Yes. I wonder what would've happened if we hadn't gotten that land, and the Palestinians had just continued to be refugees of other countries.

I'm not sure, but I think it was well understood by the Israeli government at the time that taking that territory, along with the refugees, would be a problem.

I've been a fan of yours on this site for many years :)

What if they didn’t treat it like a prison, or Palestinians like subhuman prisoners? Do you think that maybe then they wouldn’t want to go on raids and kill people? That those 1400 soldiers and civilians would still be alive?

What specifically should Israel do to "not treat Gaza like a prison"? Allow more goods in, which would specifically mean that Hamas gets even more weapons? What other steps would you want Israel to take, given that they left Gaza and gave it into Palestinian hands to run?

Note that 'The State of Israel' is not synonymous with the Jewish people - even though there are a lot of people on both sides of this who seem to want to propagate that, and that religion and land (the two major things this conflict is all about) are not worth millions of lives lost.

'now' implies that both sides back down from their frankly ridiculous stances and that in turn would require both sides to drop some fragments of their religion and to start controlling the hardliners in their factions. But as long as Arab money and Iranian weapons subsidize Hamas, as long as Israel sabotages any kind of compromise or real government on the Palestinian side and as long as settlers continue to piecemeal expand the size of the state of Israel this isn't going to happen.

You can't have change without wanting change and you can't solve a problem if neither side really wants it solved. Israel would like Palestine to disappear and pretty much all of the Arab world wants Israel to disappear. If that doesn't change eventually one of these groups is going to get their way and that would be a loss for the world as a whole because I predict that that stain will not be easily washed away if at all.

Most, but not all of them.

>> Israel would like Palestine to disappear

There is more than a million Palestinians living and working in Israel as its citizens. They hold positions in offices even such as a supreme court judge.

>> as long as settlers continue to piecemeal expand the size of the state of Israel this isn't going to happen.

Israel removed all its settlers from Gaza in 2005. In return it received shelling from Hamas.

Hamas in not interested in solving anything, having talks about anything or making any kind of compromises.

That's fair.

> There is more than a million Palestinians living and working in Israel as its citizens. They hold positions in offices even such as a supreme court judge.

You equate 'Palestine' with 'Palestinians', that's not the same thing. It's on par with equating Israel with Israeli's and many would point out that there is a very important distinction between the two.

> Israel removed all its settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Yes, but they kept on settling more and more area in the West bank and continue to do so even today, almost two decades later. It's akin to removing 'whites' from areas that were to be turned into 'homelands' prior to the establishment of the 'Apartheid' doctrine in South Africa, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan , there are a lot of parallels between those and Gaza / West Bank.

> In return it received shelling from Hamas.

In 2005 Hamas was a fringe group and all eyes were on the Palestinian Authority, which Israel has structurally undermined while at the same time supporting Hamas.

> Hamas in not interested in solving anything, having talks about anything or making any kind of compromises.

Neither are the Israeli hardliners who make a lot of policy.

People need to separate the Palestinian people (most of which don't want a conflict) and the Hamas. The Palestinian people are sandwiched between the extremists and Israel. These things can't happen until the Hamas is eliminated which is what Israel is trying to do right now. I'm hopeful that this will end up as a "good thing" for the Palestinians and result in a Palestinian state.

You would have to be an utter idiot to believe otherwise given how strong their surveillance apparatus is and the type of equipment it took to break through the barrier.

It's really surprising indeed that they were not aware of the attack and that they could not defend their settlements. But that could also be explained by thinking themselves untouchable, leading now to an overreaction to hide their responsibility in this failure to protect their citizens.

It's an awful funny coincidence that Netanyahu, who had been under political and prosecutorial pressure, suddenly and magically found himself a new conflict to embroil himself in so that he could take additional powers for himself.

> It's estimated that Hamas has between 30,000 and 40,000 soldiers(1)

This article does not provide a source for that figure but it's definitely on the high end. The number of members of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas' armed wing) has been estimated anywhere from 15-40k.

their goal can be to target soldiers, and at the same time they kill civilians (because they are near soldiers which are being attacked)

Israel's illegal settlements have a history of state-sponsored pograms and brutal violence against Palestinians in both Gaza and West Bank

Are you seriously suggesting that the children killed are to be victim blamed, because they somehow didn't learn a lesson?

Is that some kind of coping mechanism to be able to sleep at night? Where you demonize the population to make it easier to grasp. Or are you just that evil that you actually think these children deserve this?

Half or so of the population is <=18 years old. What mistakes did they do to deserve being killed and have their homeland destroyed?

Enlighten us.

Such a bizare argument. Just justification for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Roughly a fourth of all their trained personnel and a seventh of all the males available for conscription.

Nearly all of Gaza is built up urban centers and Hamas has had a decade plus of preparation time for this event. The urban fighting for the attackers is going to be some of the worst since Leningrad. It's going to take years to fully clean out the ~100 sqmi of Gaza.

Such an invasion will reverberate in Israel for 100 years. It'll be not quite as bad as what happened to the USSR's male population after WW2. But it's going to be really really bad all the same. The PTSD alone is going to be unimaginable.

Nothing good can come of this for either side, even the back of a napkin math is clear on that.

There is zero reason to think the IDF is going to take that many casualties. They are much better equipped than Hamas, and if needed, they can simply besiege areas to force Hamas to either leave or starve.

Mind you I 100% disagree that it is possible. Israel is looking at a long occupation.

That's basically what happened to WW2 Germany. The country was crushed to the point where they unconditionally surrendered, killing 5 million German soldiers in the process.

Nazism is pretty much dead in Germany. So the approach did in fact work, and quite possibly would have worked even without the Marshal plan.

You wish.

Only way for Gazans will be to assimilate to israeli/western values I guess (if they want to have a proper life)

> Anyway, if Gazan citizens learn the lessons of their mistakes, they still have a future.

That is genocidal language where you are holding civilians accountable.

The Gazan population does not favor Hamas according to polling prior to October 7th: https://twitter.com/ForeignAffairs/status/171800792755696451...

Hamas was also boosted by Netanyahu in part to prevent a two-state solution and diminish moderate Palestinian leadership: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

Like it or not, a significant percentage of the adult Gazan population are responsible for Hamas because they're actively fighting for Hamas or directly supporting them. Pointing out that those people are accountable, and can choose a different future, is not genocidal language. It's stating the facts of the situation.

Germany also faced the same choice after WW2. They chose to eradicate Nazism, which is a big part of why Germany is the successful country it is today.

1) https://www.axios.com/2023/10/21/palestine-hamas-military-po...

Israel wanted Hamas to rule Gaza though and supported it financially while working against moderate Palestinians:

> Netanyahu said: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas, ... This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-ga...

This means that this attacks of Hamas by Israel is unlikely to lead to a better situation post war, because Netanyahu's position is to always have a reason why the Palestinians should not have freedom.

It is more likely that things just get worse for the Palestinians after this war.

You are putting the blame of the situation on the civilians. That is the problem. Do you think they chose to live in such a place? Did you read on how Hamas came into power and who helped them?

Maybe we should learn the lessons of WWII, and allow Palestinians a future. Otherwise it is genocidal language.

The entire situation is deeply regrettable and it's hard to find any heroes here, but I feel like we forget our own history so easily.

The United States, within living memory, conducted a firebombing campaign of Dresden, which had limited military value, killing over 25,000. We interned over 100,000 of our own citizens of Japanese ancestry. We conducted a firebombing campaign of Tokyo, killing around 100,000 civilians and leaving over a million homeless.

And of course we dropped two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing mostly civilians and causing deep scarring both psychological and physiological for the survivors.

The reality is that these rules of war are more like guidelines. There is no one to enforce them if you win. When a nation feels existentially threatened, the gloves tend to come off.

I don't seek to excuse anything, what is happening is a tragedy and as a matter of public policy there needs to be more diplomatic costs associated with unnecessary loss of civilian life. But there are not many countries that truly occupy a moral high ground in this regard.

Like, what is really the point of your comment? I don't see where the person to whom you replied said "if only Israel was like the US" or something

Basically that what matters are international norms rather than international laws, and while Israel is plainly breaking international laws, it's less clear that they're breaking international norms.

It's about the basic morality of its imposition of collective punishment on the population of Gaza, while of course its population rages incandescently on the collective punishment Hamas sought to inflict on them, and stuff like that.

Collective punishment is rarely a moral answer.

Luckily, in this thread, we seem to have no people who are deranged enough to approve of Hamas's attack. But we do have people deranged enough to approve of Israel's response and who want everyone to think that when a Palestinian is killed, it's either a lie, or just tough, just collateral damage, but that when an Israeli is killed, it justifies the killing and further dispossession of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians in recompense.

That’s how the law is written. There is no maybe about it.

However, the fact that people are largely sympathetic to the US implies that maybe the law is a little too harsh, and does not provide any caveats for situational violence.

International law today is a perfect ideal. It’s like a criminal code that bans murder, but doesn’t include any leeway for self defense or reduced sentences for manslaughter. Only perfect people can hold to its standards and no one is perfect.

But this is exactly my point. The moral imperative was clear in WWII, but the same pejoratives ("war crimes", etc) would equally apply.

These terms are at best uninteresting and at worst distracting, which is what I'd originally intended to highlight with the quote referring to "genocidal language".

The United States was the most powerful country by far at the time. Israel is tiny in comparison; it can't afford to just disregard public opinion and make enemies with all its neighbours, because the US won't be able to protect it forever.

too late.

Israel exists because it won the 1967 war, when many of its neighbors simultaneously tried to invade.

What exactly is your point? Are you saying that genocide can happen, have happened and so nothing here is a big deal. I would prefer to stand against genocidal language and call it out. I would prefer to avoid a moral nihilism stance personally -- maybe something better like "Never Again": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again

Singling out countries is naive.

OK, let's for a second assume that all this crap started on Oct 7. What exactly have the Palestinians' in West Bank got to do with any of this shit? 1k arrests, settlers gunning down people walking down the street there. This whole shit is absolutely disgusting and the fact that people sit in the comforts of their home and preach about teaching "Gazan's their lessons", whatever the hell that means.

That’s completely ignoring the other completely faulty aspects of your comparison, e.g. which populations are being displaced?

Are you confusing Israel with russia? Afaik they declared proper war and are abiding to Geneva convention.

Israel formally declares war against Hamas https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/08/israel-hamas...

At least, that certainly has to have crossed the mind of someone in power.

When Israel "resettles" Palestinians in Gaza (interesting concept), they do it by bulldozing the homes they want them out of.

Yeah, I really feel for Israel after reading this. Always thinking of those poor Gazans to give them more space behind the fence.

100%: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231009-israel-mk-calls-f...

"The Misgav Institute is headed by former Netanyahu National Security Advisor Meir Ben Shabbat, who remains influential in Israeli security circles. The Institute’s former chairpersons and founding associates include Yoaz Hendel (chair 2012-19), a right-centrist who was Minister of Communications intermittently in the years 2020-22; Moshe Yaalon, former Defense Minister (note that both Hendel and Yaalon have become opposed to Netanyahu in the recent years); Moshe Arens, also former Defense Minister — and other top political personas."

[1] https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/israeli-think-tank-lays-out-a...

Sick and tired of whitewashing genocide.